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@ -13020,28 +13164,13 @@
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@ -13144,63 +13270,63 @@
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"title":":snowflake: :sports_medal:[[@@Paris|:test_grandes_armes_de_paris:]]: Check out the [6 Nations](https://billetterie.ffr.fr/fr)",
"title":":sunny: :sports_medal:[[@@Paris|:test_grandes_armes_de_paris:]]: Check out [RG](https://www.rolandgarros.com/fr-fr/page/billetterie-roland-garros)",
"time":"2024-01-30",
"time":"2024-03-10",
"rowNumber":102
"rowNumber":105
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"title":"🎭:frame_with_picture: [[@@Paris|:test_grandes_armes_de_paris:]]: Check out [exhibitions](https://www.offi.fr/expositions-musees/programme.html) %%done_del%%",
"title":"🎭:frame_with_picture: [[@@Paris|:test_grandes_armes_de_paris:]]: Check out [exhibitions](https://www.offi.fr/expositions-musees/programme.html) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-01-31",
"time":"2024-04-30",
"rowNumber":90
"rowNumber":90
},
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"title":":sunny: :sports_medal:[[@@Paris|:test_grandes_armes_de_paris:]]: Check out [RG](https://www.rolandgarros.com/fr-fr/page/billetterie-roland-garros)",
"time":"2024-03-10",
"rowNumber":103
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{
"title":":sunny: :racehorse: [[@@Paris|:test_grandes_armes_de_paris:]]: Check out the [Open de France](https://www.poloclubchantilly.com/)",
"title":":sunny: :racehorse: [[@@Paris|:test_grandes_armes_de_paris:]]: Check out the [Open de France](https://www.poloclubchantilly.com/)",
"time":"2024-08-25",
"time":"2024-08-25",
"rowNumber":104
"rowNumber":106
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{
"title":":maple_leaf: :partying_face: [[@@Paris|:test_grandes_armes_de_paris:]]: Fête des Puces %%done_del%%",
"title":":maple_leaf: :partying_face: [[@@Paris|:test_grandes_armes_de_paris:]]: Fête des Puces %%done_del%%",
When Myron Means poked his head into the den, the sow was already awake. The crevice den was cramped, and she turned away from him as he raised the dart gun.
The black bear had chosen to den in a crevice on a south-facing slope, just off an overgrown logging road deep in the Ozark Mountains. She had been pregnant when she picked this spot in the fall and raked all the leaves toward the narrow entrance for insulation. By the time we arrived in early March, her two cubs were six weeks old and growing fast.
Myron Means holds two cubs during a den check. He estimates the cubs, which weighed 6.5 pounds, were 7 to 8 weeks old. Courtesy of Myron Means
Means is the large carnivore program coordinator for the Arkansas Fish and Game Commission, and he spends more than half the year in the field studying the state’s growing bear population. During the winter months, he conducts den checks with a team of wildlife professionals to examine sows and their cubs. Den checks help biologists like Means understand the reproductive and recruitment (or survival) rates of their state’s bear populations. Den checks are also a great opportunity to educate the public on bear behavior and bust myths by answering common questions such as: Do bears hibernate?
It only took a few minutes for the anesthesia to kick in. As soon as it did, Means and his team got to work.
## Where Do Bears Hibernate?
In his 27 years of studying black bears and their denning behavior, Means has found hibernating bears in all kinds of places: tucked into rock crevices and briar patches, under root balls and brush piles, inside burn piles and tree hollows. Once, he had to climb 30 feet into the canopy to dart a black bear that had denned in a rotten tree cavity so he could change her radio collar.
Bears choose their dens based on their available habitat. Arkansas black bears in the Ozark Mountains, for instance, tend to den in rock crevices. Along the White River, where winter flooding is common, black bears make their dens high in the trees. In the Ouachita Mountains, bears choose dug-out dens under root balls. In the state’s southern Gulf Coastal Plain, they often choose briar thickets. Most people, says Means, can walk right past a bear den and never even know the animal is there.
“The whole idea is the bear tries to find as small and constricted a space as possible,” says Means. “That way there’s less energy for her to heat it and stay warm.”
## Bears Are Not True Hibernators
When it comes to bear hibernation, most people imagine the children’s storybook version: Bears find a roomy cave in the fall, sleep all winter long, and wake up only when spring arrives. In reality, bears are not true hibernators. But hibernation is the most common description for what bears do in the winter. [Hibernation is how bears have adapted](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3872930) to seasonal food shortages, low temps, and nasty winter weather. It’s also when they give birth.
Hibernation is characterized by three key physiological changes: A reduced metabolism, a slower heart rate, and a lowered body temperature. Groundhogs, for example, are one of the few mammals that truly hibernate. They drop their body temperature from around 99°F to below 40°F during hibernation. Groundhogs also sleep without waking while hibernating.
A black bear sow and her cubs in a crevice den. Mississippi DWFP
Black bears are more like estivators, says Means, which means they stay in a prolonged state of torpor or dormancy. Most of a bear’s bodily functions slow during its denning cycle in the winter—including its metabolism, respiration, and heart rate—but a bear’s body temperature only drops by a few degrees. A black bear’s body temperature hovers around 100 to 101°F in the summer; during hibernation, it falls to between 88 and 98°F, according [to key research](https://www.bearstudy.org/images/stories/Publications/Ubiquitous_American_Black_Bear.pdf) conducted in the 1980s. Similarly, a summer bear’s heart beat can range from 40 to 50 beats per minute; during hibernation, it drops to 8 to 19 beats per minute.
After Means and his team darted the sow, they checked her vitals. (While the anesthesia will affect the bear’s vitals, they’re still representative of bear hibernation.) The sow was breathing fewer than eight breaths per minute. Her body temperature was 97.8°F.
So in other words, bears sleep and are sluggish during the winter, but they don’t enter the sort of coma-like state that a groundhog does. They also move frequently in their dens. Biologists know this thanks to [den checks](https://www.agfc.com/en/news/2023/03/29/bear-den-surveys-reflect-effects-of-summer-drought/), [den cameras](https://www.pgc.pa.gov/Wildlife/WildlifeSpecies/BlackBear/Pages/From-Under-the-Deck.aspx), and [collar-tracking programs](https://myfwc.com/research/wildlife/terrestrial-mammals/bear/tracking/). For example: Arkansas black bears have historically been fitted with VHF radio collars. If that collar doesn’t move for four hours, it starts to transmit a mortality signal. Even during the winter, says Means, few mortality signals occur.
“Sure, if they’re undisturbed for days, they’ll sleep. A lot of times when \[our\] pilot flies \[to check collar signals\], he may hit a mortality signal,” Means says. “And then we go in to do groundwork and it’s an active signal. Yeah, bears can lay there for probably a day or two without moving in sleep \[but\] they’re always awake when we go in on them. They smell us, they hear us, and they wake up.”
While every animal is different during bear hibernation (Means has walked right up to a denning sow that didn’t move, while another sow on another den check ran when she heard his team approaching), this rule is true for [bears across North America](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3872551). Grizzlies and black [bears in Alaska](https://adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=349#:~:text=A)%20Bears%20hibernate%20during%20winter,little%20or%20no%20food%20available.), for example, don’t sleep all winter long, despite longer den cycles and harsh conditions at that higher latitude.
Staying awake during den cycles could be an evolutionary response for a few reasons, says Means, including defense from predation. While most wild critters won’t tangle with a bear even when it’s asleep, male bears are known cub predators.
A black bear den high in a tree in Arkansas; the alert bear. Myron Means
“Males will kill cubs if they have a chance to get \[a female bear\] to come back into estrous that spring. But we really don’t have dense enough bear populations in Arkansas for infanticide to account for much mortality. In some really high-density states [like New Jersey](https://www.outdoorlife.com/hunting/new-jersey-black-bear-hunting/), infanticide can account for as much as 30 percent of mortality. We don’t have densities anywhere near those states.”
## When Do Bears Hibernate?
The timing of bear hibernation typically depends on latitude. The farther north a bear lives, the sooner it will enter its den in the fall and the later it will leave its den in the spring. This can last anywhere from five to seven months in Canada and Alaska. The farther south a bear lives, the shorter its hibernation period or, more accurately, its den cycle. Arkansas black bears aren’t much bothered by inclement weather, says Means, and bears in general don’t enter den cycles in response to cold temperatures or snowfall. (Means once performed a den check on a sow that was denned in the open woods. She was covered in a layer of fresh snow and her cubs were curled under her belly, warm and healthy.) Instead, food availability dictates bear hibernation.
**Read Next:** [What Do Black Bears Eat?](https://www.outdoorlife.com/hunting/what-do-black-bears-eat/)
“When a bear starts to go into an energy deficit, that’s when the mountain bears are going to start their denning cycles,” says Means, again referring to the black bear populations in the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas. “In south Arkansas, because of all the lease lands and all the deer leases, it’s just a different food dynamic on the landscape down there. Bears don’t have to go den in November because there’s still plenty of food to eat.”
As long as a bear isn’t experiencing an energy deficit (when foraging requires more energy than the forage itself provides), that bear doesn’t need to den. Even pregnant sows can wait until it’s time to give birth before denning.
The timing of when black bears emerge from their dens depends on where they live. Neal Herbert / NPS
“A lot of females that we had down \[in south Arkansas\] that had yearlings this year never really locked down on anyplace to den. And males are the same way. Males may not even really have a den cycle in south Arkansas.”
Details on denning chronology, or the timing of when different sexes and certain females go into dens, is limited in Arkansas, says Means, but there is a definite order to when black bears begin to enter dens.
“We know that pregnant females are the first to go in,” says Means. “Females with yearlings go in after that, and then males go in after that.”
## What Do Den Cycles Have to Do with Hunting Season?
Understanding when bears typically enter and exit their dens can help state wildlife agencies set hunting season dates.
“It’s kind of crazy to think but the denning chronology of South Gulf Coastal Plain bears is tremendously different than up here in the mountains,” says Means, referring to a distance of just a few hundred miles. “They den for about the same duration, but it’s much later—probably a month or a month and a half behind what our mountain bears demonstrate. That’s a big part of the equation when you’re looking at setting hunting seasons, \[especially\] if you’re trying to bias harvest toward males or trying to increase your harvest. A lot of bear management is \[based on\] when you set those seasons.”
Arkansas [recently secured funding](https://bloodorigins.org/project-arkansas-black-bear-collaring-project/) to replace some of its VHF radio collars with higher-tech GPS collars. This should help biologists like Means gain a better understanding of black bear denning chronology, which in turn will help inform the timing of the state’s bear hunting seasons.
“I used to think that, more than likely, females are going into the den sometime between early and late November based on food availability and their reproductive status. Then \[in fall 2022\] we had a couple really odd things happen,” says Means. “We had some females actually start a denning cycle in October. So that really kind of raised the question because a lot of our bears are translocated from northern latitudes. When we have bear season on an average year, are a lot of bears in a den cycle already? So we want to be able to capture location information and timing going into den cycles.”
That’s why Means performs as many den checks as possible across the state instead of just checking a few dens.
“It’s just a completely different dynamic down there. And really the only common denominator between how we will or need to manage those southern bears and the bears in the mountains is the fact that they’re bears.”
Because den checks during bear hibernation also provide key information on reproductive and survival rates of a state’s bear population, they can help biologists adjust harvest goals.
The author keeps two six-week-old black bear cubs warm during a den check in Arkansas. Myron Means
“Bears \[naturally\] have very low reproductive rates,” says Means. “The drought \[in Arkansas\] substantially affected reproductive rates. Instead of seeing 80 to 90 percent of the sows having full litters, we’re seeing about 35 percent of the sows have full litters. If you have something like environmental conditions that cause drops in reproductive or survival rates, and that happens two or three consecutive years? It’s not cause for alarm in one year, but if it happens two, three consecutive years, it would be most likely that we would adjust harvest strategies to mitigate for that drop in population.”
## Bear Hibernation Facts
While Means’ team monitored the sow’s vitals and took hair and blood samples, Means set to work examining the male and female cubs. Like human infants, bear cubs have difficulty regulating their body temperature and are kept wrapped in blankets or zipped into volunteers’ coats during den checks.
### Hibernating Bears Don’t Eat
During a den cycle, adult bears don’t typically eat, drink, defecate, or urinate. These normally urgent needs are suppressed due to the decline in bodily functions. Instead, bears live off their fat stores, which is why it’s so important for bears to pack on the pounds during the summer and fall. This is called [hyperphagia](https://bear.org/5-stages-of-activity-and-hibernation/). Newborn cubs are an exception to these rules since they nurse in the den.
“While the females are in there with the \[new\] cubs, for about 4.5 months there’s no eating, drinking, defecating, or urinating,” says Means. “The only thing she’s eating is cub poop for three or four months.”
### Sows Give Birth During Bear Hibernation
While other big game species like deer and elk give birth to young every year, bears have a two-year reproductive process. Peak breeding season varies by location, but Arkansas sows are usually bred from May through early July.
“In the fall, at some point the sow’s body will trigger her to allow that \[developing egg\] to attach and she will complete a gestation period. And that’s probably about the time she goes into a den cycle,” says Means. “So she goes into a den, she gives birth in mid- to late-January, and she nurses the cubs, they emerge from that first den cycle in mid-April, when the cubs are big enough to follow, and they spend all summer and fall learning how to be bears.”
When food becomes scarcer, the sow and her yearling cubs enter their den cycle together.
“Females with yearlings might come out and forage if there’s a few acorns on the landscape,” says Means. “Typically, yearling cycles are abbreviated den cycles, and the sow may come out in late February or early March. She’ll allow her yearling cubs to hang around with her for a while, but when the breeding season begins, she’ll start her two-year reproductive cycle again.”
A dug-out brown bear den in the northern U.S. belizar / Adobe Stock
Because pregnant sows enter the den before other adult bears and they leave the den later, they have the longest den cycles. After Means and his team finished their exams of the sow and her cubs, they returned all three bears to the crevice den and reversed the anesthesia. As soon as she began to wake, we cleared out. Soon, though, the cubs will start nursing and settling down, and the sow will go back to sleep. In a few weeks or maybe a month, she’ll finally emerge from the den for spring and begin foraging again.
A sow reaches reproductive age between three and five years of age, and can reproduce into her early 20s. Once a sow stops having cubs, she’s close to the end of her natural life. Black bears in Arkansas give birth to an average of two cubs every other year, which means an average healthy black bear sow in Arkansas will birth up to 16 cubs in her lifetime.
### Hibernating Bears Lose Weight
While adult bears can [lose anywhere from 15 to 30](https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=21#:~:text=They%20may%20occasionally%20eat%20a,without%20really%20defecating%20or%20urinating.) percent of their body weight during a denning cycle, they stay healthy through a variety of evolutionary adaptations. Denning bears can recycle their metabolic wastes by converting the nitrogen in their urea.
“They convert it to amino acids to feed their muscles. They can actually come out of a den cycle with more lean muscle mass than when they went in,” says Means. “I mean, how great would that be? Like, pork up all summer and say, ‘I’ll see you in a couple of months. I’m gonna go take a nap, I need to lose some fluff.’ But that’s just the lifestyle that they’ve evolved to. And they’re masters at it, no doubt.”
## Final Thoughts on Bear Hibernation
It’s important to remember that bear hibernation behavior not only varies by latitude, but by habitat, too. A bear enters its den cycle based on available food and, for sows, where she is in her two-year reproductive cycle. In general, adult bears don’t eat, drink, defecate, or urinate while in a denning cycle. Hibernating bears are sleepy and sluggish, but they move often in their dens and they certainly don’t sleep all winter long.
# Did Drug Traffickers Funnel Millions of Dollars to Mexican President López Obrador’s First Campaign?
Years before Andrés Manuel López Obrador was elected as Mexico’s leader in 2018, U.S. drug-enforcement agents uncovered what they believed was substantial evidence that major cocaine traffickers had funneled some $2 million to his first presidential campaign.
According to more than a dozen interviews with U.S. and Mexican officials and government documents reviewed by ProPublica, the money was provided to campaign aides in 2006 in return for a promise that a López Obrador administration would facilitate the traffickers’ criminal operations.
The investigation did not establish whether López Obrador sanctioned or even knew of the traffickers’ reported donations. But officials said the inquiry — which was built on the extensive cooperation of a former campaign operative and a key drug informant — did produce evidence that one of López Obrador’s closest aides had agreed to the proposed arrangement.
The allegation that representatives of Mexico’s future president negotiated with notorious criminals has continued to reverberate among U.S. law-enforcement and foreign policy officials, who have long been skeptical of López Obrador’s commitment to take on drug traffickers.
The case raised difficult questions about how far the United States should go to confront the official corruption that has been essential to the emergence of Mexican drug traffickers as a global criminal force. While some officials argue that it is not the United States’ job to root out endemic corruption in Mexico, others say that efforts to fight organized crime and build the rule of law will be futile unless officials who protect the traffickers are held to account.
“The corruption is so much a part of the fabric of drug trafficking in Mexico that there’s no way you can pursue the drug traffickers without going after the politicians and the military and police officials who support them,” Raymond Donovan, who recently retired as the Drug Enforcement Administration’s operations chief, said in an interview.
In their investigation, DEA agents developed what they considered an extraordinary inside source after they arrested the former campaign operative on drug charges in 2010. To avoid federal prison, the operative gave a detailed account of the traffickers’ cash donations, which he said he helped deliver. He also surreptitiously recorded conversations with Nicolás Mollinedo Bastar, the close López Obrador aide who the operative said had participated in the scheme.
Along with the sworn statements of other witnesses, the taped conversations indicated that Mollinedo was aware of and involved in the donations by one of the country’s biggest drug mafias, current and former officials familiar with the case said.
But some officials felt the evidence was not strong enough to justify the risks of an extensive undercover operation inside Mexico. In late 2011, DEA agents proposed a sting in which they would offer $5 million in supposed drug money to operatives working on López Obrador’s second presidential campaign. Instead, Justice Department officials closed the investigation, in part over concerns that even a successful prosecution would be viewed by Mexicans as egregious American meddling in their politics.
“Nobody was trying to influence the election,” one official familiar with the investigation said. “But there was always a fear that López Obrador might back away on the drug fight — that if this guy becomes president, he could shut us down.”
Since taking office in December 2018, López Obrador has led a striking retreat in the drug fight. His approach, which he summarized in the campaign slogan “Hugs, not bullets,” has concentrated on social programs to attack the sources of criminality, rather than confrontation with the criminals.
Yet with police and military forces generally avoiding confrontation with the biggest drug gangs, those mafias have extended their influence across Mexico. By some estimates, criminal gangs dominate more than a quarter of the national territory — operating openly, imposing their will on local governments and often forcing the state and federal authorities to keep their distance. The violence has hovered near historic levels, while the gangs’ extortion rackets and other criminal enterprises have metastasized into every layer of the economy.
The Mexican president’s chief spokesperson, Jesús Ramírez Cuevas, did not respond to numerous requests for comment.
The drug trade’s toll on Americans has never been more devastating. Fentanyl — most of which is produced in or smuggled through Mexico — is fueling the most lethal illegal-drug problem in American history. The [estimated 109,000 overdose deaths](https://blogs.cdc.gov/nchs/2023/05/18/7365/) recorded in 2022, most of them fentanyl-related, surpassed the fatalities from gun violence and automobile accidents combined.
The administration of President Joe Biden has been steadfast in its refusal to criticize López Obrador’s security policies, avoiding confrontation even when the Mexican president has publicly attacked U.S. law-enforcement agencies as mendacious and corrupt. The fentanyl explosion, while a growing political concern in Washington, remains less critical to Biden’s reelection prospects than blocking immigrants at the southern border — a challenge in which López Obrador’s cooperation is essential.
After asserting repeatedly that Mexico had nothing to do with fentanyl, López Obrador has recently taken a few modest steps to renew anti-drug cooperation. His government, though, continues to ignore U.S. requests for the capture and extradition of major traffickers, while Washington officials portray the relationship in rosy terms. At the end of a [meeting with López Obrador](https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/11/17/readout-of-president-joe-bidens-meeting-with-president-andres-manuel-lopez-obrador-of-mexico/) in November, Biden turned to him and said, “I couldn’t have a better partner than you.”
A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on details of the DEA investigation into López Obrador’s political campaigns, citing a long-standing policy. But she added that the department “fully respects Mexico’s sovereignty, and we are committed to working shoulder to shoulder with our Mexican partners to combat the drug cartels responsible for so much death and destruction in both our countries.”
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For decades, U.S. law-enforcement officials have shied away from investigating Mexican officials suspected of protecting the drug mafias, saying that pursuing such cases is fraught in a country that is uniquely sensitive to American interference. U.S. agencies have been even more hesitant to dig into the gangs’ involvement in electoral politics, even as they have become a primary source of funding for Mexican campaigns and have murdered scores of municipal, state and national candidates.
In the case of López Obrador, the DEA was slow to act on information about his 2006 campaign’s possible collusion with traffickers, several officials said. When the agency finally began to investigate in 2010, it was largely at the initiative of a small group of Mexico-based agents working with federal prosecutors in New York.
The Americans’ initial source was Roberto López Nájera, a tightly wound 28-year-old lawyer who turned up at the United States Embassy in 2008 and asked to speak to someone from the DEA. The two agents who came down from their fourth-floor offices heard a compelling story: For the previous few years, López Nájera told them, he had been a sort of in-house counsel to one of Mexico’s more notorious traffickers, Edgar Valdéz Villarreal.
The Texas-born gangster had been nicknamed “Ken” and then “Barbie” when he was a square-jawed high school linebacker with dirty-blond hair. By the mid-2000s, he had become one of the Mexican underworld’s more brutal enforcers. He was also a major trafficker, working with a larger mafia run by the Beltrán Leyva brothers, who in turn were part of the alliance known as the Sinaloa Cartel. On the Mexican side of the border, he was known as “La Barbie.”
Witnesses told the Drug Enforcement Administration that the trafficker known as “La Barbie,” shown here after his arrest by Mexican authorities in August 2010, contributed some $2 million to the first presidential campaign of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Credit: Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty Images
According to López Nájera, La Barbie insisted that he start at the bottom, washing the traffickers’ cars and doing other menial chores before he was entrusted with more important tasks. He eventually managed some political contacts, paying bribes to police commanders and politicians, and oversaw cocaine shipments through the Cancún airport. After several years, however, López Nájera began to have differences with his boss, who thought him something of a slacker, officials said. In 2007, he returned from a long vacation in Cuba to find that his brother had disappeared, an apparent victim of La Barbie’s wrath. Going underground, López Nájera began plotting his revenge.
López Nájera quickly established his bona fides with the Americans, telling them the Beltrán Leyva gang had planted a mole inside the embassy. The man turned out to be an employee of the U.S. Marshals Service who had wide access to intelligence about the Mexican criminals being sought by the United States. Lured to the Washington, D.C., area on the pretense of a training junket, he was arrested and charged with federal drug crimes before agreeing to cooperate, officials said.
The DEA moved López Nájera to the United States and debriefed him extensively. In keeping with the new law-enforcement partnership known as the Mérida accord, U.S. officials then invited their Mexican counterparts to interview their prized source.
The Mexican court filings that resulted would identify López Nájera only by the code name “Jennifer.” His revelations would become the primary engine of “Operation Clean-up,” a headline-grabbing effort by the government of President Felipe Calderón to purge corrupt officials from federal law-enforcement agencies and the military.
The DEA was somewhat slower to take full advantage of its informer. It was only in the spring of 2010, more than two years after López Nájera had begun cooperating with the agency, that it began to focus on one of his more striking disclosures. In an interview in San Diego that DEA agents set up for a senior Mexican prosecutor, López Nájera described how La Barbie had summoned him to a January 2006 meeting at a hotel in the Pacific Coast resort of Nuevo Vallarta.
The man who had arranged the gathering was Francisco León García, the 38-year-old son of a mining entrepreneur from the northern state of Durango. Known as “Pancho” León, he was launching his candidacy for the Mexican Senate as a representative of López Obrador’s leftist alliance. He was friendly with one of La Barbie’s lieutenants, Sergio Villarreal Barragán, a towering former state police officer known as “El Grande,” and the two men thought they might be able to help each other, the agents were told.
Another businessman joined León at the meeting. The two said they were there with López Obrador’s knowledge and support, López Nájera recounted. In return for an injection of cash, León said, the campaign promised that a future López Obrador government would select law-enforcement officials helpful to the traffickers.
According to accounts of the negotiation that U.S. investigators eventually pieced together from several informants, the traffickers were told they could help to choose police commanders in some key cities along the border. More importantly, U.S. officials said, the traffickers were also told that López Obrador would not name an attorney general whom they viewed as hostile to their interests — seemingly granting them a veto over the appointment.
La Barbie agreed to the bargain and assigned López Nájera to meet with campaign officials in Mexico City and arrange the payoffs. (López Nájera did not respond to numerous attempts to contact him.) Soon after, officials said, he was introduced to Mauricio Soto Caballero, a businessman and political operative who was heading up an advance team under the campaign’s logistics chief, Nicolás Mollinedo.
López Obrador, left, and Nicolás Mollinedo Bastar in 2006 Credit: Marco Ugarte/AP
In three deliveries over the next several months, the DEA was told, La Barbie’s organization gave Soto and others in the campaign about $2 million in cash. As the trafficker became more invested, López Nájera said, he provided support in other ways, too: Over the final weeks of the race, López Obrador traveled twice to the state of Durango for big, boisterous rallies organized by Pancho León, to which the gang donated heavily. One was so lavish — with a big-name band and thousands of partisans bused in from outlying towns and villages — that rival politicians demanded an investigation into León’s campaign funding.
The 2006 presidential race was a dead heat. When Mexico’s electoral tribunal declared Calderón the victor by half a percentage point, La Barbie was furious, López Nájera said. The drug boss came up with an impromptu plan to kidnap the president of the tribunal and force him to reverse the decision. A convoy of gunmen was dispatched to storm the court, turning back only when they discovered army troops guarding the area.
Having insisted he was the rightful winner, López Obrador rallied thousands of his supporters to Mexico City for a monthslong sit-in that covered a swath of the capital’s colonial center. According to López Nájera, La Barbie donated funds to help feed the protesters.
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The DEA agents who heard López Nájera’s account understood that it would not be easy to build a criminal case, several officials said. Even if they could verify the allegations, high-level corruption cases were almost always hard to prove. Mexican officials used middlemen to insulate themselves from the traffickers who paid them. Politicians and criminals often protected one another; corroborating witnesses were usually reluctant to testify.
Most drug-related crimes also had a five-year statute of limitations. By the time the investigation got underway in earnest, some of the key events that López Nájera described had happened four years earlier.
The Mexican prosecutor who sat in on the López Nájera interview forwarded the allegations to more senior officials in Mexico City. But the Calderón government thought such a case would be too politically charged ahead of the 2012 election, former officials said.
DEA agents had better luck with the Southern District of New York, the powerful federal prosecutor’s office based in Manhattan. The head of the office’s international narcotics unit, Jocelyn Strauber, told them she thought the case was very much worth pursuing, current and former officials said. Strauber, who now leads the New York City Department of Investigations, declined to comment.
While the Southern District had rarely done Mexican drug-corruption cases, Calderón’s determination to work more closely with the United States gave the investigators some hope. U.S. agents had greater freedom to operate in Mexico than ever before; joint operations against traffickers had become commonplace. U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence agencies had helped the Mexican authorities arrest or kill leading figures of some big drug mafias, including the Beltrán Leyva organization. In May 2010, Mexico finally extradited Mario Villanueva, a former governor of Quintana Roo state, who eventually pleaded guilty in New York to funneling more than $19 million in traffickers’ bribes through U.S. accounts.
The investigators also recognized that López Nájera presented an unusual opportunity. Although he had been out of Mexico for more than two years, they thought he might be able to connect them to Soto, the former López Obrador campaign operative to whom he had delivered donations in 2006.
Soto was a gregarious, hustling business consultant with political ambitions of his own. He had worked in and out of government, finding angles and fixing problems with the bureaucracy. López Nájera said they had become friendly and that Soto had helped him with tasks unrelated to the campaign — acting as a front man for his purchase of an apartment in Mexico City’s tony Polanco neighborhood and helping him lease an office and renting a second apartment that La Barbie sometimes used on visits to the capital.
According to López Nájera, Soto had also introduced him to members of the 2006 campaign security team, connections that later proved useful when some of the men moved on to government security jobs. At one point, López Nájera recalled, Soto told him he might be interested in making money in the drug trade if the right opportunity arose.
With López Obrador preparing his second run for the presidency, Soto remained close to Mollinedo, who was still among the candidate’s most-trusted aides, officials said.
“Nico,” as Mollinedo was known, was something of a Mexican celebrity. Wherever López Obrador had gone during his five years as Mexico City’s mayor, Mollinedo had been beside him, at the wheel of the white Nissan sedan that López Obrador made a symbol of his contempt for the traditional excesses of Mexican politics. Mollinedo’s father had been a close friend and supporter of López Obrador’s since his days as a young activist in their native state of Tabasco.
Mollinedo had also been the subject of one of López Obrador’s first big political scandals, which erupted in 2004 with reports that the mayor’s driver earned the salary of a deputy secretary in the municipal cabinet. López Obrador brushed off “Nicogate,” as the newspapers called it, but made it clear that Mollinedo was much more than a chauffeur. He was the mayor’s personal aide and logistics coordinator and worked with his security team. Mollinedo acted as a sometime gatekeeper as well, filtering the people and proposals that clamored for the mayor’s attention.
By early 2010, a raft of Mexican officials had been arrested on López Nájera’s testimony, including a former top drug prosecutor and several senior police and military officials. His identity, though, remained a well-guarded secret, and he was confident that Soto believed he was still working for the narcos. They had last met in San Diego in late 2009, with DEA agents recording their conversation about whether Soto might want to get in on one of the drug deals López Nájera said he was putting together.
It made sense that López Nájera might be branching out on his own. La Barbie had stuck with the Beltrán Leyva brothers in what had been a two-year war with other factions of the Sinaloa Cartel. But now, as the Sinaloans gained the upper hand, La Barbie and the Beltrán Leyvas were fighting each other. The violence made headlines almost every day.
With the agents scripting his messages, López Nájera began texting Soto, officials familiar with the case said. In July 2010, they met at a hotel in Hollywood, Florida. Accompanied by an undercover DEA agent who posed as a Colombian cocaine supplier, López Nájera laid out his pitch: They had some deals in the works. They might need investors. The payoff would be big.
Soto said he was interested.
Weeks after the meeting in Florida, Soto flew to the Mexican-U.S. border to discuss a possible deal with the supposed Colombian trafficker and another undercover agent in McAllen, Texas. When he returned to McAllen in October, the two undercover agents told him they had 10 kilos of cocaine ready for him. But Soto balked, people familiar with the case said, insisting that he wasn’t ready to sell the drugs in the United States.
Needing some way to draw Soto back into their scheme, the undercover agents pressed him to safeguard the cocaine for several days until they could ship it to another buyer. As a reward, they would give him a kilo, worth about $20,000. The drugs were in a car parked nearby, one of the agents said, handing Soto a set of car keys. (There was no actual cocaine.) The conversation was recorded in its entirety.
Sometime after 2 o’clock the next morning, Soto returned to his room at a Courtyard Marriott. DEA agents were waiting.
On the wrong side of the border, without a lawyer or political connections, Soto did not take long to agree to cooperate. “He wasn’t the kind of guy who was ready to go to jail,” one official familiar with the case said. Later that day, after Soto waived his right to be prosecuted in Texas, he was flown to New York City on a commercial jet, sandwiched between a couple of agents in the back row.
Soto would thereafter become a confidential DEA source, known in the case file as CS-1. At the request of the DEA, ProPublica agreed not to identify him and other sources in the case. However, Soto was named in [a Spanish-language article](https://www.dw.com/es/el-cartel-de-sinaloa-financi%C3%B3-la-campa%C3%B1a-presidencial-de-amlo-en-2006-i/a-68121426) about the case published by DW News, the German state broadcast network.
After initially acknowledging messages from a ProPublica reporter, Soto did not respond to detailed questions about his role in the U.S. investigation.
Over several interviews with prosecutors from the Southern District, Soto confirmed that he had taken two deliveries of cash from López Nájera for the 2006 campaign and that a third delivery had been made by another envoy of La Barbie. Soto said the three contributions amounted to somewhat less than the $2 million that López Nájera had claimed, a discrepancy the agents attributed to customary skimming. Soto said he turned the money over to Mollinedo, people familiar with the case said.
In New York, Soto conferred with a court-appointed lawyer before agreeing to the government’s terms: If he continued to work secretly and speak truthfully with the investigators, he would be allowed to return to Mexico. His criminal conviction would remain sealed, and he would eventually be sentenced to the time he had “served” in federal custody — the several days he spent in McAllen and New York. Soto was brought before a federal judge and pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to distribute cocaine.
U.S. officials understood that the arrangement posed serious risks. If Soto informed his colleagues in Mexico that he was being asked to set them up — or even if he just stopped returning phone calls — the Americans’ only leverage would be to expose his guilty plea and perhaps put out an international warrant for his arrest. But Soto would be able to expose their investigation.
The agents’ plan was to confirm the evidence they had gathered about the traffickers’ donations in 2006 and then to reenact a version of that scheme with López Obrador's incipient 2012 campaign — this time with recording devices in place. They called the investigation “Operation Polanco.”
López Obrador campaigning for the presidency in 2012 Credit: John Moore/Getty Images
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To deploy Soto abroad as a covert or “protected-name source,” in the agency’s lexicon, the DEA had to submit its investigative plan to a group of Justice and DEA officials known as a Sensitive Activity Review Committee. A SARC (pronounced “sark”) is a screening process akin to a legal bomb squad. The panels examine undercover operations that involve the delivery of drugs or money to traffickers or the targeting of corrupt foreign officials; the lawyers try to deactivate the plans that might blow up on the department.
Although targeting the López Obrador campaign was an especially high-risk proposition, the SARC provisionally approved the plan in late 2010, officials said. The agents and prosecutors would have to return to the committee at least every six months for further review, and the scrutiny would intensify as they moved ahead.
The agents wanted to go big. They proposed offering the campaign $5 million in cash in return for promises that a López Obrador government would leave the traffickers alone. If Mollinedo or others in the campaign agreed, the agents would offer a down payment, maybe $100,000. They would then deliver the money to obtain hard evidence of the campaign’s complicity.
Some U.S. officials thought it was an auspicious moment for such a case. In August 2010, Mexican marines had [captured La Barbie](https://www.dea.gov/press-releases/2016/01/06/mexican-cartel-leader-edgar-valdez-villareal-aka-la-barbie-pleads-guilty). Two weeks later, they took down El Grande, his lieutenant, who had attended the 2006 meeting in Nuevo Vallarta. Both men had been indicted on federal charges in the United States and, if extradited, might be enticed to cooperate in return for a reduction of their sentences. In a brief conversation after his capture, El Grande told a DEA agent he was willing to share information about corrupt Mexican officials, but only after he was moved to the United States, documents reviewed by ProPublica show.
But even as new pieces of the investigation came together, the Obama administration was growing concerned about the fallout from another undercover operation, what became known as “Fast and Furious.” Without informing Mexican officials, agents of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed hundreds of high-powered weapons to be shipped illegally into Mexico so they could track them into the hands of drug gangs. The tracking failed, however, and the weapons were later tied to shootings that killed or wounded more than 150 Mexicans as well as the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. The Calderón government was outraged, and the tensions seemed to threaten bilateral cooperation once again.
“Things just came under a different level of scrutiny after Fast and Furious,” a former Justice Department official said. “At that point, everybody was in self-preservation mode.”
Still, American officials had some reason to hope that Mexico’s leaders might countenance — and keep secret — their investigation. Their ultimate target, López Obrador, was Calderón’s hated political rival. The DEA chief in Mexico City would inform the president’s intelligence chief, who was considered particularly trustworthy, and ask him to discuss the case only with Calderón.
The next phase of the investigation began well. DEA agents learned that the businessman who had accompanied Pancho León to the 2006 Nuevo Vallarta meeting was traveling to Las Vegas. When confronted by agents at the Bellagio Hotel & Casino, the businessman confirmed much of what Soto and López Nájera had said. He even mentioned a striking detail that López Nájera had noted: At the 2006 meeting in Nuevo Vallarta, León had given La Barbie a gift. Having heard that the trafficker collected watches, he brought a $20,000 Patek Philippe as a token of his respect.
The prosecutors initially thought they did not have enough evidence to arrest the man, so the agents let him return home after he promised to testify as a witness in any future criminal trial. The investigators had no hope of getting to León: In February 2007, months after losing his Senate race, [he disappeared](https://www.elsiglodetorreon.com.mx/noticia/2007/desaparece-empresario-de-gp.html) — the rumored victim of a drug-mafia murder.
In Mexico City, DEA agents rehearsed Soto, fitted him with a recording device and, in April 2011, sent him to talk with Mollinedo. It was a disaster. “He was terrified,” a former official recalled. Whether Soto mishandled the equipment or deliberately turned it off wasn’t clear, but he returned with a truncated recording that was often unintelligible because of background noise.
A second attempt the following month yielded about an hour of tape. It was clear from that conversation that Mollinedo knew about the 2006 transaction, people familiar with the case said. He seemed worried about two former members of the campaign security team, who had recently been jailed and might be pressured to reveal what they knew about the traffickers’ contributions. The officials said Mollinedo also mentioned friends in the Mexican attorney general’s office who might help protect him and Soto.
Although it was clear the two men were talking about the 2006 donations, Soto did not press Mollinedo to be more explicit or to incriminate himself more directly. “He never said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ or ‘I don’t know any of those people.’ There wasn’t anything said that cleared him,” one former official said of Mollinedo. “But the tape did not freshen up the conspiracy as much as was needed.”
In an interview, Mollinedo denied that he had ever received donations from drug traffickers and disputed the idea that López Obrador would ever tolerate such corruption. “We didn’t manage money,” he said, referring to his logistics team, adding that it only handled funds it was given to spend on transportation and other campaign expenses.
After going over the recordings, the New York prosecutors were underwhelmed, former officials said. For such a sensitive and risky case, they felt the evidence needed to be nearly irrefutable. The agents nonetheless proposed to move ahead with the sting operation directed at Mollinedo and other López Obrador aides. How they proceeded from there — and whether they went after López Obrador and other politicians in his orbit — would depend on what the agents learned.
When the SARC met to review the case again, just before Thanksgiving 2011, Justice and DEA officials in Washington, D.C., were joined by video link with senior DEA agents in Mexico City and New York. This time, however, the questions were sharper, several people familiar with the meeting said. Even if U.S. Embassy officials informed only trusted Mexican officials, the information could easily leak out, some officials said, and it could be explosive.
DEA representatives at the meeting emphasized that they were not seeking to affect the Mexican election, officials familiar with the meeting said. But they also made the point that if Mexico elected a president who came to office in debt to powerful drug traffickers, the consequences could be catastrophic for the two countries’ law-enforcement partnership.
Not long into the meeting, the video link to Mexico City went down — a common occurrence with the technology of the time. Without the main DEA group working on the case, the tone of the discussion shifted, two people present said. Justice Department lawyers talked about the huge risks of the operation, the uncertain evidence and the still-volatile aftermath of the Fast and Furious scandal, which had prompted some Republicans in Congress to call for the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder.
The agents and prosecutors got word of the SARC decision days later — the operation was being shut down.
In May 2012, the Mexican government extradited El Grande. When agents were able to ask him on U.S. soil about the donations to the López Obrador campaign, he confirmed that La Barbie had made them after the meeting in Nuevo Vallarta, two officials said.
Mauricio Soto Caballero, left, and Mollinedo in 2019, when they announced the launch of a new environmental political party Credit: Tomás Martínez/Grupo Reforma
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López Nájera’s star turn as Jennifer in Operation Clean-up was short-lived.
When the Calderón government was replaced in December 2012, it was not by López Obrador and his leftist alliance but by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, the political party that had held the country in a corrupt, authoritarian grip for more than 60 years until 2000. The new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, quickly pulled back from his predecessor’s close law-enforcement cooperation with the United States. Part of that shift was an effort by Peña’s attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, to disparage and reverse the previous administration’s prosecutions of corrupt officials.
According to three officials familiar with the events, Mexican prosecutors continued to interview López Nájera in the United States, but now they sought to exploit gaps and contradictions in his testimony. They asked him to corroborate new details of events he had described, sometimes suggesting specific dates, only to have other witnesses produce alibis for the dates López Nájera had confirmed.
