"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/More American Graffiti (1979).md\"> More American Graffiti (1979) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Incredible Sicilian aubergine stew with couscous Jamie Oliver.md\"> Incredible Sicilian aubergine stew with couscous Jamie Oliver </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Warm lemon and Parmesan couscous with peas — The Pastiche.md\"> Warm lemon and Parmesan couscous with peas — The Pastiche </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/After Two Decades Undercover, She’s Ready to Tell the Real Story of Human Trafficking.md\"> After Two Decades Undercover, She’s Ready to Tell the Real Story of Human Trafficking </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/An Iowa paperboy disappeared 41 years ago. His mother is still on the case.md\"> An Iowa paperboy disappeared 41 years ago. His mother is still on the case </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Skipping School America’s Hidden Education Crisis.md\"> Skipping School America’s Hidden Education Crisis </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/A Knife Forged in Fire.md\"> A Knife Forged in Fire </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/In the Heat of the Night (by Imagination - 1982).md\"> In the Heat of the Night (by Imagination - 1982) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/I’m Every Woman (by Chaka Khan - 1978).md\"> I’m Every Woman (by Chaka Khan - 1978) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/East Saint Louis Toodle-Oo Black Beauty (by Duke Ellington And His Orchestra - 1936).md\"> East Saint Louis Toodle-Oo Black Beauty (by Duke Ellington And His Orchestra - 1936) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Ethiopian Modern Instrumentals Hits (by Various Artists - 2003).md\"> Ethiopian Modern Instrumentals Hits (by Various Artists - 2003) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/King of the Delta Blues Singers (by Robert Johnson - 1961).md\"> King of the Delta Blues Singers (by Robert Johnson - 1961) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Sings the Blues (by Lightnin’ Hopkins - 1995).md\"> Sings the Blues (by Lightnin’ Hopkins - 1995) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Jacques Brel (by Jacques Brel - 2016).md\"> Jacques Brel (by Jacques Brel - 2016) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Les Vieux (by Jacques Brel - NaN).md\"> Les Vieux (by Jacques Brel - NaN) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/My Baby Just Cares for Me (by Nina Simone - 2012).md\"> My Baby Just Cares for Me (by Nina Simone - 2012) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/What’s Going On (by Marvin Gaye - 1983).md\"> What’s Going On (by Marvin Gaye - 1983) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Ultimate Collection (by Bill Withers - 2017).md\"> The Ultimate Collection (by Bill Withers - 2017) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Back to Black (by Amy Winehouse - 2006).md\"> Back to Black (by Amy Winehouse - 2006) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Naked In The Summertime Volume 2 (by Prince - 2016).md\"> Naked In The Summertime Volume 2 (by Prince - 2016) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Naked In The Summertime Volume 1 (by Prince - 2016).md\"> Naked In The Summertime Volume 1 (by Prince - 2016) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Dark Side of the Moon (by Pink Floyd - 1973).md\"> The Dark Side of the Moon (by Pink Floyd - 1973) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Joan Baez (by Joan Baez - 1960).md\"> Joan Baez (by Joan Baez - 1960) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits (by Simon Garfunkel - 1972).md\"> Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits (by Simon Garfunkel - 1972) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Louise attaque (by Louise Attaque - 1997).md\"> Louise attaque (by Louise Attaque - 1997) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Them Again (by Them - 1966).md\"> Them Again (by Them - 1966) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Rum Sodomy the Lash (by The Pogues - 1985).md\"> Rum Sodomy the Lash (by The Pogues - 1985) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Best of The Pogues (by The Pogues - 1991).md\"> The Best of The Pogues (by The Pogues - 1991) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-02-14 ⚽️ PSG - Real Sociedad.md\"> 2024-02-14 ⚽️ PSG - Real Sociedad </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/After Two Decades Undercover, She’s Ready to Tell the Real Story of Human Trafficking.md\"> After Two Decades Undercover, She’s Ready to Tell the Real Story of Human Trafficking </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/An Iowa paperboy disappeared 41 years ago. His mother is still on the case.md\"> An Iowa paperboy disappeared 41 years ago. His mother is still on the case </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Skipping School America’s Hidden Education Crisis.md\"> Skipping School America’s Hidden Education Crisis </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/A Knife Forged in Fire.md\"> A Knife Forged in Fire </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.04 Cinematheque/Ferrari (2023).md\"> Ferrari (2023) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.04 Cinematheque/Perfect Days (2023).md\"> Perfect Days (2023) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.04 Cinematheque/Perfect Days (2023).md\"> Perfect Days (2023) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.08 Bookmarks/Bookmarks - Gift ideas.md\"> Bookmarks - Gift ideas </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.08 Bookmarks/Bookmarks - Gift ideas.md\"> Bookmarks - Gift ideas </a>",
@ -12728,32 +12876,24 @@
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/I’m Every Woman (by Chaka Khan - 1978).md\"> I’m Every Woman (by Chaka Khan - 1978) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/I’m Every Woman (by Chaka Khan - 1978).md\"> I’m Every Woman (by Chaka Khan - 1978) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/East Saint Louis Toodle-Oo Black Beauty (by Duke Ellington And His Orchestra - 1936).md\"> East Saint Louis Toodle-Oo Black Beauty (by Duke Ellington And His Orchestra - 1936) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/East Saint Louis Toodle-Oo Black Beauty (by Duke Ellington And His Orchestra - 1936).md\"> East Saint Louis Toodle-Oo Black Beauty (by Duke Ellington And His Orchestra - 1936) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Ethiopian Modern Instrumentals Hits (by Various Artists - 2003).md\"> Ethiopian Modern Instrumentals Hits (by Various Artists - 2003) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Ethiopian Modern Instrumentals Hits (by Various Artists - 2003).md\"> Ethiopian Modern Instrumentals Hits (by Various Artists - 2003) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/King of the Delta Blues Singers (by Robert Johnson - 1961).md\"> King of the Delta Blues Singers (by Robert Johnson - 1961) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/King of the Delta Blues Singers (by Robert Johnson - 1961).md\"> King of the Delta Blues Singers (by Robert Johnson - 1961) </a>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Sings the Blues (by Lightnin’ Hopkins - 1995).md\"> Sings the Blues (by Lightnin’ Hopkins - 1995) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Les Vieux (by Jacques Brel - NaN).md\"> Les Vieux (by Jacques Brel - NaN) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/My Baby Just Cares for Me (by Nina Simone - 2012).md\"> My Baby Just Cares for Me (by Nina Simone - 2012) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/What’s Going On (by Marvin Gaye - 1983).md\"> What’s Going On (by Marvin Gaye - 1983) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/The Ultimate Collection (by Bill Withers - 2017).md\"> The Ultimate Collection (by Bill Withers - 2017) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Back to Black (by Amy Winehouse - 2006).md\"> Back to Black (by Amy Winehouse - 2006) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Naked In The Summertime Volume 1 (by Prince - 2016).md\"> Naked In The Summertime Volume 1 (by Prince - 2016) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/The Dark Side of the Moon (by Pink Floyd - 1973).md\"> The Dark Side of the Moon (by Pink Floyd - 1973) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Joan Baez (by Joan Baez - 1960).md\"> Joan Baez (by Joan Baez - 1960) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits (by Simon Garfunkel - 1972).md\"> Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits (by Simon Garfunkel - 1972) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Louise attaque (by Louise Attaque - 1997).md\"> Louise attaque (by Louise Attaque - 1997) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Them Again (by Them - 1966).md\"> Them Again (by Them - 1966) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Rum Sodomy the Lash (by The Pogues - 1985).md\"> Rum Sodomy the Lash (by The Pogues - 1985) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/The Best of The Pogues (by The Pogues - 1991).md\"> The Best of The Pogues (by The Pogues - 1991) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Is This It (by The Strokes - 2001).md\"> Is This It (by The Strokes - 2001) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Is This It (by The Strokes - 2003).md\"> Is This It (by The Strokes - 2003) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Rage Against the Machine (by Rage Against the Machine - 1992).md\"> Rage Against the Machine (by Rage Against the Machine - 1992) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Paris sous les bombes (by Suprême NTM - 1995).md\"> Paris sous les bombes (by Suprême NTM - 1995) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/After Two Decades Undercover, She’s Ready to Tell the Real Story of Human Trafficking.md\"> After Two Decades Undercover, She’s Ready to Tell the Real Story of Human Trafficking </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/A Knife Forged in Fire.md\"> A Knife Forged in Fire </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Skipping School America’s Hidden Education Crisis.md\"> Skipping School America’s Hidden Education Crisis </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/An Iowa paperboy disappeared 41 years ago. His mother is still on the case.md\"> An Iowa paperboy disappeared 41 years ago. His mother is still on the case </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Bookmarks - Gift ideas.md\"> Bookmarks - Gift ideas </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Bookmarks - Gift ideas.md\"> Bookmarks - Gift ideas </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.03 Food & Wine/Galette des rois.md\"> Galette des rois </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.03 Food & Wine/Galette des rois.md\"> Galette des rois </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Galette des rois.md\"> Galette des rois </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Galette des rois.md\"> Galette des rois </a>",
@ -12789,24 +12929,19 @@
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/2023-12-21 Arrival Papa.md\"> 2023-12-21 Arrival Papa </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/2023-12-21 Arrival Papa.md\"> 2023-12-21 Arrival Papa </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Stop trying to have the perfect vacation. You’re ruining everyone else’s..md\"> Stop trying to have the perfect vacation. You’re ruining everyone else’s. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/How a Prison Gang Inspired by Hollywood Heists Stole $23 Million.md\"> How a Prison Gang Inspired by Hollywood Heists Stole $23 Million </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Jacques Brel (by Jacques Brel - 2016).md\"> Jacques Brel (by Jacques Brel - 2016) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Jacques Brel (by Jacques Brel - 2016).md\"> Jacques Brel (by Jacques Brel - 2016) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Naked In The Summertime Volume 2 (by Prince - 2016).md\"> Naked In The Summertime Volume 2 (by Prince - 2016) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Naked In The Summertime Volume 2 (by Prince - 2016).md\"> Naked In The Summertime Volume 2 (by Prince - 2016) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Is This It (by The Strokes - 2003).md\"> Is This It (by The Strokes - 2003) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Is This It (by The Strokes - 2003).md\"> Is This It (by The Strokes - 2003) </a>",
@ -12907,65 +13035,63 @@
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"02.02 Paris/Andy Wahlou.md\"> Andy Wahlou </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"02.02 Paris/Andy Wahlou.md\"> Andy Wahlou </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-04-07 Mum in Zürich.md\"> 2023-04-07 Mum in Zürich </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-04-07 Mum in Zürich.md\"> 2023-04-07 Mum in Zürich </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Test.md\"> Test </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Test.md\"> Test </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Why are Americans dying so young.md\"> Why are Americans dying so young </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Why are Americans dying so young.md\"> Why are Americans dying so young </a>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/How Michael Cohen’s Big Mouth Could Be Derailing the Trump Prosecution.md\"> How Michael Cohen’s Big Mouth Could Be Derailing the Trump Prosecution </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Les Combrailles, à la découverte de l’Auvergne secrète.md\"> Les Combrailles, à la découverte de l’Auvergne secrète </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.04 Cinematheque/More American Graffiti (1979).md\"> More American Graffiti (1979) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Fifth Sun.md\"> Fifth Sun </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/A Gaza Conundrum The Story Behind the Rise of Hamas.md\"> A Gaza Conundrum The Story Behind the Rise of Hamas </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/A Gaza Conundrum The Story Behind the Rise of Hamas.md\"> A Gaza Conundrum The Story Behind the Rise of Hamas </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Sicilian aubergine stew with couscous.md\"> Sicilian aubergine stew with couscous </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Why Parents Struggle So Much in the World's Richest Country.md\"> Why Parents Struggle So Much in the World's Richest Country </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Incredible Sicilian aubergine stew with couscous Jamie Oliver.md\"> Incredible Sicilian aubergine stew with couscous Jamie Oliver </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Was Frank Gore the Last NFL Running Back - ESPN.md\"> Was Frank Gore the Last NFL Running Back - ESPN </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Warm lemon and Parmesan couscous.md\"> Warm lemon and Parmesan couscous </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Warm lemon and Parmesan couscous.md\"> Warm lemon and Parmesan couscous </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Was Frank Gore the Last NFL Running Back - ESPN.md\"> Was Frank Gore the Last NFL Running Back - ESPN </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/After Two Decades Undercover, She’s Ready to Tell the Real Story of Human Trafficking.md\"> After Two Decades Undercover, She’s Ready to Tell the Real Story of Human Trafficking </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/A Knife Forged in Fire.md\"> A Knife Forged in Fire </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Skipping School America’s Hidden Education Crisis.md\"> Skipping School America’s Hidden Education Crisis </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/An Iowa paperboy disappeared 41 years ago. His mother is still on the case.md\"> An Iowa paperboy disappeared 41 years ago. His mother is still on the case </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.04 Cinematheque/For Greater Glory - The True Story of Cristiada (2012).md\"> For Greater Glory - The True Story of Cristiada (2012) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/East Saint Louis Toodle-Oo Black Beauty (by Duke Ellington And His Orchestra - 1936).md\"> East Saint Louis Toodle-Oo Black Beauty (by Duke Ellington And His Orchestra - 1936) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/I’m Every Woman (by Chaka Khan - 1978).md\"> I’m Every Woman (by Chaka Khan - 1978) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/In the Heat of the Night (by Imagination - 1982).md\"> In the Heat of the Night (by Imagination - 1982) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Ethiopian Modern Instrumentals Hits (by Various Artists - 2003).md\"> Ethiopian Modern Instrumentals Hits (by Various Artists - 2003) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Les Vieux (by Jacques Brel - NaN).md\"> Les Vieux (by Jacques Brel - NaN) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Sings the Blues (by Lightnin’ Hopkins - 1995).md\"> Sings the Blues (by Lightnin’ Hopkins - 1995) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/King of the Delta Blues Singers (by Robert Johnson - 1961).md\"> King of the Delta Blues Singers (by Robert Johnson - 1961) </a>"
],
],
"Removed Tags from":[
"Removed Tags from":[
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.03 Food & Wine/Warm lemon and Parmesan couscous.md\"> Warm lemon and Parmesan couscous </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Templates/Template Music.md\"> Template Music </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Templates/Template Music.md\"> Template Music </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"02.02 Paris/@Commerces Paris.md\"> @Commerces Paris </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"02.02 Paris/@Commerces Paris.md\"> @Commerces Paris </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.02 Home/Real Estate.md\"> Real Estate </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.02 Home/Real Estate.md\"> Real Estate </a>",
@ -13066,10 +13194,7 @@
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/GitHub - postalserverpostal ✉️ A fully featured open source mail delivery platform for incoming & outgoing e-mail.md\"> GitHub - postalserverpostal ✉️ A fully featured open source mail delivery platform for incoming & outgoing e-mail </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/GitHub - postalserverpostal ✉️ A fully featured open source mail delivery platform for incoming & outgoing e-mail.md\"> GitHub - postalserverpostal ✉️ A fully featured open source mail delivery platform for incoming & outgoing e-mail </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/Encrypt Office is a one-stop hub to protect a modern digital business and their critical data.md\"> Encrypt Office is a one-stop hub to protect a modern digital business and their critical data </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/Encrypt Office is a one-stop hub to protect a modern digital business and their critical data.md\"> Encrypt Office is a one-stop hub to protect a modern digital business and their critical data </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/How to Run Your Own Secure, Portable PC From a USB Stick.md\"> How to Run Your Own Secure, Portable PC From a USB Stick </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/How to Run Your Own Secure, Portable PC From a USB Stick.md\"> How to Run Your Own Secure, Portable PC From a USB Stick </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/Emulator files - Emulation General Wiki.md\"> Emulator files - Emulation General Wiki </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/Emulator files - Emulation General Wiki.md\"> Emulator files - Emulation General Wiki </a>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/33 Best Open-Source Software For MacOS In 2023.md\"> 33 Best Open-Source Software For MacOS In 2023 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/Server-side Tagging In Google Tag Manager Simo Ahava's blog.md\"> Server-side Tagging In Google Tag Manager Simo Ahava's blog </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.04 IT/My guiding principles after 20 years of programming.md\"> My guiding principles after 20 years of programming </a>"
"title":":snowflake: :sports_medal:[[@@Paris|:test_grandes_armes_de_paris:]]: Check out the [6 Nations](https://billetterie.ffr.fr/fr)",
"time":"2024-01-30",
"rowNumber":102
},
{
"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",
"rowNumber":90
},
{
"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
},
{
"title":":sunny: :racehorse: [[@@Paris|:test_grandes_armes_de_paris:]]: Check out the [Open de France](https://www.poloclubchantilly.com/)",
"time":"2024-08-25",
"rowNumber":104
},
{
"title":":maple_leaf: :partying_face: [[@@Paris|:test_grandes_armes_de_paris:]]: Fête des Puces %%done_del%%",
"title":":birthday: **[[Armand de Villeneuve|Armand BV]]** %%done_del%%",
"time":"2025-01-03",
"rowNumber":105
}
],
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-01-06.md":[
{
"title":"19:18 :notebook: [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Find help online to redact a will",
"time":"2024-01-31",
"rowNumber":103
},
{
"title":"19:20 :notebook: [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Register will with [local authorities](https://www.notariate-zh.ch/deu/home?not=Riesbach-Zuerich)",
"time":"2024-02-25",
"rowNumber":104
}
],
"02.03 Zürich/@@Zürich.md":[
{
"title":"🎭:frame_with_picture: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out exhibitions at the [Kunsthaus](https://www.kunsthaus.ch/en/) %%done_del%%",
"title":"🎭:frame_with_picture: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out exhibitions at the [Rietberg](https://rietberg.ch/en/) %%done_del%%",
"title":":hibiscus: :fork_and_knife: [[Seasonal Activities]]: Book a restaurant with terrace for the season: [[Albishaus]], [[Restaurant Boldern]], [[Zur Buech]], [[Jardin Zürichberg]], [[Bistro Rigiblick]], [[Portofino am See]], [[La Réserve|La Muña]] %%done_del%%",
"title":":hibiscus: :fork_and_knife: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Book a restaurant with terrace for the season: [[Albishaus]], [[Restaurant Boldern]], [[Zur Buech]], [[Jardin Zürichberg]], [[Bistro Rigiblick]], [[Portofino am See]], [[La Réserve|La Muña]] %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-05-01",
"time":"2024-05-01",
"rowNumber":83
"rowNumber":102
},
{
"title":":sunny: :racehorse: [[Seasonal Activities]]: Check out the [Palio di Siena](https://www.comune.siena.it/node/135) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-05-15",
"rowNumber":97
},
},
{
{
"title":":hibiscus: :canned_food: [[Seasonal Activities]]: Check out [FOOD ZURICH - MEHR ALS EIN FESTIVAL](https://www.foodzurich.com/de/) %%done_del%%",
"title":":hibiscus: :canned_food: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out [FOOD ZURICH - MEHR ALS EIN FESTIVAL](https://www.foodzurich.com/de/) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-06-01",
"time":"2024-06-01",
"rowNumber":84
"rowNumber":103
},
},
{
{
"title":":hibiscus: :partying_face: [[Seasonal Activities]]: Zürich Pride Festival %%done_del%%",
"title":":hibiscus: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Zürich Pride Festival %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-06-15",
"time":"2024-06-15",
"rowNumber":85
"rowNumber":116
},
},
{
{
"title":":sunny: :movie_camera: [[Seasonal Activities]]: Check out programmation of the [Zurich's finest open-air cinema | Allianz Cinema -](https://zuerich.allianzcinema.ch/en) %%done_del%%",
"title":":sunny: :movie_camera: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out programmation of the [Zurich's finest open-air cinema | Allianz Cinema -](https://zuerich.allianzcinema.ch/en) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-07-01",
"time":"2024-07-01",
"rowNumber":98
"rowNumber":104
},
},
{
{
"title":":sunny: :partying_face: [[Seasonal Activities]]: Check out Seenachtfest Rapperswil-Jona %%done_del%%",
"title":":sunny: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out Seenachtfest Rapperswil-Jona %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-08-01",
"time":"2024-08-01",
"rowNumber":101
"rowNumber":119
},
},
{
{
"title":":sunny: :runner: [[Seasonal Activities]]: Check out tickets to Weltklasse Zürich %%done_del%%",
"title":":sunny: :runner: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out tickets to Weltklasse Zürich %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-08-01",
"time":"2024-08-01",
"rowNumber":102
"rowNumber":126
},
},
{
{
"title":":sunny: :partying_face: [[Seasonal Activities]]: Street Parade (:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:) %%done_del%%",
"title":":sunny: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Street Parade %%done_del%%",
"title":":maple_leaf: :movie_camera: [[Seasonal Activities]]: Check out Zürich Film Festival %%done_del%%",
"title":":maple_leaf: :movie_camera: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out Zürich Film Festival %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-09-15",
"time":"2024-09-15",
"rowNumber":115
"rowNumber":105
},
{
"title":":maple_leaf: :canned_food: [[Seasonal Activities]]: Check out the [International White Truffle Fair - Find out all the events](https://www.fieradeltartufo.org/en/) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-09-18",
"rowNumber":116
},
{
"title":":maple_leaf: :partying_face: [[Seasonal Activities]]: Fête des Puces (:test_grandes_armes_de_paris:) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-09-21",
"rowNumber":117
},
},
{
{
"title":":maple_leaf: :wine_glass: [[Seasonal Activities]]: Check out Zürich’s Wine festival ([ZWF - Zurich Wine Festival](https://zurichwinefestival.ch/)) %%done_del%%",
"title":":maple_leaf: :wine_glass: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out Zürich’s Wine festival ([ZWF - Zurich Wine Festival](https://zurichwinefestival.ch/)) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-09-25",
"time":"2024-09-25",
"rowNumber":118
"rowNumber":106
},
},
{
{
"title":":snowflake:🎭 [[Seasonal Activities]]: Check out floating theatre in Zürich ([Herzlich willkommen!](http://herzbaracke.ch/)) %%done_del%%",
"title":":snowflake:🎭 [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out floating theatre ([Herzlich willkommen!](http://herzbaracke.ch/)) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-10-15",
"time":"2024-10-15",
"rowNumber":52
"rowNumber":92
},
},
{
{
"title":":maple_leaf: :wine_glass: [[Seasonal Activities]]: Check out [Discover the Excitement of EXPOVINA Wine Events | Join Us at Weinschiffe, Primavera, and Wine Trophy | EXPOVINA](https://expovina.ch/en-ch/) %%done_del%%",
"title":":maple_leaf: :wine_glass: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out [Discover the Excitement of EXPOVINA Wine Events | Join Us at Weinschiffe, Primavera, and Wine Trophy | EXPOVINA](https://expovina.ch/en-ch/) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-10-15",
"time":"2024-10-15",
"rowNumber":119
"rowNumber":107
},
},
{
{
"title":":snowflake: :person_in_steamy_room: [[Seasonal Activities]]: Check out [Sauna Cubes at Strandbad Küsnacht — Strandbadsauna](https://www.strandbadsauna.ch/home-eng) %%done_del%%",
"title":":snowflake: :person_in_steamy_room: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out [Sauna Cubes at Strandbad Küsnacht — Strandbadsauna](https://www.strandbadsauna.ch/home-eng) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-11-15",
"time":"2024-11-15",
"rowNumber":53
"rowNumber":100
},
{
"title":":christmas_tree: :cocktail: [[Seasonal Activities]]: Check out pop-up bars in Zürich ([Pop-ups at Christmas | zuerich.com](https://www.zuerich.com/en/visit/christmas-in-zurich/pop-ups)) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-12-01",
"rowNumber":68
},
},
{
{
"title":":christmas_tree: :shopping_bags: [[Seasonal Activities]]: Organise a trip to a famous Christmas market (Nürnberg, Salzburg, Praha, Budapest, Wien, Basel, Merano, Esslingen, Strasbourg) %%done_del%%",
"title":":christmas_tree: :cocktail: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out pop-up bars ([Pop-ups at Christmas | zuerich.com](https://www.zuerich.com/en/visit/christmas-in-zurich/pop-ups)) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-12-01",
"time":"2024-12-01",
"rowNumber":69
"rowNumber":101
},
{
"title":":confetti_ball: :mother_christmas: [[Seasonal Activities]]: Saint Nicolas %%done_del%%",
"title":":maple_leaf: :canned_food: [[@Italy|🇮🇹]]: Check out the [International White Truffle Fair - Find out all the events](https://www.fieradeltartufo.org/en/) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-03-31",
"time":"2024-09-18",
"rowNumber":104
"rowNumber":81
}
],
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2023-12-28.md":[
{
"title":"15:31 :man_in_tuxedo: [[@Lifestyle|Social]]: Contact Thomas de Villoutreys (:test_wappen_genf_matt:)",
"time":"2024-01-21",
"rowNumber":104
}
}
],
],
"01.01 Life Orga/@Family.md":[
"03.02 Travels/@@Travels.md":[
{
"title":":family: [[@Family|Family]]: Explore civil procedures to change names (+whether in 🇨🇭 or 🇫🇷)",
"time":"2024-04-15",
"rowNumber":94
},
{
{
"title":":family: [[@Family|Family]]: Explore maintaining in the ANF books",
"title":":snowflake: :tada: [[@@Travels|Travels]]: Organise New Year’s Eve %%done_del%%",
"title":":christmas_tree: :shopping_bags: [[@@Travels|Travels]]: Organise a trip to a famous Christmas market (Nürnberg, Salzburg, Praha, Budapest, Wien, Basel, Merano, Esslingen, Strasbourg) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-06-20",
"time":"2024-12-01",
"rowNumber":96
"rowNumber":129
}
],
"01.03 Family/Armand de Villeneuve.md":[
{
"title":":birthday: **[[Armand de Villeneuve|Armand BV]]** %%done_del%%",
"time":"2025-01-03",
"rowNumber":105
}
}
],
],
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-01-06.md":[
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-01-17.md":[
{
{
"title":"19:18 :notebook: [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Find help online to redact a will",
Sam brought out what looked like a deck of tarot cards with nothing on them. No Hermit. No Hanged Man. No Fool. They were gray, thicker than ordinary cards, and clearly heavy in his hands. Inside of them a message waited. He had a long ritual to perform to release it.
As he shuffled the cards, they clattered together, revealing the first hint of their message: They were made of steel. He stacked them and squared up the edges so that all of the cards were nice and straight, nothing sticking out or crooked. Everything neat. The alchemical precision favored by Newton in his dim laboratories.
He clamped them in an industrial vise. Now the cards made a block about the size of a thick paperback book. They would never be individual cards again, these 12 pounds of two different kinds of steel, arranged in alternating layers.
The vise was mounted on a large metal table in the shop that Sam shares with his two brothers, who are fine woodworkers. The shop is in Skokie, which means “marsh” in the Potawatomi language, for these environs were once rich and populous wetlands before they were drained and turned into rows of low industrial buildings like this one and sturdy, modest residential homes. But the brothers have transformed this space into a marvelous cabinet of wonders in which to create whatever they might dream. Much of what is inside could have come from the 19th or early 20th century, great cast-iron machines of fabulous design, embossed with symbols no longer thought necessary to display on slick modern devices. In addition, some of the things in this sprawling realm of clutter might have come from another galaxy, like the ballistic cartridge for the table saw. If you accidentally touch the blade, it senses electrical conductivity and retracts. It’s gone so fast that it can’t cut you. It’s all part of the magic of this place of transformations.
Sam lowered his black face shield and picked up the MIG welder and pulled the trigger. The room lit up to an intensity such that Sam was cast as a silhouetted troupe of antic spiders dancing on the walls and floor and ceiling, sparks flying around him like a cracked nest of hornets and in his hands a burning blue hole at the center of things. All this to the roar of the forge’s fire across the room, heating up toward 2,400 degrees, and the insect chattering of the welder chewing away at liquid metal.
Sam bent over the light, his body curved around it like some sorcerer who’d caught a star and had it pinned there on the bench and was leaning over to examine it and chip away the edges. The bits were falling all around him and bouncing up in little arcs off the diamond floor of heaven. It was positively spooky the way that light stole the glory of the crisp and sunny autumn day outside the open roll-up door.
When he was done and I could look more closely without safety glasses, I saw that he had tacked the cards together with a misshapen bead of melted metal at each end of the stack. As a 12-pound solid oblong block of steel with runes inside, the stack would now be called a billet. To finish it off, he welded a two-foot length of steel rebar to one end to make a handle so that he could hold it.
Sam is afraid of some of his machines in the way that the lion tamer is afraid of his cats. You are confident. You know your skills. You have been doing this a long time. But you know that wild animals are always wild animals, and a false gesture, perhaps an unexpected noise, could set in motion events that could not be stopped. This pact requires utter honesty, complete truth. Sam is harnessing powers that few of us ever encounter in our lives. He’s directing them in order to reach down inside of this deck of tarot cards and transform the very atomic nature of its being. He’s doing what sorcerers do: magic.
John Maynard Keynes, a British economist, owned some of Isaac Newton’s papers. They were about alchemy, which was Newton’s lifelong obsession. Keynes gradually came to the conclusion that Newton “was not the first of the age of reason.” No, Keynes said, “he was the last of the magicians.”
Not the last. We have some right here in Chicago.
Sam Goldbroch is a knife maker. He was getting ready to make me a traditional Japanese-style kitchen knife.
Bladesmith Sam Goldbroch puts the metal he forged into a vise so he can cut off what isn’t needed for the author’s knife. Forging Damascus steel is such an arduous process that he made as much as possible in the batch.
I first met Sam when he was just a kid. I’d see him and his family—his parents, Claire and Bernie; his twin brother, Phil; and their older brother, Simon—at events in the neighborhood near Dewey Elementary School in Evanston where we all lived. My elder daughter, Elena, and Simon began dating in high school and are now married. The boys, as we came to call them, all went into the crafts—Phil and Simon into wood, Sam into food initially. He worked as a chef in various capacities at some of Chicago’s best restaurants, such as Blackbird, Elizabeth, and North Pond. But when he and his wife, Julie Zare, decided to start a family, they realized that a chef’s grueling schedule would not encourage the best home life. So in 2016 Sam began teaching at the Chopping Block, the Lincoln Square school for home cooks. As he taught his students how to use knives in the kitchen, he saw that he really didn’t know anything about them, though he had used them in professional kitchens for 12 years. And with a simple question from one of his students—“What makes a good knife?”—his life was swallowed up into the mysteries of metal and fire and force.
