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@ -12271,29 +12461,30 @@
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Great American Novels.md\"> The Great American Novels </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/‘We wanted to invade media’ the hippies, nerds and Hollywood pros who brought The Simpsons to life.md\"> ‘We wanted to invade media’ the hippies, nerds and Hollywood pros who brought The Simpsons to life </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.02 Travels/Skiing in Switzerland.md\"> Skiing in Switzerland </a>"
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/These three brothers scammed their investors out of $233 million. Then they lived like kings.md\"> These three brothers scammed their investors out of $233 million. Then they lived like kings </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How the Record Industry Ruthlessly Punished Milli Vanilli for Anticipating the Future of Music.md\"> How the Record Industry Ruthlessly Punished Milli Vanilli for Anticipating the Future of Music </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The last days of Boston Market.md\"> The last days of Boston Market </a>",
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"title":":heavy_dollar_sign: [[@Finances|Finances]]: update crypto prices within Obsidian %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-05-14",
"rowNumber":116
},
{
"title":":moneybag: [[@Finances]]: Transfer UK pension to CH %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-10-31",
@ -420,11 +415,6 @@
}
],
"01.01 Life Orga/@Personal projects.md":[
{
"title":":fork_and_knife: [[@Personal projects|Personal projects]]: Rechercher à créer un set Christofle (80e les 6 couteaux; 120e les 6 autres aux Puces)",
"time":"2024-05-30",
"rowNumber":75
},
{
"title":":art: [[@Personal projects|Personal projects]]: Continuer à construire un petit trousseau d'[[@Personal projects#art|art]]",
"time":"2024-06-21",
@ -440,6 +430,11 @@
"time":"2024-06-30",
"rowNumber":78
},
{
"title":":fork_and_knife: [[@Personal projects|Personal projects]]: Rechercher à créer un set Christofle (80e les 6 couteaux; 120e les 6 autres aux Puces)",
"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",
"rowNumber":104
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{
"title":"🎭:frame_with_picture: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out exhibitions at the [Kunsthaus](https://www.kunsthaus.ch/en/) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-05-15",
@ -831,7 +809,7 @@
{
"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",
"rowNumber":105
"rowNumber":106
},
{
"title":"🎭:frame_with_picture: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out exhibitions at the [Rietberg](https://rietberg.ch/en/) %%done_del%%",
@ -841,42 +819,42 @@
{
"title":":hibiscus: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Zürich Pride Festival %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-06-15",
"rowNumber":120
"rowNumber":121
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{
"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",
"rowNumber":106
"rowNumber":107
},
{
"title":":sunny: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out Seenachtfest Rapperswil-Jona %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-08-01",
"rowNumber":123
"rowNumber":124
},
{
"title":":sunny: :runner: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out tickets to Weltklasse Zürich %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-08-01",
"rowNumber":130
"rowNumber":132
},
{
"title":":sunny: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Street Parade %%done_del%%",
"title":":maple_leaf: :movie_camera: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out Zürich Film Festival %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-09-15",
"rowNumber":107
"rowNumber":108
},
{
"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",
"rowNumber":108
"rowNumber":109
},
{
"title":":snowflake:🎭 [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out floating theatre ([Herzlich willkommen!](http://herzbaracke.ch/)) %%done_del%%",
@ -886,7 +864,7 @@
{
"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",
"rowNumber":109
"rowNumber":110
},
{
"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%%",
"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":"2025-05-01",
"rowNumber":104
}
],
"03.02 Travels/Geneva.md":[
@ -952,17 +940,10 @@
"rowNumber":129
}
],
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-01-22.md":[
{
"title":"16:06 :ski: [[@Lifestyle|Lifestyle]]: Look for a ski bag & a ski boot bag",
"time":"2024-04-15",
"rowNumber":104
}
],
"01.08 Garden/@Plants.md":[
{
"title":":potted_plant: [[@Plants|Plants]]: Buy fertilizer for the season %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-04-30",
"time":"2024-05-31",
"rowNumber":111
}
],
@ -1007,18 +988,45 @@
"rowNumber":107
}
],
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-15.md":[
"01.03 Family/Dorothée Moulin.md":[
{
"title":"09:15 :performing_arts: [[@Lifestyle|Lifestyle]]: Book tickets for the [Colombian exhibition]([](https://rietberg.ch/en/exhibitions/morethangold)) at the Rietberg",
- [] 09:15 :performing_arts: [[@Lifestyle|Lifestyle]]: Book tickets for the [Colombian exhibition]([](https://rietberg.ch/en/exhibitions/morethangold)) at the Rietberg 📅 2024-04-01
- [x] 09:15 :performing_arts: [[@Lifestyle|Lifestyle]]: Book tickets for the [Colombian exhibition]([](https://rietberg.ch/en/exhibitions/morethangold)) at the Rietberg 📅 2024-04-01 ✅ 2024-04-20
# A racial slur and a Fort Myers High baseball team torn apart - ESPN
*This story has been corrected. Read below*
## ACT I: ERUPTION
**ON APRIL 6, 2023,** at Terry Park in Fort Myers, Florida, the Fort Myers High Green Wave and Estero Wildcats met as part of the annual Battle of the Border, the in-season tournament between Lee County high school baseball teams.
Tate Reilly batted leadoff that day. The Fort Myers senior outfielder was surprised by the plum assignment. He had been on the varsity two seasons and batted in the bottom third of the order. Leading off should have buttressed the even better news he held in his heart: He received an offer to play at Albertus Magnus College, a Division III school in New Haven, Connecticut. He would soon be a college player, and receiving a firm scholarship represented a vindication of the hard work he'd put into a difficult game.
Madrid Tucker was to bat second. Tucker's father is Michael Tucker, who was the 10th overall pick by theKansas City Royalsin the 1992 draft. Tucker played for seven teams over a 12-year big league career, appearing in the National League Championship Series three times. Just a sophomore, Madrid played varsity as a freshman and already had been offered a dozen scholarships to play baseball, some at Power 5 schools. Six-foot tall and widely considered by his coaches to be the most promising player on the team, Madrid Tucker played in the prestigious Hank Aaron Invitational, the joint MLB/Players Association tournament in Vero Beach, Florida, designed to develop and increase the shrinking number of Black players in the majors. He was a high-level prospect, a three-sport star on a trajectory for Division I or the Major League amateur draft by the time he graduates. According to one national prep tracking service, in 2023 he was ranked second at shortstop in talent-rich Florida and 75th overall in the nation.
While Madrid stood in the on-deck circle taking practice cuts, Reilly saw two pitches. On the second, Robert Hinson, the Fort Myers third-base coach -- his coach -- walked off the field. Seconds later, two more coaches and at least nine Fort Myers players followed out of the dugout. One player walking off the field said, "I'm out," to which Hinson added, "I'm out of here."
As the players headed for the parking lot, chaos ensued. According to later testimony, some parents and fans in the bleachers "began applauding, cheering and fist-bumping the players walking out." One Fort Myers administrator who witnessed the walkout and ensuing cheering called the scene "so selfish ... an injustice to the kids." She would later tell investigators, "This is just sickening."
In the parking lot, adults traded insults. John Dailey, a hulking man identified in one video, approached Tate Reilly's mother, Melanie, and told her, "I'm going to pray for the evil in your heart to go away." Police arrived. As various onlookers began taking cellphone video, the sound of metal baseball cleats crunching against the pavement best told the story: Led by their adult coaches and supported by their parents, members of the Fort Myers high school baseball team quit a game and left their two teammates, Reilly and Tucker, who happened to be the only two players of color on the team, alone on the field.
Xavier Medina, an assistant coach for Estero, watched from across the diamond. In all his years coaching youth sports, he had never seen a team abandon its own players. As the bizarre scene unfolded, he was witnessing the antithesis of what sports were supposed to be about. The cliches of teamwork and togetherness were collapsing in real time. Players wearing the same uniform were not united against Estero. They were divided against themselves. His second conclusion was even worse: The walkout did not appear to be a reckless act concocted by teenagers, but rather orchestrated and blessed by coaches and parents. The kids were taking the lead from the grown-ups.
"In my mind, yes, the adults were behind it," Medina said. "If that were my team and we saw the players doing that, we would have immediately asked what they were doing and why. And we would have told them to go back to playing baseball. But here's why I don't think it was the players' idea: When they started walking off of the field, not a single adult, parent or coach, tried to stop them. Not one."
**THE WALKOUT RESULTED** in the cancellation of the remainder of the baseball season; multiple local and state investigations; the resignation, firing or reassignment of virtually every coach and school administrator involved with the incident; and two federal discrimination lawsuits, one filed in February by the Tucker family and another in early April by the Reillys. It was the product of simmering fractures within the Fort Myers baseball community that had been allowed to fester long before the first pitch of the season.
The avalanche of broken relationships within this baseball community at Fort Myers High -- a school considered the "crown jewel" of the Lee County high schools -- served as a microcosm for a polarized country: the small handful of Black players on both the junior varsity and varsity felt hostility within the baseball environment, and many of the white parents, whose children comprise an overwhelming majority at both levels, insisted it was they who have endured unfair treatment -- because they were white.
ESPN interviewed Fort Myers High parents, reviewed three completed school district investigation reports into the baseball team -- a state investigation is still pending -- along with hundreds of pages of school personnel records of coaches and administrators and bodycam footage from the Fort Myers Police Department, all acquired via Freedom of Information Act requests, as well as cellphone footage from the walkout. Before the Tucker and Reilly families filed their lawsuits, Rob Spicker, assistant director, media relations and public information for the school district of Lee County, declined all requests to be interviewed or to make any employee of the school district of Lee County -- administrators, or coaches -- available for comment. "Our comment is the report speaks for itself," Spicker told ESPN in September. Two active members of the Lee County School Board, Melisa Giovannelli and Jada Langford-Fleming, also declined to be interviewed. After the lawsuits were filed, Spicker declined subsequent interview requests from ESPN, citing ongoing litigation. John Dailey, one of the adults who encouraged the walkout, declined to comment when approached by ESPN in April. The parents of three players who participated in the walkout also declined to be interviewed by ESPN.
While many team issues fell under the common soap opera of high school sports -- a nationwide epidemic of meddling parents and overbearing coaches, the unending battle between fair participation and winning at all costs -- virtually the entirety of the grievances that destroyed the 2023 baseball team can be traced to two specific areas: the internecine racial history of Fort Myers, and, more urgently, the enforcement of conservative mandates playing out in education in Florida and around the nation.
The baseball team provided an explosive stage even before last season began. Untrusting of the overall competence and values of the coaching staff, one white player quit the team before the season started. Another Black player, unconvinced varsity head coach Kyle Burchfield would give him a fair chance to compete and wary of the racial attitudes of Burchfield's second-year assistant coach Alex Carcioppolo, chose not to try out at all.
Another parent would tell school district investigators that in 2022, a white player on the junior varsity said he "wanted to punch those two n-----s in the face," referring to two of his Black teammates. When some parents -- both white and Black -- complained first to Chris Chappell, the head junior varsity coach, and later to Burchfield, Burchfield told investigators he successfully handled the incident. Parental sources said otherwise, that the coaches left the wound undressed. One source said Carcioppolo told the players and their parents to "get over it." The N-word, he reportedly reasoned, was "just a word." Carcioppolo, the source concluded, was frustrated that an oversensitive country was just making everything worse. In January 2023, Michael Tucker says he and his wife, Dee, met with Burchfield to tell the coach they did not want Carcioppolo associating with their son. Burchfield, they say, did nothing.
By allowing issues to simmer, several people associated with the situation thought the coaches already had lost control of the team. "Had they dealt with it a year ago," one white parent said, "all the things that happened would have never happened."
**THE FIRST FRACTURE** of the season occurred Feb. 14, 2023, a week before Fort Myers' first game. Burchfield sent a routine message into the team group chat regarding upcoming scheduling, to which Carcioppolo responded, "Happy Valentines Day, n---as." The offensive message was either deleted "within seconds," or according to some players, several minutes before Carcioppolo responded, "Yikes," and deleted the text. Carcioppolo said the text was intended for a group of Black military friends and wound up mistakenly on the team group chat, an alibi some parents found flimsy. "If it was for them," Michael Tucker said, "why didn't any of his Black war buddies come to his defense?"
Carcioppolo was fired within 48 hours and, as mandated by state law, the school district opened a Title VI discrimination investigation, named after the section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance. The viral text likely had been copied and shared dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times before Carcioppolo deleted it, but a certain conventional wisdom raced through the Fort Myers High baseball ecosystem: The Reillys and the Tuckers -- the only two families of color on the team -- had to be the ones who alerted school officials.
Carcioppolo's dismissal immediately was seen by many parents largely through the lens of race: White parents in his defense reasoned that a good man, an Afghan War veteran, Purple Heart recipient and a popular coach, had made an honest mistake and should be forgiven. Only the combination of "political correctness" and the racial pressure of appeasing the "troublemaker parent" pair of the interracial Reilly family and the African American Tuckers prevented Carcioppolo from receiving grace -- and an explosive issue from being quietly resolved by an apology and a second chance.
Furthermore, many white parents and players were enraged that a white coach was fired for using a word Black people used routinely as a figure of speech. It was an unfair racial double standard that galvanized the grievance of the white players and parents. In a group text chat that comprised only the team's seniors, some players argued if Carcioppolo were Black, no one would have cared.
Several players decided the best way to make themselves heard was to boycott the first game of the season in protest unless Carcioppolo was not immediately reinstated. The Tuckers and Reillys were stunned that an adult making a racial slur would be the issue around which the team would unify.
"They don't understand the magnitude within itself. You were going to boycott -- for *this?* That makes you racist," Dee Tucker said. "You don't fight to say Jewish slurs. You don't fight to say LGBTQ words. You don't fight for any other words, but you fight for this one. This one particular word is the one you're OK with because you think we're beneath you."
Burchfield would tell investigators that Carcioppolo's firing was the first time he had heard the word "walkout" around his team. Tate Reilly recalled being asked by his white teammates to join the movement. When he declined, alienation from his teammates ensued.
"It changed the course of the rest of the year compared to what we had in the fall," Tate Reilly recalled. "All of the friendships that we made were kinda on thin ice. All of the relationships with the coaches were on thin ice. It was who you wanted to walk on eggshells around. You didn't have a safe place unless you fit in with the herd. You had to go with what everyone else said, and if you weren't with them, then you were against them."
His isolation increased, he recalled, by his decision to sit in the cafeteria with teammate Madrid Tucker. "As soon as he didn't support boycotting for Carcioppolo, the players and the coaches targeted my son," said Tate's father, Shane. Added Dee Tucker: "Tate was part of the in-crowd until he refused to join the boycott for Coach Alex. Once he started sitting with Madrid, they went after him."
**CARCIOPPOLO'S FIRING IGNITED** a chain of smoldering racial resentments. Contentious school board meetings, simmering individual tensions between Burchfield and parents, Black and white. Angry white parents believed Carcioppolo's firing should have ended the controversy, but the Reillys and Tuckers refused to, as both families said they were told to "move on." Feeling silenced by the majority only deepened the chasm, Dee Tucker said.
The Green Wave also were losing -- Fort Myers lost its first seven games of the season -- but not all the losses could be attributed to racial turmoil; they were a young team. Still, race and cultural grievance permeated the dysfunction. Some white parents, community members and often Burchfield himself privately pointed to Madrid Tucker as the problem.
Carcioppolo was fired for using the N-word, they reasoned, but Black people used the word frequently and without penalty -- in routine speech and in popular music -- while a white coach had used it and was fired. The anger over use of the word at Fort Myers mirrored conversations and controversies around the country. The word was ubiquitous, and yet a white coach was now unemployed. On the baseball team, Tucker had been heard by several players and coaches using the N-word, just as Carcioppolo had, and they saw his use of the word without sanction an example of a double standard unfair to them. To angry parents, Tucker was proof of an America that punished only white people. A 2022 University of Maryland poll found that half of white Republicans saw "a lot more" discrimination against white Americans over the previous five years. That Tucker at the time was a 16-year-old sophomore and Carcioppolo was a 35-year-old coach did not assuage the collective anger of many parents.
On Feb. 23, nine days after Carcioppolo's text message, Burchfield held a meeting announcing tougher discipline. The following day, Burchfield emailed his zero-tolerance mandate to parents: "If a player strikes out and throws his hands up at the umpire and starts cussing, they will be removed from the game. No excuses. ... Actions will be taken that may look severe, but it is necessary to end the disrespect they have created for themselves, you as parents, our program, and the game of baseball." The email continued: "If any racial slurs are used at any point, the player will be removed from the game and suspended. ... Depending on the manner it was used it could be multiple game suspensions, it could be removal from the team."
Burchfield concluded his email with a tough love message delivered in all caps: "These steps taken by the coaching staff is FOR THE BOYS." The Tuckers interpreted the message as a vindictive response to Carcioppolo's firing, and now they felt Burchfield was pandering to white parents who claimed Madrid Tucker to be the beneficiary of "reverse racism" while Carcioppolo was a victim of "cancel culture." From the Tuckers' viewpoint, a moment adults could have used to constructively discuss racism was transformed into a weapon against their son.
Burchfield's tough-love message produced an unintended consequence: Instead of treating each other as teammates, players and parents began policing each other's behavior to coaches, each action or inaction proof of unfair double standards. Relations on the team grew so toxic that the school principal, Dr. Robert Butz, decided to place a school administrator in the Fort Myers dugout for every game.
Soon after, Tucker joked with a Black friend on the junior varsity, and while both were in the locker room laughing, Tucker at one point said, "N---a, pay attention." As the two Black kids continued conversing, some white players raced straight to their parents. The parents immediately went to Burchfield, who suspended Tucker for the first four innings of the next game. In another moment, Tucker threw his helmet to the ground during a three-strikeout game. Two teammates with whom Tucker was not particularly friendly engaged him to calm down -- but instead of support, Tucker saw their presence as goading. Words were exchanged. When a player suggested Tucker was all talk, he assured them he wasn't -- investigators reported Tucker told his teammate to "shut the f--- up or imma beat your ass" -- and his response netted him a five-game suspension.
The Tuckers were furious. A five-game suspension was disproportionate to the crime. Two Black kids talking to each other using common language did not constitute "hate speech." The Tuckers argued their son made no racial slur against another race -- he was talking to a friend, speaking the way people of the same race joke with one another. The sanction left the Tuckers with another conclusion: By attempting to suspend their son for 40% of the remaining season, Burchfield and the coaches were trying to make Madrid quit.
"The whole thing didn't make sense to me," Dee Tucker said. "Madrid used the word to another Black kid, and all the white kids ran and told the coach. The kid he said it to wasn't white. It wasn't like he called a white kid a cracker."
Michael Tucker began derisively calling Burchfield's new mandate "The Madrid Rules." In a charged private meeting with the Tuckers, Burchfield, athletic director Steven Cato and an assistant principal, Kelly Heinzman-Britton, Burchfield told the Tuckers that of all the players he'd ever coached, their son was "the worst" at handling his emotions. In the meeting, which Michael and Dee Tucker say they recorded with the room's knowledge and Cato's permission, Michael Tucker said to Burchfield, "No offense to you, Kyle, but how is it that we've been talking about racial issues, big bombshells being dropped for over six weeks, kids have been doing stuff, and the only kids that have been disciplined are the kids of color? How is that?" According to the recorded conversation, Burchfield did not respond to Tucker, nor did any administrator in the room.
Before the suspension was to go into effect, Burchfield was told by Butzthat district regulations against the appearance of retaliation prevented Madrid's suspension because the Carcioppolo investigation was not yet complete. That triggered more outrage from white parents: Madrid was receiving "preferential treatment" not because of an ongoing investigation, but because he was Black.
Trust between the Tuckers and Burchfield deteriorated. The Tuckers were once advocates of Burchfield. Four years earlier, they supported his hire. Michael Tucker attended Burchfield's wedding. Michael Tucker now saw Burchfield as duplicitous, assuring the family he was an ally, telling the Tuckers he understood the distinction between colloquial Black speech within the racial group while privately stoking the anger of white parents. Burchfield would confirm Michael Tucker's fear, later telling investigators that Madrid Tucker "dropped the N-word twice, with little to no consequences. It created a caustic environment showing the team there are no consequences to breaking the rules. The district tied my hands throughout the balance of the season."
Burchfield sanctioned Tucker in other ways: extra running, and twice sitting him for the early innings of games. Without a suspension, however, parents believed Madrid received no punishments, which led to players again discussing a boycott of the team.
Burchfield told investigators that on at least two occasions he had heard rumors of walkouts but nothing definite. Cato said the same, telling investigators walkout rumors had been discussed internally at the administrative level, with principal Butz, but no one confronted the players about the purpose of such a move or its consequences. Nor did Cato, Butz or anyone else who was aware of a possible walkout alert the Tucker family that some of Madrid's teammates were planning to target their child with a protest action.
"Do I feel like Fort Myers High School protected my son?" Michael Tucker asked. "No. No, I don't."
**MEANWHILE, SHANE REILLY** was convinced his son was being targeted by teammates, instigated by the coaches. A month before the walkout, Shane Reilly emailed Fernando Vazquez, a school district investigator, recommending Burchfield be fired as a coach and the "student(s) involved in the malicious targeting of my son to be kicked off the team." School documents contain several emails from Shane Reilly to school administrators demanding action. On April 8, 2023, Shane Reilly emailed Butz and told him he ordered Tate to "call 911 immediately" should he face any threat because "we have little confidence in Fort Myers High School's willingness to protect ALL kids."
There was nothing about Tate Reilly's senior year he would recall fondly. After he refused to support Carcioppolo, many of the white friends he believed he'd made on the baseball team were not friends at all. He increasingly believed Burchfield -- whom he'd known since he was 11 years old -- did not believe in him as a player. "I have nothing good to say about Coach Burchfield," he said.
Tate Reilly's instincts were correct. When his offer from Albertus Magnus was announced, Burchfield celebrated the senior publicly, but privately he held a dim view of Reilly's toughness and raw ability. "He is the slowest outfielder, he has the weakest arm, he's an OK hitter," Burchfield would later tell investigators. "He's going to play Division III baseball. There is no Division III baseball in Florida. A good high school team would beat a Division III school. I tried to help him with Division II schools. No school wanted him. I tried to help him with travel teams. No travel team wanted him." In a separate interview with investigators, Burchfield said he batted Tate Reilly low in the order "because of his speed. He's very slow. He doesn't have the best baseball IQ. When he's on base, he gets picked off. ... He gets signs wrong. It costs us wins."
Burchfield cut an imposing figure: about 6-foot-6, he headed travel teams and boasted his coaching bona fides -- the number of well-known MLB stars he'd played with, and the best calling card of them all: On his Facebook page and lesson sign-up sheets, he listed himself as a scout for theAtlanta Braves.
The Valentine's Day text was compounded by a series of incidents during the season. On April 4, at the apex of his frustration, Shane Reilly began filing what would become three separate complaints that would lead to Burchfield's suspension. One allegation stemmed from a March 10 game against Riverview High School in Sarasota. Burchfield was said to have forcibly redirected Tate Reilly toward the dugout by grabbing him between the neck and shoulder. Another alleged Hinson intentionally provided false information to the coaching staff, which led to Tate being benched.Reilly also alleged his son's baseball glove was stolen in retaliation for not supporting the aborted Carcioppolo boycott.
Shane Reilly's complaints led to Burchfield being investigated for physically confronting a student as well as the two other charges, but players and parents were given no explanation. Per district rules, a person who is the subject of an investigation is temporarily removed with pay from their position.
White players and coaches reached their boiling point. Days earlier, a Fort Myers parent, Krista Nowak Walsh, posted an article on social media from the People magazine website about Mississippi meteorologist Barbie Bassett, who was taken off the air at NBC affiliate WLBT for apparently quoting a Snoop Dogg lyric that translated into the N-word:
"OMG! But if it was the other way around, that person would still be on the air. Just like when a kid on a HS baseball team calls another teammate the N-word, that kid is still on the team, not suspended, etc...but my kid doesn't start because he cussed \[to himself in frustration\]. Can you guess who's white?"
Throughout the controversy, white parents believed the Tuckers and Reillys were the only voices being heard. In response to a social media post, Nowak Walsh said, "They're only listening to 1 of trouble maker family!"
**ON JUNE 4, 1940,** with Germany having already conquered the Netherlands, France and much of Western Europe, and five weeks from his nation being invaded by the Nazis, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his greatest oratory, the "We Shall Fight on the Beaches" speech. "We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender," Churchill told the British House of Commons. His famous defiance was broadcast on radio throughout the United Kingdom and would symbolize what would become the resilient Allied effort in World War II.
More than 82 years later, in his November 2022 speech after sweeping to a second term as governor of Florida, Republican Ron DeSantis chose a similar cadence against a dissimilar enemy -- citizens of his own country and the teaching of multiculturalism. "We reject woke ideology. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die."
DeSantis repackaging of one of the world's darkest moments, and by extension conjuring a disturbing parallel between American citizens of different viewpoints and Nazi Germany, came with serious and disturbing implications. The southwest coast of Florida is heavily conservative and Republican, fertile ground for the divisions playing out across the country -- and on the Fort Myers baseball team. A 2021 Pew Research Center study of more than 10,000 adults found that more than half of white Americans do not believe being white provides them societal advantages. Ninety percent of Black Americans surveyed believed white people benefited "a fair amount" from being white.
In the 2016 election, Donald Trump won Lee County by 20 points over Hillary Clinton, and margins of victory of 27.6 and 25.7 points in bordering Charlotte and Collier counties, respectively. In 2020, Trump lost the general election but won Lee County by 19 points, Charlotte and Collier counties by 27 and 25 points, respectively.
In his two gubernatorial races, DeSantis defeated Andrew Gillum by 22 points in Lee County, and in 2022 crushed Democrat and former Florida governor Charlie Crist by nearly 40 points.
Within that mandate, Florida has taken one of the most prominent and aggressive stances against multiculturalism as often expressed from the nonwhite, non-straight viewpoint -- the "woke ideology," as DeSantis derisively calls it. Across the country, ABC News reported at least 10 states including Florida have passed legislation restricting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, with bills introduced in 19 other states. DeSantis had carried a running feud with the Walt Disney Company (the parent company of ESPN) for its opposition to DeSantis' Florida's Parental Rights in Education Act, known publicly as the "Don't Say Gay" bill. The American Civil Liberties Union accused Florida of being one of the states leading the country in classroom censorship after DeSantis signed the "Stop W.O.K.E. Act" -- which prohibits wide swaths of Black history to be taught -- into law. In response, grassroots movements in the state combined with the ACLU of Florida in November to announce Free to Be Florida, which describes itself as "a new coalition aimed at ensuring a safe and accurate learning environment free from government overreach and censorship." PEN America reported in September a 33% increase in public school book bans from two years ago, noting that, "Books about race and racism, LGBTQ+ identities have remained a top target."
"It's an embedded cultural acceptance of racism in this district and community," said Jacqueline Perez, a Fort Myers community organizer. "It is in every aspect of school, work, etc., of a child who is Black or brown in this community that a form of racism is affecting and impacting their lives and well-being." Within a nine-month span in 2015 and 2016, there were two separate incidents of racial images and epithets directed at the North Fort Myers High School baseball coach at the time, Tavaris Gary, who is Black. In 2015, video surfaced showing a previous baseball coach, David Bechtol, taking a sledgehammer to a wall in his home with a drawing of Gary with a noose around his neck. In 2016, the N-word and a swastika were found on a dugout wall at Joey Cross Field. These histories and sentiments permeated the baseball team. Another part of the Title VI investigation into the baseball team was hampered when a white interviewee felt "uncomfortable" being interviewed by two Black district administrators because both happened to be wearing T-shirts whose fronts read "Black History Month."
"This is Florida, and this is Robert-Period-E-Period-Lee County, and they live up to every drop of that name," Gwynetta Gittens said. In 2018, Gittens was elected to Lee County School Board -- she was the first Black person ever to be elected to the school board in the then-132-year history of Lee County. It was a historic achievement that spoke to the deeply entrenched hierarchy of the region. In 2022, she lost her seat. She sees the Fort Myers baseball team as a microcosm of the state and country, the result of the consequences of political rhetoric and polarization.
"As a Black person and as a leader this was very difficult because there's enough blame on both sides," she said. "Did you used to call each other n----s and b-----s? Yes, you did. Was it right for the coach to talk like that? No, it wasn't. Was it right to walk out on your own teammates? No, it wasn't. Unraveling this to me shows the need for more conversation, more understanding, not less. When I decided to run for school board, I would collect signatures. I would say, 'I'm just asking for your signature to be on the ballot.' People would ask me, 'Are you woke?' They would tell me the schools were teaching hate, and I would say, 'Please give me an example where you think education is teaching children to hate each other.' And now we're here. Kids just want to play flipping baseball."
Baseball would now be part of the culture war. Mark Lorenz, father of Kaden Lorenz and one of the leaders of the Green Wave Booster Club, adopted the language of the civil rights movement while supporting the walkout. Initially, he was disapproving of his son participating but changed his mind as it unfolded.
"Our sons did peaceful, nonviolent protest intended to get people's attention," he said. "They got to a point where enough was enough. I'm not a racist guy, and neither are any of the kids."
Michael Tucker was unmoved by the report's conclusion that race was not central to the protest. "If this was a protest for Kyle, then why didn't they protest the administration? Why didn't they protest the principal, the people making the decisions?" Tucker said. "Who did they take their protest out on? They took it out on the only two Black kids on the team. That's who they directed the protest at."
During her successful 2022 campaign for Lee County school board, Jada Langford-Fleming posted an Instagram video where she stated: "I'm proud to endorse Governor Ron DeSantis' education agenda and put students first. ... I'm running to rid our schools of anti-American critical race theory to ensure our campuses are safe and secure for our kids. I'm running to end woke ideologies and stop the indoctrination of our students." Langford-Fleming declined to comment to ESPN.
Earlier this month, DeSantis signed SB 1264, a bill requiring public schools to start teaching K-12 students in 2026 the "dangers and evils of Communism." "We will not allow our students to live in ignorance, nor be indoctrinated by Communist apologists in our schools," DeSantis said in an April 17 news release, which added that the bill is designed to "prepare students to withstand indoctrination on Communism at colleges and universities."
On his Facebook page, Burchfield, who also taught social studies and economics at Fort Myers, revels in the political divisions by lampooning President Joe Biden. The night of DeSantis' victory speech, Burchfield posted a meme calling DeSantis the "G-GOAT: Greatest Governor of All Time."
**AFTER BASEBALL CAME** a dizzying array of investigations. The school district already had begun a Title VI discrimination investigation following the Carcioppolo text, but sources in the Fort Myers educational community were dubious of Chuck Bradley, the man handling the discrimination case. Some sources were pessimistic about Bradley's ability to conduct a thorough, impartial investigation. One source said Bradley seemed more concerned with being friendly rather than known for his rigorous casework. Gwynetta Gittens did not have an opinion on Bradley's professionalism but was very watchful of a well-practiced Lee County tactic.
"They won't ever admit any wrongdoing, and instead will just quietly reassign people to different jobs within the district," Gittens said.
Led by Fernando Vazquez, the district's office of professional standards then opened an investigation into the walkout by investigating Hinson, the third-base coach. The Tuckers and Reillys retained legal counsel.
As the investigations painted a picture of mounting frustrations and personal grievances that ultimately led to the walkout, two themes emerged from the slew of interviews, text messages and personnel files: the degree to which athletic director Steven Cato knew in advance a protest was imminent but took no initiative to prevent it and how much Xavier Medina's fears were realized; and Cato not only knew and did not act, but the coaches and parents encouraged the walkout and pressured Cato to allow it.
One player told Vazquez that Hinson called him the night before the walkout, and Hinson explained how he planned on guaranteeing a canceled game: He would demote several players to the junior varsity. "He was saying if three seniors walked out, we wouldn't have enough to play," the student told investigators. "I was on the fence. ... I was trying to understand the logic and the reasoning for the walkout. Coach Hinson told us he wouldn't leave us to dry. If one of us walked out, so would he."
Hours before the game, the player's mother called Keeth Jones -- Jones had been brought in to assist during Burchfield's suspension and her son played basketball for him -- and told him of the call with Hinson. She added that she did not agree with the boycott, that her son did not want to jeopardize his chance to play college baseball.
According to his interview with Vazquez, Jones then told Cato of the walkout. "Cato did not say he would let admin know," he said. "I don't know what he did after I talked to him. I told Cato because of chain of command. He said if they decide to walk to let them go."
When Vazquez asked Cato if any administrators had spoken to the team and warned them of the consequence of a walkout, Cato responded, "No one presented that idea." He said one assistant principal, Kelly Heinzman-Britton, suggested the game be canceled, an idea he told investigators principal Butz rejected. "He said, it would be unfair to cancel a game as it would effect \[sic\] the kids who had nothing to do with it."
Hours before the boycott, Cato called Fort Myers Police Department officer Michael Perry, a former school resource officer at the high school, referring to the game as a "volatile situation." Yet Cato still maintained to investigators he had no previous knowledge the players would walk. When his story wavered, Cato would say there had been "rumors" of a walkout, but nothing definitive.
According to the details in Vazquez's Hinson report, Butz, Cato, Jones and Perry were all alerted in some way during the season of a possible protest action. None of them contacted parents, addressed the potentially striking players or took an action to cancel the game.
"It was like they let our kids walk into a trap," Shane Reilly said.
When it was over, the parent who had originally told Jones of its possibility, called Butz. "I talked to Dr. Butz the next day," she said. "I was embarrassed and sad due to the action of the coach, and admin knew and didn't stop it."
Piece by piece, the plan hatched. Before the first pitch, one Fort Myers player left the dugout demanding a reason from Jones why Burchfield was not coaching the game. Fort Myers assistant principal Toni Washington-Knight sat in the team dugout. As other players began packing their gear, she said to one, "We going to another dugout?" Washington-Knight told Vazquez the player "looked at me and smirked. They started to walk out."
Remaining on the field, Tucker and Reilly watched their teammates and classmates abandon them. Washington-Knight told investigators she urged Tucker and Reilly to remain on the field and "not get caught up in this." When Cato saw Hinson, the coach told him, "I'm going with my guys." Andrew Dailey, identified as a volunteer coach, told Cato: "You need to be a man and stand with us."
For nearly 20 minutes, the parents sparred. Perry ordered the boycotting parents to disperse. According to Fort Myers police bodycam footage, they did not. Dee Tucker and Melanie Reilly were convinced the players and parents did not want to leave. "They walked off the field, but wouldn't leave the park," Melanie Reilly said. "If they wanted to boycott, they should have gotten in their cars and gone home -- but they didn't." Under threat from Perry, the boycotters eventually dispersed. Andrew Dailey's wife was captured on Perry's bodycam footage telling him as she walked to her car: "I know it appears that they're the victims, but I'm going to tell you, we're the victims ... and these boys finally stood up for themselves."
