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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Indonesia’s Deadly Mining Complex Powering the Electric Vehicle Revolution.md\"> Indonesia’s Deadly Mining Complex Powering the Electric Vehicle Revolution </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Home of the Brave Enduring the VA’s Homeless Veteran Crisis.md\"> Home of the Brave Enduring the VA’s Homeless Veteran Crisis </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Why Did a Father of 16 Hire a Dark-Web Hit Man.md\"> Why Did a Father of 16 Hire a Dark-Web Hit Man </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Inside the Slimy, Smelly, Secretive World of Glass-Eel Fishing.md\"> Inside the Slimy, Smelly, Secretive World of Glass-Eel Fishing </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How the Naughty ’90s Set the Stage for Today’s Tragicomedy.md\"> How the Naughty ’90s Set the Stage for Today’s Tragicomedy </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Harvard Scientists Say There May Be an Unknown, Technologically Advanced Civilization Hiding on Earth.md\"> Harvard Scientists Say There May Be an Unknown, Technologically Advanced Civilization Hiding on Earth </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Emma Stone Has Changed Her Whole Style of Acting. It’s a Wonder to Behold..md\"> Emma Stone Has Changed Her Whole Style of Acting. It’s a Wonder to Behold. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"02.03 Zürich/Segundo Rubbo.md\"> Segundo Rubbo </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/What a Leading State Auditor Says About Fraud, Government Misspending and Building Public Trust.md\"> What a Leading State Auditor Says About Fraud, Government Misspending and Building Public Trust </a>",
@ -12984,21 +13106,22 @@
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The elections next door Mexico’s cartels pick candidates, kill rivals.md\"> The elections next door Mexico’s cartels pick candidates, kill rivals </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.03 Family/2024-04-20 Naissance de Dorothee.md\"> 2024-04-20 Naissance de Dorothee </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Actual Life 3 (January 1 - September 9 2022) (by Fred again - 2022).md\"> Actual Life 3 (January 1 - September 9 2022) (by Fred again - 2022) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Qui sème le vent récolte le tempo (by MC Solaar - 1991).md\"> Qui sème le vent récolte le tempo (by MC Solaar - 1991) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Former Far-Right Hard-Liner Says Billionaires Are Using School Board Races to Sow Distrust in Public Education.md\"> Former Far-Right Hard-Liner Says Billionaires Are Using School Board Races to Sow Distrust in Public Education </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.04 Cinematheque/Kiss the Future (2023).md\"> Kiss the Future (2023) </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Home of the Brave Enduring the VA’s Homeless Veteran Crisis.md\"> Home of the Brave Enduring the VA’s Homeless Veteran Crisis </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Inside the Slimy, Smelly, Secretive World of Glass-Eel Fishing.md\"> Inside the Slimy, Smelly, Secretive World of Glass-Eel Fishing </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Why Did a Father of 16 Hire a Dark-Web Hit Man.md\"> Why Did a Father of 16 Hire a Dark-Web Hit Man </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Harvard Scientists Say There May Be an Unknown, Technologically Advanced Civilization Hiding on Earth.md\"> Harvard Scientists Say There May Be an Unknown, Technologically Advanced Civilization Hiding on Earth </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How the Naughty ’90s Set the Stage for Today’s Tragicomedy.md\"> How the Naughty ’90s Set the Stage for Today’s Tragicomedy </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Emma Stone Has Changed Her Whole Style of Acting. It’s a Wonder to Behold..md\"> Emma Stone Has Changed Her Whole Style of Acting. It’s a Wonder to Behold. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"02.03 Zürich/Juan Bautista Bossio.md\"> Juan Bautista Bossio </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"02.03 Zürich/Segundo Rubbo.md\"> Segundo Rubbo </a>",
@ -13036,20 +13159,7 @@