Both the Northeast of the United States and the Northwest have robust communities of knife makers. The American South has even more. Chicago and the surrounding area are just beginning to coalesce into a serious community of bladesmiths. You can see a sample of their wares at Northside Cutlery in North Center, a small and tidy shop of beautiful handcrafted pieces displayed in a wall-size cabinet Phil Goldbroch made for that purpose. The knives sell for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars each. They are all one of a kind, made by a variety of local bladesmiths.
Sam recently hosted a group of Chicago knife makers for a potluck lunch at the shop. After the meal, Sam cranked up the forge, and one of them, Dylan Ambrosini, crafted a blade while we all watched. Dylan, at 24, is one of the youngest and most talented knife makers in the Midwest. He and Sam collaborated on a nine-inch chef’s knife, which sold for $950 before they could get it on display at Northside Cutlery. Top-end chef’s knives can cost even more. Anthony Bourdain bought one of his favorites for $5,000 from Bob Kramer, a popular bladesmith in Washington State. It brought $231,250 at auction after Bourdain’s death.
In Sam’s kitchen and in the shop, I had seen a kind of knife called a nakiri. I wanted one. If you’re a knife nut, as I am, that’s all you have to say. Jacques Pépin, the popular French chef, once said that you need only three knives to cook well. “That being said,” he quipped, “I probably have three hundred knives at my house.” People who love cooking can’t always say what makes them fall for a particular style of knife. Most chef’s knives are at least eight inches long, which feels too big for me. Sam had already made me a chopping knife called a tall petty, whose blade was five inches long. “Tall” means that my fingers clear the cutting board, and “petty” means that the blade is short. I use it all the time for chopping, but sometimes it’s too short, as when I have a big onion. I wanted one that was a little longer. The nakiri is ideal for preparing vegetables, which is most of what I do. I have always loved the shape. And I knew that Sam would make his own Damascus steel for this knife. The blade and handle would mate to make a work of art that was an exceptional tool. When I had my first dream about this knife, I woke up and knew that I had to have it.
I decided that I wanted to follow Sam as he made my knife, to understand the process from start to finish. I did not expect that I would stumble upon a mystical and transcendent experience in the making of such a seemingly simple tool.
As my father used to say, there’s a mile of wire in a screen door.
Sam took the billet of steel, holding it by the rebar handle in a heavy blacksmith’s glove, and he carried it to the forge, with its interior of tangerine flame. The forge is a black cylindrical furnace, 16 inches long, as big around as a gallon of paint, and open at both ends. Two propane torch nozzles entered the top to provide the fire. The floor of the forge was populated by glowing white rocks of fractured firebrick. And it roared like a lion. The heat rising from it was so intense that the waves appeared to be dissolving the brick building I could see across the alley through the open roll-up door. I sat at Sam’s workbench. Although I was 20 feet away, the heat on my face was like summer sun.
Sam placed the billet among the white-hot rocks and we waited. He talked of the metal’s need to heat all the way through and “relax.” As we watched, the dull deck of gray cards began to wake up and take on the qualities of a living thing. Among the glowing rocks, it seemed to stir and issued a low, dark color. He had put two kinds of steel in the stack that became the billet, 1095 and 15N20, because he was making Damascus steel, a special kind of steel for swords and knives that combines metals to form beautiful patterns by way of forging and pounding, crushing (called “upsetting”) and twisting. Damascus is not particularly superior to other steels. It’s just prettier. But it has acquired a special mystique because hundreds of years ago, as early as the fourth century B.C., it came into Europe from the East by way of Syria. That steel had a wavy pattern in it. So by analogy, people today call steel that has a wavy pattern “Damascus.” The Crusaders were armed with Damascus blades. It was said that theirs were quenched in the blood of dragons. And it was also said that those blades could do battle with the Saracens and afterward still sever a feather floating in midair.
> If you want to know what rock is like deep in the earth, you can see it here in the shape-shifting of the metal. These are the energies that we are not used to in the quiet simmer of our daily lives.
I watched the forge. It took a long time, but it had our attention the way a green shoot would where only some damp sand had been seen before. Something was changing. Transformations were coming. If you want to know what rock is like deep in the earth, you can see it here in the shape-shifting of the metal. These are the energies that we are not used to in the quiet simmer of our daily lives. The energies of the deep earth and the high sun, the two sources that power our planet.
Half an hour passed, and now the billet was no longer gray. It had taken on the look of a bright confection of orange marzipan. Sam put on his blacksmith’s gloves. The billet was so hot that he wore glasses tinted against infrared radiation. He lifted the billet out of the forge for the first time to check the color of the metal. The rebar sagged like a fishing rod with a swordfish on the line. He wasn’t pleased with that, but he liked what he saw on the billet, and so he swung it over to the 12-ton hydraulic press just a few feet away. The billet landed on the compression platform. Holding the rebar in his left hand, he brought down the handle on the press with his right, moving the square metal die down to gently tap the mushy billet with a few tons of pressure so that he could see if it had been heated through and through. He had to make sure that his welds were holding the cards together. The smith calls this process of initial compression “forge welding,” because if everything is right with the stack, the cards will meld into one solid piece.
As the cards of metal were deformed and compressed, the surface of the billet rippled and changed color as if in emotional response to the extremes of heat and force, turning gray and deeper orange and shedding dark flakes of oxidized metal. Sam tapped the handle and added more pressure. Waves of dull gray cascaded across the surfaces and calved off and fell to the floor. But the billet held together. First success. It had cooled enough now that Sam had to return it to the forge to reheat it to a working temperature of about 2,300 degrees.
While it was heating, Sam unbolted the flat dies from the press using a socket wrench. Dies are the parts of the press that actually make contact with the hot metal. He exchanged the flat ones for more rounded ones that are called drawing dies. They would draw the billet into an elongated shape and help start to flatten it.
When the billet was hot enough once more, Sam began compressing it more aggressively to transform it into what he called a bar. In the middle of this, the rebar handle melted, menacingly clattering to the floor, ringing and dancing, and Sam stepped gingerly back to let it settle, then continued his work by lifting the billet with heavy tongs. There was no stopping now. He would succeed or fail by the skill of his hands and his knowledge as a bladesmith.
A natural, lifelong student of anything interesting, Sam got his start by trying to answer that question of what makes a good knife. He began to buy knives of good quality, but old and beat up, to restore them. He talked to knife makers and chefs who knew about knives. He took blacksmithing classes in which he began to acquire a feel for metal, not as the solid that most of us are used to but as a substance every bit as malleable as potter’s clay. He began to get a feel for taming the fire.
Heating and crushing now with more and more force, Sam gradually transformed the billet into a crude bar of steel so long, about a foot and a half, that it hung out either end of the forge. He then took the bar back to the metal table and clamped it into the vise. He put on his ear protection and picked up an angle grinder. At 1,000 degrees, the steel had gone dark.
> Sam turned his grinder to cut from the other side, and an orange volcano shot up to the ceiling. He explained that you can tell the kind and quality of steel you’re working with by the color and shape of the sparks.
To make my little six-and-a-half-inch nakiri knife, Sam didn’t need all 12 pounds of steel that he’d started with. But the process of forging Damascus steel is so difficult and time consuming that he wanted to make as much as possible in a single batch. As he began cutting the bar in half, orange sparks cascaded down, elves of fire skipping across the concrete and dancing away into the sunlight in the alley. He turned his grinder to cut from the other side, and an orange volcano shot up to the ceiling. He explained that you can tell the kind and quality of steel you’re working with by the color and shape of the sparks.
Cutting through the bar took the better part of an hour, as he heated it to soften it and attacked it again and again with different tools. After destroying several angle grinder blades, he brought out a chisel he’d forged in a blacksmithing class and began hammering it into the cut he’d made in the bar. The making of Damascus steel takes a heavy dose of artistry and craftsmanship, and if one approach doesn’t work, you try another and another until the thing in your head becomes a thing in the world. At last he had the metal bar hot and nearly severed and clamped in the vise, and with his blacksmith’s hammer, he swung for the fences and knocked half the billet across the room. Fortunately, no one was in the path of the projectile, which landed, smoking, on the floor by the forge.
When the two black hunks of metal had cooled to a few hundred degrees, they took on an almost melancholy gloom of blue-gray, dashed with a distemper of rust, and their random-seeming warts and scars gave them the aspect of objects that had made a long and lonely journey through space, ending with a fiery entry into our world. Only the squared-off shape of these meteorites betrayed the hand of man.
Sam picked up one of the chunks with his tongs, saying, as unlikely as it seemed at that moment, “There’s a knife in there. That’s all that matters.” He also mentioned that the worst accidental burns in a forging shop occur when the metal has cooled off to black and is still at several hundred degrees. The visitor learns to touch nothing.
Now that he was working with a billet that weighed six pounds instead of 12, he could proceed much faster. Moving from forge to hydraulic press, heating and upsetting and turning, occasionally changing dies to different shapes, Sam gradually formed the bar into a piece about 16 inches long and an inch and a quarter square. Some time before, Sam had acquired a rusty old-fashioned monkey wrench. He had welded a piece of steel round bar to the head to make a long and heavy wrench for one specific purpose: twisting a bar of hot Damascus steel. Now he heated the bar and clamped it with the hydraulic press just enough to immobilize it, not enough to deform it. Then he fitted the adjustable wrench to it. Because the bar was now square in cross section, he could maintain a grip on it, as with a wrench on a nut. But when he went to twist it, he managed to turn it only halfway around. It wasn’t hot enough.
He put it back in the forge and this time heated it until it was in a yellow rage of photons. Again, he fitted the wrench to the glowing end. And then, using his entire body and the leverage of the long-handled wrench, he began twisting and twisting. The metal shed great gray flakes, and the yellow bar gradually turned orange, looking like a twist of taffy as Sam put all of his effort into the now-helical bar until it would turn no more. It was as if he were doing battle not so much with steel but with fire itself, placing the bright yellow bar in the press and then wringing the light right out of it, for that’s what it was, a blade of bright light that he strangled until it went black.
Then he put the bar back in the forge and did it all again. He repeated the process five times, and as the twists grew into a tighter and tighter pattern, the steel began to bend upon itself and undulate like an incandescent banded snake.
When Sam thought that the metals had thoroughly mixed, he placed the bar in the vise and picked up the angle grinder.
“I’m going to give you a nice center cut,” he said, meaning the place in the bar where he’d find the best pattern of steel.
He took a wooden nakiri template from a board on the wall where he kept the blanks of all the knives he made. He placed it on his anvil and traced its shape with chalk on the bar to get the length right for blade and tang. The tang is the slim projection from the blade that he’d fit into the handle. Using the heat, the press, and a hammer on the anvil, he flattened the metal into a vague, cartoonish semblance of a rude asteroid-black knife that my four-year-old granddaughter, Annelise, might have drawn in charcoal. He clamped it in the vise to let it cool. He occasionally pointed an infrared meter at it to check the temperature. When it was cool enough to handle, he took it to the bench and again traced the nakiri shape onto the rough alligator surface. Then he went to the band saw and cut away as much metal as he could around the silhouette. Even though I had earplugs, the noise drove me out to the alley.
Sam was doing all this after taking a weekend forging class outside of Philadelphia. He’d driven 12 hours home, getting only five hours of sleep. Then he wrestled this demon all day, almost eight hours of back-wrenching work, until he got what he had envisioned in his head. It was roughly the right shape. But it was still scabbed black and ugly. Day one was done.
As if in rebellion against the taming of the fire, all night long the lightning lit up the low gray udders of the clouds, the wind milking them here and there for their pitiful rain. What epic history lay beyond the thunder’s crack and groan?
Goldbroch chalks a template for the nakiri knife onto the rough-shaped steel. “I’m going to give you a nice center cut,” he says.
On the second day, Sam retired to the grinding booth, an enclosure he had built for his power sanding. The belt grinder is a machine of admirable complexity that can turn every which way while keeping a six-foot loop of sandpaper revolving on drums, allowing Sam to make shapes such as Western knife handles. He has to wear a respirator, a heavy apron riveted in brass, gloves, and noise-canceling headphones.
I saw Sam at his best in there. He stood in his armor, confronting a clearly dangerous and indifferent machine of stupendous mechanical capacities for removing any material that came near it, including human flesh in large bloody quantities if he slipped up. It’s a bit like a whirling wall of razor blades. Sam put both hands into this, holding something fairly small—it might have been a knife or a handle.
He is a big man, solid and steady on his feet, with wide shoulders and strong arms. He is soft-spoken, modest, and understated, a kind of gentle giant. I’d see him Saturdays at the summer farmers’ market with one or the other of his two children on his shoulder. If you met Sam, your first impression might be of calm and strength, control and competence. He’d happily show you what he can do with hammer and tongs, and you’d understand the deep dichotomy and even mystery that powers his mastery of energy and matter. What he does is simply so self-evident in the end that it cannot be questioned. When he’s done, what he puts in your hand is self-explanatory. He does not apologize. He does not explain or boast. He does not have to. It’s in your hand. And if you met him, you’d wonder: What gives him such a solid platform?
> I think Sam’s mastery grew out of a catastrophic incident in his childhood. He had struggled with fire when he was young, and not in any artistic way.
I think Sam’s mastery grew out of a catastrophic incident in his childhood. He had struggled with fire when he was young, and not in any artistic way. The story of that struggle belongs to him and Simon and Phil, who went through it together, so it is not mine to tell. But I can say this much: They were trapped in an out-of-control fire when they were kids. They survived. Their parents did not.
When he came out of the grinding booth, Sam had the metal in the right shape and even close to the right size. This was called the rough grinding of the knife. Now he had to set the bevel, the angled portion of the blade that would terminate in the cutting edge. He did this with hammer and anvil, man against steel, as in images of 19th-century industrial infernos. The hammer rose toward the ceiling and then Sam put his whole back into it as it came ringing down on the steel. When he first brought the blade out of the forge, it was a tiger burning bright, and when he straightened up with the shape he was after, the black stubbly silhouette looked as if all it needed was a little stamp on the edge that said “Made in Hell.”
All morning long, a small heat-treating oven, actually a kiln that could have been used for ceramics, had been warming up. Now it had reached 1,650 degrees, the temperature at which to begin the process called “normalizing.” All of the forging and pressing and hammering and twisting of the metal had confused the internal crystal structure of the steel and introduced weird stresses among the grains.
But since the knife now had the exact shape that Sam wanted, he wouldn’t need to do anything violent to the blade again, except one final explosive act. To prepare for that, he first had to heat it back up to the point that the steel could, as he explained, relax again and release the tensions within, so that rather than being, at a microscopic level, like broken and jagged sea ice, the metal would be like a quiet millpond.
He placed the blade in the oven and closed the door. He set the timer for 10 minutes and went back to his bench to begin work on the handle. The artistry of this knife was all Sam’s doing. I had given him absolute control. But I’d spied a particular piece of wood among the materials he keeps for making handles. It was a rare Australian eucalyptus called vasticola burl, and when I’d first pointed to it, Sam smiled and said, “Oh, I love that wood.” He picked it up. It was just a block, perhaps six inches long and two inches square. He wiped some oil on it with a paper towel, and it seemed to glow.
“It looks like fire,” he said.
The fire again. He’d had his taste of fire when he was a child. And now it was in his blood.
The block was too wide for the Japanese *wa* handle that he was going to make, so we went into a giant room with an array of limb-snatching machines, and he cut it to size on a 1912 band saw that was taller than we were. Back at his bench, he searched in the drawers full of materials for handles and came up with a nicely patterned piece of buffalo horn for the ferrule, the protective ring between handle and blade.
“This is good,” Sam said. “It’s usually just black.”
The timer went off, and he took the blade out and put it in a rack to cool. He turned the heat down to 1,550 degrees, and when the blade had cooled, he returned it to the oven. After another 10 minutes, he put the blade aside again to cool and turned the oven down to 1,450. He repeated the 10-minute heat treating and set the blade aside once again.
“It’s still not a knife,” Sam insisted.
It was not yet good steel. It couldn’t be sharpened to take a cutting edge, and whatever edge you might put on it wouldn’t hold. It was useless for the kitchen, which was where I wanted to take it. To eat, let’s not forget. For what is a human but a transport channel for energy? And our energy comes from food. Lovely, gourmet food prepared with a fine knife. The qualities we need in a knife to create that food come from the atomic structure of the steel. But for the moment, what we had here was like a pig wallowing in mud and claiming to be cassoulet.
Sam stepped up to the oven, beside which the blade had been cooling. The oven had reached 1,475. He put the blade in and closed the door.
A slender, rectangular metal vessel sat upright on the floor by the oven. It looked somehow military, as if meant to shoot a rocket. It was filled with Parks 50, what’s known as a high-speed oil and designed for this purpose. After 10 minutes of heating to 1,475, Sam took the blade from the oven with heavy tongs and gloves and plunged it into the oil. A cloud of smoke rose to the ceiling, and a searing sound filled the room like a basket of snakes.
> “This is the moment of truth,” Sam said, holding the tongs and looking away from the smoke. “This is when it becomes a knife.”
“This is the moment of truth,” Sam said, holding the tongs and looking away from the smoke. “This is when it becomes a knife.”
The quenching is a pressurized moment on which everything else turns. He cannot flinch. He cannot fake it. Like the free solo climber, he cannot make mistakes. The mere hint of a *ping* with the knife in the oil, and he’d have to go back to the other half of the blackened billet and start over. Because the knife would have fractured. Hard to believe, but at this point, if Sam dropped the knife, it could shatter. Some American knife makers have even taken to having a quenching ceremony to mark the birth of a knife. Some of them also think that you can quench properly only while facing north. Sam doesn’t hold to those ideas. You do your best and try to have more skill than luck.
The small heat-treating oven sat atop another oven that looked as if it wouldn’t be out of place in a 1960s kitchen. It was a tempering oven. Sam had set it to 400 degrees, and now he put the knife inside for many hours of tempering, which would finish settling the structure of the metal and would reduce its hardness to the sweet spot where it could be easily sharpened and would also hold an edge. Sam could do nothing more with this blade until the tempering was finished. So he would turn to other projects.
Before I went home that second day, Sam said, “I’ll finish the belt sanding tonight and leave about 10 percent of the hand sanding for the morning so you can watch. Assuming you like to sit there and watch people sand stuff.”
Steel is not steel. It is a chameleon, completely dependent on its environment. At temperatures such as Sam was using, it is a glowing portal to the world of the atom. Steel is iron mixed with carbon and some other elements, depending on what kind of steel you want. I had asked Sam to make me a high-carbon knife, which means that, by technical definition, at least 0.6 percent of its atoms are carbon. In practical terms, it means that it’s not stainless steel and will rust if you don’t take care of it. Sam and I like to take care of our knives the way some people like to take care of their motorcycles.
Taking care of a knife is pretty simple. You strop it before each use. You don’t throw it in the sink. You wipe it off and put it in a safe place when you’re done—a knife block, for example. And we would chop down telephone poles with it before we’d put it in a dishwasher. Then again, to qualify as a master bladesmith with the American Bladesmith Society, you have to chop a wooden two-by-four in half two times with a knife you made and then still be able to shave with it. The rules for that qualification test clearly state: “The test knife will ultimately be destroyed during the testing process.”
The knives that Sam and his fellow Midwestern smiths make, passed from hand to hand with care, from mother to son to uncle to granddaughter, could last a thousand years, by which time every speck of high technology we know today will be dust. But the reality is that if a knife maker has become too famous, you simply can’t get his or her knives any longer.
Iron atoms form crystals of various kinds, atoms connected electrically to one another. Iron atoms are like little magnets, having a north and south (positive and negative) end. So they can arrange themselves like those toys for children, magnetic shapes to create pleasing patterns.
When carbon mixes with iron, the smaller carbon atoms occupy the spaces between iron atoms. The crystal arrangement of the iron atoms changes to accommodate the carbon. Different crystal arrangements give the metal different properties. Think of it as bread. It’s like deciding what kind of bread to make. White bread. Sourdough. Hard Lithuanian black bread. Fluffy Mexican bolillos. So goes the saga of steel. The tarot cards Sam dealt at the start of this process were 1095 steel, which is iron with between 0.95 percent and 1.05 percent carbon, and 15N20, which is iron with nickel. Mixing the two is popular for making Damascus and produces an attractive pattern and a very nice edge.
As a lover of good food and good kitchen tools, I don’t need to know much about metallurgy. A bladesmith like Sam can take care of that. But I find this stuff fascinating, these amazing transformations. I like to know what’s going down in the atomic world that will blossom into these beautiful patterns of his blade.
As I watched Sam work, I kept having the impression that he was trying hard to erase something—the traces of the fire, the encroaching flames, the blackened body of the meteorite after its travels. But the erasing was also an act of creating. Michelangelo said that the block of marble contains a man, and all you have to do is remove the rock that isn’t part of the man, and then you will have your sculpture. So Sam said, “There’s a knife in there. …” And in this attitude of seeking, there is a humility that does away with the myth of the conquering hero or the towering artistic genius.
> Sam does not see himself as the creator of the knife. He sees himself as having found it inside of this other, most unlikely object.
Sam does not see himself as the creator of the knife. He sees himself as having found it inside of this other, most unlikely object. As he worked, he let the steel tell him things. He followed what the material suggested rather than sticking to a predetermined plan. He was facilitating the process. He was the sorcerer. He did not invent magic, did not really make magic, but he employed magic. And with the rackety dance of hammer and tong, he was urging the knife into stelliferous being. In the process, he was also taming the fire.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, an ape not all that different from us created an edge by fracturing one rock with a blow from another. Make no mistake. Such a knife is sharp enough to shave with. And at a stroke, the woolly mammoth could fall apart into bite-size pieces. It didn’t change everything, but it laid a dense, high-calorie, protein-packed feast on our table that allowed the relatively small inner workings of our gut to extract the tremendous amount of energy needed to grow these giant billowing brains we have. In a sense, the knife marked the birth of civilization.
After being ground and cleaned of oils, the blade is bathed in etching solutions to reveal its Damascus pattern.
When I came in the next morning, while I did not feel that I had missed anything crucial (Sam sitting and sanding), the knife was now a revelation. It was the right size and shape, and it was all silver. It looked like a real knife awaiting a handle.
“Wow,” I said.
Sam smiled. Then, with a sly look: “Let me show you something.”
He carried the blade to the room of giant machines. Against one wall a sink was set up with gallon-size square beakers of colored liquid, one black or dark blue, one gold. “We’ll do a two-stage etch and see what we’ve got.” He washed the blade and cleaned it with Windex. He then put the blade into the dark solution. He set the timer on his watch, and when two minutes were up, he again cleaned and rinsed the blade and put it in the golden liquid. I knew that the dark fluid was ferric chloride. I asked what the golden liquid was. Sam reached to a shelf behind the sink and brought down a half-gallon bottle. It featured a cartoon alligator and was labeled “Gator Piss.”
“What’s in it?” I asked.
Sam shrugged. “Proprietary, I guess.” He left the blade to etch and went back to his bench to tidy up. “But it works,” he said.
The trade name might seem odd to those who don’t know the history of Damascus steel. Ancient Afghan makers, for example, quenched their blades in donkey urine. Some makers during medieval times believed that only the urine of redheaded boys should be used. Other Asian smiths prescribed heating the blade until it looked “like the sun rising in the desert” and then shoving it “into the body of a muscular slave.” About quenching by murder, Sam said simply, “I don’t make weapons.”
Half an hour later, he took the blade out of the Gator Piss and washed it. He held it under the lamp. We could clearly see the Damascus pattern, with its contour map of dark hills and bright craters, its sinewy valleys and far landscapes. And we could spot his signature, or maker’s mark, which he’d electrically etched on the blade. And as with looking through a microscope, the longer you looked, the more you saw.
Sam took the blade back to the bench for finer and finer sanding. “You don’t want to make it too fine,” he said. “Or the pores will close up and you’ll start to lose the sharpness of your pattern.” He would take this Damascus to 800 grit.
He had more polishing to do, more etching. The handle was a simple shape and Sam knew it well. He’d sand and polish it, and then the eucalyptus would really look like fire. He’d glue the tang into the handle. And of course, he would sharpen the knife and shave the hair on his arm to test its razor edge.
Outside the open door, I could see that the day was high and clear with light-year blue and upward-tumbling cumulus clouds that mirrored the Damascus pattern churning in the blade.
The knife, nearly finished: The blade had been etched, the handle shaped. Now the epoxy holding the handle in place was left to cure.
The quenching of anxiety and stress through ordered, repetitive, directed, and meaningful physical motions is an effect well known among neuroscientists and others who work with human brains and nervous systems. The rhythmic movement is soothing. Sam had tamed the fire inside and coaxed it outside to create a work both useful and beautiful. A palliative process that would give rise to a tool that would feed us and satisfy our sensibilities with its physical beauty while doing so. All of human history would thereby be embodied in a single work of art.
On the third day, when Sam presented me with the finished knife, it was so beautiful that it took my breath away. I brought it home and cut some onion for my wife, who was making dinner. The knife slid through the flesh with no resistance. It felt like cutting air. I rinsed it and wiped it dry and during dinner we propped it up in its black velvet case and we stared at it like early humans in a cave somewhere, watching fire.
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# After Two Decades Undercover, She’s Ready to Tell the Real Story of Human Trafficking
O n an August night in 2003, a young woman who went by the name Paulina sank into the sofa of her modest, rented apartment, opened up her laptop, and began talking about sex with a man she’d recently met in a Yahoo chat group. His name was Stephen Bolen. His first communications had been terse, but he soon warmed to Paulina. It didn’t take long for both of them to begin to open up.
Paulina had told Bolen she lived in the Atlanta area, that she had a three-year-old daughter, that her daughter’s father was no longer in the picture. Soon, she was sharing more intimate details: what it was like growing up a skinny white girl in a rough neighborhood outside of D.C.; how her dad, a Marine, had died by suicide two weeks before she was born; how her mom had been emotionally and physically abusive, and had never really shown her love. How she’d had a sexual relationship with her stepfather.
Paulina would put her daughter to bed and then she and Bolen would chat throughout the night, over Yahoo and sometimes on the phone. The back-and-forth could feel like dating, but with an added element of danger and risk: Both Paulina and Bolen knew they were tiptoeing up to a line to see if they trusted each other enough to cross it. It could take a while to figure that out.
Eventually, Bolen asked Paulina to send pictures of her daughter, and she agreed to do so, though the ones she’d shared were chaste — the little girl clothed and her face turned away from the camera or obscured behind an untamable halo of blond curls. After seeing the pictures, Bolen asked to meet. While a lot of the men Paulina had encountered in chatrooms like “Sex With Younger” just wanted to trade images and videos of children, to expand their illicit collections, Bolen was a “traveler,” someone looking to act upon his obsessions.
On Sept. 17, just as they’d arranged, Paulina sat on a bench outside Perimeter Mall with a stroller parked in front of her, scanning the parking lot nervously. Part of her hoped Bolen wouldn’t show. When he did, she could see he was handsome, a preppy guy in a pink polo shirt and khakis. “Paulina?” he asked eagerly. She nodded. As he smiled and pulled back the blanket draped across the stroller, he found himself surrounded, handcuffs slipped around his wrists.
## Editor’s picks
“Paulina” watched his face fall, his confusion giving way to distress as [FBI](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/fbi/) agents took him into custody. It was her first undercover arrest. It would be the first of many.
if one wanted to hide in plain sight, one could do no better than the tidy, suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of St. Louis, where FBI Special Agent Nikki Badolato now resides. The well-tended, two-story homes are so pleasantly indistinct that I could hardly tell you what hers looks like, even if it were safe for me to do so, which it is not. Suffice to say that Midwestern comfort and conformity unspool around every gently winding curve. Here Badolato has raised her two children, a daughter who is now in college and a son who is a junior at a local high school. When planning a neighborhood scavenger hunt or tending the community garden, Badolato does not often mention her many years as head of the Child Exploitation Task Force, a joint effort between the feds and local law enforcement that targets some of the country’s most heinous crimes. Open a cabinet in her kitchen, however, and a government-issued Glock 42 can be found stowed away between the vitamins and mixing bowls.
On a sunny morning this past October, Badolato sat at her dining room table, scrapbooks and albums spread out before her on the dark wood. There was the acceptance letter she’d received from the bureau the spring of her senior year of high school, after a representative had shown up to administer a test in the typewriting room. “I chose to wear a red dress and red heels,” she says of her first day as an FBI mail clerk, two weeks after her 18th birthday. “I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I guess maybe I was trying to go in bold?” She pauses at a picture of herself on the gun range at Quantico almost 10 years later, her shoulders squared and her caramel hair pulled back into a ponytail as she fires off rounds. By then, she’d married a man she met just after high school, had a little girl, completed college at night, and been accepted into agent training in the heady days after 9/11. She’d seen her first dead body only a few weeks into the job, after the pursuit of a bank robber ended with a shootout in a Walmart. When Badolato got to the scene, the body was still warm, and the perp’s head was resting on a bag of cookies. “It was surreal,” she says. “How many times have you been in a Walmart and walked down Aisle 4, not really expecting there to be a dead person with his head lying on a bag of Chips Ahoy?”