**NEITHER SHANE NOR** Melanie Reilly had any confidence the long-delayed Title VI report would provide them comfort. When it was finally released July 17, their pessimism was confirmed. Chuck Bradley's heavily redacted 36-page report concluded that "Fort Myers High School administration and baseball program staff did not intentionally discriminate against individuals based on race, color, or national origin," and that "interventions and actions were attempted without regard to individuals' race, color, or national origin." If Bradley did not outrightly contradict his conclusion, he did find "evidence of policy and procedural violations, as well as misapplications including...ineffective and/or inadequate intervention. Throughout this series of incidents, there were multiple attempts to remedy situations and/or address parent and student concerns. However, many of these attempts were not effective in addressing concerns, especially regarding racist comments, the team divide, team relationships, parent relationships and misbehavior."
The Tuckers and Reillys were frustrated by Bradley's interpretation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that for discrimination to occur, it needed to be intentional. Intentional or unintentional, both families felt their children were harmed by Carcioppolo's text and the racial climate at Fort Myers High.
Adding to the anger of the Reillys and the Tuckers was another of Bradley's conclusions: The bulk of discrimination may have been against white players, additional grist for the culture war. "While the reason for bias was alleged by some to be racially motivated," the report read, "the majority of complaints alleged that the bias was toward those of non-minority status and/or those who are perceived as non-minority."
"They keep telling us this isn't about race, and yet the whole thing began with a racist text message," Shane Reilly said. "How can that be?"
Several supporters of the coaches and school loudly claimed victory. On social media, a poster with the handle Scott Allan wrote: "Sorry but the Tucker's \[parents\] ought to be ashamed of himself. The whole thing was obvious from the get-go." Mark Lorenz, who first did not want his son involved in the walkout and then found himself immensely proud to be a part of it said: "They found the coaches did nothing wrong. It was a witch hunt." In the comments section on Burchfield's Facebook page, Lorenz posted a face-palm emoji, adding, "All that for nothing and EVERYONE already knew."
Burchfield himself joined in. On his Facebook page, Burchfield said he "could not have asked for more love and support" in "probably the most difficult time" in his life. He already had told investigators that the Reillys were upset about their son's playing time and "are using race as an excuse." After the report was released, he added a quote that would prove for him unfortunately prescient: "The time is coming when everything that is covered up will be revealed, and all that is secret will be made known to all. -- Luke 12:2."
On Sept. 1, however, the school district released an amendment to the Title VI investigation allegations that Hinson "may have walked out of a baseball game, while it was being played. It is alleged that the walkout was planned. It is also alleged that this act may involve equity/racism. The walking out may have exposed student(s) to unnecessary embarrassment or disparagement." The District "found just cause for disciplinary action" and Hinson was reprimanded due to "conduct unbecoming of a District employee." Hinson was transferred to Dunbar Middle School and banned from coaching for the 2023-24 school year.
Throughout the investigation, Burchfield told investigators how adversely he was being affected by the process, especially financially. He had told investigators he was concerned for his coaching prospects and told sources he was concerned about his scout position with the Braves. On his Facebook page, Burchfield prominently stated his affiliation with the club.
Burchfield, however, had been fabricating his involvement with the Braves. According to the team, Kyle Burchfield has never been associated with the club in any paid or official capacity.
"Mr. Burchfield was never an employee of the Atlanta Braves," the club told ESPN in a statement. "When we learned that he was representing himself as an employee of our club, we served Mr. Burchfield with a cease-and-desist letter demanding that he stop representing himself in this manner." In addition to the Braves' cease-and-desist to Burchfield, league sources said the Braves were required to refer Burchfield to MLB's security index.
In mid-October, following a public records request, the School District of Lee County released the Office of Professional Standards "investigation file" report by Vazquez on Hinson, detailing Hinson's role and Cato's inaction in a document that had less to do with Hinson specifically and more to do with the walkout. The Office of Professional Standards report provided the most damning portrait of adult behavior on the part of several parents and employees of Fort Myers High School.
The report was also nearly completed in early July, before the completion and release of the Title VI report but not released until mid-October. To the furious Reillys and Tuckers, it was another example of corruption within the school district. The combination of the three investigations revealed a far more damning picture of discrimination -- one to which the district would ultimately concur -- but Bradley's incomplete, largely exonerating report was the only one released to the public.
**WHILE INVESTIGATORS CONDUCTED** their interviews, Fort Myers High cleaned house. By summer, virtually every adult connected with the Fort Myers baseball team would no longer be associated with the school. The principal, Dr. Robert Butz, resigned just a few weeks after the walkout. Christian Engelhart was named principal.
Gwynetta Gittens' prediction that the district would reassign administrators was realized. Darya Grote, the assistant principal who was one of the administrators assigned to the team during the season but was not in the dugout on April 6, was promoted to principal of Lehigh Senior High School. Toni Washington-Knight, who was in the dugout the day of the walkout, was sent to Fort Myers Middle Academy, where she is currently assistant principal -- but not before providing a coda for her experience to investigators.
"Throughout the whole process I tried to stay unbiased," she testified. "I kept relationships with lots of the players up until that moment. I look at the kids differently ... those that walked out. I also look at the ones who stayed back differently."
Before the Title VI investigation was complete, Burchfield resigned and joined the staff at Naples High School in nearby Collier County and serves as the baseball team's pitching coach.
Cato nearly hired JV coach Chris Chappell as head baseball coach. Chappell was at first base during the walkout. The Vazquez report listed him among the coaches who "most likely" left the game that day. Chappell told investigators he left after Jones told him the game was forfeited. As the summer turned to fall, Cato informed parents he would be searching for a different head coach.
One member of the Lee County School Board aware of the full scope of the reports was Melisa Giovannelli, but she declined to discuss the matter because she is up for reelection and many of the families who supported the walkout were, in her words, "her voters."
"It's unfortunate but that's kind of where it's at, and this situation's been dealt with," she said in a voicemail to ESPN. "And unfortunately, I think to rehash it would do more harm than good, for me especially, and, um, somehow we have to move on from here."
Steven Cato, the athletic director who said he had heard rumors of a boycott and called police ahead of time but did nothing to alert the parents or stop the walkout once it began, remained in his same position. He is the only adult still associated with the baseball team who was affiliated with it at the time of the walkout.
"Under no circumstance do I believe Steven Cato protected my son," Shane Reilly said.
The baseball team has a new coach, Brad Crone, who once played at Estero High. In February, Madrid Tucker -- who had long been undecided about returning to baseball -- chose to return to the baseball team. The season cancellation dropped his rankings to 186th in the nation.
On Feb. 14, represented by prominent civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, the Tuckers filed a federal discrimination lawsuit against the School Board of Lee County and the School District of Lee County, as well as seven individuals: Cato, Burchfield, Carcioppolo, Hinson, Chappell, former Fort Myers High principal Butz and Lee County School Superintendent Christopher Bernier, who resigned in mid-April.
Madrid Tucker enjoyed his junior year on the football team. He says his real friends are on the football team and associates with virtually none of his baseball teammates.
During a game March 12 against Cypress Lake, the opposing team yelled "Happy Valentine's Day" to Madrid Tucker.
"That just proves what the culture is here," Dee Tucker said.
Tate Reilly's high school baseball career ended. He says when he received his diploma, at least one former teammate booed as he walked across the graduation stage. Nearly completing his freshman year at Albertus Magnus, he says he is still "processing what happened."
"I am left wondering what they think I did to deserve all the hate," he said in an email to ESPN. "Coaches throw out things like 'tough love' or 'kids need discipline' ... The coaches made up lies to punish me. That is not discipline. That is abuse. ... Being a kid and having a fun year with family and friends was taken away from me. My future was not important to them ... and to this day, they don't care."
On April 8, like the Tuckers, the Reillys filed a federal lawsuit against Lee County Schools, the school board and seven defendants, alleging their actions "empowered students and adults to act in ways that caused further trauma and harm." The Reilly and Tucker lawsuits were assigned to Florida Middle District Judge Sheri Polster Chappell, a 2012 Obama District Court appointee. The wife of Chris Chappell, Polster Chappell recused herself from both cases.
To Dee Tucker, Lee County School Board member Giovannelli had produced a typical response. "So, the end result is to do nothing?" Tucker said. "That's what they do around here: Nothing." It was a sentiment reinforced by Gwynetta Gittens, who said, "You're in Robert E. Lee County, and these people don't accept any blame for anything. They never have."
*ESPN producer Nicole Noren and ESPN researcher John Mastroberardino contributed to this report.*
*An earlier version of this story misidentified Andrew Dailey and John Dailey. Andrew Dailey was a volunteer coach at Fort Myers High School.*
# An Atlanta Movie Exec Praised for His Diversity Efforts Sent Racist, Antisemitic Texts
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When Ryan Millsap arrived in Atlanta from California a decade ago, the real estate investor set his sights on becoming a major player in Georgia’s booming film industry. In just a few years, he achieved that, opening a movie studio that attracted big-budget productions like “Venom,” Marvel’s alien villain, and “Lovecraft Country,” HBO’s fictional drama centered on the racial terror of Jim Crow America.
As he rose to prominence, Millsap cultivated important relationships with Black leaders and Jewish colleagues and won accolades for his commitment to diversity. But allegations brought by his former attorney present a starkly different picture. In private conversations, court documents allege, Millsap expressed racist and antisemitic views.
Various filings in an ongoing legal fight show Millsap, who is white, making derogatory comments regarding race and ethnicity, including complaints about “Fucking Black People” and “nasty Jews.”
“Ryan’s public persona is different from who he is,” John Da Grosa Smith, Millsap’s former attorney, alleges in one filing, adding: “Ryan works hard to mislead and hide the truth. And he is very good at it.”
Smith submitted troves of text messages between Millsap and his former girlfriend as evidence in two separate cases in Fulton County Superior Court. The messages, reviewed by ProPublica and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, represent a fraction of the evidence in a complex, yearslong dispute centered on compensation for the work Smith performed for Millsap.
In response to a request for an interview about the text messages and related cases, Millsap wrote that this “sounds like a strange situation,” asking “how this came up” and requesting to review the material. After ProPublica and the AJC provided the material cited in this story, he did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Many of the text messages filed with the court were sent in 2019, an important year for Millsap. He was planning an expansion of his Blackhall Studios that would nearly triple its soundstage space. Instead, Millsap ended up selling Blackhall, now called Shadowbox, for $120 million in 2021. The following year [he announced plans to build](https://www.ajc.com/life/radiotvtalk-blog/blackhall-studios-founder-investors-buy-1500-acres-in-newton-county/64W66WKDJZFRFFFHNXNT5ZHCJI/) a massive new complex in Newton County, about 40 miles east of Atlanta.
Smith started working for Millsap in August 2019, representing the film executive and his companies in a lawsuit brought by a business associate who claimed a stake in Blackhall. In May 2020, Smith became Blackhall Real Estate’s chief legal counsel.
Their relationship soured in early 2021. In the ensuing feud, Smith claimed that Millsap had promised him a third of his family company, as well as compensation for extra legal work — and, in a letter from his attorney, demanded that Millsap pay him $24 million within four business days: “We, however, have no interest in harming Mr. Millsap or disrupting his deal, his impending marriage, his future deals, or anything else.”
In the arbitration proceeding that followed, Millsap’s attorneys described the letter as “extortionate” and claimed that Smith was trying to “blow up” Millsap’s personal and business life and stall the sale of Blackhall Studios. \_“\_Smith breached the most sacred of bonds that exist between a lawyer and his or her clients: the duty of loyalty,” lawyers for Millsap later wrote.
In the same proceeding, Smith accused Millsap of firing him after he raised allegations of a hostile and discriminatory workplace, referencing Millsap’s text messages. Smith’s late father was Jewish.
In January 2023, an arbitrator sided with Millsap, ordering that Smith pay him and his companies $3.7 million for breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty. She ruled that Smith’s conduct was “egregious and intended to inflict economic injury on his clients.”
Through his attorney, Smith declined to be interviewed. In response to a list of questions, he wrote, “This has been a tireless campaign of false narratives and retaliation against me for more than three years.” He claimed that his employment agreement with Millsap guaranteed him a cut of the profits he helped generate and that an expert estimated his share to be between $17 million and $39 million.
Even as Millsap won his legal fight with his former attorney, Smith has continued to press the court battle. In an April 2023 motion to vacate, Smith called the arbitration process a “sham” and the award a “fraud,” and he is now appealing a judge’s decision to uphold the award. In January, a lawyer for Smith filed hundreds of pages of Millsap’s texts in a separate legal dispute in which Millsap is not a party.
In a city with dominant Black representation and a significant Jewish population, maintaining a positive relationship with these communities — or at least the appearance of one —is essential to doing business.
“Mr. Millsap knows,” Smith alleged in one filing, “these text messages are perilous for him.”
---
On a Thursday night in January 2019, Millsap stood near the pulpit at Welcome Friend Baptist, a Black church 10 miles from downtown Atlanta in DeKalb County, near where he was planning the expansion of his movie studio.
Securing support from the community would be key in convincing the county commission to approve a land-swap deal that would be necessary for the expansion. Several commissioners saw the project, including Millsap’s promise to create thousands of jobs, as a way to revitalize the area.
Dozens of longtime residents, most of them Black, sat in the sanctuary’s colorful upholstered chairs. The attendees received information sheets on Blackhall’s plans, which cited $3.8 million in public improvements, including the creation of a new public park. They asked about internship opportunities for their children and restaurants Millsap might help bring.
Millsap raised the possibility of a restaurant, one he said could offer healthy meals. Several older Black women in the church nodded in agreement and one clapped, Millsap’s pitch seemingly helping him appeal to those whose buy-in he needed.
Two months later, Millsap sent his then-girlfriend a text that Smith’s lawyers later alleged shows he “laments his political work with African Americans and his distaste for having to do it.”
In the text exchange, which was filed in court, Millsap wrote: “Well, it’s like me w black people in ATL!! Bahahahahaha!! Political nonsense everywhere!! … I’m so ready to be finished w that.”
Messages sent between Ryan Millsap (green) and Christy Hockmeyer (blue) in 2019 Credit: Screenshot from a court exhibit filed by John Da Grosa Smith’s attorney in January
In another text filed in court, Millsap’s girlfriend alluded to the damage she’d caused another vehicle in a car accident: “So the black girl wants $2500 to fix her car on a quote that was $1800.” He responded that she should pay the woman rather than filing an insurance claim, adding, “Fucking Black People.”
Messages sent between Ryan Millsap (green) and Christy Hockmeyer (blue) in 2019 Credit: Screenshot from a court exhibit filed by John Da Grosa Smith’s attorney in January
Court records and Millsap’s own testimony show that his girlfriend at the time, Christy Hockmeyer, was an investor in his real estate company, and their text messages show she played an active role in his business dealings. In a filing that claims the company had a “hostile and discriminatory work environment,” Smith alleged that Blackhall Real Estate “through its CEO, Ryan Millsap, and one of its influential investors, Christy Hockmeyer, disfavors African- Americans and Jews.”
When Hockmeyer texted Millsap after a doctor’s visit, complaining that a nurse was “retarded,” Millsap responded: “Not shocked. Black or Asian?” Hockmeyer wrote back: “Black.” Millsap replied, “Yes.”
Messages sent between Ryan Millsap (green) and Christy Hockmeyer (blue) in 2019 Credit: Screenshot from a court exhibit filed by John Da Grosa Smith’s attorney in January
In other exchanges filed with the court, Hockmeyer complained to Millsap, “My uber driver smells like a black person. Yuck!” He echoed her sentiment, writing back, “Yuck!” While on a flight, Hockmeyer wrote to Millsap that a “large smelly black man is seated next to me.” Millsap wrote back, “Yucko!!”
And while passing through an airport in France, Millsap texted Hockmeyer, “The smells here are unreal” and “I can't even imagine if your sensitive nose was here!!”
Hockmeyer responded, “I am so self conscious about bodily smells because there is nothing worse. I mean. Makes you dread it when you see a black person.”
Messages sent between Ryan Millsap (green) and Christy Hockmeyer (blue) in 2019 Credit: Screenshot from a court exhibit filed by John Da Grosa Smith’s attorney in January
Smith alleged that the conversations between Millsap and Hockmeyer reveal how they think about people with whom they conduct business. “The insidious belief that ‘black’ people are beneath them and not worthy of being hired is a theme that persists in their private writings to one another,” Smith said in the filing.
At a time in 2019 when Millsap was looking to hire an executive with a track record in the Atlanta film industry, Hockmeyer texted him that he might consider bringing on someone from Tyler Perry Studios, a 12-stage southwest Atlanta lot named after its founder, one of the highest-profile Black film producers in the country. “And taking someone from Tyler Perry would be fine too,” she wrote in a text exchange filed with the court. “As long as they are white.”
She also offered another name for Millsap to consider, adding: “He’s even a Jew. That’s good for this role.” Millsap responded, “Teeny tiniest Jew.”
On another occasion, Hockmeyer “opined that Anglo-Americans do not do business with Jewish people,” Smith alleged in a court filing, referencing a text message exchange in which she wrote to Millsap: “You know why wasps won’t do deals with Jews? Because they know that Jews have a different play book and they might get screwed.” Smith also claimed in a court filing that Millsap described to Hockmeyer “a terrible meeting with one of the most nasty Jews I’ve ever encountered.”
In an email to ProPublica and the AJC, Hockmeyer wrote: “I severed all personal and professional ties with Mr. Millsap years ago because our values, ethics, and beliefs did not align. As a passive investor in Blackhall, I was not involved in the day-to-day operations of the company, nor have I been party to any of the lawsuits involving Blackhall. I consistently encouraged Mr. Millsap to treat his investors and community supporters with fairness and respect.”
In a subsequent email, she apologized for the texts between her and Millsap. “There were times when I may have become angry or emotional and tacitly acknowledged statements he made or said things that do not reflect my values or beliefs, and I deeply regret that,” she wrote, adding: “I made comments and used language that was inappropriate. I referred to people in ways I shouldn’t have. I’m sincerely sorry for what I said. Those comments do not reflect who I am and I disavow racism and antisemitism as a whole.”
Smith claimed in a court filing that Millsap regularly expressed disrespect toward Jewish people, describing three of his Jewish colleagues and investors as “the Jew crew,” calling one of them “a greedy Israelite” and saying another had “Jew jitsued” him. Millsap concluded, according to Smith, that “no friendship comes before money in that tribe.”
During the arbitration, Millsap testified in August 2022 that his remarks about people of the Jewish faith constituted “locker room talk.”
In December 2019, Millsap received several warnings from Hockmeyer, according to arbitration records that highlight excerpts from some of her text messages. (Other exhibits in the case show the couple’s relationship had become strained around that time.)
“Ryan you have to understand why people are over your bulls\*\*t,” she wrote that month, according to the records. “They feel lied to taken advantage of and stolen from.”
The following month, she wrote: “Wow. You are going to get lit the f\*\*k up. Holy s\*\*t you are such a bad person. You are a f\*\*king crook!”
During the arbitration hearing, one of Smith’s attorneys asked Millsap about some of Hockmeyer’s December 2019 warnings. He responded, “These are the text messages of a very angry ex-girlfriend.”
---
As Smith began taking on more responsibility for his client in 2020, Millsap continued to connect with Black influencers and cement himself as a cultural force in Atlanta.
In December of that year, Millsap was a guest on an episode of actor and rapper T.I.’s “Expeditiously” podcast. After discussing the differences between the Atlanta and Los Angeles entertainment markets, Millsap praised what he called “a very robust, Black creative vortex” in Atlanta. And he went on to offer more praise. “There seems like a particular magic in Atlanta about being Black.”
He also talked about his studio expansion plans amid the land-swap deal in a majority-Black DeKalb County neighborhood, telling T.I., “It’s been a fascinating study in race actually.”
Millsap went on to explain how his business interests aligned with the desires of residents. “What pushed this through was Black commissioners supporting their Black residents who wanted to see this happen, right?” he said. “They’re fighting against one white commissioner and a lot of her white constituents who took it upon themselves to be against this when they’re not even the residents who live nearby.”
One evening in August 2021, Millsap stepped onto the stage at the Coca-Cola Roxy theater in Cobb County. He and a dozen other people had been named the year’s Most Admired CEOs, an honor awarded by the Atlanta Business Chronicle. The CEO’s were recognized for, among other things, their “commitment to diversity in the workplace.”
As the dispute between Smith and Millsap unfolded, Millsap expanded his business interests to Newton County, where he purchased a $14 million, 1,500-acre lot in 2022. He said at the time that his vision is to make Georgia a “King Kong of entertainment” by building a production complex on the site and [launching a streaming service](https://saportareport.com/ryan-millsap-launching-blackhall-americana-as-rival-to-netflix/sections/reports/maria_saporta/) that, in his words, would be “something on the scale of Netflix.” He later invested in a vodka brand with the aim, he said, of it becoming “quintessentially” Georgia, “like Coca-Cola and Delta.”
---
Earlier this year, Millsap sat down in his stately home office, decorated with Atlanta-centric trinkets like a model Delta plane, to record an episode of his “Blackhall Podcast with Ryan Millsap.” T.I. has been a guest, as have Isaac Hayes III, son of the iconic soul singer Isaac Hayes and a social media startup founder, and Speech, the frontman for the Atlanta-based, Grammy-winning musical act Arrested Development.
On this day, Millsap talked about race and culture, pointing out that one of his best friends is a “Persian Jew in LA”
Millsap noted that his understanding of “Black and white” was formed on the West Coast, where he had “a lot of Black friends” — “very Caucasian Black people” who had adopted white cultural norms.
“I grew up thinking like I had no racial prejudice of any kind,” Millsap said. “I thought we were beyond all that stuff.”
[Rosie Manins](https://www.ajc.com/staff/rosie-manins/) of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution contributed reporting.
# Behind the New Iron Curtain, by Marzio G. Mian, Translated by Elettra Pauletto
This article was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Russia has become, to observers in the West, a distant, mysterious, and hostile land once again. It seems implausible, in the age of social media, that so little should be known about the country that has shattered the international order, but the shadows surrounding Russia have only grown since the days of the Soviet Union. Of course, it is one thing to observe the country from the outside; it is another to try to understand how Russians experience the war and react to sanctions from within, and what they hope the future holds. If Russia seems to have become another planet, it is largely because its regime has also waged war on foreign journalists, preventing them from straying beyond established perimeters.
Over the summer, hoping to do precisely that, I spent a month traveling down the Volga River. In a land of great rivers, the Volga is *the* river. They call it *matushka,* the mother; it flows from the Valdai Hills to the land of the Chuvash, the Tatars, the Cossacks, the Kalmyks, and into the Caspian Sea. It’s where Europe and Asia meet or part, are bridged or blocked, depending on whether the compass of Russian history is pointing east or west. It’s where it all started, after all, where the empire took root: Along the river one finds many of the cities that have established Russian culture and faith—from Ulyanovsk, the birthplace of Lenin, to Stalingrad (now called Volgograd), the site of the infamous World War II siege. This is a history that weighs heavily on Russian identity today, as the country continues to look backward, sifting its vaunted past for new myths of grandeur. It seems prepared to resist and to suffer, acts at which Russians have always excelled, and to have resigned itself to a future of isolation, autocracy, and perhaps even self-destruction.
Before starting down the river, I met with Mikhail Piotrovsky, who is an old acquaintance and the director of the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, in his office on the museum’s ground floor, where he has carved out a space for himself among piles of books, stacks of paper, and various sculptures. The photographs crowding the room, of him with eminent Western leaders—a smiling Tony Blair and Queen Elizabeth—are now themselves relics, not unlike the tapestry of Catherine the Great hanging above his desk.
I asked him about the river. “The Volga was everything, and is still everything,” he told me. “Because it makes you aspire to greatness. It has a sort of intimacy, sheltering and bright skies, not like the wide-open spaces of the steppe or Siberian rivers, which make you feel like a speck in the cosmos.”
Piotrovsky is an illustrious scholar of Arabic studies. I’ve known him for years, but we would normally talk about Canaletto and Byzantium, the great Islamic explorers and his beloved Sicilian wines. This time I found him in full war fervor. And, I was convinced, it was not only to defend his prestigious position: At his age, seventy-nine, he could easily keep his head down and carry on quietly, like most Russians have elected to do. He spoke with his usual calm but looked feverish, as if something were devouring him from the inside.
Piotrovsky, who is mild-mannered and cerebral, and who wore his jacket loosely over hunched shoulders, seemed to have become a warrior. “Russia is many people, but one nation,” he asserted. “Russia along the Volga was able to incorporate everyone. Islam is just as much a religion of Russian tradition and identity as is Christian Orthodoxy. In Europe, in America, you speak of nothing but multiculturalism, but your cities are bursting with hate. For us, it didn’t take much to include everyone, because we’re an imperial civilization.” Then he grew more animated. “Look at the Hermitage!” he said, opening his arms to the room around us, widening his eyes. “It’s the encyclopedia of world culture, but it’s written in Russian because it’s our interpretation of world history. It may be arrogant, but that’s what we are.”
He took a deep breath, and began to talk of Stalingrad, his Jerusalem. “I don’t call it Volgograd, but Stalingrad,” he clarified for my sake. “It is our reference point now more than ever, an unparalleled symbol of resistance, our enemies’ worst nightmare. During the Great Patriotic War, we used it to defend the Volga as a vital corridor.” He continued to press the analogy: “And it’s been the same in the last few months. The Volga and the Caspian feed our trade with Iran to oppose the sanctions, while we use them to export oil to India and import what we need.” He removed his glasses and cleaned them with his jacket. “Stalingrad is a lucky charm, it’s destiny. If the Nazis had taken it, they would have cut off the Volga and conquered all of Russia. A very material thing that became spiritual. A warning. Whosoever tries it will meet the end of all the others—Swedes, Napoleon, the Germans and their allies.” He went on. “Russians are like the Scythians: they wait, they suffer, they die, and then they kill.”
I would think back to this meeting often over the course of my trip; following the river, I recalled the odd look in Piotrovsky’s eyes and felt the echo of his words. In fact, when I visited a sturgeon farm in Astrakhan, in the Volga Delta, I saw that his view was, in certain respects, correct. Olesia Sergeeva, a biologist who heads the company that owns the farm, reiterated the importance of the ongoing trade between Iran and Russia. In her own small way—I mean this only as a figure of speech; Sergeeva supplies the Kremlin with caviar—she skirted the sanctions, buying feed from Iran instead of Europe, as she had done before. She spoke of this as if it were public knowledge. “Everything passes through here,” she said. “They’re building new docks on the delta for container ships and oil tankers.”
Sergeeva took me to see the Jewish, Armenian, and Iranian neighborhoods of Astrakhan. An exhibition of photographs highlighting the civilian volunteers supporting the military was being set up outside of a park. At sunset, the elegant riverfront was swarmed with families and groups of young people talking and laughing in hushed tones. Couples sat on railings eating watermelon while food stalls projected multicolored lights on the Volga. There was a fin de siècle quality to the atmosphere, curls of smoke emanating from shashlik grills, a warm breeze delivering the lament of a distant violin. No military uniforms in sight.
The café façades and the wrought-iron balconies reminded me of New Orleans. Sergeeva pointed out the renovations along the canal that runs through the old town, indicating the nineteenth-century wooden villas that will soon become hotels and luxury homes. “They seemed destined to crumble,” she said. “But now that money is going around, Astrakhan is once again the gateway to European Russia, Central Asia, and India. This is how it is for now. Later, we’ll see.”
On the delta, which fans out for sixty miles before reaching the Caspian Sea, pairs of fighter jets zoomed by at low altitude. I tried catching a glimpse of customs at the commercial port, but I couldn’t see past the checkpoints, and the tourist port was closed. Even the ferry was no longer in service. But one could still see cranes loading and unloading a dozen cargo ships, and three barges waiting at the widest point. Sixty-three miles long, the Volga–Don Canal was built under Stalin with the labor of seventy-five thousand prisoners, and opened in 1952. It is part of the waterway that connects the Volga to Rostov on the Don River, from which one can reach Mariupol, which is now controlled by the Russians. South of Volgograd, I tried taking a dirt road leading to the mouth of the canal but was intimidated by the presence of a helicopter hovering some three hundred feet above me. I decided instead to gather wild strawberries.
In Astrakhan, it was rumored that the Iranians had invested billions in the development of the Caspian-Volga-Don corridor. There was talk of trafficking agricultural products and oil, but also turbines, spare mechanical parts, medicine, and nuclear components. I couldn’t verify this, but it was clear that Astrakhan is central to the anti-Western economic bloc’s efforts to turn east.
Sergeeva’s caviar is refined and humanely produced. She explained that this was the result of a process that she had invented: she extracts the eggs from the sturgeon with a small incision, without killing it. This procedure can be performed three times on the same fish. She has endeavored to ensure that the production and sale of her caviar remains the same as it was before the war. “In Russia it’s not a real party unless there’s caviar,” she said—even, apparently, in the current situation. She told me that since Russia had banned wild sturgeon harvesting in the Caspian, farms in this Volga region have proliferated, their numbers rising from three to sixty in the past five years.
Sergeeva is well-traveled and known widely for her aquaculture expertise. She could get a job anywhere, it seemed to me, so why stay? “I was born here, I studied here, my husband is Russian, my son is Russian, I’m Russian,” she said. “I wouldn’t say I’m a patriot, and I don’t want to express my thoughts on Putin and the war. But I can assure you that my life hasn’t changed. Not in the least.” She blushed as she spoke, as if the subject were uncomfortable. “The Russians are reacting to the sanctions in an extraordinary way, even with a weak ruble and the inevitable inflation. The prices of essential goods have held steady. And now we’re consuming better and healthier products than before the war, even exceptional cheeses.”
I had never imagined that the rise of hyperlocal food would be one of the recurring themes of this trip. But it appears that the Western sanctions and war economy have intensified a traditional Russian gastronomy movement. Western products had piqued the palates of average urban Russians, and local producers were trying to fill their vacuum, proudly offering Russian-made Camembert and prosciutto, as if to provide some material evidence of *Russkiy Mir,* Putin’s ideology of Russian supremacy. As I dined along the Volga, menus often specified the farms from which ingredients had been sourced. Restaurants served *svekolnik* and *okroshka,* simple cold summer soups, exalting the quality of local radishes grown without Western fertilizers.
And fishing has largely ceased in Rybinsk, the city once known as the fishery of the tsar. Instead, the area has reinvented itself as something like the oven of Moscow. Every day, trucks set off for the capital full of warm loaves. Bakeries abound: wheat and rye farming in the region has increased by 40percent.
Among the first to fire up an oven was fifty-four-year-old Andrei Kovalev, who knew nothing about baking bread until three years ago. “I learned to use *zakvaska*, a bread starter,” he told me in his large bakery in the Red Square of Rybinsk, where a statue of Lenin replaced one of AlexanderII and has loomed ever since. Kovalev was popular among the locals—he hands out samples to passersby, sporting a beard and a rough tunic made of linen and burlap. He saw opening a bakery as a political act, one salvaging rural Russian values “against consumerism copied from America,” as he put it. “Over the past thirty years people hated Russian bread,” he said, “they thought it was beneath them. They wanted baguettes, the little brats! Mine are old recipes, from long before the perestroika, from back when we were happy.”
Had it not been for a massive poster looming over a lonely intersection in the steppe, showing Sergei Kazankov alongside Lenin and Stalin, I might have missed another quite surreal thing: Soviet Union revivalism. Using a VPN to protect my online searches, I learned that Kazankov had been reelected to the State Duma in 2021 as a Communist, that he was sanctioned for supporting the invasion of Ukraine, and that his father, Ivan Kazankov, has long been a Communist power broker. Sergei himself had been the director of a meat-processing plant and agricultural combine in the Zvenigovsky District, owned by his father.
By this point I was traveling across the Mari El Republic, some ninety miles from Kazan, the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan. More specifically, I was in the Zvenigovsky District, which lends its name to Kazankov’s company, Zvenigovsky LLC, which has become known in town as the last *sovkhoz,* or large-scale collective farm. I had only to make a small detour, cross a field of sunflowers, and get directions at a gas station (“when you see the monument to Marx you’re practically there”) to arrive at its building, which, on first glance, seemed like a memorial to the old Soviets. The red flag of the USSR fluttered above the white and yellow complex. According to the company, it’s the same size as the one lowered from the Kremlin on December 25, 1991, when Communism fell. The walls of the plant were covered in red inscriptions marked by the exclamation points the Bolsheviks had so loved to use: “Honor and glory to the workers of the Zvenigovsky combine!”; “Comrades, let us fight for our village, let us fight for Russia!”; “Now and forever, war on Fascism!”
The road to the entrance was lined with modern Stakhanovite-esque photographs, presenting, for instance, one worker as the best sausage stuffer, another as the best tractor driver, and a final one, sporting a mustache and a Nike T-shirt, as the mechanic of the year. Trucks and vans marked with a hammer and sickle poured out of the gates. A statue of Stalin presided over it all, his pants tucked into his boots from his place on a four-tiered pedestal. Off to the side, a metallic Lenin looked on, his brow furrowed; his dais had only two tiers, and was partially covered by the branches of a birch tree.
The entrance to the management building, a stolid modernist structure, was dominated by bronze letters reading cccp. The security guards at reception wore fatigues. I would soon realize this was one of Russia’s most successful agricultural producers, delivering tens of thousands of tons of meat and dairy to the market each year. The business, established in 1995, well after the USSR was dead and gone, identified itself as a Communist-Stalinist enterprise.
Ivan Kazankov is eighty-one years old and has a gray, wolf-like gaze. He’s tall and robust, a wide red tie resting on his belly. He showed interest in my unexpected visit without too much reservation: you could tell he’s a real boss, one who doesn’t answer to anybody—a top dog of this agrarian Stalingrad, this rural empire on the Volga, paradoxically inspired by the greatest peasant exterminator in history. His office seemed to have been designed with the express purpose of disorienting anyone hoping to understand Russia in 2023: busts of Stalin standing alongside Russian Orthodox icons, a portrait of NicholasII looming over a Soyuz statuette, a picture of Vladimir Putin hanging next to an image of St.Andrew, the patron saint of Russia. To the chaos of this pantheon was added a general sense of opacity about the nature of the combine itself, which at first was presented to me as a “state-run agricultural coop, exactly like in the days of the USSR,” but had turned out to be a private family holding. Ivan had made his daughter director after his son left to join the Duma. “What matters is that it runs as before,” he explained. “Profits are used to increase the salaries of the four thousand employees and grow the business.”
In Kazan, they would later tell me that amid the robbery and corruption of the Nineties, when hardened racketeers pilfered Soviet industrial and military equipment, Kazankov had taken his own modest cut. He had gotten his hands on a run-down farm and deftly transformed it into this industrial colossus that had adapted the socialist combine production system to the wild post-Soviet market. The sausage oligarch Kazankov knows just how much Russian consumers still suffer the loss of state collectivism.
Since then, the company’s net worth has become the stuff of legend. But Kazankov, too, is a great supporter of Western sanctions: “They’re an incredible developmental tool for Russia,” he told me. “The West should have imposed them back in the Nineties. We’d be the engine of the world by now. Too bad.” For him, the sanctions are pure adrenaline, and to prove it he added that his company has copied Italian, German, and Israeli “production means” to the letter: “We doubled processing in one year and we supply almost a thousand supermarkets in all of Russia.” Ivan believes that his “full-circle communist company” is the ideal model for “rebuilding a new Soviet Union with healthy local food from our lands.”