A flurry of Mexican news stories, many of them driven by apparent government leaks, assailed López Nájera as a well-paid liar for the previous regime. Proceso, the country’s leading investigative magazine, [revealed his identity](https://www.proceso.com.mx/reportajes/2013/5/18/la-lengua-letal-de-jennifer-el-omnipresente-testigo-protegido-118503.html) with a cover photograph that U.S. officials said came from the Mexican attorney general’s office. Virtually all the officials jailed in Operation Clean-up were released after the charges against them were dropped.
Proceso, Mexico’s leading investigative newsmagazine, revealed in 2013 that the government’s best-known informant was a former drug lawyer named Roberto López Nájera. Credit: Proceso
What did not become public was that U.S. law-enforcement officials took the opposite view. While they noted that López Nájera had been inconsistent or mistaken on some points in his statements, almost everything else he had told them held up. So even as López Nájera became a symbol in Mexico of the justice system’s failures, the DEA judged him credible and continued to work with him.
Even before López Obrador took office in December 2018, U.S. officials began to review information from the DEA investigation as part of their effort to assess the new president’s willingness to work with them against the mafias, people briefed on the effort said. But the new Mexican leader soon answered that question himself.
First he sidelined the Mexican commando teams that had been the most trusted partner of U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. He then shut down a federal police unit that the DEA had trained and vetted to work with the Americans on big drug cases.
When DEA agents arrested a former Mexican defense minister, [Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda](https://www.propublica.org/article/mexico-drug-cartels-cienfuegos-case-dea), on drug-corruption charges in October 2020, López Obrador turned on the agency even more forcefully. With the military high command pressing the president to act in Cienfuegos’ defense, Mexican officials made clear that counter-drug cooperation was at risk. After U.S. Attorney General William Barr dropped the case and repatriated the general, López Obrador declared the Mérida accord “dead” and pushed through strict new limits on how U.S. agents could operate inside Mexico.
López Obrador’s long-standing promises to carry out a crusade against political corruption have produced [almost no meaningful results](https://mexiconewsdaily.com/politics/lopez-obrador-corruption/). Although a smattering of corruption charges were announced early in the administration — nearly all against the president’s political adversaries — almost none were successfully prosecuted.
However, López Obrador did call into question the previous administration’s discrediting of Operation Clean-up. In August 2022, his government arrested Murillo Karam on charges of helping cover up the 2014 disappearances of 43 students in the state of Guerrero. Months later, the government announced that the former attorney general would also [face corruption charges](https://apnews.com/article/business-mexico-caribbean-government-contracts-32ed862837f84458775707382bf7bd38) in connection with more than $1.3 million in hidden income and illicit contracts from which he was said to have profited during his time in office. Murillo Karam has denied the charges.
The president’s former close aide, Mollinedo, left López Obrador’s side after the 2012 campaign to go into business. He later joined Soto in trying to establish a new political party focused on the environment. The effort fizzled out within a year.
Mollinedo told ProPublica that he remains deeply loyal to the president. Although he and his family have been accused of [growing wealthy from their political connections](https://latinus.us/2023/09/12/de-chofer-de-amlo-a-empresario-de-la-4t-los-negocios-de-la-familia-de-nico-con-el-tren-maya/), he said his business endeavors have been entirely aboveboard.
**Update, Jan. 31, 2024:** At his [regular morning news conference](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZjv6HtRuXA) following the publication of ProPublica’s article, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador denounced the story as “completely false.” He added, “There is not a shred of evidence.”
He suggested that ProPublica’s story was a product of “management of the media” by the U.S. State Department and other powerful government agencies. “The DEA must say if this is true, not true, what was the investigation, what proof does it have.”
Life — or what’s left of it — stops on Kensington Avenue every 10 minutes or so. It happens when the subway hums along the elevated tracks, a blue steel structure that flies over this Philadelphia street. The roar doesn’t allow you to think… but, at least for that moment, the problems at ground zero of [the fentanyl crisis in the United States](https://english.elpais.com/usa/2023-05-22/how-the-united-states-got-hooked-on-fentanyl.html) are put on hold.
Afterward, the addicts and the volunteers who help them, the dealers and the police, the YouTubers and the tourists attracted by the news, the armed merchants and the residents of this gigantic open-air drug market will return to the free-for-all fight under the tracks. Hundreds of people who are addicted to the powerful opioid — which is 50 times stronger than heroin — live and die on these streets. Some, like Daniel — who lost all his toes due to the cold — have been wandering around them for years. Others don’t make it past their first month here.
The fate of all of them begins about 2,500 miles away, next to a different set of train tracks: those that cross [Culiacán, in the heart of Mexican drug trafficking territory](https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-11-24/succession-struggles-and-a-wave-of-internal-violence-what-the-arrest-of-el-nini-means-for-mexicos-sinaloa-cartel.html). There, a fentanyl cook — who calls himself Miguel — carries out macabre experiments on a handful of consumers, who test the merchandise before it’s shipped off to the United States. They start with one dose: one third pure and the rest, cut. The “human guinea pigs” inject it in front of him. If they say, “No, it didn’t rock me, it didn’t put me to sleep, add more,” the percentage increases. Miguel assures EL PAÍS that no one has ever died from this process.
One of the corners of Kensington Avenue in Philadelphia, which has become a symbol of the fentanyl crisis in the United States.Carlos Rosillo
Culiacán, the capital of the Mexican state of Sinaloa, and Philadelphia, the symbol of the largest drug crisis in the history of the United States, are two of the stations along the journey of a dose of fentanyl. And [more than 11,000 miles separate Daniel’s needle from the Chinese laboratories in Wuhan](https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-06-13/cryptocurrencies-chemicals-and-drugs-the-menu-of-international-fentanyl-trafficking.html), where the chemical precursors necessary to synthesize the drug are manufactured. That cheap white powder that is injected, smoked, or taken in pill form was responsible for two-thirds of the 107,888 overdose deaths recorded in the United States in 2022 — an all-time record. There are about 295 deaths a day, as if a major plane crashed at a New York City airport every morning.
With the aim of deciphering all the aspects of a global problem, EL PAÍS has followed the trail through eight cities, three countries and two continents, tracking the most effective serial killer of American adults between 18 and 49-years-old. It murders them more than traffic accidents and firearms.
Wuhan Manzanillo Culiacán Tijuana San Francisco Philadelphia
It’s a trip with stops in the slums where drug traffickers cook fentanyl and in the ports along the Pacific, corroded by corruption. It examines the propaganda machinery of Beijing and [the Washington offices where the strategists behind a losing war are at work](https://english.elpais.com/usa/2023-12-07/fentanyl-crisis-strains-us-mexico-diplomatic-relations.html). It sneaks across the border with Mexico — where, in 2022, the authorities seized 370 million lethal doses, more than enough to kill the entire population of the world’s leading power — and climbs the roads along which the trucks take it, hidden among bean jars, to the streets of Philadelphia or San Francisco, the two cities that top the rankings for fentanyl deaths in the world.
In the narco’s den: a “cook” in Sinaloa The addicts: an apocalypse in San Francisco The precursors: from a laboratory in Wuhan to the world The ports of Mexico: life or death in Manzanillo Export: the law of the border The dealers: supply and demand The science: the stronger the high, the bigger the hook Harm-reduction: needles in Kensington The Politics The way-out: veterans of the War on Drugs
### **1\.** In the narco’s den: a “cook” in Sinaloa
One of the symbols of the Sinaloa Cartel accompanied by the image of Jesus Malverde, the “narco saint.” HÉCTOR GUERRERO
Miguel is what U.S. authorities define as a “qualified chemist.” He’s used by the Sinaloa Cartel for the large-scale production of fentanyl. To be clear, Miguel isn’t actually named Miguel… and he’s not a chemist, either. He didn’t even finish high school.
He works as a “cook” in the territory controlled by [Los Chapitos](https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-04-24/secret-recordings-million-dollar-rewards-and-family-betrayal-how-the-us-hunted-down-el-chapos-sons.html), the four sons of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who inherited the business while their father is serving a life sentence in Colorado. “I learned to cook by watching others,” Miguel explains, lying on a couch in the safe house on the outskirts of Culiacán. He has agreed to tell his story, on the condition that EL PAÍS preserves his anonymity and does not reveal any details that give away his true identity. Autumn has already arrived, but it’s more than 85 degrees outside. The hum of the air conditioning accompanies the conversation — which lasts almost an hour — in a half-empty room.
Miguel says that he’s 29-years-old and that he makes a living manufacturing fentanyl in the mountains, the birthplace of legendary drug traffickers, such as El Chapo himself. He also says that he earns well: he makes about 450,000 pesos a day, or more than $25,000.
As a child, he worked in the fields. At 13, he started as a “pointer,” guarding a stretch of road for drug traffickers. At 15, some of his uncles invited him to work in a heroin laboratory as a jack-of-all-trades. They paid him 500 pesos ($30) a day. “Wouldn’t you have taken it?” he asks, without waiting for an answer. “Obviously, I was going to take it.”
He first learned how to turn opium gum into heroin. Then, a little over a decade ago, he turned to methamphetamines, while they were trendy. But he didn’t like it: the smell made him want to vomit.
Today, his fentanyl “kitchen” in the mountains is a small hut, covered by tarps and hidden by branches. That’s another of its great advantages over heroin: fentanyl not only is a much more powerful and addictive substance, it’s also much easier to produce and transport. [There’s no need for extensive fields of poppies](https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-04-18/fentanyls-butterfly-effect-end-of-heroin-boom-leaves-mexican-poppy-farmers-high-and-dry.html), nor farmers to take care of them, nor good luck with the storm season.
Members of the Mexican Army dismantle a chemical drug laboratory on the border of the mountains of Nayarit and Sinaloa.Hector Guerrero
To synthesize the drug, Miguel follows a three-step recipe. He refers to the **chemical precursors** needed for the formula as the “liquids.” How many does he use? He remains silent for a few seconds while he counts with his hands: “10, plus the base.” Of his “suppliers,” however, he doesn’t say anything.
- Chemical precursors
- Also known as drug precursors, these are substances used in the production of other substances by means of the chemical compounds they contain.
At the end of the process, he puts the thick mixture to dry on a cloth. From there, some lumps come out, which are passed through a home blender until a white powder remains. A kilo of Chinese precursors costs the cartel — according to the DEA — about $800. From there, four kilos of fentanyl come out. The profit can be between 200 and 800 times what they paid. That is, from $160,000 to $640,000 per kilo. This is why, when demand is high, up to 14 people get together to work.
Sinaloa, a state in northwest Mexico, is one of the hot spots for drug production that has put the United States in check. Most of the Mexican Army’s seizures are concentrated here. The area of Culiacán and its surroundings — one of the epicenters of the narcoculture empire, with its cult of organized crime as a lifestyle — is controlled by Los Chapitos. In February, Ovidio Guzmán — the youngest brother — was arrested. The drug traffickers’ order was, after that, to stop: don’t make noise, lower the volume. “Wait a little while.” So, Miguel has now put his laboratory on hold. He says that, at the moment, he’s peaceful with his savings. He trusts that there will be work again.
A military truck torched by the Sinaloa Cartel after the arrest of Ovidio Guzmán in Culiacán, on January 7, 2023.Gladys Serrano
During the conversation, he refers again and again to *la plebada*, a Sinaloan slang term for “the guys.” He says: “I’m not upset with *la plebada.*” Or: “*La plebada* has its workers.” Or: “Sometimes, you have to do things with *la plebada*.” Finally, he speaks directly: “*La plebada* are Los Chapitos.”
He claims that he doesn’t work exclusively for them. He says that he has other clients who are discreet, businessmen who work effectively, “who move the kilos.” He prefers not to be too close to Los Chapitos. Because “if they tell you to kill a person, you have to go kill them. And my business isn’t to kill people, you hear me? My business is to work.” That’s why Miguel has his laboratory in the mountains. And that’s why, when he finishes the interview, he’ll leave in a hurry for his ranch. He doesn’t want to “have issues with *la plebada*.”
### **2\.** The addicts: an apocalypse in San Francisco
Joseph smokes fentanyl from his pipe in a Tenderloin alley. CARLOS ROSILLO
It’s 11:30 on another foggy day in the [Tenderloin, a neighborhood in downtown San Francisco.](https://english.elpais.com/usa/2023-07-03/the-slow-death-of-downtown-san-francisco.html) With a bohemian past, the area has turned into an apocalyptic symbol of the post-pandemic city.
Joseph, 41, lives on these streets. Sitting on the floor, he reads a chronicle of the Ukrainian war in an old newspaper. He likes to know what’s going on in the world, he says. He doesn’t sleep much, almost always during the day, to avoid being robbed of the little that he has: a backpack and a garbage bag that he drags when he shuffles, because it’s difficult for him to walk upright.
He came to San Francisco in 2016 from Chicago. He lived with a girlfriend in a downtown apartment. After breaking up with her, his previous addiction problems worsened and he ended up adding to the statistics of the 653,000 homeless people living poorly in the United States, 12% more than the previous year, another historical high.
Joseph’s newspaper also serves to wrap half-a-gram of fentanyl, some crack, aluminum foil and a lighter. In a secluded alley, he pulls out a pipe, lights it and inhales. He doubles over and sways. A couple of minutes later — back from somewhere on the edge of consciousness — he confesses: “I used heroin before. This is much worse. I want more and more. And I need it every 40 minutes. If not, I go crazy.” According to neuroscience, [its effect is stronger and shorter,](https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-05-29/the-scourge-of-fentanyl-how-the-devastating-drug-affects-the-body.html) causing its addicts to live with the anxiety that Joseph describes. “The worst thing is that it’s never like the first time.”
There are hundreds of people who, like him, are looking around the Tenderloin district to feel what they felt that first time. Almost all of them have a long history of drug use behind them. Many say that they ended up using fentanyl due to some setback in life: an illness, a loss of a loved one, mental health problems… They are mostly white, extras in the third act of the opiate tragedy, which began in the 1990s with prescription pills called **OxyContin**. This continued with the resurgence of heroin at the beginning of the century. Since the middle of the last decade, the tragedy stars fentanyl, which swept all the others away.
- OxyContin
- Brand name for oxycodone and a source of wealth and notoriety for the Sackler family.
Addicts subsist in downtown San Francisco among tents, wheelchairs, sewers and garbage. In the morning, they score. At midday, they grab a juice, or something to eat. Some form groups to be protected. They don’t say much that’s intelligible to each other, but they nod along together. When they’re in one place, they lie around in any way possible, with their heads against the pavement. When they’re on the move, they smile at strangers, say “thank you” and “good morning,” clinging to the humanity that good manners can offer.
Every now and then, someone shouts “overdose!” A crowd runs into the street, armed with **naloxone** inhalers. According to [a study by Massachusetts General Hospital](https://www.massgeneral.org/news/press-release/study-reveals-fentanyl-effects-on-brain), what contributes to making fentanyl a very dangerous drug is that the consumer of too high an amount stops breathing before even losing consciousness.
- Naloxone
- Narcan, in its commercial formulation, acts on the same neuroreceptors as fentanyl, deactivating its fulminant effect.
When the overdose is a false alarm, the resurrected ones slip away at a brisk pace, without time to thank their luck. Nobody wants to end up in the hospital: a night without fentanyl is worse than death.
Given this scenario, most stores around the area have closed. On the corners, the dealers ensure the smooth running of their business, without taking their eyes off of each other. It’s easy to distinguish them: [they don’t look like they’re on drugs.](https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-12-17/the-poison-and-the-antidote-a-cry-for-help-from-ground-zero-of-the-fentanyl-epidemic.html)
The orderliness and safety of the residents is the responsibility of volunteers from associations such as [Urban Alchemy](https://urban-alchemy.us/), which receives funding from the San Francisco City Council. The police have other priorities. After three months of visiting the Tenderloin district several times a week, it’s inevitable to think that the city has handed the neighborhood over to drug addicts. Life is organized around them.
In 2021, Mayor London Breed — of the Democratic Party — declared an emergency, asking the state of California and the federal government for help. Since then, the California Highway Patrol and the National Guard collaborate with local agents in the pursuit of drug mafias. In November, they made an effort to clean up the streets on the occasion of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leader’s Meeting, which resulted in a commitment by President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping [to cooperate more effectively](https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-10-28/agreement-reached-for-biden-xi-talks-but-details-still-being-worked-out.html) to tackle the crisis. But it was just a mirage. The world leaders left and the apocalypse returned.
### **3\.** The precursors: from a laboratory in Wuhan to the world
Police discover oxycodone pills during a search at John F. Kennedy Airport, in New York. GETTY
On December 15, 2021, a self-made Chinese businessman became one of the most wanted men in the global fentanyl business. His name is Chuen Fat Yip. With brown eyes, weighing 150 pounds and standing at 5ft 6, the 70-year-old man was born in Wuhan. The U.S. Department of State is offering a $5 million reward for any information leading to his arrest.
According to Washington, Chuen runs a drug trafficking organization that operates in mainland China and Hong Kong. He also controls a group of companies that sell chemical compounds and precursors. One of them is Wuhan Yuancheng Gongchuang Technology.
The company has an active website, where it says they export to more than 20 countries. There’s a phone number. On the other end of the line, a man’s voice sounds. When asked about the sanctions, he excuses himself: “I’m just a salesman…” He’ll then stop responding to messages.
Chuen defends his innocence. He affirms that the case is based on “untrue information” circulated by American reporter Ben Westhoff. This is from a 2022 statement that his company sent to a Texas court, where — among other things — he is accused of allegedly agreeing to ship 24 kilograms of 4-ANPP, a precursor to fentanyl.
Westhoff is an investigative journalist. He was working on his book [*Fentanyl, Inc.*](https://groveatlantic.com/book/fentanyl-inc/) (2019) when he came across Chuen. He searched the internet for advertisements for precursors and found a copious amount of ads from companies in China dedicated to their production and export. Almost all paths seemed to lead to the same matrix: Yuancheng.
The DEA offered a reward to anyone providing information on Chuen Fat Yip's whereabouts.DEA.GOV
It was 2017: producing and selling these precursors was still legal in China. Part of the problem has always been that they weren’t prohibited. They contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of people on the other side of the world, even though they did no harm in the West. One of the most up-to-date sources of official information is a recent documentary that was broadcast on Chinese state television. The film claims that, in China — with one of the most severe anti-drug regulations in the world — the abuse of fentanyl is “practically unknown.” Since 2017, the People’s Republic has resolved 397,000 criminal cases related to narcotics, but fewer than 10 were linked to the opiate.
The documentary acknowledges the difficulty of keeping track of new variants. In 2013, there were already 13 types of fentanyl. Ten years later, there are more than 50 in China alone. Since 2015, Beijing has been increasing the number of controlled substances each year.
NPP and 4-ANPP entered the list of persecuted compounds in 2017, so online sellers in China began offering Westhoff legal substitutes. In a phone interview from St. Louis, Missouri, the journalist sums it up like this: “There are a lot of different chemicals that can be used to make fentanyl, and they’re legal in China.”
In May 2019, Beijing took the step of banning all analogue substances. Previously, in the first years of the epidemic, much of the fentanyl that arrived in the United States came from the Asian country, in [packages sent by regular mail.](https://english.elpais.com/usa/2023-10-26/us-government-says-it-plans-to-go-after-legal-goods-tied-to-illegal-fentanyl-trade-in-new-strategy.html) When the screws of its production in Asia were tightened, Mexican drug traffickers (as well as laboratories in the United States or Canada, where the largest one discovered to-date has just been dismantled in Vancouver) quickly learned how to cook it. Still, they continued to need the ingredients for the recipe from China: the famous precursors.
In February 2018, Westhoff posed as a buyer and visited Chuen’s company in Wuhan. In addition to being famous for being the birthplace of Covid-19, the city is the capital of Hubei province — one of the country’s chemical hubs — as well as the headquarters of several companies sanctioned by the United States for their links to fentanyl.
China is the world’s largest producer of pharmaceutical ingredients. But it wasn’t always like this. The change came with the economic reforms pushed by Chairman Deng Xiaoping. In 1985, when China began to admit foreign capital, one of the first pharmaceutical companies to arrive was **Janssen**, a Belgian firm. Its founder, Dr. Paul Janssen (1926-2003), was a lover of China and became one of the first foreign visitors to the terracotta warriors of Xi’an. He was also the chemist who synthesized fentanyl in 1959, which quickly became one of the most widely-used opioid pain relievers.
- Janssen
- Part of the giant Johnson & Johnson, which patented one of the first vaccines against Covid-19.
On the day Westhoff visited, there were hundreds of salespeople scattered throughout Chuen’s offices. It was cold. The two men spoke briefly. A few months later, he would call to tell him that he was a journalist. In his book, he clarifies that Yuancheng didn’t sell merchandise considered illegal in China, but that everything indicates that Chuen was aware that the precursors were used to illegally manufacture fentanyl.
Yu Haibin — deputy director of the National Narcotics Control Commission and one of the leaders of the anti-drug fight in China — claims to be aware of the Chuen Fat Yip case. “So far, we’ve found no evidence that he or his company has violated the law in China,” he says, during an interview with EL PAÍS in Beijing. “If the United States could provide us with legally-obtained evidence, we could take legal action under Chinese law,” he adds. “We’re open to cooperation.” The issue reflects the underlying problem. In the middle of one of the worst moments of geopolitical tension between Washington and Beijing, the White House continued to impose sanctions against dozens of Chinese companies and citizens in 2023. But Chinese investigations reveal that the equipment and substances involved “are not controlled” in his country, Yu cations. That is, the sale is not prohibited.
In November, fentanyl was one of the key issues of Biden and Xi’s meeting in San Francisco, which resulted in China’s commitment to do more to resolve the crisis. Yu explains that among the next steps to be taken will be “comprehensive cooperation that includes the exchange of intelligence information, the investigation of \[specific\] cases and technical exchange.” At the moment, it’s unclear if this will be enough. The DEA has already observed an increase in trafficking of precursors from India.
### **4\.** The ports of Mexico: life or death in Manzanillo
The Port of Manzanillo, China's main gateway into Mexico, is being investigated for the trafficking of fentanyl precursors. ROBERTO ANTILLÓN
The bodyguard made a gesture to her from the passenger seat and she managed to crouch down as best she could in the back of the car. Then, a rain of bullets began: 36 shots welcomed her as mayor of Manzanillo, Mexico.
Griselda Martínez leaned over the back of a boy sitting next to her. Their lives depended on the boy staying calm. “If he gets desperate and gets up,” Martínez thought, “they will kill us both.” The bodyguard shot at one of the two attacking motorcycles. He was hit in the face, but he also managed to hit the shooter. The driver also opened fire, before the motorcycles fled.
It was June 2019 and Martínez had only been mayor for seven months in the main port city along the Mexican Pacific, the gateway to Asia for almost a century. Tons of food, clothing and car parts pass through the port every day. And, for more than a decade, so have the precursors that arrive from China. In April, the Mexican Navy discovered 11,500 bottles of tequila that actually contained almost 10 tons of the liquids that have turned Manzanillo into a tinderbox.
The mayor is a petite woman. Before the interview, two bodyguards appear. Then, four more. The 55-year-old has 15 in total. They have accompanied her since the assassination attempt. During all this time, she has not set foot in her house. First, she spent a year sleeping in a Navy barracks. Then, two more at the City Hall. Since 2022, she has lived in another municipal building.
Griselda Martínez Martínez, Municipal President of Manzanillo, Colima, Mexico.Roberto Antillón
When Martínez became mayor, the police department was infiltrated to the bone by the two criminal groups that control the area: [the Sinaloa Cartel](https://english.elpais.com/opinion/2023-12-13/the-death-of-el-chapo-guzmans-mother-the-end-of-an-era.html) and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the two most powerful mafias in Mexico. The two operate as multinational crime syndicates, with structures that go from the top to the bottom: their brand is printed on the small bags of cocaine or meth that the dealers sell. The Sinaloa logo is an apple. The one from Jalisco is the group’s initials: CJNG.
When she came into office, Martínez fired more than 200 police officers out of a total of 300. The agents had even been killing each other, because each one worked for a different side. Navy Captain Fernando Winfield — head of the police — remembers that, a couple of years ago, he arrived with his men to a house where a murder had been reported. Upon entering the living room, the deceased was seated with a bullet in his head. He was one of his former agents. The pressure put on new ones is difficult to bear: the mafias offer them money, look them up on Facebook and threaten them.
The chain that links corruption in the port, the entry of chemical precursors and violence has even been recognized by the president of Mexico himself. “We’re going to clean up the ports and customs in the country,” Andrés Manuel López Obrador promised, in the summer of 2020 from Manzanillo. He ordered that the job of securing the ports be handed over to the military. In the last two years, four customs officials have been killed in the Port of Manzanillo.
The Navy declined to provide information or access to the port for this report. The mayor explained that, within the facilities, there are traffic lights that mark which containers are inspected and which are not. “It’s random, a matter of luck.” All these factors combined make detecting these products — which come in quantities that often don’t exceed a few liters — seem like finding a drop of oil in an ocean.
With 160,000 inhabitants, Manzanillo was, until not so long ago, the quiet fishing town where Bo Derek filmed the movie *10*, in which she played the perfect woman at the end of the 1970s. Those golden times are over, although tourism — mainly Mexican — still visits the hotels, which are a little worn out. The city is within one of the smallest and least-populated states in the country. It used to be sold abroad with the slogan: “Colima, the place where nothing happens.”
But then, things started happening. In 2010, former governor Silverio Cavazos was shot to death outside his house. The importance of the port — with the expansion of chemical drugs, its placement along the route to the north through the Pacific Passage and the fact that it is surrounded by Jalisco and Michoacán, two states dominated by organized crime — have pushed it to its limit. For years, Colima has usually topped lists of the most violent territories in Mexico. In 2022, it repeated its ranking as the place with the highest homicide rate in the country, which reached its historic record in 2019. Since then, the numbers have only decreased slightly. There are almost 100 violent deaths a day in Mexico.
### **5\.** Export: the law of the border
The road between Sonora and Arizona, one of the major border crossing points. HÉCTOR GUERRERO
Pedro, 32, is sitting in a plastic chair in a hardware store in Culiacán. He’s from the state of Durango. His real name is not Pedro and he doesn’t want his true identity to appear in the press, either.
A little over a year ago, he began “exporting” fentanyl pills to the United States. However, after the violent arrest of El Chapo’s youngest son and his subsequent [extradition to the United States in September](https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-09-16/ovidio-guzman-son-of-el-chapo-extradited-to-the-us-to-face-justice.html), he is heeding Los Chapitos’ order to slow down. As a result, he’s back to marijuana and meth. Better not to risk it. “Right now, if people here catch you with fentanyl, you’re going to get screwed. You, your mom, your cousin, they’ll kill them all. Even the dogs will get killed.”
He says that, before the break, he moved a million pills a month with his partners. Always the blue ones: “the *chingonas*.” They bought them for $2 “from a comrade here” and sold them for $15 to “another ***pocho*** comrade there.” There being New York. Deducting expenses, he calculates that he gets $5 from each pill that’s distributed, removing the “large part” that the *pleba* (Los Chapitos) take. The biggest expense, however, is transportation. “Los Angeles, Kansas, New York. The higher you go, the more expensive.”
- Pocho
- Americans of Mexican descent.
The fentanyl that enters the United States from Mexico comes in powder or, increasingly, in the form of fake pills, which are camouflaged as commercial brands such as Xanax, Vicodin or OxyContin. Drug traffickers press them with machines that they also buy from China. The street price of one of Pedro’s pills is around $20 in New York.
The trafficker makes it clear that the most difficult thing is to cross the border. According to U.S. authorities, more than 90% of fentanyl enters the country via official ports of entry, hidden in private vehicles or cargo trucks. In 2018 — according to data from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) — 600 kilos of the substance were intercepted. In 2022, the amount rose to 7,200 kilos. Two milligrams are enough to kill a person.
Pedro uses big trailers, or “worms,” as he calls them. He says that he doesn’t know where exactly the drivers hide the drugs, but that the best thing is to take the truck when it’s loaded “with food, cans of beans, chili, or car parts.” The goods are thus better disguised when going through X-rays, the use of which the Biden administration is promoting. He’s proud, because, as he assures EL PAÍS, the border patrol has never caught one of his people.
The cartel takes advantage of the holes in the border. It also pays hefty bribes to the authorities. One of the charges against El Chapo’s son details how, to guarantee a shipment, he organized a bribery network from Culiacán to Tijuana. That was Pedro’s route, along the Pacific corridor. “Just from here to the border,” he clarifies, “you spend about $30,000 in pure bribes between the police, the military and the Attorney General’s Office. In the United States, if they catch you, you go to jail, but here, in Mexico, you can settle it with a fine.”
There are different rates. You don’t pay the same to pass a checkpoint (without being checked) as the amount you have to pay in case someone is detained. “\[In that case\], they’re going to take $200,000 or $300,000 from you. That’s business,” he shrugs, like someone detailing the rules of a board game.
Once the shipment has passed, there’s another delicate moment. In one of the accusations against Guzmán, it’s described how two of his men had to move more than 20 kilos of fentanyl that they had stored in a hotel room in Los Angeles. The staff smelled something strange, so they ended up burying the merchandise in the backyard of a house. “What happens,” explains Pedro, “is that, sometimes, you arrive in Los Angeles and you have to change trucks to continue. So, you have to hide it in an office and wait.”
The most common locations for “offices” — according to Guzmán’s summary — are southern California, El Paso, Texas, and Phoenix, Arizona. From there, the cartel’s American distribution network enters the scene. “The *pochos* are the ones who have contact with the *güeros*,” says Pedro. “They sell wholesale, they have their clients, their dealers. Whites, Blacks, Puerto Ricans… you get me?”
### **6\.** The dealers: supply and demand
Several doses of fentanyl of varying origins and identification at a consumer camp in an area near the railroad tracks in Kensington, Philadelphia. CARLOS ROSILLO
Until very recently, MAC was one of the last links in this supply chain. He’s a small-time dealer who asks that his initials be used and that the location of his interview with EL PAÍS not be revealed.
He sold fentanyl in Santa Cruz, 75 miles from San Francisco. “I bought it from Hondurans in the Tenderloin, or in Oakland,” he clarifies. “They control the market there. I got an ounce (28.34 grams) for $400. Then, I sold each gram in Santa Cruz for $50. Also, 100 milligrams for $10, or a quarter for $20. It was a big business. I used to make 1,500 bucks a day.”
MAC says he himself ended up hooked on fentanyl after being prescribed OxyContin after surgery. The bulky man lost his job and became a dealer. That’s when, he says, his hell began. “Every week, I got into fights and there were a lot of robberies. Overdoses were the order of the day. Many people died. I carried Narcan myself. I sold, but I also tried to save lives.”
At the time of the interview, MAC had been trying to detox for two weeks, tired of a lifestyle that will either send him to prison, or end up killing him. “Fetty” — as it’s known in street slang — is an extremely dangerous drug when handled: accidental ingestion can be fatal. “In my opinion, that makes business easier,” MAC says. “The cocaine or methamphetamine market is controlled by cartels that find fentanyl very dangerous. If you’re willing to take the risk, it’s easy money.”
MAC, a fentanyl dealer and trafficker in Santa Cruz (California). Carlos Rosillo
On the streets, sellers like MAC borrow names from commercial brands or cultural references for their stationery — such as “Mini,” “Scooby Doo,” or “Fortnite” — to make their offer more attractive.
It’s not that fentanyl needs much help selling, warns journalist Sam Quinones, author of the book ***The Least of Us*** (2021). In it, Quinones reconstructs how the drug arrived and how it spread throughout the United States. “It entered around 2014 through the Midwest, then it came by mail from China. In just a few years, the plague spread throughout the country,” he clarifies, in a telephone interview with EL PAÍS.
- The Least of Us
- Perhaps the most comprehensive history of the current crisis.
The isolation of the pandemic — fatal for addicts in the process of recovery — and the epidemic of mental health problems that came with it contributed to triggering consumption. Between 2019 and 2022, overdose deaths grew by 99.8%, reaching 107,888.
In his book — which covers the epidemic up until mid-2021 — Quinones says that traffickers soon began to deal in fentanyl, which is much cheaper compared to other substances, such as cocaine, ecstasy, or even synthetic marijuana. “This is how thousands of people — those who didn’t die from an accidental overdose — ended up hooked on something they didn’t even know they were taking,” he explains. It wasn’t just a matter of earning more, but of increasing demand by manipulating supply. That’s one of the most pressing parts of the problem right now. And not only in the United States: in cities across Mexico, traces of the opiate have already begun to be found in substances tested at parties. At the moment, in Europe — where the authorities are closely monitoring the situation — the problem still isn’t as worrying.
For Quinones, one of the most unexpected consequences is the influence of this crisis on the recreational use of other drugs. In New York City, casual users go out partying with test strips — which cost a dollar, or are handed out for free and are legal in about 20 states — to detect the presence of fentanyl in the other drugs that they take. For their defenders, these strips are to this opioid epidemic what condoms were to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. As then, many people simply prefer not to take a risk.
### **7\.** Chemistry: the stronger the high, the bigger the hook
Joseph, a regular user of fentanyl in San Francisco, shows off a rock of approximately half-a-gram of the substance. CARLOS ROSILLO
When it was patented for intravenous administration in 1959, fentanyl changed surgery forever. For many years, aware of its enormous power, Janssen — the inventor — only allowed its controlled distribution to anesthesiologists, a profession in which the first cases of addiction were recorded. It was like opening the gates to the field: at the end of the 1960s, there were already numerous variants with similar effects.
It was difficult for organized crime to find out about its existence, but when it did, it quickly learned to take advantage of the value of fentanyl as a drug from consumption on the streets — a drug that was more powerful, cheaper, more addictive… and also more lethal. So much so that the U.S. Department of Justice has identified several cases of inexperienced “cooks” who have died in Mexico, poisoned by vapors from precursors.
“It’s important to emphasize that, even today, it’s a good and useful analgesic from a medical point of view, for complex operations, or for terminally ill cancer patients,” says Lawrence Kwan, a professor at Stanford University and chief medical officer for [St. Anthony’s Foundation](https://www.stanthonysf.org/#:~:text=Founded%20in%201950%2C%20St.,our%20doors%20joins%20the%20St.) Medical Clinic, an addiction treatment institution in San Francisco. “The problem is when it’s consumed uncontrollably.”
Fentanyl’s status as a valuable medical tool makes it difficult to combat: it simply cannot be made illegal. It’s not so easy to criminalize precursors, either: many of them are used in the manufacturing of cleaning products or commonly-used medications, such as ibuprofen.
Like any opioid, fentanyl creates anxiety and addiction; it just does so much more quickly. It only takes a few shots to get hooked. Overdoses are also more frequent.
In an interview with EL PAÍS, Julián — a 27-year-old addict, who is trying to get out of the hole in a rehabilitation center two hours from San Francisco — says that he has survived three overdoses. His brother didn’t have the same luck. That flirtation with death is a very common experience among fentanyl users.
Paradoxically, it’s a less destructive drug than others, such as meth. It has no consequences on vital organs such as the heart. Kwan says that at a cardiology conference he attended recently, he heard that “access to heart donors has improved as a sad side effect of the rise in opioid overdoses.” They weren’t lying: a study published in July 2021 by the American Heart Association confirms that the number of transplants has increased with overdose deaths.
With fentanyl, the classic dealer’s dilemma also arises: how to cut it without losing its strength? And new questions are asked: what’s the limit of purity that can be reached to encourage addiction, without destroying the clientele?
Before shipping the merchandise to the United States, Mexican drug traffickers seek answers to these questions on the streets, based on experiments that are detailed in documents from the U.S. Department of Justice. Miguel — the chemist who didn’t finish high school — recounts one such experiment. He says that once, one of the addicts took too much without realizing it. “Boom, he fell flat. Another guy went over and put salt in his mouth. And then, he was complaining: ‘Why did you wake me up?’”
In the open field next to the train tracks in Culiacán, where Miguel says he carried out his experiments, they also remember. “Sometimes people come asking, they want to get high for free,” says María, a regular, before smoking a pipe with methamphetamine. Amid the remains of clothes and syringes on the floor, she says she doesn’t even want to see fentanyl: “That shit kills you.”
### **8\.** Harm-reduction: panic in the needle district
Used syringes collected by drug addicts are then given to organizations such as Prevention Point in exchange for new ones. CARLOS ROSILLO
From his office in the White House, [Rahul Gupta — Joe Biden’s anti-drug czar —](https://english.elpais.com/usa/2023-12-12/bidens-drug-czar-we-need-china-to-be-more-aggressive-against-fentanyl.html) directs Washington’s efforts to solve a currently unsolvable puzzle. He’s the first medical doctor to hold the position in the half-a-century that the War on Drugs has lasted. He’s pursuing familiar progressive “harm-reduction” policies in his role. In an interview with EL PAÍS, he details the three main points of this program, which is being implemented for the first time: “make Narcan widely available — [since March, it can be purchased without a prescription](https://english.elpais.com/usa/2023-03-29/fda-approves-over-the-counter-narcan-heres-what-it-means.html) — distribute syringes that prevent the spread of contagious diseases, and provide strips to detect substances such as fentanyl or **xylazine** in cocaine or ecstasy.”
- Xylazine
- An animal anesthetic they call “Tranq” or “the zombie drug.”
[Xylazine is Gupta’s latest and most pressing concern.](https://english.elpais.com/usa/2023-07-12/the-white-house-declares-war-on-xylazine-the-zombie-drug-linked-to-spike-in-fentanyl-overdoses.html) Consumers mix it because it lengthens and deepens the effect of fentanyl, by slowing down the heart rate, blood pressure and breathing. Since it’s not an opioid, it doesn’t respond to naloxone, which is why it’s already involved in 90% of the 1,413 overdose deaths recorded last year in Philadelphia. Not only that: forensic specialists have already detected it in corpses in all 50 states.
Panoramic view from an elevated bridge over the Kensington tracks at Allegheny Station in Philadelphia.Carlos Rosillo
The size of the needles is at the center of the debate in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. A brick building houses the headquarters of an organization called Prevention Point. In this place — where workers prevent journalists from entering — addicts can take a break when the cold hits and change their used syringes. Kevin Bernard — the chaplain of [The Rock, a Catholic center](https://www.therockphilly.org/) whose life is organized around a boxing gym (after all, this is the city of *Rocky*) — says that, because of this policy, the sidewalks “are flooded with needles.” “Stepping around them, people walk their dogs, children go to school. What those people do is a disgrace for Kensington,” he declares.
Daniel eats lunch outside Prevention Point, a center that gives out Narcan, needles and food to drug addicts.Carlos Rosillo
Bernard is a big man with a broken nose. A former boxer and a former police officer, he’s been here all his life — he knows the neighborhood like no one else. Once or twice a week, he guides an old van full of volunteers dressed in yellow vests. They talk to the users and, if anyone is encouraged, they put them in the vehicle and take them to their center, or refer them to places like [Philly House, the oldest homeless shelter in Philadelphia](https://www.phillyhouse.org/). The president of the shelter, Phil Montgomery, explains that they have 240 beds. “From here, we divert them to specialized detox centers,” he notes.
Kevin Bernard, a former boxer and volunteer who walks the streets of Kensington helping people with addictions, poses at The Rock, a faith-based organization in Philadelphia.Carlos Rosillo
In a location adjacent to The Rock, police officers from all over the country come to learn about how to detect when a person is under the influence of fentanyl. In exchange for some food, volunteers like 36-year-old Keith — who has been in Kensington for the last four years and lost a leg on these streets — undergo tests for about an hour, from having their pupils measured, to trying to walk in a straight line.
On the street, police aren’t used against consumption. “I’m an advocate for harm-reduction policies and I overcame my own addiction, but this is just too much,” sighs Brooke Feldman, a drug reform activist. He stands next to the train tracks, in what remains of a tent colony. “Seeing how they shoot up in front of an agent, I don’t know… This has to do with human behavior. If they don’t encourage you to change, you don’t change. The \[permissive environment\] isn’t good for anyone.”