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Sexism, cheating, and nightclubs inside the dark heart of modern chess.md\"> Sexism, cheating, and nightclubs inside the dark heart of modern chess </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Local Girls Who Inspired the Hollywood Classic “Mean Girls”.md\"> The Local Girls Who Inspired the Hollywood Classic “Mean Girls” </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Sexism, cheating, and nightclubs inside the dark heart of modern chess.md\"> Sexism, cheating, and nightclubs inside the dark heart of modern chess </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Sexism, cheating, and nightclubs inside the dark heart of modern chess.md\"> Sexism, cheating, and nightclubs inside the dark heart of modern chess </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.03 Family/2024-04-20 Naissance de Dorothee.md\"> 2024-04-20 Naissance de Dorothee </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Qui sème le vent récolte le tempo (by MC Solaar - 1991).md\"> Qui sème le vent récolte le tempo (by MC Solaar - 1991) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Actual Life 3 (January 1 - September 9 2022) (by Fred again - 2022).md\"> Actual Life 3 (January 1 - September 9 2022) (by Fred again - 2022) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/IRS Audit of Trump Could Cost Former President More Than $100 Million.md\"> IRS Audit of Trump Could Cost Former President More Than $100 Million </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Former Far-Right Hard-Liner Says Billionaires Are Using School Board Races to Sow Distrust in Public Education.md\"> Former Far-Right Hard-Liner Says Billionaires Are Using School Board Races to Sow Distrust in Public Education </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/A 19-year-old Stanford phenom is blazing a new trail from Japan to the majors.md\"> A 19-year-old Stanford phenom is blazing a new trail from Japan to the majors </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Secret in the walls Hidden letters reveal love, lust, scandal in 1920s Baltimore society.md\"> Secret in the walls Hidden letters reveal love, lust, scandal in 1920s Baltimore society </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The professor, the caregiver and the missing $30 million.md\"> The professor, the caregiver and the missing $30 million </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Secret in the walls Hidden letters reveal love, lust, scandal in 1920s Baltimore society.md\"> Secret in the walls Hidden letters reveal love, lust, scandal in 1920s Baltimore society </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How a Miami Student’s Package Scam Came Crashing Down.md\"> How a Miami Student’s Package Scam Came Crashing Down </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"02.03 Zürich/Hotel Alex.md\"> Hotel Alex </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Sexism, cheating, and nightclubs inside the dark heart of modern chess.md\"> Sexism, cheating, and nightclubs inside the dark heart of modern chess </a>"
],
"Refactored":[
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Local Girls Who Inspired the Hollywood Classic “Mean Girls”.md\"> The Local Girls Who Inspired the Hollywood Classic “Mean Girls” </a>",
@ -13158,6 +13268,38 @@
"<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>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/New Yorkers Were Choked, Beaten and Tased by NYPD Officers. The Commissioner Buried Their Cases..md\"> New Yorkers Were Choked, Beaten and Tased by NYPD Officers. The Commissioner Buried Their Cases. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Indonesia’s Deadly Mining Complex Powering the Electric Vehicle Revolution.md\"> Indonesia’s Deadly Mining Complex Powering the Electric Vehicle Revolution </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Home of the Brave Enduring the VA’s Homeless Veteran Crisis.md\"> Home of the Brave Enduring the VA’s Homeless Veteran Crisis </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Why Did a Father of 16 Hire a Dark-Web Hit Man.md\"> Why Did a Father of 16 Hire a Dark-Web Hit Man </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Inside the Slimy, Smelly, Secretive World of Glass-Eel Fishing.md\"> Inside the Slimy, Smelly, Secretive World of Glass-Eel Fishing </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How the Naughty ’90s Set the Stage for Today’s Tragicomedy.md\"> How the Naughty ’90s Set the Stage for Today’s Tragicomedy </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Harvard Scientists Say There May Be an Unknown, Technologically Advanced Civilization Hiding on Earth.md\"> Harvard Scientists Say There May Be an Unknown, Technologically Advanced Civilization Hiding on Earth </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Emma Stone Has Changed Her Whole Style of Acting. It’s a Wonder to Behold..md\"> Emma Stone Has Changed Her Whole Style of Acting. It’s a Wonder to Behold. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Local Girls Who Inspired the Hollywood Classic “Mean Girls”.md\"> The Local Girls Who Inspired the Hollywood Classic “Mean Girls” </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The big idea can you inherit memories from your ancestors.md\"> The big idea can you inherit memories from your ancestors </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.04 Cinematheque/Tonari no Totoro (1988).md\"> Tonari no Totoro (1988) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Worm Charmers.md\"> The Worm Charmers </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Jerry West, as a player and exec, sustained excellence during a lifetime of emotional struggle.md\"> Jerry West, as a player and exec, sustained excellence during a lifetime of emotional struggle </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/‘The Death of Slim Shady’ or Not, You Can’t Kill Eminem. Not Really..md\"> ‘The Death of Slim Shady’ or Not, You Can’t Kill Eminem. Not Really. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Whistleblower Says Microsoft Dismissed Warnings About a Security Flaw That Russians Later Used to Hack U.S. Government.md\"> Whistleblower Says Microsoft Dismissed Warnings About a Security Flaw That Russians Later Used to Hack U.S. Government </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Vital City Jimmy Breslin and the Lost Rhythm of New York.md\"> Vital City Jimmy Breslin and the Lost Rhythm of New York </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/I have little time left. I hope my goodbye inspires you..md\"> I have little time left. I hope my goodbye inspires you. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Inside the Glorious Afterlife of Roger Federer.md\"> Inside the Glorious Afterlife of Roger Federer </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Secret in the walls Hidden letters reveal love, lust, scandal in 1920s Baltimore society.md\"> Secret in the walls Hidden letters reveal love, lust, scandal in 1920s Baltimore society </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/IRS Audit of Trump Could Cost Former President More Than $100 Million.md\"> IRS Audit of Trump Could Cost Former President More Than $100 Million </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Toxic Gaslighting How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe.md\"> Toxic Gaslighting How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The big idea can you inherit memories from your ancestors.md\"> The big idea can you inherit memories from your ancestors </a>"
],
"Removed Tags from":[
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"02.03 Zürich/Juan Bautista Bossio.md\"> Juan Bautista Bossio </a>",
"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":"2024-11-30",
@ -458,19 +458,19 @@
"05.02 Networks/Configuring UFW.md":[
{
"title":"🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-06-29",
"time":"2024-07-06",
"rowNumber":239
},
{
"title":"🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%%",
"Enabling this will insert the text at the end of the section & its subsections, rather than just at the end of the target section.A section is defined by a heading, and its subsections are all the headings inside that section."
"Enabling this will insert the text at the end of the section & its subsections, rather than just at the end of the target section.A section is defined by a heading, and its subsections are all the headings inside that section."
@ -17716,7 +17716,7 @@ var QuickAddSettingsTab = class extends import_obsidian34.PluginSettingTab {
}
addDisableOnlineFeaturesSetting(){
newimport_obsidian34.Setting(this.containerEl).setName("Disable AI & Online features").setDesc(
"This prevents the plugin from making requests to external providers like OpenAI. You can still use User Scripts to execute arbitrary code, inclulding contacting external providers. However, this setting disables plugin features like the AI Assistant from doing so. You need to disable this setting to use the AI Assistant."
"This prevents the plugin from making requests to external providers like OpenAI. You can still use User Scripts to execute arbitrary code, including contacting external providers. However, this setting disables plugin features like the AI Assistant from doing so. You need to disable this setting to use the AI Assistant."
# Emma Stone Has Changed Her Whole Style of Acting. It’s a Wonder to Behold.
## The *Kinds of Kindness* star has changed her whole style of acting. It’s a wonder to behold.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos and screengrabs by Searchlight Pictures and Showtime.
When Emma Stone won her first Academy Award, for *La La Land* in 2017, she took the stage with an open mouth and a sideways glance that seemed to say, [*Can you even believe this?*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3sotAxZSG8) But when she won again last year, for her performance as the childlike Bella Baxter in *Poor Things*, she seemed to be the one in disbelief. Although Stone was widely considered the favorite for Best Actress, the look on her face as Michelle Yeoh read out her name wasn’t the carefully rehearsed *who, me?* of a foreordained winner but [a shock so intense it verged on physical discomfort](https://slate.com/culture/2024/03/oscars-2024-winners-emma-stone-poor-things-lily-gladstone-best-actress.html). By the time she got to the microphone, Stone had collected herself sufficiently to breathlessly utter her list of thank-yous, but for a moment, she seemed to be experiencing something a little less like gratitude, and a little more like dread.