He offered to show me their newest stable, about ten miles away, where he had replicated Israeli dairy plants. The herd there grazed in large, well-defined clearings. His driver ferried us around in a brand-new armored Mercedes that I assumed had been imported from Kyrgyzstan, a preferred route for German contraband. For the excursion, Kazankov donned a baseball cap that seemed designed to make him appear younger, with cccp stitched in red on the front and a hammer and sickle on the side. He said he was thinking of branding the cows in the same fashion. “We grow fodder and cereal on thousands of hectares of land,” he explained, watching his property from the tinted window. “We raise dairy cows and pigs and take care of them all the way until the packaging of the finished product, which are meats, cheeses, kefir. Even ice cream, good like the ice cream from my childhood. Gorbachev and Yeltsin ruined ice cream, the cowards.”
The fighting in Ukraine, it seemed, would lead to a mountain of rubles for Kazankov. “Cheese production has grown eightypercent,” he said. “We’re filling in for French and Italian cheeses. We’re still buying cows.” He told me that meat production generally has thrived. What was his opinion on the war? “Obviously we’ll win,” he said, “because we know how to fight and because we can’t lose. If we have to, we’ll use atomic weapons, we’ll destroy the earth, we’ll destroy everything.”
While in Kazan, I was invited to lunch by Farid Khairutdinov, a forty-eight-year-old businessman who had been referred to me as a “very influential Tatar in town.” Messaging over an encrypted channel, he had promised me an interesting conversation. When I arrived at Tatarskaya Usadba, a renowned local restaurant, I found him waiting for me in a private room with Mansur Hazrat Jalaletdinov, a mullah at the Marjani Mosque, the only one active in Kazan until 1990, after which about a hundred more sprang up. Khairutdinov told me that they had recently, at this very table, hosted Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian prime minister and president, now deputy chairman of the Security Council. He then explained that he considered me “an enemy,” and said that no one wanted to meet with me or answer any of my questions. I was better off visiting a museum, he added. He had served in the FSB, he reminded me, and the mullah nodded along, clearly pleased.
That said, in a demonstration of Russian Tatar hospitality, they offered me an unforgettable lunch: twelve courses and three hours of conversation that was as absurd as it was instructive. They claimed that, in the Tatar language, “there is no word for retreat”; that the Tatars had been the best archers under Peter the Great; and that Mikhail Kutuzov, the general who defeated Napoleon, had been a Tatar. I pointed out that Kutuzov was the one who put down the Tatar resistance in Crimea in the late eighteenth century. “In fact, he lost an eye,” said Khairutdinov, and the mullah nodded. “We love to wage war. Am I right, Mansur?”
“It’s true,” he said. “We also fight against our demons.” I hoped to pursue the topic, but Khairutdinov changed the subject: “Sanctions have united us even more as a people.”
As the skewered lamb arrived, Khairutdinov said that before the war I would have been eating “shit lamb from New Zealand,” but that this meat, tender and tasty, was Russian. Not only that, but up until yesterday the lamb had been grazing just a few miles away. He had raised it himself, he claimed. His business was in organic lamb and goose meat. He had opened stores all over Tatarstan. “There’s no competition, it’s amazing,” he said. “Just think, we used to import geese from Romania and France. Now I export goose legs and cured meat to Turkey.”
I asked why they hadn’t raised lamb and geese before the war, or why Russia, with all its intelligent and industrious entrepreneurs, produced so little and imported almost everything without generating significant income outside of the oil and gas industry. The mullah looked me in the eyes and told me that this was precisely the Russian genius: “Buying without producing,” he said. “Why should I make a bicycle if I can just buy one? I spend less money. Easy.”
More than thirty years ago, I wrote about the first stirrings of conflict from the beaches of Yugoslavia, which was then collapsing. I remember an orchestra of elderly musicians playing the foxtrot just for me, the only guest at a grand hotel on the isle of Rab. At the time, mortars were falling and people were dying just a few miles from the Dalmatian coast. Here along the Volga, war and death felt like spectral presences. People danced to techno and indulged in cocktails with improbable names: Hiroshima, Russian–Japanese War, and Drunken German. In almost a month of traveling, I saw only four bombers, passing over Tver, near the source of the Volga; felt the rumbling of fighter jets just once, in the low course of the river; encountered a few unarmed soldiers on leave; and saw a column of twenty trucks with tanks covered by tarps probably setting off for the front, hundreds of miles away. The rest was Russia as usual. But an unusually dynamic Russia, to be sure. I saw construction sites and cranes operating in the suburbs, buildings and churches being restored, significant repairs being made to the federal roads (although the famous potholes were still there), workers installing new pipelines, teams of gardeners in the parks, diligent garbage collectors emptying trash cans. Cars flooded the streets each weekend, when Russians went out to their country homes.
Was this fatalism? Indifference? Or arrogance, as Piotrovsky had implied back at the Hermitage? I struggled to find room in hotels or on ferries, all of which were overflowing with tourists forced to give up on the Mediterranean and make do with the Volga. Take Tatiana, the middle-aged manager of a supermarket chain. When I met her on a ferry in Yaroslavl, she wore a Panama hat, Gucci sunglasses, and capri sandals; she was heading downstream, to the same dacha where she had spent her summers as a girl. “I’ve had a boat docked in Mykonos for three years—who knows when I’ll see it again,” she told me. “I’m getting to know my river again. I’m running into friends I haven’t seen in thirty years. An interesting vacation.” I told her she looked a bit sad and resigned. “Russians have been sad and resigned for thousands of years,” she replied. “It’s how we stay resilient. I’m against this war, but I can’t do anything but wait, like everyone else. They manipulate us with artificial ideas. Garbage. But the West has been humiliating us for too long. Don’t we also have a right to be who we want to be without feeling like barbarians?”
To think that the anti-Western ideas coursing through the country’s veins are simply the fruits of regime indoctrination would be to overestimate Putin—and to ignore what has driven Russia throughout its history, at least since the time of Peter the Great: a fascination with the West, paired with a proud and slightly overbearing defense of its own vast territory and resistance to assimilation. Russians have always vacillated between wanting to be included and fearing contamination or corruption, from harboring an inferiority complex to delusions of grandeur. It’s a clash that could be understood in terms of the intellectual conflict between the pro-Western Turgenev and the Slavophile Dostoevsky. Unfortunately, we’re no longer cruising at that altitude. There is arguably even less debate today than in the days of the USSR, and it’s clear that Russians are now more fully in a Dostoevsky phase: their desire to lock themselves in a small but boundless world is reemerging, even among those who reject Putin and the Orthodox Church’s revanchist narrative.
I met a woman named Anna, for example, who described herself as an “anti-establishment, pacifist, pagan environmentalist,” and said that “we must be zombies to be killing our own brothers.” Yet she defended “family values” and “love of the ancestors.” Her priority, she said, was to “preserve Russian tradition.” She rejected “modern Western culture where anything goes and everything is easy and fun. Because it’s obviously a sham.” She went so far as to say that it’s people like her “who keep old Russia in their hearts, who are the ones who safeguard the roots of Europe.” Her hair was as long and blond as grain, her eyes emerald-green, and she wore traditional necklaces and a long jade dress. She was thirty-four years old and lived in the “Jamaica of the Volga,” at the foot of the Zhiguli—the only mountains in the Russian plains until the Urals—which plunge into the river and create incredible botanical effects, including the growth of wild marijuana. Volunteers come from all over Russia to harvest it. “Memorable parties,” Anna assured me, “but now the government has practically banned non-official gatherings, it’s like being in jail.” She told me that she is a shamanic healer, even if her official title is nurse. “If I didn’t have four children I would have been sent to the Donbas for sure,” she said. Her partner composes and plays Volga dub, a kind of Russian reggae—the soundtrack of the pacifist pirates of the river.
To reach their secret island hideout, I set out after sundown on a ramshackle raft made of pallets and surfboards. I was hosted by locals named Shukhrat and Albert: they had christened the island “Shubert.” Their friendship was changed and deepened by the war—Shukhrat lost a son, Albert sent his to Sweden. They had decided to abandon reality, taking over a strip of sand that magically emerged from the Volga in the spring. They camped out with their families and were gradually joined by other fugitives. Thus began an independent community with its own rules, foremost of which is to avoid the news. They hold meetings, yoga classes, meditation sessions. They sing antiwar reggae songs, using only traditional instruments such as balalaikas, domras, and bayans. Every Friday night, friends and musicians arrive from Kazan, Samara, and Tolyatti and put on a music festival. “We’re not distancing ourselves from the world,” said Albert, a former security systems engineer, “but creating our own separate world. This is our country now, based on authentic Russian values. Everything is scary out there.”
But Shubert Island’s remoteness hadn’t assuaged all his concerns. He had established a special relationship with two Ukrainian YouTubers who spoke Russian and was planning on biking out to visit them in the Donbas during that fateful February 2022. “They left me voice messages asking if I was their enemy now and why were we bombing them and killing them,” he told me. “I still don’t know how we ended up on the other side—it’s terrible. I can only cry, but my mom used to say that boys don’t cry.” These were the only tears I saw on my voyage.
Zarina and Valentina hold a photograph of Pavel, Nizhny Novgorod
One Friday evening in Nizhny Novgorod, the birthplace of Maxim Gorky, I ended up on the main thoroughfare alongside the Kremlin, where I was almost trampled by a horde of drunken youths. The bars were overflowing with people dancing on the sidewalks, drinks in hand. The façade of a six-story building was covered with the letter *Z,* a symbol of support for the war. I was walking with Artjom Fomenkov, a historian and political science professor. I asked what he thought of the scene, of the unsettling contrast between the partiers and their peers being sent to the front. “Those fighting aren’t from big cities, but from small towns,” he explained. “The most downtrodden places,” that is, where they only enlist for the money. “It’s unlikely that the bulk of the urban population would feel directly affected by the war.” He thought for a moment and added, “and that’s why they go on living like that. They’re not involved, and so they do the same thing they were doing two years ago, one hundred years ago, two hundred years ago—marinating in their despair.” This is what I would hear referred to as the “Russian syndrome,” which is a mixture of nostalgia, melancholy, and affliction. “Putin is just the latest to exploit this passive attitude,” he said. “Remember, Russians are agents of their destiny, not victims.”
But just five hundred meters from the chaos, we encountered a sobering scene. Osharskaya Ulitsa is still known as the brothel street, because of its reputation in Gorky’s day. A building that once served as a brothel now supposedly hosts military offices. Anyone dragged in there at night has a high chance of being sent to a training camp the next morning, and then to the front. Fomenkov seemed to reconsider his earlier comments. “The kids you saw are actually terrified, they drink much more than before,” he said. “They know not to be found in certain places alone, drunk, and without a solid alibi, or at least an important last name.”
The next day I ended up on a nameless street, in the living room of a blue cottage besieged by skeletal hens and the carcasses of old cars repurposed as chicken coops. This was the home of Pavel, who died in the Donbas in the fall of 2022, only forty days after enlisting. His eighteen-year-old daughter, Zarina, was pregnant, and looked at me with astonished eyes, green and yellow like the grass of the steppe in summer. She was sitting on a burgundy couch next to her mother, Valentina, who looked worn out. They told me that Pavel had been a taxi driver and had gone into debt. One night, he came home drunk and said he had enlisted. He showed Valentina the contract, for just over two hundred thousand rubles a month. Driving a cab had earned him fifty thousand rubles at most, and some months almost nothing.
The ceiling was low and had been painted to resemble the sky. On the walls hung pictures of the kids—one showed them swimming in the Volga with their father. Then there was Pavel, beaming with his new weed wacker. “He was a good man, respected,” Valentina said. “I couldn’t stop him. He did it for his three children, to pay off the mortgage.” Ten days of training and he left. Apparently he had stepped on a mine. “They sent him ahead to check out the terrain. But we’ll never really know,” said Zarina, biting her lip. Two military officers had arrived on their doorstep to deliver Putin’s form letter and a medal. Valentina assured me that people were there for her—even neighbors whom she hadn’t spoken to in years had come by with bread and vodka. She and Pavel had loved each other, she told me, but they had never married. Valentina was now suing his mother to obtain the millions of rubles the state provided to compensate the families of the fallen. “What was he thinking?” she said. “Pavel had his own ideas. He used to say it was time to stick it to everyone who left the USSR. But he left to make a few bucks, so in the end he was just a mercenary, right?”
In the corner, near the stereo and CDs, lights illuminated a small shrine flanked by the Russian flag: Pavel’s accordion, his straw hat, fake sunflowers, images of the Madonna, whom he worshiped, and the teddy bears he had bought Zarina. And then, smiling above it all like a kindly uncle, Stalin. “His beloved Stalin,” Valentina said.
Stalin, as far as I could tell, had become the symbol of the summer, a totemic figure along the lines of Che Guevara. Lenin may be one of the most common statues in the world, with seven thousand in Russia alone—but it is no longer Lenin’s arm that points to the future. Stalin is experiencing a Second Coming, his name recurring like a mantra. He even has his own namesake sausage brand. His biggest sponsor, perhaps, is Putin, who knows that by invoking him he is pulling on a magic string that will reawaken secret dreams of glory.
“Putin can’t compare himself to Lenin,” the historian Dmitry Rusin told me. “He was too intellectual and complex in these days of easy approximations. It’s too European.” Rusin is a professor at Ulyanovsk State University. In 1970, they built an enormous Lenin memorial in the city center. “Putin prefers to be compared to Stalin, just as Stalin drew his ruthless idea of Russian power from Ivan the Terrible,” said the professor as we approached the memorial. “Not a European idea, but an Asian one, that doesn’t hold the life of the individual in consideration. I find this return to the cult of Stalin, especially among young people, horrifying. I feel a catastrophe coming.” The fountain in front of the complex had run dry. “They closed the complex for renovations five years ago,” Rusin said. “It was supposed to reopen in 2020, now they’re saying 2025. But no funds are coming from Moscow. They want to make Ulyanovsk poor.”
Volgograd is a different story. Putin wants to change its name back to Stalingrad, the better to exploit the symbol of the battle. “We are again being threatened by German Leopard tanks,” the president said in February 2023, inaugurating a new monument to Stalin at the museum dedicated to the two-hundred-day siege, when more than a million Soviet and German soldiers were reported dead, wounded, missing, or captured. “Again and again, we have to repel the aggression of the collective West.”
Yet Samara, five hundred miles north of Volgograd, is where the ghost of Stalin really makes one realize just how little the outside world understands about Russia. The city is located at the point where the Volga veers east, as if attracted by the pull of the Urals. The city is generally known as the Russian Chicago, because of its great industrial vitality and popularity with merchants and criminals. But in the summer, Samara becomes the Saint-Tropez of the Volga, with elegant beaches and a fashionable riverside promenade that is second only to Sochi’s. And just like Sochi, it seems to be a destination for hardcore Putin supporters. Bourgeois kids traverse its streets on scooters, wearing expensive American sneakers and the hottest T-shirt of the season—one bearing Stalin’s face and the phrase if i were here, we wouldn’t be dealing with all this shit.
Stalin built a secret bunker under an old Communist Committee building in town in 1942, just after the narrow Soviet victory at the Battle of Moscow. These days it’s a pilgrimage destination. I went on a tour of the bunker, in which at least half my group consisted of people in their twenties. We descended to find the control room and apartment for the head of the USSR. The bunker was never used, but the guide explained that it was updated during the Cuban Missile Crisis and again after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Today it can hold up to six hundred people for five days and “even gets cell phone service.” Andrei, a twenty-four-year-old electrical engineer who was visiting from Moscow with three friends, spontaneously told me of Stalin that “he was a winner.” We were in front of an original military map of the Soviet counteroffensive. “For us young people, Stalin is number one. We must fight evil like during the Great Patriotic War.” Did any negative associations come to mind? “They say a lot of things, but what matters is the results,” he said. “I think there were more deaths in the Nineties with the gang wars and alcohol. That was our first experience with democracy—the worst period of our history.”
In this second summer of what Andrei called the “war on evil,” even the most zealous popes indulge the Stalin worship, despite his confiscation of Orthodox Church assets and the fact that he has turned many of their cathedrals into prisons, factories, and army barracks. It was Piotrovsky, at the Hermitage, who suggested I meet a young priest named Mikhail Rodin, whom he called “an emerging voice.” He lived in Balakovo, Piotrovsky added, “a place forgotten by God.”
Father Rodin, who is forty-four and has four children, belongs to the Russian Orthodox Old Believer Church, which was born out of a seventeenth-century schism with the official Orthodox Church. A long history of repression and semi-clandestine masses followed. But today, the conflict with the main church, presided over by the crusading Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, seems to have subsided, with both factions supporting Russia’s sacred mission in Ukraine.
I arrived in Balakovo in the evening, the smell of ammonia in the air. Though the city revolved around two of the biggest power plants on the Volga, all its roads were dark. The only sign of life came from the Lucky Pub, which was hosting a concert by the Kiss, a popular local rock band—all the kids seemed to know their songs. I entered and felt like I was in the Midwest; there were pool tables, darts, French fries in baskets with checkered paper, and a sign reading make love not war.
Batyushka Rodin, who speaks excellent English, said that his church near Balakovo’s squalid industrial zone—a luxury lodge with fragrant pine logs, an oven to make the communion bread, icons donated by parishioners—had been financed by one Robert Stubblebine, an American native who relocated to Moscow. He’s known as a VP and early shareholder of Yandex, the Russian Google, started by his business partner Arkady Volozh, an oligarch who has called the war “barbaric” (probably just in an unsuccessful bid to be taken off the list of sanctioned billionaires).
Rodin had other ideas. “The war is the last opportunity to bring salvation to the human soul,” he said with a beatific smile. “In the Book of Revelations, John the Apostle wrote of these last trying times for the human race, when everyone would have to choose their own path: they will either stay with God or go forth to great pain and suffering forever.” His tone didn’t change when I asked about Stalin’s resurgent popularity. “I don’t want to judge, because God can’t be removed from the hearts of Russians,” he said. “No one called Stalin for help, no one called the Party for help. Everyone cried out to God!”
I know Russian priests fairly well—they tend to be rough and arrogant. Rodin was different, at once modern and archaic. He uses social media and medieval mannerisms. He has traveled a bit, but for him there is no place like Russia. I asked him what being Russian meant to him. “We’re influenced by the immense nothingness around us, and by the harsh climate,” he said. “In a land like this, you have to have an objective, a dream. We Russians need to have something big to strive for. We dreamed of communism, equality, and of a life where no one is exploited by anyone. Every person the same as the next.” He went on: “If Russians believe in something, they believe until the end. They believe in God. They’re ready to die for their faith. They believe in communism. They’re ready to die for that. They believe in Russia and they’re ready to sacrifice themselves for Russia.”
Even the atomic bomb, *batyushka*?
“Of course,” he replied quickly. “We’re ready to sacrifice ourselves. Because if we don’t win, we’ll burn it all down. If we can’t achieve this bright future, then what’s the point in living?” He grew more heated. “Our president is saying what everyone is thinking. If we don’t have the Russia we want, we’re ready to martyr ourselves, sacrifice ourselves and the whole world if it’s unjust and evil. There’s no need for a world like that.”
I was back out on the street when I saw that I had a voicemail from Albert, from Shubert Island. He had composed a new reggae song: “At sunset the Volga is bathed in pure light,” he sang, “when illuminated by love, my heart is the same.”
The weather for New York on Friday, April 12th, is set to be overcast, with an average temperature of fifty-two degrees. Rain may be waiting in the wings. So, here’s an idea. Escape to Film Forum and watch Alain Delon and Romy Schneider, dripping wet and lightly broiled by a Provençal sun, make out beside a swimming pool. That should suck the grayness from your day.
The movie—“La Piscine” (1969), directed by Jacques Deray—is one of eleven features that are being screened at Film Forum in tribute to Delon. He is still alive, at the age of eighty-eight, though reportedly in poor health. Of late, he has found himself at the center of a sour feud, involving his children and his housekeeper-companion, and the press has reported every wrinkle in the dispute. What better way to wish him well, and to register our scorn at the treacherous flow of time, than to behold him in his pomp? The retrospective, which runs to April 18th and has been preceded by a two-week run of “Le Samouraï” (1967), moves from the late springtime of Delon’s career to its high summer. The earliest works are “Purple Noon” and “Rocco and His Brothers,” both of which were first screened in 1960, and the last is “[Mr. Klein](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/09/the-hour-of-reckoning-descends-in-mr-klein)” (1976). Cultists will be gratified by the inclusion of the overheated “Red Sun” (1970), which stars Toshiro Mifune, Charles Bronson, Ursula Andress, and Delon. What a cast! It’s like a salad bar at the United Nations.
To be an international figure, in movies, is something of a glamorous embarrassment. As far back as 1964, Delon had to climb on board the “Yellow Rolls-Royce,” a juddering M-G-M vehicle, in the company of Rex Harrison, Jeanne Moreau, Shirley MacLaine, and Omar Sharif—the internationalist par excellence, a frictionless all-purpose “foreigner,” ever ready for a deft hand of bridge. Fifteen years later, I clearly remember staring, mouth agape, at “The Concorde: Airport ’79.” Delon, as the harassed captain of the plane, was joined by Bibi Andersson (an incandescent stalwart for Ingmar Bergman), Mercedes McCambridge (formerly the voice of Beelzebub in “The Exorcist”), and, as a flight attendant, Sylvia Kristel (no stranger to airborne tumult, as scholars of “Emmanuelle” could tell you). Delon looked weary and resentful, probably because, for once, he was in danger of being outshone by a co-star more gorgeous than him. More galling still, she was made of metal. Appealing Delon may have been, but, in the gorgeosity stakes, the Concorde won by a nose.
As for American fame, Delon never quite broke the code, though it was not for want of trying. Look at him, hilariously suave, in white tie and tails, invited to present an Oscar at the Academy Awards in 1965 and, in so doing, to lay on the Frenchness like *crème Chantilly*. “I am delighted to be over here, even though it is now spring in Paris and the chestnuts are in bloom,” he says. Bob Hope, standing beside him, cracks up, takes a beat, and adds, “You should feel right at home. Some of mine’ll bloom tonight, too.” Delon duly announces “Mary Poppins”—or, as he calls it, “Marry Poppins,” like somebody issuing an instruction—as the winner for visual effects, and you can imagine his publicists, behind the scenes, planning their campaign. Maybe this cute kid could become, after Louis Jourdan, Hollywood’s next in-house Gaul. Maybe they could find him another “Letter from an Unknown Woman” (1948). Or, better still, another “Gigi” (1958).
If the plan faltered, it may be because neither the melancholic grace that Jourdan brought to the first of those films, not the charm-laced levity that he displayed in the second, lay within Delon’s ambit. In truth, his skills are fairly restricted. Fine actor though he is, no jury would convict him of being a great one. Yet he is a star of enduring magnitude, especially in France, and what he *did* do, when he was shrewd enough to operate within his limits, was so compelling that a formidable squad of directors was drawn toward him: Joseph Losey for “Mr. Klein,” Michelangelo Antonioni for “L’Eclisse” (1962), and Jean-Pierre Melville for the bleak triad of “Le Samouraï,” “Le Cercle Rouge” (1970), and “Un Flic” (1972). Luchino Visconti used Delon twice, once for “Rocco and His Brothers” and again for “The Leopard” (1963). When asked why he had chosen Delon to play Rocco, the most saintly of the siblings, Visconti replied, “Because Alain Delon *is* Rocco. If I had been obliged to use another actor, I would not have made the film.”
What is it about this particular actor, then, that marks him out and favors him with that uncanny, self-enclosing remoteness that we associate with stardom, even at its most gregarious? It was not his voice, for sure; when he is dubbed into Italian for Visconti and Antonioni, there isn’t much of a letdown. If we watch him greedily, asking for more, it is for a reason so obvious, and so elemental, that stating it plainly seems almost indecent, but here goes. Alain Delon, in his prime, was the most beautiful man in the history of the movies.
The defining of beauty is a thankless task. It has taxed and eluded professional thinkers, bibulous poets, and writers of *billets-doux* so cheesily heartfelt that they have to be kept in the fridge. In the dusk of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant argued for a disinterested evaluation of beauty—“the beautiful is that which, apart from concepts, is represented as the object of a UNIVERSAL delight”—and was roundly abused, almost a hundred years later, for his presumption:
> From the very beginning, we get from our philosophers definitions upon which the lack of any refined personal experience squats like a big fat stupid worm, as it does on Kant’s famous definition of the beautiful. ‘That is beautiful,’ says Kant, ‘which pleases *without interest*.’ Without interest?! Compare this definition with this other one, made by an ‘artist,’ an ‘observer’ truly capable of aesthetic appreciation—by Stendhal, who once called the beautiful *une promesse de bonheur*.
That could only be Nietzsche. No other philosopher would get away with hurling worm-based invective at his peers. As it happens, he slightly misquotes Stendhal, who proposed, in a footnote to his study of love, that beauty “is only the *promise* of happiness.” That “only” adds a wonderful shrug; it hints that happiness may not be such a big deal, after all, and reminds us that promises are as often broken as kept.
Is even Stendhal’s attitude, worldly and accommodating as it sounds, permissible these days? The broaching of beauty, as a theme, is no longer to be encouraged. Ruminations on the subject now call for a handling so delicate that it verges on the paranoid, and they carry a high risk of nonsense: bullshit in a china shop. As moviegoers and critics, say, we hesitate to pass comment upon the appearance of a person onscreen, especially if that appearance makes us catch our breath, and we have good cause to pause. The dread of objectification cuts deep. Easier, by far, to approach the matter as a born-again Platonist, peering through the visible veneer of the characters, while you gnaw your popcorn, to discern the immanent forms below. Force of personality can be praised to the hilt, as can dramatic dexterity. If anything about the character gladdens the eye, however, it’s probably best to keep quiet. Even haircuts can be a minefield.
In one respect, this is nonsense. Movies, from their infancy, have been in the objectifying racket. The making of an appearance, however fiercely we may object to its methods, is their raison d’être. Celluloid is a strip of flammable skin, coated with photosensitive chemicals, and unsurpassed in its registration of human flesh—the warm and no less sensitive exterior of living creatures. If all that counts is inward essence, what the hell were those teams of makeup artists, coiffeurs, and cinematographers employed by the major studios, in the golden age, doing all day? What was the point of the costume tests, for example, that William H. Daniels, the director of photography on “Queen Christina” (1933), ran on Greta Garbo almost ninety years ago? Silently she smiles, poses, turns, casts her gaze upward and sideways, and confronts the camera head-on; at one dumbfounding moment, Daniels cuts her face in half, diagonally, with a scarf of black shadow, leaving just one eye exposed. She rests her hand on her chin, as though lost in thought. Garbo showed us all how to get lost.
And that’s the kicker. Of all the stars that ever were, it is Garbo who best perpetuated the possibility—or the captivating lie—that film could be more than a simple surface. Beauty *is* skin-deep, but somehow, if you’re Garbo, you can intimate the blood flow of feelings beneath. Daniels, who photographed her in twenty-one films, had a keener grasp of that mystery than anyone else, though he was left with a specific regret. In 1969, the year before his death, he confessed, “The saddest thing in my career is that I was never able to photograph her in color. I begged the studio. I felt I had to get those incredible blue eyes in color, but they said no. The process at the time was cumbersome and expensive, and the pictures were already making money. I still feel sad about it.” I like to think that, before he died, Daniels might have seen “Purple Noon,” and the eyes of Alain Delon. Here was a new kind of blue.
René Clément’s “Purple Noon” is adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel “[The Talented Mr. Ripley](https://www.amazon.com/Talented-Mr-Ripley-Patricia-Highsmith/dp/0393332144).” So is Anthony Minghella’s film of that title from 1999, and also “Ripley,” now on Netflix, which is determined to winnow away any specks of pleasure, energy, or guilty fun from the tale. Not so “Purple Noon,” in which Ripley starts off at the edges of the action and gradually oils his way into the core. Casting is everything; Minghella arranges for his most handsome performer, Jude Law, to play Dickie Greenleaf, the wealthy wastrel whom Ripley (Matt Damon) slays and then seeks to replace. But the earlier Ripley is played by Delon; in all the plenitude of his splendor, *he* is the murderer, and that makes it much easier—indeed, compulsory—for us to be wooed by his cunning machinations, just as Highsmith intended. Late in the film, in an unforgettable closeup, he trains those eyes of his, as clear and as cloudless as the Mediterranean sky, upon Dickie’s girlfriend, who still knows nothing of the crime, and who considers Ripley an odd fellow but a loyal pal. We know better, or worse. We know that beauty is the beast.
All of which is a brazen refutation of Stendhal. This Ripley doesn’t promise happiness. He promises trouble, and from that springs the fundamental doubleness of *Delonisme*. Here is someone, evidently, from whom we ought to steer clear, yet we can’t get away from him. We can’t even look away. What’s more, Delon is highly unusual, among those of divine aspect, in that he is said to have cultivated connections with the actual underworld. Murmurs of scandal and impropriety dogged him for decades. In 1968, the body of a Serbian man named Stevan Marković, who was a friend of Delon’s and had been his bodyguard, was found on a garbage dump in a village outside Paris. A Corsican gangster was arrested, charged with the killing, but then released. Darkly exciting rumors of parties attended by Marković, Delon, and Claude Pompidou—the wife of the French Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou, who was campaigning for the Presidency—added to the mix. Marković’s death remained unsolved, and Delon was thereafter shadowed, though never overshadowed, by an air of menace. Indeed, he did little to dispel it. What better way to nourish, or to intensify, the fictional figures whom you are hired to portray than to allow your life, offstage, to feed into them?
With that murk in mind, it’s tempting to trace a direct line from Ripley to the assassin played by Delon in “Le Samouraï,” who, in a delicious gesture of prëemption, already dresses like an undertaker: dark suit, dark tie, white shirt. It’s like a uniform—a lethal update, so to speak, on the calculated nattiness of Piero, the broker played by Delon in “L’Eclisse.” Piero is no villain, but he strikes us as morally null; when a drunkard steals his Alfa Romeo, crashes it into a river, and dies, all that really concerns Piero are the dents in the bodywork. “I think I’ll sell it,” he says. We first observe him darting to and fro at the stock exchange in Rome, but later he slows to wandering pace, strolling around half-empty streets, meeting up (or, famously and climactically, failing to meet up) with a woman named Vittoria (Monica Vitti). Whether they can summon the strength to be in love is open to question. One of their most impassioned kisses is impeded by a pane of glass. Even their lips can’t meet.
Stand back from the retrospective at Film Forum; stop swooning for a minute; try to be as Kantian as you can, suppressing the thirst of your personal interest; and consider how the idea of beauty has been reconfigured by the case of Delon. First, beauty is *lonely*. In a relationship, one side of him remains unreachable; in a crowd, he is set apart. (Watch him ambling through a fish market, in “Purple Noon,” tracked by a handheld camera. People keep glancing at him, as if this were a documentary. The very fish take a peek.) Second, beauty is *modern*. The clean, carved lines of Delon’s face require outfits to match; in “The Leopard,” he is dashing enough, yet oddly uneasy in period costume. He also sports a mustache, as slender as a rapier, and even that feels a little excessive. There are certain glories of cinema that we deface at our peril. (I have always refused to see the 1964 comedy “Father Goose,” on the ground that the trailer depicts Cary Grant with stubble. Blasphemy!) Third, beauty is *vulnerable*. There is a mournful sadism in the spectacle of Delon, in “Rocco and His Brothers,” being hurt by a nocturnal brawl, and in the boxing ring. He’s no featherweight, but he lacks bulk, and you wince to see him take his lumps. The tape applied to a cut on his eyebrow stays there, in the ensuing scenes, like the bruise on the cheekbone of Michael Corleone. Fourth, beauty is *serious*. For optimum effect, Delon should be neither laughing nor cavalier. His stabs at comedy, thankfully infrequent, are no joke.
Needless to say, that yen for solemnity is not exclusive to Delon. George Folsey was the director of photography on “Lady of the Tropics” (1939), and his mission was to lend lustre to Hedy Lamarr. Not exactly demanding, you’d think, but there was a hitch. “She was a very, very beautiful woman to photograph—until she smiled. It was difficult for her to smile and be attractive,” Folsey said. By common consent, no one lovelier than Lamarr ever set foot on Californian soil; if only Kant had hung around and seen her in “Algiers” (1938), he would have leapt from his seat and shouted, “Hey, *meine Herren,* check it out! Universality! Just like I told you!”
Yet the fact remains that Lamarr, like Ava Gardner or Gene Tierney—or Delon—is stuck on the lower slopes of Mount Olympus. It is paradoxical (and, for mere mortals, cheering) that some of the greatest stars, the occupants whose slot at the top of the mountain is secure, were scarcely good-looking at all, and certainly conformed to no classical ideal of pulchritude. Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford: they knocked an audience sideways, but no one could mistake them for knockouts. Only very rarely do we encounter beings who simultaneously dazzle the senses, command the box-office, and remain, as it were, in communion with themselves. When I first glimpsed Edward Steichen’s *Vanity Fair* portrait of Gary Cooper, from 1930, I thought, O.K., so perfection *has* been achieved. Game over.
If I could cram one more movie into the Delon package at Film Forum, it would be Volker Schlöndorff’s “Swann in Love.” I haven’t seen it since it was released in 1984. But I recall Jeremy Irons, as Charles Swann, pretty much fainting as he drinks in the fragrance of the corsage worn by Odette (Ornella Muti) between her breasts, which struck me as a useful guide to the etiquette of desire. Above all, I remember Delon as the Baron de Charlus—a trifle stiff, the bloom gone from his youthfulness, and a touch of twilight in the azure of his gaze. Grace notes of the homoerotic had been perceptible in Delon ever since “Purple Noon,” and now they evolved into a sad music, in the person of Charlus. With a white-gloved hand, as if flirtation had become an effort of will, he pinched the cheek of a beau.
Can we, or should we, cut beauty out of the conversation altogether? So natural an insult to our faith in human equality seems, well, unnatural. Yet there it is, no more liable to extinction than a peacock. In any case, the overwhelming majority of us will never know how it feels, or what it might mean, to be beautiful. Simply imagining that status, with its unearthly blessings and its many complications (who’d want to be stared at just for walking into a room?) is a challenge. What we *can* conceive of, perhaps, is the fading of the glow: having the world at your feet, and your fingertips, and feeling it slip away as age dims the lights on your looks. It’s the oldest story of all. Helen must have told it to herself, in her dotage, long after the ships had sailed home from Troy. In the messy mythology of our own era, Alain Delon—the blue-eyed boy, the bad guy in the excellent suit—told the story from the start. No doubt he will see it through to the end. ♦
# Chinese Organized Crime’s Latest U.S. Target: Gift Cards
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Federal authorities are investigating the involvement of Chinese organized crime rings in gift card fraud schemes that have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars or more from American consumers.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has launched a task force, whose existence has not previously been reported, to combat a scheme known as “card draining,” in which thieves use stolen or altered card numbers to siphon off money before the owner can spend it. The initiative has been dubbed “Project Red Hook,” for the perpetrators’ ties to China and their exploitation of cards hung in store kiosks on “J-hooks.”