Keith, 36, voluntarily submits himself to drug testing at a store in downtown Kensington.Carlos Rosillo
Feldman goes out on patrol with Ronnie Kayser, who founded a women’s organization that helps addicts — [Angels In Motion (AIM)](https://aimangelsinmotion.org/) — after losing a brother to an overdose. They’re joined by Mary Lou Toewe, who’s part of the board of directors of AIM and the mother of a boy who “has been on and off drugs for years.” They drive a car loaded with water and some bags of food that they distribute to addicts. They also carry an ointment for wounds caused by xylazine, which, when injected, causes bruises, makes the flesh necrotic and ends up leaving holes through which, in some cases, bone appears.
Ronnie Kayser treats the skin wounds of a fentanyl addict in Kensington, Philadelphia.Carlos Rosillo
Detractors of harm-reduction policies — which can include the distribution of free tents to addicts — warn that these measures can act as magnets for addicts, who move to places such as the Tenderloin district or the Kensington neighborhood, so they can live their lives without problems. In San Francisco, Gina McDonald — a mother of one — explains that her daughter Sam preferred to exchange “the comforts of the family home” for the Tenderloin. “I didn’t allow her to take drugs in her room. In the area where we live, you cannot put up a tent, you cannot buy on the street. They would arrest her. In the Tenderloin, she can do whatever she wants.”
John Quinones runs a store selling second-hand goods and gold. He has been working in the store for 45 years and has witnessed the decline of the surrounding streets in recent years.Carlos Rosillo
In Philadelphia, the big question is what the recent election of Democrat Cherelle Parker — the first female mayor in the city’s history — will mean. She campaigned on a tough-on-crime message, promising to ask the National Guard for help. Everything indicates that, in an election year, the cultural war between Democrats and Republicans will intensify even further on the fentanyl front. Conservatives blame the problem on the management of liberal cities and the calls to defund the police that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
### **9\.** The political fight: “This is a war. Do something!”
Andres Manuel López Obrador and Joe Biden at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperative summit. EFE
Michelle Leopold found out about her son Trevor’s death through social media. She knew that he used to smoke marijuana, but not that he took fentanyl. Everything indicates that he didn’t know it, either.
That night, Trevor and two friends bought four 30-milligram oxycodone pills and took them in his dorm room. Only one of them contained a fatal dose. According to the coroner, Trevor died a few minutes after consuming that pill. Hence, the friend who slept beside him that night did so next to a dead body.
Since November 17, 2019, his mother has turned her son’s room in Marin City — 20 minutes from San Francisco by car — into the operations center of her fight against fentanyl. Next to the bed where he used to sleep, there’s a photograph of the boy’s smiling face, with an accompanying text that reads: “Trevor Leopold, 18-years-old, victim of a homicide induced by fentanyl poisoning.”
Cases like Trevor’s have permeated American public opinion, thanks to the testimony of mothers such as pro-life advocate Rebecca Kiessling, who testified before Congress in February. She lost two of her children in 2020 to an accidental overdose of fentanyl, which she said “came across the Southern border.” “This is a war. Act like it. Do something!” she demanded of the congresspeople.
Michelle Leopold holds a photo of her son Trevor in the room where he used to sleep in their Marin County, Northern California, home.Carlos Rosillo
Members of the hard-right wing of the Republican Party have asked for the authorization of the use of bombings and [anti-terrorist operations to put an end to Mexican drug trafficking](https://english.elpais.com/usa/2023-10-05/democrats-reject-republican-calls-to-declare-a-war-against-cartels-in-mexico.html), as was done against ISIS. They know that it’s politically and diplomatically impossible to carry out such a proposal, but fentanyl — which, as Republican candidate for the White House Nikki Haley recalled, has already killed more Americans than the number of U.S. troops who died in the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined — has also become a powerful weapon to inflame voters and attack Biden. They blame his management of the border for the deaths of these young people.
The issue is one of the biggest points of friction in the relationship between Mexico and the United States, especially since China banned its export in 2019 and production was left in the hands of drug traffickers. Mexican President López Obrador has defended himself by criticizing U.S. politicians who demand an invasion or wave the threat of blocking binational funds. He has also put his consular network into operation — the largest in the United States — to convince millions of voters of Mexican descent not to vote for candidates who use such rhetoric.
Until recently, López Obrador didn’t even acknowledge that fentanyl was manufactured in his country. He dismissed Mexico’s responsibility as a passage from China to the north. He even sent a letter in the spring to his Chinese counterpart, President Xi Jinping, asking for help. The response from the other side of the Pacific was clear: “The United States must handle its own problems.” Meanwhile, the White House — which has created an alliance of 130 countries to fight synthetic drugs (including Mexico, but not China) — is desperately trying to give the impression that it has the crisis under control.
Mexican authorities have dismantled 37 laboratories manufacturing fentanyl pills since López Obrador came to power in 2018. This is according to a statement from March 2023, made by Mexican Secretary of Defense Luis Cresencio Sandoval. Mexico has also defended itself by comparing the seizure figures with respect to the previous six-year term of Enrique Peña Nieto: 7,576 kilos compared to 532. The detail that’s omitted is that the crisis was unleashed during the years of this government, not the past one.
### **10\.** The recovery: veterans of the War on Drugs
A talk at a rehabilitation center in San Francisco. CARLOS ROSILLO
Morning has broken in front of San Francisco City Hall. Three young women — who have slept in the heat of a sewer — are lying around. They’re under the effects of the first dose of fentanyl of the day. When one of them regains some lucidity, she explains that her name is Abby, that she’s from Oregon, that she studied Fine Arts and that she shaved her hair to get rid of the lice. She doesn’t have a phone, she says, but she does have Instagram.
Her account is a story, in pictures, of the fentanyl crisis in the United States. A girl who descended into the abyss of addiction: in 2018, she showed herself to the world as a music lover who liked to skate. Then, she started smoking and growing marijuana. After that came the bad company, the pandemic, the loneliness, the death of her mother, the highs, the bad days and the streets.
Steve Adami spent two decades in and out of jails and prison accused of various drug crimes. When he left, he rebuilt his life, he obtained a master’s degree and even received an award for his academic excellence. He now tries to help other people quit drugs. Adami is the Executive Director of The Way Out, a recovery-focused homeless initiative of The Salvation Army San Francisco. He is in favor of harm reduction policies, but believes it is not enough. “If we only distribute syringes and pipes, our neighborhoods will be known for consumption. What message are we sending? Come to San Francisco, here you can get high and commit crimes freely.” He assures that the way out is to motivate those addicts to go to centers like his. “We have increased enrollment in our drug treatment programs by offering two years of free housing to those who complete treatment,” says Adami. “We are giving people hope and helping them reclaim their lives.”
There are an estimated 48 million people who, like Abby, suffer from addictions to some type of substance in the United States — a brutally individualistic country where it often seems that all it takes is one stroke of bad luck to lose everything. According to a study published in August, only one in five fentanyl addicts has access to a prescription for the most effective medications: methadone and, to a greater extent, buprenorphine.
Abby (in the back) with two friends after taking fentanyl in the heat of a street gutter in the Tenderloin, San Francisco.Carlos Rosillo
Improving access to these medications in a ruthless healthcare system is one of the challenges in facing an enormously complex crisis. According to Carl Hart — a psychologist at Columbia University and one of the world’s leading experts on the use of recreational drugs — adds that another solution is to legalize sites to take substances. He is a defender of responsible consumption. “Accidental overdoses would fall. The authorities mistakenly believe that this can be confused with encouraging consumption, but that’s not the case. It would save lives.”
The apostles of drug policy reform feel that the fentanyl crisis has, once again, demonstrated the failure of the War on Drugs, which was launched in 1971 by Richard Nixon. With a famous speech televised from the White House, the president — who ultimately resigned over the Watergate scandal — inaugurated an offensive that, according to some estimates, has cost the United States a trillion dollars. And, while that war was being fought beyond the borders — and while the guerrillas, paramilitaries, gangs, corrupt politicians, police and military personnel continued to enrich themselves with a formidable business — the origins of the worst drug crisis in the country’s history were revealed. It was incubated in the 1990s, at home, within the all-powerful pharmaceutical industry. This was all thanks to a family — [the Sacklers — who have avoided jail by paying billion-dollar fines.](https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2023-12-04/the-supreme-court-wrestles-with-oxycontin-makers-bankruptcy-deal-with-billions-of-dollars-at-stake.html)
On that historic day in 1971, Nixon’s goal, he said, was to end opium consumption, which had spread among veterans returning from the Vietnam War. He couldn’t do it: in 1970, one in every 100,000 Americans died from an overdose, but by 2022 — at the height of the worst drug crisis that the United States has ever known — the figure has multiplied by 30. Meanwhile, the spiral of violence continues in Mexico: since President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) took the military out of their barracks in 2006 to combat the cartels, murders have increased by more than 300%.
Behind those numbers are the lives that are on hold due to fentanyl. There are the Mexican farmers, who cook drugs in the mountains and do experiments with human guinea pigs. There are the traffickers who get rich, by sending truckloads of beans across the border. There are the mayors, who are threatened with death by the narcos. There are the Chinese businessmen and their precursor factories in Wuhan. And then, there are the dealers, the addicts, the volunteers and the mothers who have lost their children on the frontlines of the opiate war.
### Credits
Coordination: Brenda Valverde Rubio and Guiomar del Ser
# Hippy, capitalist, guru, grocer: the forgotten genius who changed British food
If you were a young person living in London in the early 1970s and you were looking for a bargain, the word of Nicholas Saunders was something close to holy scripture. Whatever you sought, Saunders had the answer. If you wanted to start an anarchist squat or self-publish a Trotskyist pamphlet, you consulted Nicholas Saunders. If you wanted to know how much a gram of cocaine should cost, or where to get free legal advice if you were arrested, you consulted Nicholas Saunders. If you just wanted to find out how to unblock a drain without calling a plumber, which supermarkets were cheaper for which goods, or how to fly all the way to India on a ticket to Frankfurt, you consulted Nicholas Saunders.
A tall young man with a wild beard that gave him the look of a shaman, Saunders was obsessed with documenting how the new global counterculture was changing the ancient city around him. In 1970, at the age of 32, he self-published his findings in a slim but dense guidebook called Alternative London. The book was testament to Saunders’ belief that information should be made available to all, and that this information should be rigorously tested. For the section on abortions, Saunders had a friend phone up each provider in the city, in the process uncovering a London-wide scam of clinics that marketed themselves as “cheap” but in reality were charging over double the non-profit rate. By 1974, Alternative London and its subsequent revised editions had sold close to 200,000 copies and become an underground bible.
Like many people who grow up around wealth, Saunders was attuned to how money flowed, and he loved circumventing official systems in order to find bargains for himself. “He didn’t want to spend any more money than he had to,” Anja Saunders, his partner during his final years, told me. “He was always looking to make something efficient.” In 1974, using £7,000 he had inherited from his recently deceased great aunt, he bought a former banana warehouse overlooking a triangular shard of courtyard in Covent Garden, which was going cheap owing to the looming redevelopment of its wholesale fruit and vegetable market. Two years later, Saunders started selling dry foods from the warehouse, enabling the type of people who had read Alternative London to stock up on rice, nuts and muesli for their communes. It was a success, and with the profits, Saunders added a bakery, a mill and a coffee roastery, all of which shared the same courtyard.
By the autumn of 1977, the coffee house was thriving and Saunders needed new premises. Anita Le Roy, a customer at the warehouse, recalls Saunders coming to the furniture shop where she worked with a proposition: “Want to start a business?” At 28, she knew nothing about coffee sourcing and less about business, but she was exacting about taste. She agreed – on the condition that she choose the coffee. In 1978, Saunders found a property nearby that could fit a roaster in the basement. He and Le Roy filled out the interior with wooden cubicles that looked like confessional booths, in imitation of the old Jacobean London coffee houses. They named the business after the street it was on: Monmouth [Coffee](https://www.theguardian.com/food/coffee).
Saunders was always looking for the next thing, and if it didn’t already exist, he would make it himself. In the winter of 1978, back in London after a holiday in Greece, he found himself craving proper Greek yoghurt: dense and creamy with a lactic tang and golden skin. This was a time when supermarkets mainly sold yoghurts with added sugar and flavouring, while unadulterated yoghurt – a pallid, joyless thing – was sold in health shops run by puritanical hippies. In search of his perfect yoghurt, Saunders scoured libraries for recipes, consulted a man called “Nick the Greek” who supplied all of London’s Greek restaurants, forced friends to bring back souring yoghurt on the plane and even went to the island of Paros to grill farmers. Everyone told him the same thing: it’s not possible.
Most people would have given up, but Saunders was not most people. “Anyone can do it,” he was fond of saying to sceptics. “It’s really quite simple.” The next year, he decided to start a dairy. He enlisted the help of a friend at the bakery, who, in turn, recruited Randolph Hodgson, a young man with a cherubic face and mop of blond hair who had just completed a food science course. Saunders, who was suspicious of insider knowledge, bluntly told Hodgson his degree was useless. Still, Saunders saw in him a pleasing willingness to try new things and he tasked Hodgson with the yoghurt project.
When the dairy opened in July 1979, it did indeed sell its own yoghurt. Unfortunately, it tasted disgusting. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that staff realised the vile taste had been caused by the newly varnished incubation cupboards. After a few months, the dairy found its feet selling ice-cream and homemade soft cheeses. Eventually, even the yoghurt began to taste good. As with Monmouth Coffee, the new business was given a name with a nod to its location: Neal’s Yard Dairy.
Almost 50 years later, the dairy and coffee house Saunders helped conjure out of nothing have been almost inconceivably influential. There is strong evidence to suggest that the first commercially made flat white served in the UK was made with Monmouth beans, while if you walk into a cheese shop in the UK today, there’s a good chance the monger will proudly say they worked at “The Dairy”, without having to qualify which one. They are not only “the yardsticks by which other cheese shops and coffee emporiums are judged”, [according to](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/jan/12/foodanddrink) the writer Matthew Fort, but have also been responsible for the success of artisanal food producers across the country who have revived – in some cases, reinvented – British food traditions. While the 60s counterculture helped export British music, films and theatre to the world, today we also export our chefs, produce and restaurant culture. In 2021 alone, Neal’s Yard Dairy sold €1m of British cheese to France.
Yet Saunders himself remains relatively unknown. When he died in 1998, he received few obituaries, and since then his fame has receded further. Even now, it’s hard to pin down exactly who Saunders was, not least because he was so many things at once: a hippy, a capitalist, a pioneer, a property developer, a drugs advocate, a social inventor, a greengrocer, a visionary. Yet a consistent philosophy guided everything he did: he believed, above all, that information should be wrested from gatekeepers and made free for people to use. “He didn’t just make information available, but made you feel like anyone has the capacity to go and do it,” Hodgson recalls. “He lit a fire inside people.” With this philosophy, Saunders’ dairy and coffee house have not just been influential in their own field; together they have been the two transformational businesses in the modern British food culture.
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From the vantage point of the 21st century, it’s difficult to fully comprehend how dire British cuisine once was. “We are notoriously the worst and most wasteful cooks in Europe,” a British food journal of 1870 begins. It would get much worse before it got any better. The twin ruptures of the Industrial Revolution and rationing during both world wars, which didn’t fully end until 1954, meant that knowledge of traditional food production ceased being handed down. At its low ebb, British cuisine was characterised by the hangovers of wartime austerity: sandwiches lubricated with mayonnaise made from water, flour and powdered egg; waterlogged cabbage; hotels serving French food that resembled *la grande cuisine* as much an episode of ’Allo ’Allo! does a Jean Renoir film. Even worse was the decline of British produce. Shops sold chalky, greying bread made with adulterated flour; tasteless, factory-produced cheese; and increasingly bland varieties of fruit and vegetables made homogenous for the supermarkets.
There are two well-worn narratives that explain how British food recovered. The first places the revolution in the 1950s with a small cadre of upper-middle class writers inspired by Europe and its peasant cooking, who asserted that good taste could be found in simple, unadorned cooking that relied on good ingredients. Postwar Britain under rationing was not an easy place to recreate this food. Garlic, so crucial to Elizabeth David’s 1950 debut Book of Mediterranean Food, was a rarity (the following year, it became the [first luxury ever chosen on Desert Island Discs](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009ycmc)). David admitted that “the production of high quality foods in this country is so small … that only a negligible minority of people ever set eyes on \[them\].” The result was that peasant food became a desirable aesthetic for the upper-middle classes, difficult to maintain and available to just a few devotees.
A roaster at Monmouth Coffee. Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian
The second narrative about the rebirth of British food converges on late-80s London, and the creation of the Modern British culinary movement in restaurants. In this version, a small cadre of upper-middle class chefs looked again towards France and the simplicity of Italian peasant cooking to transform British food. The techniques were European, but these chefs could call their new cuisine “Modern British” because the *produce* was British: sturdy Scottish and Cumbrian meat, native and regional cultivars of vegetables, farmhouse cheese made from cows fed on English pastures. (Today, when an ambitious restaurant opens in Britain, it will usually list the British food producers that supply it.)
These narratives are compelling, but they aren’t the whole story. Many other events occurred in Britain to improve its food: the arrival of immigrants from former colonies after the dissolution of empire; the stewardship of its institutions – caffs and fish and chip shops, particularly – by Europeans; the explosion in materials such as Formica that modernised cafes and espresso bars; the creation of the European Economic Community; the leaps in industrial techniques that improved its vernacular foods: biscuits, crisps, ice-creams.
But what the two dominant narratives miss most of all is what happened between the 1950s and the late 80s – namely the story of how British produce improved to reach the level those writers craved and those restaurants needed: how British farmhouse traditions were revived, how wholefoods and the organic movement shifted consumers’ diets and shopping habits, how the world-class produce being made by a tiny number of rural farmers found an audience in affluent city-dwellers. This revolution has many strands, but to explain it fully you have to look to another small cadre of upper-middle class members of the late-60s counterculture.
And at the centre of this scene was Nicholas Saunders.
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Nicholas Carr-Saunders was born in 1938 into a wealthy family who lived at a 16th-century mansion, Water Eaton Manor, on the outskirts of Oxford. As a child, if Nicholas had a question that his father, Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders, the director of the London School of Economics, could not immediately answer, Alexander would retreat to his study. A few days later, he would present the young Nicholas with a thorough answer. The idea that the information you need could always be made available was a lesson that never left Saunders.
Nicholas moved to London in the early 1960s, just as the city was hoovering up a generation of hippies who had abandoned the pursuit of success and found inspiration in the mantra of the American author Timothy Leary: “Turn on, tune in and drop out.” It was a cultural shift that suited Saunders, who had dropped the “Carr” from his surname early – too posh, he decided – and whose relationship to authority was always antagonistic. (At Ampleforth, the Catholic public school he attended, he once stole ammunition and created a bomb, attempting and failing to blow up the chapel.) Saunders initially studied engineering, loving nothing more than to dismantle and reassemble things just to see how they worked, but he cut short his degree to live in the “alternative society” – a term he claimed to have coined – which was primarily made up of people like himself who could afford to drop out. In 1969, he took up residence at 65 Edith Grove – near Chelsea’s World’s End Estate, the centre of London’s counterculture – where he engineered an egg-shaped papier-mache cave at its centre. Passersby could always spot the house thanks to a contraption that blew bubbles out on to the street.
The Cave, as the flat became known, was not a hippy squat; Saunders owned the property and he didn’t let people forget it. But it soon attracted like-minded people interested in alternative ways of thinking. One of them was a puckish man called Nicholas Albery who worked for BIT, an underground information service that had been partly funded by a £1,000 donation from Paul McCartney. It was London’s answer to free information initiatives like Stewart Brand’s San Francisco-based Whole Earth Catalog – a publication Steve Jobs famously called “[Google in paperback form](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/05/stewart-brand-whole-earth-catalog%0D)” – that acted as the nerve centre of the alternative society.
Nicholas Saunders at home in World’s End, London, on his swing. Photograph: Mark Edwards
Albery’s work inspired Saunders to write Alternative London, the aim of which was to arm countercultural individuals with the information that might allow them to thrive*.* Saunders and Albery styled themselves as “social inventors” and ran a competition called The Alternative Ideas Pool to encourage people to think up ways to improve the world. One contributor proposed breaking up the UK into 40 republics; another, not content with just one bad idea, suggested both a university built on a cruise ship and a “Love House” where people “could learn how to fuck”.
By the early 1970s, the utopian ideals of the 60s were being tested out in real world experiments. Saunders was fascinated by the back-to-earthers, who had retreated from cities to live a simpler, communal life. In 1973, he started research on a new book, [Alternative England and Wales](https://ediblewomansdigest.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/alternative-england-and-wales-1975-the-psychedelic-guide-to-uk-counterculture/%0D), which would take him around the country visiting communes. But visiting farm after farm left Saunders disillusioned: none of the people he met had found a way to live outside mainstream society in a sustainable way.
Meanwhile, the success of his books was so huge that what was meant to be a celebration of individuality was creating a new orthodoxy, with Saunders as its spokesperson. His friend Judith Morgan, who accompanied Saunders on his farm visits, recalls how impatient Saunders was to move on to the next thing, rather than repeat previous successes. “He would always look for how to exploit the system, or show the weaknesses in the system,” she says. But the more he did this, the more it catalysed a completely new obsession. What Saunders really dreamed of was creating the kind of communal village he could not locate for his book. When a Danish girlfriend meditating with a candle inadvertently burned down his highly flammable cave, Saunders was ecstatic. “I told her that the whole flat represented the life I wanted to leave behind,” Saunders later [wrote](https://nealsyardlondon.co.uk/history/). “It was the best thing she could have done for me.”
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One day in 1976, Saunders was in a minivan laden with Brazil nuts when an idea came to him. He was making one of his regular trips to Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen, which had begun, five years earlier, as a squat in a derelict military barracks in Copenhagen and had grown into a large-scale experiment at building a society without centralised leadership, police or traditional family units. Christiania reminded Saunders of the energy of 60s London. It was, he felt, truly changing how people lived. There was a “real luxury of life there,” Saunders wrote in 1976. “Fresh wholemeal rolls with butter and strong freshly ground coffee for breakfast is normal. All the food is best quality – the organic vegetables straight from farming communes. I never saw anyone drink instant coffee.”
To pay for the cost of the trips, Saunders would load his minivan with Brazil nuts, which were expensive in Denmark owing to a luxury tax, and sell them to Christiania’s general store. On that day in 1976, in a minivan with his friend, the photographer Mark Edwards, Saunders realised that London’s health food shops were charging outrageous markups for foods bought from wholesalers he was already using, and that he could undercut them if he sold them in large amounts. Saunders thought of the now-empty warehouse in central London that he had bought two years earlier. By the time he passed Stratford, a plan had come together. “I mean,” Edwards recalls Saunders spluttering, “I could set it up in Neal’s Yard!”
Neal’s Yard in 1981. Photograph: Mark Edwards
At the time, the British counterculture was embracing wholefoods, which Saunders defined in Alternative London as food “farmed without the usual intensive techniques, free of additives and \[with\] the minimum of processing”. (In other words, organic-*ish*.) Wholefoods sold in bulk were favoured by people living in communes, who could stock up on essentials cheaply. But if you didn’t live in a commune, you could only buy wholefoods at expensive health food shops run by hippies who, in Saunders’ words, “would make customers feel bad because they could not recognise a mung bean”. Saunders hated these shops, which he saw as inefficient, expensive and exclusionary. If wholefoods were going to reach as many people as possible, he needed to offer something different.
Six months later, after his eureka moment on the way to Denmark, Saunders opened his wholefood warehouse in Neal’s Yard. It was decked out in the cheapest, utilitarian way possible, “Christiania style” as Saunders put it, using recycled materials from demolition sites. It sold staples in bulk: nuts, tahini, honey, oils, peanut butter and, most famously, muesli. A bakery and a flour mill, using a grinder imported from Christiania, soon followed.
Yet Neal’s Yard was less striking for what it sold than what it *was*: a secret village right in the middle of one of the world’s most mapped cities. Around this time, Le Roy, who worked around the corner, started to notice groups of “tattooed and beautiful people with feathers in their hair” emerging from what she had previously considered a dank, rat-infested courtyard. They were the wholefood warehouse workers, many of whom, Saunders later wrote in his autobiography, were secretly raiding the costume department of the nearby Royal Ballet Company, which they could access walking across the rooftops from Neal’s Yard.
Around Saunders, who now lived and worked in Neal’s Yard, a spirit of creative anarchism flourished. Workers moved sacks of produce from the ground floor to the packing floor by throwing themselves off the building on a rope to act as a counterweight. For a time, the yard was soundtracked by the squiggly hiss of film stock being rewound, as the Monty Python team, the only other people who had premises in Neal’s Yard, finished work on The Life of Brian.
Passersby assumed it was all a posh hippy commune, and in some sense they were correct. For all its democratic impulse, many workers in the warehouse either had the title “Honourable” before their names, had been to the same public school as Saunders, or were ex-Christianites. Some resented the increase in “straight” customers that the Yard’s success was attracting. In 1977, when a Daily Telegraph article flooded the Yard with people from the home counties desperate for bargain basement coffee, Saunders temporarily shut it down. He may have distrusted the “freaks”, but Saunders also realised that if too many “straights” came then the Yard’s alternative atmosphere could not be maintained. Days later, an irritated customer came by to harangue Saunders with his thoughts on the matter: “So you stopped selling coffee because you were too successful? How British. How disgustingly British.”
Unlike many in his scene, Saunders was not a leftist. He had no time for welfarism or state ownership, which he dismissed as inefficient, yet he also rejected rampant capitalism, which he saw as fundamentally unfair. He steered an alternative path, cultivating a community of businesses rather than the more radical Christiania-style community he had once envisioned. Saunders set out 12 principles for how the businesses in Neal’s Yard should operate:
Neal’s Yard Bakery in 1981. Photograph: Mark Edwards
1\. All food must be prepared or at least packed on the premises.
2\. The ingredients must be “wholefoods” ie pure, without any additives, such as flavouring, colouring or preservatives. Highly refined ingredients must be avoided.
3\. Prices must be reasonable.
4\. Descriptions (both verbal and written) must be straightforward, down to earth and objective. Persuasive, enticing or glamorising descriptions must not be used.
5\. The size and style of notices must be simple – not attention-seeking, enticing, image-building or making any use of advertising or merchandising techniques.
6\. “Point of sale aids” must not be used.
7\. Information about recipes, ingredients, quality and suppliers must be freely available.
8\. The neighbours must be given consideration and cooperation.
9\. All staff must be free to see the accounts and attend meetings where they can freely express their views.
10\. Jobs should be rotated as far as possible, and in particular no one should be left with the unpopular jobs.
11\. Outside contractors should be avoided if the work can be done by the regular staff.
12\. In the event of a business growing, it should not expand or set up branches, but instead assist and encourage some of its staff to split off and start another independent business.
If he had franchised the Neal’s Yard ethos, Saunders could have become another Richard Branson, a former hippy who had so carefully studied the vices of capitalism that he had learned how to become one of its most skilful exponents. What made him different was his habit of giving away his most successful businesses. “Nick would jump in at the deep end of things, try to figure everything out about them, take what he could and move on,” Edwards, the photographer, told me. Hodgson recalls Saunders, just three months after the Dairy started, marching him over to a bank on Pall Mall to sign over the entire business to him. It was only later, when Hodgson started doing business with other people, that he understood just how unusual this decision was.
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Of all of the Neal’s Yard businesses, it was Hodgson’s and Le Roy’s – the Dairy and Monmouth – that cleaved closest to Saunders’s principles. To those who worked at either, it was less a job and more a lifestyle cult: employees sometimes switched from one company to the other, or attended shared tai chi lessons before work. In 1982, Le Roy and Hodgson married, serving coffee ice-cream at their wedding reception in the yard to edibly symbolise their union.
Saunders’s followers took inspiration from his 12 principles – but they quickly started to feel that the rules could be bent and sometimes broken. During the second year of the Dairy, Hodgson realised there was a limit on how much self-produced yoghurt he could sell. (It is Neal’s Yard lore that the [Monty Python cheese sketch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3KBuQHHKx0) about a cheese shop that doesn’t sell cheese is based on John Cleese attempting and failing to order some cheese at the Dairy.) Hodgson decided to diverge from Saunders’ first rule and sell good quality hard cheese that wasn’t manufactured or prepared in the yard. This made no sense to Saunders, who was mainly interested in the effect that producing food could have on a person’s self-fulfilment rather than the actual quality. “I don’t think he was driven by how it’s going to make food taste better,” Hodgson says. “It was about how it grew the individual.”
Hodgson was driven by both possibilities, and set off round the country in a van, seeking out his own freaks: farmers who were committed to making their own cheeses with traditional methods that their grandparents might recognise. Like Saunders and his back-to-earthers before him, the search was demoralising. The number of farms that made cheese themselves had declined from more than 1,000 in 1939 to just 62 by 1974. But Hodgson found them, and created a new market by connecting these producers with consumers who had an appetite for weirdness. One former employee at the Dairy recalls Hodgson phoning up a farmer demanding that he raise his prices, a move that the bargain-hunting Saunders would never have been able to understand, but made the strange methods of the cheesemakers financially viable.
By the mid-90s, the influence of the Dairy had grown to the point that any cheese it sold was globally significant solely by virtue of being stocked there. [Cheese](https://www.theguardian.com/food/cheese) shops in the US could show they were serious by buying cheddar from Neal’s Yard. The best British restaurants could prove they cared enough about native produce by removing the French cheese course that had traditionally punctuated meals and replacing it with cheeses from the Dairy. Trevor Gulliver, who opened the era-defining restaurant St John with Fergus Henderson in 1994, told me that “there was no one else”, when it came to deciding their cheese supplier, a relationship that has continued for 30 years.
Borough Market at Christmas, 2023. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA
During these years, what the dairy was doing for cheese, Monmouth was doing for coffee. [James Hoffmann](https://www.jameshoffmann.co.uk/), one of the architects of Britain’s third-wave coffee movement, remembers coming to London in the early 2000s and being struck by how out of step Monmouth was with everything else going on. “At that time, coffee in England was a joke globally,” Hoffmann recalls. Monmouth was the only place in London doing good filter coffee, even if they didn’t advertise it. It was also transparent about where its coffee was from, a continuation of Saunders’ seventh rule. “They proved a model that people will pay more for better coffee that tastes of somewhere,” Hoffmann says, pointing to the coffee wholesalers and shops who built their businesses on the success of Monmouth.
Perhaps the most transformative legacy of the Neal’s Yard businesses is what they achieved when working together. One day in 1994, Hodgson was on his way to visit the Dairy’s new yoghurt production site in Kent when he noticed an unusual space under the railway tracks at London Bridge. The area was reminiscent of Neal’s Yard in 1976: derelict and located near a wholesale vegetable market in steep decline. Hodgson needed space. In the previous 10 years, the Dairy’s rent had shot up, and he saw that there was enough space under the tracks for both the Dairy and Monmouth, plus more left over. Like Saunders 30 years earlier, Hodgson realised the space’s potential. The Spanish food specialist Brindisa was also moving in, and Hodgson calculated that if more food businesses moved in alongside them, they could open up their warehouses at the weekends and sell to the public at wholesale prices. He told the food writer Henrietta Green, author of the [Food](https://www.theguardian.com/food) Lover’s Guide to Britain*,* of his plans. When she asked Hodgson for the name of the place, he told her: “Borough.” (She answered: “Where?”)
The new incarnation of Borough Market opened in 1998. Though it was only the second regular farmers market in the UK – [the first was in Bath](https://visitbath.co.uk/shopping/markets) – it was an immediate success, feeding a new culture that deemed it desirable, even fashionable, to eat well. The columns of Nigel Slater and the TV shows of Jamie Oliver broadcast to the world that the best produce in the UK, maybe even Europe, could be found at Borough. The market was telling the country a story about itself that it wanted to hear, of a Britain that was reviving its cultural history. Malcolm Veigas, an assistant director with Bolton Council, once gave an interview to the BBC’s Food Programme in which he cited Borough as the lightbulb moment for councils that wanted to harness the new interest in food to rejuvenate their areas. “Market professionals up and down the country, when they heard about what was going on in the Borough, realised that the future of retail markets in the UK was going to be predicated on food.”
By 2005, the reputation of British food had transformed so much that American food magazine Gourmet dedicated an entire issue to London, calling it “the world’s best place to eat”. In her introduction to the issue, editor Ruth Reichl named four places in the first paragraph: St John, Neal’s Yard Dairy, Monmouth Coffee and Borough Market.
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During the years British food culture was being reshaped by his proteges, Nicholas Saunders had sunk into a deep depression. Although he had generously given away ownership of his businesses, the fact he continued to live in Neal’s Yard meant it was impossible for him to stop meddling. “For years I watched gloomily as my ideas were discarded and buildings were bought up by developers,” he later wrote, appalled at the encroachment of what he considered to be “straight” businesses.
Still, Saunders kept creating success for others. In 1981, distracted from the yard by the birth of his son, Kristoffer, he made plans to start an apothecary selling herbal remedies. He asked a friend, Romy Fraser, to run it. The business opened that same year as Neal’s Yard Remedies. With a turnover of £36m in 2022, it has become an international skincare empire and the most successful of all the Neal’s Yards businesses, instantly identifiable by its blue-tinted bottles (which Saunders, predictably, vehemently disliked for being flashy).
The 80s were a rough decade for Saunders, who was living alone and took little delight in the quality of produce his former businesses sold, preferring to eat Marks & Spencer’s ready meals. As ever, he continued to come up with new business ideas. In 1988, Saunders opened the world’s first “computer launderette” – a proto-cyber cafe – and launched a desktop publishing house where you could use computers to publish your own work. It was not a success. Most of the other quixotic schemes that he had around this time were never realised, except one, a restaurant called The World Food Cafe, which served vegetarian food from around the world (inspired by Saunders’ love of restaurant crawls where he would eat starters in one restaurant, mains in another and dessert at a third).
Friends attribute the happiness Saunders suddenly found in the 1990s to two events. First, he fell in love with a woman named Anja Dashwood, with whom he collaborated and lived, in the flat above Neal’s Yard, for the rest of his life. The second was his discovery of MDMA. Finding that it relieved his depression, Saunders began researching the drug in his typically obsessive way. His commitment to understanding MDMA would find him turning up to drum’n’bass raves, nervously looming over a baffled crowd of people a third of his age, who eventually adopted him as their own. “I experienced a feeling of belonging to the group, a kind of uplifting religious experience of unity that I have only felt once before, when I was part of a community \[Christiania\] that was threatened with closure,” he later wrote. Saunders combined all his research, including a thorough scientific analysis of every single street pill he came across, into a book published in 1993 called E For Ecstasy. Saunders’ website [ecstasy.org](http://ecstasy.org/) would become as canonical to the 90s counterculture as Alternative London had been for the 70s; his acolytes called him the new Timothy Leary.
Montgomery’s cheddar at Neal’s Yard Dairy in Borough Market. Photograph: Graham Turner/The Guardian
Then, a week after he turned 60, in February 1998, Saunders was dead. He had travelled to South Africa to research a new book on the use of psychoactive plants, and somewhere near the town of Kroonstad, the car he was being driven in skidded off the road. His funeral took place in a patch of forest in Surrey that he had bought in the 90s. It was perhaps the first time everyone from his many lives were in the same space: Saunders the hippy, Saunders the businessman and Saunders the guru. The abiding memory of everyone who attended is of the forest streaming with bubbles.
---
The businesses Saunders started – with the exception of the Dairy and Monmouth Coffee – have mirrored the fate of the counterculture itself. Some sold out and became big, others faded into obsolescence. Neal’s Yard Remedies is now owned by the Kindersley family (of Dorling Kindersley), while the wholefoods warehouse later became a branch of the multinational health food chain Holland & Barrett. The promise of freely available, high-quality information embodied by Alternative London seemed to have arrived in its ideal form with the early days of the internet, but is now fading, as a tiny number of infinitely rich tech companies dominate the space. Neal’s Yard, like Christiania, is a simulacrum of its former self, a restaurantified tourist trap, with only one business left that produces food, the St John bakery.
At Borough Market, the process that happened at Neal’s Yard took root almost instantaneously. In the early 2000s, the cheese historian Ned Palmer recalls seeing Hodgson standing on the market corner, furiously counting people’s shopping bags. More customers than ever were crowding into Borough, eating sandwiches, chorizo rolls and paella, but Hodgson was dismayed that so few were buying produce. To Hodgson, Borough had lost what had made it special: the mix of old wholesalers and new retailers, all dedicated to producing their own food rather than cooking it.
The solution was to follow the Victorian railway viaduct a mile down the road to Spa Terminus in Bermondsey. When Le Roy first visited in 2010, she was awed by the cathedral-like space: 70 disused arches, over a mile in length, forming about 140,000 sq feet. With the encouragement of the Dairy and Monmouth, a few like-minded food producers started secretly moving in, a process that would speed up over the next few years. “There’s nothing else like it in the world,” said Jason Hinds, a director at Neal’s Yard Dairy, in 2014, referring to the existence of a space for artisan food production so close to the city centre. In 2015, Neal’s Yard Dairy and Monmouth Coffee, in partnership with the property developer Matching Green, took it, all of it, on a leasehold for 40 years, securing it for the next generation of food producers.
There is still something of the original Neal’s Yard in Spa Terminus: a cloistered village of producers united by monomania for their work and a distrust of outsiders. Many of the businesses are run by ex-Dairy or Monmouth workers, such as The Kernel, a craft brewery whose minimalist labels and lack of advertising recall Saunders’ principles. It is the home of Natoora, a wholesale grocer so influential that it practically writes the menus of most modern British restaurants, and a near neighbour of [40 Maltby Street](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/nov/28/40-maltby-street-restaurant-review-marina-oloughlin), a wine importers turned restaurant run by Hodgson and Le Roy’s children that has been the template for every wine bar that has opened in Britain for the past decade.
And yet, walking around Spa Terminus on a Saturday morning – with its £8 punnets of wild strawberries, and hams weighed out like precious metals – it’s hard to escape the feeling that Saunders would be ambivalent about the modern British food scene that he helped create. At times, its institutions bring to mind Saunders’s criticism of the shops he was once trying to put out of business: meeting places for the in-group, expensive, making ordinary people feel like intruders. It is doubtful whether many people who have lived in Bermondsey for decades can afford the produce being sold on their doorsteps, or see the diversity of the area reflected in the people who sell and shop there. Though the aim of Neal’s Yard Dairy and Monmouth in creating Spa Terminus is to control enough real estate to preserve it as the site of production they envisioned, new builds are already going up around the arches like saplings, while Southwark council has rebranded the entire viaduct as [The Low Line](https://lowline.london/), in homage to New York’s tourist attraction, The High Line.
This is something Saunders at least would recognise. The last thing he wrote before his death was a proposal to Camden council arguing for the preservation of Neal’s Yard against gentrification. “Neal’s Yard has developed its own unusual character which is different to other parts of London. This unusual atmosphere has developed over many years through caring by people working here,” he wrote. “Although I have started many of the businesses and own two buildings in the yard, I have always been more interested in providing a socially rich environment than of maximising profits and property values.” His fears were well founded – the Neal’s Yard he helped create no longer exists.
---
The central question of Saunders’ life is what happens when you try to create an alternative and it becomes so successful that it is co-opted by other people into the dominant culture. It was a tension he was never quite able to resolve, except in a few small projects. It is striking, when talking to people who knew Saunders, that what they recall most about him is not his businesses or his books but his delight in these small, frivolous projects. There’s the maze of 1,500 trees that he designed for his sister Flora; the garden he flooded at Edith Grove so ducks could dive bomb into his living room; the doves that he and Anja dyed primary colours and would make tourists visiting Neal’s Yard double-take in disbelief; the pneumatic chute he made as a present for Monmouth that sprayed hot coffee beans everywhere and had to be uninstalled. The compulsion that made him treat the question of yoghurt production in the same way as the chemical composition of an ecstasy pill found its purest expression in things that were done solely for the fun of it.
In 2021, at the height of the pandemic, the BBC released [a newsreel](https://twitter.com/bbcarchive/status/1458056790487097350?s=46&t=9F7GuDIlM8TRgElZHtZpFg) from its archives about someone who had “mastered the perfect lockdown project” during the 1960s. It was one of those quirky silly-season stories, about a mysterious occurrence along the Kings Road in Chelsea. Soap bubbles had been spotted emanating from a building, to the bafflement of passersby. The bubbles were unusually strong; buffeted by the wind, they were launched high above the city to the delight of those who were looking. Pedestrians were stopped and asked for their theories about where the bubbles had come from; some guessed a secret launderette, others a factory. “It’s jolly pretty,” one woman says. “It just makes your day.” “What if I told you,” the presenter asks each one, “that there is a man behind there who’s blowing those bubbles?”