Badolato wasn’t deterred. She felt like the bureau saved her, plucked her out of a shitty home life, and gave her prospects and purpose. As a new agent, she was intent on proving herself worthy. “My training agent told me, ‘You know, Nikki, it’s a marathon, not a sprint,’ ” she says. “I was like, ‘That’s ridiculous. I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.’ ” She turned a few pages to show a picture of the 391 kilos of cocaine and 140 pounds of meth she’d recovered on a single raid during a stint with a cartel squad, then pointed out another in which she poses with a five-year-old child she’d rescued, the little girl’s hair cut short because the kidnapper had wanted her to look like a boy. But the keepsake she really wants to find is the card that Bolen’s wife had pressed into her hand at his sentencing, the one with the picture of their children — a blond girl of about three years and a tiny baby — and the words “These are the faces of the children you protect each day.” Bolen’s wife had been the only one she’d ever encountered who had lobbied for her husband to receive the maximum sentence. Some wives accused the FBI of planting evidence inside computers. Most seemed intent on clinging to their delusions. (Attempts to reach Bolen for comment were unsuccessful.)
Which, Badolato has come to understand, is the way it goes with child trafficking and sexual abuse. She had invited me into her home — had agreed to speak on the record about her decades-long career working undercover — because when it comes to the crimes she’s spent her career fighting, she has had enough of the delusions people are under. She’s had enough of the way movies like *[Sound of Freedom](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/sound-of-freedom/)* both glamorize and trivialize the work she and her colleagues do, enough of the idea that swashbuckling white men burst through doors and rescue trafficked children with a Bible in one hand and a firearm in the other, enough of conspiracy theories about Hollywood and Washington that detract from the real root causes of why children are trafficked and abused. “Human trafficking is not the movie *Pretty Woman* — the girl doesn’t get the guy — and it’s not the movie *Taken*, where people are kidnapped in a foreign country and sold on the black market, or shipped in a container across the world,” one of the detectives who worked on Badolato’s task force tells me. “I’m not saying that doesn’t ever happen, but it’s not what we’re seeing.”
>
> “Right now some little girl is being dropped off in the parking lot of a motel,” Badolato says. “There are four girls holed up in a hotel next to a McDonald’s. It is happening all the time.”
What they are seeing is a lot more insidious and a lot more homegrown. A report released in 2018 by the State Department ranked the U.S. as one of the worst countries in the world for human trafficking. While the Department of Justice has estimated that between 14,500 and 17,500 foreign nationals are trafficked into this country every year, this number pales in comparison to the number of American minors who are trafficked within it: A 2009 Department of Health and Human Services review of human trafficking into and within the United States found that roughly 199,000 American minors are sexually exploited each year, and that between 244,000 and 325,000 American youths are considered to be at risk of being trafficked specifically in the sex industry. Heartbreakingly, many of these children are victimized not by strangers who’ve abducted them from mall parking lots but rather by people they know and trust: Studies have found that as much as 44 percent of victims are trafficked by family members, most often parents (and not infrequently parents who were trafficked themselves). Between 2011 and 2020, there was an 84 percent increase in the number of people prosecuted for a federal human-trafficking offense. Of the defendants charged in 2020, 92 percent were male, 63 percent were white, 66 percent had no prior convictions, and 95 percent were U.S. citizens.
Badolato’s unit with a kidnapping victim after her recovery in 2011. COURTESY OF NIKKI BADOLATO
Badolato started her career as an FBI agent in some of the earliest days that children could be bought, sold, and traded online. As the internet-porn industry mushroomed, its most lucrative branch turned out to be that of child sexual-abuse materials (the term “child pornography” is no longer used by those in the field, as it implies consent). And as demand for these images increased, so did the abuse that led to their creation.
In 2003, just a few months after Badolato graduated from Quantico, a Crimes Against Children squad was formed in the Atlanta office where she’d been stationed. By then, the FBI was starting to get a handle on the extent of the problem — if not exactly what to do about it. At a weeklong training in Baltimore, Badolato was given a tour of the darkest underbelly of fetish chat groups and then instructed to figure out how to infiltrate. “Everyone was a little nervous,” she explains of the directive. “It was a process, a direction that was new.” Agents were told that they would need to come up with a “persona” and a “story,” and that they would likely have to provide images of children to “prove” they had a minor on offer. They were also told that they could use images of their own children, if they were comfortable doing so (the FBI no longer endorses this policy).
Badolato developed “Paulina” based on her understanding that any persona would need to share most of her own backstory and traits. “That’s the only way you can really do undercover work,” Badolato says. “People can tell the sincerity in what you’re saying, so there has to be a level of genuineness, but then you just add this criminal element to it.” Most of the things Badolato had told Bolen were true: where she was from, her family background, the monstrousness of her mother, a woman who she says would pass out cigarettes and beers to Badolato’s 13-year-old friends in a state of manic permissiveness one minute and fly into a violent rage about a piece of lint on the floor the next. (Badolato’s mother declined to comment for this article, but a childhood friend corroborated Badolato’s account.) It was true that growing up in an unstable home with a string of stepdads, she had never really felt loved, true that she had divorced her first husband, true that she was raising their three-year-old daughter on her own. The only thing that wasn’t true was her tale of being molested, her initiation into the “lifestyle” — to use the chatroom parlance — that Paulina said she now wanted for her daughter. As Badolato had familiarized herself with the language and behaviors of the chatrooms, she’d honed that added criminal element, imagining what psychological conditions might believably lead a parent to traffic their own child and how those conditions could be grafted onto her real life story. She already had a history of abuse; it was not hard to extrapolate to a fictional stepfather who had seemed to provide a gentle counterpoint, showing her love and making her feel special when no one else had, even if others couldn’t understand. From there, it was easy to convince the chatroom participants that she shared their belief — or justification — that most people had it all wrong and that “child love” was natural, and could even be beneficial for the child.
Badolato estimates that she has arrested more than a thousand people; not one of those arrests has failed to end in a conviction. She didn’t know until she was in the thick of it that most agents refuse this sort of work, that most can’t even pretend to forge a relationship with someone looking to victimize a child. But she could. “Paulina,” she points out, is not a name she chose at random; it’s similar to her own mother’s name. Badolato says she had grown up learning to compartmentalize for the sake of her own emotional survival. She’d perfected the art of engaging with someone whose actions she couldn’t stand. Doing this work had felt like a way of taking her trauma and putting it to good use, of leveraging her past as a safeguard against her daughter’s and other children’s futures.
Of course there were moments that were hard to take — when suspects mentioned which brands of lubrication were best or whether or not a parent might hold a child down. There were times when she knew that even talking about these things was a turn-on for these men, times when the conversations made her nauseous, times when she’d lie awake all night or play back a recording and think, “Holy shit, I listened to this? I said these words?” But she kept faith in the mission. She reminded herself that the pictures she sent of her daughter — the beautiful, little girl sleeping in the next room — did not represent a real child on offer. “I was thinking, ‘If I send this obscure picture of my daughter and he acts on it, then he’s never going to harm my daughter or anybody else’s,’ ” Badolato says now. “I was presenting a fake girl to save a real one.”
**Kyle Parks seemed** to think he could get away with anything. He seemed to think, for instance, that he could get away with running a brothel, a 1-900 sex line, and a housecleaning company out of the same Columbus, Ohio, office park and under the same oxymoronic name, XXXREC and Hygiene Services. He seemed to think he could invite one young woman and five teenagers (four of whom he had only just met) on a road trip to Florida, but instead deposit them in two rooms of a Red Roof Inn in St. Charles, Missouri. When they piled out of the minivan — high on the drugs he’d given them — saw snow falling and asked to be taken home, he thought he could make a little money off them first. All it took was a few ads in Backpage — the Craigslist of sex advertisements — and men began showing up.
Even after things started going south for him, Parks couldn’t fathom that he wouldn’t prevail. When someone alerted law enforcement as to what was going on, Parks (who, according to legal documents, had been out getting food when the police showed up) burst into the precinct the next morning looking to bail his “friend” out. When questioned about the 88 condoms found in the back of his van, he said they had been prescribed to him by a doctor. After being taken into custody, he protested that he was being set up. Most people would have cut their losses and pleaded guilty, but not Parks. He thought he could take his case to court and win.
And it wasn’t impossible to imagine that he might. Badolato knew that even the tightest cases could go sideways when put before 12 people who would inevitably enter the courtroom with a cinematic sense of what [sex trafficking](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/sex-trafficking/) was supposed to be. In fact, it wasn’t just the jury that Badolato knew she would need to convince; it was also often the victims themselves, young people who had internalized the exact same misconceptions about trafficking that the jury had — along with any number of other judgments society had thrown their way — and who were loath to submit themselves to a courtroom full of more judgment.
Of all of Parks’ underage victims, the hardest to pin down had been a 17-year-old we’ll call Sierra. Once she returned to Columbus, Sierra seemed to basically disappear. Calls to her mother’s number went unanswered. When one of the other victims managed to track her down in December 2016, a month before the case was to go to trial, Sierra agreed to meet Badolato on a blighted Columbus block with a string of dilapidated homes, climbing into the bureau’s Chevy Malibu with matted hair, dirty clothes, and a wary expression.
By this time, Badolato had remarried, had a second child, relocated to St. Louis, and taken over as head of the Child Exploitation Joint Task Force, which had become one of the most productive FBI teams in the country in terms of arrests and convictions. Meanwhile, as the internet streamlined the process of buying or selling any good or service, trafficking had become one of the fastest-growing criminal enterprises, estimated by the Department of Homeland Security to bring in $150 billion globally and considered by many criminals to be a superior business model: If caught, the sentences were often lighter than those for peddling drugs; and unlike crack or heroin, the same product could be “used” again and again and again.
Badolato taught her team of 20 how to do the online undercover work she’d trailblazed in Atlanta, tracking the movements of child-abuse material through the online underworld and then prosecuting those who distributed and produced it. Her new squad also initiated her in the type of undercover work it had been doing before her arrival: covert sting operations in which a detective would pose as a john, set up a “date,” and then meet said date in a hotel room fitted out with hidden recording devices while, in the next room over, a task-force team listened in, waiting for the code word that would let them know that enough evidence had been gathered for them to swoop in and shut the op down. This had proved a very effective technique for getting convictions, but Badolato’s arrival coincided with both a growing sentiment that consensual sex work had been over-criminalized and an increasing awareness that what looked like consensual sex work might actually be trafficking, no matter what the “date” professed in that hotel room.
Badolato has a tendency to say aloud the things she notices — about you, about others, about situations — observations that are not at all unkind but are perceptive enough that most people would keep them to themselves. She points out when someone deflects, and she has a sharp eye for defense mechanisms. She once casually mentions my tendency to mirror other people’s vocal and speech patterns. She is not shy about bringing up the emotional and physical abuse she says she experienced as a child, and she is quick to comment when someone is making excuses for someone else’s behavior. It was soon clear to her colleagues that Badolato brought a trauma-informed mentality to the work, a tendency to look beyond what someone was doing and instead try to parse why they were doing it. And she was relentless: While some squads did one or two trafficking sting ops a year, her team was doing four or five a month. In addition to the hotel rooms reserved for the john and the team, they would have a social worker set up in a third room, ready to offer services to the victims. They would have lookouts stationed to see who might be dropping the date off. If that date was found to be underage, the case was automatically classified as trafficking. But even if they weren’t, Badolato’s team was primed to get to the bottom of what was going on, to figure out whether they were being manipulated or coerced, and by whom.
“If I could put my hands on a pimp, that’s what I wanted,” says Jeff Roediger, a St. Louis county detective who was the “john” for many of Badolato’s sting ops and who makes clear that the team was not interested in policing voluntary sex work. “When I had those types of cases, and I knew they were being sincere with me, I wouldn’t book them,” he says. “It was all about talking to the girls. It’s not like in the movies where they come running to you. You know, ‘Thanks, you rescued me!’ It’s not like that. A lot of them try to bullshit you at first — ‘That’s my boyfriend, blah blah blah’— but once I talked to them for a while, they would become more forthcoming.”
Badolato’s unit was one of the first in the country to take on this “progressive and proactive” approach, as she puts it. Soon, St. Louis looked like a sex-trafficking capital — not because it was actually trafficking more victims than other cities but because the task force was so aggressively pursuing those cases, and classifying them as what they were. “I mean, I was working in vice for years,” says Roediger. “Back in the day, it was always ‘prostitution,’‘prostitution,’‘prostitution’ — until we started to figure it out a little bit, until we started digging a little deeper.”
Once they did, the task force found that roughly a third of the sex-trafficking victims they recovered were under the age of 17 — and they began to see the reach of the problem. Kids were being trafficked out of every hotel in the area, from the seediest roach motel to the fanciest Ritz-Carlton. They were being trafficked every time of day and by every socioeconomic group (“Before you go do brain surgery, you got to bust a nut real quick,” one underage victim told Badolato of her high-end clientele). Some of the victims were girls. Some were boys. Some were LGBTQ kids who’d been kicked out of their homes. Some were straight cis kids from the suburbs. “I tell people that I could probably name two or three \[kids\] in the school district they live in that have been trafficked,” Roediger says. “And they just can’t comprehend it.”
There were kids who were about to age out of foster care (a particularly at-risk group, according to those who work in the field), kids who’d run away, kids who were being sold to pay their family’s rent, or to buy their family member’s drugs. There were kids who’d sit in the hotel room, backpack at their feet, dutifully working on their math homework while agents and social workers tried to figure out what to do with them. Was their home life safe enough that they could be returned to it? Would a residential program take them? Of all the imperfect options, which would make them least likely to be trafficked again?
The one common denominator was this: They all had a vulnerability that could be preyed upon. They all lacked a safety net — societal, familial, emotional, or some combination thereof — that might have broken their fall. Mostly, their stories weren’t dramatic; they were typical American tales of neglect, of abuse doled out casually, of a steady stream of letdowns by people and institutions who should have propped them up. Badolato found that she had a knack for getting them to talk about this, for getting them to open up to her. She didn’t look like an FBI agent — at least not what they’d imagined. She spoke softly, but with authority and a slight vocal fry. And she thinks that, at some level, they could probably sense that she’d once been a vulnerable kid too, that with only a few slightly different twists of fate, she could have become a trafficking victim herself — and that she knew it. “My trauma looks different than theirs, but it’s trauma nonetheless,” she says. “And I think victims can feel that.”
Badolato with former FBI director Robert Mueller on the day she graduated from the academy in 2002.
**As the task** force learned more about the psychology of victims, they also learned more about the ways in which their vulnerability was being manipulated, and how those ways were evolving. It was known in law-enforcement circles that once a skilled trafficker set his or her sights on a vulnerable young person, they could be groomed in a matter of days: one day for an introduction, a day or two to make the victim feel special and cared for, and then the day when a “friend” comes over and he needs to be “cared for” as well. Sometimes violence was involved at that point; sometimes drug use was involved throughout. But emotional manipulation was the key element, which is why it was so easy for grooming to move online, for groomers to take advantage of the false senses of connection fostered on social media.
Of the victims who are not being trafficked by family members, the majority are being groomed in this way. “I would say that probably 75 percent of the initial grooming is happening online now,” says Cindy Malott, the director of U.S. Safe Programs at Crisis Aid International. “Recruiters used to have to work really, really hard to get access to kids, but now they’re practically sitting in a child’s bedroom. And kids put everything out there — what’s going on in their life, who they’re angry about, parents are going through a divorce, their insecurities about their body, about themselves, what they do, how they spend their time — so it’s like a gift to these predators.”
The ways to manipulate are legion: Get a kid to send a compromising photo, and she’ll do almost anything to keep you from sending it out to all her Facebook friends; find out a gay kid is still closeted, and the threat of outing him gives you incredible power. And predators aren’t just on Instagram and Snapchat; they lurk in the chat functions of Roblox, *Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto.* “They’re everywhere,” says Malott. “People think, ‘Oh, I just got to keep my kids away from those porn sites, those horrible places.’ Well, no, predators are gonna go where the kids are.” And once there, they’re going to zero in on the kids who are most vulnerable.
That’s what got to Badolato. In her online undercover work, she’d plumbed the psychology of pedophiles, but now she wasn’t just dealing with suspects; she was spending time with victims and seeing the same vulnerabilities in them that the traffickers had seen: the instability or poverty, the addiction or mental health issues or abuse that had been normalized in their lives long before the traffickers entered them. Sometimes Badolato couldn’t help but feel that all the conspiracies and misconceptions weren’t just a distraction from the truth of trafficking but rather some sick attempt to let society off the hook for trying to solve the much more intractable problems at trafficking’s root. “People would rather stick their head in the sand than address the real problem, because then you have to face and talk about the societal issues,” she says. “With a movie like *Sound of Freedom*, it’s like, ‘Oh, this is in a jungle in South America. This isn’t actually in \[my neighborhood\].’ You know? It’s easier for people to ignore the problem than deal with the issues on a societal level.”
**By the time** Badolato was sitting in that Chevy with Sierra, on that blighted Ohio block, she knew that the rate of re-victimization for children who are trafficked was as high as 95 percent, according to FBI reports. She knew that 90 percent of sex-trafficking victims have a history of child sexual abuse, that more than 75 percent had lived in foster or adoptive care. She knew that she could arrest one perpetrator, and another would pop up in his place, that she could send one pimp to prison and the same victims would show up to stings some short time later, run by a different crew. She knew that testifying was a way for Sierra to psychologically push back against what had happened to her, and she was right: After the young woman took the stand on Jan. 10, 2017, Parks was found guilty and sentenced to 25 years; while testifying, Sierra had seemed to transform, to channel and embody a sort of empowerment. But Badolato also knew that once her testimony was over, Sierra would go back to that blighted block. She wondered how long that empowerment would last.
She also wondered about her own trajectory, her own ability to continue doing this work. The youngest trafficking victim she’d ever recovered from a sting op — an 11-year-old who’d been recruited through Facebook — had been returned to her family in a house that had no heat (Badolato had used an FBI slush fund to get it turned back on). One did not become immune to the human misery of such things. They compounded, became harder and harder to compartmentalize. “It’s just a combination of all of those years — and it’s all awful,” she says. “But there are particular moments that, for one reason or another, you can’t get out of your head. I just don’t think it’s in human nature to be exposed to that for so long and it not start changing who you are.”
One night, at a restaurant near where Badolato lives, I ask her whether she thinks children are being sex-trafficked right then, in that very moment, in just the mile or two radius around us. She’s quiet for a long time, her gaze fixed downward at her glass of wine. By the time she looks up, her whole body is trembling. “It’s happening right now,” she says quietly. “Right now some little girl is being dropped off in the parking lot of a motel. There are three or four girls holed up in a hotel next to a McDonald’s. It’s not only when we think about it. It is happening all the time. And if I’m just sitting here, present, having dinner, not thinking about it, that means I’m ignoring a problem that I know is real.” Tears stream down her face.
“Many images have never left my mind,” she says. “It’s really hard to have worked your entire life in law enforcement with a lot of child [crime](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/crime/) victims and be at the end of your career looking at the situation where you realize you can only do so much to make a difference.” Badolato wipes back the tears with the palm of her hand and shudders her head, as if she can shake the thoughts away. “Damn,” she says. “Fuck. I shouldn’t be the one crying. I’m not the victim of this.” The veteran agent steels herself and repeats, “I am not the victim.”
**The house where** Korina Ellison says she was first sex-trafficked no longer exists. It once stood on an unassuming lot in a residential suburb of Portland, Oregon, that stumbles down to the banks of the Willamette River. Now, Ellison can’t quite bring the house’s features to mind. She was so young back then, maybe four or five. There is so much she’s repressed, or only pieced together after the fact. As a child, she wouldn’t have known what she now believes to be true: that her grandmother scored her drugs by offering up her youngest daughter, Ellison’s mom. Or that, once her mom was hooked on the meth cooked by the man who’d lived in that house, she’d known just what to do to get more. But Ellison does remember being inside the house, unclothed. She does remember how the man would touch her.
Her life unspooled from there. Her father died of a heroin overdose when she was six. Her mom lost custody for good. She bounced around foster care, then various residential institutions, then whatever shelter she could find. In the story she tells of how she was sex-trafficked again in her teenage years, there’s no moment of drama, no kidnapping, no clear coercion. There was just a random, rainy afternoon when she had no place to go and was alone in the street and a car pulled up. The man inside took her home with him, fed her, introduced her to his girlfriend. They took her shopping. They let her stay. When men showed up at the home to have sex with the woman, Ellison was invited to watch, but she wasn’t expected to participate — not at first, anyway. According to a statement Ellison later made to law enforcement, she just “realized that people aren’t going to take care of \[me\] for free.” Soon, the woman was posting Ellison’s services on Backpage — $150 for half an hour, $200 for a full one — and the trio were traveling the Midwest. For a long time, it didn’t even occur to Ellison, then 16, to leave. “Where would I have gone?” she asks. “I’d been missing for over a year. Nobody was looking for me.” When the man told her to call him “Daddy,” she complied.
Korina Ellison, a trafficking survivor, around the time she was recovered by Badolato’s task force. Courtesy of the subject
That was more than a decade ago, near the beginning of Badolato’s tenure as head of the Child Exploitation Task Force. But by 2021, leaving it had seemed a necessary form of self-preservation. One of her last cases had gone well legally: The perp, a retired police officer from California who had produced child sex-abuse materials of three sisters in Manila, had pleaded guilty to such charges when he learned that Badolato had brought the girls to the states to testify against him. But the experience had been emotionally devastating for Badolato, who had wanted the sisters, then 16, 13, and 11, to have memories of the U.S that consisted of more than reliving their trauma in a courtroom. She took them shopping and to the zoo, invited them to her home to have dinner with her own family, saw them slowly start to open up and laugh and behave like the children they were. Then she’d had to put them on a flight back to Manila, back to the aunt who had allowed the man to abuse them and who Badolato had been unable to extradite. Fortunately, she says, their estranged father ended up intervening and taking custody of the girls, but that feeling of futility in the fight lingered.
>
> “If I can be perfectly honest,” Badolato says, “I truly don’t believe that the FBI realizes what they put their agents through doing that kind of work.”
“I stayed for a little bit longer after that trial, but it really was when I should have been able to look myself in the mirror and say, ‘Nikki, you’re done,’ ” Badolato had told me in St. Louis. “It became clear that I had been doing it too long.” She’d spend the last couple of years working national security, a position without the immediacy of child-exploitation work, but also without the heartache. “If I can be perfectly honest, I truly don’t believe that the FBI realizes what they put their agents through doing that kind of work. I just don’t,” she says.
And yet, here Badolato was in Portland, leading Ellison, now 30, up to her hotel room, telling her about all the announcements she’d heard in the Atlanta airport instructing travelers to be on the lookout for sex trafficking. “It’s like white noise in the background,” she says as Ellison settles into the sofa. “It’s a false sense of doing something to help.”
“Here’s the thing: Nobody knows what to look for,” Ellison agrees.
“And what about the victims who are in that airport, who are walking around and listening?” Badolato asks.
“I wouldn’t have even heard that announcement,” Ellison replies. “Because I didn’t feel like a victim. It goes a lot, lot, lot deeper than anybody realizes.”
That’s what she and Badolato both understand. That’s why they started talking eight months ago. Of all the teenage victims Badolato’s task force recovered, Ellison is one of the few who she knows has permanently extricated herself from being prostituted, though it took years for her to get to that point, years for her to see that what happened to her was not her fault but rather a fault in the system, a fault in many systems over the course of generations. Neither she nor Badolato can fix that.
Yet they can’t help feeling like there’s something they can fix — or at least try to. Under the umbrella of an organization she’s founded called Innocent Warriors, Badolato created a program for schools, instructing educators on the signs that might indicate a student is being trafficked and teaching kids how to avoid getting groomed online, which, she believes, is not about stranger danger but rather an awareness of subtle manipulation. Ellison has been working with trafficked youth through nonprofits like Children of the Night, the residential program where Badolato’s team sent her when she was 17. Together, they’ve been talking about having Ellison help train undercovers who are learning to do trafficking sting ops. They’ve also discussed starting a mentorship program in which children who are still being sex-trafficked are paired with young adults like Ellison who once were, providing a way for victims to begin to envision a different future for themselves and a path toward it even while being prostituted. Such a program may be retroactive rather than proactive, but it would capitalize on Badolato’s and Ellison’s experience and expertise — and it could help in the healing of mentors and mentees alike.
Badolato had traveled to Portland for the two to talk face-to-face about how the program might work. “You have to understand how they’ve been traumatized because sometimes, to a child, relating doesn’t sound like you’re relating. It sounds like you’re pointing out all the bad things in them,” says Ellison from the driver’s seat of her Nissan Pathfinder as she drives Badolato around to show her certain landmarks of her past after she’d left Children of the Night: the bridge she’d slept under for over a year after a boyfriend had gotten her hooked on heroin, the blocks downtown where she’d bounced between a children’s shelter and the needle exchange. It had taken a prison sentence for her to finally break her addiction and commit to a different kind of life, though that evolution had had less to do with not having access to drugs than with seeing her own mother cycle in and out of the same facility — like looking into her own future and witnessing how bleak it would be. Maybe, she thought, she could provide the inverse of that for kids in Innocent Warriors. Maybe she could reverse engineer her own escape.
“I just want to make it very clear that if you were a victim, you are a victim, and just to not have any shame in that,” she tells Badolato as they drive through Portland’s misty streets.
“What I anticipate and hope is that then we get survivors that are like, ‘They get it,’ ” Badolato replies. “And that it opens up doors to help, for people to recognize that there are people who get what’s really going on.”
“It took a really long time for me,” Ellison says of coming to terms with her own victimhood.
“It’s like reworking your thought process about some of those things,” Badolato agrees. “And that’s hard, and it happens slowly over time, and it looks different for everybody.”
Ellison grips the wheel tightly. “The truth does matter. It does. The truth is the fucking truth. And it’s been empowering to be able to talk about it because that’s another way that I’ve realized, like, ‘Man, I was a victim,’ is re-going over all of this. Because when it happens so many times, you do blame yourself. It’s a lot easier to just continue to live in a lie than believe that you were lied to.”
Still, Ellison and Badolato agree that the impressionability that makes children vulnerable is also what makes them open to guidance and mentorship if a relationship of trust can be established. “What do you think a parent does? They groom you. I’d been waiting to be guided and groomed,” Ellison says.
It’s been instructive to see that potential from another perspective, as a mother doing the guiding. As the afternoon wears on, Ellison stops to pick up her then-15-month-old son, who was being watched by a social-worker friend. She buckles the little boy into his car seat, ruffles his hair, and passes him a bottle. He grins widely and begins removing his shoes and socks, throwing them gleefully onto the floor of the car and then kicking his tiny feet in time with the music as Ellison glances back at him and smiles. “Kids are so perfect,” she says.
The last stop of the day is the large plot of land where the drug dealer’s house once stood. Now, it’s been turned into a playground, with brightly-colored jungle gyms, a covered picnic area, and a large lawn, where a couple leisurely walks their dog. Ellison and Badolato climb down from the car and stand at the park’s edge, as Ellison’s son toddles around the grass, oblivious to what had transpired in that very spot. There is some form of poetic justice in the land being earmarked for children’s enjoyment, but neither woman voices it. Mostly, they’re quiet. Night is falling, the air growing cooler, and the gray sky fading into dusk.
“You would never think a park could hide what it used to be,” Ellison says at last. And yet it did. Driving off with Badolato at her side and her son babbling happily in the back seat, Ellison glances in the rearview mirror, but only for a moment. Badolato keeps her eyes fixed only on the road ahead.
*If you or someone you know may be involved in trafficking, call the toll-free National Human Trafficking Hotline at 888-373-7888, text the hotline at 233733, or talk online at humantraffickinghotline.org/chat.*
# An Iowa paperboy disappeared 41 years ago. His mother is still on the case
After his disappearance in 1982, Johnny Gosch became one of the first “milk carton kids.” (Des Moines Register/USA Today Network)