This marks the first time that federal authorities have focused on the role of Chinese organized crime in gift card fraud and devoted resources to fighting it. Homeland Security Investigations, a DHS agency, began prioritizing gift card fraud late last year in response to a flurry of consumer complaints and arrests connected to card draining.
Over the past 18 months, law enforcement across the country has arrested about 100 people for card draining, of whom 80 to 90 are Chinese nationals or Chinese Americans, according to Adam Parks, a Homeland Security assistant special agent in charge based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Parks, who is leading the task force, estimates that another 1,000 people could be involved in card draining in the U.S., mostly as runners for the gangs.
“We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially billions of dollars, \[and\] that’s a substantial risk to our economy and to people’s confidence in their retail environment,” he told ProPublica.
Card draining is when criminals remove gift cards from a store display, open them in a separate location, and either record the card numbers and PINs or replace them with a new barcode. The crooks then repair the packaging, return to a store and place the cards back on a rack. When a customer unwittingly selects and loads money onto a tampered card, the criminal is able to access the card online and steal the balance.
Federal investigators believe multiple Chinese criminal organizations are involved in card draining and are using the proceeds to fund other illicit activities, from narcotics to human trafficking, according to Parks. ProPublica recently revealed [Chinese organized crime’s involvement](https://www.propublica.org/article/chinese-organized-crime-us-marijuana-market) in the illegal U.S. cannabis industry and the [laundering of cocaine, heroin and fentanyl profits](https://www.propublica.org/article/china-cartels-xizhi-li-money-laundering). ProPublica has also exposed how [Walmart and other retailers have facilitated the spread of gift card fraud](https://www.propublica.org/article/walmart-financial-services-became-fraud-magnet-gift-cards-money-laundering) and has revealed the role of Chinese fraud rings in gift card laundering.
The DHS team in Baton Rouge led an investigation that resulted in the conviction and [2023 sentencing](https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdla/pr/canadian-man-sentenced-lengthy-federal-prison-sentence-scheme-operate-illicit-online) to prison of a Canadian man who stole more than $22 million by operating an illicit online gift card marketplace that victimized American consumers and businesses. As arrests for card draining began piling up around the country, Parks and special agent Dariush Vollenweider saw the need for a national response.
Last November, they convened a two-day summit at DHS headquarters in Washington, D.C., attended by many of the country’s top retailers and gift card suppliers. Federal authorities pushed the industry to share information and help thwart the gangs. The agency then issued a bulletin in December alerting law enforcement across the country about the card-tampering tactics. Parks said about 15 Homeland Security agents are now spending most of their time on Project Red Hook.
“It’s not just a one-store problem,” Vollenweider said. “It’s not just a Secret Service or DHS or FBI problem. It’s an industry problem that needs to be addressed.”
The Illinois State Police found hundreds of altered gift cards in the back of a car during a traffic stop in January 2023. Credit: United States District Court
Americans are expected to spend more than $200 billion on gift cards this year, according to an industry estimate. Retailers love gift cards because they drive sales and profit: Consumers typically spend more than a card’s value when they shop, and chains like Walmart and Target earn a profit when someone buys a third-party gift card, such as those from Apple or Google.
Data from retailers and consumers shows that card draining has skyrocketed in recent years. Target alone has seen $300 million stolen from customers due to card draining, according to comments last June from a company loss prevention officer contained in [a Florida sheriff’s office report](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24536188-gainesville-case-detailed-arrest-report). A recent survey by AARP, the nonprofit advocacy group for people over age 50, found that almost a quarter of Americans have [given or received a card with no balance](https://www.aarp.org/pri/topics/work-finances-retirement/fraud-consumer-protection/gift-card-scams-survey.html) on it, presumably because the money had been stolen. More than half of victims surveyed said they couldn’t get a credit or refund. (Apple, Walmart and Target say, in their terms and conditions, that they are not responsible for lost or stolen gift cards.)
More broadly, almost 60% of retailers said they experienced an [increase in gift card scams](https://nrf.com/research/national-retail-security-survey-2023) between 2022 and 2023. Between 2019 and 2023, Americans lost close to $1 billion to card draining and other gift card scams, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
Target and Walmart have faced class-action suits from consumers who bought or received gift cards only to discover the balance had been stolen. In each case, the plaintiffs alleged that the companies have failed to secure the packaging of gift cards and to monitor their displays. “The tampering of Gift Cards purchased from Target is rampant and widespread and Target is well-aware of the problem, yet Target continues to sell unsecure Gift Cards susceptible to tampering without warning consumers of this fact,” reads the complaint in the Target case.
The Walmart case was resolved in 2022 with an undisclosed settlement, and Target is engaged in settlement talks. [Apple settled a similar card-draining class-action case](https://www.shaygiftcardsettlement.com/) in January, agreeing to pay $1.8 million. Walmart and Apple did not admit liability.
Apple declined to comment about card draining and the DHS investigation. In court filings in the class-action, Apple said that since the cards were purchased at Walmart, “the fraud occurred as a result of Walmart’s security protocols, rather than Apple’s.” A Walmart spokesperson told ProPublica, “Although we will not comment on ongoing investigations, we are proud of our routine work with federal law enforcement to stay ahead of these fraudsters and help keep customers safe.”
Target denied in court filings that its gift card security practices were inadequate and that its cards were susceptible to third-party tampering. “We are aware of the prevalence of gift card tampering and take this issue very seriously,” Target said in a statement to ProPublica. “Our cyber fraud and abuse team uses technical controls to help protect guests, and our store teams inspect cards for physical signs of tampering.” Target said it encourages employees to watch for people buying “high dollar amounts or large quantities of gift cards, or tampering with gift cards in stores.” Like Walmart, Target said it works closely with law enforcement.
Gift card scammers linked to Chinese criminal organizations trick their victims in many ways besides card draining. Some scams dupe victims into unwittingly paying criminals with gift cards. Whatever the ruse, the crime rings make use of low-level “runners” in the U.S., who are almost exclusively Chinese nationals or Chinese Americans. In card draining, the runners assist with removing, tampering and restocking of gift cards, according to court documents and investigators.
A single runner driving from store to store can swipe or return thousands of tampered cards to racks in a short time. “What they do is they just fly into the city and they get a rental car and they just hit every big-box location that they can find along a corridor off an interstate,” said Parks.
In a 24-hour period last December, an alleged runner named Ming Xue visited 14 Walmarts in Ohio before being arrested, according to court documents. Police said they found 2,260 Visa, Apple and Mastercard gift cards in his car. Xue entered the U.S. illegally months before his arrest, according to a prosecution motion. He has pleaded innocent.
DHS is looking at whether Chinese criminal organizations bring people into the U.S. to use them as card-draining runners. John Cassara, a retired federal agent and the author of “China-Specified Unlawful Activities: CCP Inc., Transnational Crime and Money Laundering,” said Chinese criminal enterprises often smuggle workers across the border for other enterprises such as prostitution or growing marijuana.
Parks said investigators are aware that “some of the individuals who were arrested were within weeks to months of being encountered illegally crossing the southern border.”
Other alleged card-draining runners entered the U.S. legally and told police they were hired via online postings. Donghui Liao was arrested at a Florida Target after employees noticed him removing gift cards from a bag and placing them on racks. Through a translator, he told police that his employer hired him online and mailed gift cards to him, according to court documents. He was paid 30 cents for each card he returned to the rack. Police said they found $60,000 worth of tampered cards in his possession. Liao remains in custody and his case was recently transferred to federal court. The DOJ did not respond to requests for comment and Liao has pleaded innocent.
In New Hampshire, police arrested three people between December and March for, among other alleged crimes, using stolen gift card balances to purchase millions of dollars worth of electronics such as iPhones. An apartment used by two of the suspects contained “a large quantity of Apple brand devices, cash, and a computer program that appeared to be running gift card numbers, in real-time,” according to a police report. (Criminals use software to automatically check gift card balances so they can be alerted when a customer buys and loads money onto a tampered card.) The fraudsters typically export the electronics back to China to resell them, according to Vollenweider.
Parks said Red Hook is recommending anti-fraud measures to retailers, such as closer scrutiny of gift card displays, while also heightening awareness of the problem among merchants and local law enforcement. Store security and local police have sometimes treated runners as small-time annoyances and booted them from stores, rather than arresting and prosecuting them, according to Parks. The task force hopes to work with local police to locate and charge previously released runners.
“It’s important for us to start delivering consequences,” he said.
Correction
**April 10, 2024:** Based on information provided by a Walmart spokesperson, this story originally stated incorrectly that Walmart attended a two-day summit between DHS and top retailers to address gift card fraud. Walmart subsequently said it did not attend the November meeting. Walmart is participating in Project Red Hook.
**Clarification, April 10, 2024:** This story has been clarified to note that the investigation described in the article is being conducted by Homeland Security Investigations, a DHS agency.
**In the early aughts**, Frank Warren ran a medical document delivery business in Germantown, Maryland. It was a monotonous job, involving daily trips to government offices to copy thousands of pages of journal articles for pharmaceutical companies, law firms, and non-profits. By his early forties, he had a house in a nice subdivision, a wife, a young daughter, and a dog. His family fostered children for a few weeks or months, and he felt a sense of purpose in helping kids who were suffering acute crises in their own homes. From the outside, things appeared to be going better than well. But inside, something was missing: A sense of adventure, or at least a little fun. An outlet to explore the weirder, darker, and more imaginative parts of his interior world. He’d never been one for small talk, preferring instead to launch into deep discussions, even with people he barely knew. He wondered if he could create a place like that outside of everyday conversation, a place full of awe, anguish, and urgency.
In the fall of 2004, Frank came up with an idea for a project. After he finished delivering documents for the day, he’d drive through the darkened streets of Washington, D.C., with stacks of self-addressed postcards—three thousand in total. At metro stops, he’d approach strangers. “Hi,” he’d say. “I’m Frank. And I collect secrets.” Some people shrugged him off, or told him they didn’t have any secrets. Surely, Frank thought, those people had the best ones. Others were amused, or intrigued. They took cards and, following instructions he’d left next to the address, decorated them, wrote down secrets they’d never told anyone before, and mailed them back to Frank. All the secrets were anonymous.
Initially, Frank received about one hundred postcards back. They told stories of infidelity, longing, abuse. Some were erotic. Some were funny. He displayed them at a local art exhibition and included an anonymous secret of his own. After the exhibition ended, though, the postcards kept coming. By 2024, Frank would have more than a million.
\*
After his exhibit closed, the postcards took over Frank’s life. Hundreds poured into his mailbox, week after week. He decided to create a website, PostSecret, where every Sunday he uploaded images of postcards he’d received in the mail.
The website is a simple, ad-free blog with a black background, the 4x6 rectangular confessions emerging from the darkness like faces illuminated around a campfire. Frank is careful to keep himself out of the project—he thinks of the anonymous postcard writers as the project’s authors—so there’s no commentary. Yet curation is what makes PostSecret art. There’s a dream logic to the postcards’ sequence, like walking through a surrealist painting, from light to dark to absurd to profound.
*I’m afraid that one day, we’ll find out TOMS are made by a bunch of slave kids!*
*I am a man. After an injury my hormones got screwed up and my breasts started to grow. I can’t tell anyone this but: I really like having tits.*
*I’m in love with a murderer… but I’ve never felt safer in anyone else’s arms.*
*I cannot relax in my bathtub because I have an irrational fear that it’s going to fall through the floor.*
Even if you don’t see him on the website, Frank is always present: selecting postcards, placing them in conversation with one another. Off-screen, he’s a lanky, youthful 60-year-old emanating the healthy glow of those who live near the beach. Last August, we met at his house in Laguna Niguel, in a trim suburban neighbourhood a few miles from the ocean; when I asked about his week, he told me his Oura Ring said he’d slept well the night before. He offered me a seat on his back patio, and the din of children playing sports rang out from a park below. His right arm was in a sling. He’d fractured his scapula after a wave slammed him to the sand while he was bodysurfing.
As we spoke, I gathered that his outlook on most everything is positive—disarmingly so. The first time he had a scapula fracture, after a bike accident a few years ago, “I had this sense of release, I would say, from my everyday concerns and burdens,” he said. Physically exhausting himself through endurance exercise is his relief from the postcards, which skew emotionally dark. “I’ve had to become the kind of person that can do this every day,” he told me.
For years, Frank has been interested in postcards as a medium of narrative. Before PostSecret, he had a project he called “The Reluctant Oracle,” in which he placed postcards with messages like *Your question is a misunderstood answer* into empty bottles and deposited them in a lake near his house. (A *Washington Post* [article](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2004/10/04/postcards-from-the-waters-edge/316c1548-a0c0-45b4-aaf1-ee023bd8a071/) from the time said “The form is cliche: a message in a bottle,” but called the messages themselves “creepy and alluring.”)
What he considers his earliest postcard project, though, dates from his childhood. When he was in fifth grade, just as he was about to board the bus to camp in the mountains near Los Angeles, his mother handed him three postcards. She told him to write down any interesting experiences he had and mail the cards back home.
Frank took the cards. “It’s a Christian sleep-away camp, so of course a lot of crazy stuff happened, and of course I didn’t write my mom about any of it,” he said. But just before camp ended, he remembered the postcards, jotted something down, and mailed them. When he saw them in the mailbox a few days later, he wondered, *Am I the same person that wrote this message days ago?* The self, he had observed as a grade schooler, was always in a state of flux.
Examining secrets was part of a lifelong inquiry into what it means to speak. Frank’s parents split up when he was twelve—a shocking and destabilizing event that would define his adolescence. Soon after, he moved with his mother and brother from Southern California to Springfield, Illinois. Messed up by his parents’ divorce and his cross-country move, Frank became anxious and depressed.
While he was in high school, Frank went to a Pentecostal church three or four times a week, searching for a sense of connection with others. At the end of every service, churchgoers would pray at the altar to receive the Holy Spirit. Then, they spoke in tongues. All around him, the Spirit took hold, and people flailed their arms, wept, and danced. Frank looked on with envy and shame. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how many people tried to help him, he never spoke in tongues. It was a spiritual failure, this failure of language.
After college, while living in Virginia, he met a guy named Dave on the basketball court. They became close fast. Dave was funny and sensitive, and also athletic: he and Frank played hundreds of pickup games together. But Dave seemed to be struggling. He was living with his parents, couldn’t land a job. He spent a lot of time on computers, and confided in Frank that he was being bullied online. “You’ve got to get out of here,” Frank told him. That was one of the last things he ever said to Dave. Frank moved to Maryland, and not long after, he got a call from Dave’s father. Dave had killed himself. Frank was crushed. He felt like he should have seen more warning signs, and at the same time, felt helpless. He ruminated on how Dave might have interpreted their final conversation. *Out of his parents’ house*, he’d meant. *Not out of this life.*
In the wake of his loss, Frank wanted “to do something useful with his grief,” so he decided to volunteer on a suicide prevention hotline. In training, his supervisors modelled how to inflect his voice to sound non-judgmental, how to ask open-ended questions and get below the surface of everyday conversation—lessons he would carry into his later life. He felt catharsis in listening to other people’s pain, and, in turn, sensed that they appreciated his presence. Simply by talking about their struggles, he found, they sometimes gained new understanding. Once every week or two, Frank listened for six hours, up until late in the quiet of his house, as people unravelled. He let them talk, and he let them stay silent. Listening to people’s confessions in the wee hours of the morning, Frank realized that people needed a way to talk about the messy topics often off limits in everyday conversation.
PostSecret contains echoes of his time volunteering on the suicide prevention hotline. Like the hotline, the project draws attention to the ways people conceal parts of themselves, and encourages disclosure. But the postcards go even further: They’re public, available for anyone to see. They show us the types of stories people normally keep guarded, creating, in the aggregate, a living inventory of our taboos.
\*
What is a secret? Knowledge kept hidden from others, etymologically linked to the words *seduction* and *excrement*. To entice someone to look closer; to force them to look away.
Secrecy, writes psychologist Michael Slepian in his 2022 book, *The Secret Lives of Secrets*, is not an act, but an intention — “I intend,” he writes, “for people not to learn this thing.” “To intend to keep a secret,” he continues, “you need to have a mind capable of reasoning with other minds.” Thus, psychologists believe we start to develop a concept of secrets at around the age of three years old, when we also begin to understand that other people have minds—beliefs, desires, emotions—different from our own. At that point, researchers believe, we also develop the ability to experience self-conscious emotions like guilt, shame, and embarrassment. As our theory of the mind develops, we begin to worry that other people are unable or unwilling to understand us, which, in turn, motivates secrecy. Our teenage years are especially ripe for secret-keeping. As we develop stronger senses of self, we distance ourselves from our parents in a bid to assert control over our lives. Keeping secrets from our parents “allows an escape from \[their\] criticism, punishment, and anger,” Slepian writes, “but it also precludes the possibility of receiving help when it’s most needed.”
Cultural taboos create secrecy. Systems and structures uphold it. The nature, and content, of secret-keeping varies across cultures, but we have always hidden things from one another. The Greek gods had secret affairs; for centuries, women in central China wrote to each other in a secret language to evade the ire of oppressive husbands. Today, people keep secrets for safety: They conceal medical conditions to receive better insurance coverage, and hide their legal status so they don’t get deported. Even scripture has something to say about secrets, which is, mostly: don’t keep them. Proverbs 28:13 reads, “He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses them and renounces them finds mercy.” God, in other words, wants full disclosure.
We keep secrets because we are ashamed or afraid; we tell them because we want an escape. We want to feel accepted, seen. Naturally, we share some secrets with our friends and partners, but sometimes those relationships are the source of a secret, so instead we seek out neutral interlocutors. A bartender in Las Vegas told me the same client came, week after week, to talk specifically with him about her anxiety and troubled dating life. A hairdresser in Salt Lake City told me that Mormons grappling with their faltering faith came to her, an ex-Mormon, to work through family conflict. A therapist I met in Arkansas observed that many of her clients were leaving Christianity and using therapy as their new religion, which she found “a little spooky.”
When I asked what she meant, she told me that people, ex-Christian or otherwise, often look to therapy to find a source of meaning and release in their life—to fill a spiritual and emotional vacuum. Evangelicalism, she said, values “inappropriate vulnerability,” where people share testimonies and break boundaries in public venues. She’s wary when she hears those same stories within the context of therapy—when clients come in and feel obligated to spill everything up front, then ask for cures to their emotional ailments.
Later, thinking about secrets, I remembered this conversation and the phrase “inappropriate vulnerability.” How much vulnerability with strangers is appropriate? How much is too much?
\*
For a while, PostSecret was my secret. The website existed in the internet nest I made for myself during adolescence, along with sites like fmylife.com, where users each posted a few lines about the tediums and mishaps of their days, often involving anxiety, depression, alcohol, and sex. They were websites that revealed glimpses of how other people lived, where I could gather anecdotes about adult life and begin to construct an idea of how my own world might look one day.
I grew up in Temecula, a California suburb not too far from where Frank currently lives. My friends and I wandered around the mall to try on skinny jeans, and sprinted around after dark to toilet-paper our classmates’ yards. Suburban life often felt stifling, so I had a habit of inventing stories to make my world seem more interesting. I recounted to friends, with narrative flourish, an encounter I’d had with a freshwater shark in an alpine lake. I created a mysterious, dark-haired boyfriend who I’d met at a soccer tournament. I’d never actually had a boyfriend.
Temecula had a distinctly conservative atmosphere, and it was impossible to escape the shame that accompanied any stray thought about boys, or my changing body. Ours was a town where, in 2008, neighbours supported a California ban on gay marriage. Residents protested the city’s first mosque with signs reading “no to sharia law” in 2010. Arsonists set fire to a local abortion clinic in 2017, and, just in the past two years, the school board would ban critical race theory and reject an elementary school curriculum that referenced Harvey Milk. My family went to a Methodist church, but I sometimes went to Mormon dances with friends; at one such dance in middle school, my dress was too short, so a chaperone made me staple cloth to the hem to cover my knees. During slow dances, we held on to boys’ shoulders from an arm’s length away.
Most everyone I knew in Temecula went to church on Sundays. But I found church boring. I’d excuse myself to go to the bathroom and linger there during sermons, counting the flowers on the wallpaper. I didn’t understand how God, who I didn’t see or hear, could exist.
But even if I didn’t believe God was real, my family did, and religious ideas subtly permeated our home life, shaping what we did and did not talk about. We talked about doing well in school and sports; we didn’t talk about our feelings, or puberty, or dating. My body was a secret, softening and bleeding, fascinating and repulsive.
I didn’t really speak to anyone about these changes, though I do remember one car ride to school with a friend. Her mom was driving, and my friend slipped me pieces of paper in the backseat. In her scrunched-up handwriting, she asked: *Do you wear bras? Do you have hair down there?* When I was a freshman, my period bled through my capris, and upperclassmen stared as I waddled across campus to the cross-country teacher’s classroom for gym shorts, sweat slicking down my back. I’d only ever used thin pads, and I was too anxious to ask about buying tampons. I didn’t want to talk about it, and no one ever asked.
I can barely remember sex ed programming in school; for years, I thought just sleeping next to a boy could get me pregnant. When, in high school, I started the drug Accutane to tame my unruly face, my dermatologist listed off options for pregnancy prevention to avoid harm to an unborn fetus. A family member who was in the room interjected: “She’ll choose abstinence.” It was only after I left and my world opened up that I understood where I came from. That my hometown, and even my own family, bred secrecy.
If I wanted answers to questions—Should I be shaving? Why do I sometimes feel sad?—I had to find them elsewhere. So I swivelled for hours on an office chair in front of a wheezing PC. It was here I learned of Frank’s work.
I remember the glow of the monitor in the dark upstairs hallway, the feeling of the mouse under my hand as I scrolled through secrets. I remember the padding of feet on stairs, the quick click of the X. Browser window vanished.
\*
Over the years, Frank has developed a process for selecting secrets. He sorts the most promising ones into a few boxes. A good secret involves a particular alchemy of art and content. He likes secrets he’s never heard before—there are fewer and fewer these days, but every once in a while something new will pop up—and secrets he has seen but which are presented in a surprising way. At this point, twenty years after the project began, he mostly relies on intuition to select those he posts to the website. He’s kept every postcard over the years, even during a cross-country move. (The secrets he’s posted in the past decade are stored in his upstairs closet and garage; the rest are mostly on loan to the Museum of Us, in San Diego.) Every postcard, that is, except one. He blames a relative for losing it.
On the website, the scrolling experience is simple enough—scroll, rectangle, scroll, next rectangle—but within the rectangles, something else is happening: a cacophony of colour, scrawl, scribble, cross-outs, stickers, stamps, maps, photographs, sketches. Once, I saw locks of hair taped to a postcard; the writer said they collected the hair of children they babysat. The spectre of tactility, if not tactility itself, reminds the viewer that there are thousands of people behind these postcards, and thousands of hours over the course of twenty years were spent creating them.
Is this sociology? Psychology? Voyeurism? The postcards are shaped like little windows, glimpses into someone’s life, devoid of context. Frank likes to think of them, in the collective, as a cross-section of human nature, and each week he tries to select a range of moods, including a smattering of lighthearted secrets to round out his postcard representation of the psyche, even though most of what he receives is dark. I wondered if reading all these secrets gave him some sort of unique lens into who we are, but he’s not sure. Everyone has different parts of themselves or their lives that they’re afraid to acknowledge. Today, most secrets he receives are about relationships—either feeling dissatisfied with a partner or revolving around loneliness.
“My hope is when people read the secrets each week they have no idea what I think about religion, politics, or feminism. I want to be across the board, so anyone can see themselves in a secret,” he said. “If it’s strong and offensive, guess what, people keep offensive, racist secrets in their heart. That’s part of the project—exposing that.” He doesn’t intentionally seek out racist or sexist secrets, and doesn’t post anything that’s “hardcore racist,” but he thinks there’s value in representing the less-than-savoury aspects of human nature, because that’s a true representation of who we are as a whole.
That said, there are some kinds of secrets he generally doesn’t post. He often doesn’t upload postcards written from the throes of suicidal ideation. He doesn’t want the website to become a toxic cesspool of hopelessness. He also doesn’t generally post the photos included with secrets when doing so might share with someone intimate knowledge that they didn’t know themselves. One postcard, for example, included a family photograph alongside a secret reading, *My brother doesn’t realize his father isn’t the same as our father*. All the faces were visible. What if the brother saw it and recognized himself? “I don’t feel like I have ownership of that secret,” Frank said. Instead, he posted the text.
There’s no way to fact-check the secrets; Frank takes those sharing them at their word. In 2013, he posted a secret depicting an image from Google Maps and a red arrow. It read: *I said she dumped me, but really, I dumped her (body)*. After an internet uproar, Reddit users found that the location was in Chicago, someone called the police, and the police found nothing, eventually determining the secret was a hoax. Legally, Frank told me, the postcards are considered hearsay.
\*
The secrets come without context, so Frank put me in touch with a handful of their authors so I could understand what inspired them to send him their postcards. (Occasionally, the authors email him and reveal their identities.) One of them, Casey, was possessed by secrets for all of her childhood. (Casey is a pseudonym; some people in this piece asked that their names be changed to maintain their privacy.) Her father discouraged his kids from making friends and conditioned in them a suspicion of other people. Because he didn’t work, and because her mother, who she suspected had undiagnosed schizophrenia, was shuttered inside all day, Casey was forced to support the family financially. At age fourteen, she was collecting soda bottles for money. The roof was falling in. She was afraid to tell her family she was gay.
When she left home for college in the early 2000s, she was finally able to make friends of her own accord. All of them knew about PostSecret—it was, at the time, in its heyday—and they’d scroll through the entries every Sunday to compare favourites.
Casey liked the honesty of PostSecret, how it gave voice to the unspoken. Her father still had a psychic hold over her life, but she started opening up about her family to her new friends. One of them, Ramón, was gay, too, and not out to his family. They soon became close. He was an aspiring actor, extroverted and funny. It seemed like he knew everyone, and in turn, everyone said he was their best friend. Casey and Ramón were the only people in their friend group who didn’t drink. They’d both grown up with unstable families and were afraid that alcohol would make them lose control.
But when, in junior year, she started experimenting with drinking, he cut off their friendship, accusing her of betraying her values. She was baffled and frustrated; she thought his response was extreme. To do something with her frustration, she submitted a secret decorated with a photo of him in a Halloween costume reading: *A real friend would have stayed around and helped me*. She heard he’d seen the postcard and was furious, but they never really talked about it, and today, decades later, they’re no longer close. Casey doesn’t keep secrets anymore. She doesn’t tolerate them.
Some secret-keepers described their postcard as liberating. One woman, V., sent in a secret acknowledging that her infertility was a relief because she wouldn’t have to go off her bipolar medications while pregnant. She wanted to become a mother, but she felt that, even if fertile, her body wasn’t capable of carrying a baby, and she didn’t know how to tell her husband. When she wrote her secret, she stared at it on her table, and when it was posted, she stared at it on her screen. She was struck by the fact she could reveal her secret to the public but not to her partner, and decided to tell him how she felt. Last September, they adopted a son.
Others didn’t seem to think much about their secrets after the fact, I learned when I talked to Carl, aged sixty-seven, a former federal law enforcement agent who lives in Washington State. His postcard depicted a hand of eight playing cards. With a Sharpie, he’d written in all caps: *GAMBLING DESTROYED MY 4TH AND LAST MARRIAGE.*
As we talked, he was to the point, answering questions in a sentence or two and never elaborating. I could picture him: a gruff, single, middle-aged man who left the house every once in a while to get a cup of coffee with a buddy. He must be lonely, though he’d never admit it, and gambling must have distracted him from his loneliness. “I don’t have any secrets,” he said. “And if I did, I wouldn’t be telling you.”
In 2007, he found a postcard among the “boxes and boxes of crap” in his dead mother’s house. At the time, the divorce from his fourth wife was fresh and he was feeling bitter, so he grabbed a Sharpie, scrawled his message, and put it in the mailbox. “That was that. I was blowing off steam,” he said. “It wasn’t some contemplative therapeutic thing.” Then, he told me something that upended my assumptions about him. “It wasn’t my gambling,” he said. “It was her gambling.”
Some postcards are impulsive, I realized. And because the postcard hadn’t specified whose gambling was the issue, I’d filled in the gap. Fascinated by my own mental jump, I asked more questions. How long had they been married? How did he learn about the gambling? Four marriages? What about the other three? To that last question, Carl said, “I don’t think that applies.”
I wanted to tell him: *Of course it applies!* I felt like his whole life was bound up in that postcard. Something led to the breakup with his first wife, and his second, and his third, which then led him to his fourth, and to their breakup, and to this piece of mail that ended up on Frank’s website. I wanted his autobiography. I wanted to know everything.
\*
Frank told me, “Most of our lives are secret. I think that in the same way that dark matter makes up ninety percent of the universe—this matter that we cannot see or touch or have any evidence of except for its effect on gravity—our lives are like that too. The majority of what we are and who we are is kept private inside. It might express itself in our behaviours, and our fears, and even in human conflict and celebration, but always in this sublimated way.”
Carl was less philosophical. “This thing happened, I forgot about it, and now I’m talking to you.”
\*
In the years after he created the website, Frank wrote several books and held live events, which were often sold-out with more than a thousand people in the audience. The events were usually scripted: Frank shared secrets he’d received and secrets of his own. He was no longer the invisible curator. He was, instead, the very reason people gathered. Today he doesn’t do many events, and he says he’s finished writing books. But at the height of PostSecret a decade ago, the events were central to his work—and underscore how much he values the catharsis that follows disclosure.
In 2013, Frank travelled to Australia for a PostSecret tour. At an event in Melbourne, he seemed comfortable assuming his central role; midway through the evening, he shared his own story. He played a voicemail from his mother, who’d seen a copy of Frank’s first book. “I’m not too happy with it, so forget about mailing me one,” she said. This, Frank told the audience, was not a surprise. “My mom has been like that as long as I’ve known her.” His brother and father were estranged from her, but he and his mother still had a functional relationship. “Even so, my earliest memories being around my mom are memories of having to have my defences up. I couldn’t let my guard down. My earliest memories keeping secrets were from my mom,” he said.
He told the audience about his experience with the Pentecostal church. At the end of every service, he explained, members would share their testimonies, and the congregation would cheer and shout, “Amen!”
Evoking that part of the service, Frank said he wanted to share his own testimony with the audience: If he could go back in time and erase all the moments in his life that had caused him pain and humiliation and suffering, he wouldn’t. Each one of those moments, he said, had brought him to this moment and to the person he is today. He likes who he is today. Suffering in silence led him to make PostSecret; the darkest parts of his past were inseparable from the parts of himself he liked now, and they made him a better father. If you can get through your own struggles, he told the audience, “you’ll have this beautiful story of healing, a story that you can share with others, others who are in that struggle.” Adopting a faint Southern accent, he asked, “Can I get a witness? Can I get an amen, brother?” Someone shouted amen. “Thank you, sister.” The theatre erupted into applause.
Then, Frank invited people to line up in the aisles and share their secrets. When one woman stepped up to the microphone, she said, “About a year ago, my ex-boyfriend raped me.” Her voice broke, and through tears, she continued, “And then told me he was getting engaged the next day. I think it’s about time I ask for help.” The audience applauded, and Frank commented that often the first step to making change in one’s life is sharing a secret. The woman left the microphone. The next person stepped up to share.
There was something both beautiful and garish about this spectacle. I remembered my conversation with the Arkansas therapist and the idea of inappropriate vulnerability. Watching the woman speak, I felt a mix of queasiness and regret and rubbernecking and curiosity. It was the feeling I have when I reveal too much about myself too quickly, without the slow buildup of trust and intimacy. Then the microphone went to another person, as if this were a conveyor belt of secrets, and there was no time to grapple with the weight of what had just been said.
In a 2016 LitHub essay, the writer Erik Anderson accused Frank of profiting, however indirectly, from other people’s traumas with his books and speaker fees. Frank often refers to secrets as the currency of intimacy—we exchange our secrets and become deeper friends or partners—but to Anderson, they’re also Frank’s professional currency, the reason he has a career at all. What happens to the secrets of PostSecret, he asks? Does having a secret posted actually do anything beneficial for the sharer? “Warren’s feel good message about the healing benefits of disclosure, about self-actualization through confession, may elide a painful truth about secrets,” he writes. “Once shared, especially anonymously, they become secrets again, hidden by and in the very excesses of the internet that made them possible.”
Frank told me he’s aware of the delicate role he plays as the keeper of people’s secrets. People trust him to treat their stories with care, so he’s never tried to monetize the website. It’s true, he says, that most of his income from the past decade has come from book advances and speaker fees. But, he told me, “I don’t get too much negative feedback from anyone in the community.” And as for what happens to the secrets, he says he hopes that by sharing them, people might be motivated to take action. Or perhaps, like on the suicide hotline, they can begin to see their secrets differently. We often assign secrets a physical weight; maybe by making them public, we can make them lighter, or smaller. But none of that is guaranteed.
For an hour, the theatre in Melbourne was transformed into a church of secrets. In the church of secrets, pain is pedagogy. Pain must teach us something, must have meaning, or else how could we live through it? We turn pain into a story, and make that story public in the hopes that we might get something in return. Empathy. Action. Friendship. Money. If I could go back, I would never choose pain.
\*
*I have a secret*—this is the language we use. We possess secrets, hold them close, though sometimes, perhaps, it’s better said that secrets possess us. And by secrets I mean the things we feel we cannot say, and so no one says them. What I mean by secret is taboo. What I mean by secret is fear.
Around a year ago, when I was in California for the holidays, a high school friend who I’ll call Sam invited me to meet in a park. Another friend, Alex, was in town too. I hadn’t seen either of them in years. We sat underneath a cypress tree and threw a rubber Frisbee to the Australian shepherd Sam was dog-sitting. The air smelled of salt. The grass itched our legs. Sam told us she’d been going to sex therapy with her husband, who she married when she was twenty-three. She was now twenty-seven. She and her husband were both deconstructing from the church, a painful personal reckoning with a culture that preached sexual purity. She’d always felt guilty about sex, and she didn’t know about pleasure.
“I didn’t start going to the gynecologist until after college,” I offered in commiseration. “Until tenth grade I thought having sex was just sleeping next to each other.”
“I always felt so observed,” said Alex, the first of us to have a boyfriend in high school.
“You were observed,” I said. We laughed, and I sat back and marvelled. The three of us had slept together on blow-up mattresses and swum at the beach and splashed in backyard pools but had never really talked—at least, not about the things we considered secrets. We were women now. All these years later, we’d finally found the words.
I wondered if Frank had ever been able to talk openly with his family. PostSecret was, after all, partly inspired by the difficulties of his upbringing. Frank told me his father was initially skeptical of the project, finding it voyeuristic, and maybe unnecessary. But eventually he began to appreciate the project and even told Frank something he’d been holding in for a while.