And then, there he is, Nicholas Saunders, the man behind the curtain. “I studied engineering for four years and wanted to create something that’s really useless,” Saunders tells the presenter, his face breaking out into a Cheshire-cat grin. “And I think I’ve done it.”
# How Two Single Moms Escaped an Alleged Sex-Trafficking Ring and Ultimately Saved Each Other
***Editor’s note:** This story contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence, battery, exploitation, suicidal thoughts, and child endangerment. It draws from extensive interviews with both women, conducted between August 2023 and January 2024, and reflects their experiences and voices. Other details are taken from allegations in an ongoing lawsuit filed in U.S. district court—allegations that most of the defendants deny; other defendants had not responded to the lawsuit’s allegations or to* Cosmopolitan*’s request for comment at press time.* *In early January, a number of defendants—including one of the physicians alleged to have prescribed Julia Hubbard drugs—were voluntarily dismissed with the women’s consent.*
Julia Hubbard was one of the best bottle girls at Plush. Her role at the trendy Dallas nightclub was to support the VIP area. Keep the drinks flowing. Turn customers into regulars. As a 27-year-old extrovert, she made good money. As a newly single mom of two kids under 10, she needed to.
One summer 2009 night, Julia’s manager pulled her aside. A silver-haired gentleman’s date was being kind of loud and messy—Julia should intervene, be extra nice to him. She got the okay to take the man up to the roof for a quiet smoke. *This guy must be a big deal*, she thought. Customers were never allowed on the roof.
He told her his name was Trammell. Trammell Crow Jr.—some kind of philanthropist. He was a great tipper and seemed friendly, so much so that she took his number and agreed to stay in touch. In the months that followed, he invited her to charity events and she invited him to her modeling gigs. All in good fun—and strictly platonic.
Julia’s trove of police records and court filings illustrates her drawn-out and difficult escape.
Around the same time, Julia began dating again. One of her friends introduced her to a former frat buddy of his named Rick Hubbard. Rick, then 35, was handsome, a charmer. Ambitious too, bursting with big salesman energy. As the founder of multiple small businesses, he liked to think of himself as a mogul. Still, he always found time for Julia. He vowed to be a stabilizing force in her life and could even help with her kids, he said. She had never known such support. Growing up, Julia had been sexually abused. She had come to believe she was broken. But now, Rick saw her as whole. “You’re the most lovable person I’ve ever met,” he said.
When Julia mentioned her connection to Trammell one day, Rick couldn’t believe it. “*You* know Trammell Crow Jr.?” To Julia, Trammell was a casual pal. To Rick, he was a giant, an heir to Trammell Crow, the late billionaire real estate tycoon hailed during his life as America’s biggest private landlord. Trammell Jr. was also president of the philanthropic Crow Family Foundation and the founder of Earth Day Dallas, a global environmental education and leadership summit now known as EarthX. Rick, seemingly dazzled, asked Julia to introduce him.
She did, at one of her modeling events in late 2009. Afterward, she remembers, the three of them went out for an impromptu celebration. The night was a blast. Soon, her lawsuit states, she and Rick were invited into Trammell’s hard-partying orbit, to the wild gatherings Trammell allegedly hosted at his properties. For Rick, this access to a coterie of powerful men in real estate, film, and other aspirational industries was networking at its finest. He wasn’t in the same social class as Trammell’s crowd, but with Julia as his passport, he could pretend.
Susanna Raab
Julia withstood increasing pressure from Rick to please their wealthy friend.
**Julia and Rick married in February 2010**, but that did little to curtail her new husband’s freewheeling lifestyle. On nights Julia’s kids were with her ex, she and Rick hit the Dallas [swinger circuit](https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/a32620605/swinging-with-partner-swinger-facts/). He told Julia he loved how hot she was, how so many people wanted to hook up with her. Julia wasn’t always into it, but Rick would insist that she join, that she break free from the “religious indoctrination” of her Mormon upbringing. She remembers an early party at which Rick tried to slide his fingers inside her as strangers watched. Julia resisted, then relented. It was the first time she felt coerced.
By then, Julia was working as a nude dancer, making six figures a year at The Lodge, a high-end club themed like an opulent hunting cabin. Rick asked that she leave her cash wages and tips on the kitchen microwave each night, ostensibly for the household pot. He managed all their finances, including her personal debit card, and praised her earning power effusively. *She could be a billionaire with that body of hers,* he marveled. *Maybe she should try to get pregnant by Trammell Crow Jr. Ha ha.*
Julia ended up having Rick’s baby instead. A beautiful daughter, born in late 2010. A few weeks later, Rick urged Julia to get back to work—and to the party scene, where he made it increasingly clear he expected her to please their wealthy friend Trammell. Rick pressured her to perform sex acts with Trammell’s then-girlfriend as Trammell and Rick captured everything on video. He ordered her to find more and more women for the gatherings, bringing her to gas stations to cruise for prospects on some nights. Trammell had plenty of drugs and dedicated lingerie rooms at his homes with skimpy apparel and stilettos in a range of sizes for lady guests, according to the legal complaint. (In a statement to *Cosmopolitan* through his attorney, Trammell Crow Jr. denied all allegations of wrongdoing against him, as he has in court filings.)
Susanna Raab
To be clear, says Julia, these “jobs” were always unpaid, yet she got the sense that money was moving all around her. One time, at home, she glimpsed a letter Rick wrote asking Trammell for $25,000. To Julia, this entire world felt reckless and wrong. Never mind that she had three kids to raise.
She said no. Repeatedly. Rick responded with threats, then increasing violence. Sometimes he wiped the $100 he allowed Julia per week off her debit card so she couldn’t even buy food, she says. Beatings became routine. She alleges that he broke her arm and once delivered a blow so strong, it tore her intestinal lining. Rick was close pals with an elite Texas Ranger—a guy Julia found scary. If she called [the cops](https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a39574281/sexual-misconduct-police-sandy-beal/) or tried to press charges, Rick told her, his friend could bury her claims with one phone call.
When Julia still resisted, Rick decided she should be medicated. He arranged for her to have remote “therapy” sessions with his personal business coach, a California-based guru named Benjamin Todd Eller, who Julia would later discover had neither a psychology degree nor a license to [practice therapy](https://www.cosmopolitan.com/health-fitness/a26901647/online-therapist/). (Eller has denied the allegations in court filings, including that he ever treated Julia or wrote the letters described in the complaint. Eller’s renewed request to dismiss the case against him was pending as this story went to press. When reached by *Cosmopolitan,* Eller’s attorney declined to provide further comment.) Court filings allege that Rick then handpicked a series of prescribing physicians who were willing to consider Eller’s recommendations and prescribe Julia stimulants, antidepressants, benzodiazepines, and opioids.
Julia’s life became a substance-altered blur, while Rick assumed total control. As described in the complaint, she tried telling Trammell, the most powerful man she knew, that Rick was forcing her to perform sex acts and forcing her to take drugs to induce those acts. But Trammell took no action to help Julia nor did he cut ties with Rick.
Kayla Goedinghaus was having a shitty 2018. Her marriage was over. Her mom had passed away. She was 30, new in Austin, and knew practically no one outside a few work acquaintances. Then *boom*, something good happened. That November, she met a cute older guy at a house party: Rick Hubbard, an entrepreneur and sweet single dad.
Rick opened up to Kayla with a story that made her soul ache. His ex—his daughter’s mom—was a heroin addict, a crazy mess who had abandoned the family nearly two years prior. *How awful*, Kayla thought. She was a mother herself. Her daughter was 6, about the same age Rick’s had been when his ex had disappeared. Rick and his 8-year-old had moved down from the Dallas area for a fresh start, into a modern house on a cul-de-sac. Their block included several investment properties Rick was developing through his new company, EcoLoft Homes.
Kayla fell hard for Rick, and she felt her free spirit flare back to life. Even their girls bonded quickly, like real sisters. Kayla decided to move in after only about a month of dating. It felt right. Plus, she was trying to hold down two jobs—stocking shelves at Target and butchering meat for a supermarket chain. “Come work for me part-time instead,” Rick offered. Kayla could provide admin support for his business right from home and be there for both girls during the day.
With a new lens into his professional dealings, Kayla soon noticed that Rick seemed to play harder than he worked, partying into the wee hours while his real estate projects faltered. And sure, she liked to have fun too. Hanging out with him and his dealer friend one night, she took a hit of DMT, a short-acting hallucinogen known as “the God molecule.” Kayla closed her eyes and felt time stretch backward and forward, as though she were dying while taking her first breath. Trippy colors gave way to total blackness. A female figure swam into view.
“There are three phases of life, and you still have one more to go,” the figure revealed. “In the third, you will help save other women.” Kayla opened her eyes and sobbed, not quite understanding what it meant. Not yet.
Susanna Raab
Kayla, unaware of Julia’s experiences, was drawn in by Rick’s perfect-dad persona.
**For now, phase two of Kayla’s life** had started going off the rails. In a December 2018 incident, Rick and one of her brothers had an ugly altercation at their house. Rick was convinced Kayla’s brother was stealing from them, something Kayla says her brother would never do. Rick pulled a gun. The cops got involved. Kayla consented to a drug screening, which came back positive for ecstasy and amphetamines. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services removed her daughter from the home, placing her with Kayla’s ex pending an official investigation.
Susanna Raab
Pages from Kayla’s 2019 journal hint at her struggle to survive under Rick’s control.
Rick’s growing paranoia made everything worse. The government was after them, he told Kayla. They needed to fight this with the best lawyer they could find, and for that, they needed capital. He had an idea: Maybe his drug dealer friend, the God molecule guy, would be willing to make a sizable business investment…provided Kayla slept with him to sweeten the deal. She protested, and Rick threatened to strangle her. (*Cosmopolitan* was unable to reach Rick Hubbard for comment despite multiple attempts via phone and email. As of press time, he had neither responded to the lawsuit nor appointed an attorney.)
As recounted in court filings, Kayla submitted to the forced sex act. Afterward, she watched the man hand Rick $27,000 in cash. She’s still not sure where the money went. Everything was happening too quickly for anything to make sense. All Kayla wanted was her daughter back. This synthesis of dysfunction and desperation was unbearable.
Rick arranged for Kayla to begin weekly phone sessions with Benjamin Todd Eller, whom Rick billed as the best psychologist in the biz. Rick also forced her to start seeing a new physician, who prescribed at least five medications for depression, anxiety, panic attacks, PTSD, ADHD, and nightmares. From then on, if Kayla disobeyed Rick, he withheld the drugs to mess with her head. Kayla claims she told both providers Rick was abusing her and neither intervened. (Both providers deny this.)
The way Kayla recalls it, in the spring of 2019, Rick’s company was defaulting on its loans. They lost the houses on the cul-de-sac, including their own, and moved to a trailer home in a remote area an hour northwest of Austin. The small dwelling was a pressure cooker for Rick’s fury. Their money problems were Kayla’s fault, he ranted, so it was her job to help fix them. *Investors. Investors. They needed investors.* That’s when Rick started throwing adult parties right in their living room. He forced Kayla into naked “hosting” duties and sex acts in front of his guests—including their landlord, who would grope Kayla, masturbate, and then let the rent slide.
Susanna Raab
The women crossed paths in 2019 and quickly discovered chilling parallels in their stories.
When Kayla and Rick were alone together, he choked her on at least 25 occasions for resisting, often to the point of unconsciousness. He rigged the home with surveillance cameras and obsessively tracked her phone. She had known this man for less than six months, yet he was now dictating every aspect of her life.
And still, to much of the outside world, Rick came across as a stand-up guy, a champion dad. On the day of his daughter’s third grade graduation, Rick and Kayla rolled up to the elementary school like any other family, normal as could be.
Only there waiting for them was someone who knew better. A smiling blonde woman.
Setting eyes on each other for the first time, Julia and Kayla were zapped with an eerie sense of mutual recognition, as though they were standing on opposite sides of a looking glass: Kayla as the new Julia and Julia as the former Kayla. They even looked alike.
Kayla was almost startled by how normal Julia seemed. *This* was the demonic, drug-addled train wreck who tried to ruin Rick’s life? Julia seemed warm and friendly. Her daughter ran right over and gave her a giant hug. “Mommy!” the girl exclaimed.
Now united, Julia and Kayla vow to go “scorched earth” on their accused traffickers.
Julia, for her part, clocked that Kayla—beautiful as she was—appeared worn out, as though she hadn’t slept in some time. Rick’s breath smelled of stale alcohol, and Kayla’s smile belied an unhappiness in her eyes, a look of detachment Julia knew from experience. An alarm went off in her head: *My god, he’s doing it to her too.*
It had taken Julia more than two years to recoup the strength she needed to show up that day, to face him again. She’d escaped in March 2017, when a bitter argument about money had escalated into Rick pointing a .40 caliber pistol at her head and calling her a whore. After a terrifying moment, Rick had lowered the gun and stalked out of the house, telling Julia she was already dead to him. She ran.
She dropped her two older kids with her ex and asked that they finish the school year with him, not realizing this would mark the end of her custody. She took her younger daughter and sheltered at her mother’s home 30 minutes away. Julia then had Rick arrested but soon walked back her allegations (ones he would later deny in divorce proceedings), fearful he would retaliate.
Breaking out of the black hole she’d been sucked into—one swirling with complex trauma, violent men, forced substance misuse, and lack of economic autonomy—required an escape velocity Julia hadn’t yet summoned. Months of profound struggle ensued. Rick announced he and their daughter were moving three hours away, to Austin. Julia felt powerless to stop him.
In late 2018, in an act of sheer desperation, Julia got on a plane to her estranged father’s house in Virginia. She holed up in his basement and forced herself to go off everything—meds, drugs, booze—contorting in agony as seizures racked her body. Some forms of detox can lead to life-threatening withdrawal effects that require [medical care](https://www.cosmopolitan.com/health-fitness/a28246521/rehab-drug-addiction-centers-cost-access/), but at the time, Julia could think of no other way. A month went by before she felt human again.
She decided to stay in Virginia. Texas didn’t feel safe anymore. She found a restaurant job and a roommate. Soon, she and her younger daughter reconnected over the phone (with Rick’s grudging approval). Julia still had much healing ahead of her, but the black hole was getting smaller.
With her trip to Austin for her younger daughter’s third grade graduation, Julia had hoped to begin laying the groundwork toward gaining full custody. She went home to Virginia a few days later with a second mission: Get Kayla out too.
**Julia and Kayla secretly stayed in touch over Snapchat**, using the app’s disappearing messages feature. Kayla wrote to Julia in furtive blasts when she ran errands, pretty much the only time Rick wasn’t spying on her.
The summer was long and cruel. Court filings describe a bachelor party for Rick’s associate at which Rick forced Kayla into performing sex acts with strippers by choking her. There was her horrific birthday weekend at Trammell’s house, when she recalls Rick coercing her into donning skimpy lingerie and submitting to various humiliations, like giving a near-naked ukulele performance. Privately, he pressured her to seduce Trammell, and when that didn’t happen, Rick choked her and threatened her with Trammell’s influence. Rick then led her into the backyard for sex, where anyone could watch. Kayla seriously considered [killing herself](https://988lifeline.org/). She didn’t want to die, exactly. She just wanted to stop living as a hostage.
On her end, Julia raced to devise an escape. She flew to Austin the first week of October bearing plane tickets for herself, her daughter, and Kayla. The plan was to run together to Utah—Julia’s home state—and report Rick to the authorities as a united front from a safe distance.
But Rick intercepted Kayla’s phone at the worst possible moment. The night before her flight, he saw some of Julia’s messages pop up. *Fuck*. Kayla stayed behind while Julia and her daughter took off. Rick followed them to Utah and spent two weeks chasing them down, ultimately wrangling an emergency court order that required Julia to give up their daughter until an official hearing. A devastating blow.
Susanna Raab
Meanwhile, in Austin, Kayla scrambled to pull off a solo escape. She made her way to a shelter for domestic violence victims run by an organization called the [SAFE Alliance](https://www.safeaustin.org/). She filed for an order of protection, her first time taking any kind of legal action against Rick.
A victim advocate from the county, a kind-sounding woman, got in touch and invited Kayla to have a casual talk, wherever Kayla felt most comfortable. With her daughter in tow, Kayla met the woman at an indoor kids’ park. “Listen, I grew up with an abused mother,” the advocate said as Kayla’s daughter ran off toward the bouncy slides. “I know what this looks like. What is he doing to you?”
Kayla was moved by the woman’s compassionate recognition. She didn’t share everything that day, but the advocate sensed well enough. Kayla’s experiences of domestic abuse—the extreme control, the forced sexual acts for Rick’s apparent financial benefit—might actually point to trafficking, the advocate said. Kayla’s brain squashed the idea. *What? That’s crazy. I am not a sex-trafficking victim.*
It was too much—Kayla wasn’t ready. She wasn’t even sure she could trust the system to help her. Becoming Rick’s enemy suddenly seemed scarier than staying with him. She left the shelter and went home.
**On a January 2020 day** when Rick and his daughter were an hour’s drive away, Kayla finally thought, *Now*. She swept through their home, yanking out all the security cameras’ power cords. She hastily grabbed clothes, her ukulele, her mother’s ashes. She and her daughter jumped in the car. As they pulled away, Kayla chucked her phone into the neighbor’s yard.
They drove to a Chinese restaurant for dinner—one last meal before her daughter went to stay with Kayla’s ex for a while. Kayla swallowed her fear and kept the mood light. This was not the time to crumble. She needed stamina for the months ahead.
Susanna Raab
She crashed with friends in the area, although not for long—what if Rick came after her? So she made her way to Julia’s place in Virginia, but the timing felt wrong; their shared trauma was too raw. In 2021, Kayla entered a California rehab program, a positive experience that almost inspired her to remain on the West Coast...until loneliness kicked in. She took off for Tennessee but didn’t feel like she belonged there either. After all she’d been through, home was proving hard to find.
By July 2022, both Kayla and Julia were in better places. Kayla was sober. Julia was in therapy, officially divorced from Rick, with full custody of their daughter based on Rick’s history of domestic violence. The energy had shifted, and the women felt stronger in each other’s presence. They became roommates and started mapping their next move.
In the Hollywood version of sex-trafficking stories, victims are abducted off the street by masked men. Thrown into windowless vans. Locked in storage containers. Sold into a violent underworld. And while such horrors can and do occur in real life, they are not the only sex-trafficking stories. A more insidious scenario often goes unrecognized: the one where the “unmarked van” presents as a legitimate romantic relationship and the victim climbs in willingly, unknowingly.
As of 2020, an estimated 39 percent of sex-trafficking victims in this country were brought into it by intimate partners—men, in most cases, boyfriends and husbands who exploit the trust and vulnerability of their mostly female victims, constructing sexual economies around them. Through physical force, manipulation, or fraud, those victims are compelled to engage in sex acts for the trafficker’s benefit. That could mean posing for nudes he secretly sells to cover his gambling debts or sleeping with random men off the street so he can score drugs or letting the landlord watch sex acts through the bedroom window as a form of rent payment.
Experts estimate that thousands of U.S. women are currently stuck in such cycles. And like Julia and Kayla, many may not recognize what they’re living through as sex trafficking. They’re just trying to survive. It took Julia and Kayla time, distance, and external support to truly reckon with what had happened to them. By 2022, they’d connected with an attorney through the [Human Trafficking Legal Center](https://htlegalcenter.org/), an organization focused on strategic litigation for survivors. That November, they filed a major civil suit accusing more than two dozen defendants of enabling and benefiting from an interstate sex-trafficking venture in which they both were repeatedly victimized.
Susanna Raab
While working to win their massive lawsuit, the women hope to empower fellow survivors.
The case is complex. It may not go to trial for another year, says attorney Matthew Schmidt of Balestriere Fariello in San Francisco, who is representing the plaintiffs. Julia and Kayla both know that they’ll be subject to scrutiny—about their past lifestyle choices, their histories of substance misuse, all of it. That their stories challenge the myth of the “perfect victim,” a pervasive bias that people who are harmed must pass a moral purity test for their humanity to be recognized.
They’re prepared for that and not at all interested in settling out of court. They want their full experiences in the public record so that others may spot the signs sooner. They want women to check in with themselves: *Are you a girlfriend or a hostage? A wife or a prisoner?*
In the meantime, Kayla and Julia are prioritizing [their healing](https://www.cosmopolitan.com/mental-health-depression-anxiety/) and health. They see the same therapist, whom they nicknamed Mom. Kayla is reconnecting with her [yoga practice](https://www.cosmopolitan.com/health-fitness/a25336826/best-yoga-apps/). She likes her job waiting tables and is considering going to cosmetology school. Julia has discovered a gift for gardening, along with a passion for advocacy. She’s planning a career pivot toward consulting on trafficking issues. Who knows? Maybe she’ll get a law degree.
Their girls, now 13 and 11, have reunited thanks to the shared custody agreement Kayla worked out with her ex. The home feels full, the family complete. Kayla and Julia joke that they should just marry each other already.
Their emotions often run high—a fire hose of rage and sorrow and gratitude and determination built up from years of survival-mode numbness. Sometimes they find themselves crying together for no specific reason—part catharsis, part incantation.
“Oh my god, look at us!”
“We’re crying, but we’re fine!”
“It’s amazing!”
“We’re okay!”
---
## *If you are experiencing sexual violence and need support, consider reaching out to the [National Sexual Assault Hotline](https://rainn.org/) at 800-656-4673 or using the online chat feature at [Hotline.RAINN.org](https://hotline.rainn.org/).*
---
*Hair and makeup: Melissa Jones at Zenobia.
*
Christopher Johnston is the author of *Shattering Silences: Strategies to Prevent Sexual Assault, Heal Survivors, and Bring Assailants to Justice*. His work has also appeared in the *Daily Beast*, *Scientific American*, and other outlets.
Erin Quinlan is a journalist in New York City and the features director at *Cosmopolitan*.
*I am writing this in a blue notebook I often carry with me while waiting for my wife Faith. This time it is a visit to the doctor’s office. She will soon be 84. I will be 90 in a few weeks.*
I’m parked on a street across from Dr. Sylvia Eymar’s offices, which are on the second floor. On my car radio is Daniel Barenboim, a man I greatly admire for his talent and life choices, playing a Chopin *Nocturne.* When I arrived, a very old couple was outside apparently waiting to be picked up. They are still there and it has begun to rain. Fortunately the woman has an umbrella.
I sit, I listen, I watch, I make notes. Another very old woman comes slowly down the stairs, one careful step at a time. I understand her caution completely; falling would be a disaster. Then another woman comes along and begins ascending just as cautiously. Shortly after, a man with a cane arrives and begins his slow, deliberate climb. Then a car pulls up, a young woman helps an elderly man out of the car, takes a walker out of the trunk and escorts him to the elevator. Was she his granddaughter? I hope so. Still no one has picked up the waiting couple and I worry for them.
That is when it strikes me all at once that I am in a different place: I am in the Land of the Very Old.
This is not a view of the Land of the Very Old. It is simply the area of France where Sam and his family live.
This was all happening in Gap, a town in the French Alps of about 45,000 inhabitants. But it could have been in almost any town or city in the so-called developed world. People are said to be living longer these days so there are more of us, the Very Old, than there have ever been before. And in France more of us go to the doctor because health care, from birth to death, is believed to be a human right and a function of good governance, so the costs for patients are relatively reasonable.
On my car radio, Barenboim’s virtuosity is completely in the service of Chopin’s melancholy and I now allow myself to worry about Faith’s excessive fatigue and wonder what the doctor would prescribe. But my concern is diverted by a young woman who drives up in a rush, kisses the waiting couple, helps them into the car, and drives off. I continue my wait and begin to notice that almost everyone descending from the doctors’ office, especially the Very Old, hold prescriptions in their hands. The paper represents their hope that those medications will ease their pain and perhaps even prolong their lives. I smile as I imagine those papers are passports to a safer and more distant country.
Daniel Barenboim–all of 82 years old, by the way–is revealing the sweetness in Chopin’s melancholy when Faith finally comes down those steps slowly, one at a time, passport in hand. We have been married almost 60 years and I want more time together.
Is that greedy of me?
##### **2\. The Old Country, or The Good Old Days**
Before I tell you where I have come to, let me tell you where I have come from.
Back in New York when I was in my mid-70s, I belonged to a group of a dozen or so old men, friends since our college days, who met at Foley’s, a now-closed but much-beloved sports bar on 33rd Street, just across from the Empire State building, every couple of months to share fellowship, a good meal, libation, and some common lies. We called ourselves “The Grandpas.”
All of us were former athletes at a relatively high level. I remember walking into the darkness of the pub from the bright street and trying to move as steadily and youthfully as possible as I approached the table of old men. How comical that must have appeared.
After a round of hugs and a display of grandchildren’s photos and recent vacation spots, the conversation inevitably turned to matters of health, more specifically what a departed friend called “the organ recital.” Heart and lung problems, joint replacement, prostate reports, and cancer treatments were common motifs. Through it all, we remained in good spirits because we were still alive to enjoy one another, though it was understood by everyone present that this could not possibly remain the case. As a result, the conversation was about races run, goals scored, trophies won; it was lore repeated at successive meetings as though for the first time. Always stories of youth, success, tales of the good old days.
But the lives we were living at the time were being dismissed, conveniently overlooked. An awful lot of energy was being expended on not trying to become exactly who we had become—men who were entering Very Old.
I was more interested in who we were now, in what we had become and how we were dealing with it, as opposed to some inflated, nostalgic version of who we once had been. So I mostly listened to the glory-days storytelling rather than participating in it. I did enjoy the fellowship, though, as well as the rare occasion to drink some Guinness.
Admittedly, back in those New York “Grandpa” days, I was extremely judgmental and often unfair in those judgments. It is important to know about that period that, even though I could be considered old, I was making television documentaries full time for PBS, so my perspective then was of someone still exhibiting “productivity,” still living some pretty “good old days.” Most of the other Grandpas were retired but also doing interesting things, with animals, writing, travel, charity, yet when we came together, it was always the past, youth and the comfort it gave them, that dominated our conversations.
I continued on as a “Grandpa” until I was almost 80 and our family decided to move to France. It was also the time when the first of the “Grandpas” died.
##### **3\. Weighing Your Baggage Part I, or The Corrections Page**
I do the *Times* crossword each morning (the Very Old do lots of little tests and checks of this manner, more on that in a bit) but before I do, I take a quick look at the obituaries. I tell myself it’s to get a look at the ages that prominent people are living to these days, but it’s really to see who I’ve managed to outlive today, if I’m being honest.
Recently I skipped over the name, MARTIN WILLENS and noticed the age, 89, same as mine. “A Project Manager on the Apollo 17 Space Mission.” I glanced at the text. He went to Andrew Jackson High School in Queens, N.Y. My school. It was the first name that threw me. No one called him “Martin.” He was “Marty” Willens, the kid I hated in school, the kid who beat me out in everything ever since grade school, who won every spelling bee and math competition, got the lead roles in every play, who dated the only girl I cared about in eighth grade.
At Andrew Jackson High we both went out for the same position on the basketball team. All the kids knew I was the better player but the coach picked Marty because as he told me, “Marty is more settled, more coachable,” whatever that meant. I hated Marty Willens daily for two full years until my family moved to a different neighborhood. He had been in my very-old-age thoughts recently. I had even thought of looking him up and writing to him. Now he was dead. Too late. No surprise he became a big deal in the space program.
Good newspapers like *The**Times, Le Monde*, *The**Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal* all run “Corrections” pages. They know full well that it is often too late to change the misperceptions created by their errors and misstatements, but since they are committed to factual accuracy as a basis for truth, they still want to show their good faith and professional commitment. So as I always look at the *Times* obits, I always look at the corrections.
I was stunned a few days ago to see the MARTIN WILLENS obit corrected. The deceased was actually a MARTIN WALLENS, 89, indeed a Project Manager on the Apollo 17 Mission, but he had gone to Andrew Johnson High School in Bergen, N.J. A simple case of mistaken identity on the internet.
So Marty Willens may still be alive. Last night I remembered what he looked like when we were 14 and there in bed, a very old man of almost 90, I felt again the raging jealousy of a teenager with acne. A very specific memory came to me:
> “*Samuel, your word is ‘fatigue.’”*
>
> “*Fatigue. F-A-T-I-Q-U-E. Fatigue.”*
>
> *‘’That is incorrect, Samuel. Sit down.’’*
>
> *“Martin, can you spell ‘fatigue.’?”*
>
> *“F-A-T-I-G-U-E.”*
>
> *“That is correct.”*
If the track of our lives were short, if we remained so active and absorbed that we couldn’t get a steady look at our path to very old age, how in the world would we know what we have been, how we have been, maybe even why we have been?
I believe that only from this distant place can you observe things you’d never have distinguished from up close, things that would be a blur in the swirl of an active life. From this safe distance you can see not merely behavior but patterns over a lifetime that reveal more than an occasional misstep or a poor choice.
I am not daydreaming in my armchair; I am watching myself from a distance and noting my behavior with some objectivity. Just before I drop off to sleep each night, I conjure distant memories that begin to fit the pattern of who I have been. Even my dreams have begun to provide episodes from an almost forgotten past.
Fairly early in the process of assembling my own corrections page, I discovered a tendency that had caused me to make some terrible decisions in my life: I was too much of an ideologue politically, socially, and culturally and too harsh in my judgments. I lost some close friendships as a result and can’t possibly retrieve them. I tended stubbornly to put what I believed ahead of the human realities of most situations.
In retrospect, I can say I was wrong fairly often. The old joke about the French scientist who looked at an Englishman’s practical solution to a problem and said grudgingly, “Yes, but does it work in theory” applies. Fortunately, there still may be some life left to me in which to correct some of my most glaring errors.
Professionally speaking, I remained teaching at the university a year too long; I was a burnt-out teacher that final year. And while making some very good documentaries, I regret that I allowed myself to be talked out of too many very good ideas.
Then there’s also my tendency to anger too quickly, to exaggerate achievements and its opposite, the exasperating fault of false modesty. I realize also that I have talked too much and too often in my life and as a result am not very interesting to myself these days. And I’ve interrupted others too often and embarrassed myself at other times with outrageous statements. I’ve also lied on too many occasions, small things always but that makes the tendency even more troubling. This confessional list is partial. In time I’ll recognize other faults, but I’ve begun to make progress on correcting the unpleasant tendencies I’ve discovered because of the critical examination a very long life makes possible. The process will end only when I do.
But all in all, warts and all, I believe I’ve lived an honest life, didn’t intentionally damage anyone, made the necessary sacrifices, did good work, and enjoyed myself.
Of course one could live in the Land of the Very Old and opt to do none of this stuff. That would be a mistake. It doesn’t cost a penny and in some strange way visiting your truer self in this land makes you feel younger. I’m not sure I’d feel so good about the grade I give myself had I discovered more about me to dislike. But even then I believe there would have been the necessity to make my remaining time meaningful with discovery and corrections.
##### **4\. Weighing Your Baggage Part II, or The Spice**
I have a good French friend who is not merely old, but is a very reliable bilingual critic. When he read this essay, his response was lukewarm, but because he was indeed a good critic he suggested how it could be improved. Spice it up a bit, he wrote. Give some specific examples of how recollection leads to understanding. My problem then was how many examples and which ones. I’ve decided on just these two. I hope they’re spicy enough.
The first is an example of a realization that’s been dormant but because it wasn’t connected to other realizations remained unseen and unrealized, or more accurately out of focus. Make sure you pack your microscope if you travel to this Land of the Very Old.
The incomparable novelist Carlos Fuentes makes a distinction between memory and recollection that I had never considered before: Memory is a vast, dark pool you allow yourself to tumble into; recollection is more like a card catalog in an old-time library. I went to my card catalog trying to find the best example of an experience from the past that altered or redirected me in a significant way, and found this in my memory pool:
I received a phone call from the editor of *TV Guide* in July of 1984 to interview the British actor Richard Burton. Burton was making “Ellis Island,” a made-for-television movie—a step down for a star of his magnitude. Kate Burton, his daughter from his first marriage, was launching her acting career and was featured in the film. Burton’s presence would add to its importance, bring publicity, and allow him back into his daughter’s life after his turbulent years with Elizabeth Taylor.
I did not admire Richard Burton. I knew of his brilliant beginnings as a stage actor when he was welcomed as the second coming of Laurence Olivier. And I saw that brilliance for myself when he was Jimmy Porter in the iconic English film Look Back in Anger. Then Hollywood discovered Burton and vice versa. Money. Glamor. More money, more glamor. Elizabeth Taylor. Publicity, bottomless publicity. Lousy roles, lousy acting. I didn’t believe Burton had the right to waste a talent as rare as his.
I took the assignment.
When I arrived on the set, a castle near Swindon, I was told that Burton was not available for an interview. We arranged one for the following day. Again it was canceled; I was told Mr. Burton was slightly ill. The next afternoon lawn chairs were set up on the lawn behind the castle. A vast forest was spread against the sky. The sun was descending. Richard Burton, wearing a robe, appeared; we shook hands and took to the lawn chairs, lying down facing the forest. He looked withered and seemed to be in quite a bit of pain– it struck me that this man wasn’t merely ill. Richard Burton was dying.
I remembered then from my research that he had been a close friend of the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, whose poem “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” was one of the few I had committed to memory. So we talked about Thomas and Wales and their friendship. The subject relaxed Burton and he smiled as he began to recite the poem: “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light….” And Richard Burton’s remarkable voice, full of energy now, carried that poem across the lawn and up and over the forest. Then, unasked, he began to recite it in Welsh. Then, after a silent time, we talked not about movies or career or fame but about our lives.
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I had done my research and knew that he had been born in a small Welsh mining town, the 12th of 13 children, that his mother died shortly afterward, that his older brothers, all miners, vowed to keep him from the mines. I knew that he had been adopted by a teacher named Burton, who saw to his education and that Richard eventually was accepted to Oxford, where he began his promising career on the stage. So I had what I needed for a conventional *TV Guide* article.
When I got back to France and wrote my piece, I could not avoid the fact that Richard Burton was a man who did not have long to live, and I suggested as much at the end of the article. He died a week after it was published.
Now all these years later, in recalling the interview, I have come to realize how incredibly judgmental I had been. The young actor’s talent was his talent to do with as he wished. Richard Burton owed me nothing. Who was I to judge him?
Then there was a far more personal discovery: You can rage against that “dying of the light” all you want, as I thought I would when I was influenced by Thomas’s poem. It is an almost comic bluster to think our lives are that significant.
A second spicy example of old-age research and discovery was understanding why, and how, I married Faith Potter.
I called her for a blind date on October 6, 1966, a Thursday, and discovered that her apartment was walking distance from mine in Manhattan. She invited me over. We both were English teachers. We talked well into the night about teaching and poetry and politics and personal histories and agreed to have dinner at a restaurant the following Tuesday. The conversation was more of the same but more detailed and deeper. The following Thursday another dinner date, more conversation at my apartment, where we made love. At evening’s end, we eloped to be married in Elkton, Maryland. We’d known each other for exactly one week, been with each other for perhaps 15 hours.
It had been a very long and, by Shakespearian standards, a “marriage of true minds.” Yes, Faith was beautiful, strong, sensitive and compassionate; she was someone I could spend a lifetime with, but why did I rush into marriage so quickly? In the Land of the Very Old these are the kinds of questions you ask yourself at two o’clock in the morning. You also have the distance and perspective to find answers that never would have occurred to you earlier.
Mine came this way: I was lying in bed taking stock of myself—as is my want often these days because my corrections page requires it. I usually spend too much time on “flaws,” but this night a counter voice whispered, “What about virtues?” That’s when I realized that I believed one of them was the ability to recognize excellence. I could tell true talent from faux in a great many areas—in the arts, in sports, in politics, in people, in life. It was an ability I had come to possess with a high degree of accuracy.
Before that realization I never connected that belief with my haste in marrying Faith Potter. She was undoubtedly an “original.” I had seen too many copies to be fooled.
##### **5\. Crossing The Border, or The Diminishing**
Aging is not merely an accumulation of years; it is also a passage through various stages of growth. It’s a movement from one land into another–adolescence follows childhood, or as middle age presents some of us with midlife crises very different from any earlier passage. Each stage puts us in a different landscape, and I can now attest that being Very Old is qualitatively different from being just plain old.
Like adolescence, it ought to have its own designation. It doesn’t, I think, because it is a twilight time and there is so little that’s good about it, so little to look forward to.
Adulthood, usually a desirable period, follows adolescence, but retirement and the likelihood of becoming unproductive and ill awaits those who cross the border into the Land of the Very Old. No, not much to look forward to in that. Some propagandists have dubbed it “The Golden Age,” but that generally has been shrugged off as a bad joke. I recall telling Faith a few days after my 80th birthday when I lost my balance putting on my pants, “Eighty is different.” If I had to give this stage, this exile, a name, I’d call it “The Diminishing.”
This might seem a simplification to those who are not Very Old, but I knew I had crossed the border when I decided to go under the sink one morning to fix a leak. Addressing the leak was easy enough, standing up again was not. No one was home. I had to use all my strength and have a plan to first get to my knees and then hold on to the cupboard to rise.
I must have looked ridiculous, so now I use the inability to stand up with a degree of grace as a simple test of Very Old citizenship. The wise among us know this and are reluctant ever to get on the ground. As a result, reluctance and caution become necessary qualities of mind and character and begin to reshape the essential personality of the Very Old. Overly cautious people become different people. Easy movement becomes a shuffle, clothes fit differently, pants tend to hang loose, the second sleeve of a jacket disappears behind you.
I won’t go into detail, but simple bodily functions require more attention and at times engender fear of creating embarrassing public situations. Should I even address flatulence? No, I’d better not. The possible indignity of those moments and other diminished capacities, such as driving, make Very Old people reluctant to travel great distances, so we tend to confine ourselves to smaller and smaller living spaces, making the physical and mental diminishing of our lives even greater. Vision and hearing decline as well. Teeth will be a problem. Sometimes I have my voice, sometimes I don’t. The forgetfulness of the old will become the dementia of the Very Old, tiredness becomes fatigue, weakness frailty, caution fear. Indignity, thy name is Elderly.
No, this land of the Very Old is not a very pleasant place to be in or even to read about, but if you have followed me this far into very old age, you might as well follow me the rest of the way. Because I remain an optimist, my journey has a surprising destination.
I won’t go into much detail about my own “organ recital” because it’s pretty standard stuff—a touch of cancer, dizzy spells, and balance problems, a gimpy leg, hernias, back pains, *et al*. So approaching my 90th year I am in relatively good health. Not as strong as last year, or as flexible, or as mentally adept, but I am thankfully without excessive physical pain or emotional depression. My experience in this land may not represent the suffering of some others, but it is representative enough to give what I write truth and value.
In this diminished Land of the Very Old most of my energy goes to fighting off greater diminishment. As I said, I do the *Times* crossword most mornings to prove to myself that I’m not *that* diminished. It is among the brave and admirable little evaluations, tactics that we develop to encourage ourselves about our futures.
And although I do the puzzle in a reasonable amount of time, instead of immediately knowing the word from the clue, I have to tell myself *I know I know that word…*and often it comes, but a while later. My habitual forgetfulness when I was merely old has become in this country short-term memory loss. I also know that it will never reverse itself. It is only an annoyance. But annoyances pile up and become concerns.
I tell myself repeatedly even in the dark confines of “The Diminishing” that there has to be a way to understand this state of affairs that can still find the means to satisfy the human spirit, *my* human spirit. I’ve tried mightily to discover what can be enriching about being Very Old. To the American cultural psyche, consolation means that you’ve already lost and gotten a “consolation prize.” And living in the Land of the Very Old is generally a losing proposition. After all, to get there, you must be diminishing.
Nevertheless, here are a few of my consolation prizes in random order: Writing, forests, reading, the sun, music, animals, family, mountains. Not bad, eh?
I read books now for the second and third times and understand them at this age very differently from ever before—more truly, I think. This experience is deeply satisfying. I have invented a writing project that will take me to the end and may not remain unfinished, since I’ve written the final chapter already. The project makes continuous demands on my imagination and keeps me guessing. I listen to and understand music as I never have before, thanks to the instruction of virtuoso and jazz philosopher Wynton Marsalis. The various young animals we have need me on occasion: If you are needed by a pet, you can’t be irrelevant. We are three generations living in one large house—Faith, our daughter Olivia, and her son Asher.