**WEST DES MOINES, Iowa** — Johnny Gosch left home for the last time on a warm Sunday in late summer, in the pale morning light before sunrise. He was 12 years old, and he liked building model rockets. Just before 6 a.m., a neighbor heard a wagon rattling through the yard and figured it was Johnny taking his usual shortcut on his way to pick up his newspapers. Another paperboy recalled seeing Johnny near the newspaper drop site. The boy saw a blue car pull up, and saw Johnny talking to a stranger.
What happened in the next few minutes would resonate for the next four decades, far beyond the rolling green hills of Iowa. Johnny would become a tragic abstraction, a face on a milk carton, a story that warned other kids away from paper routes and changed the way police handled missing-children cases.
The reasons for Johnny’s disappearance would be fiercely debated. Theories would proliferate. Some would call it an impenetrable mystery, insisting that countless hours of police work had led nowhere near the truth.
Johnny’s mother would open a parallel investigation, one that continues to this day. In August 2023, not long before her 80th birthday, she pointed to her own skull and said, “I’ve got pretty much all of it in the file cabinet up here.”
By then she had named the names of more than half a dozen alleged perpetrators or potential suspects, none of whom had been arrested in her son’s case. She’d been ignored and dismissed, threatened and ridiculed, but Noreen Gosch kept searching for answers. The loss of Johnny changed the way she saw America. She said it convinced her of the corruption in our institutions, the injustice in our justice system, the breathtaking power behind the men who took her son. A force none other than evil itself.
The Gosch case is a vast labyrinth, full of wonder and terror, a place so dark you can barely see your hand in front of your face. I spent several months there while reporting this story, trying to reconcile Noreen’s findings with those of the authorities, hoping to gather all the objective facts. Many of those facts remain undiscovered.
And so, a warning: Any conclusion you make about the fate of Johnny Gosch will require some combination of guesswork and faith. Most people who study the case eventually settle on one of the following two theories.
You can choose to believe that Johnny was murdered soon after his disappearance, even though no killer has been identified and no remains have been found.
Or you can believe Noreen Gosch, who says she saw Johnny years later, very much alive, and talked to him just long enough to know why he had to disappear again.
Four decades later, Noreen Gosch is still investigating her son’s disappearance. (Will Lanzoni/CNN)
### A stranger in a blue car kept asking for directions
About 41 years after Johnny vanished, his mother rode through the wide, quiet streets of what used to be her neighborhood. A summer afternoon was getting on toward dusk. Noreen Gosch wore dark sunglasses, and her nails were painted a glittering blue. She had the calm resolve of a farm girl from the northern prairie.
She had once survived a tornado that destroyed her house, and she became a widow at a young age when her first husband died of cancer in 1965. Noreen married another man, John Gosch, and their son Johnny was born in 1969. She had gotten very good at controlling her emotions, even when talking about the worst thing a mother could imagine.
“There,” she said, on Marcourt Lane, just off 42nd Street, “that’s where Johnny was kidnapped.”
By now she could talk about Johnny’s case for hours on end: the twists and turns of her investigation, the compounding horrors and astounding revelations. On this drive down memory lane, she’d also been imagining what might have been, if not for that one morning. Noreen had other stories about Johnny. Better ones.
He would ask his older sister to drive him to the mall, where he’d use his paper-route money to buy supplies for model rockets. And then, if he had some money left, he’d go upstairs to the flower shop to buy a single rose. Johnny did this a few times. He’d walk up to Noreen with the rose behind his back. And then he’d pull it out and hand it to her and say,
This is for you, Mom.
There was also the time Johnny took on the bullies. Four boys in their neighborhood liked to terrorize smaller children, steal and smash their lunchboxes. One day Johnny walked by and saw the bullies picking on a little kid. Johnny was big for his age. He knocked down the bullies and led the little boy home. Then he went to his own house and said nothing about what he’d done. The little boy’s mother told Noreen about this a few days after that terrible morning, when Johnny was outnumbered again.
It was September 5, 1982, when the stranger in the blue car pulled up near Johnny. Witnesses would later say the car was two-tone blue, perhaps a Ford Fairmont. The driver “was described as a white male in his thirties, possibly having a mustache and somewhat dark complected,” according to a police report. Johnny was on his way to a newspaper drop site when the man stopped the car, backed up, stopped again near Johnny, and asked for directions to 86th Street.
In the span of about 10 minutes, the stranger in the blue car asked at least three people for directions. And near the newspaper drop site, another stranger appeared.
As Johnny walked north on 42nd Street, a very tall man was seen walking behind him. It seemed he was following Johnny.
Moments later, two other paper carriers saw Johnny on Marcourt Lane. For reasons not made clear in the police report, Johnny stopped pulling his wagon and sat down. When the other carriers picked up their papers and returned to the same place, Johnny’s wagon was still there.
But Johnny was gone.
Another witness looked out his bedroom window and saw what may have been a silver and black Ford Fairmont running a stop sign, turning left on 42nd Street, and heading north toward the interstate.
Crucial minutes passed. Almost two hours after Johnny was last seen on the streets of West Des Moines, the phone started ringing at the Gosch house. Subscribers were asking why Johnny hadn’t delivered their papers.
“His dad went out and delivered all the papers,” Noreen said, not far from the place where Johnny’s wagon was found. “And then I had put a call in to the police, but we waited almost an hour for them to come.”
Noreen had lived more than half her life with a strange relationship to time. Even as she grew older she was frozen in one place, reliving the same day, trying to make sense of the moments that tore her family apart. She looked at their old house at the end of the cul-de-sac, noticed it had been repainted, remarked on how much the trees had grown. It was 2023, but it was still 1982, and Noreen repeated a central finding of her long investigation.
“The police chief was corrupt,” she said. “I know a lot more about him.”
Johnny’s parents eventually divorced and moved away from what was once his home. (Will Lanzoni/CNN)
### A police chief’s questionable record
Orval Cooney’s name and photograph appeared on the front page of the *Des Moines Register* on February 27, 1951, when he was 17. The story said he was among five youths accused of taking a teenage boy for a ride and “severely beating him.” In June, he pleaded guilty to assault with intent to inflict great bodily injury; he was sentenced to 30 days in jail, the paper said. Later he served in the Marines and worked as an upholsterer before becoming a police officer. In 1976, after eight years with the agency, Cooney was appointed chief of the West Des Moines Police Department.
Early in 1982, the *Des Moines Tribune* published an astonishing piece of investigative journalism. The reporters interviewed 18 employees of the West Des Moines Police Department, including 14 of the 20 patrol officers, who alleged that Cooney had “beaten a handcuffed prisoner, compromised a burglary investigation implicating one of his sons and threatened and harassed his own officers. They say they have smelled alcohol on his breath when he was on the street at night checking up on them and that they’ve seen beer cans in the vehicle he uses.”
The report said the department had no Black employees, and cited three employees who said they heard Cooney say “he would never hire a Black or a woman as an officer.” The sources also accused Cooney of repeatedly using the N-word.
The city opened its own investigation, which spared Cooney and instead found wrongdoing by the whistleblowers. Two officers were fired, allegedly for misdeeds committed months earlier, and several others were reprimanded. A *Tribune* editorial complained that “the city officials who launched the investigation might have had a whitewash in mind from the beginning.” Cooney kept his job. He was still chief that September, when Johnny Gosch disappeared.
Noreen believed in the system until that day. She says an officer asked her if Johnny had ever run away before, even though it was obvious to her that Johnny had been kidnapped. She says the police did far too little to investigate the case in the first 72 hours. And she says that as volunteers searched the woods and fields for Johnny, some reported that Chief Cooney had told them to go home, because “the kid is probably just a damn runaway.”
Volunteers searched for Johnny, but he was nowhere to be found. (Des Moines Register/USA Today Network)
She kept examining the puzzle in her mind, arranging and re-arranging the pieces. And she kept thinking about the incident at the football game.
Two nights before Johnny disappeared, the Gosches went to Valley High School to watch their older son’s JV football game. Johnny left to get some popcorn from the concession stand. When he didn’t return right away, his father went looking for him and found him under the bleachers, talking to a police officer.
Noreen says she questioned Johnny about the encounter. He didn’t seem upset about it — in fact, he told her the officer was very nice — but it seemed strange to Noreen that a cop had called to her son from under the bleachers so they could have a private conversation in the dark.
Why did you go? she asked.
He was a policeman, Johnny said. Don’t you have to do what he says?
After the game, as they were leaving, Johnny pointed out the officer. Noreen got a good look at his face. And after Johnny disappeared, Noreen wanted to question the officer. But first she had to find out who he was.
Noreen made an appointment at the West Des Moines Police Department and then went to the school board office and obtained a list of cops who’d been hired to provide security at the football stadium. She brought it to her meeting with Chief Cooney, where pictures of the department’s officers were laid out on a table.
None of the pictures resembled the man who’d been under the bleachers with Johnny. Noreen insisted that some pictures must be missing. Finally an official left the room and came back with more pictures. Noreen says she recognized one as the cop from the football game. And with the roster of officers who worked security, she figured out his name.
It’s possible there was an innocent explanation for the encounter. Other officers told me the cop in question was interviewed by investigators after Johnny disappeared, and that he’d done nothing wrong. But Noreen felt stonewalled.
She had two copies of the roster, and handed one to the police chief. She says Cooney started yelling and stamping his feet. Noreen asked if she could question the officer, but Cooney told her that wouldn’t be possible. She wondered if the chief was hiding something.
(The West Des Moines Police Department declined to release its full investigative case file, because the Gosch case is still an active investigation involving state and federal authorities, and declined to make any current investigators available for an interview. It also declined to answer my extensive list of questions about the case. But the agency did send me a statement, which read, in part, “We understand how deeply this case has affected the family, the community, law enforcement officials and the nation. This case will remain open, and we won’t stop investigating until we have closure and answers as to what happened to Johnny Gosch.”)
In 1982, after more disagreements with Chief Cooney about Johnny’s case, Noreen’s suspicion grew. Her son, a responsible paperboy who’d kept the route for almost a year, had vanished without delivering a single paper. Witnesses had seen two strange men nearby, including one who talked to Johnny, and had seen a car run a stop sign and leave the area where Johnny was last seen. And the police would not even call it a kidnapping. It seemed to Noreen that the failure to solve the case could not be solely explained by a lack of evidence.
The Gosch case stayed in the news for years after Johnny vanished. (Will Lanzoni/CNN)
### Johnny may have been seen in Oklahoma and Texas
Four days after Johnny disappeared, a picture of his mother and father was published on the front page of the *Des Moines Tribune*. They were holding hands. John Gosch stood on the front porch, and Noreen sat on a brick ledge in front of him, looking mournful. Behind them, the porch light burned. They kept it on for Johnny, just in case he ever found his way home.
If he’d been killed in those early days, as some people suspected, no such evidence came to light. In fact, there were signs that Johnny might be alive.
About six months after he vanished, he may have been seen in Oklahoma. A woman reported that she’d seen a boy on a streetcorner, out of breath and asking for help.
My name is John David Gosch, he told her, before two men grabbed him and dragged him away.
It’s not clear whether the woman told police about what she’d seen. Her name was not made public, although a reporter for the *Chicago Tribune* later interviewed her on condition of anonymity. In any case, according to news reports, the woman was apparently unaware of the Gosch disappearance until months after her encounter with the boy, when she saw a story about Johnny’s case on TV and recognized his picture.
According to a story from the Associated Press, the woman got in touch with a private investigator working for the Gosches. A spokesman for a Chicago-based firm called the Investigative Research Agency was quoted as saying, “We and the FBI checked it out. And we’re both convinced it positively was Johnny.” The AP story said an FBI spokesman declined to comment on an ongoing investigation. Decades later, when I inquired with the FBI about this incident, a spokesperson replied, “We don’t confirm or deny investigations.”
Just after midnight on February 22, 1984, about a year after the possible sighting in Oklahoma, the phone rang at the Gosch house in West Des Moines. Noreen picked up. Someone said, “Mom?” She thought it sounded like Johnny.
She later said his words were slurred, and he was asking for help. When she asked where he was, someone hung up the phone. She answered two more brief calls in the next few minutes, again from someone who sounded like Johnny. Noreen told him she loved him, and that he should try to get away to a police officer. The line went dead. She informed the police but said she was told the calls were untraceable.
About a month later, the AP published a story on more reported sightings of Johnny, this time in Texas. Guy Genovese, a sheriff’s investigator in Nueces County, was quoted as saying, “I believe the boy is alive and I believe he can be found, but I’m not saying when or anything like this.”
It seemed possible that Johnny was out there, in the hands of bad men, hoping to be rescued. Other sightings would be reported in the years that followed. Noreen herself would eventually swear under penalty of perjury that she’d seen Johnny again.
But first, a man came forward with new information about the case. He claimed to be one of the kidnappers.
Noreen Gosch says Johnny used his paper-route money to buy her roses. (Will Lanzoni/CNN)
### Was Johnny taken by kidnappers from Nebraska?
One day in 1991, Noreen got a phone call from a private investigator in Nebraska. He worked with a lawyer whose client was in prison for child molestation. This prison inmate said he’d taken part in kidnapping Johnny. The investigator had several hours’ worth of recorded interviews with the supposed kidnapper. He offered to visit Noreen and play the tapes.
By then, almost nine years after Johnny disappeared, Noreen was desperate for reliable information. And she was used to going about the mundane business of daily life even as she contemplated the awful details of what happened to her son. So she told the investigator to come over on a Saturday. They would spend much of the day going over the tapes. And Noreen would make Italian beef sandwiches for lunch.
Johnny used to love those sandwiches. Noreen put a beef roast in the slow-cooker, along with broth and garlic and oregano and pepperoncini and some juice from the pepperoncini jar. It was all simmering when she and the investigator, Roy Stephens, sat down at the kitchen table. He put in a tape and pressed play.
The voice on the tape belonged to Paul Bonacci, then 23 years old. He had endured a miserable childhood, full of sexual abuse and other horrors, and once told a psychiatrist that his first stepfather chopped up toys with an axe.
Adrift, Bonacci met a boy named Mike in a park outside Omaha. Bonacci told him about some of the abuse he suffered. Mike seemed interested in this, and introduced him to a man named Emilio, who produced child pornography, according to Bonacci. It was 1982. Paul Bonacci was 15. Just before Labor Day weekend, Mike and Emilio invited Bonacci on a trip with them. They were going to Iowa.
Bonacci has told the story many times since the early 1990s. This account is drawn from sworn testimony he gave at a court hearing in 1999.
In September 1982, Bonacci said, he accepted the invitation to go on a road trip with Mike and Emilio. They stayed at a hotel on the west side of Des Moines. Another man came in, holding a paper bag full of photographs.
This is the one, he said, pointing to a picture of Johnny Gosch.
Bonacci said he wasn’t exactly sure how Johnny was chosen, but “a lot of it had to do with the fact of the way he looked. Because the color of his hair and his eyes and everything. It could make them more money, I guess.”
Once he realized he’d been drawn into a kidnapping plot, Bonacci said, he tried to back out. But then, he said, “Emilio took me for a little drive, stuck a gun in my head on a dirt road and told me I either did this or he was going to blow my brains out right there and then.”
So Bonacci agreed to help with the kidnapping. Back at the hotel, the conspirators rehearsed the plan, which involved three vehicles and about half a dozen people. They arranged chairs to serve as models for seats in the kidnap car, and practiced where they would sit. Paul and Mike would be in the back. The driver would pull up to Johnny, ask him a question, then drive around the block. Then Paul would get out and ask Johnny a question. He was small and nonthreatening. As he later said, children are sometimes frightened by strange adults. “But \[when\] kids your own age are talking to you and stuff you normally aren’t frightened by them.” Paul said he was there to “lure him or get him close enough to the car where we could get him in.”
Marcourt Lane in the suburban community of West Des Moines, Iowa. The Gosch family lived around the corner. (Will Lanzoni/CNN)
Early the next morning, they carried out the plan. Paul got out and asked Johnny a question. He said a man named Tony pushed Johnny into the car. Paul helped incapacitate Johnny by putting a chloroform-soaked rag over his face. They drove out of town.
Once they’d made their getaway, the kidnappers switched Johnny from one vehicle to another. The original kidnap car apparently drove east toward Chicago. A station wagon went south. Out in the country, where the corn would have been high in late summer, the kidnappers put Johnny into a van that drove west, toward Omaha, and then north, to a house near Sioux City.
“That night at first Emilio and this couple other guys went into town to drink,” Bonacci said, according to a court transcript. “And they left me, Mike and Johnny in a room that had no windows on it. That they had locked from the outside of the room and stuff. They lock us all three in this room. And that night when they got back they ordered me and Mike to do some things with, sexual things with Johnny. And they filmed it so that they could sell the film or whatever they were going to do with it.”
Bonacci said he was driven back to Omaha the next day. Johnny stayed behind in Sioux City.
“And then a couple of months later I got a chance to take a trip out to Colorado,” Bonacci said. “And that’s where I seen Johnny Gosch the second time. And at that point he was staying with a guy that I only knew as The Colonel. And it was a kind of a ranch house but it was out, had a raised floor, underneath there was a space that had been dug out. And that’s where they kept some of the kids at and stuff when they caused trouble or were bad.”
There have been plenty of questions about Bonacci’s claims. In 1993, the Fox TV show “America’s Most Wanted” depicted Bonacci leading a camera crew to an abandoned house in Colorado where he said Johnny had been kept. Producer Paul Sparrow said on the film “Who Took Johnny” that the house had a secret underground chamber with what he thought were children’s initials carved into the wood. (The film did not show independent confirmation for that claim.) Weeks after that episode of “America’s Most Wanted” was broadcast, the Omaha World-Herald published a story that said sheriff’s investigators in Colorado had examined Bonacci’s claims about the house and “don’t have any substantiation that Gosch was ever held there or that any laws were violated.”
It’s not clear how they reached their determination. I requested documents of that investigation from the Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office. Even though the agency found and provided records dating back to 1982 in response to a related request, a records manager said she could find nothing in the system about the 1993 investigation of Bonacci’s claims.
If there was any good news in Bonacci’s account, it was that Johnny might still be alive. But the story made it sound as if he was living in captivity.
As the news spread, letters of support poured in. (Des Moines Register/USA Today Network)
### Noreen visits a prison to see the man who says he helped kidnap Johnny
On that day in 1991, Noreen sat at the kitchen table, not far from what used to be Johnny’s room. She was listening to the tapes from the private investigator, thinking about the little boy who gave her roses. And she was forced to imagine him pulled off the street, drugged, imprisoned, corrupted, tormented, afraid.
It was the sort of story no one would want to believe. But Noreen believed it. She thought Paul Bonacci could not have made it up. It was clear to her that he’d talked extensively to Johnny. He knew that Johnny had bought a dirt bike to ride around the vacant lot near their house. He knew that Johnny sometimes went to the yoga classes that Noreen taught. And he knew where Noreen and Johnny liked to go afterwards: a Mexican restaurant called Chi-Chi’s.
The private investigator had a question for Noreen: Would you like to go to the prison and talk to Bonacci yourself?
Noreen said yes. But she needed a few weeks to prepare. This man said he’d done horrible things to her son. Before she faced him, she had to work through the anger.
Noreen had thought a lot about forgiveness. She’d read about positive thinking in a book called “Rays of the Dawn,” by Thurman Fleet. And Noreen had come to realize that when you’re angry with someone, forgiveness isn’t for them. It’s for you. Because the anger and hatred can poison you. Letting them go is a gift you give yourself.
As the meeting with Paul Bonacci drew nearer, this was all easier said than done.
“When something so vile hits you,” she recalled, “and you’ve got to face it, there were times I had to read the chapter on forgiveness five times over and over in one sitting, in order to be able to get up from the chair or the couch and not feel the anger anymore.”
The day arrived. She’d made arrangements to go to the prison in Lincoln, Nebraska, with the private investigator and a news crew from WHO, a TV station in Des Moines. Some of the footage would later appear on newscasts and in the documentary film “Who Took Johnny.” Bonacci, thin and pale in his prison jumpsuit, did not know in advance who he’d be meeting. When someone told him this woman was Johnny’s mother, he nearly broke down.
“Just tell me what happened,” Noreen said. “Please.”
“I feel so — I feel so bad about it,” he said, fighting back tears. “Because — of what they made me do.”
Noreen did not hate him. He was a lost boy, similar in some ways to her own son, and she was filled with compassion. Jim Strickland, the TV reporter who went to the prison, was struck by Noreen’s quiet composure.
At home in West Des Moines, Noreen kept thinking about Johnny. (Taro Yamasaki)
Bonacci had previously accused others of sexual wrongdoing in Omaha, Nebraska, during a wide-ranging investigation that involved the collapse of the Franklin Community Credit Union and widespread allegations of child abuse. But state and federal authorities found little or no veracity in the most salacious of those claims. A grand jury called many of the allegations a “hoax.” One witness was convicted of perjury, and Bonacci was also charged with perjury in that case, though a prosecutor later dismissed the charges against Bonacci “in the interests of justice,” according to a court document.
Since the late 1980s, other people have examined some of Bonacci’s claims and determined that he was likely telling the truth. Loran Schmit, who investigated the Franklin scandal as a Nebraska state senator, wrote in a 1991 affidavit that “this Senator now believes that Paul Bonacci did tell the truth to the Franklin committee and the Committee Investigator.”
At the prison with Bonacci in 1991, Noreen Gosch was also convinced.
In those conversations, Bonacci shared more details about the crime, and about Johnny. He drew what Noreen thought was an accurate map of the crime scene.
“Did you ever see any marks or anything on Johnny’s body?” Noreen asked.
“When we got him in there, he had a birthmark on his chest,” Bonacci said, “or a something on his chest, it was like a — looked like South America.”
Noreen knew he was right about that. Bonacci also knew about the scar on Johnny’s tongue, a reminder of the time Johnny bit his tongue after falling from a treehouse. And he knew about a burn mark on Johnny’s leg, near the ankle, from the time it touched the tailpipe of his older brother’s motorcycle.
“Credible,” Strickland said, when asked how Bonacci came across during that interview 32 years ago.
It seemed possible that Paul Bonacci was the key to solving one of the most notorious missing-persons cases in modern history. And so Jim Strickland found it strange that the police decided not to interview him.
“Why wouldn’t you just drive two hours and talk to the guy?” Strickland wondered. “Do you want to solve it, or not?”
### The mysterious backstory of Paul Bonacci
The police could give several reasons for ignoring Bonacci. The short version is that some people thought he was insane, or lying, or both. The long version is worth explaining, despite its strange and horrifying complexity, because both Bonacci and Noreen Gosch are convinced it is relevant to Johnny’s case.
In 1991, the same year he met Noreen at the prison, Bonacci filed a federal lawsuit against more than a dozen defendants, including a former top official from the Franklin Community Credit Union, Lawrence E. King, who had political connections that reached all the way to the White House. Bonacci accused King of vicious sexual abuse, among other atrocities. By then, King was on his way to prison for embezzlement, and he did not respond to the lawsuit, though he was quoted in a 1990 Washington Post story calling sex-abuse allegations against him “garbage.” In 1999, a federal judge entered a default judgment in Bonacci’s favor, awarding him $1 million. (I tried to reach King by phone and letter for this story, but did not receive a response.)
Although Senior District Judge Warren K. Urbom had previously called some of Bonacci’s testimony “bizarre,” he wrote a memorandum of decision in Bonacci’s favor:
“Between December 1980 and 1988, the complaint alleges, the defendant King continually subjected the plaintiff to repeated sexual assaults, false imprisonments, infliction of extreme emotional distress, organized and directed satanic rituals, forced the plaintiff to ‘scavenge’ for children to be a part of the defendant King’s sexual abuse and pornography ring, forced the plaintiff to engage in numerous sexual contacts with the defendant King and others and participate in deviate sexual games and masochistic orgies with other minor children.”
Lawrence E. King Jr. managed the Franklin Community Credit Union in Omaha, Nebraska, before going to prison for embezzlement and other charges. (Bill Batson/Omaha World-Herald/AP)
King was never charged criminally for sexual abuse, and the judge wrote that there were “reasons to question the credibility of the plaintiff’s testimony.” But the judge also wrote that King’s failure to respond to Bonacci’s allegations “has made those allegations true as to him. The now uncontradicted evidence is that the plaintiff has suffered much. He has suffered burns, broken fingers, beatings of the head and face and other indignities by the wrongful actions of the defendant King…He is a victim of multiple personality disorder, involving as many as fourteen distinct personalities aside from his primary personality.”
In a deposition for the case, Bonacci gave a surreal explanation for his condition, which is now known as dissociative identity disorder. At one point another personality surfaced, and this other personality, known as West Lee, was separately sworn in as a witness.
West Lee said he’d been created by a secret government program called Monarch. He said this program involved sexually abusing children, intentionally splitting their personalities, and using them in espionage, with missions that included entrapping and sexually blackmailing politicians.
This program’s existence has never been confirmed, and an attorney who questioned Bonacci called his story “preposterous.” I filed Freedom of Information Act requests with several branches of the US military and intelligence community, looking for more information. No documents were released. A Navy FOIA officer wrote that the Navy didn’t have records like these, but said the CIA might have them. The CIA said in a letter it did not find any such records.
In his sworn testimony against the Omaha businessman Lawrence E. King, Paul Bonacci said King had been both a target of Monarch — that is, someone to be sexually compromised — and one of the people who controlled Bonacci in sexually compromising others.
According a court transcript, he said King brought him to parties in Omaha, on Embassy Row in Washington D.C., and elsewhere.
“If they wanted to get something passed through the legislature or whatever, he would put some people that were against it in a compromising position,” Bonacci told the judge in 1999, though he didn’t show proof of that allegation. “By using us boys and girls.”
“Was this by your being the sexual partner of that person?” Judge Warren K. Urbom asked.
“Yes,” Bonacci said.
At that hearing, a man named Rusty Nelson also testified. He said he’d been a photographer for Lawrence King, and said that King “obviously was into pimping gay prostitutes and children to, basically for influence purposes. Whether it be politicians or whatever.” Nelson said he knew who Paul Bonacci was, and said King “wanted me to take pictures of Paul, various other children or various other people…in compromising position, you know, sexual type things.”
When Nelson was asked what happened to his pictures, he said King “has a lot of them.” Others were given to Gary Caradori, an investigator who died in a plane crash while he was looking into allegations of child sexual abuse in connection with the failure of the Franklin Community Credit Union in Nebraska. Nelson said the FBI had some of his pictures, and police in Oregon might have others.
(I inquired about this claim with the FBI and the Oregon State Police. Both agencies told me to file records requests. The FBI then refused to confirm or deny it had records on Nelson, and the OSP said it did have records on Nelson but declined to release them because records related to child abuse are confidential.)
“One of the pictures that may be in those is of Johnny Gosch,” Nelson said on the witness stand, although he did not supply further details about the picture.
Noreen always believed what Paul Bonacci said about her son. She says she got further confirmation on March 18, 1997, from Johnny himself.
Years passed, and then decades. Noreen Gosch kept looking for her son. (Taro Yamasaki)
### Noreen says Johnny visited her and told her what happened to him
By early 1997, Johnny had been missing for almost 15 years. His parents were divorced, and Noreen had moved to her own apartment. She was asleep in bed in the middle of the night when she was awakened by someone knocking on the door.
Noreen got up. She felt afraid, because she’d gotten various threats since her son disappeared but she put her face to the door and looked through the peephole. Two men stood in the hallway. She thought one looked like Johnny.
This account is based on sworn testimony she gave at one of Bonacci’s court hearings, a summary of an interview with a police detective, a description of the encounter in her book, *Why Johnny Can’t Come Home*, and my extensive interviews with her.
Who is it, Noreen asked the man at her door that night in 1997.
It’s me, Mom, he said. It’s Johnny.
Noreen was shaking. She had imagined this moment for years. Johnny would have been 27 by then, and he was a full-grown man, but she recognized the eyes. “The eyes don’t change,” she said later, and this man had the same eyes her little boy once did.
She opened the door. They hugged. It felt good but strange, considering he’d been gone for more than half his life. Regardless, the hug further convinced Noreen that this was indeed her son. People have their own vibration, a specific pulse or energy, she said, and this man she was embracing *felt* like Johnny. She invited both men to sit down in the living room, where she said Johnny proved his identity by opening his shirt and showing her the South America-shaped birthmark on his chest.
The other man didn’t say much, although he and Johnny sometimes exchanged glances, Noreen said. She wondered if he was controlling Johnny somehow. When she asked Johnny where he’d been living, he looked at the other man, who told him not to answer that question. Johnny didn’t answer.
Later, Noreen would be heavily criticized for not calling the police. But she had long since lost trust in the police, and had come to suspect more than one law enforcement official of complicity in Johnny’s disappearance. “Well, who the hell would call the police that didn’t do anything in the first place?” she asked. “Why would I do that? No. I wouldn’t put my son in danger from them again.”
Noreen says she did offer to call Roy Stephens, the private investigator who’d brought her the Bonacci tapes. But that idea seemed to terrify Johnny. She says he asked her not to, and said he would leave immediately if she did. So Noreen didn’t call the investigator. Instead, she tried to catch up on the last 14-and-a-half years of Johnny’s life.
She says Johnny told her he’d been pulled off the sidewalk into a car, where he lost consciousness. When he woke up in a basement, he was bound and gagged. Johnny was scared, and started crying. He saw another young man. It was Paul Bonacci. And Paul told him, *Just do what they tell you and it will be all right*.