But Frank’s mother never came around. When we were sitting on his patio in Laguna Niguel, I asked about her a few times, and he told me a story. When he was a teenager, after he’d moved to Illinois, Frank got into a fight with her. He can’t remember what happened, only that he’d probably done something to anger her. He ran to his room and locked the door. His mom pounded on the door with a mop, broke through one of the panels, and reached her hand through to unlock the door. Frank ran into his bathroom and opened the window. It was snowing and dark outside, around 9 p.m. He climbed through the window and ran a block down the street to his friend’s house. He and his friend started talking as though this were a normal hangout, but eventually, his friend looked down at his feet. “Where are your shoes?” Frank was wearing only socks.
I asked another question. Gently, without drawing attention to what he was doing, Frank changed the subject. It was the first time I’d seen him withhold information. He didn’t want to talk about his mother anymore, and I didn’t need to know.
# Evan Gershkovich’s Stolen Year in a Russian Jail
Updated March 29, 2024 12:10 am ET
[Evan Gershkovich](https://www.wsj.com/topics/person/evan-gershkovich) was supposed to be with his friends in Berlin the first week of April 2023.
The Wall Street Journal Russia correspondent was set to stay in an Airbnb in the edgy Neukölln neighborhood, a base to explore the city’s cobble-lined streets with his tightknit crew of journalist pals exiled there from Moscow. He was going to drink coffee in hipster cafes and chat into the night over glasses of beer.
At Casa Cipriani. Photo: Dolly Faibyshev for New York Magazine
One afternoon last spring at Casa Cipriani, a members-only club at the foot of Manhattan, [Frank Carone](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/tags/frank-carone/) was sitting in a plush upholstered chair, barking into his phone. “You don’t have Waze?!” he said. He looked at me and rolled his eyes. “Apparently his app is broken.” Carone, a lawyer whose connections to Mayor [Eric Adams](https://nymag.com/tags/eric-adams/) allow him to charge clients with business before the city $20,000 a month, was on the line with a driver who was attempting to deliver several palm trees to his waterfront mansion in Mill Basin. The trees have to be planted anew every year after northeastern weather takes its toll.
Carone’s neighborhood, in the furthest reaches of Brooklyn, can feel more like Miami Beach than New York. His extravagantly decorated property — “*Baroque* is the word I would use,” says a visitor — is where he began hosting fundraisers in the early aughts for a rising generation of then-obscure Brooklyn Democrats, including Bill de Blasio and Hakeem Jeffries. One of the regulars at his soirées was Adams, who was just getting into politics after a career as a police officer. Years before the 2021 mayoral race began in earnest, Carone went all in on Adams, soliciting donations and acting as one of his most trusted advisers. When Adams won, in part by following Carone’s advice to position himself as a centrist and ignore the party’s left wing, he rewarded Carone by naming him chief of staff.
Like Adams, Carone took an unusual delight in his new job. While the role is usually about managing downward, keeping the bureaucratic trains running, Carone’s Instagram feed showed a man living his best life: speaking at a conference in Istanbul, touring the Holy City with the mayor of Jerusalem, talking whiskey with Liev Schreiber, hanging out on the sidelines of New York Giants games. At the same time, powerful developers and businessmen say Carone was remarkably responsive to their needs, with an ability to get any government official on the phone and smooth things that needed smoothing. “Things he got involved in got done,” said one lobbyist. “Things he didn’t, didn’t.”
Carone’s priorities reflected that Adams, for all his talk of being the new face of the national Democratic Party, was at heart an old-school Brooklyn clubhouse pol. Before 2022, Carone had never spent a day working in an elected official’s office, and in his career he had represented any number of outer-borough scoundrels, including slumlords, insurance fraudsters, and disreputable operators of homeless shelters. People in the city’s permanent government wondered if Carone was treating his time in power as a chance to level up, prospecting for richer clients — suspicions that hardened when after just nine months he announced he was quitting to run both a consultancy, Oaktree Solutions, and Adams’s reelection campaign. One labor leader told me, “It’s the worst smash-and-grab operation in the history of city government.”
“I am only 39, and my memory only goes back a couple of decades, but I can’t recall anything like this in New York City,” said Lincoln Restler, a City Council member from Brooklyn. “I cannot remember another person who was in the inner circle, among the closest of advisers to the mayor of New York, trading on his influence at the beginning of that mayor’s term in office. By going into government and becoming the most powerful person in the administration of Eric Adams, he dramatically enhanced his rolodex and his ability to make boatloads of cash on behalf of special interests and translate it into a Fifth Avenue firm with global reach. I guess this is what you get when you appoint a hacky Brooklyn apparatchik as chief of staff.”
At Casa Cipriani, an opulent space that resembles a Gilded Age ocean liner, Carone and I were approached by Boyd Johnson, a lawyer who leads the New York office of the white-shoe firm WilmerHale. It was hard to imagine a more disparate pair. Carone, who is 55 and stocky, with a nearly permanent five-o’clock shadow, is from the streets of Canarsie and went to community college, St. John’s, and Brooklyn Law. Johnson is lantern-jawed, tall, and lean with degrees from Hamilton and Cornell. Carone had just been discussing the reprobates he used to associate with, while Johnson is a former deputy U.S. Attorney and represents some of the city’s most powerful corporations. And yet here they were sidling up next to each other.
“I think you are setting the example for the new kind of back-and-forth between government and industry,” Johnson said. “You are like the unicorn at the stuff that you do. Folks think that you are about fixing people’s problems. You do fix problems — but that is not the client you are trying to get or that WilmerHale is trying to get. We’re all trying to get clients who have to interact with the government because that is their industry, who care about their reputation with the government, and who care about their brand and the sustainability of their business. So onetime fixes, or fixing a parking ticket, doesn’t do anything for anybody. But having a situation where you have a different kind of car that you can park in different places, consistent with the law? That’s durability.”
If Johnson’s vehicular metaphor wasn’t entirely clear, the upshot of his tribute was unmistakable: Far from being a liability or something to be ashamed of, Carone’s spin through the revolving door is something to be celebrated in the Adams era. After 20 years in which mayors Bloomberg and de Blasio made an effort toward transparency and good government, the people now running New York are grubbier, more transactional, and not at all embarrassed about it. Not since Ed Koch has the pay-for-play spirit been so manifest.
“I have been able to make great friends and good relationships in City Hall,” Carone said. “And the circle grows.” Johnson got up to leave, and Carone called after him: “That other topic. Let’s follow up on it.”
The dynamic that powered Carone’s rise could take him higher if Adams wins a second term. It could also destroy him if Adams — or Carone himself — is indicted. Investigators from the Southern District of New York are engaged in a sprawling probe into whether the mayor and his top advisers broke fundraising laws. In November, FBI agents made coordinated raids on the homes of Adams’s chief fundraiser, an aide in his office of international affairs, and a Turkish businessman who had a position on his transition team. A few days later, in a dramatic confrontation on a Manhattan street, federal agents climbed into Adams’s official government vehicle, ordered his security detail out, and demanded the mayor turn over his phones and devices. Adams denied wrongdoing and hired a criminal-defense attorney to represent him: Boyd Johnson.
The legal peril is getting more complex. Recently, the FBI raided properties tied to Winnie Greco, a senior Adams aide, fundraiser, and liaison to the Chinese community, as part of an investigation launched by prosecutors in New York’s Eastern District — an entirely separate inquiry.
Many City Hall watchers have been surprised that the probes have not, to anyone’s knowledge, touched on Carone yet. Adams never listed him as an official bundler while running for office, but he was instrumental to his fundraising efforts. Carone was so intimately involved with Adams’s campaign that for a time much of it operated out of his law office free of charge — an illegal in-kind contribution that Adams fixed only after it became the subject of news reports. To some, Carone’s apparent distance from the federal investigations suggests the possibility that he’s informing on Adams. In January, Carone flatly disputed it. “I have not been contacted by any law enforcement ever,” he told me. “And if I am, I’ll happily cooperate.”
Another possibility is that the government plans to charge Carone himself. (Carone maintains he’s done nothing wrong.) “There is something inherently fascinating to people about Frank,” said Max Young, Adams’s former communications director. “I don’t know if it’s his hardscrabble upbringing or if the fact that he made a lot of money coming from humble beginnings creates an assumption that there was malfeasance or dastardly deeds along the way. But I tell you this: Some of the city and the nation’s great enterprise reporters have tried to find something on Frank and have been unable to do it. Frank is scrupulous about following the rules and doesn’t care about appearances.”
Others aren’t so sure, and they wonder if Carone’s skill at navigating the intersection of power, politics, and money in Brooklyn can continue to protect him now that he is playing the game at its highest level. “I just don’t think Frank has the instincts to understand where the lines are,” said a former federal prosecutor. “As you walk toward the cool breeze, you have to be careful that it’s not a propeller you are walking into.”
With Mayor Eric Adams in September 2022. Photo: ZUMA Press/Alamy
When Carone and I first spoke, last spring, he said he couldn’t care less about how his operation looked to his critics. Carone had been traveling the world to solicit new business, and he suggested we meet not in Mill Basin or at Oaktree’s Fifth Avenue offices but at a five-star resort overlooking the Florida coast, near where he lives part of the year. Dressed in sandals, shorts, and a black T-shirt, Carone ordered scrambled eggs with Baeri Royal caviar and talked about some of the 16,000 contacts in his phone. He said he had just been named the godfather for the grandson of Eduard Slinin, who owns one of New York’s largest limousine fleets, which meant holding the baby right after his bris. He seethed about people who had betrayed Eric Adams in the 2021 election, including a local leader who told Carone he was backing Andrew Yang. “Ridiculous,” Carone said. “I wanted to throw him through a plate-glass window.”
Carone grew up in Canarsie a block from where his parents, the children of Sicilian and Puglian immigrants, had been raised. The neighborhood was undergoing rapid demographic change, as Italian and Jewish families moved out and Black and Caribbean families moved in. His mother worked as an assistant principal; his father was an exterminator who switched to reselling estate-sale goods at flea markets in the West Village. Frank’s father revered Tony Genovesi, a fearsome state assemblyman who ran Canarsie as a fiefdom. (He was a protégé of Meade Esposito, the legendary Brooklyn political boss who kept a baseball bat by his desk and was reported to be a hero to a young Donald Trump.) Young Frank was thrilled when Genovesi presided over the rehabilitation of the local Little League field, and one day his father arranged for him to go by the famed Thomas Jefferson Democratic Club in Canarsie to meet him.
On his 12th birthday, he went, alone. Genovesi and another local ward heeler, Frank Seddio, were there. “And they treated me like gold,” Carone said. “I didn’t want to get into politics. I wanted to get out of Canarsie in the worst way. But that was my indoctrination.”
In a sense, Carone never really left the Thomas Jefferson Club. After law school and two years in the Marine Corps, he started working for Seddio’s firm at $200 a week. At night he handled arraignments for a criminal-defense lawyer, which entailed calling a 24-hour hotline to find out when clients facing charges for DUI, domestic violence, grand theft auto, assault, and similar offenses were due before a judge. His most memorable case was a heroin murder conspiracy. The client, whose brother was the head of a local gang, had sold tainted dope to someone who later died from it. Carone met with him at a mall in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and convinced him to surrender on federal charges.
“I was very easily able to disconnect,” Carone said. “I didn’t even think about it. It didn’t matter how egregious the charges were. To me, they were just a set of words on paper. It’s funny — when you read the charges, it gives you one set of emotions. But when you’re talking to a human being, they don’t sit there with horns coming out of their head. And I always said to myself, *The government has a lot of resources focused on this person, and the one person they have to keep the system honest is me.*”
Meanwhile, he helped Seddio launch a long-shot congressional campaign, licking envelopes at a desk wedged up against a toilet. Like everyone else in politics, Carone didn’t like politics at first. “But I couldn’t say ‘no’ to a friend,” he told me. “Finally, I guess, I became what I am without me realizing it.”
In the early aughts, Carone took a brief detour to start a mortgage-banking business, Berkshire Financial, which packaged loans together and sold them to investors. (When I asked Carone how this differed from the subprime lending that precipitated the financial crisis, he said, “It was exactly that.”) He sold the company in 2006 and rededicated himself to the Brooklyn Democrats. “Frank was a guided missile,” recalled Jeff Feldman, who was executive director of the county party at the time. “At heart, the guy is a Marine. He was going to take the hill by whatever means made the most sense. He adapted to the political culture, and he made a conscious mental effort to figure out what goes on in these power circles and find the best approach. And he enjoyed the challenge of getting people to give you money. The more you get people to contribute, the more you develop a coterie of people.”
One of those people was Hakeem Jeffries. Now the likely next Speaker of the House, Jeffries was just an outsider angling for the State Assembly in the mid-aughts. The party power brokers had a reputation for going to war with anyone who crossed their incumbents, and Jeffries recalls that Carone was distinctly different — gracious and helpful. “I never saw him as a political operative,” Jeffries said in his office on Capitol Hill, sitting beside a throw pillow that reads “If you don’t know, now you know.” “He never struck me as someone with an ax to grind on behalf of a particular political leader that prohibited his ability to get along with people from other parts of the party.”
The Brooklyn Democratic Party was not a beacon of clean government. One chairman was investigated for extorting money from judicial candidates, then jailed in 2007 for soliciting illegal campaign contributions and falsifying business records. (“A tragedy in my mind,” Carone told me. “A missing receipt, and you get consecutive terms. That blew me away.”) His successor was Vito Lopez, a gigantic man with a protruding belly and menacing affect. “Not a very easy guy to work with,” recalled Feldman. “Vito was tough. He ruled more by fear than by love. Frank was able to steer him.” In 2011, Carone became the county party’s chief counsel. “You don’t hire a lawyer to tell you what you can do; you hire a lawyer to help you do what you want to do,” said Feldman. “Frank made Vito seem like more of a reformer than he was otherwise. I don’t know another political leader who needed that level of babysitting. No one wanted to be around the guy, but Frank had the patience for it.”
Although Lopez was under three investigations (two federal, one city) for the sprawling patronage mill he ran, he was never charged. What finally did him in was that multiple female staffers accused him of sexual harassment. In 2013, it fell on Carone to tell Lopez he had to resign. Carone scheduled a meeting at Pinocchio’s, a dimly lit Italian restaurant in Mill Basin. Lopez showed up with ten allies, but Carone stood firm. “When we are in the ring together, I can be a real motherfucker,” Carone told me.
Carone had recently begun a law firm with Seddio, which they merged with Abrams Fensterman, then a small outer-borough practice. They grew it from 30 lawyers to 120, representing 21,000 clients; some of the biggest had business before city government, among them yellow-cab companies, major developers, the union representing correctional officers, and two large hospital networks. After Lopez’s resignation, Seddio became the new boss of the Brooklyn Democratic Party. That put him and Carone in a position to determine who would be the next Brooklyn borough president, with term limits opening up a vote in 2013.
They liked Eric Adams. Carone had known about Adams since his days as the boisterous head of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care. As a state senator, he had proved himself a loyal soldier in the battles the county party was waging against a reform faction. After Adams entered the race for borough president, “We were able to eliminate the competition,” Seddio told me. “It’s not a pressure thing. We just convince them that it is not the best option for them at that time.” Adams won with 90 percent of the vote.
Later, Adams came by the Abrams Fensterman office with a whiteboard and an easel and laid out exactly how he was going to become mayor, drawing a chart with himself and various rivals. As the 2021 election neared, Carone called in the chits he had accumulated after a quarter-century in Brooklyn politics, especially among the Hasidic community. He played the heavy when necessary, joking with some local leaders that if they didn’t back Adams, they would have to move out of New York. When Adams was sworn in on January 1, 2022, Carone was among a small group that joined him onstage.
Carone at the Oaktree offices on Fifth Avenue. Photo: Dolly Faibyshev for New York Magazine.
Carone at the Oaktree offices on Fifth Avenue. Photo: Dolly Faibyshev for New York Magazine.
Frank Carone has a simple theory of reciprocity. He is a voluminous consumer of business self-help books, and in 2020, he co-wrote one of his own, titled *Everyone Wins! How You Can Enhance Business Relationships Just Like Ultra-Wealthy Entrepreneurs.* “You take certain actions to help those in your business relationships explicitly achieve their self-interests that are distinct from your own self-interests,” reads one passage. “Because you’re helping them achieve their goals and agenda they ‘owe’ you. In order to pay you back, they’ll be strongly inclined to fulfill your requests, take your recommendations, and so on. Simply put, when you help others get the results you want, they often become ‘indebted’ to you. This can then motivate them to be helpful to you in achieving your goals.”
Adams’s victory gave Carone an opportunity to put his approach to work in the public sector. “Frank likes people, he likes doing things for people, and he likes being in the mix,” said Young, the former Adams spokesman. “Frank’s superpower is around relationships and using those relationships — and I don’t mean in a bad way — to achieve good ends. People trust him, they want to be around him, and they believe he can facilitate mutually beneficial situations.”
Carone pledged to put his holdings in a blind trust and establish a firewall between his new job and his old one at Abrams Fensterman. “That’s a previous life,” he told Politico New York. Despite these good-government moves, the papers were filled with unsavory stories about Carone: about how he was subpoenaed as a witness for advancing money to a group of doctors who allegedly defrauded Geico; about how he invested in BolaWrap, a somewhat preposterous crime-fighting tool out of *Spider-Man*, then saw his investment skyrocket after Adams touted it at a news conference; about his work for a homeless-services provider that was under federal investigation for corruption; about how he was meeting privately with campaign contributors and real-estate executives at lavish restaurants like Mark Joseph Steakhouse and Wayan.
Carone seemed to be on a mission to meet every billionaire in New York, and the City Hall he ran was a relatively fun one. He was a macho, almost martial, presence, but he also started a book club, leading staffers through motivational titles like *Grit* by Angela Duckworth and *Ego Is the Enemy* by Ryan Holiday. Every Friday, he bought pizza for the staff and for the press corps in Room Nine, and he liked taking low-level staffers out to Cipriani.
While Carone had Brooklyn wired, he was relatively unknown in elite political circles, and several of the lobbyists that have long represented billionaires and old-money interests told me that Carone seemed eager to shed his reputation as a “Court Street lawyer.” He bought an apartment for $2.2 million on Sutton Place and became the mayor’s designee on the board of MoMA. When City Hall proposed closing parts of Fifth Avenue around Christmas to better accommodate the hordes of tourists that descend on the city, Carone threw himself into it, befriending the retail and real-estate titans who make up the Fifth Avenue Committee. “He loves the power. He loves the influence. And he loves the money, if we are being quite honest,” said one longtime friend. “This is a guy who likes living well, and likes that people have a perception of him as powerful, and likes the access that it gives. He loves being able to walk in the circles of certain people.”
Curiously, for a person so well versed in politics, Carone was unfamiliar with the playbook used by the largest and most powerful operators in the city. Contrary to popular understanding, the real work of lobbyists and consultants isn’t about buttonholing officeholders and convincing them to vote or govern a certain way. One longtime lobbyist told me that in 30 years she had never once called any mayor of New York about anything. Instead, the job of achieving a desired outcome involves running what are called “campaigns”: getting stakeholders, activists, and community groups on your side, plus getting stories placed in the press, maybe an editorial if you’re lucky. An apex fixer creates conditions that prompt politicians to act a certain way of their own accord, because the politics makes sense for them. (A classic recent example is Uber. In 2015, Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled a plan that would limit the company’s growth. Acting for Uber, Bradley Tusk unleashed a multipronged campaign: advertisements featuring sympathetic drivers; media coverage that said the de Blasio idea was discriminatory; celebrity comments from Kate Upton, Ashton Kutcher, and Neil Patrick Harris. The coup de grace was a new “de Blasio” tab on the Uber app that showed how terrible it would supposedly become.)
All this was outside Carone’s ken. One lobbyist recalls visiting Carone early in his tenure and being asked what their job entailed. Carone seemed confused. What did they mean they ran campaigns? They put pressure on politicians by using the press? How did that work? “It was, ‘I don’t understand. People do things because I am Frank Carone. I raise money for them and I am their friend and we get together in a room and we sort it out,’” the lobbyist recalled. “He didn’t understand political interests. He just seemed to understand transactions, like ‘You do this for me and I will do that for you.’” (Carone said this encounter did not happen.)
To cynics, that context explained a lot of Carone’s priorities. He took a noticeable interest in the rebuilding of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, a $5.5 billion undertaking that stands to be a lobbying frenzy. Such a project is usually the purview of the Department of Transportation, not the mayor’s chief of staff. The way Adams and Carone shaped the plans has outraged locals and activists, who say their proposal will harm Brooklyn Bridge Park and be more expensive and take more time than the available alternatives. “It is as close to public-policy insanity as I have ever seen, and it makes no goddamn sense,” said a person who has worked on the project for years. “The only way it makes sense is if these guys have something weird going on.”
Photo: Luiz C. Ribeiro/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service, via Getty Images
After our breakfast in Boca, Carone climbed into his massive black Escalade, a pair of golf clubs rattling around in the back, and set off to meet with some Oaktree clients. One was a Hasidic businessman who was flying down from La Guardia to meet with Carone for an hour and immediately return to New York. “He is the Waze of City Hall,” a rival said of Carone. ‘He tells you where to go to get what you need done. It’s: ‘Here is the key staffer for this issue. Let me call him and tell him you are reaching out.’”
In Florida, Carone spent part of the day on the deck of the *Princess Nauti Natalie*, an 80-foot yacht owned by a childhood friend from Canarsie. “I am an open book,” Carone said, and reminded me that as chief of staff, he once released his schedules and convened a call for reporters to ask him whatever they wanted. During the session, someone from the *Times* asked if he took any NYCHA residents to Casa Cipriani. “Really cute,” Carone responded. “I hope you are proud of yourself.” What the journalists didn’t know was that Carone conducted his end of the call from the yacht. “Right here, right on this boat!” he told me.
The ship’s owner, Frank Grasso, poured some anejo tequila into a couple of inscribed *Nauti Natalie* glasses. Carone recently hired his daughter as an intern. “I like to do that for friends,” he said. “My clients, by the way, are mainly friends, and I have no problem blending the two. I tried this very strategically. In the morning they call, we talk about what’s going on, we talk a little socially, we talk personally, and then we get to some of their business problems.”
Carone bills Oaktree as existing “at the intersection of legal, regulatory, and political.” Its website describes services from “issue advocacy and market positioning” to business development to crisis PR. But Carone has never worked in communications, Oaktree is not a law firm, and until his brief stint in City Hall, his strategy sessions were confined to the back rooms of Brooklyn. I put the question to Carone directly: What do you do for clients? “Executive problem solving,” he said. What does that mean, exactly? “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Doesn’t matter. It’s about looking at their policies. Looking at a market they want to enter. It could be an RFP they want to apply for, and they want to prepare themselves. It could be, you know, a merger, and they want to know how to get past the immovable object. And I may not have all the answers, but I do know how to get the answers.”
“So we do all-in C-suite executive problem solving,” he continued. “Branding. Business development. Clients asking me to introduce them to other clients or people that I may know throughout my 30-year history or have access to one phone call removed. If they are having a difficult time getting their product in front of someone, I can grease the skids.”
Plenty of people are convinced that as long as Adams is in office, Oaktree has a lucrative edge. “I think there is a big difference between selling access — which is ‘I can do this for you’ — and understanding how government works,” said a second rival consultant. “He is the person that gives you the real personalities of the people who make decisions. He knows their rivalries in a way that other lobbyists only wish they knew. And he knows you can have as many meetings with as many commissioners as you want, but that real decisions take place in rooms that the commissioner doesn’t even know about, in bars and restaurants, places like Zero Bond, where there aren’t any lobbyists in the room but Frank Carone is. Every other lobbyist is at a disadvantage.”
In my conversations about Oaktree with the city’s influence peddlers, the comparison that came up most often was Teneo — a notorious consulting firm co-founded by Doug Band that traded on his close connection to Bill Clinton in the years that Hillary Clinton was the front-runner to be the next president of the United States. That business was built on the perception of access: access to the Clintons and, ouroboros style, whatever other companies were paying Teneo for access. After the Clinton political dynasty ended, Band and the family had a spectacular falling-out — but not before he got incredibly rich.
I asked Carone what he saw his business as being modeled on. “Teneo,” he replied.
At Oaktree, Carone offers his expertise to clients in an unusual manner. Complying with city ethics guidelines, he did not register as a lobbyist until a year had passed since his departure from the Adams administration. During that interval, he employed lobbyists, but he could not legally discuss clients’ business with lawmakers directly. Carone is also generally not his Oaktree clients’ primary attorney. He told me that “very often,” Oaktree clients retain him through their existing law firms. He cited a federal precedent that allows law firms to hire architects and engineers to advise them on cases and said it allows his customers to enjoy attorney-client privilege with him even though he is not, technically speaking, their lawyer. “I am not appearing before agencies; I am not communicating,” he said. “I am teaching them how to do so through their law firm.” I had heard that Carone had set up this unusual arrangement with the powerful hotel trades union, which he confirmed.
The scheme would seem to run right up against the city’s strict laws governing the influence industry, which require all lobbyists to register publicly; their meetings with lawmakers are recorded in a searchable database, along with who is paying them and what they talked about. John Kaehny, the leader of the good-government group Reinvent Albany, told me that Carone’s arrangement was nothing more than an end-run around reporting requirements. “Carone gambled that he could get away with skirting lobbying rules for an entire year, and he did,” he said. (Oaktree says that Carone’s practice is “consistent with his ethical obligations and the law,” and that the relationship is “standard practice.”)
Another Oaktree situation that comes awfully close to ethical lines involves the competition to build a casino in New York City — one of the biggest development deals of this century. Carone is forbidden from working on matters that he had a hand in at City Hall, and he met with several casino executives while he was there. SL Green, the real-estate behemoth that is trying to site a casino in Times Square, has Carone on retainer. It’s being finessed by the fact that Carone is not lobbying per se, but rather building community support.
At home in Mill Basin, Brooklyn. Photo: Dolly Faibyshev for New York Magazine
Does he know what is going on inside the hall of government? No question,” one real-estate executive said about Carone. “Does he play with fire? Also no question. He has got a lot of friends that a lot of us would find unsavory, but Eric doesn’t seem to care. He has been vetted up the wazoo and no one has tagged him with crossing the line.”
Who is hiring Frank Carone, how much they are paying him, and, most important, why has been one of the great mysteries among the lobbyists, consultants, operatives, and PR pros who make up the permanent governing class of New York City. Carone wouldn’t let me see his full client list, but he did say that he has about 100 clients and that his minimum fee is $20,000 a month for at least a year. Northwell Hospital Systems has been reported as a client, as well as Saquon Barkley, the star running back for the New York Giants. “I mean, Saquon Barkley!” said one lobbyist. “I am envious of that alone. I don’t even know what Frank does for him, but it certainly boosts Frank’s image in all the right places.”
“He tells you straight up what it is and what it ain’t,” Barkley told me. “He worked with the mayor in one of the hardest cities in the world and dealt with all the scrutiny that comes with that.” Carone advises him on charitable work, branding, and how to handle the media. Barkley found Carone through one of his representatives, Ken Katz, who sat next to Carone in the owners’ box at a Giants game. “I talk to Frank almost every day,” Katz said.
Carone told me that he also represents London’s Halcyon Gallery, which the *Art Newspaper* once described as a contender for the title of “the worst gallery in the world.” Carone is helping Halycon seek public-art commissions and expand to New York. He said his other clients include an English sustainable-vodka company, theaters, sports arenas, nonprofits, and developers.
Carone watchers like to scour his social media feed for clues. Why was he visiting dignitaries in Georgia and Azerbaijan over the summer? What to make of his photo with former LiveNation CEO Michael Cohl in London or his visit with the fashion designer Philipp Plein at his boutique? What was Carone doing at Representative Jim Clyburn’s fish fry, that famous stop for presidential contenders? That one may have an obvious answer: Carone believes Adams could one day be the commander-in-chief. “One, he has law-enforcement experience,” he told me. “He is center. African American — so he identifies with the experiences therein. He is articulate. He is a hard worker. He knows how to run a campaign. He is not afraid to attend fundraising events, which people don’t want to hear but is part of a campaign. What else is there?”
First, Carone needs Adams to win reelection, something that is beginning to look shaky. One recent poll of registered voters by Quinnipiac University found that just 28 percent of voters approve of the job Adams is doing, while 58 percent disapprove — almost unheard-of numbers. “I don’t believe those approval ratings are real,” Carone said. “When the mayor walks around the city and attends events, he’s greeted with great adulation and great affection. There’s a disconnect between what you see in everyday people, what you hear in cocktail parties, what you hear in bar mitzvahs and communions, and what this poll said.”
So far, the only potential mayoral candidate who has announced an exploratory committee is Scott Stringer, the former comptroller, who has pledged a return of technocratic governance and a City Hall less focused on the mayor’s outings and outfits. Carone, who raised money for Stringer before Adams signaled he was going to run, is dismissive of his chances.
That, of course, assumes that Adams will make it to Election Day without being indicted. “I know what you know,” Carone told me in January during an apparent lull in the investigation. “I know the mayor to be an incredibly conscientious person, respectful of the law. He surrounds himself with incredibly gifted law-enforcement alumni. I do believe that the mayor has done nothing inappropriate. You know, you go to events, you don’t know what half the people are. Sometimes you count on your team to vet people, but you don’t know exactly what’s in the back of their brains. You just know your own behavior. I’ve watched the man for many, many years, and he treats law enforcement and the law as sacrosanct.”
At Casa Cipriani, Carone told me about his efforts to sign LIV Golf, the Saudi Arabian golf venture, despite that country’s brutal human-rights violations. “There is no such thing as negative attention,” he said, describing how to lean into media coverage and turn it to one’s advantage. “We all make mistakes. But it is the collection of mistakes, more than the successes, that make me who I am.”
I asked him what mistakes he was referring to. “Probably allowing people in my life I shouldn’t have,” he said. “Putting my guard down for folks and having too much confidence in my own judgment and what I perceived to be my indestructibility. Hubris. I just have to remind myself that I am fallible like everybody else. So my mistakes were in befriending folks — investing in projects without the proper due diligence, without realizing how spending time in the mud with a pig, you are going to get dirty.”
“Those are things I regret,” Carone said. “Strike that. I don’t regret any of it. I learned from it.”
# How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
###### THE SURVIVOR SPECIES
## Having lost many of their cattle, traditional herders are trying out a milk-producing animal that is more resilient to climate change
Photos and video by Malin Fezehai
April 17, 2024 at 5:00 a.m.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
NTEPES, Kenya
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
The camels had thump-thumped for seven days across northern Kenya, ushered by police reservists, winding at last toward their destination: less a village than a dusty clearing in the scrub, a place where something big was happening. People had walked for miles to be there. Soon the governor pulled up in his SUV. Women danced, and an emcee raised his hands to the sky. When the crowd gathered around an enclosure holding the camels, one man said he was looking at “the future.”
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
The camels had arrived to replace the cows.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
Samburu County’s governor says that the climate patterns have become “abnormal.” The reduction in rainfall is so obvious, he said, that anybody can see it. “You don’t need science machines here to measure that.”
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
Cows, here and across much of Africa, have been the most important animal for eons — the foundation of economies, diets, traditions.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
But now grazable land is shrinking. Water sources are drying up. A three-year drought in the Horn of Africa that ended last year killed 80 percent of the cows in this part of Kenya and shattered the livelihoods of so many people.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
In this region with the thinnest of margins, millions are being forced to adapt to climate change — including those who were now drawing numbers from a hat, each corresponding to one of the 77 camels that had just arrived in Samburu County.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
“Your number?” a village chief, James Lelemusi, asked the first person to draw.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
The regional government had purchased the camels from traders near the border with Somalia, at $600 per head. So far 4,000 camels, as part of that program, have been distributed across the lowlands of the county, speeding up a shift that had already been happening for decades across several other cattle-dependent parts of Africa. A handful of communities, particularly in Kenya and Ethiopia, are in various stages of the transition, according to academic studies.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
The global camel population has doubled over the last 20 years, something the U.N. agency for agriculture and investment attributes partly to the animal’s suitability amid climate change. In times of hardship, camels produce more milk than cows.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
Many cite an adage: The cow is the first animal to die in a drought; the camel is the last.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
“If there was no climate change, we would not even bother to buy these camels,” said Jonathan Lati Lelelit, the governor of Samburu, a county about 240 miles north of Nairobi. “We have so many other things to do with the little money we have. But we have no option.”
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
Kenya rainfall map
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
Authorities had selected the recipients, those crowding around the camels, on the condition that they use the animal for milk, not meat. They were also those judged by local officials to be the most in need. They had stories of near-total cattle losses, of walking miles to find water, of violent run-ins with a neighboring tribe as they strayed farther from their territory in search of grazing space for their faltering livestock.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
Still, many said the plight of one person stood out: Dishon Leleina.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
Leleina, 42, had been wealthy by the standards of this region before the drought. He had two wives and 10 kids, and had been surrounded by an abundance of cows for nearly as long as he could remember. He even sacrificed bulls — with a stab to the back of the head — on each of his wedding days.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
But when one rainy season failed, then another, then another, his stock of 150 cows plummeted over several years as never before. A few dozen were raided by the bordering Pokot tribe. And more than a hundred withered away — going skinny in the midsection, swelling in other areas. Some would go to sleep at night and never wake up. Some would arrive at last at a water source, drink lustily and collapse to their death. Several times, including after losing his best milking cow, Leleina roared at the sky in fury. By the time the rains resumed last year, he had seven cows left.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
“I had one status” before the drought, he said. “And now I have another.”
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
People walked for hours to attend the camel distribution, some putting on their best clothing.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
What hadn’t changed was his daily routine; he moved in step with his livestock, often walking miles per day. But now he had cut back to one meal per day — as did many other pastoralists. He lost weight. Several times, he fainted. Even on the day of the camel distribution, as the event stretched into late afternoon, almost nobody was seen eating or drinking.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
As the number drawing began, Leleina pressed into the crowd. An organizer with a sheet of paper recorded who would take which camel home. Some of the camels were big, some small, some muscular, many slender, and as soon as people pulled numbers — 73, 6, 27 — they darted off to find their animal in the crowd.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
Then it was Leleina’s turn. He reached into the hat.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
“Number 17,” he said.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
Camel recipients, including Leleina (center, in green), crowd around a checklist keeping track of the animals and their new owners.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
He walked toward the camels, scrap of paper in hand, and tried to use his wooden staff to poke a few of the animals, which were bunched together, obscuring the numbers painted at the base of their necks. Leleina squinted into the sun. He went in another direction. He prodded a few more animals. And then he found her: a skinny camel with a medium build, a rich tuft of longer fur on its hump.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
He gave her a pat.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
It would be dark soon, and Leleina still needed to guide his new camel home — several miles through the powdery dirt and shrub land. But even in this harsh place, Camel 17 could manage to find a snack.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
She darted over to an acacia tree, pulling flowers into her mouth, working her tongue around two-inch thorns.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
The camel is sometimes described as an animal designed by committee, what with its hodgepodge of features —
Camel features
But among mammals, the camel is almost singularly equipped to handle extremes.