They constitute, as you will see, the heart of the paradox that has helped me understand why “The Diminishing” exists and what it really means in our lives.
##### **6\. Making a Home in a New Land, or The Paradox**
At about the time I was approaching “the diminishing” border, I left the daily commute to PBS in Manhattan, eased out, as is proper and necessary, by younger and cheaper documentary makers. Every worker knows that one day the elevator doors will part and the Inevitable pushes the *down* button. Faith, who had been an excellent high school teacher, loved her profession and retired long after the required age. And Olivia, with a young son, was the head of a public library in a Queens neighborhood that despised books. Spontaneously we all considered moving to a summer house we had built in the French Alps. The vote was swift and unanimous.
We had spent a year in this rural village—Saint Bonnet-en-Champsaur—when Olivia was three, and we were struck by its good weather, surrounding beauty, and welcoming people. We bought a plot of land before we left. The family spent almost three decades of summers finishing the house and enjoying the life, but to make it livable all year round for the four of us required extensive and costly modernization, expansion and winterizing. Moving there permanently required us to sell everything we owned. Obviously we are an adventurous lot.
Our house is about two kilometers beyond the village and sits like an aerie high above the road to town. When we arrived as permanent residents, I was almost 80 but in reasonable shape. I did not know then that there was a difference between being old and becoming Very Old, did not really consider the effects of the declining years in the decade ahead.
In truth, even if I had known how much I would decline, I’d have proceeded anyway: ignorance is a necessary condition for an adventure and often essential to its success.
Some of the things that make Sam’s life pleasant in the Land of the Very Old. Loved ones (human and animal), a comfortable home, and a beautiful setting.
After our furniture finally arrived from New York and we began to settle in, the great concern was mostly a matter of getting Asher comfortable in school and acclimated to a new language and new friends. They came to him naturally. So we simply began the familiar routine that is the rhythm of family life. The house is on three levels and is so large that we can stay easily out of each other’s way, but since we all like one another well enough that’s rarely a problem. I guess we can be considered one of Tolstoy’s “happy families” that do not make for very interesting novels.
As is generally the case, “The Diminishing” came gradually, but in some ways surprisingly swiftly, for me. We have two acres of steep, heavily landscaped property that I prided myself on maintaining over the years. In our third year here, Faith hired a young man to do the heavy work of weeding, pruning, replanting, moving large rocks. I rebelled, threw a fit actually, and put on a great display of wounded pride.
By the fourth year I was silently grateful. In year five I could actually admit it had been a fine idea.
Similarly, I had been able to fix almost anything that went wrong in the house; after all, I had built much of it myself. Faith no longer waited for me to be the handyman; she called in repairmen immediately. Again, I managed to be outwardly miffed, inwardly grateful.
My great pleasure living amidst very high Alps has always been mountain walks with friends. A backpack with provisions, a path through the woods, walking stick tapping ahead, brief stops and conversations, then getting above the tree line and looking at the world from the peak. Those are all fond memories now. I played basketball with Asher and his friends until two years ago when I discovered I couldn’t reach the basket from the free-throw line—a mere 15 feet. I did *Tai Chi* on the balcony in the morning sunshine until last year when a loss of balance brought me to my knees. Last year even swimming became too uncertain.
Because we live in the seasons, winter has been the best time to measure my decline with exactitude. The entire house is heated by a centrally placed wood-burning stove and the firewood has to be carried up from the woodpile on the ground floor. There are 14 steps. When we arrived permanently, I could easily carry up nine pieces of firewood, often without using the banister. This year it’s five and I pull myself along, counting every step as I rise.
> Ignorance is a necessary condition for an adventure and often essential to its success.
Indeed, I have declined in all the usual ways that befall–perfect word in this context–the Very Old. Let me mention another, one that is less debilitating and far more subtle: Looking at yourself in the mirror and appreciating the person there.
I’ve never been one to look at myself unless I have to, and these days I do so even less. The person I see there now is a stark reminder of who the world actually sees. But doing this literal self-reflection is essential to my understanding of how to live well in the Land of the Very Old. The Very Old person looking back holds the key to whatever happiness remains.
And fortunately, I like the flawed, very old man I see in the mirror now, so I intend to pursue self-discovery until the very end because it is the source of my present well-being.
Here is the paradox simply told: Even while I am moving deeper into very old age, recognizing and recording my own diminishing as time passes, my truth is that this last decade has been the happiest of my entire life.
If that is not a mind-blowing paradox, I don’t know what is.
(Please forgive me. No writer worth his computer would be satisfied with the word “happy” to describe the complex emotions that lead to the contentment I feel much of the time.)
I might be in the kitchen making breakfast, sun streaming in, and I will feel a sudden, palpable sense of well-being in my chest that requires me to share the feeling with anyone I can find. Or, I will be talking to and petting Coda the poodle, and my joy is suddenly so great for no apparent reason that I squeeze him much too strongly. Or, at night in the dark in my armchair, a page of the book in my lap illuminated, I sit back and take a deep breath because I am thrilled by a passage in Malraux or Fuentes.
Truth, as Keats said, is beauty, but it is also contentment. Hence my sunshine breakfasts and poodle-squeezings, my spontaneous outbreaks of joy—of well-being, of—yes, I’ll say it—happiness.
*All photos courtesy of**Sam Toperoff**. This story was made possible by the support of**Sunday Long Read subscribers**and publishing partner**Ruth Ann Harnisch**. Edited by* ***Peter Bailey-Wells****. Designed by**Anagha Srikanth**.*
*Sam Toperoff loves his mortality. He lives with his wife, daughter and grandson on a hillside in the French Alps in a chalet much of which he built himself. He has published thirteen books, hundreds of magazine articles, and produced dozens of documentaries for PBS, one of which won an Emmy. This essay is an excerpt of a longer work that he hopes to see published in the US.*
Local concerts like these are one reason Joe and other young people migrate to Boston. In a city with a [lackluster nightlife scene](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/09/08/metro/boston-nightlife/) that’s financially and logistically inaccessible for many young people, student-run house shows provide a place for twenty-somethings to hang out at a cost far lower than clubs or bars.
Local concerts like these are one reason Joe and other young people migrate to Boston. In a city with a [lackluster nightlife scene](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/09/08/metro/boston-nightlife/) that’s financially and logistically inaccessible for many young people, student-run house shows provide a place for twenty-somethings to hang out at a cost far lower than clubs or bars.
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“We came to Berklee looking for something like this,” said Joe, who also plays with his roommates in their band, Mt. Greylock. “This is the part of Berklee that Berklee doesn’t promote. You learn how to perform, how to create crowds, how to control crowds, how to network.”
“We came to Berklee looking for something like this,” said Joe, who also plays with his roommates in their band, Mt. Greylock. “This is the part of Berklee that Berklee doesn’t promote. You learn how to perform, how to create crowds, how to control crowds, how to network.”
The shows at Mt. Greylock started in the fall of 2021, after Joe and his bandmates moved to their new digs. When things were at their busiest, the crew hosted three or four shows a month — sometimes two in one weekend, Joe said. Now, the group has aged and gone their separate ways, but they still “throw together a ‘bill” every month or so.
The shows at Mt. Greylock started in the fall of 2021, after Joe and his bandmates moved to their new digs. When things were at their busiest, the crew hosted three or four shows a month — sometimes two in one weekend, Joe said. Now, the group has aged and gone their separate ways, but they still “throw together a ‘bill” every month or so.
# Precipice of fear: the freerider who took skiing to its limits
The Combin de Valsorey is a rocky Alpine peak that stands nearly 4,200metres above sea level near the Swiss-Italian border. Its north-west face rises 670 metres, at a gradient ofabout 50 degrees, steep enough that you can stand on the slope and touch the higher ground beside you without bending down.
In May 2016, when Jérémie Heitz climbed the Combin for the first time, the north-west face of the mountain looked like a vertical curtain of white, fringed by bands of dark rock. In several places, smears of greyish ice darkened the snow cover. Heitz’s ascent was nothing extraordinary in mountaineering terms: this face was first ascended in 1958, by Egbert Eigher and Erich Vanis. But Heitz was not climbing the Combin because he cared about going up – his plan was to ski down it.
Heitz, who was 26 at the time, is a professional freerider, a skier who spends his time on wild mountain slopes far from groomed pistes and resortboundaries. His speciality lies at the extreme end of freeriding: steep skiing, descending ground with a gradient twice that of some “expert” terrain in ski resorts. This activity combines two of the world’s most perilous sports – alpine mountaineering and backcountry skiing – and regularly kills a handful of its [practitioners](https://www.espn.co.uk/olympics/story/_/id/35559277/world-champ-freeskier-kyle-smaine-dies-avalanche-japan) every year. Heitz had come to the Combin as part of a film project he had devised, called [La Liste](https://www.redbull.com/gb-en/films/la-liste), which involved descending some of the steepest and tallest faces in the western Alps.
Heitz would not be the first person to ski the north-west face of the Combin; that accomplishment was secured in 1981. But the pioneers of steep skiing, who developed the sport in the 1960s and 70s, had relied on [so-called pedal-hop turns](https://www.sierradescents.com/2013/04/steep-technique-i-was-wrong.html#:~:text=The%20DesLauriers%20brothers%20advise%20beginning,snow%2C%20lifting%20your%20heels%2C%20and), making one staccato leap after another to deal with the impossibly precipitous slopes. Heitz had a different vision.
In its early days, steep skiing’s drama had come from the fact that these slopes could be skied at all. Now Heitz sought to bring speed – up to 75mph (120km/h) – and style to a sport that once impressed through sheer audacity. The result was something remarkable – and even riskier than before. “That style of skiing is incredibly dangerous,” says [Dave Searle](https://www.davesearleguiding.com/about-me/), a British mountain guide based in Chamonix. “You can keep pushing the limits of it until you either stop pushing the limits, or you die. That’s the two things really.”
At the top of the Combin, Heitz stood on a crest of snow that curved like a frozen wave. He looked down at the clouds in the valleys far below. “You ready?” someone said on the radio. A countdown cued the camera crew hovering nearby in a helicopter: “5,4,3,2,1. Go.”
Heitz slid sideways down the first few metres, made a turn, and then cut down on to the highest grey smear of ice. [Skiing](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/skiing) on ice is not generally recommended: all skiers control their speed by making turns. That’s how they tame gravity. But on ice, the edges of the ski can’t bite, which means you can’t turn, which means you can’t slow down. Instead, you become a vector, pure speed with no directional control.
Heitz believed he could handle the ice, and he thought it would make good footage. He was wrong about at least one of those things. On the ice he lost control and started sliding. One ski came off and he began to tumble. “No, no, no,” he shouted.
Freeriders talk about the “no-fall zone” – territory so steep that it can prove lethal if you lose your balance. The no-fall zone is generally Heitz’s natural habitat, but on the Combin it seemed for a moment that it might get the better of him. Heitz himself thought he was going to fall to the bottom, 600 metres below.
He was lucky. The Combin, unlike some of his other proving grounds, is concave, with the steepest section at the top. There was no cliff below him, and he was able to manage some semblance of control with the ski he didn’t lose. He halted himself after falling perhaps 150 metres (he says the exact distance is hard to judge). The loose ski slid further below him before it, too, came to a stop.
“You OK, Jérémie?” the radio burbled. Heitz drew an ice axe from his pack and hacked at the frozen face of the slope to secure himself. He went down gingerly to retrieve the lost ski. “I really frightened myself,” he radioed back. “Let’s call it a day.”
---
Heitz grew up in the same region of western Switzerland as one of the pioneers of extreme skiing, [Sylvain Saudan](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/sylvain-saudan-godfather-of-extreme-skiing-lends-his-name-again-to-blackcomb-mountain-1.4395230), who made his name in the 1960s and 70s with regular descents of mountain faces that were thought to be unskiable. Heitz’s idea for La Liste had been to redo his predecessor’s path-breaking descents, albeit with a twist. He compiled a list of Swiss and French mountains with enormously steep faces – hence the title – and decided to ski them in grand style, at high speed.
[La Liste](https://www.redbull.com/gb-en/films/la-liste) officially premiered in Lucerne, on the biggest screen in Switzerland, in November 2016, six months after Heitz’s fall. By ski-movie standards it was an instant sensation, and not only because it racked up hundreds of thousands of views online and made a persuasive case that Heitz was now the best freeride skier in the world. The stomach-dropping descents recorded in the film suggested that Heitz had achieved something truly new in the sport. His fusion of style, speed and extreme danger produced scenes that are almost literally breathtaking. Much like Alex Honnold’s ropeless ascent of the vertical rock formation El Capitan in Free Solo*,* Heitz’s daredevil plunges, at once terrifying and beautiful, offer their audience an experience of pure astonishment. To see him in full flight was to wonder whether you were watching a man or a comet.
Extreme skier and Base jumper Shane McConkey in Reno, Nevada. McConkey died in 2009. Photograph: Scott Sady/Alamy
Like big-wave surfing, extreme skiing has always carried an existential charge: its dangers are not incidental or extraneous, and death is not a rare accident that only occurs when things go terribly wrong. Doug Coombs, an American whose style was once compared to “a droplet of water trickling down a rough plaster wall”, plunged to his death in the French resort of La Grave in 2006. Shane McConkey, a Canadian who was pivotal to the development of wider skis in the 1990s, lost his life in 2009 in an attempt to combine skiing with Base jumping in Italy. Swedish pro skier Matilda Rapaport died in Chile in 2016 while filming for an extreme sports video game, the title of which was, simply, Steep.
It was for the sake of one of his viewers – his mother – that Heitz had been initially reluctant to include footage of his fall on the Combin. He was not eager to show her how close he had come to dying that day. But one of the editors of La Liste, a Swiss film-maker called Nico Falquet, who had known Heitz since he was a child, insisted that the fall belonged in the film. It was, he said, the most dramatic moment.
Heitz eventually relented, and today he says that showing his fallibility on screen was central to the film. This, Heitz told me recently, is the simple reality of this kind of skiing. “There are times when things go well, and times when things go badly,” he said. Transparency was not the only virtue of the footage: to see Heitz stumble and fall, in the middle of a film full of inhumanly beautiful performances, was to be reminded just how dangerous what he was doing truly was. As American climber and Free Solo film-maker Jimmy Chin puts it in one of Heitz’s films: “Serious ski mountaineering, you are free soloing. You can’t make mistakes. You blow an edge. You fall. You die.”
---
Before La Liste, Heitz had been a well-regarded, if largely unknown, professional freerider. After La Liste*,* his name was spoken with awestruck admiration. “Ithink Jérémie is probably one of the greatest living freeskiers or freeriders or even skiers, if you want to take away the qualifier of what type of skiing,” says [Drew Tabke](https://www.instagram.com/drewtabke/), an American skier who competed with him. “You see a picture of him making turns down one of those faces, and there’s just something universal.”
The success of La Liste offered Heitz and his skiing partner on the project, [Sam Anthamatten](https://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/sam-anthamatten-big-mountain-skiing-la-liste), immediate material rewards. Today, Anthamatten is supported by the US brand North Face, while Heitz has become a favourite for European outdoor brands. Scott, the Swiss firm that manufactures his skis, [sells a model](https://www.scott-sports.com/gb/en/product/scott-pure-pro-109ti-ski?article=2830899992172) “made by and for Jérémie Heitz”, which it describes as “a true freeride weapon”. Mammut, a Swiss apparel firm once known for high-quality but rather staid mountaineering and ski touring kit, marketed a La Liste jacket in pursuit of a younger customer base. Reusch, the Italian glovemaker, has a [Jérémie Heitz glove](https://www.reusch.com/int/en/shop/winter/men/freeride-gloves-men/reusch-lleon-r-tex-xt/?card=13762&search=heitz&color=7707&size=7%2C5).
Today, Heitz makes about 300,000 Swiss francs (£273,000) a year; many pro skiers would count themselves lucky to make a fraction of that. The sponsorship money has allowed him to focus entirely on his film projects. He generally skis for eight months of the year, from the autumn, when the snow first accumulates in the northern hemisphere, through to July, the end of the season for high-altitude faces in the Alps. While both Heitz and the sport of steep skiing are closely rooted in the European Alps, Heitz’s pursuit of increasingly impressive lines has taken him to Canada, the US, Pakistan, Peru, Spain, Japan, Chile, Russia, Turkey and Argentina.
Heitz’s most significant sponsor is Red Bull, the Austrian drinks brand. When Heitz signed with the company while he was making La Liste*,* he knew he’d ascended to a new plane. In the years since, their collaboration has allowed him, as he likes to put it, “to play the game” at ever more rarefied levels. For Heitz, *jouer le jeu* means operating in the strange world where commercial imperative and athletic ambition meet. That can potentially also create a whirlpool effect, dragging athletes towards ever more ambitious, and more dangerous, objectives.
---
I got a chance to ski with Heitz last April, at Les Marécottes, the tiny Swiss resort where he learned to ski. He picked me up at the train station in Salvan, a village in the Vallée du Trient where he grew up, and drove me to the chalet he built in 2017-18, which sits at 1,100 metres altitude on the edge of a village called Les Granges.
By Swiss standards, Heitz grew up in modest surroundings. “When you think of Switzerland, you think of big chalets and you think of all the skiers that grew up going to private schools,” says Jancsi Hadik, a ski photographer who first visited the Heitz household in the mid-1990s. That wasn’t Heitz’s background. “When I visited them it was a two-bedroom little place on top of a coffee shop in the main street of Salvan,” recalled Hadik.
Heitz himself says that he would have never guessed that someday the money he earned from skiing would make it possible for him to build his own house. Built largely from larch, his chalet looks out over the Rhône valley to the alpine peaks beyond. Downstairs, the whole of the ground floor is an open garage space, effectively an enormous gear closet that, on the day Ivisited, was awash with skis.
Jérémie Heitz during his ascent of the Matterhorn in 2020. Photograph: Red Bull Content Pool
The house gives an impression of stability and calm that reflects Heitz’s quiet, modest personal bearing. But his girlfriend, Louise Janssens, with whom he lives, acknowledged that the apparent placidity rests on hazardous foundations. “Sometimes, I worry,” she told me. “I have a friend who lost her boyfriend, a young guide on the Matterhorn. And when I see her I can only put myself in her place, because the same thing could clearly happen to Jérémie. I can’t imagine that tomorrow he won’t be there. So I really try to stay positive and tell myself that thanks to his way of skiing, thanks to his skill, he will also be able to manage the risks.”
The morning I arrived, after a brief stop at the chalet, we set out to ski. We ascended to the top of the Les Marécottes lift system, bootpacked up a slope beyond the chairlifts to a col, the lowest point of a ridge connecting two mountain peaks, briefly cruised downhill, then climbed several hundred metres up a shoulder to the left. On the ridge at about 2,600 metres, the sun was out and the snow around us was light and powdery.
The upper section of the shoulder was steep, maybe 45 degrees, and where two other skiers had just made a dozen turns on their way down, when Heitz descended, he jumped over a rock, made maybe two turns and was immediately at the bottom. I’d spent a lot of time that winter with skilled practitioners, instructors and guides. Heitz was an order of magnitude better than any of them – better than any skier I have ever seen. Like most of the best freeride skiers, Heitz is small – about 170cm and 66kg – his low centre of gravity helping maintain balance on theunpredictable terrain.
Heitz was on skis before he was three years old. By the time he was seven he was training for races with the local club. He never won any big competitions, but he was so proficient that coaches kept him on the team. Slalom, which requires swift, short radius turns, was his best event, and his least favourite. “I was small and technically good,” he told me. “But on the other hand, Ilove downhill and [super-G](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-G), things that go fast.”
Heitz says the regular experience of losing was crucial to his later development, giving him a determination to continue even when things were not going well. But he could also be temperamental. If something didn’t go right in a race, he would sometimes disappear into the forest for hours to calm down. In 2005, when he was turning 16, Heitz gave up racing: not only was he clearly not going to make a career in the traditional disciplines, but he also chafed against the rigidity and regimentation of conventional ski competitions.
The following winter, he fell into the orbit of Nico Falquet and his brother Loris, two local film-makers who were working on an experimental film project about night-time skiing. At the time, Heitz was working as an apprentice landscape gardener, and at the end of his work days he would head up to Les Marécottes, where he would ski and film with the Falquet brothers into the small hours. Through the Falquets, people started to notice Heitz. “This kid skis better than you,” Hadik recalls telling the brothers, after he watched Heitz ski with them. Dédé Anzévui, a Swiss mountain guide who made the first ski descent of the Matterhorn in 1989, has recalled hearing about “this kid in Les Marécottes who’s an extraterrestrial”.
It was the Falquets who first taught Heitz that there might be money in skiing. The film they were shooting in the winter of 2006-7 was partially sponsored by the surfing company O’Neill, which was then trying to get into mountain sports. When shooting, Loris lent Heitz his O’Neill jacket. It was wildly oversized – Loris wore an XL – but it suggested to Heitz the possibility of a paying future for him, a way to live a skiing life that didn’t involve being a part-time gardener or an instructor. “It was too cool. I talked about it everywhere,” Heitz recalled. “I was super-proud to be playing the game.”
---
While skiing is classically an individual sport, skiing alone on wild terrain is deeply ill-advised, and partnerships are key to freeriders’ careers. Likewise, steep skiing blurs the lines with mountaineering, since getting to the top of the best slopes often involves a difficult ascent. And as soon as ropes are involved, you also need someone to be on the other end. Since 2010, Heitz has worked with Anthamatten, who is a specialist in rock and ice climbing, as well as skiing. Their partnership fused Heitz’s racing DNA and Anthamatten’s high-mountain skills, a combination that would prove central to La Liste.
Although there are freeride skiing competitions – such as the Freeride World Tour, founded in 2008 – it has become clear over the past decade that athletes do not necessarily need these competitions to maintain public visibility. Freeriders happily admit that their sport largely exists to be seen on a screen, and the goal even on the mountain is to look good. “The finished product is a three-minute highlight reel,” Tabke, the American freerider, told me. Social media meant that they could become their own brands. “It’s complicated, but I think today it’s more important to have 50,000 followers than to win a stage of the Freeride World Tour, for the brands,” says [Léo Slemett](https://www.instagram.com/leoslemett/), the French freerider who won the tour in 2017.
These days Heitz has more than [91,000 followers on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/jeremieheitz/?hl=en). On his profile page, a picture shows him wearing a Red Bull beanie, and the logos of his major sponsors all feature prominently. In the wake of La Liste*’s* success, Heitz reached the top tier of extreme sport. “We need brands to live our passion, and brands need us,” Slemett told me. “It’s a tacit, unspoken agreement that has always worked like this, but it’s poorly paid compared to the real risk.” (In2016, Slemett’s girlfriend, the snowboarder [Estelle Balet](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/apr/19/snowboarding-champion-estelle-balet-killed-avalanche), herself a winner of the FWT in the snowboard category, was killed in an avalanche in Switzerland.)
Jérémie Heitz skiing. Photograph: Red Bull Content Pool
Heitz, for his part, was willing to play the sponsorship game. During my visit last April, when I suggested that Anthamatten could afford not to work as a mountain guide “*à cause de” –* due to – his sponsors, Heitz corrected me politely yet firmly. À *cause de* is pejorative, he said. Better to say, “*grace à*”: thanks to.
I sensed part of Heitz’s drive came from his own personal background. His father had left when he was a small child (though his stepfather, a mountain guide, later became an important mentor). By Swiss standards, his family weren’t rich, and he was physically always a slight kid. Playing the game was a way out, and maybe a way to prove something, too.
For all the freedom that Heitz’s sponsorships have provided him, it also seemed clear to me that this freedom comes with its own kinds of constraints. Though the brands themselves say they never demand that their athletes take on certain objectives, in reality it’s a more delicate dance. As Nico Falquet says, many skiers feel that if you don’t deliver material that is both dramatic and beautiful your contract is likely not to be renewed. “It’s business. I mean, if you can no longer deliver your rolls to all the cafeterias in the region, they will look for another baker.”
---
To spend much time in Heitz’s world is to encounter something like the normalisation, even the banalisation, of premature death. “To be honest, there are so many deaths that it’s not like it’s the elephant in the room, because it’s not a secret how dangerous backcountry skiing is,” Tabke told me. I was speaking to him shortly after the death of [Tof Henry](https://www.skimag.com/news/tof-henry-obituary/), a French freerider whose style was sometimes compared to Heitz’s. “Tof, who just died, is one of, like, 20 of our friends who have died. I know dozens of people who have died, and there’s not that many practitioners.”
Something that comes up often in conversations with steep skiers is the notion of managed risk. Heitz’s admirers like to emphasise his control, his coolness, the careful way he makes decisions. “I worry less about Sam and Jérémie than I do about other people,” Tabke says. “If anybody can do it safely it’s that partnership, just theirskills and knowledge and approach.”
The notion that skill and meticulous preparation can mitigate danger is an appealing one – but it is a partial truth at best. [Mountains](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/mountains) are unpredictable environments, and the management of avalanche risk in particular remains an inexact science. There’s a haunting scene in the Falquet brothers’ 2012 film A Secret Spot, in which four skiers, including Heitz and Anthamatten, ski a huge face on a peak called LeGénépi near Heitz’s home in the Vallée du Trient. At one point, Loris dislodges a cornice, which triggers anavalanche so large that it almost takes out their parked helicopter below. Afterwards, having narrowly avoided writing off an extremely expensive aircraft, everyone looks rather sheepish.
Heitz in Pakistan. Photograph: Red Bull
When I spoke with him, Heitz admitted that the idea that you can manage all the factors is a fantasy. “Often, on the majority of faces, if you fall, you’re going to the bottom,” he told me at his chalet.
“And you’re OK with that?” I asked him.
“Well, yes, otherwise you wouldn’t do it. But it also something that’s fading as I get older, and I don’t know now I will approach things in the same way.”
“Have you lost any friends?” I asked.
“Of course. And then having accidents, like losing a ski on the Grand Combin, these are all things that will never be erased from my head. It stays there. You’re setting yourself up for something if you don’t think about it, but it’s there.”
---
Heitz told me that since the winter of 2006-7, when he watched his stepfather ski down the north face of the Tour Noir, a peak on the Swiss-French border, during one of his first sorties with the Falquet brothers, he’d been more concerned for the safety of those around him than for himself. Yet when it came time to film thefollow-up to La Liste*,* in 2018, he would be confronted with a situation that brought to the fore all the tensions involved in using hazardous mountain sports to sell Gore-Tex and energy drinks.
After La Liste, Heitz and Anthamatten wanted to take their style of steep skiing beyond the Alps. “Sylvain told me, ‘Jérémie, the Alps are over now. You have to be somewhere else, in the Himalayas,’” Heitz said. “For skiing, and for me, that is the future.”
La Liste was made on a budget of 130,000 francs, most of which was swiftly absorbed by the cost of the helicopters needed for aerial photography. The money was enough for 15days of shooting big descents, with other, cheaper shoots for interviews and what the director calls “lifestyle shots” – Heitz at home, etc. The success of the film meant that a sequel could be produced on another scale entirely. This time Heitz and Anthamattan were able to secure about 2m francs (£1.85m) for a film, the majority of which came from Red Bull. That was enough to take a film-making crew to the Andes and to the Karakoram in Pakistan. Going to South America and Asia would be a completely different undertaking than their previous projects in the Alps. In the Karakoram mountain range, even just reaching their remote base camps could require as many as 60 porters to carry their supplies.
Their first target was a 6,025-metre blade of ice and rock in Peru called Artesonraju. In 2018, Heitz, Anthamatten and the other three members of their crew set off for the summit from a camp on the glacier below. It took 12 hours to reach the peak, with the final stretch on a narrow ridge. On the way up the snow conditions seemed good, but the winds they met during the climb had transformed the south-east face into a mix of crust and hard ice.
Mika Merikanto, a Finnish photographer and experienced steep skier, went first. He skied down the first third of the face, then radioed to say the conditions meant high-speed sweeping turns were not possible. Anthamatten and Heitz followed, taking on board the advice and eschewing their usual grand style. The two athletes paused briefly where Merikanto was standing, then continued on their way down. In the interim, waiting, Merikanto had become very cold. He set off again, but lower down the face his ski hit a concealed rock and he lost his footing. His skis came off, and soon he was cartwheeling down the mountain. Watching after his own descent, Anthamatten thought Merikanto was dead. But Heitz, about 150 metres away, traversed furiously and was able to reach Merikanto’s sliding body in time to stop him, using his own body as a barricade. “It was so steep Icouldn’t move,” Heitz recalls. It took an hour before anyone else in their crew was able to reach them.
The team were eventually able to contact the Peruvian authorities on a satellite phone, but they said it would take 24 hours for a helicopter to reach them. It was clear that Merikanto would not make it that long. He had sustained a spinal injury, a punctured lung, damage to both knees and an elbow, and had a bleed on the brain. He was drifting in and out of consciousness, and was rapidly becoming hypothermic.
The crew decided to bring Merikanto down the mountain themselves. They improvised a sledge fromskis and managed to get him down to their base camp, where they bundled him into a tent with flasks of hot water in his sleeping bag. A few hours later, Peruvian porters arrived and helped them bring Merikanto down to a lake, which they crossed in a small boat. Finally, 15 hours after Merikanto’s fall, theyreached an ambulance waiting for them.
Merikanto recalls that Heitz was next to him when he woke up in a rural Peruvian hospital. Heitz told him he was done with skiing. “He was blaming himself a lot for it,” Merikanto told me. “Blaming himself so much for it. And I guess I was just trying to calm him down a bit.”
Heitz does not dispute this. “He was there for my project,” Heitz told me. “So it’s clear that if I hadn’t had this project, he wouldn’t have come and he wouldn’t have had this accident.”
After the accident, the team abandoned the Peruvian expedition. Heitz’s girlfriend found him in a similar state of mind when he got back to Europe. “He came back from Peru and told me he was stopping skiing,” Janssens recalled. “He told me, ‘I don’t want it any more, I’m selling my skis, I don’t want to hear about skiing any more.’”
In Switzerland, Merikanto began a gruelling process of rehabilitation. Eventually he would walk again, and even ski a little, but he can no longer move as he once did.
---
After Merikanto’s near-fatal accident, a question mark loomed over the film. Heitz says there was no pressure from the sponsors to continue, and after deliberating, he and Anthamatten resolved to finish what they had started.
As they prepared for their second trip, to Pakistan, Anthamatten and his girlfriend split up. She had long been uncomfortable with the way he lived his life, but Peru was the final straw. Shortly after the team arrived in Islamabad, they learned that three climbers – who, like Anthamatten, were sponsored by North Face, and whom both Heitz and Anthamatten knew personally – [had died in an accident in the Canadian Rockies](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/18/three-mountaineers-presumed-dead-avalanche-canada).
Heitz and his crew had no further accidents, but they found in Pakistan what they had already discovered in Peru: doing their style of skiing at approaching 6,000 metres, at the end of tenuous supply lines, in mountains they did not know, was barely viable. They filmed some striking descents, in particular in the Snow Lake region of Pakistan’s Karakoram. But they didn’t have the volume of footage that made the first La Liste a sensation.
“They didn’t have much luck with the skiing,” Merikanto told me. “They really didn’t have much material without the accident. And then it kind of went a bit nasty.” In Merikanto’s telling, Red Bull, the primary sponsor of the project, wanted to centre the film on his injury to make up for the absence of extreme ski footage. Merikanto didn’t want that.
A standoff ensued. Merikanto hired a lawyer, and eventually he struck a deal with Red Bull for an undisclosed sum. In return, he agreed to let the story of his injury be used in the film. La Liste 2 premiered in 2021. Subtitled Everything or Nothing, it is a very different production from its predecessor. The film is primarily the story of Merikanto’s injury and rehabilitation, along with Heitz’s growing uneasiness about the risks involved in the project. His decision to turn back on Laila Peak in Pakistan while Anthamatten continues is portrayed as a signal moment.
Jérémie Heitz and Sam Anthamatten in Pakistan. Photograph: Red Bull
Red Bull turned down a request for an interview for this article, though one of Heitz’s contacts at the company, speaking on the condition that they not be named, told me that Red Bull did not suggest ideas for projects. The athletes came to them. “Having Red Bull as a partner is like insurance for an athlete,” Heitz said. “OK, it’s a drink brand, it’s not an insurance brand. They do a lot of marketing. But they are aware that they sponsor extreme-sports athletes. They started like that. They have been there to help every athlete who has had accidents. If you get injured, they have a centre in Austria. You can recover at their expense.”
Merikanto appears to hold no grudge against Heitz – they remain friends – but he finds it hard to justify the risks involved in the sport. “It’s a waste of incredible people, personalities. I feel it’s a waste,” he told me. “Somebody dies and then on the next day you have your social media, full of this ‘ride in peace’ bullshit. And then the circus continues.”
When Tof Henry died, in October last year, he was with Mathurin Vauthier, a French photographer based in Chamonix. Afterwards, Vauthier published a long post on Instagram describing what had happened to Henry and Juan Señoret, the Chilean skier who died in the same accident. It read like [an anguished howl](https://www.instagram.com/p/Cyk_QAzI4Jx/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==) for lost friends. “They were at the peak of their joy and their reasons to live. Skis on the feet, a sublime mountain, a sunrise, and with a partner who shared the same vision.” Then, below, Vauthier added: “Finally, thank you to the sponsors, without them nothing would have been done in the same way.” I wondered if he was aware of the irony, or if the brands listed were either.
---
On the second day I skied with Heitz last year, we drove towards the French border up a forest road. It was a spring morning, there was no snow on the ground, and liverwort flowers poked from the turf. For the next five and a half hours, as we climbed up towards a 2,628-metre peak called Bel Oiseau and then descended again, I had a sense that Heitz was oscillating between two states of being. He had been a professional steep skier, maybe the best in the world. He had played the game as well as anyone. But now he was 33, and ageing out of peak athletic performance. He told me he had pulled back from the craziest risks after Merikanto got hurt. He was slowly leaving behind that old life, and moving towards a new one. He was training to be a European mountain guide, which involves reaching a high standard in climbing on rock and ice as well as skiing, and usually takes an investment of time comparable to a PhD.
We carried our skis, and then, once the snow had thickened, we climbed using skins – strips, once sealskin, now synthetic – attached under our skis for traction on the snow. Heitz set a ferocious place. I am pretty fit, but I still lagged behind. Every so often, he vanished out of sight. We climbed without pause for 1,300 vertical metres. We passed chalets, then the tree line. Finally, he waited for me to catch up. As we approached a ridge that ran north-south at above 2,500 metres, he showed me how to dig the heel of the downhill ski into the snow below to make a firm platform when changing direction between uphill tacks.
When we reached the ridge, the glory of ski mountaineering opened out before us: an empty crest, the quiet, the lake far below. A couloir – a steep gully – plunged down on the left-hand side of the ridge. Heitz fastened a sling around a boulder and fished a climbing harness out of his pack. “It’s a prototype,” he said, as he pressed it on me. “Not been tested yet.” It was clear he was joking, but I was still apprehensive, in part because I had no idea what the plan was.
Heitz lowered me down to the start of the couloir. I reached a position where I could stand without sliding, unroped. Heitz jumped over the crest and skied down to where I was. He put a ski pole on the slope and held an iPhone clinometer against it. “Fifty degrees,” he said. “That’s the same slope as the Lenzspitze, more or less” – one of the peaks from La Liste.
It was extremely steep, but the snow was soft, and that changed everything. The steep pitch continued for only around 80 metres before it eased, with no cliff beneath us. I side-slipped the first sections, and then Heitz showed me how to turn on slightly gentler ground. I was relieved when it was over.
For the rest of the day, Heitz remained in full-on instructional mode. He was a different person from theone he had been when we had set out: earlier he had kept a distance, now he was gracious and engaged. It was clear that he would be a good mountain guide, even if the only clients he’ll take out may be the oligarchs who have seen his films, and even if part of him would miss the danger that had defined his life ever since he was a teenager. We skied down to the woods and back into springtime.
More recently, when we spoke, Heitz seemed reconciled to his new life. He told me that he has no ambitions to take his skiing even higher, on to 8,000-metre mountains, the very highest ground on the planet. His aim was “to be as versatile as possible in themountains”. That meant skiing, certainly, but alsorock climbing, and paragliding. He wanted, he said, “to be a Swiss Army knife”.
NEW YORK — There was a woman walking toward him, but he didn’t recognize her. They were at a basketball court on a Tuesday morning in Brooklyn, just after 10 a.m. — two strangers at a playground. The sun was out. It was warm. Ashish Prashar, 40, had taken off his jacket and laid it on the ground. He watched his son, who was 18 months old, standing near the three-point line, happy, babbling, fascinated by an older boy playing basketball. Maybe the boy was this woman’s son, Ash thought, and now she was coming closer, and she began to speak.
The tone of her voice surprised him. It was firm and direct.
Two weeks from now, in a courtroom, a prosecutor would summarize what Ash said he heard:
“You support Hamas.”
“They kill babies.”
“Your baby should die.”
“You’re a terrorist.”
That morning, it was one month into the Israel-Gaza war, and as the woman came closer, Ash asked himself what was happening. He scanned the playground, and now the facts of the situation came to order in his mind: Around his neck, he was wearing a kaffiyeh, a Palestinian scarf. He and his son had brown skin. They were not Palestinian — Ash was Punjabi, born in London — but they might look Palestinian to the woman, whose voice was getting louder now. Ash took a few steps back. He grabbed his son. He grabbed his phone inside his jacket pocket. And then he made a decision that would cascade outward in the weeks ahead, testing what he thought he believed about accountability and compassion.
At 10:19 a.m., he pressed the record button.
“Go away,” the woman said.
The phone shook, pointed at the ground, a blacktop covered in dry leaves. The camera leveled. Her figure came into focus on the screen: a woman in a hat and sunglasses, phone in one hand, paper coffee cup in the other.
“You and your son, go away,” she said.
“Why?” Ash asked.
She walked toward him, nearly in front of him now.
“Don’t!” she said at a high pitch. “You cannot take —”
She raised her hand and hurled her cellphone toward him.
“— any pictures!”
Her phone crashed, landing in the leaves.
“What?!” Ash said.
She raised her hand again and this time hurled the coffee cup. The cup flew past him, but the lid came off. He felt the liquid hit his neck. It felt hot.
“Get away!” she said.
She was close to his face now. The camera shook.
“Don’t f---ing touch me, love!” Ash said.
“Get away!” the woman said.
“Why am I getting away?”
“I told you to leave,” she yelled. “I told you to leave.”
She picked up her phone from the ground.
“Get the f--- out,” the woman said. “Get the f--- out.”
“I’m not gonna do that.”
She walked back to Ash again and lunged, swiping at his phone.
“Don’t — don’t come near me, love,” he said.
“Don’t take pictures of me,” she said.
The woman swiped at him a second time. Then a third.
“I’ve got a baby,” Ash said.
“Get away,” she said.
“*I’ve got a baby*!” he said.
The woman turned and started to leave. The playground was quiet.
What is happening, Ash kept thinking, until whatever just happened was over.
He stopped recording, held his son and wondered what he was supposed to do next.
Forty-seven seconds — that’s how long the video lasted. And that might have been the end of it. But in a time of rising hate crimes, with anger and outrage available to anyone at any time online, that’s not the way it worked out. Ash went home and showed the video to his wife, Mary Rinaldi. “We got attacked,” he said. Later that day, he walked to the 88th Precinct in Brooklyn and showed the video to the police, who elevated it to the Hate Crime Task Force in Manhattan. The next day, after Mary said to him, “She hurt our child and needs to be held accountable,” Ash decided to post the video on Instagram, too.
In a week, it had passed 1 million views.
Now his phone was filled with hundreds of messages. Sad faces, angry faces, Palestinian flags. Strangers zoomed in on the woman’s face, rushing to identify her. They zoomed in on Ash’s son, who had been on the ground at one point, holding something small and red. An Israeli hostage poster, someone online said, though it was only an empty bag of chips, crinkling in his hands. One person sent close-ups of the coffee cup the woman had thrown, identifying the logo of the bakery where it had been purchased. People told Ash how well he handled the situation, how calm he’d kept his voice. More than one person said they would have punched the woman in the face, if it had been them that day.