Johnny didn’t tell his mother the details of his sexual abuse. But according to Noreen, Johnny told a story that echoed Paul Bonacci’s story: Johnny said he was locked in the basement for days, until a man came to buy him from the kidnappers. The man counted out a large sum of cash on a table. He was known as The Colonel. Noreen says Johnny told her he was taken away, moved around the country, and used to sexually compromise businessmen and politicians.
The apartment complex where Noreen lived in 1997. (Will Lanzoni/CNN)
Noreen said the visit lasted only an hour or two, so there wasn’t time for Johnny to tell the whole story. Johnny said he was on the run, hiding from the people who took him, barely able to support himself. He’d been unsure if visiting Noreen was a good idea, because during his captivity he’d been told she would be killed if he tried to contact her. She said Johnny told her he wouldn’t be safe until the perpetrators were arrested and brought to justice. He asked her to do something about it.
And much too soon, Johnny stood up and said he had to go.
Noreen didn’t try to stop him. Later, she would be criticized for this as well. But her little boy was already long gone. Johnny could make his own choices now, and there was nothing she could do about it. So she hugged him, and let him vanish again. Noreen walked outside and watched him walk off into the night.
This may be the last time I’ll ever see him, she thought to herself.
She went back inside, sat down in the living room and prayed for strength. Her mission was clear, and daunting. Find the rest of the truth. Tell it to the authorities. Force them to act. Leave them no choice but to arrest and convict the perpetrators. Make it safe for Johnny to come out of the shadows.
### ‘But this is America,’ Noreen kept saying
Twenty-six years later, with her work still unfinished, Noreen poured coffee into a dark blue mug and sat at the kitchen table. Now her kitchen was in the cabin of a boat that was docked in East Dubuque, Illinois, on a waterway that led to the Mississippi River. It was August 2023, and she was spending the summer on the 41-foot boat with her husband, George Hartney, who had also become her partner in the long investigation. Through a window behind Noreen, an American flag could be seen on the bow. Noreen had complicated feelings about that flag.
“I was just a mom, doing my job, raising my kids, cooking,” she said, recalling how innocent she was before September 5, 1982. She didn’t know words like *pedophilia*, or phrases like *human trafficking*, and she had no idea any of this stuff was happening around her, outside the walls of her suburban home. As she learned more, through independent research, and private investigators, and experiences with law enforcement, she repeated this one phrase, this little protest, these same four words, trying to hold on to what she once believed.
“But this is *America*,” she kept saying, as those old ideas gave way to something else, a new understanding, a reckoning with the very American forces she believed she would have to overcome.
Noreen and her husband, George Hartney, spend part of their time on a boat near the Mississippi River. (Will Lanzoni/CNN)
Noreen had a long list of suspects in Johnny’s disappearance. But a wide space remained between what she suspected and what she could prove. Despite her best efforts, she had *not* made it safe for Johnny to come out of the shadows.
This was the theory Noreen had developed in her 41-year investigation: Her son was kidnapped. The kidnappers were part of a sex-trafficking ring. She believed it had ties to a sexual-blackmail operation, in which her son said he’d been forced to participate, and it was all so big, so powerful, so pervasive, that the authorities would never solve it, would never arrest anyone, because, as Noreen had come to believe, *this* is America, where some people are sacrificed because others are above the law.
Still, Noreen kept trying things. Based on new information she received about Orval Cooney, the former West Des Moines police chief, she spoke with John DeCamp, the lawyer who represented Paul Bonacci, about filing a lawsuit against Cooney for misconduct on Johnny’s case. She said she hoped more of the truth would come out in discovery.
They were preparing the lawsuit in early 2003 when the former police chief died suddenly at age 69. He had suffered a heart attack.
### A police detective looks back on the Gosch case
Tom Boyd, a retired detective from the West Des Moines Police Department, sits at his kitchen table on a Tuesday morning, drinking a Coke Zero. He wears glasses and has a thin gray beard. On his left forearm is an arrow tattoo that commemorates the day he killed a 10-point buck with a recurve bow. Boyd investigated the Johnny Gosch case for more than two decades and managed to stay on cordial terms with Noreen, which was more than some of his colleagues could do. He says people keep asking him the same question: *Do you believe Noreen when she tells you that Johnny visited her at the apartment?*
Boyd answers carefully.
“It’s Noreen’s statement to me. And that’s what she told me.”
“I don’t know. I *don’t* know. I — I don’t want to call Noreen a liar. Noreen is likely grieving the loss of her — her son. It seems weird, yes. And I’ve always just kind of thrown the question back. ‘Well, I don’t know. Do you believe it?’”
He chuckles.
“And there’s a weird factor to it. So that’s what makes it hard to believe. But I don’t want to call Noreen a liar.”
Johnny’s parents led a massive search for him that continued for years after he disappeared. (Des Moines Register/USA Today Network)
Over the years, a number of people have questioned Noreen’s credibility. Some say Johnny didn’t really visit in 1997. The 2018 “Faded Out” podcast concluded that Noreen was almost entirely wrong about Johnny’s case. The host, Sarah DiMeo, cast suspicion on several local pedophiles, including the late Wilbur Millhouse, a former circulation manager for the *Des Moines Register* who pleaded guilty in 1987 to sexually abusing teenage boys.
Noreen says her private investigators checked out Millhouse in the 1980s and found he had an alibi for the kidnapping; he was visiting a relative in Kansas City on the day Johnny vanished. A 1986 *Des Moines Register* story said police had found no link between Millhouse and the Gosch disappearance. Tom Boyd, the retired detective, said he was aware of Millhouse but never ruled him in or out as a potential suspect. Millhouse died in 2015.
All that aside, Noreen’s theory of the case has remained consistent for three decades. In 1999, she sat down with Boyd at the police station for a videotaped interview.
The detective kept a six-page synopsis from that interview and gave me a copy. It contains most of the key points that she is still making today: Johnny visited her almost 15 years after his disappearance, Johnny confirmed much of what Paul Bonacci said, a man named Emilio took part in the kidnapping, and Johnny was held at a farmhouse outside Sioux City owned by a man named Charlie Kerr.
In that interview with Detective Boyd, Noreen mentioned Lawrence King, Rusty Nelson, and a military officer named Michael Aquino. According to Boyd’s summary, “she believes that Michael Aquino who is a colonel in the military possibly used military resources to include planes to transfer or transport children across the USA where they were reportedly utilized at ‘sex parties.’”
Boyd took it in and dutifully wrote it down.
“She’s told me so much,” he says at the kitchen table 24 years later. “I’ve had so many lengthy conversations with Noreen where — where topics just start branching out everywhere.”
“But Noreen was just always talking of things that couldn’t be investigated. And — like Johnny coming to her house. I couldn’t investigate that, really. I mean, two years later, what am I going to go do? A door-to-door canvass now at that apartment building and see if anyone remembered the evening or early morning of whatever March something? It’s just things that I — I couldn’t follow up on. That I couldn't prove didn’t happen. But yet again, I couldn’t prove were not legit. So there was always this open gray area where I can’t say it didn't happen and I can’t say it did… That’s how a lot of this investigation has been for me over the years.”
On a recent visit to West Des Moines, Noreen noticed how much the trees had grown. (Will Lanzoni/CNN)
Boyd is right that he couldn’t do much to check out the Johnny sighting at Noreen’s apartment. One could believe her, or not. But some of what she said *was* verifiable.
Lawrence King was real; he was in federal prison for financial crimes, and he’d been repeatedly accused of sex crimes against children, though he denied those allegations. Rusty Nelson was real; he’d just testified in Bonacci’s case against King in federal court. Charlie Kerr was real, and had been previously accused of sexually abusing a minor. (Police reports describe the allegations, but online court dockets give no indication that Kerr was ever prosecuted. Kerr died in 2004.) A retired sheriff’s investigator named Dave Kjos told me he’d served a search warrant on Kerr’s house in the 1990s in an unsuccessful attempt to get information about the Johnny Gosch case. Kjos said he found an odd combination of Disney films, pornography, and what appeared to be love letters from boys.
U.S. Army Lt. Col. Michael Aquino was real, too. Before his death by suicide in 2019, he’d been a controversial figure. Aquino was accused in 1987 of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a child as part of a major scandal at the Presidio Army base day-care center. Aquino denied wrongdoing and was not criminally charged. But according to a judge’s subsequent ruling, Army investigators found “there was probable cause to title LTC Aquino with offenses of indecent acts with a child, sodomy, conspiracy, kidnapping, and false swearing.”
“And I’ll have to admit I’m guilty of not taking some of that too seriously,” says Boyd, the retired West Des Moines detective. “I didn’t look into this Aquino character until much later and realized…his Satanic-cult-type worshippings, things of that nature.”
Boyd says he is sure Johnny was kidnapped. But he doesn’t know who did it. It’s hard to know what role, if any, people like Kerr and Aquino played in Johnny’s case. The case is lost in an investigative purgatory, a wilderness of unanswered questions. Noreen has her theories, but she has yet to prove them. They are intriguing possibilities, but many dots remain unconnected.
I ask Detective Boyd if he should have done more to follow up on the other leads Noreen gave him.
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m not perfect.”
“I admit my mistakes.”
Then, of course, there is Paul Bonacci, who was never interviewed by the West Des Moines Police Department despite his professed knowledge of key details about Johnny and his claim of involvement in the kidnapping. Detectives did speak with some of Bonacci’s relatives and decided Bonacci couldn’t have been in the Des Moines area on the day of Johnny’s kidnapping because the relatives said he was with them in Omaha. But those interviews took place almost a decade after Johnny disappeared, and police did not explain how those relatives could have remembered Bonacci’s whereabouts so precisely, so many years later.
When I ask Boyd about this, he acknowledges that the West Des Moines Police ruled out Bonacci too quickly.
“Is Paul Bonacci still alive?” he asks. “Is he around?”
He is told that Bonacci is apparently still alive.
“I’d talk to him today if I could,” the detective says, and then he’s quiet for a long time.
Noreen Gosch holds a copy of her book, “Why Johnny Can’t Come Home,” which includes a picture of Paul Bonacci. (Will Lanzoni/CNN)
### A reporter finds Paul Bonacci, who is now 56
Later that day, I drive to Nebraska to look for Paul Bonacci. His last known address was on a gravel road near a river west of Omaha. It’s late in the afternoon when I pull up and walk toward the Bonacci home. A dog barks loudly, and several cats and kittens mill around. After a knock at the front door, a woman answers. She says Paul isn’t home.
As I prepare to drive away, a red pickup truck comes down the gravel road. The driver parks near the Bonacci home and gets out. I wave. Yes, this is Paul Bonacci. Everyone involved in Johnny’s case is either dead or much older than they were when it started. Bonacci has just turned 56. He’s got the same dark eyes he had in the videos from three decades earlier. Now he also has a few lines on his face.
Bonacci is reluctant to give a formal interview. He’s skeptical of reporters, and he needs to go pick up his daughter soon. But he’s friendly enough, and the conversation continues for about 10 minutes.
I ask if he thinks Johnny Gosch visited Noreen in 1997.
Yes, he says. He *knows* it happened, because Johnny told him about it shortly thereafter. Bonacci says Johnny has visited him, too. Right here at this house.
I ask if Johnny is alive.
Yes, he says. As far as he knows, Johnny is alive. With a family of his own.
Bonacci cuts the conversation short, and doesn’t return my texts or phone calls after that. But on a warm afternoon in October, I go back to see him again. He’s in the yard, and he’s got work to do, but he doesn’t tell me to leave. So I keep him talking and start taking notes.
He doesn’t have much new information about the other kidnappers. He never knew Tony’s full name, or what became of him. He never learned Emilio’s full name either, but he’s been told Emilio is dead.
The story he tells about Johnny is difficult or impossible to prove. And given the questions about Bonacci’s credibility, many people say he does not deserve the benefit of the doubt. Nevertheless, Bonacci stands by his story.
I ask Bonacci if he has any pictures or documents to corroborate what he says.
“Anything I had was destroyed in the flood here,” he says. Bonacci lives near a river, and flooding in 2019 put four feet of water in his house. He’d been hand-writing some notes for a possible book, “about 2,000 pages,” he said, but those notes were left waterlogged and illegible.
Bonacci says he’s seen Johnny Gosch 15 or 20 times in all, the last time around 2018. He says Johnny is in hiding, afraid to come out and tell what he knows.
“He’d be killed,” Bonacci says. “That’s what he’s afraid of. He’d be silenced.”
### Noreen wishes ‘the truth would finally be acknowledged’
Days after my first visit with Bonacci, I’m back at the boat in East Dubuque. Noreen and George are eager for news. When they’re told what Bonacci said about Johnny, they agree. Noreen thinks Johnny is alive, with a family of his own. He would be 53 on this day in August, turning 54 in November, and she thinks he could be using another name.
“He’s probably wanted for all kinds of things,” George says, raising the notion that Johnny was forced into criminal activity the same way Paul Bonacci says he was.
Noreen and George have become partners in the independent investigation. (Will Lanzoni/CNN)
“But the other reason, too,” Noreen says, “and Paul said this to me one time, he said, ‘Even though Johnny has not been — did not come forward,’ he said, ‘he knows what you’re doing. He keeps tabs on things. And he’s not about to come out of hiding to a dog and pony show.’ Meaning he has watched how I was treated in the news and publicly, and he doesn’t want any part of that circus. And Bonacci has said that several times. And if Paul said to you that he believes Johnny’s alive, then that means he’s had contact with him. That much I know.”
“They keep in touch,” George says. “They all keep in touch.”
“Yeah,” Noreen says, “they do.”
“It’s a fraternity,” George says. “It’s a strange — you don’t want to be in it. But the only people they really trust are each other.”
“Makes them blood brothers, almost,” Noreen says. “And that’s a stronger bond than maybe their real families that they’ve been separated from for all these years.”
“I’d bet money,” George says, “give you 2-to-1 odds, that Johnny knows you were at Paul’s house by now.”
There is no way to know how many people are in this secret and unconfirmed network of survivors. But Noreen says she’s spoken to more than 100 people who claim to have suffered the same kinds of abuses that Paul and Johnny did.
George says he’s met some of these survivors too. Back when he and Noreen still lived in West Des Moines, more than one knocked on the door late at night and just wanted to talk. Their eyes darted around the room to see who might be looking for them, he says. They didn’t give names and didn’t ask for help. They just wanted someone to listen, and to believe them.
“Sometimes just to get it off your chest makes you feel better,” George says.
Noreen says six people have told her they saw Johnny out there. They knew details about Johnny that had not been publicized. One told Noreen that Johnny had taught him the same relaxation techniques he’d learned from Noreen’s yoga classes. Another said, “Johnny told us that you’d be nice to us.”
As George puts it, “She’s kind of the godmother of the victims.”
They say they’ve heard other stories about Johnny, too. More sightings from Paul Bonacci and his wife.
“In fact,” Noreen says, “Johnny showed up with a — was it a car seat?”
“Yeah,” George says.
“ — or something,” Noreen says, “when they had their first baby. And gave ‘em a car seat. Bonacci’s wife told us. Years ago.”
These days, Noreen and George are both retired. They both enjoy spending time with their grandchildren from previous marriages. They have good friends who stay on neighboring boats. Noreen gets up early and answers questions from members of Facebook’s Official Johnny Gosch Group, which has more than 6,000 members. Sometimes, George and Noreen take the pontoon boat up the river and stop for lunch at a dockside restaurant.
“You hungry?” Noreen says.
They walk along the dock, from the big boat to the smaller one. Noreen wears a brace and limps slightly from an injury to her left knee. At the pontoon boat, George hands Noreen a tool that resembles a can opener. He has one too, and together they unfasten the snaps on the faded red cover of the pontoon boat that bobs in the dull green water.
When it gets cold around October, they leave the boat and head for Florida. (Will Lanzoni/CNN)
George takes the wheel and guides the boat through the channel. It’s a warm and cloudy afternoon. They are asked if they are happy.
“Yeah,” George says.
“Yeah,” Noreen says. “I am.”
A blue heron soars in the middle distance, flapping its long, slender wings. Noreen is asked what she has left to accomplish.
“I would like to see this case resolved and justice served,” she says.
“It would be important to me, before I leave this earth.”
“If the truth would finally be acknowledged.”
George speeds up the boat. The engine gets louder. Hot sunlight comes down through a break in the gray ceiling of clouds. Here is the Mississippi.
“America’s greatest river,” George says.
“Oh,” Noreen says, “that breeze feels good.”
She is still thinking about that question, what she has left to accomplish, and a related one, what she wants most.
“I think the other thing I want is for Johnny to know that I tried,” she says, meaning she did all she could to rescue him when he first disappeared. When he was still a boy.
“I tried everything,” she says. “Everything.”
She interviewed the neighbors herself, pored over diagrams of the crime scene, relentlessly demanded action from the police and the FBI, went on TV countless times to keep the spotlight on his case, was accused of crying too little, and crying too much, was accused of looking too put-together, and not put-together enough, gave over 800 speeches at schools, churches and civic groups about the kind of danger he was in, wrote to President Ronald Reagan, testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee, helped pass Iowa’s Johnny Gosch bill to make sure the police didn’t wait to start looking for missing children, worked three jobs to help pay for the private investigators who were crisscrossing the country to look for clues, woke up in the middle of the night with new ideas and wrote them down in the notebook she kept on her nightstand, because she was still Johnny’s mother, even though he was gone.
George drives the boat up the river. To the left are the bluffs of Dubuque, Iowa, and ahead, past the bridge, is Wisconsin. Johnny is somewhere out there too, in some unknown condition, and Noreen is still talking about him, though it’s hard to hear her now, with the wind and the engine. Still she keeps talking about Johnny, as if the sound of her voice could keep him alive, and the boat goes north, against the current, up the middle of America.
@ -60,12 +60,6 @@ When the Writers Guild of America went on strike earlier this year, the awkward
Frank is a commercial writer. He has never worked in independent film. Craig Mazin, who wrote the HBO series “The Last of Us” and “Chernobyl,” told me, “In a good old-fashioned vaudevillian sense, Scott worries about the audience,” adding that he regards Frank as “one of the best screenwriters of all time.” The writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson told me that Frank’s work reminds him of Hollywood’s golden age. “He’s a formalist, and I mean that as the highest compliment,” Anderson said. “It’s what I always admired and wanted to emulate. He understood classic structure in a way most people can’t ever grasp, so they end up having to be ‘inventive.’ His scripts have always felt like they had one foot in the nineteen-thirties or forties.”
Frank is a commercial writer. He has never worked in independent film. Craig Mazin, who wrote the HBO series “The Last of Us” and “Chernobyl,” told me, “In a good old-fashioned vaudevillian sense, Scott worries about the audience,” adding that he regards Frank as “one of the best screenwriters of all time.” The writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson told me that Frank’s work reminds him of Hollywood’s golden age. “He’s a formalist, and I mean that as the highest compliment,” Anderson said. “It’s what I always admired and wanted to emulate. He understood classic structure in a way most people can’t ever grasp, so they end up having to be ‘inventive.’ His scripts have always felt like they had one foot in the nineteen-thirties or forties.”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a22241)
“Can you buy me a six-pack?”
Cartoon by Jon Adams
Frank’s IMDb page obscures the true extent of his contributions to cinema, because he has also enjoyed a quiet, and extremely lucrative, sideline as perhaps the most in-demand script doctor in Hollywood. Studios summon him to punch up dialogue or deepen a character or untangle a contorted third act. For such assignments, which are generally uncredited, he commands a fee that he acknowledges is “insane”: three hundred thousand dollars a week. Most jobs last a few weeks. He has done rewrites on nearly sixty films—possibly more than any other contemporary screenwriter—including “Saving Private Ryan,” “Night at the Museum,” “Unfaithful,” “The Ring,” and “Gravity.” (He also did “a lot of the X-Men movies,” he told me, adding, “I don’t remember their titles.”)
Frank’s IMDb page obscures the true extent of his contributions to cinema, because he has also enjoyed a quiet, and extremely lucrative, sideline as perhaps the most in-demand script doctor in Hollywood. Studios summon him to punch up dialogue or deepen a character or untangle a contorted third act. For such assignments, which are generally uncredited, he commands a fee that he acknowledges is “insane”: three hundred thousand dollars a week. Most jobs last a few weeks. He has done rewrites on nearly sixty films—possibly more than any other contemporary screenwriter—including “Saving Private Ryan,” “Night at the Museum,” “Unfaithful,” “The Ring,” and “Gravity.” (He also did “a lot of the X-Men movies,” he told me, adding, “I don’t remember their titles.”)
It’s hard to turn down this kind of assignment, and Frank is keenly aware that the opportunities afforded to him are something most screenwriters could only dream of. Nevertheless, it can be demoralizing to expend so much of one’s creative energy servicing someone else’s vision. Steven Soderbergh, who directed “Out of Sight” and is a close friend, described Frank to me as “a ventriloquist.” Just as Frank can inhabit movie characters so completely that he can compose fluid dialogue in their precise manner of speaking, he is adept at channelling the voice of a director or a previous screenwriter. The producer Nina Jacobson, who has worked as a senior executive at three studios, told me, “Scott folds himself into the process. He’s sort of foolproof, in terms of being able to diagnose what you need, team up with the director, and deliver it.” Frank’s ability to offer solutions within an existing stylistic idiom makes him a “chameleon,” she said, adding, “You’d be hard-pressed to find an executive or producer who doesn’t think of him first virtually anytime they have a problem on a script.” The one trouble with having this talent, Jacobson pointed out, is that it can lead you to “spend your whole career rewriting other people’s movies.”
It’s hard to turn down this kind of assignment, and Frank is keenly aware that the opportunities afforded to him are something most screenwriters could only dream of. Nevertheless, it can be demoralizing to expend so much of one’s creative energy servicing someone else’s vision. Steven Soderbergh, who directed “Out of Sight” and is a close friend, described Frank to me as “a ventriloquist.” Just as Frank can inhabit movie characters so completely that he can compose fluid dialogue in their precise manner of speaking, he is adept at channelling the voice of a director or a previous screenwriter. The producer Nina Jacobson, who has worked as a senior executive at three studios, told me, “Scott folds himself into the process. He’s sort of foolproof, in terms of being able to diagnose what you need, team up with the director, and deliver it.” Frank’s ability to offer solutions within an existing stylistic idiom makes him a “chameleon,” she said, adding, “You’d be hard-pressed to find an executive or producer who doesn’t think of him first virtually anytime they have a problem on a script.” The one trouble with having this talent, Jacobson pointed out, is that it can lead you to “spend your whole career rewriting other people’s movies.”
@ -94,12 +88,6 @@ Because Frank has such intuitive mastery of narrative structure, he finds rewrit
On rewrites, Frank tends to work quickly—and often under enormous time pressure. Nina Jacobson told me that Frank was brought in to rewrite “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” when the film was just weeks from production. She likened the process to “laying down new train track while conducting the moving train at the same time.” On his own projects, it takes a year or more to write a script. He always starts with the first scene. William Horberg, who produced “The Queen’s Gambit,” recalls Frank pitching what became the opening of the series: “He said, ‘You’re in this hotel room. This girl throws open the curtains. There’s somebody in the bed, we don’t know who it is. She’s hungover. She goes down in the elevator and through the hotel and into this big room, and it’s a *chess tournament!*’ ” This was not the beginning of the 1983 Walter Tevis novel upon which the series is based, but a scene from later in the book. Frank plucked out that moment, Horberg said, and “it just established the whole show.”
On rewrites, Frank tends to work quickly—and often under enormous time pressure. Nina Jacobson told me that Frank was brought in to rewrite “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” when the film was just weeks from production. She likened the process to “laying down new train track while conducting the moving train at the same time.” On his own projects, it takes a year or more to write a script. He always starts with the first scene. William Horberg, who produced “The Queen’s Gambit,” recalls Frank pitching what became the opening of the series: “He said, ‘You’re in this hotel room. This girl throws open the curtains. There’s somebody in the bed, we don’t know who it is. She’s hungover. She goes down in the elevator and through the hotel and into this big room, and it’s a *chess tournament!*’ ” This was not the beginning of the 1983 Walter Tevis novel upon which the series is based, but a scene from later in the book. Frank plucked out that moment, Horberg said, and “it just established the whole show.”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a25461)
“Were we expecting a baby?”
Cartoon by Mick Stevens
Book adaptations are Frank’s specialty. Translating a novel for the movies, especially a popular one, is often fraught. After the success of “Dead Again,” Frank signed on to adapt the Elmore Leonard novel “Get Shorty.” Before he started writing, he had lunch with Leonard at the M-G-M commissary. Leonard once published a list of ten “rules of writing,” which included “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters” and “Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.” His novels are lean and well paced, like good screenplays, so you might suppose that they’d transfer easily to the screen. But at lunch Leonard regaled Frank with horror stories about how much he hated all the adaptations of his books. The young screenwriter wanted very much to impress the older novelist. By the time Leonard said, in parting, “Have fun,” Frank was nauseous.
Book adaptations are Frank’s specialty. Translating a novel for the movies, especially a popular one, is often fraught. After the success of “Dead Again,” Frank signed on to adapt the Elmore Leonard novel “Get Shorty.” Before he started writing, he had lunch with Leonard at the M-G-M commissary. Leonard once published a list of ten “rules of writing,” which included “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters” and “Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.” His novels are lean and well paced, like good screenplays, so you might suppose that they’d transfer easily to the screen. But at lunch Leonard regaled Frank with horror stories about how much he hated all the adaptations of his books. The young screenwriter wanted very much to impress the older novelist. By the time Leonard said, in parting, “Have fun,” Frank was nauseous.
Faithful adaptations usually make terrible films. There are exceptions: Frank especially admires Ted Tally’s script for “The Silence of the Lambs,” which, apart from some judicious pruning, seems to have been lifted directly from the Thomas Harris novel. The screenwriter Steven Knight has remarked that, if a book is a mountain, then a good adaptation is a painting of the mountain—a vivid impression that can never be as multidimensional as its subject but that retains its essence. The first time Frank read “Get Shorty,” he went through it with a green highlighter, coloring the parts he thought he might use. When he finished, practically the whole book was green. With any adaptation, he reaches a point where he must decide what the novel means to him, then build the script around that core idea, discarding everything else.
Faithful adaptations usually make terrible films. There are exceptions: Frank especially admires Ted Tally’s script for “The Silence of the Lambs,” which, apart from some judicious pruning, seems to have been lifted directly from the Thomas Harris novel. The screenwriter Steven Knight has remarked that, if a book is a mountain, then a good adaptation is a painting of the mountain—a vivid impression that can never be as multidimensional as its subject but that retains its essence. The first time Frank read “Get Shorty,” he went through it with a green highlighter, coloring the parts he thought he might use. When he finished, practically the whole book was green. With any adaptation, he reaches a point where he must decide what the novel means to him, then build the script around that core idea, discarding everything else.
@ -130,12 +118,6 @@ By the time Frank reached his fifties, he was feeling a rising unease. There was
One day last year, I visited the South of France, where Frank was directing a new limited series, “Monsieur Spade.” It was early October, but it still felt like summer. At a remote farmhouse an hour north of Montpellier, I found Frank, in a baseball hat and sunglasses, preparing to shoot a scene with Clive Owen. The series is not an adaptation, but something like it: several years ago, Frank was informed that the rights to the Sam Spade character were available. Apart from “The Maltese Falcon,” Spade appears in only a few Hammett stories, but Frank saw an opportunity to build a new tale around the famous detective. As it happened, he had been trying to obtain the rights to a different Dashiell Hammett property, “Red Harvest,” which is one of Frank’s favorite novels. (He likes to tell young writers that “Red Harvest” can teach them more about the velocity and economy of screenwriting than any manual.) So initially he demurred on the character rights. But then he had a thought: “I went, Wait, I know what this is about. It’s about middle age.” What if Spade was no longer a detective but an expat—in France? “He’s living a quiet life. Tranquil,” Frank told himself, warming to the idea. “And it’s about to get very untranquil.” He approached Tom Fontana, a veteran TV writer who created the HBO drama “Oz,” about collaborating. Fontana told me, “Scott said, ‘Sam Spade, twenty years after “The Maltese Falcon,” living in the South of France.’ I said, ‘I’m in.’ ”
One day last year, I visited the South of France, where Frank was directing a new limited series, “Monsieur Spade.” It was early October, but it still felt like summer. At a remote farmhouse an hour north of Montpellier, I found Frank, in a baseball hat and sunglasses, preparing to shoot a scene with Clive Owen. The series is not an adaptation, but something like it: several years ago, Frank was informed that the rights to the Sam Spade character were available. Apart from “The Maltese Falcon,” Spade appears in only a few Hammett stories, but Frank saw an opportunity to build a new tale around the famous detective. As it happened, he had been trying to obtain the rights to a different Dashiell Hammett property, “Red Harvest,” which is one of Frank’s favorite novels. (He likes to tell young writers that “Red Harvest” can teach them more about the velocity and economy of screenwriting than any manual.) So initially he demurred on the character rights. But then he had a thought: “I went, Wait, I know what this is about. It’s about middle age.” What if Spade was no longer a detective but an expat—in France? “He’s living a quiet life. Tranquil,” Frank told himself, warming to the idea. “And it’s about to get very untranquil.” He approached Tom Fontana, a veteran TV writer who created the HBO drama “Oz,” about collaborating. Fontana told me, “Scott said, ‘Sam Spade, twenty years after “The Maltese Falcon,” living in the South of France.’ I said, ‘I’m in.’ ”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a26342)
“Interesting. I don’t remember that part of the book I listened to at 2x speed while doing other things.”
Cartoon by Asher Perlman
As French crew members adjusted lights around a storage shed where the scene would be shot, Frank conferred with Owen, who was dressed in suspenders and a high-waisted suit; the look was reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart, the quintessential Sam Spade (though Owen is about twice Bogart’s height). Owen, a lifelong Hammett fan himself, expressed amusement to me that when the opportunity arose to play Spade it was in a series that would deconstruct the very macho iconography that made the character famous, and portray him as a man out of his element. The first scene Frank wrote finds Spade with his pants around his ankles, prone on an examination table, being given a prostate exam by a droll French physician who says that it’s time to quit smoking. Chuckling over the humiliations Frank had visited upon his hero, Owen drawled, in his malty baritone, “I don’t get the hat, I don’t carry a gun, I don’t smoke. I’ve got one word for this job—I’ve been duped!” He picked up a folding chair marked “*clive owen*,” relocated it to a spot in the shade, and sat down to study his script.