Camels can go two weeks without water, as opposed to a day or two for a cow. They can lose [30 percent](https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/how-do-camels-survive-in-deserts.html?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) of their body weight and survive, one of the highest thresholds for any large animal. Their body temperatures [fluctuate](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270234/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) in sync with daily climate patterns. When they pee, their urine trickles down their legs, keeping them cool. When they lie down, their leathery knees fold into pedestals that work to prop much of their undersides just above the ground, allowing cooling air to pass through.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
One recently published paper, perhaps straying from science to reverence, called them a “miracle species.”
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
“They’re unparalleled in terms of domestic animals.”
— Piers Simpkin, the Nairobi-based global livestock adviser for Mercy Corps
Milk is one of the biggest nutrition sources for people in Samburu. With camels, the hope is that people can still have milk during droughts.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
And yet in much of Africa — for much of human history — their attributes haven’t been needed. For centuries, they’ve resided primarily in the driest outer ring of the continent, while cows — outnumbering camels in Africa 10 to 1 — reigned in the lush river plains, in the highlands. Kenya, where the landscape can turn from green to reddish and back in an hour’s drive, has long been a middle ground: a place where some tribes use camels and more use cows, with identities forming around that choice. Because of that, neighboring tribes see the consequences of using one animal vs. the other. That has seemingly transformed Samburu County — an area the size of New Jersey that is home to the Samburu tribe — into an experiment on how livestock fare, and how humans respond, in a warming climate.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
The experiment started about a half-century ago, according to Louise Sperling, a scholar who conducted fieldwork in Samburu in the 1980s. The Samburu were among the most “specialized and successful” cattle-keepers in East Africa, she wrote in one account, but they were increasingly mixing with and marrying members of a nearby tribe, the Rendille — camel-keepers.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
Over the subsequent decades, they also noticed changes in traditional weather patterns. Fewer rainy seasons. Less predictability. And most importantly: more frequent droughts.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
Uptake was gradual. Cows still overwhelmingly outnumbered camels. And cows still defined the Samburu identity, used in celebrations or as dowries.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
But then came the [longest series of failed rainy seasons](https://fews.net/horn-africa-experiences-five-consecutive-seasons-drought-first-time-history?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) on record in the Horn of Africa.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
The drought started in 2020 and held its grip for three years. An international team of scientists said a drought of this severity had been [100 times more likely](https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/human-induced-climate-change-increased-drought-severity-in-southern-horn-of-africa/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) because of climate change. In Samburu, the smell of rotting cattle carcasses spread across this county of roughly 310,000 people. Malnutrition spiked, including among children and the elderly. The Kenyan government and the World Food Program had to step in with aid.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
And yet the level of need wasn’t equal.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
Noompon Lenkamaldanyani, a single mother of four, lost 18 of her 20 cows and fell short on milk, but she noticed her camel-owning neighbors were willing to step in and offer help.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
Lekojde Loidongo said he and his family “didn’t suffer much,” as all 22 of their camels continued to produce milk.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
Even Leleina, the new owner of Camel 17, said he noticed how the animals fared differently. He’d owned three camels before the drought hit. They all survived.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
If he had any regrets, it was that he hadn’t moved earlier. His father, who died in 2021, had been an early adopter of camels.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
“In the future,” Leleina said, echoing a conclusion shared by others, “I foresee having more camels than cows.”
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
Because of these realizations, there has been very little backlash to the government’s camel program, which started eight years ago. Some are also obtaining their own camels by trading cattle at markets. Pastoralists — people who move with their livestock herds — are often described as among the most vulnerable people in the world to climate change, and their fortunes can swing based on the decisions they make about which animals to keep.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
A 2022 research paper published in Nature Food, analyzing a huge belt of land across northern sub-Saharan Africa, noted increased heat stress and reduced water availability in some areas and said milk production would benefit from a higher proportion of camels, as well as goats, which are also more climate-resilient than cows. Camel milk is a comparable substitute for cow’s milk. It tends to be lower in fat and higher in certain minerals, said Anne Mottet, the lead livestock specialist at the International Fund for Agricultural Development. Many say it has a saltier taste.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
Camel vs cattle
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
“We’re just following the trends of the drought,” said Lepason Lenanguram, another camel recipient in Samburu. “People want camels now. The culture is changing.”
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
The Samburu governor said he believes “totally” that shifting to the camel is the right move. He noted that Samburu — with large swaths far removed from the electrical grid and without running water — had contributed relatively little to global greenhouse gas emissions. By far the greatest source of emissions in rural areas like Samburu is methane, a byproduct of the cow’s complex digestive process. Camels emit far less methane.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
The program gives away only one camel per person. But it can still build up peace of mind, said the director of the governor’s press service, Jeff Lekupe, who was on-site when the camels were distributed. With even one camel, a family has better chances of having milk during a drought. And then there is a “ripple effect,” he said. The camel gives birth. The population grows.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
“So that next time,” he said, “the need for the WFP will be minimal.”
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
For Leleina, Camel 17 — a female — symbolized the start of a rebuild, but it didn’t begin well. Arriving at her new home — a circular property, ringed by branches and thorns, a mile from the closest unpaved road — the animal quickly started tussling with one of the three other camels. They bit one another. They made noises. They locked necks, and they only stopped when Leleina roped the legs of the other camel as a way to keep her from moving.
That night, Leleina put a mat on the floor outside his hut and felt too nervous to go to sleep. He’d heard stories about other camels darting off — something that almost never happened with a cow — or feeling uneasy in new surroundings; a neighbor’s camel had escaped and been mauled by a lion. So Leleina trained his eyes on Camel 17 for hour after hour as she brayed.
Eventually the sun rose. Camel 17 was still there.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
“The camel might have been thinking about where it came from,” Leleina said.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
In the morning, more at ease, he let the newest addition to his herd go off. She needed to eat. The job of following her fell to Leleina’s 9-year-old daughter, and after the camel had been out for a while, Leleina decided to join her. So he set off in the direction of a red-rock table mountain, crunching through the scrub, occasionally coming upon bones, and moving closer to an area that he knew had foliage for camels and was free of predators. He heard nothing for five minutes, then 10, and then shouted his daughter’s name.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
“Nashenjo,” he shouted.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
Then a minute later:
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
“Nashenjo!”
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
He heard an animal noise.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
“The camels are not far from here,” he said.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
In a circle of trees, he saw not only Camel 17, but a half-dozen other camels — craning their necks from branch to branch. A few of the camels were his. Others belonged to a neighbor. It was a critical mass of camels in a place that had once belonged almost entirely to cattle, and the ranks only figured to grow. A day earlier, at the same time of the distribution, a neighbor’s camel had gone into labor. Leleina’s neighbors had crouched at the camel’s side, pulling out the healthy baby by the legs.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
Leleina sat down at the base of a tree and watched the animals eat. Camel 17 was still skinny, but that was understandable, he said. She needed time to recover. Her trip to get here had been 100-odd miles, seven days, three stops for water, and even in that journey he saw why she was suited for her new home.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
“She’s a survivor,” he said.
## How climate change is turning camels into the new cows
##### About this story
Design, development and illustrations by Hailey Haymond. Map by Naema Ahmed. Editing by Stuart Leavenworth, Joe Moore, Sandra M. Stevenson and Alice Li. Copy editing by Christopher Rickett.
##### Sources
Precipitation data from [Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station data.](https://www.chc.ucsb.edu/data/chirps) Milk production data from "A shift from cattle to camel and goat farming can sustain milk production with lower inputs and emissions in north sub-Saharan Africa’s drylands," [Nature Food, 2022.](https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00543-6) Figures reflect average values for cattle and camels.
# I Got Mailers Promoting Toddler Milk for My Children. I Went on to Investigate International Formula Marketing.
When my sons were young, ads promoting formula made especially for toddlers appeared unsolicited in my mailbox. I found them curious. My kids drank cow’s milk when needed. It cost less and worked just fine.
Little more than a decade later, my questions about the product would fuel [reporting that took me half a world away](https://www.propublica.org/article/how-america-waged-global-campaign-against-baby-formula-regulation-thailand), to Thailand, where public health officials were trying to stop similar formula marketing. I found they’d encountered an adversary that many Americans, including myself, might find surprising: the U.S. government.
I started looking at the baby formula industry in the wake of the 2022 shortage, when supply-chain problems and the shutdown of a Michigan formula plant amid contamination concerns led to scarcity. But my reporting soon took another turn.
After academics and health advocates told me that U.S. officials had for decades opposed regulations abroad related to formula marketing, I woke up before dawn one morning last March to watch the livestreamed meeting of an international food standards body in Dusseldorf, Germany. The topic was a new standard on toddler milk — the very product I’d wondered about years before. I saw the U.S. delegation, which included formula industry representatives as well as government officials, raise objections. They were concerned with language mentioning World Health Organization recommendations on banning [formula advertising](https://www.propublica.org/article/what-is-toddler-milk-marketing-to-parents).
After that meeting, I filed dozens of information requests to federal agencies, seeking to understand more about the U.S. position on formula regulation. I reached out to health advocates working for nongovernmental organizations around the world, videoconferencing with them late at night and in the early morning to accommodate different time zones.
I learned countries around the world had sought to outlaw the marketing of toddler formula in recent years, sometimes by extending baby formula advertising bans they already had in place. Health experts say aggressive formula marketing — such as steep discounts and free samples — can make misleading claims and prompt mothers to prematurely give up breastfeeding. The industry has a troubled history. In the 1970s, it was accused of causing thousands of infant deaths in Africa and other developing regions by promoting powdered formula to families without access to clean water.
In statements emailed to me, the formula industry acknowledged that breastfeeding is superior but said families sometimes need a safe alternative.
I knew from experience that the choices parents make in feeding their children are never simple. Breastfeeding has well-documented health benefits, including lowering the risk of infant death and obesity later in life, but it is time-consuming and can be logistically difficult. Still, health officials around the world told me they wanted to make sure that mothers who would otherwise breastfeed weren’t derailed by misleading corporate ad campaigns.
Toddler milk evoked its own set of concerns, I found. Its packages often carried promises of boosting brain and eye health. [Extensive studies](https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD000376.pub4/full) have not backed up those claims.
The Infant Nutrition Council of America, a trade group, said toddler drinks “meet all legal, regulatory and nutritional science requirements.” The product can “potentially fill nutrition gaps,” it said.
Health officials worried, too, that parents would confuse toddler milk, whose ingredients are less regulated and have drawn criticism from nutritionists, with infant formula. The labeling for both products looks nearly identical in many cases.
Infant Formula Looks Nearly Identical to Toddler Milk on a Grocery Store’s Shelves in Bangkok
Thailand's Milk Code restricts the advertisement of infant formula, but marketing of toddler milk is generally allowed.
As [documents from my public record requests](https://projects.propublica.org/toddler-formula-documents) rolled in, I began to see the U.S.’s impact. In Thailand, a 2016 letter the U.S. sent to Bangkok contained a flurry of criticisms and questions about its newly proposed formula marketing ban, including asking if it was “more trade restrictive than necessary.” A memo said the U.S. had also relayed concerns during a bilateral trade meeting with Thailand, as well as on the floor of the World Trade Organization, where such concerns carry an implicit legal threat.
Eventually, Thailand backed down, weakening its proposed advertising ban and allowing formula marketing for children over the age of 1 to continue. My records and other research revealed a trend, showing that Thailand was just one of more than a dozen countries where the U.S. sought to undercut formula restrictions.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative — the agency at the heart of many of the efforts — declined to comment on specific cases from our reporting, but a spokesperson acknowledged the office’s “formerly standard view that too often deemed legitimate regulatory initiatives as trade barriers.” With respect to infant formula, the agency’s statement said officials “work to uphold and advocate for policy and regulatory decisions that are based on science.”
For me, it was a visit with a middle-class family in rural Thailand that brought this story home.
Like me, Sumet Aunlamai and Jintana Suksiri had two boys a little more than three years apart in age. The parents had read the health claims about brain and eye development on the formula packaging and chose to spend the extra money to buy toddler milk for both. The boys craved the drink, which their parents gave them whenever they asked because they thought it was good for them.
Both boys gained large amounts of weight. Gustun, the youngest, was nearly 70 pounds by the time he was 3 — the average weight for a 9-year-old. He had trouble moving. Medical tests offered no explanation.
When the boys’ school switched them to cow’s milk, both lost the weight, and Jintana now wonders if toddler milk was the problem.
Watching them play soccer in their driveway one afternoon last September, she told me both her sons, who are 6 and 9, have healthy weights now. Gustun darted about. “His movement is perfect,” she said.
# Riding the baddest bulls made him a legend. Then one broke his neck.
STEPHENVILLE, Tex. — The black bull stands in an upper pasture on J.B. Mauney’s ranch like a blot on the green ryegrass horizon. His dark hulk presides over a hilly rise looking down on the tin-roofed hay sheds and iron chutes where Mauney is hard at work. Mauney moves to a dissonant music of creaking gates, unceasing wind and snorting animal exhalations, punctuated by the laconic cussing of the cowboy himself as he pours feed into buckets. The bull watches as Mauney makes his way up the hill and steps into the pasture to fill a trough. “A--hole,” he mutters with something like fondness.
Mauney, too, cuts a black outline. From under a black felt cowboy hat, hair blacker than coffee runs to the collar of his black shirt. The impression of severity is relieved by blue eyes the color of his jeans and a smile crease from the habit of grinning around a Marlboro. It’s an arresting face, burnished by years of outdoor chores, smoke, roistering humor and pain soothed by shots of Jägermeister. It befits arguably the greatest rodeo bull rider who ever lived and certainly the hardest-bodied, a man who never conceded to any power. Until a bull broke his neck.
“I always knew something like this was going to have to happen,” he says.
Arctic Assassin does not enter the ring at J.B. Mauney's ranch. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
It had been less than six months since *something like this* happened. On Sept. 6, during an event in Lewiston, Idaho, a bull named Arctic Assassin sling-shotted Mauney (pronounced Mooney) into the dirt squarely on top of his hat, summarily ending the most legendarily gallant career in rodeoing. After emergency surgery to stabilize his head on his shoulders, Mauney retreated to heal with wife Samantha and 5-year-old son Jagger on his ranch, a place called Bucktown XV, where he is still adjusting to his abrupt retirement. “*Forced* retirement,” he corrects. Gesturing at his wife and son, a striking former barrel racer and a child with hair like flying corn silk, he adds, “If it wasn’t for her and that little boy, I’d never have stopped.”
Samantha follows after the boy, who shucks his shoes and clothing like a bird drops feathers while she retrieves them from the ground. “He’s my boss,” she says. She wears loose jeans, a sweatshirt and Converse sneakers, her only adornment some earrings and a diamond ring. J.B. likes to tell a story about that.
He picked out the stone at a jewelry store in one of those fancy malls where they also sell what he calls “Louis Vooton.” He looked at the jewel and said, “I like that one.” Samantha said, “I do, too.” The saleswoman told them it was a fine choice, then announced how much it cost.
“Do what now?” J.B. said.
He looked at the diamond again and began turning it over with his finger.
“Is something wrong with the stone, sir?” the saleslady asked.
“Naw,” J.B. said. “I’m just trying to find the motor on it because I figure anything that expensive, you ought to be able to drive it out of here.”
Mauney, 37, was the first man to get legit rich at bull riding. “The Dragonslayer,” they called him, as he set the record for career prize money with more than $7.4 million and tied for most event victories on the Professional Bull Riders circuit with 32. But his real legacy, what made him the most popular draw in fringed chaps, was that he always chose the fiercest bull to ride, costing himself who knows how much more in money and titles.
A bull rider doesn’t earn a score unless he can stay on for eight seconds. And if he gets bucked off, he doesn’t get paid at all. Most bull riders in championship rounds choose the bull discerningly, with business in mind. Not Mauney. He would tie his hand into the baddest bull as if he was lashing himself to a mast in a hurricane and just refuse to let go. “I’d rather get dragged to death than starve to death any day,” he would say. From 2007 to 2018, Mauney rode every ranked world championship-caliber bull there was.
The consensus greatest bull of all time is named Bushwacker. A mahogany-colored beast, he could kick his hind legs so dynamically that his hoofs reached 10 or 12 feet in the air. Newsweek magazine dubbed him “the Michael Jordan of bulls.” For five years, Bushwacker was all but unrideable. He owned the longest streak of consecutive buck-offs in PBR history, with 42, until one summer night in Tulsa in 2013 when Mauney caught a ride on him that friend and PBR publicist Andrew Giangola likened to “bodysurfing a tornado.” Mauney scored 95.25 points out of a possible 100. Bushwacker would not be ridden again, by anyone.
J.B. Mauney ends Bushwacker's streak of 42 consecutive buck-offs during the championship round of the Tulsa Built Ford Tough series PBR. (PBR)
Arctic Assassin was no Bushwacker. But by last September, Mauney was not his younger self, either. He had so much metal in him from being torn up by bulls that if you gave him a full body X-ray, his bones would look like silverware. There were a screw with 13 anchors in his right shoulder, a plate and screws in his left hand and a plate in his pelvis. He had broken his jaw on both sides, fractured an eye socket, taken five staples in his head above his left ear.
Arctic Assassin came out of the chute and wrenched right, then left. Mauney was okay for the first couple of bucks. But then he sat down hard and lurched sharply forward. The bull’s rising hips caught him and propelled him into the air. Mauney’s boots and spurs went up over his hat. He was halfway into a somersault when he slammed to the ground.
Mauney landed in the sand of the arena floor and flopped over on his belly. He tried to raise his head, and pain ran through his neck as if he had been stabbed with a hot knife. Somehow, he got half upright. He began walking insensibly on his knees across the arena in the dirt. It was an old instinct, drilled into him as a boy by a mentor named Jerome Davis, the 1995 Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association world champion bull rider.
“Unless you got a broke leg or you’re knocked out,” Davis told a young Mauney, “you better get up and walk out.”
Davis spoke those things from a wheelchair, having been paralyzed from the chest down by a bull in 1998.
Get up and walk out, Mauney told himself. He rose and staggered. Watching from the fence, three of his best friends and top riders realized he was hurt way beyond the ordinary. One of them, Shane Proctor, leaped down and got an arm around him and guided him to safety behind the chute gate. “You all right?” Proctor asked.
Mauney's fateful fall from Arctic Assassin seemed unlikely. (August Frank/Lewiston Tribune)
Mauney limped away, clutching an arm stiffly to his side to keep his head from lolling, and headed straight toward the paramedic station.
Another rider asked Mauney’s friend Stetson Wright, “You really think he broke his neck?”
“I don’t know, but something’s wrong because I ain’t never seen him walk straight to any paramedics,” Wright said.
Mauney was infamous for resisting hospitals.
At the paramedic station, a medic said to him, “What’s going on?”
“I just broke my f---ing neck,” Mauney said.
“Well, we should probably get a collar on you,” the medic said.
“That’d probably be a good idea,” Mauney said.
Mauney sat down at a picnic table. As he waited for the ambulance, he casually lit a cigarette. “I figured where I was headed, I couldn’t smoke,” he says.
The break was bad. It required the insertion of a rod, a plate and screws in his neck. He also had lost a disk. The next day, a doctor talked to him about the risk of resuming bull riding.
If he landed on his head again, Mauney was told, he more than likely would break his neck a second time, either above or below the reinforcing rod and plate. Snap the neck below, and he would be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Snap it above, and he would be dead.
The doctors kept using the word “if.” Mauney knew better. “There was no ‘if’ about it,” he says.
Mauney looked the doctor in the eye and said, “It’s about a 100 percent chance I’ll land on my head.”
On Sept. 12, Mauney announced his retirement. He would never ride a bull again.
About two weeks later, he was at home in Stephenville convalescing in a neck brace, with little to do but think. He picked up the phone and called his good friend Matt Scharping. A top stock contractor who breeds champion bucking bulls out of Minnesota, Scharping was the co-owner of Arctic Assassin.
Mauney asked him, “Hey, what are you going to do with the black bull?”
“I’m going to retire him,” Scharping said.
“Well, I want him,” Mauney said.
There was an incredulous pause on the line.
“For *what*?” Scharping asked.
Retired professional bull rider Mauney on his ranch Feb. 7 in Stephenville, Tex. (Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)
**FOR WHAT? THERE’S A QUESTION.** For what reason does anyone mess with, much less provoke, a 1,700-pound *bos taurus*, a creature that is all chest, haunches and horns and that exerts a ground force reaction of 12 times its body weight when it stomps you with its back legs? That in its prime has such a fighting instinct that if you merely float a piece of paper into a pasture, it will try to gore it?
Every other activity at a rodeo has some passing relationship to ranching skills. Breaking wild horses and roping steers are necessary for managing rough stock. But bull riding is just a dare. It has no other reason for being.
To animal rights activists, it’s a barbaric relic of the Visigoths. PETA claims “countless animals have paid with their lives to satisfy humans’ desire to play cowboy.” PBR counters that a 2020 study showed there were just two bull injuries in more than 5,000 “outs,” meaning the times its bulls left the chute, and that the animals receive first-rate nutrition and sports medicine. It’s a legitimate question whether animals should be used for entertainment. But it’s also an ugly truth that the career option for a bull is the meatpacking industry. Most cattle have an average life span of just 18 months before slaughter, the same as for chickens.
Champion bucking bulls, however, tend to live for 10 to 15 years and retire to pastures, valuable as sires. Bushwacker’s sperm goes for $5,000 a vial.
Still, life is cruel for all range animals, given that the American range no longer exists.
Since he retired from professional bull riding, Mauney has turned his ranch into a practice site for bull riders and young bulls. (Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)
“He goes to work and gets outside, and he feels so much better,” Sam said of her husband. “He feels better if he’s moving around.” (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
Mauney herds bulls into pens as young riders pull on their gear. (Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)
If rodeos are part nostalgia, they also reflect a modern anxiety. The enthusiasts of the sport — five PBR events on CBS in 2023 commanded more than 1 million viewers — see a desperately needed antidote to creeping cultural neurasthenia. In Mauney particularly, they saw a last American vestige of stoicism, self-reliance and “cowboying up,” so much so that he still commands more than 1 million followers on Instagram and retains all of his sponsors, from Wrangler to Monster Energy to the American Hat Company. As Mauney sat atop a bull that twisted and stamped, all kinds of things swirled around him. Fear. Character. Power. And make no mistake, ethic.
Man’s fascination with the epic form of a bull — and his attempt to bestride it — is older than any American rodeo. In an exquisite Minoan fresco at the Knossos palace in Crete dated to 1450 BC, a man is depicted vaulting off the flank of a bull. The most striking thing about the fresco is the profound mismatch between the slight human figure and the mass of charging, rearing bull. The contest is not about strength — and never could be.
“You’re not going to overpower them,” Mauney says. “It’s a dance partner. They make a move, you got to follow.”
Bull riders are not in charge. And that is a part of the draw — that feeling that they have hooked into an intense and massive primal force and are in something like cooperation with it. They put the lie to the notion of human sovereignty over nature.
In every other dangerous form of competition, “You’re still the one with your foot on the accelerator or the brake,” says former champion Ty Murray, now a commentator. “Even if we’re talking about mountain climbing, you’re still the one that’s deciding what level things are going to. But in bull riding, the bull is the one with the accelerator.”
There have been attempts to scientifically measure the forces that a rider experiences on an erratically bucking bull. One study using NASA-provided accelerometers showed that a bull weighing 1,700 or more pounds rearing explosively can exert a pull of 26 G-forces on a man. For context, an IndyCar wreck at 200 mph creates about 50 Gs. That’s just acceleration. Now mix in violence. The hind hoofs of a large bull generate a force of 106.3 kilonewtons. An Olympic boxer delivering a straight punch, just 3.4.
Mauney is not a big man. He is 5-foot-10 and a blade-thin 140 pounds. On a 1,700-pound bull, “he’s outmatched on a scale that you just can’t imagine,” says Tandy Freeman, who has treated bull riders for more than 30 years as part of PBR’s sports medicine program. Most of the injuries Freeman sees are head injuries. According to a paper titled “[Rodeo Trauma: Outcome Data from 10 years of Injuries](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9224891/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template),” rodeo athletes suffer serious head injuries at a rate 15 per 1,000 rides, far outstripping any other sport. They’re 10 times more likely to suffer major injury than football players.
Mauney always has felt most comfortable working outside. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
What really makes bulls buck is genetics: They are bred to it. They’re animals of prey, programmed by evolution and DNA to rear, shake, stamp and horn-hook the things that land on their backs, and breeders enhance their athleticism through bloodlines. Bushwacker’s owner, Julio Moreno, once observed that the first time he threw a flake of hay into the pen, the bull tried to kick it.
In world-class bull riding, the bull is regarded as every bit as much of an athlete as the rider — to the point that the bull’s performance counts for half of a cowboy’s score. PBR even names bulls as world champions along with riders. Bucking bulls in their prime are worth at least $10,000, and if they come from proven sire lines, their value skyrockets to $500,000 or more.
The people who climb on these creatures are, of course, addicts. They have a dependency that requires regular doses of centrifugal and vertical speed as well as sluices of dopamine and epinephrine and a sense of conquering the well-nigh unconquerable. When a bull reared and stamped, Mauney could feel all those G-forces and kilonewtons in his fingertips.
“I would rope and make a good run, and, yeah, I felt good about it. But it wasn’t the same,” Mauney says. “I made a good bull ride, and I was 10 foot tall and bulletproof.”
Mauney's fearless approach made him a fan favorite. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
The sensation leaves a man wanting more — craving it, even, to a degree that trumps any pain. Jerome Davis craved it. He had been rocked to sleep on horseback as a baby at his parents’ ranch in Archdale, N.C., but no other motion did for him what a bull’s did. When he was taken to rodeos as a boy, he couldn’t take his eyes off the bulls. “I was just glued,” he says. “I would just sit in my seat and wouldn’t talk, just stared. … After you get into it, you just get eat up with it. It just takes you over to where you become infected with it.”
In 1992, Davis was one of 20 men who met in a hotel room in Scottsdale, Ariz., and founded the Professional Bull Riders circuit with $1,000 stakes each, breaking away from the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association to start a tour of elite stand-alone bull events.
By 1998, Davis was making $500,000 per year, ranked No. 1 and leading the PBR standings when he got on a bull in Fort Worth named Knock ’Em Out John. The bull lived up to his name. He whipsawed forward, then rocked back and hit Davis’s forehead. Knocked cold, Davis was thrown off like a heavy sack and came down on the side of his neck. The fall crushed two vertebrae.
Later at the hospital, his fiancée, Tiffany, a horsewoman whose family staged rodeos, was at Davis’s side when a doctor told him he would never walk again. He was 25.
“The first thing Jerome said was, ‘I can’t ride bulls again?’ ” Tiffany remembers. “He didn’t even think about the not walking part. That’s how much they love it.”
Within a year, Davis got back in a horse saddle, with the help of Velcro, a back brace and a gentle animal. He and Tiffany began raising bucking bulls and hosting rodeo events on weekends. Just being around the pens, gates and chutes gave Jerome back some of the “bull mojo,” as he called it.
The Davises threw a lot of junior rodeos, with prizes for the local kids that ranged from belt buckles to Bibles. One day, a guy named Tim Mauney, a longtime acquaintance from the Carolina rodeo world, showed up with his black-haired 6-year-old in tow and entered him in a junior calf-riding event. That’s when the Davises met James Burton Mauney.
“That’s the first time I remember him, sticking in my head,” Tiffany says, “because I thought, ‘Ohhhh, rascal’s got some grit to him.’ ”
Since retiring from professional bull riding, Mauney spends his time running his ranch and caring for the young bulls he's breeding and training. (Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)
**ON THE MAUNEYS’ FAMILY FARM** in Mooresville, N.C., J.B. was always getting caught climbing the fence boards to try to mount something bigger than him. “My grandpa would raise hell at me because I’d be riding his beef cows and stuff,” Mauney says.
The Mauneys came from Alsace-Lorraine settlers who established a large farm in Iredell County in the 1820s. At one time it was pure cow country, with more than 300 cattle ranches and dairies, scores of rich brown cows lolling in the grass. But by the 1930s, large textile mills came in and the farms dwindled. Most of the people Mauney grew up with worked as laborers, ranching just a sidelight. His grandfather did 27 years in the Templon Spinning Mill. His father, Tim, worked night shifts in a lumber mill, while his mother, Lynne, worked for the local school system. But they still found time to keep cows, and every weekend they went off to a rodeo.
Tim Mauney was an amateur steer wrestler and such an enthusiast that he would volunteer at local shows. When a rodeo was short of riders to fill out the program, Tim would make two or three extra runs. “He’d put on a different cowboy hat so the crowd wouldn’t know it was the same guy,” remembers Tiffany Davis, whose father staged some of the shows.
Most of the rodeos offered “mutton busting” events for the smallest children; 5- and 6-year-olds were placed on the back of sheep and rode until they fell off. But J.B. Mauney wanted no part of that. “Boy, he felt it was stupid,” recalls Michael Laws, a family friend who was J.B.’s first bull instructor. “He wasn’t riding no sheep. He was going to ride bulls.”
By age 9, J.B. was riding the family steers and winning youth events in the Junior Southern Rodeo Association. He was just 13 when he got on his first small bull. His father and Laws used white medical tape to mark an X on the bull’s shoulders; Laws told him don’t take your eyes off it. Don’t look down; don’t look at your dad. It taught him focus.
Bull riding wasn’t about “manhandling” an animal, explained Laws, who made stained glass for a living during the week and rodeoed on weekends. “That’s not how you ride bulls. You have to ride them with grace, finesse — just flow with them.”
To do that, the boy had to develop a gymnast’s core strength. Laws took a two-by-four and shaved it edgewise down to about an inch and a half wide. He mounted the plank in the air like a tightrope and told J.B. to get on it and practice walking on that edge, with one hand up in the air, as if he was on a bull.
To improve his core strength and balance for bull riding, Mauney used to stand on a ball while rewatching old rides. (Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)
Mauney got to where he was so strong that he could tiptoe on the plank edge in his cowboy boots. “Imagine a bull rider taking ballet,” Laws said. “I seen him get on a board fence, which wasn’t but three-quarters of an inch wide, and walk halfway around the arena. … That’s balance.”
Mauney was long in the legs but featherweight light, weighing just 120 pounds as a freshman in high school, thin and bendable as a willow switch. But it was a serious mistake to take him for weak. On his first day aboard the high school bus, he got teased by a senior, who pinched his ear and called him skinny. Mauney leaped out of his seat and punched the guy in the mouth. “Broke my hand,” he recalled.
Mauney preferred outdoor work to anything. He would cut his agriculture classes to work at a cattle sale barn, herding and loading bulls, only to get caught when the class took a field trip there.
He spent weekends and most of his summers over at the Davis ranch, along with a gang of other aspiring young cowboys. J.B. would help set up the arena for rodeos and pick up trash. He ended up staying there for long stretches, crashed on the living room sofa or in an old bunk room.
Being around Jerome and his wheelchair “made you open your eyes pretty good,” Mauney says. “You realize a lot earlier than most guys that if you’re going to do it, you better mean it because one day it’s here and next it’s gone.”
Jerome didn’t talk much about his accident. He just taught J.B. with the way he went about his rehab and built his life back. He would say: “Don’t cry on my shoulder. You’ll rust my spurs.”
Most important of all, Jerome taught that when you got hurt, “no reason to complain; you picked it,” J.B. says.
After a life being thrown from bulls, Mauney feels the toll every day. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
By 15, Mauney was the closest thing to a prodigy in rodeo. He won the Southern Rodeo Association junior all-around title in 2002 and the adult title just two years later. He turned pro on his 18th birthday Jan. 9, 2005, and won the very first event he entered for a $10,000 prize.
Then he got stomped — bad. At a rodeo in Raleigh, N.C., a bull came down on his midsection with two hoofs. Mauney knew his ribs were broken, but he figured all a doctor did was tape you up. He wrapped himself in an elastic bandage and drove home. The next morning, his side was badly distended, as if a football had been shoved under the skin. He took himself to an emergency room. “That’s your liver,” a doctor told him. He was rushed into surgery, and afterward the surgeon said she didn’t understand why he hadn’t keeled over dead. He was ordered not to ride for eight months — if he got gored by a bull while his organs were healing, it could kill him.
To make money as he recovered, he went to work at a local ball-bearing plant, sweltering through shifts covered in grease. He quit after four months and went back to riding. At his first competition, someone asked who cleared him to ride again.
“Dr. Mauney,” he shot back.
Young bull riders prepare to ride on Mauney's ranch. (Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)
**BY 2006, MAUNEY WAS ON HIS WAY** to becoming the fastest bull rider to collect $1 million. At 20, he was making $400,000 a year and thought he would never be broke again. It wasn’t just the winning; it was his devil-may-care attitude that attracted fans. With a cigarette perpetually dangling from his lip, he radiated uncompromisingness. When a chewing tobacco company offered him a $250,000 endorsement deal, he turned it down because it said he couldn’t smoke. When the company redid the language to say he couldn’t smoke at public appearances, he said, “Okay, for 250, I can hide it.”
He traveled in a 24-foot camper that between seasons he parked back at the family farm in Mooresville. When someone asked him why he didn’t get a house, he said, “So if the neighbors piss me off, I can move.”
In 2007, he went to Las Vegas for an annual event, and as he walked into the lobby of a hotel, he noticed a woman with waist-long hair so ash blond it looked almost white, amber eyes and a laugh that radiated across the room. He stalked over and said, “What are you doing tomorrow night?” She answered, “Having dinner with my family.” He said, “Can I come?”
“I’d rather get dragged to death than starve to death any day,” he would say in his riding days. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
Her name was Samantha Lyne, and she turned out to be the daughter of one of the greatest all-around rodeo athletes ever, Phil Lyne, who was being inducted to the PBR’s Ring of Honor that weekend. Phil Lyne had dominated the early 1970s before he retired to a ranch in Cotulla, Tex. A superbly athletic rider and roper who was the subject of the 1973 Academy Award-winning documentary “The Great American Cowboy,” Lyne had been featured in a famous Chevrolet trucks ad that boasted, “A great way to get to work.”
Samantha’s parents tolerated Mauney at dinner, but they were appalled when she went down to North Carolina to stay in his camper. They had sent her off to TCU for a degree and wanted her to go into business, but she kept going back to the horses and cowboys.
This cowboy and cowgirl were a little too wild to hang together for long. Samantha was chasing her own career as a decorated barrel racer — she would qualify for the national finals in 2014 — while Mauney was approaching his height as a competitor — and a carouser. While other cowboys lifted weights and trained in gyms, he bragged that the only time he had been on a treadmill was for a bet — which he won. He drank four cups of black coffee in the morning, his nutrition consisted of Corn Pops and Uncrustables, and he stayed up till closing time drinking beers and Jägermeister.
“The most exercise he got was lifting a can,” Laws laughs.
Mauney rode with no regrets, except for the money he lost or threw away or people filched from him. “I could’ve took care of business a little bit, not been at the bar all night,” he says. “But you live and learn.”