Ash didn’t want to punch the woman. He’d tried to de-escalate the situation. He considered himself a nonviolent person, in large part because of two things that had happened in his life. The first came when he was 17 years old. He was arrested for stealing from a London department store and spent four months in prison. Anger was all around him there, and he told himself that in order to survive, he would need to become a different person — someone who didn’t react. One morning, when a guard pinned him against the wall and shouted racist slurs, Ash just looked at him and let him yell. He became a person who said, “Okay,” if he said anything at all.
The second thing happened years later, after he had begun a career in politics. He joined a team working for former prime minister Tony Blair, the Middle East peace envoy at the time. In 2011, the job took Ash to the West Bank, where he received his kaffiyeh as a gift. That same year, he traveled to Sierra Leone, where he sat in on reconciliation meetings as the country healed from a decade-long civil war. He watched a mother face the child soldier who had been accused of killing her son and daughter. Here was a chance for vengeance, but when the council asked what punishment the soldier should face, the mother asked for the boy to be released into her own care, and to raise him as her own. It was a life-changing moment for Ash. He began to think of himself as an abolitionist, a person who stood against forms of oppression and occupation. It was a feeling that only deepened as he moved to the United States, met and married Mary, and worked as a human rights activist and political strategist for campaigns and criminal justice groups.
In Gaza, Ash had long seen another system of oppression. After Oct. 7, when Hamas militants killed at least 1,200 people and took hundreds hostage in Israel, he and Mary began organizing pressure campaigns for a permanent cease-fire. They used words like “genocide” to talk about Israel’s military actions in Gaza, where the death toll would climb past 25,000 in the weeks to come, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Along with a few activists, they spent their days documenting firsthand accounts from the region to send to reporters and government officials.
Ash wanted the person who attacked him and his son to be held accountable, but he also worried about the anger stirred up by the video of the confrontation he'd posted online.
Ash and his wife, Mary, dress their son at their Brooklyn home.
Now, seeing the outrage on his own Instagram feed, where strangers were promising to “find” the woman in the video, he began to worry about what all the anger could turn into. He posted a message urging restraint: “If you think you know this person please share the information but don’t take this in your own hands. We have never asked for that and we do not want that. This is not vigilante justice.”
But the messages kept coming.
Two strangers contacted Ash to say they recognized the woman from their gym. They each gave him the same name*.* “I do not have any doubt about who she is,” one of them said.
He looked up the woman’s name online. He read old comments he thought she’d left on YouTube videos. He wondered if he might pass her on the street. He sent the name to the detective assigned to his case, and now the detective was on the phone, sounding out the same name.
“Her name is, like, Hadasa … Kara — vani? Karavani — Bozak?”
Ash and Mary, 44, sat at their kitchen counter, listening.
Now the detective was asking if Ash had seen any other photos of the woman online that he could send. It would help make a positive identification and ensure an indictment, he said.
“The big deal is getting her prosecuted, you know?”
“Just to confirm, you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt,” the detective said.
Mary didn’t speak until the call was over.
“So we need to do the work for them, is basically what they’re saying,” she said.
“Well, we need to do a search,” Ash said.
“We don’t need to do their job for them. That’s my opinion,” Mary said. “I think it’s not very valuable for us, for our own mental space.”
“No,” Ash said. “It’s a waste of energy.”
“And it upsets you a lot.”
Ash stared at his laptop, where a Google search for the name was still open in his browser.
“I might email them and say they should look at the immigration database,” he said.
“No, no, no,” Mary said.
“No? Okay. Let them do it.”
“You gotta let that go.”
“Okay,” he said, but a few hours later, when Mary and their son were out, Ash was looking through his messages again. “My wife and I have to constantly look over our shoulders and don’t feel safe out and about with our baby,” he’d written in an email to the detective the day before. “It’s not a nice feeling at all.”
The gym must have a photo on file. The bakery must have security footage. They weren’t far away.
He got his coat and his scarf and walked out the door.
Outside his building, he passed lampposts where someone had taped fliers.
Fliers were posted around Ash's neighborhood asking for information about the woman who had attacked him and his son.
A few blocks away, a woman sat in her apartment looking at messages on her phone.
“ … You vile human being!!!!!!”
“ … YOU ARE EVIL.”
“ … You thought you wouldn’t be found?”
Her name was Annette Lalic.
Did she look like the woman in the video? She had short, dark hair like the woman did, but that’s where the similarities ended. She lived in another part of Brooklyn. She worked as a lawyer for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and at 10:19 a.m. on that Tuesday, as Ash pressed the record button in Brooklyn, she was at her office in Lower Manhattan, preparing for mediation in a discrimination case.
Two days later, Annette, 38, was working from home, just after lunch, when the first message came. A notification from Instagram said she had been tagged in a photo. It was a picture she hadn’t seen before: a woman in a hat and sunglasses. The logo on the hat was familiar to her, from a Brooklyn running store she went to often. Now she had a text from a friend at the store: “Call me when you get this.”
“Something weird is going on online,” her friend said.
Somehow, from the hat in the video, people had found a picture of Annette wearing a hat on the running store’s website. The hats didn’t look the same, she thought, but it didn’t matter. “Her name is Annette Marie Lalic,” someone said online. Now she watched part of the 47-second video and searched her name on social media. Someone had posted her photo next to screenshots from the video, with arrows pointing to each woman’s chin, nose and jawline. “100% is Annette Lalic,” the person had written.
She felt herself begin to panic.
She went to a neighbor’s apartment across the hall.
“Do I respond to this?” she asked.
“Let’s slow down,” her neighbor said.
“How do I even prove that it’s not me? Clearly, it’s not me.”
Annette Lalic, a lawyer for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, was misidentified as the assailant in the attack on Ash and his son.
Friends told her to stay off the internet, but Annette wanted to know what the people online knew, in case of a threat. She went through more messages. “Two blocks down … they’re watching you. When you least expect it,” one person wrote to her on Instagram, with an emoji of a gust of wind. What did the wind emoji mean? She didn’t know. She saw people post her old home address, her work address, her license number from the New York State Bar Association. They called her office in Manhattan. They found her LinkedIn, so she deactivated her account. There were friends and acquaintances on Reddit and Instagram, and neighborhood group chats for parents, all saying it wasn’t her.
“This is misinformation! The woman in the video is NOT Annette Lalic!”
“It’s definitely not her. I used to work with her.”
“I can also confirm it is not Annette.”
It didn’t matter.
“ … Your life will be hell from now on.”
“ … You SLUT.”
“ … You’re sick.”
Voice mails filled her inbox.
“ … You’re disgusting. Know that, all right? You’re a disgusting human being. I don’t even want to call you a human being.”
“ … Annette, do you call yourself a woman? You are a barbarian.”
“ … You stupid, racist, Jewish b----.”
“ … Quit hiding, you f---ing p---y, Annette.”
“Doxed,” she wrote in her planner beneath the date.
She went to bed and thought about what to do next. She could issue a statement of her own saying, “It’s not me.” She could record a video of herself reading the statement. Surely, as soon as people heard her voice and saw her face up close, they would realize it wasn’t her. “You need to do this,” some friends had told her. She wondered if people even cared whether it was her or whether it wasn’t. She had already seen one commenter say, “It doesn’t look like her,” to which another replied, “Agree to disagree.” There was no logic here. She decided to do nothing.
Annette described feelings of fear and guilt after being falsely accused of attacking Ash and his son.
The days passed, and now, as people kept telling her how terrible she was, her panic gave way to a new feeling, one she hadn’t expected. It was a feeling of guilt — as if she really had done something wrong, “as if I’d actually done what the woman had done,” she thought. The guilt was peculiar — detached and almost out-of-body. Physically, she was at home, eating dinner next to her cat. “*This is me*,” she told herself. She was fine, but the messages kept coming, telling her that she was not.
“ … I will make sure the whole world knows that you are racist,” one said.
“That’s not who I am,” she told herself.
“ … We’re gonna see you out in the street.”
“It’s not real,” she told herself.
On the day Ash left his apartment to search for the woman, Annette was scheduled to coach a running group in Central Park but thought about staying home instead. “Do what you’re comfortable with,” one of the other coaches told her. On the train, she looked around and wondered if people were staring at her. How many knew her face as the face in the video?
She got off the train, walked into the park, coached the group and was starting to leave when she heard someone shout her name.
“Annette!”
Her stomach dropped. Panic.
She turned around. It was only someone she knew, a friend coming up to her to say hi.
Ash was still out searching. Seven blocks west, past the playground, past more fliers, past a crossing guard on the corner who stopped him and said someone told her just yesterday that the woman in the video was an attorney.
“No,” Ash said to her, knowing she meant Annette. He had already heard about what happened to her. He had thought about contacting her, but what would he even say? Instead, he told the crossing guard: “It’s not her. I think I know who the woman is. I’m just trying to find her now.”
He walked another 13 blocks to the gym, where the people behind the front desk said they couldn’t give out private information. Another seven blocks back to the bakery, where the people behind the counter said they would check their security footage and get back to him. Six blocks back to his neighborhood. It was getting dark now. From the street, he called the detective again and told him about his trip to the gym, and the bakery, and that’s when the detective told him that they didn’t need any more photos of the woman. They had an arrest warrant.
“Oh!” Ash said. “That’s amazing!”
He headed home, walked inside and kicked off his boots.
“Well, they’re gonna arrest her,” Ash said.
Mary stood at the kitchen counter chopping onions.
While Ash had been out on his search, she had been looking at news from overseas. A video from al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, showing premature babies crying. Another video from the West Bank, showing two boys, one 8, one 14, shot in the street.
“Mer?”
“Great,” she said. Her voice was low. She kept chopping. “You know how I feel about it.”
He did know. Earlier that week, Ash had told her, “Mary, you might have punched her in the face,” and Mary had said, “I wonder what I would have done.” Maybe she would have snapped, she said, or maybe she would have picked up their son and run. “You don’t know until you’re in the situation,” Ash said, and that was the difference between them. Ash had been there. Mary hadn’t. And now they were processing the same event in their own way. While Ash was becoming more and more focused on the arrest, Mary sometimes noticed herself getting quiet.
Ash took off his scarf and coat. “They’re issuing an arrest warrant,” he said again. “Like, I think they might actually pick her up today.”
“Okay,” Mary said.
“Which means, ‘Yay,’” Ash said.
“Mhmm.”
“A little bit of relief.”
“Yeah,” Mary said. She paused. She didn’t want her son to be hurt. “Obviously,” she said. “And I don’t want other kids to be hurt.” She kept her head down. “But it’s all sad. Like, the whole thing is just …”
Now she stood in the kitchen and began to cry.
“The emotion … it’s up here,” she said, putting a hand to her neck.
“Hey, come here. I’m sorry.”
Ash walked to the other side of the counter and put his arms around her.
Mary took a deep breath. “So what’s the next thing for us?” she asked. “Is the state going to prosecute her? Or the city? Do we have a say?”
“I don’t know. I actually don’t think we’re going to have a say.”
Ash was invited to speak at pro-Palestinian demonstrations after the video of him and his son being attacked went viral.
No matter how many times they discussed it, Ash and Mary couldn’t come up with an answer.
They thought an arrest might bring some clarity. But the arrest did not happen that night, as Ash thought it would. It did not happen the next day, or the next, or the day after that. The weekend came and still no arrest. Ash was still getting messages, and in between his Instagram posts about Gaza, he wrote updates about the case to his followers, which in a matter of weeks had grown from several hundred to 10,000. He was invited to speak at two pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and he accepted. People in the neighborhood recognized him on the street. He was becoming the face of something.
He could sense people becoming impatient, and he understood their frustration.
“What’s taking them so long?” someone asked in the comments of one of Ash’s posts.
“What’s her name?!” said another.
“Release the name.”
“Please we need her full name.”
“It’s gonna snowball,” the detective had warned him, and it had, so much so that Ash was now worried about the woman’s safety. What if someone attacked her? He thought about what had happened to Annette, and imagined worse. “Someone is going to make a citizen’s arrest,” Mary told him.
Protesters watch as Ash speaks at a New York rally opposing the ongoing Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip.
Now there was a new message.
Someone had seen the woman at a grocery store in Brooklyn.
The person had taken photos. They’d called the precinct and waited at the store for the police. No police came. No arrest was made. Ash was also feeling impatient. He decided to post the photos to his Instagram. “It is disheartening to let you know that the NYPD didn’t send an officer to the scene to apprehend her,” he wrote, and more comments came streaming in.
But a few days later, he saw something that alarmed him. It was a new video about the case, from another stranger. This one named the woman and listed her home address.
“This is not what I wanted,” Ash said.
He called the detective. “Someone posted her address and her name online,” he said, speaking quickly. “I don’t know who this person is, but I wanted to call you to tell you straight away —”
The detective stopped him. “Okay, so, Ash,” he said, “I have her under arrest.”
After all this time, Ash had seen the woman only once, during that brief encounter at the playground. He could only guess what she had been doing in the days since. He’d imagined her in a state of isolation, rarely leaving her apartment building, 12 blocks away from his own, where fliers of her face still hung outside on the street. He’d studied the pictures from the grocery store, where she stood with a shopping basket on her arm, glancing at a bin of fresh fruit. But the woman was still a stranger to him, a person he could read about online, the same as anyone else.
Now there was a chance to see her. Arraignments were open to the public.
The courthouse in Brooklyn was a 25-minute walk away, and the woman was already there.
She had turned herself in at 7 a.m. She’d been in one of the holding pens downstairs since morning, waiting. All day there were arraignments. First-degree robbery. Second-degree harassment. The hours passed. It was evening now. “Warning,” read a sign on the stairwell door. Each time the door opened, yelling came from the floor below.
The door opened again and now it was almost midnight.
The woman walked into the courtroom, led by a police officer. She was short and small. Her hair was tied back. A black mask sat beneath her nose. Her fingernails were painted. Her hands were in handcuffs behind her back. In legal documents, her name was listed as Hadasa Bozakkaravani.
“How do I say your last name?” the judge said.
“Karavani,” she told the judge.
“Karavani,” he repeated. “Good evening, Miss Karavani.”
Across the aisle, a prosecutor approached a microphone and began to recount that morning in the playground for the judge. “Defendant was a stranger to the complainant,” she began.
“Defendant approached the complainant …”
“ … stated in sum and substance: ‘Why are you wearing that? You support Hamas. They kill babies. Your baby should die. You’re a terrorist …’”
“Defendant then threw a cellphone …”
“ … threw a hot beverage …”
“ … nearly striking the child …”
Bozakkaravani shook her head.
Her lawyer introduced her to the court: forty-eight years old, a longtime Brooklyn resident and a first-time offender — zero contacts with the system, he told the judge. No warrant history. No absconding or escapes. No felonies. No misdemeanors. “Nothing,” he said. She had turned herself in voluntarily. “Everything went very smoothly.” The complainant, “by the way,” he said, “went immediately onto social media and did every interview he could possibly do to explain what he believed occurred.”
“Obviously, the court is aware of what is occurring politically, not only internationally, but out there on the streets.”
The case should have been charged as a misdemeanor assault, he said, or a menacing, or an attempt of those things. “Instead, it’s been charged as a hate crime.”
Bozakkaravani stared ahead.
At 12:11 a.m., some 16 hours after she’d turned herself in, she was released without bail. She was handed a copy of an order of protection, barring her from contact with Ash and his son. The handcuffs came off. She left the courthouse with her lawyer, stepped outside and disappeared.
By that time, Ash and his family were asleep.
Instead of going to the courthouse, he and Mary had stayed home. They were cooking dinner. Their son was in the living room. The television was on, and suddenly Ash heard a voice in his apartment. The local news was playing the video again.
Ash plays with his son at Edmonds Playground in Brooklyn, where the attack on them happened in early November.
The fliers in the neighborhood had come down. The mob that had found the wrong woman and misidentified an empty bag of potato chips had mostly moved onto another outrage. The online comments had slowed. It had been six weeks since that morning in the playground, but Ash still had one question he couldn’t answer: What was an appropriate punishment for hate?
Hate is what it had been, he thought.
And the charges that followed were serious: attempted assault as a hate crime, menacing as a hate crime, aggravated harassment and endangering the welfare of a child. Twelve counts in all.
After her arraignment, Bozakkaravani had returned to court, this time to enter a plea.
She had yet to say anything publicly about the case. (She and her lawyer declined multiple interview requests for this story.) As she waited to see the judge, a tabloid photographer walked up to her and began to take pictures. She held a hand up to cover her face. “No,” she said. She got up from the bench where she’d been sitting and stood in a corner, turning her back to the camera. “She said no,” said a man in the waiting room. “She said no, bro.” The photographer took another picture. “I’m gonna knock your head off,” the man said. The photographer stopped and a few minutes later, Bozakkaravani entered the courtroom and pleaded not guilty.
“Justice and mercy are hard,” Mary had said to Ash as they discussed it one day.
“Mercy isn’t always the answer,” she said.
But prison?
The charges carried a maximum sentence of seven years, according to the district attorney’s office.
“Is there a path to reconciliation?” Ash asked during another conversation.
“That’s the question,” Mary said.
“What *is* justice now?” Ash asked.
“I don’t know,” Mary said.
Another conversation:
“It was a hypothetical. Now it’s real,” Ash said. “My feelings are more complex.”
Soon, the prosecutor would ask them what they thought the woman deserved.
They had contacted a few Palestinian friends for advice. One of them said the woman should be forced to attend a class about Palestine. Another said she should be forced to spend one day in jail, to have some idea of what it’s like to be oppressed. Just one day.
“They can’t appear to be soft,” Mary said during another conversation. They were back at the playground with their son.
“If she’s going to prison, okay, fine,” Ash said, “but they need to put the same energy that they put into this into everything else — every hate crime.”
They were still talking when they heard a cry.
“Oh, no!” Ash said.
It was their son. He had tripped near the entrance to the basketball court.
Ash and Mary ran to him. They wiped some dirt off his pants. They wiped a small bit of blood from a scrape on his forehead. They hugged him until he stopped crying, and then, distracted for a moment from their conversation about hate and the question they still could not answer, Ash helped him to his feet, held out his hand and guided him back onto the court.
# Super Bowl Strip Tease: The NFL and Las Vegas Are Together at Last
In the primitive days before caller ID, Terry Bradshaw answered the phone in his Las Vegas hotel room and listened in wonder as Elvis Presley—presumably ensconced in the 5,000-square-foot Imperial Suite of the Las Vegas Hilton—invited the [Pittsburgh Steelers](https://www.si.com/nfl/team/pittsburgh-steelers)’ quarterback to join the King of Rock ’n’ Roll’s regular touch football game. Bradshaw, in the first blush of his own ’70s superstardom, politely declined.
And so the respective faces of Vegas and the NFL were not metaphorically married in the Little White Wedding Chapel, to Bradshaw’s everlasting regret. More than 40 years later, the Fox Sports analyst told Fox Sports: “Man, I still think about it now.” It was one of countless missed love connections between Las Vegas and the NFL, two American institutions that flirted for decades, locked in an endless cycle of attraction and repulsion, come-hither and go-thither, codependents united by the very thing that kept them apart: gambling.
Illustration by Davide Barco
In time, there would be an NFL quarterback named for the King. The former [San Francisco 49ers](https://www.si.com/nfl/team/san-francisco-49ers) signal-caller Elvis Grbac and his brother, Engelbert, shared their names with icons of the Vegas stage. Las Vegas has had such a powerful hold on the world’s imagination—the Grbacs were sons of Croatian immigrants to Cleveland—that NFL owners could hardly ignore the city’s charms. By 2019, even Bradshaw would have his own Vegas stage show—singing, dancing, costume changes—at the Luxor. They had so much in common, Las Vegas and the league, including their strange fixations on ancient Rome.
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And so [Super Bowl LVIII](https://www.si.com/nfl/2024/01/29/2024-super-bowl-58-first-look-preview-49ers-chiefs) will be held within walking distance of Caesars Palace, in whose Forum Shops—beneath a man-made heaven that changes from dawn to pink-clouded dusk every day—is the NFL Las Vegas store. There, beside a faux-Roman piazza stocked with exotic fish, one can fog the jeweler’s case displaying a [New York Giants](https://www.si.com/nfl/team/new-york-giants) helmet bedazzled in Swarovski crystals, yours for $9,999.
Las Vegas and the NFL share a fondness for neon cowboys (“Vegas Vic,” [Deion Sanders](https://www.si.com/college/2023/11/30/deion-sanders-sportsperson-of-the-year-colorado)) and a vernacular of nickels and slots. The [Super Bowl](https://www.si.com/super-bowl) gives equal weight to the high-gloss halftime show and the un-Vegas-y business of winning football games. It’s part Bill Belew (who designed Presley’s rhinestone-studded jumpsuits) and part [Bill Belichick](https://www.si.com/search?query=Bill+Belichick) (who said, when asked this season to name his favorite place in Las Vegas: “Been at the stadium four times”).
That stadium stands at the southwest corner of Dean Martin Drive and Al Davis Way, at the physical intersection of Las Vegas and the NFL. It was silent on a winter Tuesday morning in midseason, save for the whine of a worker’s power drill as he resecured a 14-foot aluminum can of Coors Light to a billboard that screamed JUST WIN BABY! Black, shiny and sleek against the dun-colored Spring Mountains, Allegiant Stadium looks like Darth Vader’s mask discarded on Tatooine, an architectural style that might best be called Mid-century Madman.
It fits perfectly here. A block to the east is the Strip, with its Lady Liberty, Giza Pyramid and Arthurian castle, to say nothing of the billboards (SIN HAS CONSEQUENCES: REPENT) and T-shirts (I SUPPORT SINGLE MOTHERS ONE DOLLAR AT A TIME) competing for tourist souls.
In 1989, the [Super Bowl halftime show](https://www.si.com/longform/halftime/index.html) featured an Elvis impersonator, Elvis Presto, fanning out an oversize deck of cards. Why? That game was in Miami, yet human playing cards cavorted onstage at Joe Robbie Stadium. By then, the NFL was the most popular play in Las Vegas sportsbooks, including the Stardust, the first sportsbook inside a casino. Lefty Rosenthal, who opened it in ’76, bet on only NFL games, with a special affinity for *Monday Night Football.*
Everyone knew this unrequited, long-distance relationship—a series of come-ons and ghostings going on 75 years now—would have to be consummated somehow, someday in the quickie marriage capital of the world. They were made for each other or deserved each other, depending on your perspective. Either way: the NFL and Las Vegas? Get a room already.
Allegiant Stadium, which sits at the southwest corner of Dean Martin Drive and Al Davis Way, stands out among the flashy lights and over-the-top architecture of the Las Vegas Strip.
Marco Steinbrenner/DeFodi Images/Getty Images
What took them so long? For four seasons, from 1946 to ’49, the [New York Yankees](https://www.si.com/mlb/team/new-york-yankees) were a professional football team playing in Yankee Stadium in a rival pro league that seriously challenged the NFL. Like the baseball Yankees, the Yankees of the All-American Football Conference were owned by Dan Topping and Del Webb, the latter of whom was a real estate developer who built the original Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. The Flamingo was the first modern Vegas attraction, the original resort-style casino hotel.
The Flamingo was owned by a syndicate led by Bugsy Siegel, the man who established Las Vegas as a glamorous getaway accessible to the workingman, and a central-casting kind of mobster. “He told me one night when I was waiting for my money that he had personally killed twelve men,” Webb told the sportswriter Bob Considine in 1955. “But then he must have noted my face, or something, because he laughed and said that I had nothing to worry about. ‘There’s no chance you’ll get killed,’ he said. ‘We only kill each other.’”
In 1947, shortly after the Flamingo opened, Webb said: “We \[see\] a big future in professional football and I look for other major league \[baseball\] clubs to buy into professional \[football\] teams in the future.” Webb didn’t forecast business trends so much as create them. It was Webb who coined the phrase “the golden years” for old age, which he rebranded—through his Sun City retirement communities—as a permanent vacation, a perpetual summer of shuffleboard, golf and canasta.
Six months after the Flamingo opened, Siegel “died of lead poisoning,” in the tabloid parlance of the day, succumbing to a drive-by fusillade of bullets on June 20, 1947, as he sat on a couch in the window of his girlfriend’s house in Beverly Hills.
The first Vegas sportsbook was opened at the Stardust casino in 1976.
Earl Leaf/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Webb persisted through three more years of war between the AAFC and the NFL, both sides hemorrhaging money while bidding up players. In 1949, to stop the bleeding, owners agreed to merge three AAFC teams—the San Francisco 49ers, [Cleveland Browns](https://www.si.com/nfl/team/cleveland-browns) and Baltimore Colts—into the National Football League. Some Yankees players were subsumed into the New York Football Giants, including punter Tom Landry.
Webb got out of pro football but remained in the baseball and casino businesses. Baseball commissioner Happy Chandler wasn’t happy that Webb worked simultaneously in Sin City and the South Bronx, but no matter: Webb led a faction of owners to fire Chandler. We only kill each other.
The new commissioner—Webb headed the screening committee—was Ford Frick, who had no qualms about the Yankees’ owner’s Vegas ties. When Webb bought the Sahara and Mint casinos, Frick shrugged and said, “It’s strictly a real estate deal.”
NFL commissioner Bert Bell, meanwhile, met with President Harry S. Truman in the Oval Office in 1951 to discuss ways to “keep sports free of the influence of gamblers.” His successor, Pete Rozelle, suspended Paul Hornung and Alex Karras in ’63 for gambling and associating with “known hoodlums.”
If the NFL was “negging” Las Vegas, it only made the city more desirous of pro football. In 1973, in the short-lived Southwestern League, the Las Vegas Casinos were coached by Dick Pruitt, a blackjack dealer at the Tropicana. The Casinos tried unsuccessfully to sign a disgruntled Roman Gabriel away from the Rams, but Roman’s numerals—$100,000 for an eight-game contract—proved too much. “I don’t think Pete Rozelle would want to put a team here,” Pruitt told a reporter. “Rozelle hates gambling.”
In their lone season of 1994, the Las Vegas Posse of the Canadian Football League practiced in a converted parking lot at the Riviera. When their anthem singer caused an international incident by singing “O Canada” to the tune of “O Christmas Tree,” Posse owner Nick Mileti apologized in writing to Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. Game-time temperature for a June exhibition was 146˚ on the turf. That was a night game, versus the Edmonton Eskimos. If you’ve never heard of the Posse, you are not alone. In pro football, what happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas.
After decades of resisting a union, the NFL has finally embraced Las Vegas as a sports destination as well as the city’s favorite pastime: gambling.
Aaron M. Sprecher/AP
That famous campaign—“What Happens Here, Stays Here”—was supposed to debut on ABC during Super Bowl XXXVII, in 2003. But the NFL rejected it. In the first decade of the 21st century, NBC wouldn’t even advertise its own show, *Las Vegas*, on its NFL telecasts, in preemptive obeisance to the league. But culture and laws and mores had already begun shifting. That same year, the NBA placed a WNBA team in a casino in Connecticut, whose Native American gambling palaces were a new paradigm of mini-Vegases nationwide.
A year later, in 2004, a troubled 31-year-old named Cole Murdoch Ford—whose life and mental health had been spiraling downward since his release as the Oakland Raiders’ placekicker—fired six shots from a 12-gauge shotgun at the Jungle Palace, the rainforest-themed estate, on Vegas Drive, of the Teutonic magicians Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn. These were literally the final shots fired in the long, strange relationship between Las Vegas and the NFL. The rest would mostly be a love story.
Those Raiders moved to Las Vegas in 2020. When the [Las Vegas Raiders](https://www.si.com/nfl/team/las-vegas-raiders) hosted the Jets last November, Mike Tirico said on NBC, as *Sunday Night Football* went to commercial: “Wanna play a slot machine? There are only 10 million of those in Vegas. Why not? Give it a whirl.”
On four of those slot machines, in the Mirage, you can choose your own NFL logo in lieu of the old lemons or cherries. Get three Packers and win a jackpot of $1,115,621.86.
Like so many others before it, the NFL shrugged off its old identity and eased into an entirely different one here, no questions asked. “Las Vegas was a city with no memory,” Vegas bard Nicholas Pileggi wrote in *Casino*, which became the film starring Robert DeNiro as a version of Lefty Rosenthal. “It was the place you went for a second chance. It was the American city where people went after the divorce, after the bankruptcy, even after a short stint in the county jail. It was the final destination for those willing to drive halfway across America in search of the nation’s only morality car wash.”
The Raiders moved to Las Vegas in 2020, shortly after the NHL and WNBA set up shop with teams of their own. The Raiders, Golden Knights and Aces could soon be joined by the Oakland A’s.
Candice Ward/Getty Images
Las Vegas has become, just as Bugsy Siegel dreamed, the American Monte Carlo—without any of the inevitable upper-class baggage of the Riviera casinos,” Tom Wolfe wrote in *Esquire* 60 years ago. “At Monte Carlo … there are still Wrong Forks, Deficient Accents, Poor Tailoring, Gauche Displays … concepts unknown in Las Vegas. For the grand debut of Monte Carlo as a resort in 1879 the architect, Charles Garnier, designed an opera house for the Place du Casino. … For the debut of Las Vegas as a resort in 1946 Bugsy Siegel hired Abbott and Costello, and there, in a way, you have it all.”
It’s still true. The Monaco Grand Prix is world champion Alberto Ascari crashing his Lancia into the harbor in 1955 and swimming to a yacht. The [Las Vegas Grand Prix](https://www.si.com/formula1/2023/11/10/formula-one-las-vegas-strip-racetrack) is world champion Max Verstappen saying in November that he felt “like a clown” in the prerace hoopla: “It is 99% show, 1% sport.” If the same criticism is sometimes leveled against the Super Bowl, so what? As the Roman centurion Maximus said, at Caesar’s actual palace: “Are you not entertained?”
Monte Carlo (and its Grand Prix) is James Bond in a Savile Row tuxedo. Las Vegas (and its Super Bowl) is the sign outside the coffee shop inside the Tropicana Hotel: “Thank you for wearing shoes and shirts inside the property.”
Like the storied Sands and Stardust before it, the Tropicana will soon collapse into dust. The casino hotel implosions are a genre of spectacle unto themselves here. In their place will rise a 33,000-seat, retractable-roofed, $1.5 billion baseball stadium, the planned new home of the old [Oakland Athletics](https://www.si.com/mlb/team/oakland-athletics), who would join the Raiders, Aces and Golden Knights, the latter two defending champions of the WNBA and NHL, respectively. As LeBron James said before the NBA’s in-season tournament semifinals on the Strip: “It’s crazy to say, but Vegas is a sports town.”
And now, the biggest spectacle of them all. Visitors in town for Super Bowl LVIII may pay their respects to Bugsy Siegel at the gangster’s brick-and-bronze memorial in the Flamingo’s outdoor courtyard, with its live flamingos and white-faced whistling ducks, whose three-note song sounds like a referee signaling the start of play.
Bugsy Siegel, the inventor of Sin City, and Del Webb, the inventor of Sun City, remain twinned here: Take Del Webb Boulevard to one of his two 55-plus developments or swing by the Del Webb Middle School, home of the Wranglers. Seventy-five years after he challenged the NFL, the NFL has come around to Del Webb.
So stop by the Trop, while it (and you) still stands, and grab a drink at the End Zone bar, festooned with Raiders logos. It’s on the sidewalk outside the Tropicana’s lobby, so no need for a shirt. Toast the happy couple: the NFL and Las Vegas, together at last, as they were always meant to be.
She never felt right about sending him to prison. Every year around Christmas, Estella Ybarra would find herself thinking back to December 1990 and that El Paso courtroom, where for three days she sat on a jury holding Carlos Jaile’s fate in her hands. From the start of the trial she’d been unimpressed by the evidence that he had raped an eight-year-old girl. The state’s case hinged on the victim’s identification of Jaile in a police lineup two years after the attack. The girl said her assailant wore mechanic’s clothes and drove a beige sedan. Jaile was a successful vacuum cleaner salesman who wore a shirt and tie and drove a red Subaru hatchback. His lawyer brought in three alibi witnesses who testified he was with them that day. Ybarra was certain he wasn’t guilty.
Then she went to the jury room. Ybarra was 48 at the time, just four foot nine, with long black hair. She worked as a supervisor at Lighthouse for the Blind, an agency that helps the visually impaired. She was outgoing with friends and colleagues, but not as much with strangers. She had never served on a jury before, and the truth was the El Paso native had only recently started to feel comfortable speaking English.
Downtown El Paso.Photograph by Eric Ryan Anderson
When the jurors began deliberating around 2:30 p.m., she quickly realized that only a few others believed in Jaile’s innocence. She remembered two white men in particular, both of them loud and pushy. “He’s guilty,” each insisted the moment they entered the room. They kept referring to the most dramatic moment in the trial, when the victim took the stand and pointed out Jaile right there in the courtroom. In their minds, no further proof was needed. Their arguments got more emphatic as the afternoon wore on, with one of them eventually raising his voice in exasperation: “We shouldn’t be sitting here wasting the government’s money!” The other holdouts, all of them Mexican American women, gradually gave in.
Finally, sometime around 5 p.m. on December 19, Ybarra succumbed to the pressure too. Back inside the courtroom, she hung her head as the jury announced its verdict. Ybarra couldn’t bear to look at Jaile as he learned he was being sent to prison for the rest of his life.
It was cold and dark when she arrived that night at her little brick house on a cul-de-sac in a working-class neighborhood in El Paso’s Lower Valley. She expressed her doubts about the case to her husband, a former deputy sheriff, and her four grown sons. The trial was over, they told her. There wasn’t anything else to be done. She felt completely alone.
A few days later she got a letter in the mail. At the top, the word “Award” was printed in bold. “This certification of appreciation is given to Estella Ybarra for able service as a Juror in the 65thJudicial District Court,” it read. “By accepting this difficult and vital responsibility of citizenship in a fair and conscientious manner, you have aided in perpetuating the right of trial by jury, that palladium of civil liberty and the only safe guarantee for the life, liberty and property of the citizen.”
Ybarra snorted in disgust. “We sent an innocent man away for the rest of his life,” she thought to herself. She stuffed the certificate back in the envelope and tossed it in a desk drawer.
Her life went on. Years passed, then decades. Her four sons married and had children. She grew into her new role as an abuela. She stopped working, and her husband retired. Every year at Christmas she would sit around the tree with her children and grandchildren, opening presents and talking about their lives. She treasured such moments, but during those gatherings she also found herself wondering about Jaile: What was his Christmas like, locked in a lonely Texas prison cell? Did he have kids? What about his parents? The shame she felt came flooding back. Why hadn’t she stood her ground?
Then one day in 2017, she was cleaning out her desk drawers and came upon an old envelope. She opened it and, to her surprise, there was the juror’s certificate. Though it had been 27 years, her “award” was in pristine condition. She held it in her hands, studying those principled words that had unsettled her in the days after the trial: fair and conscientious, life, liberty. All of the old regrets rose in her again. But this time something shifted. For reasons she didn’t completely understand, she felt different.
This time, she decided to do something about it.
Estella’s juror certificate from 1990.Photograph by Eric Ryan Anderson
In the eighties, Carlos Jaile was one of the best vacuum cleaner salesmen in El Paso. He sold Kirbys, the elegant, retro machines with distinctive wide steel nozzles. Kirbys were expensive and sold only in person, inside the homes of potential customers, a dynamic in which Carlos thrived. For him, there was nothing as exciting as walking up to that front door, anticipating the hustle. Carlos had all the attributes of a great salesman: enthusiasm, confidence, empathy, and, with bushy black hair and an easy smile, good looks. He knew that once he got inside, he had five minutes to sell himself—to make the stranger comfortable—and then sell the machine.
Nobody worked harder. Carlos was the first to arrive at the office and the last to leave. He closed deals all over the El Paso area—in the more affluent areas near the mountains, in the new suburbs on the East Side, across the border in Juárez. “Shy salespeople have skinny kids,” he would tell his coworkers. “Persistence will always overcome resistance.” His boss, Jose Gutierrez, would hold contests, awarding to the top salesperson $50 and a trophy of a bear standing on its hind legs. He called it the Bear Hunter Award. Carlos won so many that his colleagues started calling him the Bear.
He was in his mid-twenties when he started, in 1982. About five years later he opened his own branch office on Pellicano Drive, eventually employing a dozen salespeople and several secretaries. He called it Jaile Enterprises and had the words written in large type on the building’s facade. Carlos was bent on realizing the American dream—just like his father.
Carlos Jaile on a recent visit to El Paso.Photograph by Eric Ryan Anderson
Carlos had grown up in Maywood, a pleasant western suburb of Chicago, the youngest son of Cuban émigrés who fled the island in 1966. His father, Franco, had run a grocery store in Cuba and started another in Maywood that became so successful he also opened a liquor store. Carlos idolized his father and would sometimes tag along and watch how friendly he was with customers, most of whom he knew by name.
Carlos’s cheerful, devout mother, Esther, ran the tight-knit household. Carlos and his three older siblings went to Catholic schools—he was the baby of the family, and his parents doted on him. “He had a big heart, but he was spoiled and he knew it,” said his high school girlfriend Kim Spallone. He was a popular kid and would often play baseball with his friends at fields near his home. When the Cubs were on TV, they would all plan their afternoons around watching the game.
Carlos’s parents had always wanted him to be a doctor, so after graduating from high school, in 1977, he took a few premed classes at a local community college. A former classmate who’d enrolled in medical school in Juárez persuaded Carlos to come check it out. He visited El Paso and liked the city, so he applied and was accepted. Before moving, he and Kim married in Chicago, and once they arrived in Texas, they briefly lived with Carlos’s friend at his ranch-style home on the East Side of El Paso. Their address: 2825 Chaswood.
Carlos Jaile and Kim Spallone in 1979.Photograph by Eric Ryan Anderson
Carlos and Kim were young and immature, and the marriage didn’t last. In May 1980 they got into a heated argument at another friend’s house. The cops were called, which made Carlos angrier. “What business is it of yours?” he yelled at the officers. They arrested him for criminal trespass and resisting arrest. He was booked, and mug shots were taken. Kim decided not to press charges, but the two officially split that October. Four months later Carlos got himself in trouble again. He was 23 by then and had started dating a 16-year-old. Her mother called the police, and Carlos was arrested and charged with statutory rape. The case was thrown out after the girl insisted the relationship was consensual.
Carlos’s life changed forever in August 1981, when his father died. Much of his ambition came from his dad. “I’d wanted him to be proud of me,” he said. Now he lost interest in becoming a doctor. Carlos dropped out of med school, his future suddenly uncertain. His three older siblings were all in business, and one day he saw an ad in the newspaper promising good money for selling Kirbys. He visited the office, liked the people, and loved the idea of selling this machine, with its powerful motor and distinctive design. Carlos saw his future—and it was in sales.
By this point he was dating a young woman named Pam Yates. She was blond, beautiful, and smart, studying to be a nurse. Soon the two were inseparable. They began talking about starting a family and were married in 1984. The Jailes loved El Paso—the weather, the mountains, the shopping excursions to Juárez. They had a lot of friends and an active social life. Carlos, who spent weekends tinkering with the shiny black Trans Am his parents had bought him for his high school graduation, joined a car club that met at a parking lot near his neighborhood. He felt at home in El Paso and could see himself staying there forever.
And then on June 26, 1989, not long after lunch, a squad car pulled up at Jaile Enterprises. Two uniformed officers walked into the front room and said they were looking for Carlos Jaile. A couple of his employees looked up from their desks. “That’s me,” Carlos said. “How can I help you?”
The cops said they had a warrant for his arrest. Carlos was flabbergasted. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he protested. The cops handcuffed him and took him away.
Police and prosecutors in El Paso in the late eighties were, they often boasted, tough on crime. The city’s district attorney, Steve Simmons, liked to say, “We don’t make sweetheart deals with criminals.” At the time many residents felt anxious about crimes—both real and imagined—committed against children and young women.
In 1986 two women who worked at a local YMCA day-care center were accused of molesting kids in freakish fashion, including by allowing them to be fondled by “monsters” that the kids described as being twelve feet tall. Each woman was convicted but had her sentence thrown out for procedural reasons. Unsatisfied, single-minded prosecutors came back and tried them again. One was acquitted and the other found guilty, but her verdict was eventually tossed out a second time.
In the fall of 1987 the city was thrown into a panic after [the bodies of six teenage girls and young women](https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/crime/2017/08/10/desert-deaths-david-leonard-wood-murders-30-years-later/547396001/) were found buried in shallow graves in the desert north of town. An auto mechanic named David Wood, age thirty, was eventually caught, convicted of murder, and sent to death row.