As French crew members adjusted lights around a storage shed where the scene would be shot, Frank conferred with Owen, who was dressed in suspenders and a high-waisted suit; the look was reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart, the quintessential Sam Spade (though Owen is about twice Bogart’s height). Owen, a lifelong Hammett fan himself, expressed amusement to me that when the opportunity arose to play Spade it was in a series that would deconstruct the very macho iconography that made the character famous, and portray him as a man out of his element. The first scene Frank wrote finds Spade with his pants around his ankles, prone on an examination table, being given a prostate exam by a droll French physician who says that it’s time to quit smoking. Chuckling over the humiliations Frank had visited upon his hero, Owen drawled, in his malty baritone, “I don’t get the hat, I don’t carry a gun, I don’t smoke. I’ve got one word for this job—I’ve been duped!” He picked up a folding chair marked “*clive owen*,” relocated it to a spot in the shade, and sat down to study his script.
In the course of the past several years, Frank had experienced the kind of reinvention that his characters often undergo. Several changes transpired in close succession. After he and Jennifer moved to New York, he did “a ton” of therapy. He began taking Zoloft for anxiety, a move that he had resisted for a long time, because he felt that fear might be integral to his creative process. He wrote a novel, “Shaker,” about a dissolute hit man whose plan to execute someone in L.A. is upended by an earthquake. The book, which Knopf published in 2015, didn’t find a big audience, but writing it was cathartic. “Part of the exercise was getting all these other voices out of my head—all these people I liked collaborating with,” Frank said. “I wanted to just write for myself.” Perhaps most consequentially, he decided to stop doing rewrite jobs. “My identity for so long was defined by a lack of self-confidence in my own ideas,” he told me. “Pleasing others seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to organize my art around. Until it wasn’t.”
In the course of the past several years, Frank had experienced the kind of reinvention that his characters often undergo. Several changes transpired in close succession. After he and Jennifer moved to New York, he did “a ton” of therapy. He began taking Zoloft for anxiety, a move that he had resisted for a long time, because he felt that fear might be integral to his creative process. He wrote a novel, “Shaker,” about a dissolute hit man whose plan to execute someone in L.A. is upended by an earthquake. The book, which Knopf published in 2015, didn’t find a big audience, but writing it was cathartic. “Part of the exercise was getting all these other voices out of my head—all these people I liked collaborating with,” Frank said. “I wanted to just write for myself.” Perhaps most consequentially, he decided to stop doing rewrite jobs. “My identity for so long was defined by a lack of self-confidence in my own ideas,” he told me. “Pleasing others seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to organize my art around. Until it wasn’t.”
This story is exempt from our Creative Commons license until March 15.
On a cold, clear weekday morning in early December, Shepria Johnson pulled up to a small house in Ecorse, Michigan, in an SUV with a decal on the driver’s door that read “Student Wholeness Team.” She looked at an app on her phone. It was her third of 10 visits that morning, and she was there to check on a girl and a boy, 11 and 9, who had missed enough days of school to put them on a list of “chronically absent” students at Grandport Academy, in Ecorse, an industrial suburb of Detroit.
In case there was no one home, Johnson wrote the students’ names on a form letter and addressed the envelope to “the parent of Jisaiah and King.” She wrote “parent,” avoiding the plural as she had seen schools do. “If it’s a one-parent household, that might get touchy.”
There was someone home. Kuanticka Prude opened the door; behind her were some of her eight children. Cats darted up and down the front steps, which were garlanded with Christmas decorations. Johnson introduced herself and said that she was concerned about Jisaiah’s and King’s attendance and wanted to see if there was anything the family needed to help them get to school.
“This is King,” Prude said, gesturing to a slender boy with wary eyes, “and this is Jisaiah” — a girl with her hair in thick side buns. Prude, a friendly 32-year-old with multiple nose and lip studs, said she had woken the two up that morning, but they had gone back to bed, assuming she would be at her job, as a security guard at the Fillmore Detroit entertainment venue. By the time she discovered that they hadn’t left for school, it seemed too late to send them. She had set up a nanny cam to see what was going on at the house when she was away, she said, but the cats had chewed it up. She hadn’t been aware until recently how many days they had missed; she had noticed some attempted calls from their school but hadn’t realized what they were about.
“I tell them, ‘Y’all are going to get me in trouble for this,’” she told Johnson.
“This is not anything like truancy. We come from a place of support,” Johnson said, in her characteristically upbeat tone. “But, yes, it could lead to that, if they’re not in school, so we want to make sure they understand.”
Back in the SUV, Johnson’s composure briefly fell away. “Wow, they are too little to be skipping,” she said under her breath.
Johnson is part of an increasingly popular approach to combating truancy: She makes home visits to learn why children are missing school and then works with families and schools to get them back on track. She oversees a team of six people in southeastern Michigan who are employed by a Baltimore company called Concentric Educational Solutions, which has contracts with seven small school districts in the Detroit area. Since 2021, she has been driving back and forth across the Downriver towns southwest of the city, a vast expanse of dollar stores, pot dispensaries and manufacturing plants — some active, some abandoned. She passes the Marathon refinery, the Great Lakes Steel Works and the giant Ford Rouge Complex, where this fall she could see the picket line of the United Auto Workers strike.
The strike ended. The crisis that Johnson was dealing with, on the other hand, seemed never-ending. Absenteeism has long been a problem in the Detroit area, as in other places with high poverty rates, but since the coronavirus pandemic it has worsened dramatically. Nationwide, the rate of chronic absenteeism — defined as missing at least 10% of school days, or 18 in a year — nearly doubled between 2018-19 and 2021-22, to 28% of students, according to data compiled for The Associated Press by Thomas Dee, a professor of education at Stanford. Michigan’s rate was 39%, the third highest among states. States that have reported data for the most recent school year showed only minimal improvement; some cities have rates of more than 40%.
Absenteeism underlies much of what has beset young people in recent years, including falling school achievement, deteriorating mental health — exacerbated by social isolation — and elevated youth violence and car thefts, some occurring during school hours. But schools are using relatively little of the billions of dollars that they received in federal pandemic-recovery funds to address absenteeism. The issue has also attracted surprisingly little attention from leaders, elected or otherwise, and education coverage in the national media has focused heavily on culture-war fights.
This void created an opportunity for a fledgling company like Concentric. Founded in 2010, by David Heiber, a former school administrator, the company grew slowly. It had only about 20 employees before COVID-19 ignited the business. Concentric now has more than 100 employees, and it recently received a $5 million investment from a social-venture-capital firm to fuel expansion.
“Right place, right time, right pandemic,” Heiber told me sardonically.
It takes help to build the habit of going to school, said Johnson, seen at Wayne Memorial High School in the suburbs of Detroit. “I don’t think just one person can do it alone. Credit: Brittany Greeson for ProPublica
---
Kuanticka Prude had her first child when she was 13, so she finished her education at the city’s maternity academy. Before that, though, she’d liked going to school. “It was fun! Who wanted to be at home and listen to your mom complain all day?” she told me, when I spoke with her after Johnson’s visit. “But, then, we didn’t have COVID and cities being shut down.”
During the pandemic, Detroit’s public schools, where her kids were enrolled at the time, remained closed to in-person instruction for nearly a year. “They did school online. I hated it,” she said. “They took it as a joke most of the time, playing in class, because they felt like they were at home and they could do that.” After the family moved to Ecorse, last summer, the mindset lingered. “They got too comfortable at home,” she said.
This is a dynamic that Johnson has repeatedly encountered. When classes were virtual, students would log on some days, and some days they wouldn’t. The world did not end. For parents, it might seem easier that way. No dragging kids out of bed before daybreak. No wrestling them into proper clothes. No getting them to the bus stop as one’s own work waited. “You were able to just do the things you needed to do,” Johnson said. “Everybody was comfortable. It was: ‘I can go to my computer, my baby is in my room on the computer. We’re good.’”
After that hiatus, relearning old behaviors was hard. “If I were a child, and I could stay at home on my computer, in my room, and play with my little toys on the side, pick up the game for your break or lunchtime, how hard is it to sit in a school building for seven hours?” she said. “It takes us to help build those habits, and I don’t think just one person can do it alone.”
Some parents, unimpressed by what instruction consisted of during remote learning, didn’t see missing school as that consequential. Some simply liked having their kids around. “You’re dealing with a different generation here. This is a parent generation that plays video games with their children,” Steven McGhee, the superintendent of the Harper Woods district, another Concentric client near Detroit, said. “When we were kids, we were out of the house and at school. There was no option. This became optional.”
Even before COVID, some students in the Detroit area had been able to choose online-only learning as an offering from public or charter schools. Since the pandemic, many schools have made it easier for students to try to catch up from missed days with online material.
The spectrum from in-person to virtual to nothing at all can get pretty fuzzy. One early afternoon, I saw an 8-year-old boy with headphones on standing outside a house in Ecorse, playing a video game on a tablet. His mother had died of a heroin overdose two years earlier, and his father said that he had enrolled his son in an online academy, because their housing situation was uncertain. Usually, there were three hours of instruction daily, he said, but the Wi-Fi hadn’t been working properly. “He’s done for the day,” his father said.
Families faced other hurdles as well. One student’s father had died a month earlier, and in the previous six months two of his grandparents had also died; his mother was suffering from heart disease that prevented her from working, and she could no longer afford school clothes. Johnson alerted the student’s principal, who had a special fund for such needs.
The mother of a middle school girl had been in a car crash; when a Concentric employee visited, the mother had trouble even coming to the door, and she explained that she couldn’t get her daughter to school anymore. A high school boy had moved in with his grandmother, but he was sleeping on the porch for lack of a bed; Concentric bought him one. A superintendent purchased a washer and dryer after hearing from Concentric that some students weren’t coming to school because they didn’t have any clean clothes. “Once you have these conversations, you know that there are real-life events that happen, there are real-life circumstances, where they’re just not able,” Johnson said.
Still, there were circumstances in which negligence did seem to be an issue. Johnson, who is 34 and has three kids, could feel her natural sympathy being tested: “I’ve had a parent tell me, ‘Well, hey, she wasn’t there because of my life problems.’ I get it, but you can’t just leave a student out of school because you have issues.”
---
Sometimes parents asked Johnson if she was a truant officer, and she would reply, “No, I’m a professional student advocate,” which was what Concentric called its outreach workers. “If you’re a truant officer, they’re defensive,” she told me. “They automatically assume you’re here to get them in trouble.”
Within the U.S., the concept of mandatory schooling can be traced to the 17th century, when the Puritans of Massachusetts positioned it as fundamental to Christian society, but this tenet was challenged by the Industrial Revolution, as children went to work in the mills. After Massachusetts instituted compulsory schooling policies in the 1840s and ’50s, enforcement was spotty. But, in 1873, the state passed a law requiring attendance between the ages of 8 and 12, for at least 20 weeks a year. The law was enforced by agents of the school committee — truant officers — with fines of up to $5 per week. Sixteen years later, the age range was expanded to 14, and a year after that the required term became 30 weeks a year. W.E.B. Du Bois, reflecting on his upbringing in western Massachusetts in the 1870s and ’80s, emphasized his school routine. “I was brought up from earliest years with the idea of regular attendance at school,” he wrote. “This was partly because the schools of Great Barrington were near at hand, simple but good, well-taught, and truant laws were enforced.”
By the 1890-91 school year, more than 200 of Massachusetts’s 351 towns had an average daily attendance of 90%, and only 11 were below 80%. During the following decades, mandatory schooling spread nationwide. William Reese, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, found that just 6% of adolescents were in high school in 1890 but that by 1930 half of them were. By 1950, attendance was so universal that those who weren’t in school were called dropouts. “By the early 20th century, the truth is that you’re supposed to be in school, and, in the long reach of history, that’s a remarkable fact,” Reese told me. “It became a universal norm. Other European nations sort of caught up eventually, but America was in the vanguard of this.”
Cities often employed truant officers, who roamed the streets searching for children to corral, and repeat offenders risked being brought to juvenile court. But in recent decades many areas have moved away from legal remedies, following a general shift toward less punitive juvenile justice. In addition, experts — citing psychology literature and evidence from states that still meted out consequences — argued that threats were unlikely to be effective. “Punitive rather than positive is not the best approach,” Michael Gottfried, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, said.
Enforcement of state truancy laws has grown rarer. In August, Missouri’s highest court affirmed the sentencing of two parents to at least a week in jail for their young children’s absences, but most of the movement has been in the other direction. In 2019, for instance, New Mexico removed the role of district attorneys in enforcing attendance. (The state, which had some of the longest school closures, saw its chronic absenteeism rates more than double after the pandemic, to 40%, the second-highest rate among states, after Alaska.)
The case of Kamala Harris is instructive. As the San Francisco district attorney in the mid-2000s, she made headlines for prosecuting parents of extremely truant students. “I believe that a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime,” Harris said, during her run for state attorney general, in 2010. “So, I decided I was going to start prosecuting parents for truancy.” During that campaign, she pushed for a statewide law that made it a misdemeanor for parents if their kids were chronically absent, punishable by a fine of up to $2,000 or a year in jail. In 2013, the state amended the law, giving school principals more leeway to excuse absences.
When Harris ran for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president, she received heavy criticism for her efforts. She expressed contrition, saying that she had hoped the law would simply prod districts to offer more resources to aid truant students. “My regret is that I have now heard stories where, in some jurisdictions, DAs have criminalized the parents,” she said. “And I regret that that has happened.”
In recent years, however, efforts to fight absenteeism have tended to involve nudges, not threats. In 2015, Todd Rogers, a behavioral scientist at Harvard, co-founded EveryDay Labs, which sent letters and text messages to families with reminders about the importance of school, and statistics about how their children’s attendance compared with classmates’. Parents could also respond to a chatbot about challenges that they were facing in getting their kids to school. The company was hired by some 50 school districts, but its approach was most effective with milder cases of absenteeism, less so with more severe ones.
---
David Heiber, Concentric’s founder, is an advocate of direct intervention, perhaps because he wishes he had received it when he was young. Heiber, who is 47, was brought up in Delaware by his maternal grandparents. He had some contact with his mother, a white woman who suffered from alcoholism, but he did not know his father, who was Black, until he was an adult. His grandfather, whom he called Dad, was a truck driver, and he and Heiber’s grandmother — Mom — provided him with a stable middle-class upbringing. In high school, he was a track star who attracted scholarship offers.
In his senior year, his grandfather had a fatal heart attack while Christmas shopping. Heiber went back to school just two days later and, receiving no social-work support — although a gym teacher let him play Ping-Pong for hours on end — he “spun out of control,” he told me. He was expelled from school, convicted of burglary and sentenced to some five years in prison. While he was incarcerated, his grandmother died of cancer. “I just decided, Something has to happen,” he said. “I got to do something.”
He earned his GED behind bars and a judge released him after 27 months, on the condition that he enroll in college. He attended Lincoln University, a historically Black institution in Pennsylvania, and got a job teaching high school in Baltimore, which he did for a year before taking an administrative position at a different local high school. But, in 2006, he faced one set of misdemeanor charges related to a breakup, which were later dropped, and another set, he told me, for his role interceding in a fight between students at a high school in Washington, D.C., which he had been visiting as an observer. That case resulted in four years of probation. “It was a rough period,” Heiber said. “Very few people go in a straight trajectory.”
In 2007, he moved to Washington, D.C., to become the director of student services for a small group of charter schools. One day, Heiber and some colleagues were wondering what to do about truant students, and it occurred to him that one lived just across the street from the school. He suggested going to the student’s home. There, his grandmother said that he was attending a different school. For Heiber, it was an epiphany: To get the right information, you needed to go to students’ homes, both to show families that the system cared about them and to gain a better understanding of what was keeping the students away — unreliable transportation, depression, lack of clothes or myriad other factors. “There was a list of maybe 200 or so, and we just thought, Ask them questions,” he said.
Heiber came to realize that there was an art to conducting visits in ways that didn’t make families feel judged. In one home, a cockroach fell onto his shoulder, and he managed to keep himself from recoiling, “because it would have made the whole conversation go different,” he said.
In 2010, he was approached by the NewSchools Venture Fund, a philanthropy looking to invest in Black entrepreneurs. He received $150,000 to help create Concentric, with the initial aim of advising districts on how to improve home visits by teachers. But it became apparent that many districts were having trouble getting teachers to do home visits at all and, instead, were interested in having Concentric do them.
Heiber embraced the new mission, becoming an evangelist for what he saw as an underappreciated aspect of the education system. Most school systems “pay the least amount of money for the most important job,” he said. “I’m not saying that teaching is not a very important job. But they got to be in school to be taught.”
His initial contracts were primarily in Detroit. He met several administrators in the school system there, mostly Black men roughly his own age, who then left to lead districts in the city’s working-class inner suburbs. They hired Concentric and recommended it to others in the region.
The frequent travel to Detroit was a strain on Heiber and his family, as was the scramble for new clients. He incurred bills for unpaid taxes and home improvements, leading to court proceedings in Prince George’s County, a Maryland suburb of Washington where he lived. Then came the post-pandemic boom, with new business in Maryland districts. Contracts ranged from $50,000 for home visits in a small district to several million dollars for home visits, plus mentoring and tutoring, in some large ones. In 2021 and 2022, Concentric hired dozens of employees, many of them young Black college graduates. It gave them two weeks of training, which included instruction as basic as how to knock on doors. “I tell everyone, ‘Knock a little harder, but don’t knock like the police,’” a Concentric manager said. The job mostly paid on an hourly basis, as much as $35 per hour. The “professional student advocates” dressed well, in black polo shirts with the company logo or, sometimes, in suits. “I didn’t want people to go into a building and not know that they were our PSAs,” Heiber said.
The company’s rapid expansion, with revenue reaching $8 million last academic year, brought growing pains. Some employees went weeks without getting paid, as income from new contracts arrived too late for payroll, and the company had to turn to lenders, several of whom later filed suit for nonpayment. (Most of the legal actions against Concentric and Heiber have been settled.)
Concentric’s growth only accelerated as the new school year began. For many districts, tracking down missing students was existential. About a million children had left public schools, either because they switched to private or parochial schools or homeschooling, or for reasons unknown. With fewer students, some districts faced teacher layoffs and school closures.
To bring more order to the expansion, Heiber hired experienced managers. In early October came an announcement that a firm called New Markets Venture Partners was investing $5 million in Concentric.
One of the firm’s partners, who was in charge of the investment, told Heiber that Concentric was worth $15 million. The federal pandemic funding that some districts were using to pay Concentric would fade in 2024, but many districts were using state money, which would continue. “He thinks we could be a $150 million business in five to seven years,” Heiber said.
---
Every few weeks, Concentric received a fresh list of absent kids from each district, often about 50 names. Shepria Johnson’s list brought her to tiny bungalows, ramshackle apartments and public-housing complexes. Sometimes she arrived at homes that appeared abandoned. “I pull up and am, like, No way, nobody lives here,” she said. “And I would knock on the door, and I see people peeking out, and I think, Oh, my God, someone does live here.”
She was able to stave off demoralization by feeling a purpose far greater than she’d had at her previous jobs — she’d worked as a manager at a shoe store and at a Verizon store, while making efforts to complete her college degree. “You don’t know what you’ll go and see, but if you’re not doing it then you can’t help,” she said. “It doesn’t make me sad anymore, it’s just, ‘How can I help?’”
She took pride in her ability to get parents to open up to her. “They go off of your energy. If you’re at the door, and you’re upset with me, I’m not going to get upset with you,” she said. “We should all consider the person on the other side of the door. *We* know what we’re trying to do — we’re trying to make a difference — but they don’t know that when we’re knocking at the door.”
The conversation was only the first half of the job; next was relaying what information she had learned to school officials or to Concentric employees stationed at schools. A mother in a mobile-home park said that her son, who was in high school, needed tutoring; another mother said that her son was always late to school because he hated algebra, his first period, and suggested changing his schedule. Even when Johnson found an address uninhabited, with nothing but a can of air freshener visible in the empty living room, she considered it useful, because it alerted the school that it needed updated contact information for a student.
These sorts of home visits are so new that there has been little chance to assess them. A Johns Hopkins University evaluation of Concentric in the Baltimore school district — its largest contract — during the 2021-22 school year reported that a majority of home visits found nobody there. The evaluators struggled to judge the impact even of the visits that did reach family members, because there was no attendance data from the pandemic year of 2020-21 to compare the new numbers with.
The Johns Hopkins study found, however, that school administrators praised the company’s efforts. Superintendents in Michigan echoed this praise. “The number of companies that pledge or promise to address inequities or deficits that are experienced in urban schools — it’s exhausting,” Derrick Coleman, the superintendent of Michigan’s River Rouge school district, told me. But Concentric, he said, is “able to go into places that many educators are reluctant to go into, for safety reasons, and make families feel comfortable. They create psychological safety to share whatever those challenges are. And that then gives us data and information to make adjustments.”
Connecticut, which has launched a home-visit initiative in 15 districts, has taken a slightly different approach: Outreach workers call ahead to schedule visits with families, which can last longer than an hour. A study found that the program — which is carried out by school employees or community members and which has cost $24 million — resulted in an increase in attendance of 15% to 20% among middle and high schoolers nine months after the first visit.
But Johnson preferred arriving unscheduled, believing that it gave her a clearer picture of the household context. “When you’re on the spot, you have the pure parent,” she said. “If you schedule it, they’re prepared, they already know why you’re coming, they already know their story, but you’re not getting the raw reason.”
“I’ve had a parent tell me, ‘Well, hey, she wasn’t there because of my life problems.’ I get it, but you can’t just leave a student out of school because you have issues,” said Johnson, at an apartment complex to check on a student. Credit: Brittany Greeson for ProPublica
---
On a couple of occasions, visits by members of Michigan’s Concentric team uncovered situations so troubling that they prompted calls to child-protective services. More often, the team found a different recourse. Michigan is one of the few states that still enforce legal repercussions for truancy: A school police officer or administrator or a Concentric PSA can send a JC 01 form to the prosecutor’s office for Wayne County, where most of the Concentric districts are.
If the prosecutor’s office finds sufficient evidence, it typically offers students who are 10 or older a diversion program — the chance to improve attendance and have their records wiped clean. If that fails, students may be brought before a judge. (Cases of younger kids are referred to the adult division, and charges may be brought against their parents.)
Johnson, her colleagues and the superintendents in the Concentric districts in Wayne County all said that the JC 01 forms have been a valuable tool in the most extreme cases — sometimes the court would even threaten to block parents’ welfare payments. “It was very powerful,” Josha Talison, the superintendent in Ecorse, said.
But during the pandemic, the superintendents said, the process broke down — it took much longer to hear from the prosecutor’s office about forms that had been filed. “When the pandemic started, they just stopped doing it,” Talison told me. Stiles Simmons, his counterpart in the Westwood district, which is nearby, told me the same. “The courthouse pretty much shut down,” he said. “And then there was a backlog.”
(Robert Heimbuch, the chief of the juvenile division at the prosecutor’s office, said that his team had continued to handle JC 01 forms, shifting meetings and hearings to Zoom, but that some steps in the process might have taken longer. He didn’t know if referrals for chronically absent students had fallen off, because JC 01s were filed for all manner of juvenile-delinquency cases, and his office did not keep a tally of how many were for truancy.)
After a morning of home visits with Johnson, I met with Sarah Lenhoff, a professor of education policy at Wayne State University, who started studying absenteeism in 2016. She joined a coalition to tackle the problem in Detroit and became convinced that the crisis is now so severe that it requires a greater response. “We’re thinking about school attendance all wrong,” she said. “It’s societal.”
Several of the Wayne County superintendents working with Concentric agreed. “The issue of chronic absenteeism is much broader than what the school and its partners can handle,” Simmons said. “There needs to be something else done.” It was a compelling argument: Throughout the country, local and state government officials, school boards and others had decided that it was in the public interest to close school buildings for a year or more, and now it was going to take a group effort to rebuild the norms. The issue couldn’t be left to individual schools or districts — or to a single company.
Society, as a whole, needed to reinforce — as it had in Massachusetts more than a century ago — the importance of school. It was where children awakened to the world’s opportunities, where they learned how to be productive citizens and, for some, where they found a daily routine and regular meals.
Instead, as Lenhoff noted, families often got the opposite message. Inadequate infrastructure had led Detroit to cancel school for several days last year because of excessive heat. Schools had also closed in the face of forecasts of snow that brought no actual snow. Districts get penalized by the state’s funding formula if attendance drops below 75% on any day, and so they may close schools when they fear that too few kids will show up. “If you have that happen often enough, it does erode your feeling that the system is there for us, and not just when it’s convenient for them,” Lenhoff said.
One day, shortly after noon, I encountered several 15- and 16-year-old boys who had recently arrived from Latin America and were walking a dog in the quiet streets of River Rouge. But they weren’t playing hooky. School had been closed that day, owing to plumbing problems.
A short drive away, a middle school girl was playing in a front yard, while her older sister and some of her friends, in their late teens and early 20s, were hanging out in a nearby car, one with a baby on her lap. The younger sister was also not missing school: It had been only a half day in her district, to allow for professional-development courses.
Asked why absenteeism had increased, the young women didn’t hesitate. “That’s what the corona did,” Serenity, who is 21, told me. Now “they’re sending the kids back to school, and they don’t want to no more. They want to stay home and play on their computers.”
---
When December arrived, the weather became another obstacle: Leaving home was even less appealing when it was dark and cold out. One mother told Johnson that her son had been missing school because she hadn’t been able to buy him a winter jacket.
Another mother told Johnson that she had just been crying on the toilet: Her rent had doubled, so she wasn’t going to be able to afford Christmas presents for her kids. The rent increase had forced her to pick up a second job, at a fast-food restaurant, which had disrupted her school drop-off and pickup routines. Johnson alerted the children’s school and suggested that it put the family on its list for gift donations.
In Ecorse, Kuanticka Prude was worried about money, too. She had less coming in now than a year earlier, when she had been working a second job, at a Wendy’s. The reason her nanny cam wasn’t working, she told me, was not the cats, as she had said to Johnson, but because she couldn’t afford the monthly payments.
But she told me that she might quit her security job, too, to better monitor the schooling of her kids, who also included a girl in ninth grade, twin girls about to turn 8 (who were in special-education programs) and a 4-year-old girl in preschool. “I’m going to get it together,” she said. With Jisaiah and King, “it’s going to take me to sit them down and talk to them really good and let them know, to understand what they’re doing and causing. Because this is not a game or a joke. Not only can you get people in trouble but you need an education.”
The next morning, it was just getting light as Jisaiah and King were scheduled to bring their little sister two blocks away for her preschool bus. A cat pawed at the front door, as if to remind them. And then they emerged. They were a few minutes late, which meant that King needed to wave at the bus as Jisaiah hustled her sister down the sidewalk, a hand on her shoulder. Then Prude’s mother emerged to load the two of them and their older sister into her car. On this day, they were going to make it.
Correction
**Jan. 12, 2024:** This article originally misstated the number of children who have left public schools in recent years. About a million have left, not several million.
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#### Sport
- [ ] :snowflake: :sports_medal:[[@@Paris|:test_grandes_armes_de_paris:]]: Check out the [6 Nations](https://billetterie.ffr.fr/fr) 🔁 every year 📅 2024-01-30
- [ ] :sunny: :sports_medal:[[@@Paris|:test_grandes_armes_de_paris:]]: Check out [RG](https://www.rolandgarros.com/fr-fr/page/billetterie-roland-garros) 🔁 every year 📅 2024-03-10
- [ ] :sunny: :racehorse: [[@@Paris|:test_grandes_armes_de_paris:]]: Check out the [Open de France](https://www.poloclubchantilly.com/) 🔁 every year 📅 2024-08-25
- [ ] :snowflake:🎭 [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out floating theatre ([Herzlich willkommen!](http://herzbaracke.ch/)) %%done_del%% 🔁every year 📅2024-10-15
- [ ] 🎭:frame_with_picture: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out exhibitions at the [Kunsthaus](https://www.kunsthaus.ch/en/) %%done_del%% 🔁every 3 months 📅2024-02-15
- [ ] 🎭:frame_with_picture: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out exhibitions at the [Rietberg](https://rietberg.ch/en/) %%done_del%% 🔁every 3 months 📅2024-03-15
 