Stone’s victory might have been dampened by the fact that it prevented a historic win by Lily Gladstone, the first Native American to be nominated for Best Actress—especially given the backlash Stone faced for taking the role of a character with Chinese and Native Hawaiian ancestry in [Cameron Crowe’s *Aloha*](https://slate.com/culture/2015/06/bumpy-kanahele-hawaiian-sovereignty-and-cameron-crowes-aloha.html). But that wave of criticism, nearly a decade in the past, is remarkable for being the only substantial pushback Stone has received in her nearly 20-year career. Much, if not most, of her largely unblemished record can be chalked up to the reputation-management apparatus that surrounds the Hollywood elite. But it’s notable that, despite being every inch the theater kid, Stone never suffered the post-Oscars opprobrium of, say, [Anne Hathaway](https://slate.com/culture/2013/01/why-do-people-hate-anne-hathaway-one-reason-is-simple-sexism.html), let alone the slings and arrows directed at her [longtime friend Taylor Swift](https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/taylor-swift-attends-premiere-emma-003356443.html).
Stone is arguably one of the most talented, and inarguably one of the most lauded, actors of her generation, but that stardom doesn’t sit comfortably on her shoulders. As an actress and a celebrity, she has a knack for undercutting big moments that verges on a compulsion, turning her expressive face into a rubbery mask or sending her limbs flying out at impossibly odd angles. Winning her second Best Actress Oscar by the age of 35 put Stone in an exclusive club that includes Bette Davis, Jodie Foster, and Meryl Streep, but she’s the only one who celebrated her membership by spinning around to show an audience of 21 million the broken zipper on her dress.
The regular-gal act wore thin when Jennifer Lawrence tried it, mainly because we’re not willing to accept that the prom queen can also be the class clown. But the further Stone ascends, the more determined she seems to be to express her inner weirdo. She’s found an ally in the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, whose seriocomic grotesques have allowed her, in [*The Favourite*](https://slate.com/culture/2018/11/the-favourite-review-emma-stone-rachel-weisz-movie.html), [*Poor Things*](https://slate.com/culture/2023/12/poor-things-emma-stone-mark-ruffalo-movie-review.html), and their latest collaboration, *Kinds of Kindness*, to see just how far an audience will follow her.
As it turns out, not only will that audience accept her as a venomous 18th\-century courtier or an adult woman with the brain of a newborn baby: They’ll embrace her, as will her awards-voting peers. And that success has emboldened Stone to push even further, past goofball exaggeration into a deadpan style that flirts with overt alienation. At the same time, Stone and her husband, Dave McCary, have been proving themselves to be some of Hollywood’s most adventurous producers, putting their muscle behind such out-there projects as Julio Torres’ [*Problemista*](https://slate.com/culture/2023/03/sxsw-problemista-julio-torres-snl-everything-everywhere.html) and Jane Schoenbrun’s [*I Saw the TV Glow*](https://slate.com/culture/2024/01/i-saw-the-tv-glow-sundance-2024-a24-movie.html). We are blessed to be living through Emma Stone’s Freak Era.
After years of supporting parts, beginning with an ill-fated 2005 attempt to reboot *The Partridge Family*, Stone broke through with 2010’s [*Easy A*](https://slate.com/human-interest/2010/10/the-era-of-great-parents-in-teen-movies-is-upon-us.html), a comedic riff on *The Scarlet Letter* set in a Southern California high school. Directed by Will Gluck, last seen spinning Shakespeare into box-office gold with [*Anyone but You*](https://slate.com/culture/2024/01/movie-anyone-but-you-sydney-sweeney-glen-powell.html), the movie is such a delight that it’s easy to overlook what a high-wire act it must have been transforming a 19th\-century novel into a breezy morality play about teenage slut-shaming. But Stone, in her first leading role, holds it together with a performance that toggles, precisely but without apparent effort, between slapstick and pathos.