Then came the East Side flasher. For two years a man had been driving around the East Side, pulling up next to teenage girls, rolling down his window, and masturbating. The police couldn’t catch him, but they had some good leads. On April 28, 1989, seventeen-year-old Melanie Nieto was walking to school with a friend when an olive-green Cadillac parked near them. The door opened, and a man emerged with his pants around his ankles. “Come here, girls,” he said. The man eventually sped away. Nieto saw him again that day after school—he was, she later told the cops, either Anglo or Hispanic, about five foot five, 140 pounds, with a beard, sandy brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, and a dirty gray ball cap. “He is a very short person,” Nieto emphasized. Her brother, who was with her, told the police the man was five foot three.
A week later, while riding with her boyfriend in his car, she saw him again in the same Cadillac, and they followed him to a house on the East Side. She watched him park in the driveway and walk inside. She called the police and gave them the address: 2825 Chaswood.
Paul Blott, the detective who was investigating the Nieto case, wrote in an offense report, “I checked out this address and learned that subject Carlos Manuel Jaile lives at this address.” In fact, Carlos hadn’t lived there in nine years, but Blott still did a little digging and found a mug shot from one of his arrests. Carlos had facial hair, but otherwise he was nothing like Nieto’s initial description. Carlos was five foot ten and two hundred pounds, and he didn’t have a ponytail or an olive-green Cadillac. Still, Blott put Carlos’s photo in a lineup with four other bearded Hispanic men and took it to Nieto. She picked him out. Blott even told her his name. Two weeks later Carlos was arrested at his office for indecent exposure.
Pam bailed him out, and Carlos figured it was just a simple mistake he could straighten out. But things were about to get a lot more complicated.
Two years earlier, an eight-year-old girl named Maria had walked out of her babysitter’s El Paso house and wandered down the street. A man drove up, stopped, and began talking to her, telling her in Spanish that he was her mother’s mechanic. He was dressed accordingly, and when he asked if she wanted a ride, she said yes. He then drove her out into the desert and raped her. The heinousness of the crime made headlines and shocked the police force.
Maria said the rapist drove a beige sedan. Based on her descriptions, the police made a composite drawing that was used to create a wanted poster, and lead detective Benito Perez made sure both were sent to police stations around the city. Her assailant, she said, was Hispanic and heavyset with a beard. But he hadn’t left any semen, blood, or saliva behind. All that investigators found were a few hairs on her body. The trail went cold.
It warmed up again two years later, in late June 1989. After putting Carlos in that photo lineup, Blott told Perez that he thought Carlos looked a lot like the guy in Maria’s rendering, made two years before. Perez went to the jail to get a look. As he later wrote in an affidavit, “I got chills when I first saw him because he looked just like the composite drawing.”
On June 27, the day Carlos was released on bond, Perez contacted Blott about putting Carlos in a live lineup for Maria. Meanwhile, Blott took a photo lineup to the house of another flasher victim, Kelly Jackson, who was fourteen in September 1988 and had said her potbellied, possibly Hispanic flasher drove a four-door green Cadillac. Jackson pointed to Carlos, who was arrested again on June 28 and charged with another count of indecent exposure. Once again, he thought somebody had just made a stupid mistake that needed clearing up.
His assumption that this was a harmless misunderstanding ended the next morning, when he was escorted from his cell and inserted into a lineup with five other Hispanic men. He had a lawyer with him, who told him why he was there—a little girl had been raped, and he was a suspect. For the first time, Carlos started to worry about forces beyond his control. Maria, ten years old by then, pointed to Carlos as her rapist. “As soon as I entered the room,” the girl said in a statement, “I recognized the man that assaulted me almost two years ago.”
Maria said this in Spanish to detective Lilia Beard, who then translated it into English. At the time Beard was the lead detective on another child-rape case, that of a five-year-old named Andrea, who in July 1987 had been kidnapped and assaulted by a man in a light green car. Beard was well-known in the department. Five years earlier she became the first female valedictorian of the El Paso Police Academy. Now she dealt with sex crimes against children. “She was tough as nails,” said defense attorney Matthew DeKoatz, who often saw the results of her work.
Fifteen minutes after Maria identified Jaile, both Nieto and Jackson were brought in. Three minutes apart, they both identified Carlos as well. These photo and live-lineup procedures, in which the officers in charge knew who the suspect was—and even named him—would not be allowed today. Eyewitness misidentification is a leading cause of wrongful convictions, and [in 2011 the Texas Legislature passed a law](https://www.texastribune.org/2011/09/19/report-police-lineup-protocol-can-be-improved/) mandating that police departments adopt written rules about photo and live lineups, including making sure they are “blind”—the person running them shouldn’t know who the suspect is so the witness can’t be tipped off, accidentally or otherwise. Departments now have to draw up written policies about matters such as instructions given to witnesses, with the clear aim of keeping processes regimented, objective, and anonymous.
But this was 1989, and the police felt they had hit the jackpot. According to an *El Paso Times* story about Carlos, police were looking at him “as a possible suspect in at least two dozen unsolved indecent exposure cases and an unspecified number of cases in which girls have been kidnapped and sexually abused.”
Carlos was soon charged with kidnapping and aggravated sexual assault. He called an older brother, Mario, who had just one question: “Did you do this?”
“Of course not,” Carlos replied.
“Okay. That’s all I need to know.”
His brother flew down from Chicago and took charge. He hired Michael Gibson, one of the best and most expensive attorneys in El Paso. In order to pay for the legal expenses, an investigator, and all of the bonds, Carlos had to sell everything—including his Trans Am and his business. Even more devastating: Pam left him. He phoned her from jail one day, and she told him the marriage was over. “I’m washing my hands of you,” she said. He swore he hadn’t done anything wrong, but she hung up.
Suddenly the entire life he’d built had vanished. Before he’d even gone to trial, it seemed as if everything had been taken from him. All he had left to fight for was his freedom. “Do innocent people actually go to prison?” he asked Gibson, who had worked some four hundred trials in his career.
“Yeah,” said Gibson, “sometimes they do.”
Estella outside her home.Photograph by Eric Ryan Anderson
Estella was nervous when she got the notice from the Sixty-fifth District Court to report for jury duty in October 1990. In many ways she felt like an outsider in her own city. She was born in Segundo Barrio, a historic neighborhood squeezed between the Rio Grande and downtown El Paso that was ofte[n referred to as the “other Ellis Island”](https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/the-other-ellis-island/) because of all the migrants who passed through.
Her father was a steelworker, and her mother raised their fourteen kids; Estella was number four. Growing up, she slept on the floor in tenement apartments with no toilets or running water. She spoke no English, and even as a kid she ascertained that the better-paid, well-educated white residents of the city were considered first-class citizens, while Mexican Americans, most of whom were poor, were expected to be deferential and subservient. She remembers watching as her mother let white residents talk over her, whether they were at the bakery or her school. Estella didn’t like it, but she found herself falling into the same trap. “Keep quiet,” she was told.
Estella had olive-colored eyes and was so short her friends called her Pulgarcita, or Thumbelina. She was a smart, chatty kid, unafraid to voice her opinions among her friends. She liked school but mostly kept quiet there, because Spanish was forbidden and trying to speak English usually led to other kids laughing at her. Wanting to make her own money, she dropped out during ninth grade. She started babysitting, then got a job doing laundry at Hotel Dieu, the first general hospital in El Paso, making around $100 a month.
In December 1961, when she was nineteen years old, she took a couple of her younger siblings shopping at the J.J. Newberry department store. She was heading down the escalator, and a young man named Johnny Ybarra Jr. was going up. He was struck by her eyes, and when he got to the top, he turned around and went back down to talk to her. Johnny was a professional boxer, a featherweight, two years older than she was, with a pompadour of thick black hair. They married a month later.
Johnny soon began working for his father, a longtime constable. Through the sixties Estella and Johnny welcomed four sons—Johnny III, Michael, Tommy, and David—and in 1976 the Ybarras bought their first house. To help with the mortgage, Estella got a job in the day care at a local YMCA. But the pay was low, and she decided to pursue a GED. She had to first take a prep class; after making dinner for her family, she would put her sons to bed and study English late into the night. None of her siblings had graduated from high school, but Estella managed to complete her degree.
Still, she wanted more—more money but also to feel more involved in her community, to feel more confident speaking English. El Paso Community College offered a two-year program for an associate of applied science in mental health, which would allow her to work with everyone from teenagers to the elderly. Though some in her family, including her mother-in-law, told her she was too old, she enrolled. She graduated in 1980, at age 38.
> Estella took note of the defendant: he was young, and he reminded her of her eldest son, Johnny.
That allowed her to land the job with Lighthouse for the Blind. Estella was good with people and soon was elevated to supervisor, overseeing forty employees and also handling payroll.
When the jury summons arrived in the mail, Estella was so busy at work that her supervisor didn’t want her to go. She wasn’t interested in the judicial system or in politics—she had never even voted for president. But she was picked for the jury. When Johnny dropped her off on the first day in court, December 17, 1990, she couldn’t help but notice that the courtroom was just a few blocks from her old neighborhood. She’d come a long way from Segundo Barrio.
As she took her place in the jury box, she looked around at her fellow jurors. Eight were women, most of them Hispanic, and three were men. Estella took note of the defendant, too: he was young, and he reminded her of her eldest son, Johnny.
Carlos, sitting next to his lawyer, didn’t notice Estella. He was too scared, still trying to figure out how he’d gotten there. His mother and older brother were in the gallery, and he would occasionally look back at them for support. Despite everything, he was confident he would walk out of there, and that he’d leave town and never return to Texas.
There was no physical evidence tying him to the crime, such as fingerprints or hairs, and Gibson put together a strong case, including an alibi defense based on the testimony of three people Carlos had shown Kirbys to on the day Maria was raped. The assault had happened between 1:30 and 3:30 that afternoon, and one of the witnesses recalled that Carlos, wearing a dark suit, visited her home between 1:30 and 2:00. He shampooed and vacuumed a rug and sold her a new unit. In order to have raped Maria, Carlos would’ve had to change clothes, switch cars, cruise the city for his victim, kidnap her, drive into the desert, assault her, return her, switch cars again, change back into his suit, and stop by his office before going out to a final appointment between 4 and 5. Gibson would later say that Carlos’s alibi defense was one of the best he’d ever crafted.
But the prosecution had one of the most powerful courtroom weapons of all: an eyewitness. On the first day of the trial, ten-year-old Maria took the stand; her mother was allowed to sit next to her as she testified. Maria cried as she told what happened to her, and when she pointed out Carlos as her assailant, he noticed tears in the eyes of some of the jurors. He still believed they would use reason, that they would listen to Gibson, who spoke eloquently about the dangers of relying on the traumatized girl’s “powers of recollection” two years after the assault.
While the case was ongoing, the jurors weren’t supposed to talk about the evidence among themselves, so Estella kept her doubts private. Surely, she thought, the others had them too. But as soon as she walked into the jury room, she realized she was in the minority. It was easy for her to write “not guilty” on a piece of paper but much harder to discuss the case confidently as the two white men aggressively advocated for guilt. The old feelings came racing back, the fears of saying the wrong word and getting laughed at. Sitting at the end of the table, she occasionally voiced her opinion that the evidence wasn’t enough. “It’s the life of a man!” she remembers saying.
After a couple hours of heated discussions, she was the last holdout. She didn’t completely understand the legal system, that she had every right to stand firm if she believed the state hadn’t proved guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But things were getting ugly. “You’re wasting the taxpayers’ money,” one man said to her. “Who do you think is paying for your lunch?” Finally, Estella gave in.
Carlos was stunned when he heard the word “guilty,” as if he had entered some kind of dream state. Gibson was so incensed that, at the punishment phase, when it was time for him to thank the jury for its service and make a case that jurors should be lenient to his client, he instead insulted them. “In some twenty-six long years of prosecuting and defending people in court, trying literally hundreds of cases,” he thundered, “I have never felt compelled or had the opportunity to say the things that I want to say to this jury. I am shocked and appalled by your verdict. A great injustice has been done here. Whatever you do with respect to sentencing can only compound it. I’m sorry, but I can’t find it in my heart to thank you.”
Prosecutor Robert Riley had no problem showing appreciation to the jury—or asking for a life sentence. He got it, plus twenty more years. Carlos was handcuffed and taken away.
Estella was so upset that when she got home, she began sobbing. She’d been weak, she thought, giving in and changing her vote. She talked about it with Johnny, but he told her there wasn’t anything she could do. Drop it, he said. She was a proud member of a law enforcement family, but now the police—with her help—had put someone in prison for something she was certain he hadn’t done. That night she lay awake rehashing conversations from the jury room.
Two things happened in the wake of the verdict: one made her feel better, the other worse. Gibson called to canvas jurors, and he told her she wasn’t alone. Others he’d spoken to had also expressed doubts. “Don’t feel bad,” he said.
Then came the certificate, which she threw in a drawer in disgust.
Carlos was so humiliated by the verdict that he told his brother to inform his Chicago friends that he had moved to Spain, where one of his uncles lived. He was sent to the Clements Unit, a new prison facility and one of the state’s largest, in Amarillo. It was terrifying at first—the constant din, the hostile guards, the occasional violence among inmates. The upper-middle-class kid from suburban Chicago learned to choose his acquaintances carefully, to keep secrets.
He was still convinced he could clear up this terrible mistake. His brother hired an investigator to assist his lawyer working on his direct appeal, but the court ruled against Carlos. He read about a new nonprofit called the Innocence Project, and his brother wrote asking for help, sending along trial transcripts. But the group worked only on cases in which DNA had been a known part of the investigation and trial, and the transcripts were sent back.
A couple of years later, Mario, with his wife, flew down to Amarillo to visit. It was heartbreaking for him to see his kid brother in prison for a terrible crime he knew he hadn’t committed. As the years passed, Carlos’s chances for a normal life slipped away, while Mario raised three sons and ran a successful wholesale meat business in Chicago. “Don’t give up,” Mario would tell his brother when they spoke on the phone. “Something good will happen.” Their mom died in 1996, five years into his sentence. Her death was the toughest thing Carlos ever went through, made worse when he applied for a furlough to travel to the funeral and was denied.
He did a lot of reading (westerns, *USA Today*) and praying, attending Mass every Wednesday. Some nights he would lie awake in his cot, asking unanswerable questions. Why me? What did I do wrong?
He held a series of jobs, first in the maintenance office, then starting in 2006 in the law library as a clerk. Prisoners would stop in and ask Carlos questions, and he’d help them with forms and dole out advice. Because he was a model inmate, he was granted a job in the prison craft shop, working with wood, creating wall clocks and heart-shaped jewelry boxes, each with a rose carved on the top. Carlos would spend his spare time—sometimes six or seven hours a day—working on the boxes, briefly forgetting his grief. He would sell them to guards, staff, and outsiders. Even in prison he was a businessman: taking orders, buying supplies from vendors, working early until late.
Cubs games were occasionally broadcast on the prison TV, and he watched as many as he could. He had a running joke with friends at the unit: before I die, just let the Cubs win the World Series. Then, in 2016, they did.
Carlos was often confronted with death. Several times fellow inmates killed themselves by leaping headfirst from the third tier. But he was determined to never join them. He believed something good was going to happen, and he repeated the mantra that he once shared with his Kirby colleagues: persistence over resistance.
Estella had troubles in her life too. Her mother had died around the time of the trial, her father soon after. She had high blood pressure and bleeding ulcers, which put her in the hospital. In 1994 she lost her job at Lighthouse. She began a part-time gig as a home health-care worker, and to bring in more income, she and Johnny started an informal resale business at the local Bronco Swap Meet. They would buy mattresses in bulk from La Quinta for $10 apiece, then sell them for $125 each.
She took pride in her sons as they advanced in their careers: Johnny in the Air Force, Michael in the Army, David in the Border Patrol, and Tommy building houses in San Antonio. Every year at Christmas, the family would gather, but she’d still find herself wondering about Carlos. It was an espinita in her side—a little thorn. She couldn’t get free of it. She kept her feelings mostly to herself but occasionally mentioned them to family. “She felt so bad,” said her granddaughter Trisha Ybarra, who credited Estella with pushing her to go to college and to finish her master’s degree. “It would tear her up.”
In 2017 Estella was throwing out some old papers when she came upon that 27-year-old envelope. Inside was the certificate. She called out to Johnny: “This is what I got for putting an innocent person in jail for life.”
She was 75 now. For a generation she had suppressed the shame, the guilt. She had gone through a lot in that time. She’d become more engaged in the world around her. She had seen her children and grandchildren become active citizens. Most important, she’d become more assertive. “I found that you have more power if you talk,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong if you say what you think.”
She knew how hard it was to take a stand. She knew how hard it was to do the right thing. And now she was going to do it.
She called the El Paso Police Department and told the woman on the line that she had been a juror on a 1990 case, and that even after all these years she didn’t think the guy was guilty. The woman told her it was too late to do anything and hung up.
Estella called back and talked to someone else. She explained everything again, recalling details from the trial. This time the person told her to dial the office of Jaime Esparza, the district attorney. Estella called and explained again what was on her mind. She was transferred to Tom Darnold, the head of the appellate division.
DA’s offices get unusual calls all the time, including from jurors having doubts about cases, but usually these come immediately after a trial. Estella was calling about a case from when Bill Clements was governor. She told Darnold what she’d told the others: she didn’t feel right about the verdict. Something she said convinced Darnold to take her seriously, and he promised her he’d look into it. He read the appellate opinion and didn’t see any obvious red flags. He told his boss Esparza about the unusual call from the juror and about his research, and Esparza told him to keep digging. Darnold read the trial transcripts and saw that the case wasn’t the strongest the office had ever prosecuted. He noted the discrepancies with the car and clothes, and also that Carlos had a strong alibi. He went back to Esparza, who decided it was time to take the whole thing to the next level. “We decided,” said Darnold, “just to be on the safe side: let’s look further.”
> It soon became clear that in Carlos’s case, the rules had been flat-out ignored.
Esparza called in Roberto Ramos, a longtime assistant DA, and the only person in the foreign prosecution unit, which went after fugitives who fled to Mexico. Ramos was known as a quiet, diligent lawyer who would come in on Sundays to finish his work. His role in Carlos’s case was to be an unofficial one-man conviction-integrity unit. As he later said, “I review the case, which includes the evidence and the testimony. I review our file. I review the work that was performed by our office to make sure that the rules of disclosure have been complied with.”
It soon became clear that in Carlos’s case, the rules had been flat-out ignored. Most of the DA’s file had been destroyed long ago, and Ramos asked his investigator to cast a wide net looking for documents. In early August 2017 the investigator contacted the FBI—and struck gold. The FBI uncovered five letters from 1989 and 1990 between the FBI lab and the El Paso Police Department, addressed to Lilia Beard—the lead detective who had taken the statement from Maria, the young rape victim.
The FBI lab was at the time one of the only places in the country handling DNA profiling, the crime-solving technology that had first been used in Texas courts in 1988. The letters showed that on July 12, 1989, Beard called John Brown of the FBI lab about sending clothes and biological samples from two victims—hair found on Maria in addition to hair and semen discovered on the clothing of Andrea, the five-year-old rape victim whose case Beard had also been investigating. (Police believed Andrea’s case was so similar to Maria’s that for a time the prosecution considered using it to shore up Maria’s case.) Because police suspected Carlos had assaulted the girls, they had also taken biological samples from him—blood, hair, and saliva. Beard then wrote a cover letter about the package she and Perez put together.
The letters addressed to Beard were stunning. The first had arrived January 9, 1990, six months after Carlos’s arrest, saying the hairs found on Maria’s clothes were “unlike” Carlos’s. The second came the next day: the hairs found on Andrea’s clothes were also “unlike” Carlos’s. Four months later—and seven months before Carlos would go on trial—came the DNA results from Andrea’s underwear. The profile had been compared with Carlos’s, and the semen “could not have been contributed by this individual.” These results should have made Carlos the first Texan to be cleared by DNA.
All that digging uncovered another surprise: the district attorney and Carlos’s defense attorney, Gibson, knew about the testing too. In January 1990 assistant district attorney Gina Longoria filed a motion asking to delay the trial because of the testing being done. She wrote that she’d already informed Gibson about the DNA tests. She had even called the lab to talk about the testing in Andrea’s case.
In other words, Ramos’s research revealed that everybody knew about the DNA testing, and even when the results indicated Carlos wasn’t the rapist,
In July 2018 Carlos was sitting in his cell in Amarillo when he was told to go to the mail room. He was sixty years old, his hair completely gray. The letter that awaited him was from an El Paso lawyer named Matthew DeKoatz, whom he’d never heard of. Carlos walked to the library, sat down, and began reading.
DeKoatz wrote that his firm had been appointed to pursue an 11.07 writ on
Carlos’s behalf. Carlos knew from his work in the library that this referred to a writ of habeas corpus, a potential ticket out of prison for the wrongly convicted. He showed the letter to his supervisor Daryl Glenn, who looked at Carlos excitedly. “You probably got some action,” he said. Tears rushed to Carlos’s eyes. Soon after, he got on the phone with DeKoatz, who told him about the DNA and hair evidence and also explained how all of this had come about—a call from a juror second-guessing the verdict.
Carlos was confident he would finally be going home, but first he had to win the writ. DeKoatz alleged that back in 1990 the state had failed to turn over scientific evidence that would have led to Carlos’s acquittal. He requested a new trial. Judge Patrick Garcia set an evidentiary hearing for November 2018 to see whether the state had indeed hidden evidence.
By day three of that hearing, it was clear that the answer was yes; it was also clear that several El Paso lawyers and cops have lousy memories. Though Carlos’s case was the first involving DNA in El Paso history, few of the players remembered it. His trial lawyer Gibson swore he didn’t recall any discussion about DNA or hairs and said he would have used DNA if he’d known about it. Longoria, who had worked up the case for trial, said, “I have no independent recollection of this case.” She pointed out how all the letters regarding DNA were addressed to the police, not her or the DA’s office. She acknowledged talking to the FBI lab about the testing but said she never saw the results.
Detective Perez couldn’t be at the hearing but filed an affidavit in which he wrote, “I was shown documentation reflecting that I, along with Detective Lilia Beard, requested that the FBI conduct DNA testing in that case and in another case involving similar facts. I do not have any recollection of anything related to that request, including whether or not our department ever received the results.”
Beard, the main character in the DNA saga, wasn’t at the hearing—and wasn’t even subpoenaed to be there. The judge asked where she was. “Your Honor, I tried to get ahold of her, and she wouldn’t call me,” assistant district attorney Rebecca Quinn responded. (Beard, who changed her last name to Medina after getting married, retired from the police force and has been a hospice nurse for more than a decade. She said recently that no one reached out. “If I had been contacted,” she maintained, “I certainly would have gone.”)
Judge Garcia didn’t hold back in his March 2019 opinion, blaming everybody involved in the case for failing Carlos: “It was incumbent upon the state to reveal this information to Carlos Jaile’s lawyer. It appears that the state’s lawyers were in the least grossly negligent if not more in failing to disclose this information and turn it over to the defense. The state’s excuse that they didn’t know about these reports because they were sent to El Paso Police and not the state is unacceptable. The court further finds the defense lawyer was aware these tests were being conducted and should have demanded to know the results.”
The judge acknowledged that DNA testing was new at the time. “But that doesn’t excuse the prosecution in failing to turn it over.” He recommended that the Court of Criminal Appeals grant Carlos a new trial, something the district attorney objected to, arguing that the DNA and hair evidence didn’t prove that Carlos wasn’t guilty. The CCA, which is the state’s highest criminal tribunal, ultimately agreed with Garcia.
The state still had to decide whether to retry Carlos. In the meantime, he would get to post bond—and go home.
In late August a sheriff’s deputy drove Carlos from Amarillo to the El Paso County jail annex, where he lingered for two weeks. Finally, at dusk on September 12, after the judge approved a $30,000 bond, the jail’s electric doors opened, and Carlos, carrying a small bag containing his Bible and a few legal documents, walked out.
Often when wrongly convicted citizens go free, they emerge from the jailhouse with arms raised, joined by smiling defense attorneys as they meet a crowd of well-wishers and journalists, who ask how it feels to finally get justice. Carlos was alone. There were no reporters to ask about the hidden DNA evidence, no prosecutors pledging to do better next time, no defense lawyers patting him on the back. It was as if El Paso officials wanted Carlos to slip away quietly in the night.
He sat on a curb in the dark to wait for his brother, who had flown down from Chicago and was driving over from a nearby hotel. Fifteen minutes later, Mario pulled up. The two hugged, and both began crying. “Thank you,” said Carlos.
“It’s finally over,” said Mario.
Then he asked if his little brother was hungry. Yes, said Carlos. He was craving Whataburger.
As they drove across El Paso, Carlos couldn’t help but look around warily, as if someone might be pursuing him to throw him back in prison. But the next morning they flew home to Chicago, Carlos taking the window seat, still in disbelief as he gazed at Soldier Field shortly before touching down. He moved in with Mario, who, with his wife, Mercy, was an empty nester.
Carlos grew close with Mario’s three sons; the oldest was still a toddler the last time Carlos saw him. On weekends they often took him to play a round of golf or hit a bucket of balls at a driving range. That fall, Mario took Carlos to a Cubs game at Wrigley Field, and Carlos gawked at the ivy-colored walls as they walked into the stadium. When they settled into their seats, Carlos burst into tears.
“What’s the matter?” his brother asked.
“I can’t believe I’m here,” Carlos responded.
He was desperate to start earning money again, and he worked at Mario’s meat shop for a few years. In November 2022 he landed a job with the Illinois Department of Human Services as an office coordinator. In his free time he would visit places from his childhood. One day he found himself at his old elementary school, and memories flooded him as he walked around. He began thinking about his old friend Kathy. They’d met when they were six, and though they were close, they’d lost touch in high school. She was probably married, he thought, but he wanted to find out. One of his nephews looked up her phone number, and he got up the courage to call. It turned out she was retired after 35 years with UPS, divorced, and had a grown son. Talking with her was easy, and they quickly became friends again. Soon he asked her out.
After their date, they went back to her house. “I need to tell you something,” he said, and recounted the story of his last three decades. “You don’t have to believe me,” he reassured her, pulling out several documents he had brought along, including Judge Garcia’s opinion.
As she read, she began crying. She stayed with him, and soon he moved in with her.
I first reached out to Carlos in June 2022, but he wasn’t interested in talking. He’d experienced enough grief, he said, and wanted to put everything behind him. He’d also known other wrongly convicted men who felt betrayed by journalists. I wrote him three more times. His story involved hidden DNA results that should have freed him 32 years ago, I said, and the only reason the genetic testing came to light was because of a juror who was still anonymous. I told him I wanted to track her down. Finally, he agreed.
I flew to Chicago last May and drove through the western suburbs to meet him at a crowded restaurant. Carlos was burly and shy, his hair short and gray. We sat at a booth, and he was initially guarded. When he smiled, his face sometimes curled into something like a grimace. Within ten minutes, though, as he spoke about his father, he was wiping his eyes with the handkerchief he’d pulled from his shirt pocket. The other person whose name consistently brought tears was his older brother. “Mario was the rock,” he said. “And I owe him the world.”
I spent the day with him, talking about his case and his life, from Chicago to El Paso to Amarillo, from successful salesman to convicted child rapist to free man.
He expressed gratitude to both Ramos and the juror. “I don’t know anything about her,” Carlos said. “I don’t even know her name. Maybe I can just say thank you for setting me free.”
The district attorney had finally dismissed the charges against him, but Carlos hadn’t been found actually innocent, a legal classification that would make him eligible for more than $2 million in compensation from the state for his almost 29 years behind bars. From his work in the law library, he knew all about actual innocence: how rarely it was granted and how hard it was to prove—his appellate lawyer didn’t even bother claiming it in Carlos’s appeal, so the judge wasn’t able to consider it.
We also talked about how he could’ve been the first Texan to be cleared by DNA, a dubious honor that instead went to Gilbert Alejandro, of Uvalde, who was convicted of rape in 1990 and exonerated in 1994. I asked Carlos who he thought bore the brunt of the blame for DNA evidence not showing up in his trial: the police, the DA, or his own attorney, Gibson. “Straight-up crooked cops,” he said. “That’s all it was. Plain and simple.”
> Everyone involved in Carlos’s case found a reason to look the other way. Everyone, that is, except for one woman determined to do the right thing.
When I later called Beard (now Medina), the former detective insisted she didn’t recall the case. She also insisted she wouldn’t have knowingly hidden DNA testing. “I can’t see any of us intentionally or maliciously withholding that evidence. I mean, if he’s not the right guy, he’s not the right guy.”
Yet Bob Storch, a longtime El Paso defense lawyer, told me, “Back then, cops hiding the ball was standard procedure. If they found that the evidence didn’t meet their purpose or was inconsistent with their theory, they just ignored it or swept it off to the side. They got tunnel vision. When the DNA tests finally came back, the cop may not have even opened the envelope. Probably just threw it in the box.”
Beard’s former partner John Guerrero told me he suspects that the other evidence was given more credence. “I can tell you that in all probability,” he explained, “their whole case was that he was identified in the lineup. ‘Look, we don’t care that you have an alibi. She picked you out. You’re the guy.’ ”
Another case from the same year reveals that Beard was indeed prone to tunnel vision, as was Guerrero. In August 1990 the two interrogated a young man named Orlando Garcia, whose mother had been murdered. After an eight-hour session with Beard and Guerrero, Garcia confessed. He recanted immediately and at trial described how the two had fed him information and intimidated him, with Guerrero pulling his hair and pushing him around. Jurors found Garcia not guilty. When I reached Garcia recently, he told me that, from the start, it was clear Beard and Guerrero had made up their minds about him. “They had their man, and that was me. They never looked for anybody else.” He said that during the interrogation they’d played good cop, bad cop, though he said Beard could be rough too. “I remember her specifically saying. ‘We have you by the maracas.’ ” (She recently denied saying this.)
Of course, it wasn’t just the cops who were at fault in Carlos’s case. The DA’s office played a role. Two lawyers told me that in El Paso in 1990, if prosecutors had doubts about their cases, they were told to ignore them and push ahead to trial—to let a jury settle the issue. “Prosecutors are competitive,” said Charles Roberts, a longtime El Paso defense attorney. “Sometimes they find it difficult to shed the jerseys of their team in the heat of trial preparation and go down investigative paths that might help the defendant.”
And then there was Gibson, Carlos’s attorney, who told me he didn’t recall any DNA tests. “Had I known, I would have been all over it,” he said. He acknowledged that Longoria, the assistant district attorney, might’ve told him about the analysis. It’s possible he ignored the newfangled DNA tests because he already had a strong alibi case.
The truth is, everyone involved in Carlos’s case found a reason to look the other way. Everyone, that is, except for one woman determined to do the right thing.
Estella reunites with Carlos at her home.Photograph by Eric Ryan Anderson
In the court files, I found the names and addresses of the members of the jury and wrote them letters, laying out Carlos’s story and the role of the juror who came forward. I sent them out on a Tuesday, knowing I was unlikely to hear back. Two days later my phone rang with an El Paso area code. I answered and heard a rapid skein of words, some of which I caught: “Ybarra,” “letter,” “evidence.” I recognized her name and realized that I was talking to a juror. *The* juror.
We spoke for forty minutes. She didn’t know until she opened the letter that Carlos had been freed—or that she had made it happen. She started crying when she told me about her resurgence of regret each Christmas, and then again when I told her how grateful Carlos was. He’d like to tell you in person, I said.
On July 21 I met Carlos at the El Paso airport. I had no problem picking him out in his Chicago Cubs jersey. As we headed to the Lower Valley, he pointed out a few memorable places from his past, such as the parking lot where the Trans Am club would meet. It was early afternoon as we pulled up to Estella’s small brick home on a sunbaked cul-de-sac.
“You ready for this?” I asked as we walked up the sidewalk.
“Yeah, I think so,” he said apprehensively.
Johnny let us in and led us to the dining room, where we sat together. The house was tidy and spare, the curtains closed to keep out the heat. “Have you been together many years?” Carlos asked Johnny in Spanish.
“Oh, yeah,” responded Johnny. “Since ’62.”
On the wall above us was a photo of Estella taken around that time, her feathered hair hugging her head like a helmet. We looked out over the living room walls, which were covered with photos of their four sons, seven grandchildren, and great-grandson, Lucas. Then we heard a commotion.
Estella, who lives with bad knees, diabetes, osteoporosis, and arthritis, shuffled in with a walker. Carlos stood up.
“Hola, Estella.”
“You must be Carlos,” she said.
He laughed nervously, then asked in Spanish, “Could I hug you?”
“Come on, come on. Of course!” she said. As he moved toward her, she said, “Oh, my god. I thought you were short!”
He reached down and squeezed her. She hugged him back.
“Thank you,” he said, his voice cracking. “Thank you for all you’ve done.” He smiled at her, his arm still draped around her shoulder. “I am so thankful for everything you’ve done for me. You let me out of that horrible place.”
She looked up at him, grinning. “It was my pleasure.”
They each moved to sit at the table. Estella looked over at him. “I feel bad,” she said, raising her arms, “because I didn’t do it sooner, but—”
Carlos shook his head. “If you didn’t do it, I would still be there.” His voice was weak with emotion. “I am so grateful for everything you’ve done.”
“That’s good.”
“Thank you. Thank you, so much. You’re a wonderful person.” He was nodding and blinking tears from his eyes.
“I didn’t forget you,” she said, reaching for a napkin. Now she began to cry.
“Thankfully,” he said.
“Never,” she said, and she lifted her glasses and started drying her tears.
---
*Writer Michael Hall spent months reporting this story. Watch him discuss how it came to be, and see the moment when Ybarra and Jaile reunite.*
---
The two fell into easy conversation talking about the trial, which was the last time they were in the same room together. Carlos remembered how he felt sitting in the courtroom. “I was just trying to tune in on everything that was going on, scared to death of what was happening and—why am I even here?”
Estella told Carlos he reminded her of Johnny, her eldest son, and Carlos—who never got over the death of his mother while he was in prison—was drawn to this woman who had mothered four sons.
They talked about their respective histories in El Paso: Segundo Barrio, the old coliseum where he went to a concert and she went to a rodeo. She mentioned the casino on the Tigua reservation, and Carlos brought up the bread he used to buy there when he passed by that part of town.
“It was good,” said Estella. “It was spongy and—”
“Right out of the of the oven!” he finished her sentence. “Oh, you’ve just brought back memories.”
They talked for two hours, this odd couple, each haunted by the past. He told her about his job in Chicago. “I have to work,” he said. “I don’t even qualify for Social Security because I haven’t put enough into it. No Medicare, no nothing. I have to keep on trucking until I can’t no more. That’s my plan for now.”
“You’re starting all over again.”
“I’m starting all over again, yes I am.”
Downtown El Paso.Photograph by Eric Ryan Anderson
After we left, Carlos wanted to cruise around El Paso. He’d spent years driving the streets, selling Kirbys, and he remembered them well. “The streets got old,” he said, “just like I did.”
We drove past the Chaswood house, his first Kirby office, and his own office on Pellicano, where he’d been arrested 34 years before. He also wanted to visit Pam’s grave. “I loved the woman,” he explained. “She’ll always have a place my heart.” After he was released from prison, he’d hoped to let her know he’d been innocent all along. Then he discovered she’d died of cancer two decades earlier, in 1997. At Restlawn Memorial Park we found her gravestone, which was hidden by overgrown grass, and he laid his hand on the gray slab. “She was young,” he said. “She was good. Also beautiful. Trustworthy. But the sh— hit the fan, and it splattered everywhere.”
Back in the car, he talked about the life he created with her. “I had such wonderful memories of this place,” he said. “My business, my wife, my friends. I considered myself successful. I was making very good money and happily married. And all of a sudden, see you later.”
It was clear he had found some solace sitting with Estella, but he was still wrestling with bitterness. In Chicago, it’s been hard for him to see friends with houses, retirement accounts, children. “I was never able to have a family,” he said. “I would have loved to have a couple of kids.”
He’s an optimist by nature, and it’s still possible for him to receive compensation from the state, though at this point that’s a long shot. Lawyers with the Innocence Project of Texas recently tried one path to remuneration, petitioning the current El Paso district attorney, Bill Hicks, to consider the DNA and hair evidence and assert that Carlos is actually innocent. Hicks declined.
“If I get money,” Carlos told me, “fantastic. Thank you, Lord. And if not, I can’t worry about that. Whatever happens, I can accept it. Whatever life I have left, I’m going to do the best I can and be happy with that.” He gazed out the window at the city he had once known so well, the place he had called home, wondering what could have been.
*This**article**originally appeared in the February 2024 issue of*Texas Monthly*with the headline “The Juror Who Found Herself Guilty.”*[***Subscribe today***](https://subscription.texasmonthly.com/pubs/TZ/TXP/Main-Subscribe.jsp?cds_page_id=261743&cds_mag_code=TXP&id=1673294688511&lsid=30091404485013890&vid=1&utm_medium=webcta&utm_source=texasmonthly.com&utm_campaign=end-article)*.*
The ways we socialize and date, commute and work are nearly unrecognizable from what they were three years ago. We’ve enjoyed a global pandemic, open employer-employee warfare, a multifront culture war, and social upheavals both great and small. The old conventions are out (we don’t whisper the word *cancer* or let women off the elevator first anymore, for starters). The venues in which we can make fools of ourselves (group chats, Grindr messages, Slack rooms public and private) are multiplying, and each has its own rules of conduct. And everyone’s just kind of rusty. Our social graces have atrophied.
The ways we socialize and date, commute and work are nearly unrecognizable from what they were three years ago. We’ve enjoyed a global pandemic, open employer-employee warfare, a multifront culture war, and social upheavals both great and small. The old conventions are out (we don’t whisper the word *cancer* or let women off the elevator first anymore, for starters). The venues in which we can make fools of ourselves (group chats, Grindr messages, Slack rooms public and private) are multiplying, and each has its own rules of conduct. And everyone’s just kind of rusty. Our social graces have atrophied.
## On the cover
### —
We wanted to help. So we started with the problems — not the obvious stuff, like whether it’s okay to wear a backpack on the subway or talk loudly on speakerphone in a restaurant (you know the answers there). We asked people instead what specific kinds of interactions or situations really made them anxious, afraid, uncertain, ashamed. From there, we created rigid, but not entirely inflexible, rules.
We wanted to help. So we started with the problems — not the obvious stuff, like whether it’s okay to wear a backpack on the subway or talk loudly on speakerphone in a restaurant (you know the answers there). We asked people instead what specific kinds of interactions or situations really made them anxious, afraid, uncertain, ashamed. From there, we created rigid, but not entirely inflexible, rules.
Then we took our own medicine — we implemented these rules in our professional and personal lives. Some really didn’t work. (“It’s been great to chat” didn’t quite land when we used it as a way to [exit a boring conversation at a holiday party](https://www.thecut.com/article/tipping-rules-etiquette-rules.html#exit).) Others felt like instant canon (we agreed, for example, that [text-message amnesty is granted after 72 hours](https://www.thecut.com/article/tipping-rules-etiquette-rules.html#amnesty)). We fine-tuned and eliminated. We talked to friends, entertaining experts, and service workers. We sparked office arguments and made messes and ended up with a guide that we hope will stand the test of at least a bit of time — until the next great exciting social upheaval.
Then we took our own medicine — we implemented these rules in our professional and personal lives. Some really didn’t work. (“It’s been great to chat” didn’t quite land when we used it as a way to [exit a boring conversation at a holiday party](https://www.thecut.com/article/tipping-rules-etiquette-rules.html#exit).) Others felt like instant canon (we agreed, for example, that [text-message amnesty is granted after 72 hours](https://www.thecut.com/article/tipping-rules-etiquette-rules.html#amnesty)). We fine-tuned and eliminated. We talked to friends, entertaining experts, and service workers. We sparked office arguments and made messes and ended up with a guide that we hope will stand the test of at least a bit of time — until the next great exciting social upheaval.
Taylor Swift attends the Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills this month. (FilmMagic / Getty Images)
Is it too early to say that, on balance, generative artificial intelligence has been bad for the internet?
One, its rise has led to a flood of AI-generated spam that researchers say [now outperforms human-written stories in Google search results](https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf?ref=404media.co). The resulting decline in advertising revenue is [a key reason that the journalism industry has been devastated by layoffs over the past year](https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/25/media/news-industry-future?ref=platformer.news).