It was part of his heedlessness. He rode with a looseness others envied, the fringe on his chaps flying around. In 2012, he broke his left (riding) hand and simply switched to his right — and still managed to place among the top five in the world. His epic conquering of Bushwacker in 2013 propelled him to his first world championship and a $1 million bonus.
Mauney's ride of Bushwacker remains the stuff of legend among rodeo fans. (Andy Watson/PBR/Bull Stock Media)
It wasn’t as jaunty as he made it look, of course. Between the big rides, there were terrible wrecks. A bull named Jawbreaker horned him in the chest and collapsed his lung. There were personal wrecks, too. A brief encounter left him with a baby daughter, Bella, an adored black-haired child who looked just like him. A marriage to a young woman he met through rodeo colleagues collapsed after just two years. He became estranged from his family in a business dispute that left him feeling more used than loved.
The injuries began to mount. Mauney’s problem wasn’t so much what happened on the bull; it was that he was terrible at getting off. When it came time to dismount, he just couldn’t seem to release his hand and land neatly. “Everything I’ve got, since the age of 14, I made all of it tying that thing in there to where it wouldn’t come out,” he says, showing his gnarled hand. He cracked both shoulder blades and his tailbone. He lost the ACLs in both knees and had a perpetually untreated ulnar collateral ligament tear in his elbow. And the pinkie on left hand was permanently curled from his poor dismounts.
“I was not worth a s--- at it,” he says. “I’d land up underneath them, my hand would hang in my rope and jerk me under them, and I’d get stomped. Well, my entire life I practiced how to stay on them, not jump off them. … I tied my hand in there to *mean* for it to be there.”
Nevertheless, he still chose the “rankest” bulls whenever he could. Most famously, in 2015 Mauney already had clinched his second title when he called for a bull named Bruiser at the PBR World Finals in Las Vegas. He was a two-toned creature who would be named world champion bull for three consecutive years. Bruiser lashed him around so violently, the bull’s tail was flapping against his hat. He stayed on for a score of 92.75.
In 2015, Mauney rode Bruiser at the PBR World Finals in Las Vegas. (PBR)
By then, Mauney was back with Samantha, her family had fully come around to him, and what no one knew about that championship was that each morning in their hotel room, she had to help him out of bed. “I was, like, lifting him,” she says. Both had matured, and along with the original attraction they had something deeper: understanding. She was ranch-reared, capable in brittle situations and had a no-quit attitude as he did. “We’re a lot alike,” she says. That’s why she also understood that beneath Mauney’s exterior lurked sensitivity.
“I just knew he was not the person that he wants people to think he is: tough guy,” she says. “Which he *is*, right? But he’s really kind.”
She knew how to deal with the fact that J.B. wouldn’t go to the doctor unless it was an emergency. Once, he developed abscesses in some shattered teeth from a broken jaw after taking a hoof to the face. Instead of going to a dentist, he shot himself up with cattle antibiotics. The only problem was the cow needle was as big as something you would knit with. When he jabbed himself with it, he shuddered in pain for a full two minutes, his bare backside hanging out, before he could squeeze the plunger and pull his pants up.
Samantha would employ vet medicine on him, with salves and therapeutics for his joints such as an equine laser. “She doctored me like a horse,” he says.
The habit of choosing the baddest bull certainly cost him another title. Mauney mounted Bushwacker 13 times, almost twice as much as any other rider, and was bumped off 12 of those. In 2016, he had a clear shot at another championship gold buckle, but he chose Air Time, 1,650 pounds of dappled heavyweight. Ten riders had tried Air Time, and all of them were thrown. So was Mauney, who lasted about three seconds before Air Time threw him into the metal fence, subluxing his bad shoulder and tanking his chances.
There was something “honorable” in the way Mauney always chose the hardest ride, Murray observes, even though he didn’t need to.
“He’s always going to be remembered as a guy that slayed every dragon there is at some point,” Murray says. “Even the guys who did it that way at times, they didn’t do it that way all the time. J.B. basically did it that way *all* the time.”
J.B. and Samantha were married Jan. 3, 2017, and she moved into a log cabin in North Carolina with him and his collection of junk food. “He eats like a 5-year-old,” she says. All of their friends thought they were a perfect match. According to the Davises, Samantha is the only person J.B. toes the line for. “They’re tit for tat,” Jerome says. Tiffany says, “Sam’s woman enough to call him out.”
They eventually found their way to Stephenville, where they bought some acreage a few miles outside of town. It had nothing on it but a single-wide trailer with a tin roof. They decided to live there while they looked for a house and ended up staying in it for two years.
As they put away their things in the single-wide, J.B. told her, “I knew I’d white trash you up.”
Jagger and Samantha pet a calf on the family's ranch. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
Only two things disturbed their happiness: J.B.’s increasing string of injuries and Sam’s difficulty getting pregnant. At the July 2017 Calgary Stampede, J.B. got his hand caught in the rope as he tried to dismount after scoring over 90 points on a bull named Cowabunga. The bull stepped on his shoulder at the armpit, just about ripping his arm off. It was the worst injury he had ever suffered: Three rotator cuff tendons were torn off the humerus, and the ball of the shoulder was fractured. A screw and 13 anchors reattached his shoulder, and he turned the mandated six-month recovery period into four months.
Meanwhile, Samantha was told that because of a medical condition in her youth, she had only a 1 percent chance of getting pregnant. The couple considered in vitro fertilization treatment and visited a clinic. They listened to a lecture on the difficult decisions they would have to make, such as whether to choose the sex of a child and what they would do with unused embryos. On the ride home afterward, both were quiet. Then Mauney burst out: “Samantha, I’m not real religious, but I’ll be damned if I want to choose. I just don’t feel right about that.” Samantha said: “I know. I don’t feel right, either.”
“Well, look,” he said. “How about we just go along for a while and see what happens?”
A few months later, they were sitting out front of their camper as usual with a circle of their friends, opening beers. Samantha said, “I don’t really feel like drinking.” Mauney whipped his head around. Samantha could usually drink his friends under the table. She said, “I just feel funny; I’m going to lay down.” He followed her to the back of the camper and said, “You’re pregnant.” And when the test came back, she was.
“Don’t ever tell me I can’t do something,” he said, grinning.
Jagger Mauney plays with the calves his father recently purchased for his 5-year-old son. (Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)
**JAGGER BRIGGS MAUNEY ARRIVED** early in the morning of Jan. 23, 2019. After that, the collision between Mauney and Arctic Assassin became increasingly inevitable.
Just a few weeks after his son’s birth, Mauney rode a bull named Big Black to tie the record for PBR event victories. But when it was over, he had to ask for a hand up from the sand, unable to stand.
That year, he rode through a fractured tibia, a torn medial collateral ligament, a torn rotator cuff, a rib separation and fracture, a sprained wrist, a sprained ankle and a groin strain.
“He doesn’t bitch about anything. He never complains,” Samantha says. “But I mean, I could see it all over his face.”
Mauney talks with other competitors during the American Rodeo in Arlington, Tex., in March. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
Samantha managed to watch outwardly impassive from ringside, with the little boy in her lap. She was more nervous than she appeared. “Lots of times,” she admits. “Especially if I got a bad feeling, and then it was like, you can’t say you have this weird bad feeling, right? Because if something happens, then you feel like it’s your fault.”
She had one of those feelings in August 2021 in Kennewick, Wash. He got a hoof in the head and was out for five minutes. When she arrived backstage, he was still unconscious with blood coming out of his mouth and medics were yelling at him, “J.B.! J.B.!” trying to make him come to.
At the end of 2021, he was tied for first place after the opening round of the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas. The next bull was named Johnny Thunder. Mauney’s head collided with a horn, rendering him unconscious while he was still atop the bull. He sagged off sideways and was dragged like a sack of potatoes as the bull kicked him repeatedly. His hand came free at last. Somehow, the motionless heap started crawling. He left the arena under his own power. “Things got a little western,” he [joked afterward](https://www.thecowboychannel.com/jb-mauney-to-compete-in-round-3-tonight?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template).
At some point in those years, an interviewer who saw where it was all headed asked him how he wanted to be remembered. [Mauney answered](https://www.instagram.com/p/C4YJulYOUTw/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template): “That’s pretty easy. That’s *real* easy. … I don’t really give a s--- what anybody thinks about me, whether I’m the greatest or not. … All I want to be remembered as is that son of a bitch put it all out there every single time he nodded his head.”
It’s fair to say Mauney proved his point. And once a bull rider has proved everything to himself, that’s where the most danger comes in. Ty Murray explains, “The only thing that’s left out there is for you to get hurt.”
Jagger touches his dad’s scar after they ate lunch at a local country store. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
On the day Mauney and Arctic Assassin met in Lewiston, Idaho, Samantha wasn’t there to see it. They had driven the camper to Ellensburg, Wash., which was their next stop up the road, so Jagger could settle for a few days and Samantha could go to a barrel race. “Just stay,” J.B. told her. He would ride to Lewiston in a truck with a couple of other riders and then double back to join them.
The cell reception in her camper was so bad she couldn’t stream his ride. “And it was a good thing it wasn’t on, to be honest,” she says. Instead, she got a call later that night from Shane Proctor’s wife, Haley. “J.B’s okay. He got up and walked out, but he said he broke his neck,” she reported. Samantha spent the night packing up the trailer and then drove it over a mountainous route to the hospital.
It was a three-day trip from Lewiston back to Stephenville, and when they got home, he spent exactly two days in bed. The hospital had given him all sorts of do’s and don’ts, such as, “Don’t lift anything heavier than a gallon of milk.” But Mauney got up and started putting his clothes on.
“What are you doing?” Samantha said,
“I’m going to the barns,” he said.
Pretty soon, he was working the gears in a tractor in his neck brace, shoving dirt around.
Mauney feeds bulls on his ranch in Stephenville, Tex. (Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)
About two weeks after he got home, Mauney picked up the phone and made the call to Matt Scharping, to tell him he wanted to buy Arctic Assassin.
When Scharping asked, “What do you want him for?” Mauney might have replied that he wanted to make a belt out of him. Instead, what he said was this:
“I want to say I was the last guy who ever rode him.”
One afternoon, Mauney was working around the barns when one of his friends said to him, “I just hate that you didn’t get to end on your own terms.”
“It was always going to end this way,” Mauney said. “I wasn’t ever going to be able to tell myself I couldn’t do it.”
Mauney chats on the phone with longtime friend and Arctic Assassin's previous owner Matt Scharping. (Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)
**THERE WAS** the “for what.” J.B. Mauney chose to live with the bull that ended his career because Arctic Assassin delivered the message that he was never going to tell himself: It was time to quit.
“That was the best thing that could’ve happened,” Mauney says. “I’m still upright.”
It had been a little more than 16 weeks since the catastrophic injury. Mauney no longer wears a neck brace, and his curling black hair hides any sign of scarring on his neck. When he wakes in the morning he is achingly stiff, but he has found that over the course of a day, working with the animals in open air eases it. “He goes to work and gets outside, and he feels so much better,” Samantha observes. “He feels better if he’s moving around.” As a result, he has pivoted to training the next great bull riders, as Jerome Davis once trained him. In February, Mauney announced he will serve as the coach of the Oklahoma Wildcatters, part of the PBR’s team competition.
Mauney flips over the fence as a bull runs loose in the arena on his ranch. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
Mauney’s ranch has become a practice site for bull riders — newly minted 23-year-old PRCA champion Ky Hamilton is there almost weekly. On horseback, Mauney herds bulls into the pens while young riders pull on their gear. Jagger arrives with Samantha from preschool to watch. He has miniature versions of his own riding gear: chaps, boots and a glove.
Jagger swirls through the legs of the men, imitating their every move. Someone hands him a bull rope. Jagger stomps in a circle, imitating a stamping, twisting bull. Then he falls to the ground and clutches his throat.
“Daddy, my neck is broke!” he cries.
There is silence.
“Daddy, my neck is broke! My neck is broke!”
Mauney is up on a welded metal fence, bent over the chute, dealing with a bull.
“Well, quit talking then,” he says mildly without looking around.
Jagger seizes a roll of adhesive tape, which the cowboys use for their ankles and wrists, and bandages his neck. After a while, he tries to rip it off his tender skin. An expression of shock crosses his face, and he begins to wail. Samantha picks him up, and J.B. stops what he’s doing and climbs down from the fence. She hands him over, and the boy buries his face in his father’s shoulder.
Pain is the price of living rampant. Jagger will figure that out, just as his parents did. They won’t spare their child this education. “He can play the piano for all I give a s---, as long as he does it 110 percent,” Mauney says, and you can tell he means it.
Mauney and Jagger are kindred spirits. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
Late in the day, after the cowboys have left, it is evening feeding time. Mauney heads to the upper pasture to tend to the black bull on the horizon, the inevitability he always knew he one day would have to surrender to, given all the things he jumped off of and ran into, the things hazarded rather than held back. Arctic Assassin was loaded on a trailer and delivered to Stephenville in late January. Mauney gave him his own broad, quiet paddock on the hillside, well away from the bucking ring, which Arctic Assassin will never see. As Mauney likes to say, “He retired me, so now he gets to retire.”
As Mauney steps into his pasture, the black bull wanders over and noses him. The bull bends his head, conciliatory, as Mauney gently strokes his back with a peculiar half-smile on his face. What happened between the two of them, after all, was only life.
“Of all the mean son of guns I got on in my career, and this dog-gentle one is the one that ended it,” he says.
As the cowboy strokes the tough hide, he’s at peace with his fortunes, while out across the American savanna, more riders await their bulls.
Mauney said of Arctic Assassin, “I want to say I was the last guy who ever rode him.” He got his wish. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
##### About this story
Photo editing by Toni L. Sandys. Video by Whitney Leaming. Video producing by Jessica Koscielniak. Design and development by Laura Padilla Castellanos. Design editing by Chloe Meister and Matt Callahan. Audio producing by Bishop Sands. Editing by Matt Rennie. Copy editing by Brad Windsor.
@ -57,7 +57,7 @@ Bubba Copeland had many secrets. And as a servant to both God and man, the judgm
He was empathetic and industrious and always seemed to be doing something for somebody. By last fall, he had been the senior pastor at First Baptist for four years and the church’s youth minister for fifteen years before that. Bubba was not seminary trained and was not what you might call an intellectual from the pulpit, but what he lacked in academic theology he made up for in his eagerness to answer to the spiritual and material needs of others, no matter the time or expense. According to the people in his church family who knew him best and loved him most, Bubba possessed an enormous capacity to serve, and his sermons were personal, compassionate, and often funny. As a Christian and as a pastor, he thought that in a pinch the Sermon on the Mount was just about all the Bible a man would ever need, and his favorite verse was Matthew 7:1—“Judge not, that ye be not judged.” All he knew about the ministry he had learned by the side of his first father-in-law, Dr. Eugene Langner, who pastored to the souls of the congregation at First Baptist Church for thirty years until his death in 2013. Even after Bubba and Merrigail, Langner’s daughter, got divorced, the two men maintained a loving friendship. Bubba and Merrigail had given Langner a grandson, after all. Young Carter Copeland would grow up underfoot at the church, singing hymns from the pulpit with a poise that would make his father cry. Grandfather, father, and son remained exceptionally close, their relationships unburdened by the strain that often comes with divorce.
By the last Sunday of October 2023, not only were Bubba and his second wife, Angela, and his two stepdaughters the first family of First Baptist Church, but the Copelands were also the first family of nearby Smiths Station, Bubba’s hometown, where he was finishing his second term as mayor. He was renowned for bringing a Love’s truck stop to the main highway through town, a feat of economic development that most mayors of towns the size of Smiths Station (population: 5,470) can only dream of—to hear the awe with which the people there talk about that truck stop, you’d think Bubba had brought IBM to town. When a tornado struck Smiths Station in 2019, killing twenty-three East Alabamians in the neighboring community of Beauregard, he was a twenty-four-hour one-man rescue crew—removing debris, providing supplies and reliable information to his people, and offering hugs when nothing else would do. That same year, when a high school senior in Smiths Station named Lexi Webb took her own life, Bubba initiated #SSNotOneMore, a suicide-prevention campaign. On the night before school started, without telling anyone they were doing it, Bubba and a group of volunteers scattered hundreds of signs all over town: YOU ARE WORTHY OF LOVE. YOUR MISTAKES DO NOT DEFINE YOU. YOU MATTER. DON’T GIVE UP. He had Post-it notes printed with the same affirmations and had volunteers pass them out at all the schools.
By the last Sunday of October 2023, not only were Bubba and his second wife, Angela, and his two stepdaughters the first family of First Baptist Church, but the Copelands were also the first family of nearby Smiths Station, Bubba’s hometown, where he was finishing his second term as mayor. He was renowned for bringing a Love’s truck stop to the main highway through town, a feat of economic development that most mayors of towns the size of Smiths Station (population: 5,470) can only dream of—to hear the awe with which the people there talk about that truck stop, you’d think Bubba had brought IBM to town. When a tornado struck Smiths Station in 2019, killing twenty-three East Alabamians in the neighboring community of Beauregard, he was a twenty-four-hour one-man rescue crew—removing debris, providing supplies and reliable information to his people, and offering hugs when nothing else would do. That same year, when a high school senior in Smiths Station named Lexi Webb took her own life, Bubba initiated `#SSNotOneMore`, a suicide-prevention campaign. On the night before school started, without telling anyone they were doing it, Bubba and a group of volunteers scattered hundreds of signs all over town: YOU ARE WORTHY OF LOVE. YOUR MISTAKES DO NOT DEFINE YOU. YOU MATTER. DON’T GIVE UP. He had Post-it notes printed with the same affirmations and had volunteers pass them out at all the schools.
In his spare time, Bubba also owned and operated the Country Market over in Salem, where he had a reputation for employing local folks who might have trouble finding work elsewhere. His social-media feed was always full of cheerful posts about the latest specials on pork butts and paper towels. Life was good, if maybe a bit hectic.
# Sextortion Scams Are Driving Teen Boys to Suicide
I have ur nudes and everything needed to ruin your life
Send me $2000 and I’ll delete
I’m going to make it go viral 😡
You want your parents to see this? 😂
u know u will be expelled from school…
I got all I need rn to make your life miserable dude
u will be exempt from universities if u don’t cooperate…
I bet your GF will leave you for some other dude
If u block me, I will ruin your life 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬😡😡
Cooperate with me and all this will end
IF YOU TRYNA ACT SMART ILL RUIN YOU
am going to make sure to humiliate you 😡
Just comply and I delete all rn
I AM NEVER GONNA UNSEND THEM UNTIL YOU PAY ME BRO 😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡
Answer me
Your time is limited
10… 9… 8… 7…
Pay me rn and I’ll end this
should I send your nudes to everyone?
I’m gonna expose you 😡😡😡
Your family are going to regret they ever had you when I am done with you
I will make you regret your life
I promise you. I swear
I am begging for my own life
Businessweek | The Big Take
## Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media—and driving some to suicide.
April 15, 2024, 5:00 PM UTC
One word from a stranger on social media was all it took. “Hey,” she said.
Jordan DeMay read the Instagram message at 10:19 p.m. on a Thursday night in March 2022. He had just kissed his girlfriend goodnight and was on his way home to pack: The next day he was escaping Michigan’s frozen Upper Peninsula for spring break in Florida.
“Who is you?” he responded.
Tall, athletic and blond, Jordan was a football and basketball star at Marquette Senior High School, as well as its homecoming king. The 17-year-old often received friend requests from random girls on social media. He liked the attention.
This one came from Dani Robertts. Her profile photo showed a teenager with a cute smile, sunglasses perched atop shiny brown hair, hugging a German shepherd. Dani told Jordan she was from Texas but was going to high school in Georgia. They had one mutual friend and started texting about school life while he did his laundry.
Around midnight, Dani got flirtatious. She told Jordan she liked “playing sexy games.” Then she sent him a naked photo and asked for one in return, a “sexy pic” with his face in it. Jordan walked down the hallway to the bathroom, pulled down his pants and took a selfie in the mirror. He hit send.
In an instant, the flirty teenage girl disappeared.
“I have screenshot all your followers and tags and can send this nudes to everyone and also send your nudes to your family and friends until it goes viral,” Dani wrote. “All you have to do is cooperate with me and I won’t expose you.”
Minutes later: “I got all I need rn to make your life miserable dude.”
Jordan’s tormentor knew his high school, his football team, his parents’ names, his address. Dani had created photo collages of his family and friends and plastered his nude picture in the middle. One screenshot had his nude selfie in a direct message addressed to his girlfriend. Dani said Jordan had 10 seconds to pay, or the message would be sent.
“How much?” Jordan responded.
The price was $300. He transferred the money via Apple Cash and pleaded to be left alone. But it wasn’t enough. Now Dani wanted $800. Jordan sent a screenshot of his bank account showing a balance of $55, offering to send everything he had.
“No deal,” Dani replied.
By 3 a.m., Jordan was starting to unravel.
Jordan:Why are you doing this to me?
I am begging for my own life.
Dani:10… 9… 8…
I bet your GF will leave you for some other dude.
Jordan:I will be dead.
Like I want to KMS \[kill myself\]
Dani:Sure. I will watch you die a miserable death.
Jordan:It’s over. You win bro….
I am kms rn. Bc of you.
Dani:Good. Do that fast.
Or I’ll make you do it.
I swear to God.
It was early 2022 when analysts at the [National Center for Missing & Exploited Children](https://www.missingkids.org/home) (NCMEC) noticed a frightening pattern. The US nonprofit has fielded online-exploitation cybertips since 1998, but it had never seen anything like this.
Hundreds of tips began flooding in from across the country, bucking the trend of typical exploitation cases. Usually, older male predators spend months grooming young girls into sending nude photos for their own sexual gratification. But in these new reports, teen boys were being catfished by individuals pretending to be teen girls—and they were sending the nude photos first. The extortion was rapid-fire, sometimes occurring within hours. And it wasn’t sexually motivated; the predators wanted money. The tips were coming from dozens of states, yet the blackmailers were all saying the same thing:
“I’m going to ruin your life.”
“I’m going to make it go viral.”
“Answer me quickly. Time is ticking.”
“I have what I need to destroy your life.”
In January 2022 the center received 100 reports of financially motivated sexual extortion. In February it was 173. By March, 259. The numbers were trending up so quickly and the script was so similar that the analysts reported it directly to Lauren Coffren, the executive director of the center’s exploited children division. “The bad actors were so fast and so ruthless,” Coffren says. Last year, after the center asked social media platforms to start tracking the crime, NCMEC received more than 20,000 such reports.
The scam, which the FBI calls sextortion, has become one of the fastest-growing crimes targeting children in the US, according to the agency. In an 18-month period ending in March 2023, the FBI says, at least 20 minors, primarily boys, [killed themselves after falling victim to the scam](https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/memphis/news/sextortion-a-growing-threat-targeting-minors). (Seven more sextortion-related suicides have been reported since then, the latest in January.) The crime is “just out of control,” says Mark Civiletto, a supervisory special agent in the FBI’s Lansing, Michigan, office. “This is something that’s touching every neighborhood across the country.”
The FBI, Civiletto says, is used to handling online fraud cases, such as romance scams or elder abuse, which require a long runway so the perpetrator can build rapport with their victims. Sextortion can be done in minutes. Scammers have zeroed in on a faster method, Civiletto says, one that returns a higher payout by exploiting the shame and embarrassment of teenage boys. And social media has given scammers a direct line to American teens. With the swipe of a thumb, criminals can see a scrapbook of these kids’ lives, including the names of their friends and family members.
Last year a Snap Inc. survey of more than 6,000 young social media users in six countries including the US found that almost half said they had been [targeted in an online sextortion scheme](https://www.weprotect.org/blog/two-thirds-of-gen-z-targeted-for-online-sextortion-new-snap-research/). One-third of those said they had shared an intimate photo.
The scammers have been bold enough to publish playbooks for how to commit this type of blackmail via TikTok and YouTube, in clear violation of social media platforms’ community guidelines. Both companies said in written statements that they had removed posts related to this scam that have been brought to their attention and vowed to continue to take down such content. But a search on both platforms found similar content is still available.
In late January the chief executive officers of the world’s biggest platforms, including Meta, Snap and TikTok, were [grilled during a congressional hearing](https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/committee-activity/hearings/big-tech-and-the-online-child-sexual-exploitation-crisis) about how their companies have endangered a generation of children. There were questions about addictive algorithms and youth suicide rates—and the sudden rise of sextortion.
At one point in the hearing, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., which owns Instagram, was asked to say something to the dozens of bereaved parents sitting in the gallery, holding photos of their dead children. “[I’m sorry for everything you have all been through](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/zuckerberg-offers-impromptu-apology-at-child-safety-hearing "Zuckerberg Apologizes to Families of Online Child Sex Abuse"),” he said.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, addresses parents of children harmed by social media at a Senate hearing in January. Photographer: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg
The 911 call blared over the sheriff’s office radio in the picturesque lakeside city of Marquette at 7:40 a.m. on a Friday morning: “17-year-old suicide, gunshot.” Detectives Lowell Larson and Jason Hart caught each other’s eye. Suicides in the area were rare; the sheriff’s office had responded to only three the previous year. Teen suicides were even rarer. They ran to an unmarked Chevy Tahoe, leaving two steaming coffee cups behind. The sun was just beginning to rise over Lake Superior.
The detectives arrived at the scene within minutes. John DeMay, a former police officer who went to school with Larson, was standing in the doorway of his beige split-level house, wide-eyed and wearing a T-shirt despite the below-freezing temperature. “My son…” he started. “It’s OK, John,” Larson said, placing a hand on his shoulder. Hart guided DeMay upstairs, and Larson walked toward Jordan’s bedroom.
He took a deep breath and stepped inside. Jordan was sitting upright in his bed, leaning against a blood-spattered wall. His left arm hung from the mattress, and his right hand held a pistol. His cellphone was in his lap, the screen lighting up with messages.
John DeMay is still grieving his son’s death. Photographer: Kevin Serna for Bloomberg Businessweek
Larson photographed the scene. He pulled on a pair of black nitrile gloves before picking up Jordan’s phone, switching it to airplane mode and sliding it into a paper bag. He also bagged the gun, which belonged to Jordan’s father, and the cartridges, entering it all into the case file.
The “what” of the case was already clear, Larson recalls two years later from behind his desk at the sheriff’s office, raccoon and beaver hides splayed on a wall behind him. It was the “why” that was disturbing him.
Looking around Jordan’s messy bedroom that morning, Larson didn’t see a suicide note. Jordan had no history of unhappiness or mental illness. His bag was packed with swimsuits and sunscreen, ready for Florida. The alarm on his phone kept going off. Everything Larson could see indicated that when Jordan got into bed, he intended to wake up.
Jordan’s bedroom at his mother’s house in Marquette, Michigan. Photographer: Kevin Serna for Bloomberg Businessweek
A jersey worn by Jordan. Photographer: Kevin Serna for Bloomberg Businessweek
Jennifer Buta, Jordan’s mother, in his bedroom. Photographer: Kevin Serna for Bloomberg Businessweek
Kyla Palomaki was in class but couldn’t concentrate. Text messages to her boyfriend weren’t going through. She kept rereading Jordan’s last cryptic message, sent at 3:30 a.m.: “Kyla, I love you so much. I made a mistake and wish I could continue but I can’t do this anymore. This was a choice I made and I must pay myself.”
Jordan had left her house at about 10 the night before. What mistake could he possibly have made in the early morning hours? He hadn’t replied to three phone calls and eight text messages, including her last one that just said “JORDAN!” The only message she’d received about Jordan that morning was from his mom, Jennifer Buta, asking whether he was in school—which seemed odd.
She was sitting in her second-period class, watching a movie she couldn’t care less about. Kyla, an A student who goes to church every Sunday, was instead staring at her phone, willing Jordan to reply. She recalls that at this point her unease was giving way to fear.
When the school administrator knocked on the classroom door, Kyla prayed that her name wouldn’t be called. It was. The administrator wouldn’t answer any of her questions on the one-minute walk to the principal’s office or even look her in the eye. When she saw her mom and dad inside the office crying, she melted to the floor. “No, no, no, no!” she screamed.
The next student pulled from class was Justin Jurmu. His dad was sitting stone-faced in the assistant principal’s office, waiting for him, they both recall. “Jordan’s gone, buddy,” Justin’s father said softly. “He shot himself last night.”
Jordan had been Justin’s best friend since they were 8. “There’s no way, Dad,” he said. “There is zero chance Jordan is gone.” For 10 minutes, he shook his head, growing increasingly agitated.
Then he saw Kyla leaving the school, propped up by her parents. He watched her collapse, shoulders heaving. Her dad scooped her up and folded her into the back seat of his car. Justin howled.
Everyone in the school knew Jordan. He was the guy everybody was jealous of, the one who picked up a hockey stick and just knew how to play. He danced in the hallways between classes, headphones plugged in, blasting rap music. He had a big ego and wasn’t afraid to admit it. “Jeez, how can one young man be so happy all the time?” his football coach, Eric Mason, asked Jordan a week earlier. “That’s just the way I am, Coach,” Jordan chimed back.
The Marquette Senior High School football field where Jordan played. Photographer: Kevin Serna for Bloomberg Businessweek
Marquette is a city of 20,000 where front doors are rarely locked and stolen mountain bikes make the news. Nothing stays secret for long. The school administrator who escorted Kyla to the principal’s office is also her next-door neighbor. Kyla’s dad attended high school with Detective Larson’s sister and now works at the local bank where John DeMay is a client.
Kyla’s parents had been high school sweethearts. They had married and had children young. Kyla and Jordan talked about doing the same. Jordan started attending church with her family and scrapped plans to seek a basketball scholarship at an out-of-state school. He applied to Northern Michigan University in Marquette, where Kyla was planning to go.
For their one-year anniversary, he asked his mom for Kohl’s cash to buy Kyla a promise ring. On her 18th birthday card, he wrote: “I want to spend the rest of my life with you. You would be such an amazing wife, mother, grandma, everything, and I cannot wait for those days to come.” He wore hair ties around his wrist in case she needed to pull her wavy blond hair into a ponytail. He was wearing one when he died.
Kyla’s phone wouldn’t stop vibrating. People were messaging her, asking if it was true that Jordan was dead. Rumors were spreading that Kyla had dumped him and that’s why he killed himself. She decided to get out of the house. That afternoon, she and a friend drove to Presque Isle Park, where Kyla and Jordan would go to watch the sun set. They parked at the end of the road, facing the lake, and tried to reckon with what had happened.
Kyla Palomaki, Jordan’s girlfriend, looks at his Instagram profile. Photographer: Kevin Serna for Bloomberg Businessweek
Kyla under a photo of the couple in her bedroom. Photographer: Kevin Serna for Bloomberg Businessweek
As Kyla fixated on the last text Jordan had sent her, new Instagram messages kept popping up. Strangers were finding her account because Jordan’s public Instagram profile looked like a tribute to her. Half of his photos were of the two of them together, kissing, cuddling, dancing at prom.
One message was from someone named Dani Robertts. The message contained no words, just a photo of Jordan exposing himself in his bathroom mirror.
Kyla stopped breathing. This was the first nude photo of Jordan she’d ever seen. He was wearing the red, white and pink plaid pajama bottoms that matched her own and the T-shirt he’d had on when he left her house. She looked at the time stamp: 3:30 a.m.
This must be the mistake he was talking about. “I need you to drop me home now,” she told her friend. Then she replied to Dani Robertts.
Kyla:What is this about?
Dani:Do you know him?
Kyla:Do you?
Dani:Answer me
Kyla:Who are you?
Dani:I bet you know him.
Kyla:That’s my boyfriend why
Dani:I swear I will ruin his life with this
Kyla:He killed himself last night. Please don’t
Dani:Do you want me to ruin his life?
Kyla:He’s gone. No
Dani:Do you want me to ruin his life? Yes or no
Kyla:He’s already ruined. Wdym
Dani:He his **\[*sic*\]** going to be in jail
Kyla:HES DEAD
Dani:And this will go viral
Kyla:HE SHOT HIMSELF
Dani:Haha.
Do you want me to end this. And delete the pics?
Yes or no....
Cooperate with me and this will end...
Just do as I say and all this will end.
Dani started video-calling Kyla on repeat. Kyla ran to her parents. “Something happened last night,” she sobbed. “Someone has a nude picture of Jordan.”
By the time word of the nude selfie got to Larson, it was late that Friday night. He immediately called Kyla. She told him about her message exchange with Dani Robertts, and Larson asked her for screenshots so he could investigate. He hung up at 10 p.m., ending a 15-hour shift, but at least now he was one step closer to the “why.”
First thing Saturday, he drove to the sheriff’s office. It was his day off, but he had to file a preservation request with Meta for all records associated with the Jordan DeMay and Dani Robertts accounts.
Meta has a [portal for police](https://about.meta.com/actions/safety/audiences/law/guidelines) to file requests to preserve records of accounts connected to criminal investigations. Like other social media companies, it has to hold the records—including emails, IP addresses, message transcripts and general usage history—for 90 days. It only hands over user data if it’s ordered to do so by a court.
There’s one way to expedite the request: file it as an emergency, meaning a child could be harmed or there’s risk of death. Larson believed this case qualified. He told Meta that a 17-year-old was already dead, and there was a high probability other kids were in danger, too.
Meta declined his request within an hour, he says. “The request you submitted does not rise to the level of an emergency,” the company responded.
Jordan’s tombstone in Marquette. Photographer: Kevin Serna for Bloomberg Businessweek
“Screw you,” Larson thought. He drafted an affidavit and looked up the county magistrate who was on call that weekend. He asked her to sign a search warrant and a nondisclosure order so Larson could gain access to Dani Robertts’ records without alerting whoever was using the account that an investigation was underway. Larson got the signed documents back later that day and forwarded them to Meta. Then he waited.
“I was helpless,” Larson says. “I was at their mercy.” (A Meta spokesperson declined to answer *Bloomberg Businessweek*’s questions about the matter.)
The following night, as Larson was getting into bed, he received a notification that the judge-ordered report from Meta was ready. The five-hour message exchange between Dani Robertts and Jordan DeMay was worse than he could have imagined. He read it twice, adrenaline pumping at the brazenness of the blackmailer.
“I will watch you die a miserable death.”
Larson had found his why. His next question was who. It was clear to him that the messages had not been written by a teenage girl.
The Dani Robertts Instagram account records contained a clue: time-stamped IP addresses—a unique set of numbers that identifies a specific device on the internet. Larson plugged them into a geolocation tool, and it kicked back latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. Whoever was running the Dani Robertts account was based in Lagos, Nigeria.
Larson called a friend, an agent in the FBI’s Marquette field office. “You got a minute?” Larson said. “I might need some help.”
Lowell Larson, an avid hunter-trapper, says he applies the same skills to his detective work by thinking about behavior patterns of his prey. Photographer: Kevin Serna for Bloomberg Businessweek
That day, Jordan’s red iPhone XR was dropped off at the Michigan State Police Computer Crimes Unit in Marquette. Ryan Frazier, a digital forensics analyst who’d been on the force 10 months, opened the sealed evidence bag. He’d already heard about Jordan’s death and recognized his name. He’d played for the same high school football team a few years earlier.