Although Stone was barely into her 20s, *Easy A* instantly established her ability to carry a movie, to balance conflicting tones with the confidence of a seasoned professional and yet maintain a sense of spontaneity and vulnerability. It also established her as an actor who wasn’t afraid to look silly. The movie’s most memorable sequence has nothing to do with sexual mores. It’s a montage in which, over the course of a couple of days, her character resists and then succumbs to the charms of Natasha Bedingfield’s “Pocketful of Sunshine.” By the time she’s [belting the chorus into a showerhead](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HVCB9hW6kg), you know you’re looking at a movie star.
After a few years of romantic comedies and a brush with franchise fame as [Spider-Man’s girlfriend](https://slate.com/culture/2012/07/the-amazing-spider-man-reviewed.html), Stone tried to break out of the normie rut with 2014’s [*Birdman*](https://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2014/10/birdman_starring_michael_keaton_reviewed.html), where she plays the recovering drug addict daughter of Michael Keaton’s fading movie star. But though the role got Stone her first Oscar nomination, she comes off as a regular person’s idea of a weird person, her damaged blond hair artfully mussed, her wide eyes bulging and rimmed with black. (The distortion of the movie’s wide-angle lenses occasionally makes her look a tad amphibian.) She’s meant to be a burnout, a flaming wreck of a person, but the movie gives away the game when Edward Norton’s self-absorbed thespian tells her that despite the false modesty of her “fragile little fuck-up routine,” he sees how special she really is. “You’re anything but invisible,” he tells her. “You’re big. You’re kind of a great mess.”
Neither the greatness nor the messiness keys into what Stone does best, which is playing just-this-side-of-noteworthy people who are barely keeping it together. Take [*La La Land*](https://slate.com/culture/2016/12/la-la-land-starring-emma-stone-and-ryan-gosling-reviewed.html)’s Mia, an aspiring actress whose dreams of stardom are rapidly dashed on the rocks of her modest talent. Although the movie eventually grants her professional success, it comes off as an almost ironic gesture, a vision of the perfect life—fame, husband, kids—that’s missing only the passion of her doomed love affair with Ryan Gosling’s jazzbo. It’s not Mia’s eventual ascension that makes her intriguing, but the struggle it takes to get there (a quality Stone’s middling singing and dancing only work to heighten). Nonetheless, Mia’s rise assured Stone’s, lifting her all the way to a Best Actress win.
Then came the movie that changed everything: *The Favourite*. While many actors use Oscar wins to mount vanity projects or command bigger paychecks, Stone used her newly acquired clout to take a meeting with Lanthimos, then best known for the warped romantic allegory [*The Lobster*](https://slate.com/culture/2016/05/yorgos-lanthimos-discusses-the-lobster-the-pressures-of-dating-and-shooting-his-first-english-language-film.html). The role of Abigail, a fallen aristocrat whose father gambles her away in a card game, isn’t even the lead, but it gave Stone a chance to try out what was, at least for her, a radically different kind of acting, as cold and calculated as her earlier characters were spontaneous and outgoing.
When she arrives at the court of Queen Anne, played by Olivia Colman, Abigail is a babe in the woods, her pale face splattered with mud from the cramped carriage ride. Despite the fact that her cousin Sarah, played by Rachel Weisz, is the queen’s closest adviser, Abigail is immediately put to work in the scullery, where the washerwomen trick her into burning her skin with lye. Regarding the downtrodden specimen before her, Sarah remarks, “You are perhaps too kind for your own good.”
That kindness doesn’t last. In *The Favourite*, as in many of Lanthimos’ movies, a person gains power by learning to master their emotions, whether it’s within a romantic relationship or the world at large. As she gains Queen Anne’s confidence, and eventually makes her way into her bed, Abigail becomes increasingly remote, almost robotic, never betraying a feeling that someone might turn against her. In a rare moment of weakness, she starts crying in front of one of the queen’s chief opponents, who orders her to “Turn off the tears.” In an instant, she complies. But that brief glimpse is enough to remind us how much Abigail has had to snuff out in order to secure her place among the heartless schemers of the ruling class.