#### Local activities & social life
- [ ] :snowflake: :person_in_steamy_room: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out [Sauna Cubes at Strandbad Küsnacht — Strandbadsauna](https://www.strandbadsauna.ch/home-eng) %%done_del%% 🔁every year 📅2024-11-15
- [ ] :christmas_tree: :cocktail: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out pop-up bars ([Pop-ups at Christmas | zuerich.com](https://www.zuerich.com/en/visit/christmas-in-zurich/pop-ups)) %%done_del%% 🔁every year 📅2024-12-01
- [ ] :hibiscus: :fork_and_knife: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Book a restaurant with terrace for the season: [[Albishaus]], [[Restaurant Boldern]], [[Zur Buech]], [[Jardin Zürichberg]], [[Bistro Rigiblick]], [[Portofino am See]], [[La Réserve|La Muña]] %%done_del%% 🔁every year 📅2024-05-01
- [ ] :hibiscus: :canned_food: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out [FOOD ZURICH - MEHR ALS EIN FESTIVAL](https://www.foodzurich.com/de/) %%done_del%% 🔁every year 📅2024-06-01
- [ ] :sunny: :movie_camera: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out programmation of the [Zurich's finest open-air cinema | Allianz Cinema -](https://zuerich.allianzcinema.ch/en) %%done_del%% 🔁every year 📅2024-07-01
- [ ] :maple_leaf: :movie_camera: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out Zürich Film Festival %%done_del%% 🔁every year 📅2024-09-15
- [ ] :maple_leaf: :wine_glass: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out Zürich’s Wine festival ([ZWF - Zurich Wine Festival](https://zurichwinefestival.ch/)) %%done_del%% 🔁every year 📅2024-09-25
- [ ] :maple_leaf: :wine_glass: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out [Discover the Excitement of EXPOVINA Wine Events | Join Us at Weinschiffe, Primavera, and Wine Trophy | EXPOVINA](https://expovina.ch/en-ch/) %%done_del%% 🔁every year 📅2024-10-15
- [ ] :christmas_tree: :shopping_bags: [[@@Travels|Travels]]: Organise a trip to a famous Christmas market (Nürnberg, Salzburg, Praha, Budapest, Wien, Basel, Merano, Esslingen, Strasbourg) %%done_del%% 🔁every year 📅2024-12-01
- [ ] :snowflake: :tada: [[@@Travels|Travels]]: Organise New Year’s Eve %%done_del%% 🔁every year 📅2024-10-15
- [ ] :maple_leaf: :canned_food: [[@Italy|🇮🇹]]: Check out the [International White Truffle Fair - Find out all the events](https://www.fieradeltartufo.org/en/) %%done_del%% 🔁every year 📅2024-09-18
 