Frazier needed a four-digit passcode to unlock the device. He tried Jordan’s birthday and those of his four younger sisters and his girlfriend. Then he called Jordan’s basketball and football coaches to ask about his jersey numbers. He wore 05 on the court and 02 on the field. Bingo. The device unlocked.
Frazier was able to extract a full file system from the phone until the moment of Jordan’s death. It was a digital footprint of Jordan’s usage history, including what applications were active, what time they were opened, what messages he sent and when. Frazier returned the iPhone to the sheriff’s office the next day along with his report.
Larson noticed there was no message history with Dani Robertts. Jordan had deleted the conversation before he killed himself. The last activity on the phone was his 3:30 a.m. message to Kyla and one he sent to his mom: “Mother, I love you.”
Recounting the specifics, Larson’s bottom lip starts to quiver. An imposing figure with a buzz cut, he asks to pause the interview, gets up from his desk, adjusts his holster and walks to the back of his office, looking for a tissue. “This case,” he mumbles under his breath, “it’s haunting.”
A memorial page dedicated to Jordan in the Marquette Senior High School yearbook. Photographer: Kevin Serna for Bloomberg Businessweek
By mid-2022 sextortion was dominating NCMEC’s [cybertip report line](https://www.missingkids.org/gethelpnow/cybertipline). In June the center summoned social media companies to an urgent meeting to warn them about the scam. More than 50 people joined the call, including representatives from Meta, Snap and TikTok.
NCMEC’s Coffren says she described the targets, the motives and the mechanics of the crime, warning that some teenage boys had already killed themselves. “We need you to take action. Fast.”
The month after the call, the 17-year-old son of [Brandon Guffey](https://www.scstatehouse.gov/member.php?code=0730681731), a Republican South Carolina state representative, received an Instagram message late on a Tuesday night. “Your cute,” it said. The message was from a biracial girl wearing a crop top in her profile photo. Her bio said she was a freshman at a nearby college.
Gavin Guffey was in his bedroom playing video games with friends online. He told them he was going to drop off to chat with a girl. It didn’t take long for the conversation to turn risqué. She sent a sexy photo and asked for one in return. When he complied, she threatened to forward it to everyone he was friends with on Instagram unless he sent her money. He paid $25 via Venmo. It wasn’t enough. Around 1 a.m. she sent a mock-up of a news story with his photo and the headline “Gavin Guffey Caught Sending Nudes on the Internet.”
Brandon Guffey, a South Carolina state representative, at a Senate hearing in January holding a portrait of his son Gavin. Photographer: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc./Getty Images
According to his father, who’s seen a transcript of the conversation, Gavin wrote back that he was going to end his life if the photos came out. Less than an hour later, he did.
His father, who had just returned from a political event, heard a shot from inside the bathroom and kicked down the door. His son was already gone.
A few days later, while planning Gavin’s funeral, Guffey got a call from an aunt who shares the same last name. She said her 14-year-old son had been contacted online by someone claiming to be Gavin’s girlfriend, saying dangerous people were blackmailing her over nude photos of Gavin. She said they were going to ruin her life if she didn’t pay them $2,000.
When Guffey opened his own Instagram account, he found a similar message. “She said she needed to talk to me right away and that she was going to ruin my political career,” Guffey says.
A month later, in August 2022, Guffey was in Myrtle Beach with his wife to mark what would have been Gavin’s 18th birthday. He was sitting on the back deck of a family member’s condo with a glass of bourbon, smoking a cigarette, when a WhatsApp message from a random number flashed on his screen. It said: “Did you know your son begged for his life 😂”.
Guffey snapped. “I will f---ing end you,” he replied. A back-and-forth between Guffey and the scammer ensued, lasting for hours. They sent him photos of his house from Google Street View, threatening to break in. He invited them to do so: “I will kill you with my bare hands.” In the end, the scammer told Guffey he was sorry about what had happened to his son and said he’d been hired by a political opponent. No arrests have been made, but Guffey says an FBI investigation is ongoing. The FBI didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Since sharing the story of his son’s death, Guffey says he no longer silences his phone at night. That isn’t for the blackmailers; it’s for their victims. He says he’s received about 200 calls from teens, usually between midnight and 3 a.m.: “I’ll answer, and they’ll say, ‘Mr. Guffey, what happened to Gavin is happening to me. Please help!’ ”
By early 2023, FBI agents in Michigan were homing in on an apartment complex in Lagos. Social media records and email addresses obtained from Apple, Google and Meta linked two brothers who lived there to the crime. Buried inside their Gmail and iCloud accounts, FBI agents found evidence that Samuel and Samson Ogoshi, 22 and 20, respectively, had bought hacked Instagram accounts, including the one being used by the fictitious Dani Robertts. They had 12 photos including the profile picture of the account’s original owner, a teenage girl who hasn’t been identified, as well as the nude photo of Jordan DeMay and the Photoshopped collage sent to torment him. Their emails contained a word-for-word script of what was in the messages sent to Jordan the night he died.
The FBI found evidence that the brothers had used the Dani Robertts account to message Jordan and target more than 100 other victims in the US, according to court records. On the same day Jordan died, they were messaging another victim in Warrens, Wisconsin, threatening to “make u commit suicide.”
The agents also found an incriminating Google search history that included “Instagram blackmail death,” “Michigan suicide,” “how to hide my IP address without VPN?” and “how can FBI track my IP from another country.”
The Ogoshi brothers were arrested by Nigerian authorities in January 2023. Court records show they come from a middle-class family. Their father is a retired member of the military, and their mother runs a small business selling soft drinks in their apartment complex. The boys grew up attending church, singing in the choir and playing soccer with neighborhood friends. The older brother, Samuel, was studying sociology at Nasarawa State University, while Samson was training to be a cobbler.
In August the brothers left Nigeria for the first time, escorted by the FBI. They were [extradited to Grand Rapids](https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdmi/pr/2023_0813_Two_Nigerian_Men_Extradited_To_The_United_States), Michigan, to face federal charges in connection with the death of Jordan DeMay. A third defendant, Ezekiel Robert, has been arrested and is appealing a Nigerian extradition order.
The FBI says the Ogoshi brothers and Robert worked with three unnamed co-conspirators, according to court documents. They bought the hacked Instagram account from one and got the victims to pay a US-based money mule, someone who converted the payment into cryptocurrency before sending it to another co-conspirator in Nigeria. The Ogoshi brothers told the FBI they received only a portion of the money they extorted.
During the brothers’ extradition proceedings, the US government promised it wouldn’t seek the death penalty. On April 10 they [pleaded guilty](https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdmi/pr/2024_0410_Ogoshi_Plea) to conspiring to sexually exploit teenage boys and face mandatory sentences of 15 years in prison. The maximum possible penalty is 30 years. Their attorneys didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In the meantime, they are being held in a county jail in White Cloud, Michigan, about an hour north of Grand Rapids and 6,000 miles from Lagos. They haven’t been allowed to speak to each other. For entertainment, they have playing cards, books and a communal TV. They get one hour of recreation a day in a small outdoor courtyard.
One morning in February, as icicles hung from the barbed wire, Samson Ogoshi opted to stay inside. Wearing open-toe sandals and white socks, his orange jumpsuit pants rolled up above his ankles, he did squats with other inmates in a communal day room as a *Businessweek* reporter watched on a security camera. With snow piling up knee-deep in the courtyard, Ogoshi must have felt out of place, says the county sheriff, who’s in charge of the jail; he’d probably never seen snow before.
In November another Nigerian, Olamide Oladosu Shanu, was indicted for running a similar sextortion ring that received more than $2.5 million in Bitcoin from victims. The US Secret Service spent months investigating Shanu, who allegedly worked with four co-conspirators to hack social media accounts of teenage girls in the US and persuade teenage boys to send nude photos and videos of themselves, according to a 21-page indictment filed in federal court in Idaho.
The Ogoshi and Shanu alleged crime rings are the modus operandi of [Nigeria’s Yahoo Boys](https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/Yahoo-Boys_1.2.24.pdf), according to a January report written by Paul Raffile, an analyst at the Network Contagion Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. Nicknamed after the Yahoo.com emails they used to swindle thousands of unsuspecting Westerners into sending money, often posing as Nigerian princes, the Yahoo Boys are a group of digitally savvy con men who design new scams and encourage others to copy them.
Raffile found hundreds of instructional videos on TikTok and YouTube about how to blackmail teens. They were posted by young men in Nigeria who used the hashtags `#YahooBoysFormat` and `#BlackmailFormat`. The how-to guides advised targeting, or “bombing,” American high schools and sports teams to make friends with as many kids as possible from the same community. One of Jordan’s football teammates was a mutual friend of Dani Robertts’, which made her account appear legitimate.
Raffile says he started studying sextortion last year after a friend was blackmailed and asked for help. He read victims’ stories in news reports, Reddit forums and social media posts and was struck by the similarities of their experiences, especially when it came to the blackmail script. “There was some mystery to this,” Raffile says, “like invisible organized crime.”
The Yahoo Boys videos provided guidance on how to sound like an American girl (“I’m from Massachusetts. I just saw you on my friend’s suggestion and decided to follow you. I love reading, chilling with my friends and tennis”). They offered suggestions for how to keep the conversation flowing, how to turn it flirtatious and how to coerce the victim into sending a nude photo (“Pic exchange but with conditions”). Those conditions often included instructions that boys hold their genitals while “making a cute face” or take a photo in a mirror, face included.
Once that first nude image is sent, the script says, the game begins. “NOW BLACKMAIL 😀!!” it tells the scammer, advising they start with “hey, I have ur nudes and everything needed to ruin your life” or “hey this is the end of your life I am sending nudes to the world now.” Some of the blackmail scripts Raffile found had been viewed more than half a million times. One, called “Blackmailing format,” was uploaded to YouTube in September 2022 and got thousands of views. It included the same script that was sent to Jordan DeMay—down to the typos.
While YouTube and TikTok are the preferred platforms for how-to videos, the extortion typically happens on Instagram or Snapchat, according to Raffile’s report. Instagram contains extensive personal information blackmailers can use to torment victims, including their location, school and friends. Snap’s disappearing messages give users a false sense of security that their images aren’t being saved. Both companies say they have zero tolerance for this crime and have vowed to do more to protect their users.
Snap has been “ramping up our tools to combat” sextortion, a company spokesperson says. “We have extra safeguards for teens to protect against unwanted contact and don’t offer public friend lists, which we know can be used to extort people.”
Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, said in an emailed statement that sextortion “is a horrific crime, and we’ve spent years building technology to combat it and to support law enforcement in investigating and prosecuting the criminals behind it.” She said scammers keep changing their tactics, but the company tracks new trends “so we can regularly improve our tools and systems.”
Meta says it’s using artificial intelligence to detect suspicious activity on the platform and to blur nudity and is now showing teens a sextortion-focused safety notice if they message with a suspicious account. And it has helped run a training session in Abuja, Nigeria, to educate law enforcement and prosecutors there. Meta is also a founding member of [Take It Down](https://takeitdown.ncmec.org/), an initiative launched by NCMEC last year for teens to flag intimate images and block them from being shared across social media.
Raffile says none of the companies contacted him after his report was published and before *Businessweek* made inquiries. Social media companies “could have curbed this crime from the beginning,” he says. “It’s a disastrous intelligence failure that over the past 18 months all these deaths and all this trauma was preventable with sufficient moderation.”
John DeMay at his home in Marquette. Photographer: Kevin Serna for Bloomberg Businessweek
In January, Jordan’s parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit in a California state court accusing Meta of enabling and facilitating the crime. That month, John DeMay flew to Washington to attend the [congressional hearing with social media executives](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/meta-x-tiktok-ceos-face-us-senate-on-protecting-kids-online?srnd=premium&sref=2o0rZsF1 "Meta, X, TikTok CEOs Ripped by Senators Over Child Safety"). He sat in the gallery holding a picture of Jordan smiling in his red football jersey.
The DeMay case has been combined with more than 100 others in a group lawsuit in Los Angeles that alleges social media companies have [harmed children by designing addictive products](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-26/suing-social-media-lawsuits-aim-to-make-platforms-safer-for-kids "Suing Social Media: Lawsuits Aim to Make Platforms Safer for Kids"). The cases involve content sent to vulnerable teens about eating disorders, suicide and dangerous challenges leading to accidental deaths, as well as sextortion.
“The way these products are designed is what gives rise to these opportunistic murderers,” says Matthew Bergman, founder of the Seattle-based [Social Media Victims Law Center](https://socialmediavictims.org/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=17676029706&utm_content=137273494926&utm_term=social%20media%20victims%20law%20center&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwt-OwBhBnEiwAgwzrUsET_TvD0Mwf5c6KbGBNRqzJ8OKsTks-SCnImsCn1yIN2hupBcJjhxoC5XYQAvD_BwE), who’s representing Jordan’s parents. “They are able to exploit adolescent psychology, and they leverage Meta’s technology to do so.”
Bergman also represents a family from Arizona whose 14-year-old son was blackmailed after sending nudes. And Guffey, the South Carolina lawmaker, filed his own wrongful death case against Meta. A spokeswoman for Meta says the company can’t respond to questions about these cases because litigation is pending.
The lawsuits face a significant hurdle: overcoming [Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-18/what-is-section-230-how-online-speech-is-moderated-in-us "What Is Section 230? How Online Speech Is Moderated in US"). This liability shield has long protected social media platforms from being held accountable for content posted on their sites by third parties. If Bergman’s product liability argument fails, Instagram won’t be held responsible for what the Ogoshi brothers said to Jordan DeMay.
Regardless of the legal outcome, Jordan’s parents want Meta to face the court of public opinion. “This isn’t my story, it’s his,” John DeMay says. “But unfortunately, we are the chosen ones to tell it. And I am going to keep telling it. When Mark Zuckerberg lays on his pillow at night, I guarantee he knows Jordan DeMay’s name. And if he doesn’t yet, he’s gonna.”
Presque Isle Park, overlooking Lake Superior, where Kyla and Jordan would go to watch the sun set. Photographer: Kevin Serna for Bloomberg Businessweek
@ -63,11 +63,6 @@ For this story, the Sunday Long Read spoke with family, friends, and associates
Six years passed after Bayani was arrested by the IRGC. Apart from a five-day period [when she was released on furlough](https://council.science/current/blog/un-international-day-of-solidarity-bayani/), she spent the entire time behind bars.
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##### **Act I: “If only we had known what was to come”**
# The Fake Fake-News Problem and the Truth About Misinformation
Millions of people have watched Mike Hughes die. It happened on February 22, 2020, not far from Highway 247 near the Mojave Desert city of Barstow, California. A homemade rocket ship with Hughes strapped in it took off from a launching pad mounted on a truck. A trail of steam billowed behind the rocket as it swerved and then shot upward, a detached parachute unfurling ominously in its wake. In a video recorded by the journalist Justin Chapman, Hughes disappears into the sky, a dark pinpoint in a vast, uncaring blueness. But then the rocket reappears and hurtles toward the ground, crashing, after ten long seconds, in a dusty cloud half a mile away.
Hughes was among the best-known proponents of [Flat Earth theory](https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/looking-for-life-on-a-flat-earth), which insists that our planet is not spherical but a Frisbee-like disk. He had built and flown in two rockets before, one in 2014 and another in 2018, and he planned to construct a “rockoon,” a combination rocket and balloon, that would carry him above the upper atmosphere, where he could see the Earth’s flatness for himself. The 2020 takeoff, staged for the Science Channel series “Homemade Astronauts,” was supposed to take him a mile up—not high enough to see the Earth’s curvature but hypeworthy enough to garner more funding and attention.
Flat Earth theory may sound like one of those deliberately far-fetched satires, akin to Birds Aren’t Real, but it has become a cultic subject for anti-scientific conspiratorialists, growing entangled with movements such as [QAnon](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/qanon) and *COVID*\-19 skepticism. In “[Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything](https://www.amazon.com/Off-Edge-Earthers-Conspiracy-Anything/dp/1643750682/)” (Algonquin), the former Daily Beast reporter Kelly Weill writes that the tragedy awakened her to the sincerity of Flat Earthers’ convictions. After investigating the Flat Earth scene and following Hughes, she had figured that, “on some subconscious level,” Hughes knew the Earth wasn’t flat. His death set her straight: “I was wrong. Flat Earthers are as serious as your life.”
Weill isn’t the only one to fear the effects of false information. In January, the World Economic Forum released a report showing that fourteen hundred and ninety international experts rated “misinformation and disinformation” the leading global risk of the next two years, surpassing war, migration, and climatic catastrophe. A stack of new books echoes their concerns. In “[Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop It](https://www.amazon.com/Falsehoods-Fly-Misinformation-Spreads-Stop/dp/0231213956/)” (Columbia), Paul Thagard, a philosopher at the University of Waterloo, writes that “misinformation is threatening medicine, science, politics, social justice, and international relations, affecting problems such as vaccine hesitancy, climate change denial, conspiracy theories, claims of racial inferiority, and the Russian invasion of [Ukraine](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/ukraine).” In “[Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity](https://www.amazon.com/Foolproof-Misinformation-Infects-Minds-Immunity/dp/039388144X/)” (Norton), Sander van der Linden, a social-psychology professor at Cambridge, warns that “viruses of the mind” disseminated by false tweets and misleading headlines pose “serious threats to the integrity of elections and democracies worldwide.” Or, as the M.I.T. political scientist AdamJ. Berinsky puts it in “[Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It](https://www.amazon.com/Political-Rumors-Misinformation-Princeton-Behavior/dp/069115838X/)” (Princeton), “a democracy where falsehoods run rampant can only result in dysfunction.”
Most Americans seem to agree with these theorists of human credulity. Following the 2020 Presidential race, sixty per cent thought that misinformation had a major impact on the outcome, and, to judge from a recent survey, even more believe that artificial intelligence will exacerbate the problem in this year’s contest. The Trump and the DeSantis campaigns both used [deepfakes](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/a-history-of-fake-things-on-the-internet-walter-j-scheirer-book-review) to sully their rivals. Although they justified the fabrications as transparent parodies, some experts anticipate a “tsunami of misinformation,” in the words of Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington and the first C.E.O. of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “The ingredients are there, and I am completely terrified,” he told the Associated Press.
The fear of misinformation hinges on assumptions about human suggestibility. “Misinformation, conspiracy theories, and other dangerous ideas, latch on to the brain and insert themselves deep into our consciousness,” van der Linden writes in “Foolproof.” “They infiltrate our thoughts, feelings, and even our memories.” Thagard puts it more plainly: “People have a natural tendency to believe what they hear or read, which amounts to gullibility.”
But do the credulity theorists have the right account of what’s going on? Folks like Mike Hughes aren’t gullible in the sense that they’ll believe anything. They seem to reject scientific consensus, after all. Partisans of other well-known conspiracies (the government is run by lizard people; a cabal of high-level pedophilic Democrats operates out of a neighborhood pizza parlor) are insusceptible to the assurances of the mainstream media. Have we been misinformed about the power of misinformation?
In 2006, more than five hundred skeptics met at an Embassy Suites hotel near O’Hare Airport, in Chicago, to discuss conspiracy. They listened to presentations on mass hypnosis, the melting point of steel, and how to survive the collapse of the existing world order. They called themselves many things, including “truth activists” and “9/11 skeptics,” although the name that would stick, and which observers would use for years afterward, was Truthers.
The Truthers held that the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were masterminded by the White House to expand government power and enable military and security industries to profit from the war on terror. According to an explanation posted by 911truth.org, a group that helped sponsor the conference, [GeorgeW. Bush](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/george-w-bush) and his allies gagged and intimidated whistle-blowers, mailed anthrax to opponents in the Senate, and knowingly poisoned the inhabitants of lower Manhattan. On that basis, Truthers concluded, “the administration does consider the lives of American citizens to be expendable on behalf of certain interests.”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a23905)
“Out of this dispute, a clear leader will emerge.”
Cartoon by Frank Cotham
The Truthers, in short, maintained that the government had gone to extreme measures, including killing thousands of its own citizens, in order to carry out and cover up a conspiracy. And yet the same Truthers advertised the conference online and met in a place where they could easily be surveilled. Speakers’ names were posted on the Internet along with videos, photographs, and short bios. The organizers created a publicly accessible forum to discuss next steps, and a couple of attendees spoke to a reporter from the *Times*, despite the mainstream media’s ostensible complicity in the coverup. By the logic of their own theories, the Truthers were setting themselves up for assassination.
Their behavior demonstrates a paradox of belief. Action is supposed to follow belief, and yet beliefs, even fervently espoused ones, sometimes exist in their own cognitive cage, with little influence over behavior. Take the “Pizzagate” story, in which Hillary Clinton and her allies ran a child sex ring from the basement of a D.C. pizzeria. In the months surrounding the 2016 Presidential election, a staggering number of Americans—millions, by some estimates—endorsed the account, and, in December of that year, a North Carolina man charged into the restaurant, carrying an assault rifle. Van der Linden and Berinsky both use the incident as evidence of misinformation’s violent implications. But they’re missing the point: what’s really striking is how anomalous that act was. The pizzeria received menacing phone calls, even death threats, but the most common response from believers, aside from liking posts, seems to have been leaving negative Yelp reviews.
That certain deeply held beliefs seem insulated from other inferences isn’t peculiar to conspiracy theorists; it’s the experience of regular churchgoers. Catholics maintain that the Sacrament is the body of Christ, yet no one expects the bread to taste like raw flesh or accuses fellow-parishioners of cannibalism. In “[How God Becomes Real](https://www.amazon.com/How-God-Becomes-Real-Invisible/dp/0691164460/)” (2020), the Stanford anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann recounts evangelical Christians’ frustrations with their own beliefs. They thought less about God when they were not in church. They confessed to not praying. “I remember a man weeping in front of a church over not having sufficient faith that God would replace the job he had lost,” Luhrmann writes. The paradox of belief is one of Christianity’s “clearest” messages, she observes: “You may think you believe in God, but really you don’t. You don’t take God seriously enough. You don’t act as if he’s there.” It’s right out of Mark 9:24: “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”
The paradox of belief has been the subject of scholarly investigation; puzzling it out promises new insights about the human psyche. Some of the most influential work has been by the French philosopher and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber. Born into a Jewish family in France in 1942, during the Nazi Occupation, Sperber was smuggled to Switzerland when he was three months old. His parents returned to France three years later, and raised him as an atheist while imparting a respect for all religious-minded people, including his Hasidic Jewish ancestors.
The exercise of finding rationality in the seemingly irrational became an academic focus for Sperber in the nineteen-seventies. Staying with the Dorze people in southern Ethiopia, he noticed that they made assertions that they seemed both to believe and not to believe. People told him, for example, that “the leopard is a Christian animal who observes the fasts of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.” Nevertheless, the average Dorze man guarded his livestock on fast days just as much as on other days. “Not because he suspects some leopards of being bad Christians,” Sperber wrote, “but because he takes it as true both that leopards fast and that they are always dangerous.”
Sperber concluded that there are two kinds of beliefs. The first he has called “factual” beliefs. Factual beliefs—such as the belief that chairs exist and that leopards are dangerous—guide behavior and tolerate little inconsistency; you can’t believe that leopards do and do not eat livestock. The second category he has called “symbolic” beliefs. These beliefs might feel genuine, but they’re cordoned off from action and expectation. We are, in turn, much more accepting of inconsistency when it comes to symbolic beliefs; we can believe, say, that God is all-powerful and good while allowing for the existence of evil and suffering.
In a masterly new book, “[Religion as Make-Believe](https://www.amazon.com/Religion-Make-Believe-Theory-Imagination-Identity/dp/067429033X/)” (Harvard), Neil Van Leeuwen, a philosopher at Georgia State University, returns to Sperber’s ideas with notable rigor. He analyzes beliefs with a taxonomist’s care, classifying different types and identifying the properties that distinguish them. He proposes that humans represent and use factual beliefs differently from symbolic beliefs, which he terms “credences.” Factual beliefs are for modelling reality and behaving optimally within it. Because of their function in guiding action, they exhibit features like “involuntariness” (you can’t decide to adopt them) and “evidential vulnerability” (they respond to evidence). Symbolic beliefs, meanwhile, largely serve social ends, not epistemic ones, so we can hold them even in the face of contradictory evidence.
# The Family Photographs That Helped Us Investigate How a University Displaced a Black Community
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James and Barbara Johnson flip through a book of their memories. They arrive at a photograph Mr. Johnson snapped as a surprise: a photograph of the long-married couple’s first kiss.
Even after all this time, Barbara Johnson quietly says to herself, “I don’t know how he did that.”
James Johnson kept this selfie of his and Barbara’s first kiss. Credit: Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO. Original photograph by James Johnson.
The Johnsons are the center of a short documentary ProPublica released last year. The documentary, “Uprooted,” is part of an investigative project reported by Brandi Kellam and Louis Hansen, [both of the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO](https://vcij.org/), in partnership with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network and co-published by the Chronicle for Higher Education and Essence. The investigation examines [a Black community’s decadeslong battle to hold on to its land](https://www.propublica.org/series/uprooted) as city officials wielded eminent domain to establish and expand Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia.
Now in his 80s, James Johnson has spent decades chronicling through photographs the life of a neighborhood that for the past several decades he’s watched disappear. The Johnsons live in one of five remaining homes of what was once a flourishing middle-class Black community, with roots that extend to the late 1800s. James Johnson’s grandfather, in 1907, purchased slightly more than 30 acres of land in what’s called the Shoe Lane area.
Mother and daughter Ellen Williams Francis and Mannie Francis Johnson Credit: Courtesy of James Johnson
Eventually, the Shoe Lane community expanded from mostly a community of farmers and laborers to a growing middle-class community including dentists, teachers and a NASA engineer in 1960. This was during a time when racial segregation was a legal pillar of American society, and all-white communities, including the then-all-white Christopher Newport University, enjoyed systematized benefits not afforded to Black people.
Johnson and his son during the home’s construction in September 1964 Credit: Courtesy of James Johnson
As Brandi reported, the 110-acre Shoe Lane area was adjacent to one of the city of Newport News’ most affluent white neighborhoods. So, when the Johnsons made it known they intended to subdivide more of their 30 acres to help provide Black families with opportunities for homeownership, the all-white City Council perceived it as a threat. Like many localities in midcentury America, the Newport News City Council had [weaponized urban renewal against Black people](https://www.propublica.org/article/these-virginia-universities-expanded-by-displacing-black-residents) to maintain racial segregation and the illusion of white superiority.
Brandi found that in 1961, the city used eminent domain to “seize the core of the Shoe Lane area, including the Johnsons’ farmland, for a new public two-year college — a branch of the Colleges of William and Mary system.” That college eventually became Christopher Newport University.
The Johnsons raised three children in their Shoe Lane home. Credit: Courtesy of James Johnson
At the time, the university and City Council all but ignored the community’s protests. Instead, the narrative conveyed by the white newspaper was that the Black people of Shoe Lane were against the university because they were anti-education.
For a story that for so long had been told wrong, Brandi saw an opportunity for her reporting to get the story right.
Watch “Uprooted: What a Black Community Lost When a Virginia University Grew”
As bulldozers and trucks filed into Shoe Lane over various waves of university expansion, James Johnson turned to his camera to preserve what he could. His photographs became evidence Brandi relied on in her reporting. While investigative reporters often use Freedom of Information Act requests and government data to document the past, Johnson’s personal archive told the story of what happened to Shoe Lane better than the official records.
After homes are demolished, trucks haul away the debris. Credit: Courtesy of James Johnson
“I just started knocking on doors,” Brandi told me of how her reporting began two years ago. “The person who opened the door for me was Mrs. Johnson.”
When Brandi eventually met James Johnson, she sat with him for hours. She said she let him teach her what happened; she absorbed the history like a sponge.
“He just started opening up these notebooks,” recalled Brandi. “I almost fainted.”
He had kept the original deeds to the land his grandfather bought. He printed out parcel data that was no longer publicly available. He had photographed the front of dozens of homes that no longer existed, writing on sticky notes captions that could only hint at the emotional weight they carried to a community as it was systematically dismantled.
“He collected this not because he was looking for someone to tell the story,” said Brandi. “He did it because he was deeply hurt by what happened to his community.”
What Johnson’s archive documented was, in one light, a story of loss. But, said Brandi, his documenting was also an act of love.
A wedding in the Johnsons’ backyard Credit: Courtesy of James Johnson
His photographs of his own family and of the community depict lifetimes of what the people of Shoe Lane had earned and experienced for themselves. Today, the Johnsons’ home — the one they built with their own hands — is only one of five remaining. The university’s updated site plan calls for acquiring the last houses in the neighborhood by 2030, Brandi reported.
Barbara and James Johnson sit in their living room in July. They helped build the home on family property almost 60 years ago. Credit: Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO
But, for the first time, the university is publicly reckoning with the damage it’s caused to the Shoe Lane area. In January, the university [announced its launch of a joint task force with the city of Newport News](https://www.propublica.org/article/christopher-newport-university-black-community-uprooted-task-force) to reexamine decades of records regarding the neighborhood’s destruction. It may also recommend possible redress for those uprooted families. That reckoning is because of Brandi’s reporting and the accountability lens she’s brought to the story of Shoe Lane. But, Brandi said, her work is building on James Johnson’s project of making sure people don’t forget about Shoe Lane.
The investigation has also prompted attention from Virginia lawmakers, who’ve [approved a commission to examine universities’ displacement of Black communities](https://www.propublica.org/article/virginia-commission-investigate-black-community-displacement-universities). That commission would consider compensation for dislodged property owners and their descendants.
@ -35,9 +35,6 @@ One year matters more than any other for understanding the Israeli-Palestinian c
If 1948 was the beginning of an era, it was also the end of one — the period following World War I, when the West carved up the Middle East and a series of decisions planted the seeds of conflict. To understand the continuing clashes, we went back to explore the twists and turns that led to 1948. This path could begin at any number of moments; we chose as the starting point 1920, when the [British mandate for Palestine](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/palmanda.asp) was established.
The Old City in Jerusalem in the early 1900s.
Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress
In the time of the British mandate, Jews and Palestinians, and Western and Arab powers, made fundamental choices that set the groundwork for the suffering and irresolution of today. Along the way, there were many opportunities for events to play out differently. We asked a panel of historians — three Palestinians, two Israelis and a Canadian American — to talk about the decisive moments leading up to the founding of Israel and the displacement of Palestinians and whether a different outcome could have been possible.
@ -62,7 +62,7 @@ This is a world in which the soft art of self-care is made concrete, in which Go
The wayward son would devote himself to therapy and also to science. He would turn Rancid all the way up and study all night long. He would be tenured at Stanford with his own lab, severing optic nerves in mice and noting what grew back.
Huberman has been in therapy, he says, since high school. He has, in fact, several therapists, and psychiatrist Paul Conti appears on his podcast frequently to discuss mental health. Therapy is “hard work … like going to the gym and doing an effective workout.” The brain is a machine that needs tending. Our cells will benefit from the careful management of stress. “I love *mechanism,*” says Huberman; our feelings are integral to the apparatus. There are Huberman Husbands (men who optimize), a phenomenon not to be confused with #DaddyHuberman (used by women on TikTok in the man’s thrall).
Huberman has been in therapy, he says, since high school. He has, in fact, several therapists, and psychiatrist Paul Conti appears on his podcast frequently to discuss mental health. Therapy is “hard work … like going to the gym and doing an effective workout.” The brain is a machine that needs tending. Our cells will benefit from the careful management of stress. “I love *mechanism,*” says Huberman; our feelings are integral to the apparatus. There are Huberman Husbands (men who optimize), a phenomenon not to be confused with `#DaddyHuberman` (used by women on TikTok in the man’s thrall).
A prophet must constrain his self-revelation. He must give his story a shape that ultimately tends toward inner strength, weakness overcome. For Andrew Huberman to become your teacher and mine, as he very much was for a period this fall — a period in which I diligently absorbed sun upon waking, drank no more than once a week, practiced physiological sighs in traffic, and said to myself, out loud in my living room, “I *also* love mechanism”; a period during which I began to think seriously, for the first time in my life, about reducing stress, and during which both my husband and my young child saw tangible benefit from repeatedly immersing themselves in frigid water; a period in which I realized that I not only liked this podcast but liked other women who liked this podcast — he must be, in some way, better than the rest of us.
@ -73,7 +73,7 @@ Keeping personal projects in check and on track.
 
- [ ] :fork_and_knife: [[@Personal projects|Personal projects]]: Rechercher à créer un set Christofle (80e les 6 couteaux; 120e les 6 autres aux Puces) 📅2024-05-30
- [ ] :fork_and_knife: [[@Personal projects|Personal projects]]: Rechercher à créer un set Christofle (80e les 6 couteaux; 120e les 6 autres aux Puces) 📅 2024-11-30
title: "Entdecke die schönsten Spielplätze der Schweiz | Spielplatz-Portal"
description: "Das Portal für die öffentlichen Spielplätze der Schweiz! Kinderspielplätze, Abenteuerspielplätze, Piratenspielplätze und viele mehr. Spielplätze für Gross und Klein auf spielplatz-portal.ch."
title: "Die coolsten Outdoor-Spielplätze der Schweiz"
description: "Mit dem Sommer kommt die Outdoor-Zeit. Und wo könnte man die mit Kindern besser geniessen als auf Spielplätzen? Blick stellt zehn Spielplätze vor, die besonders viel Spass und Abenteuer für die Kleinen versprechen."
title: "Das sind die schönsten Spielplätze der Schweiz"
description: "Spielplätze wirken auf Kinder wie ein Magnet. Verständlich, denn hier können sich die Mädchen und Buben nach Herzenslust austoben. Wir zeigen die Schönsten der Schweiz."
<spanclass='ob-timelines'data-date='2024-04-26-00'data-title='First S&B of the season'data-class='green'data-type='range'data-end='2024-04-26-00'> First Stick and Ball of the season. Sally is very fresh.
</span>
```toc
style: number
```
 
---
 
First S&B with [[@Sally|Sally]] who was very fresh and ran as soon as we arrived on the field
- [ ] :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: :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 📅 2025-05-01
- [x] :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 ✅ 2024-04-29
- [ ] :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
- [ ] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2024-04-20
- [ ] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2024-05-04
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2024-04-27 ✅ 2024-04-26
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2024-04-20 ✅ 2024-04-19
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2024-04-13 ✅ 2024-04-14
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2024-04-06 ✅ 2024-04-05
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2024-03-30 ✅ 2024-03-29
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2023-08-12 ✅ 2023-08-07
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2023-08-05 ✅ 2023-08-05
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2023-07-29 ✅ 2023-08-04
- [ ] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2024-04-20
- [ ] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2024-05-04
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2024-04-27 ✅ 2024-04-26
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2024-04-20 ✅ 2024-04-19
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2024-04-13 ✅ 2024-04-14
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2024-04-06 ✅ 2024-04-05
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2024-03-30 ✅ 2024-03-29
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iOS
7 months ago