Two, generative AI tools are responsible for a new category of electioneering and fraud. This month synthetic voices were used to deceive in [the New Hampshire primary](https://apnews.com/article/new-hampshire-primary-biden-ai-deepfake-robocall-f3469ceb6dd613079092287994663db5?ref=platformer.news) and [Harlem politics](https://www.politico.com/newsletters/new-york-playbook/2024/01/23/faked-ai-audio-hits-harlem-politics-00137132?ref=platformer.news). And the *Financial Times* reported that the technology [is increasingly used in scams and bank fraud](https://www.ft.com/content/beea7f8a-2fa9-4b63-a542-88be231b0266?ref=platformer.news).
Three — and what I want to talk about today — is how generative AI tools are being used in harassment campaigns.
The subject gained wide attention on Wednesday when sexually explicit, AI-generated images of Taylor Swift flooded X. And at a time when the term “going viral” is wildly overused, these truly did find a huge audience.
Here’s [Jess Weatherbed at *The Verge*](https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24050334/x-twitter-taylor-swift-ai-fake-images-trending?ref=platformer.news):
> One of the most prominent examples on X attracted more than 45 million views, 24,000 reposts, and hundreds of thousands of likes and bookmarks before the verified user who shared the images had their account suspended for violating platform policy. The post was live on the platform for around 17 hours prior to its removal.
>
> But as users began to discuss the viral post, the images began to spread and were reposted across other accounts. Many still remain up, and a deluge of new graphic fakes have since appeared. In some regions, the term “Taylor Swift AI” became featured as a trending topic, promoting the images to wider audiences.
At its most basic level, this is a story about X, and not a particularly surprising one at that. When Elon Musk took over X, he dismantled its trust and safety teams and began enforcing its written policies — or not — depending on his whims. The resulting chaos has caused advertisers to flee and regulators to open investigations around the world. (X didn't respond to my request for comment.)
Given those circumstances, it's only natural that the platform would be flooded with graphic AI-generated images. While it is rarely discussed in polite company, X is one of the biggest porn apps in the world, thanks to its longstanding policy allowing explicit photos and videos and Apple's willingness to turn a blind eye to a company that has long flouted its rules. (X is officially rated 17+ for "Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content and Nudity," a historic understatement.)
Separating consensual, permissible adult content from AI-generated harassment requires strong policies, dedicated teams and rapid enforcement capabilities. X has none of those, and that's how you get 45 million views on a single post harassing Taylor Swift.
It would be a mistake, though, to consider Swift's harassment this week solely through the lens of X's failure. A second, necessary lens is how platforms that have rejected calls to actively moderate content have created a means for bad actors to organize, create harmful content, and distribute it at scale. In particular, researchers now have repeatedly observed a [pipeline between the messaging app Telegram and X](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/telegram-fueling-israel-hamas-war-misinformation-1234854300/?ref=platformer.news), where harmful campaigns are organized and created on the former and then distributed on the latter.
And indeed, the Telegram-to-X pipeline also brought us the Swift deepfakes, report [Emanuel Maiberg and Samantha Cole at *404 Media*](https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-taylor-swift-porn-twitter/?ref=platformer.news):
> Sexually explicit AI-generated images of Taylor Swift went viral on Twitter after jumping from a specific Telegram group dedicated to abusive images of women, 404 Media has found. At least one tool the group uses is a free Microsoft text-to-image AI generator. \[...\]
>
> 404 Media has seen the exact same images that flooded Twitter last night posted to the Telegram a day earlier. After the tweets went viral, people in the group also joked about how the attention the images were getting on Twitter could lead to the Telegram group shutting down.
I'd say there's little chance of that, given that Telegram [won't even disallow the trading of child sexual abuse material](https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/addressing-distribution-illicit-sexual-content-minors-online?ref=platformer.news). In any case, with each passing day it becomes clear that Telegram, which has [more than 700 million monthly users](https://telegram.org/blog/700-million-and-premium?ref=platformer.news), deserves as much scrutiny as any other major social platform — and possibly more.
As a final lens through which to consider the Swift story, and possibly the most important, has to do with the technology itself. The Telegram-to-X pipeline described above was only possible because Microsoft's free generative AI tool Designer, which is currently in beta, created the images.
And while Microsoft had blocked the relevant keywords within a few hours of the story gaining traction, soon it is all but inevitable that some free, open-source tool will generate images even more realistic than the ones that polluted X this week.
It would be a gift if this were a story about content moderation: about platforms moving to remove harmful material, whether out of a sense of responsibility or legal obligation.
But generative AI tools are already free to anyone with a computer, and they are becoming more broadly accessible every day. The fact that we now have scaled-up social platforms that enable the spread of harmful content through a combination of policy and negligence only compounds the risk.
And we should not make the mistake of thinking that it is only celebrities like Swift who will suffer.
On 4chan, groups of trolls are watching livestreams of municipal courtrooms and then creating non-consensual nude imagery of [women who take the witness stand](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/08/technology/ai-4chan-online-harassment.html?ref=platformer.news). This month, [nonconsensual nude deepfakes were spotted at the top of Google and Bing search results](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/google-bing-deepfake-porn-image-celebrity-rcna130445?ref=platformer.news). Deepfake creators [are taking requests on Discord](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/deepfake-porn-ai-mr-deep-fake-economy-google-visa-mastercard-download-rcna75071?ref=platformer.news) and selling them through their websites. And so far, [only 10 states have addressed deepfakes through legislation](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/little-recourse-teens-girls-victimized-ai-deepfake-nudes-rcna126399?ref=platformer.news); there is no federal law prohibiting them. (Those last three links come from [NBC's Kat Tenbarge](https://www.threads.net/@kattenbarge?hl=en&ref=platformer.news), who has been doing essential work on this beat.)
The rise of this sort of abuse is particularly galling given that researchers have been warning about it for a long time now.
"This is 100% a thing that was “predicted” (obvious) \*years\* in advance," said Renee DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, in [a post on Threads](https://www.threads.net/@renee.diresta/post/C2h_lrYxESC?hl=en&ref=platformer.news). "The number of panels and articles where those of us who followed the development of the technology pointed out that yeah, disinformation tactics would change, but harassment and revenge porn and \[non-consensual intimate imagery\] were going to be the most significant form of abuse."
The past decade offers little hope that Congress will work to pass legislation on this subject in any reasonable amount of time. But they will at the very least have the chance soon to grandstand: on Wednesday, nominal X CEO Linda Yaccarino [will make her first appearance before Congress as part of a hearing about child safety.](https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/29/23981662/meta-x-tiktok-ceos-testify-us-senate-child-exploitation?ref=platformer.news) (She'll be joined by the CEOs of Meta, Snap, Discord, and TikTok.)
In 2019, [Congress blasted Facebook](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/23/faked-pelosi-videos-slowed-make-her-appear-drunk-spread-across-social-media/?ref=platformer.news) for declining to remove a video that artificially slowed down then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's speech, making her appear to slur her words. Five years later, the manipulated media is much more graphic — and the scale of harm already dwarfs what we saw back then. How many more warnings do lawmakers need to see before they take action?
Generative AI clearly has many positive, creative uses, and I still believe in its potential to do good. But looking back over the past year, it's clear that any benefits we have seen today have come at a high cost. And unless those in power take action, and soon, the number of victims who will pay that cost is only going to increase.
---
**Elsewhere in fakes**:
- [YouTube removed more than 1,000 videos of deepfaked celebrities pitching scams](https://www.404media.co/youtube-deletes-1-000-videos-of-celebrity-ai-scam-ads/?ref=platformer.news). Among the celebrities? Taylor Swift, of course. (Jason Koebler / *404 Media*)
- [The use of AI tools and apps to generate pro-Israel content and mass report pro-Palestinian content is raising concerns over disinformation about the war.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/24/gaza-israel-activism-online/?ref=platformer.news) (Taylor Lorenz / *Washington Post*)
- [Election misinformation is getting tens of millions of views on X; some of it is authored by Musk himself](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/25/us/politics/elon-musk-election-misinformation-x-twitter.html?ref=platformer.news). (Jim Rutenberg and Kate Conger / *New York Times*)
**On the podcast this week:** Kevin and I try to talk Andreessen Horowitz's Chris Dixon out of continuing to invest in crypto. Plus, sorting through AI's effect on the news industry, and the year's first round of HatGPT.
On Tuesday the newsletter for paid subscribers inadvertently pasted the Governing links twice, including over where the Industry links should have gone. We updated those links on the site soon after; if you missed them and want to catch up [you can find them here](https://www.platformer.news/netflix-wwe-raw-deal-algorithms/). Sorry about that! And thanks to all the readers who wrote in to point it out.
---
### **Governing**
- The day’s biggest story is that Apple announced a huge slate of changes to its App Store policies to comply with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act:
- [Apple will introduce alternative app marketplaces for European iOS users to download apps outside of the App Store.](https://www.macrumors.com/2024/01/25/ios-17-4-alternative-app-marketplaces-eu/?ref=platformer.news) (Juli Clover / *MacRumors*)
- [But the company is reportedly planning on adding new fees and restrictions in Europe on how users download apps outside of the App Store, as app developers consider alternate download methods.](https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-plans-new-fees-and-restrictions-for-downloads-outside-app-store-f464f426?mod=followamazon&ref=platformer.news) (Aaron Tilley, Salvador Rodriguez, Sam Schechner and Kim Mackrael / *The Wall Street Journal*)
- [There’s a new reduced commission structure for iOS apps, but there’s also a new Core Technology Fee that applies for more popular apps, charged per customer.](https://9to5mac.com/2024/01/25/apple-announces-reduced-commission-structure-for-apps-europe/?ref=platformer.news) (Benjamin mayo / *9to5Mac*)
- [Users will have to download third-party marketplaces from their websites, but marketplaces will still have to go through Apple’s approval process.](https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24050200/apple-third-party-app-stores-allowed-iphone-ios-europe-digital-markets-act?ref=platformer.news) (Jon Porter and David Pierce / *The Verge*)
- [Game streaming apps and services will soon be allowed on the App Store.](https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24050430/apple-app-store-game-streaming?ref=platformer.news) (Andrew Webster / *The Verge*)
- [The move also means that Apple will allow European users to run alternate browser engines on iOS.](https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24050478/apple-ios-17-4-browser-engines-eu?ref=platformer.news) Let’s see if Chrome can do to my iPhone what it does to my MacBook battery! (David Pierce / *The Verge*)
- [Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says the changes are an “anticompetitive scheme rife with junk fees” that forces developers into a corner.](https://9to5mac.com/2024/01/25/epic-ceo-tim-sweeney-app-store-dma-changes/?ref=platformer.news) Still, the company plans to bring the Epic Games Store (and *Fortnite*) to the iPhone. (Benjamin Mayo / *9to5Mac*)
- [Spotify is ready to launch in-app purchases in Europe, once a law comes into effect that will prevent Apple from charging additional fees and restricting payment processors.](https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/24/24048561/spotify-dma-eu-apple-app-store-epic?ref=platformer.news) (Ariel Shapiro / *The Verge*)
- [Apple’s lawsuit against the NSO Group over Pegasus spyware’s attacks on iPhone users will proceed in the US, a judge ruled.](https://9to5mac.com/2024/01/23/apple-vs-nso-filing/?ref=platformer.news) (Zac Hall / *9to5Mac*)
- [The FTC launched an inquiry into Microsoft, Amazon, and Google’s investments into OpenAI and Anthropic.](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/25/technology/ftc-ai-microsoft-amazon-google.html?ref=platformer.news) (David McCabe / *The New York Times*)
- [OpenAI is going back on a longstanding transparency promise, declining to share its governing documents with the public after initially promising to do so.](https://www.wired.com/story/openai-scrapped-promise-disclose-key-documents/?ref=platformer.news) (Paresh Dave / *WIRED*)
- [Sam Altman has reportedly been in talks with congressional members about where and how to build semiconductor chip factories in the US.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/24/sam-altman-ai-chip-factories/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzA2MDcyNDAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzA3NDU0Nzk5LCJpYXQiOjE3MDYwNzI0MDAsImp0aSI6ImMxNjRmY2NhLTYzNjgtNGYyYS04NGQ1LWZmMThkYjlmZDQyNiIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS90ZWNobm9sb2d5LzIwMjQvMDEvMjQvc2FtLWFsdG1hbi1haS1jaGlwLWZhY3Rvcmllcy8ifQ.-_Y_swpkxuSZoMutZcj9z8--codCGq-iPjaGieDPMiQ&ref=platformer.news) (Gerrit De Vynck and Jeff Stein / *Washington Post*)
- [Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the US and China will work together on AI safety in the next few months.](https://www.ft.com/content/94b9878b-9412-4dbc-83ba-aac2baadafd9?ref=platformer.news) Good! (Madhumita Murgia / *Financial Times*)
- [Inside the New Hampshire Voter Integrity Facebook Group on primary day, election deniers spreading conspiracies are running rampant.](https://www.wired.com/story/election-denial-facebook-group-new-hampshire/?ref=platformer.news) (David Gilbert / *WIRED*)
- [Content glorifying mass shootings are readily available for minors to view on social media platforms like TikTok, Discord, Roblox, Telegram and X, researchers found.](https://www.isdglobal.org/digital_dispatches/minors-exposed-to-mass-shooter-glorification-across-mainstream-social-media-platforms/?ref=platformer.news) (Moustafa Ayad and Isabelle Frances-Wright / *Institute for Strategic Dialogue*)
- [The Oversight Board overturned Meta’s decision to leave up an Instagram post containing false claims about the Holocaust, saying the post violates its hate speech policies.](https://oversightboard.com/news/332899856283341-oversight-board-overturns-meta-s-original-decision-in-holocaust-denial-case/?_hsmi=291086607&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8LYYUPn3UkTzMYZisPCQE9MqAjrUDdjoN6D8tkODrRqrBVXrKyzolnWgjgOjlaKvTngzCd9TsKv5m_htHronF1g3hZIg&ref=platformer.news) (*Oversight Board*)
- [Meta is rolling out DM restrictions on Facebook and Instagram for users under 16 to prevent teens from receiving unsolicited messages.](https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/25/meta-is-rolling-out-tighter-teen-messaging-limitations-and-parental-controls/?ref=platformer.news) (Ivan Mehta / *TechCrunch*)
- [Amazon’s Ring says it will stop letting police request footage from user surveillance cameras, now requiring law enforcement to seek warrants first.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-24/amazon-s-ring-to-stop-letting-police-request-video-from-users?sref=CrGXSfHu&ref=platformer.news) Good! (Matt Day / Bloomberg)
- [A number of British artists are discussing a class action suit against Midjourney and other AI companies, after a list surfaced of 16,000 artists that AI firms allegedly used to train their models.](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/21/we-need-to-come-together-british-artists-team-up-to-fight-ai-image-generating-software?ref=platformer.news) (James Tapper / *The Guardian*
- [Wikipedia in Russia was forced to shut down following pressure from Vladimir Putin’s government.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-24/russia-s-wikipedia-shuts-down-under-pressure-from-putin?sref=CrGXSfHu&ref=platformer.news) (Noam Cohen / Bloomberg)
---
### **Industry**
- [Kids spent 60 percent more time on TikTok than YouTube last year, a study shows, despite YouTube’s dominance still within the demographic.](https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/25/kids-spent-60-more-time-on-tiktok-than-youtube-last-year-20-tried-openais-chatgpt/?ref=platformer.news) (Sarah Perez / *TechCrunch*)
- [Apple is seemingly ramping up its efforts to potentially introduce generative AI to iPhones.](https://www.ft.com/content/52839eb2-6641-42a6-acd7-5d41e809c97a?ref=platformer.news) (Michael Acton / *Financial Times*)
- [Google Gemini now powers conversations in Google Ads, which will help advertisers build and scale Search campaigns more easily.](https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/23/googles-new-gemini-powered-conversational-tool-helps-advertisers-quickly-build-search-campaigns/?ref=platformer.news) (Aisha Malik / *TechCrunch*)
- [The Circle to Search Feature is being introduced on Google Pixel 8 and 8 Pro devices, allowing users to search highlighted content.](https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/24/24049669/google-pixel-8-pro-feature-drop-circle-to-search-update?ref=platformer.news) Also, users can finally use the built-in thermometer to measure body temperature. (Chris Welch / *The Verge*)
- [Lumiere, Google’s AI video generator, can generate many things, but it apparently performs best when generating animals in ridiculous scenarios.](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/01/googles-latest-ai-video-generator-renders-implausible-situations-for-cute-animals/?ref=platformer.news) (Benj Edwards / *Ars Technica*)
- [Startup Hugging Face’s AI software will be hosted on Google Cloud, giving access to open source developers.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-25/google-to-team-up-with-startup-hugging-face-to-host-ai-software?sref=CrGXSfHu&ref=platformer.news) (Julia Love / Bloomberg)
- [Microsoft briefly reached a $3 trillion market cap, the second company to do so after Apple.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-24/microsoft-hits-3-trillion-value-cementing-strength-of-ai-rally?sref=CrGXSfHu&ref=platformer.news) (Ryan Vlastelica / Bloomberg)
- [Microsoft laid off 1,900 employees at Activision Blizzard and Xbox, about eight percent of its gaming division.](https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24049050/microsoft-activision-blizzard-layoffs?ref=platformer.news) Blizzard president Mike Ybarra is leaving the company. (Tom Warren / *The Verge*)
- [OpenAI is reducing the price of API access and releasing a few new models, as well as a new preview model of GPT-4 Turbo that’s intended to reduce “laziness”.](https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/25/openai-drops-prices-and-fixes-lazy-gpt-4-that-refused-to-work/?ref=platformer.news) (Devin Coldewey / *TechCrunch*)
- [BeReal is starting to reach out to brands and celebrities, allowing them to sign up as “RealBrands” and “RealPeople”.](https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/24/bereal-which-now-has-23m-daus-is-onboarding-brands-and-celebs/?ref=platformer.news) (Amanda Silberling / *TechCrunch*)
- [Twitch is changing the way it pays creators, including changing its Prime Gaming subscription payouts to a flat rate, resulting in a pay cut for some.](https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/24/24048458/twitch-prime-subscription-change-partner-plus-expansion?ref=platformer.news) (Ash Parrish / *The Verge*)
- [Over 88 percent of top-ranked US news outlets block web crawlers that AI firms use to scrape data for training, data shows, but most leading right-wing media outlets don’t.](https://www.wired.com/story/most-news-sites-block-ai-bots-right-wing-media-welcomes-them/?ref=platformer.news) (Kate Knibbs / *WIRED*)
- [Ads within hundreds of thousands of apps can be used to track physical locations, hobbies, and family members of users, an investigation found.](https://www.404media.co/inside-global-phone-spy-tool-patternz-nuviad-real-time-bidding/?ref=platformer.news) (Joseph Cox / *404 Media*)
- [Streaming sites with pirated content are on the rise, and are reaching profit margins of almost 90 percent, according to a trade group, bringing in about $2 billion annually.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-24/streaming-service-costs-drive-new-era-of-hollywood-piracy?sref=CrGXSfHu&ref=platformer.news) (Thomas Buckley / Bloomberg)
---
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# Why Tim Cook Is Going All In on the Apple Vision Pro
T**he first time** Tim Cook experienced the Apple Vision Pro, it wasn’t called the Apple Vision Pro. It was years ago; maybe six, seven, or even eight. Before the company built Apple Park, where we’re sitting right now, at a bleached oak table in this incredible circular edifice of a building clad in miles of curved glass. It’s been raining, and the clouds are clearing over the pine trees and the rows of citrus and maple trees, and the sun is reflecting off the pond in the meadow, and it’s kind of mesmerizing. And Cook’s telling me about that time, all those years ago, in his dulcet Robertsdale, Alabama, accent, when he first saw it.
It was at Mariani 1, a nondescript low-rise building on the edge of the old Infinite Loop campus with blacked-out windows. This place is so secret, it’s known as one of Apple’s “black ops” facilities. Nearly all of the thousands of employees who work at Apple have never set foot inside one. There are multiple layers of doors that lock behind and in front of you. But Cook is the CEO and can go anywhere. So he strolls past restricted rooms where foldable iPhones and MacBooks with retractable keyboards or transparent televisions were dreamed up. Where these devices, almost all of which will never leave this building, are stored in locked Pelican cases inside locked cupboards.
This building, after all, is folklore to Apple. It’s where the iPod and the iPhone were invented. This same building, where Cook finds the industrial design team working on this thing virtually no one else knows exists. Mike Rockwell, vice president of Apple’s Vision Products Group, is there when Cook enters and sees it. It’s like a “monster,” Cook tells me. “An apparatus.” Cook’s told to take a seat, and this massive, monstrous machine is placed around his face. It’s crude, like a giant box, and it’s got screens in it, half a dozen of them layered on top of each other, and cameras sticking out like whiskers. “You weren’t really wearing it at that time,” he tells me. “It wasn’t wearable by any means of the imagination.” And it’s whirring, with big fans—a steady, deep humming sound—on both sides of his face. And this apparatus has these wires coming out of it that sinuate all over the floor and stretch into another room, where they’re connected to a supercomputer, and then buttons are pressed and lights go on and the CPU and GPU start pulsating at billions of cycles per second and…Tim Cook is on the moon!
Photograph by Norman Jean Roy.
He’s sitting right there. On the fucking moon! With Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong of Apollo 11, he looks around and there’s the ghostly luminescence of ancient dust under a black, star-studded sky. It’s magnificent. It’s amazing. There, in the distance, is the earth. The blue dot. Where all of this magic is happening.
But Cook’s not just on the moon. He’s also in that secret room. In that secret building. And he can see Rockwell and other Apple employees, and he can see his own hands. And he knows right then and there what this all means. Like the universe is telling him something. He knows that this is the future of computing and entertainment and apps and memories, and that this crude apparatus wrapped around his head will change everything. He knows Apple has to make this thing its next product category.
What Cook didn’t know is how his engineers were going to take this thing that needs a supercomputer in another room, and fans and multiple screens, and shrink it down to the size of a pair of goggles that weighs a little more than a box of spaghetti. “I’ve known for years we would get here,” Cook told me. “I didn’t know when, but I knew that we would arrive here.”
Now that time is finally here. The first Vision Pro, in a perfect white cube the size of a large shoebox, will arrive in stores on Friday, with tens of thousands of Apple obsessives and early adopters already having preordered it. Of course, the niche crowd is easy. What Cook and his army of executives know is that the company still has to convince everyone else that, in their own daily lives, for work or entertainment or meditating or capturing the most surreal family memories, or all of the above, they need to spend $3,500 on a spatial computer. A headset that makes you look, as a friend put it, like “you’re going skiing in the Matrix,” and on which you can’t access popular apps like Netflix and YouTube—at least not yet. It won’t be hard to get people to try the Apple Vision Pro; buying it may be another story. Though fortunately for Apple, seemingly anyone who has strapped one on prior to Friday’s launch is preaching with the zeal of the converted about all the wondrous things it can do.
“I **would say** my experience was religious,” the director James Cameron told me when I asked him about his first encounter with the Apple Vision Pro. “I was skeptical at first. I don’t bow down before the great god of Apple, but I was really, really blown away.” Another prominent filmmaker, Jon Favreau, offered a similar sentiment, telling me he was “blown away” by the technology and what it will do to storytelling. (Favreau created content for Apple specifically to showcase the device’s 3D capabilities, where a dinosaur climbs out of a screen and looks like it wants to eat you.) “I’m excited by what kind of story I can tell now that I couldn’t tell before now,” he said. And when I called Om Malik, who has been writing about tech since tech reporters used to write about calculators, he was even more effusive. “It’s amazing! It’s incredible!” he enthused. “You can feel a vibration in the universe!” Everyone else I’ve spoken to who has had a chance to try out the Apple Vision Pro: investors (“Whoa!”) and designers (“Wow!”) and analysts (“Ooh!”) and producers (“Ahh”).
I was thinking about all of those *whoas* and *wows* and *oohs* and *ahhs* as I walked up to the Steve Jobs Theater, a round building with walls made of nothing but glass that hold up a massive cylindrical roof that looks like it’s resting on air. It was my first time visiting “SJT,” as they call it, an homage to the man, the legend, the guy who dreamed all of this up. An Apple employee walked out holding a Pelican case the size of a lunch box, and I knew what was inside. Yeah, it’s one of those. And seeing him reminded me that when I had first spoken to Apple months earlier, I had absolutely no desire to try what was inside that case.
Zero interest. Not an inkling.
I didn’t watch Cook’s June keynote about the Apple Vision Pro. I didn’t read the dissecting blog posts or the uninformed conjecture on social media. I just kept scrolling, like I do when I see anything about Harry and Meghan. I told Cook this as I sat with him in the same room where he did that keynote, because I’ve seen this play before, and I know what the first act is like, and the second act, and I know how it ends.
Back in 2013, in a conference room in Los Angeles, I strapped an Oculus VR headset to my head for the first time. (Oculus, a well-funded start-up, would later be purchased by Facebook, which would later rename itself Meta.) It was cool, sure. I offered my proverbial “wow” and gave out a few oohs and aahs as I played a video game with brutalist square-edged graphics that looked like Pablo Picasso had smoked too much opium and designed a digital world. But after a few minutes I felt claustrophobic, and by the intermission I was mired in an existential crisis that maybe I had stopped inhabiting the real world because I could only see myself in the virtual one. Over the last decade, as the graphics became smoother and the chips faster, the same thing kept happening with each new VR device. Rift, Vive, Quest, Quest 2, and Quest 3. I used them all once or twice, and then they went into a drawer or a cupboard or a box in my basement because I didn’t want to feel the claustrophobia of putting something on my face.
Then last August, I was invited to Apple’s Los Angeles office, formally the home of Beats, to experience what I thought would be yet another VR device. I was sitting in a sleek room with white oak furniture and polished floors, and all I was thinking about was how long it would take me to get home, and whether I’d take the local streets because the 405 by that hour is just a nightmare. I sat on this gray couch, and an Apple employee told me to reach out and grab the Apple Vision Pro in front of me and place it on my head, which I did, reluctantly, just wanting to get this over with, and then—as I expected—the world disappeared, as it always does with VR headsets. But that only lasted for a few seconds, because a digital curtain pulled back and behind it was the real world. I could see my arms and legs, and then the Apple app icons popped up in front of me like a multicolored apparition.
This was as far from a VR headset as a kid’s Schwinn bicycle is from a Gulfstream G800 private jet. Just as when I scrolled my finger around the wheel of the first iPod or used my finger and thumb to zoom into an image on the first iPhone. With the Vision Pro, I could look at an app icon and simply tap my fingers together, and the app would open. And then it was hanging in front of me. In the clearest resolution I’d ever seen in my life. I could swipe through images with my hands, move things with my fingers. Unlike other VR headsets, where you have to use a controller that feels like you have lobster claws for hands, with the Apple Vision Pro your eyes become the mouse absolutely seamlessly. “It’s mind-blowing,” Cook said to me when I told him about my experience. “We live in a 3D world, but the content that we enjoy is flat.”
During that first demo I went to the iconic Mount Hood stratovolcano in Oregon, and I could hear and see a million raindrops falling into Mirror Lake, so much so that I felt like I was there, and the only thing missing was the earthy scent of rain-soaked soil. I interacted with graphics in midair that were crisper than anything I’d ever seen before. And I touched them all with my fingers, not a mouse or keyboard. I saw spatial videos for the first time. To say this feature is astounding is an understatement. You actually feel like the person is in front of you and you can reach out and touch them. I saw clips of movies that were 100 feet wide, sharper and clearer than any IMAX. But most importantly, I saw the world around me. That very room. I didn’t feel closed off or claustrophobic. I was there. I was everywhere, all at once.
I left the Apple offices that day and went to a nearby coffee shop, and when I opened my laptop, a relatively new computer, it felt like a relic pulled from the rubble of a Soviet-era power plant.
“You know, one of our most common reactions we love is people go, ‘Hold on, I just need a minute. I need to process what just happened,’” said Greg “Joz” Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, as we ate lunch at Apple Park. “How cool is that? How often do people have a product experience where they’re left speechless, right?”
I wasn’t really left speechless until the second demo. A few months after my initial experience, I went back to the LA offices. Two Apple employees led me into a room. I put on the Apple Vision Pro and the curtain opened and I was looking at them. The only difference this time was I had a cup of tea with me. In the middle of this new demo, I reached down and grabbed the tea and I took a sip, and as I did, one of my fingers flickered, like I was in a simulation no different from reality and there was a glitch.
“Wait, what am I seeing?” I asked, confused. “Are you real? Or…”
“No, you’re seeing a video of us that’s being rendered in real time,” one of the employees explained. I sat there for a moment, speechless. I had thought what I had been seeing was the real world, and that all the digital wonder was layered on top of that. That the Apple Vision Pro was transparent and there was a layer of technology on top of it. In reality, it was the other way around.
“I think it’s not evolutionary; it’s revolutionary,” Cameron said to me when I told him about my experience. “And I’m speaking as someone who has worked in VR for 18 years.” He explained that the reason it looks so real is because the Apple Vision Pro is writing a 4K image into my eyes. “That’s the equivalent of the resolution of a 75-inch TV into each of your eyeballs—23 million pixels.” To put that into perspective, the average 4K television has around 8 million pixels. Apple engineers didn’t slice off a rectangle from the corner of a 4K display and put it in the Apple Vision Pro. They somehow compressed twice as many pixels into a space as small as your eyeball. This, to people like Cameron who have been working in this space for two decades, “solves every problem.”
But even with all this wonder, with 23 million pixels that are so clear and crisp that you can’t tell reality from a digital composite of it, there are some problems Apple hasn’t solved—at least not yet.
T**here’s an old** story about Steve Jobs that has become folklore in Silicon Valley. It takes place about 25 years ago, in that same nondescript black ops building, Mariani 1, where Cook would see the first Apple Vision Pro prototype years later. Back then, in the late ’90s, Jobs had a team of engineers building the first iPod. They’re toiling away, bending physics and doing engineering acrobatics to make the smallest prototype of an iPod they can squeeze into a box. Finally, when it can’t get any smaller, they take it to Jobs. Now, these prototypes cost millions of dollars, sometimes more, and Jobs looks at it, he inspects it, and he says it needs to be smaller. The engineers say it’s as small as it can get, and Jobs walks over to a fish tank and drops the prototype in—*splash!* And as it drowns, Jobs says, “You see those air bubbles? That means you can make it smaller.”
“You’ve got your M2 chip here…R1 chip…near zero latency…5,000 patents…seven years…” Richard Howarth, the vice president of industrial design, said in a thick Leicester accent as he pointed to the dozens of disassembled components splayed out in front of me, all of which made up the cadaver of the Apple Vision Pro. And yet, all I could think about was the fish story and that iPod prototype, and whether Jobs, if he were alive today, would throw the Apple Vision Pro into a fish tank and say, “There’s bubbles. Make it smaller!”
If there’s one consistent grumble about the Apple Vision Pro, it’s about the size and weight. It’s around 20 ounces, which might not sound like a lot, because you cook with ounces, you don’t necessarily wear them. But that’s the same as five sticks of butter—imagine walking around with five sticks of butter on your face all day. Carolina Cruz-Neira, a pioneer of virtual reality, told me that the way a device sits on your face really impacts how you respond to the technology. “I’ve been working in VR for over 30 years, and until we can get the scuba diving mask off your face and we make it less noticeable, we’re not going to make this a mass-adoption technology,” Cruz-Neira said. “And the size and weight of these scuba diving masks are not going to be solved in a year.”
It’s largely this question that will determine if the Apple Vision Pro will be a financial success. While Apple execs would only tell me “we’re excited” about the sales numbers so far, Wall Street analysts believe the company sold around 180,000 units in the opening weekend of online preorders. Morgan Stanley anticipates that sales will ramp up to 2 million to 4 million units a year over the next five years, and it will become a new product category for the company. But others, like Ming-Chi Kuo, an Apple supply chain analyst, thinks it’s going to remain a niche product for some time. Almost all the analysts I spoke with believe it will eventually get there. “We think a few years from now it’ll resemble sunglasses and be less than $1,500,” Dan Ives, a senior analyst at the investment firm Wedbush Securities, told me.
I didn’t even have to ask Howarth about the weight; he brought it up himself. But he did so as he explained that this component and that component are made of magnesium and carbon fiber and aluminum (he pronounced it a-loo-*min*\-e-um, not a-*loo*\-min-um, which I respected as a Brit myself), and he noted that these are the lightest materials on earth, and that there is no more diminutive alternative. “There’s nothing we could have done to make it lighter or smaller,” Howarth explained. “This is the state of the art.” Everyone else I spoke to at Apple proffered a similar sentiment. “It feels like we’ve reached into the future and grabbed this product,” Joswiak said to me. “You’re putting the future on your face.” As did Rockwell, who told me: “We packed just about as much technology as you could possibly pack into that small of a form factor.”
“Y**ou can actually** lay on your sofa and put the displays on your ceiling if you wish,” Cook told me. “I watched the third season of *\[Ted\]**Lasso* on my ceiling and it was unbelievable!” When I got home and hooked up my own Apple Vision Pro, I watched *Ford v Ferrari* on my ceiling, and with the spatial audio it felt like Ken Miles’s Ford GT40 was in the room with me. “I think meditation is on a different level than anything I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve meditated for a long time,” Cook said. I’ve always had trouble meditating, and he was right about that too. “And I use it for productivity,” Cook told me.
Typing with the Apple Vision Pro virtual keyboard is a little like trying to write with a pen between your toes. Not impossible but impractical. But when I opened my MacBook Pro while wearing the Vision Pro, the screen popped into my augmented reality and I was able to work pretty seamlessly. I’m actually writing these words here, the ones you’re reading, on the Vision Pro using the MacBook, and all I can say is I bet if you were watching me now you’d think I looked just like Tom Cruise in *Minority Report,* only slightly more handsome. And then there’s those spatial videos. I’ve recorded and watched dozens of spatial videos of my kids just playing and talking, reliving moments that seem mundane but when played back are so emotionally immersive, it’s like stepping into a living, breathing memory. Again, it’s hard to describe how realistic the environments feel, but I’ve found myself periodically returning to Mirror Lake, turning off all my notifications, and just sitting there at the edge of the water, peacefully watching and listening to the rain for 5 or 10 minutes before returning to work.
There are plenty of quirks using the device. One of my favorites is when you use the Vision Pro in one room and then go to another, open the same app, and you have to find it by looking all around the room; sometimes it’s on the ceiling or the floor. I couldn’t find my text app the other day and turned around to find it was in my bathroom. (I later learned you can reset the apps by pressing the digital crown for a few seconds.) But the more I’ve used the Apple Vision Pro over the past two weeks, the more one glaring problem revealed itself to me. It’s not the weight (which is a problem but will come down over time), or the size (which will shrink with each iteration), or the worry that it will drive us to consume more content alone (almost half of Americans already watch TV alone). Or how tech giants like Meta, Netflix, Spotify, and Google are currently withholding their apps from the device. (Content creators may come around once the consumers are there, and some, like Disney, are already embracing the device, making 150 movies available in 3D, including from mega-franchises like *Star Wars* and Marvel.) And it’s not even the price, because if Apple wanted to, the company could subsidize the cost of the Apple Vision Pro and it would have about as much financial impact as Cook losing a nickel between his couch cushions.
I’m talking about something that I don’t see a solution for.
I first recognized the problem when I was at Apple Park, in the basement offices of SJT. I was seeing yet another demo, this time in Joshua Tree, where I sat in the striking desert silhouette of the arid landscape. I played Fruit Ninja, where I got to slice fruit with my bare hands. Then I tried a DJ app, where a turntable opened in front of me and I could slide the fader, tweak the mixer, and scratch the records, and I summoned a disco ball that magically clung to the ceiling as animated ravers danced around me.
In the middle of my DJ set, an Apple employee said it was time to wrap up. I took the Apple Vision Pro off, and that’s when it hit me. The problem. It happened again at home, scrolling through the spatial videos I’ve taken of my kids over the last few weeks, seeing them as if they’re actually in front of me. And it’s going to happen in a few minutes, when I finish writing this article and the Word document in front of me the size of an IMAX screen goes away.
When I take it off, every other device feels flat and boring: My 75-inch OLED TV feels like a CRT from the ’90s; my iPhone feels like a flip phone from yesteryear, and even the real world around me feels surprisingly flat. And this is the problem. In the same way that I can’t imagine driving a car without a stereo, in the same way I can’t imagine not having a phone to communicate with people or take pictures of my children, in the same way I can’t imagine trying to work without a computer, I can see a day when we all can’t imagine living without an augmented reality. When we’re enveloped more and more by technology, to the point that we crave these glasses like a drug, like we crave our iPhones today but with more desire for the dopamine hit this resolution of AR can deliver.
I know deep down that the Apple Vision Pro is too immersive, and yet all I want to do is see the world through it. “I’m sure the technology is terrific. I still think and hope it fails,” one Silicon Valley investor said to me. “Apple feels more and more like a tech fentanyl dealer that poses as a rehab provider.” Harsh words, but he feels what we all feel, a slave to our smartphone, and he’s seen this play before and he knows what the first act is like, and the second act, and he knows how it ends.
I didn’t ask Cook about this because I didn’t realize it all until days later, but I did ask him if technology is moving too quickly. If all of it, AI, spatial computing, and our reliance on technology, if it’s all too much. “What does the future of it all look like?” I asked Cook.
“I think it’s hard to predict exactly,” he replied.
“But you’re making it,” I said. “So don’t you get to predict it?”
“What we do is we get really excited about something and then we start pulling the string and see where it takes us,” Cook told me. “And yes, we’ve got things on the road maps and so forth, and yes, we have a definitive point of view. But a lot of it is also the exploration and figuring out.” He concluded, “Sometimes the dots connect. And they lead you to some place that you didn’t expect.” (Letting connected dots lead the way was a theme Cook’s predecessor used to talk about.)
The question is, is the place we’re about to go, into the era of spatial computing, going to make our lives better, or will it become the next technology that becomes a necessity, where we can’t live in a world that’s not augmented? I think Joswiak had it half right when he said, “It feels like we’ve reached into the future and grabbed this product. You’re putting the future on your face.” I think it’s the other way around. Apple is taking us into the future, into a new era of computing. Some of us are running as fast as we can to get there, and others are being dragged, kicking and screaming. But we’re all going. We’re going to the moon, and we’re going to look around at the ghostly luminescence of ancient dust under a black, star-studded sky, and we’ll just know that this is the future of computing and entertainment and apps and memories, and that this apparatus wrapped around our head will change everything.
- [Simone Biles](https://www.vanityfair.com/style/simone-biles-cover-interview) Talks Marriage, WAG Life, and the Paris Olympics
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@ -100,7 +101,8 @@ style: number
#### Sport
#### Sport
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- Heat a large skillet over medium heat and add the oil. Once the oil is heated, add the diced onion and bell pepper. Sauté until mostly tender, stirring occasionally, about 5 minutes.
 
- Add the ground beef and cook, stirring and breaking up the meat, until mostly cooked, about 5-7 minutes. Stir in the garlic, spices and a pinch of salt and pepper.
 
- Stir in the crushed tomatoes, raisins, olives, and capers. Let simmer, stirring occasionally, until thickened, about 10 minutes.
 
> [!tip]
> Serve hot over rice with chopped cilantro if desired.
Whisk together all ingredients for the peanut sauce until smooth, adding another splash of coconut milk as desired for thinner consistency. It will thicken up later in the pan with the chicken.
- creamy peanut butter
- coconut milk
- honey
- soy sauce
- rice vinegar
- garlic cloves
- red pepper flakes
 
Heat a large skillet over medium high heat and add the oil. When the oil is hot, add the chicken and season with a pinch of salt and pepper. Cook the chicken, rotating and flipping the pieces every couple minutes, until almost done, about 4-6 minutes. In the last couple of minutes of cooking, add the peanut sauce and simmer 1-2 minutes or until the chicken is cooked through.
 
**Make slaw**
In a small bowl, whisk together the olive oil, lime juice, honey, and soy sauce to make the dressing. In a large bowl, toss together the cabbage, carrot, cilantro, and green onion. Pour desired amount of dressing over the cabbage mixture and toss to combine.
 
>[!tip]
>Serve the chicken on a bed of cauliflower rice with the slaw on top.
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iOS
10 months ago