#### Sport
- [ ] :sunny: :racehorse: [[@Italy|🇮🇹]]: Check out the [Palio di Siena](https://www.comune.siena.it/node/135) %%done_del%% 🔁every year 📅2024-05-15
1. Trim and cut the aubergine into large chunks. Heat a couple of lugs of olive oil in a large pan over a medium heat, add the aubergine, oregano and a little sea salt, then toss to coat.
 
2. Turn the heat up to high and cook for 4 to 5 minutes, giving the pan a shake every now and then.
 
3. While that’s ticking away, peel and finely chop the onion and garlic. Pick and chop the parsley leaves and finely chop the stalks, then roughly chop the tomatoes.
 
4. When the aubergine is golden all over, add the onion, garlic and parsley stalks, then cook for a further 2 minutes – if the aubergine gets too dry, add a little more oil to the pan.
 
5. Drain and add the capers, destone and add the olives, then drizzle over the vinegar.
 
6. When all the vinegar has evaporated, add the tomatoes and simmer for around 15 minutes, or until the aubergine is tender.
 
7. Put the couscous into a bowl, add a pinch of salt and just cover with boiling water, then pop a plate on top and leave to fluff up.
 
8. Lightly toast the almonds in a dry pan over a medium heat for 1 to 2 minutes, or until golden, keeping them moving.
 
9. Use a fork to fluff up the couscous and stir through half the chopped parsley.
 
10. Season the stew to taste, then drizzle with extra virgin olive oil.
 
11. Serve the stew with the couscous and sprinkle with the almonds and remaining parsley.
In a medium sauce pan, heat olive oil over medium low heat. Saute garlic for a couple of minutes, stirring to keep from burning,until fragrant.
 
Pour in chicken stock and bring a boil. Stir in 4 T of butter. Add in couscous, remove from heat, and cover for 5 minutes.
 
While you wait, make the dressing by whisking or shaking together olive oil and lemon juice. Set aside.
 
When couscous is done, uncover and fluff with a fork. Dispose of garlic cloves. Transfer couscous to a large bowl or serving dish, and mix in peas. Stir in grated Parmesan. Pour dressing over couscous and fluff again to distribute. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and sprinkle with chopped parsley.
 
Serve (right away is best, but cover to keep warm) with extra grated Parmesan on top.
plot: "Set in the summer of 1957, with Enzo Ferrari's auto empire in crisis, the ex-racer turned entrepreneur pushes himself and his drivers to the edge as they launch into the Mille Miglia, a treacherous 1,000-mile race across Italy."
plot: "Told in four different New Year's Eves in the mid 1960s, John, Terry, Debbie, Steve and Laurie deal with adulthood, the Vietnam war, peace rallies, and relationships."
plot: "Fast Eddie Felson teaches a cocky but immensely talented protégé the ropes of pool hustling, which in turn inspires him to make an unlikely comeback."
iOS
10 months ago