Over the course of three features, Stone and Lanthimos have already staked a claim as one of the great actor-director pairings. Lanthimos has given Stone the freedom to explore, and she brings a mercurial humanity to his acidic fables, preventing his clinical abstractions from shading into outright misanthropy. There are a thousand ways that *Poor Things*’ Bella could go wrong, shading into softcore fantasy or parable, but as a woman with the brain of a rapidly maturing infant, Stone navigates the development of Bella’s sexual urges with a remote curiosity that defies a prurient leer. Bella doesn’t learn to bring herself to orgasm; she discovers “happy-when-she-want.” She’s fascinated by lust, not controlled by it.
In Lanthimos’ movies, bodies are inconvenient when they’re not outright humiliating, pulsing with urges that mock our attempts at nobler thoughts. Although Stone, who did the first nude scene of her career in *The Favourite*, is frequently naked in *Poor Things*, the movie’s sex scenes draw less on her looks than her talent for physical comedy. Because the body she inhabits is not her own, Bella approaches sex like an anthropological experiment, studying her own compulsions and the inexplicable pleasure she derives from mashing her body against another’s. It’s as if she can’t get over how something so awkward and gross can also be so satisfying.
*Poor Things* feels like an experiment for Stone, too, a test to see just how much leeway 20 years of playing the genial goofball has bought her. She narrows her expression to a sliver of its normal range, a choice that has all the more impact because of how dramatically it jars with what we’re used to seeing. It’s as if she’s spun the magnet of her movie-star charisma 180 degrees, repelling as forcefully as it attracts, just to see if we’ll still try to get close.
Stone pushed the experiment even further with the TV show [*The Curse*](https://slate.com/culture/2023/11/the-curse-showtime-review-emma-stone-nathan-fielder-benny-safdie-a24.html), where she plays a brittle white liberal trying to launch her own home-improvement show. Whitney might be the most outwardly repellent character of Stone’s career, an edgy manipulator whose plans to build eco-friendly housing in a New Mexico exurb reek of gentrification and unconscious privilege. (The scenes where she tries to curry favor with a Pueblo artist may be the most painful thing I’ve ever watched.) It’s a merciless performance, almost brutal in its resistance to softening Whitney or making her sympathetic in any way. And it’s an unbelievably bold thing to release in the middle of the six-month charm offensive that is an Oscar campaign.
*Kinds of Kindness* almost feels like a lark by comparison, a three-part anthology film whose stories are loosely tied together by Lanthimos’ belief in the transactional nature of human relationships. Along with the rest of an ensemble cast that includes Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, and Hong Chau, Stone plays a different role in each part: a woman in thrall to a businessman who dictates every aspect of her life, down to what she eats and what time she has sex; a scientist marooned on a research trip, who returns home unplaceably different than she was before; a member of a cult obsessed with the purification of bodily fluids. But her characters share a fixation on self-control, and a flat, almost affectless bearing that only cracks open in the movie’s final moments. (If you’ve seen Stone dancing in the trailers, arms flailing in a slim-fitting pantsuit, you know what that looks like.)
Stone’s deadpan is so extreme that at times it’s almost zombielike—she walks as if her spine is a steel rod, turning her head like it’s on a swivel—but it’s also what makes *Kinds of Kindness* register as an exhilaratingly morbid comedy rather than a miserabilist horror show. (She reserves her driest delivery for the line “[There, dogs were in charge](https://slate.com/culture/2024/05/the-substance-demi-moore-movie-cannes-2024.html?pay=1718901783482&support_journalism=please).”) Because she accepts this world as it is, with its sharp-edged cruelty and absurdist flourishes, we do too. She’s taking her audience to darker and darker places, and we keep trusting her to lead the way.
Stone hasn’t abandoned the limelight: Among her upcoming projects is a sequel to 2021’s [*Cruella*](https://slate.com/culture/2021/05/cruella-movie-review-emma-stone-disney-plus.html?pay=1718901944710&support_journalism=please), where she plays a punk-lite version of the classic Disney villain. (Imagine *Birdman*’s sullen twentysomething donning Vivienne Westwood.) But she’s also signed on to her fourth movie with Lanthimos, as well as the next by Ari Aster, another director known for pushing his audience, and his actors, to extremes. Sally Field, who fulsomely recapped Stone’s career as part of the Best Actress presentation in March, famously accepted her second Oscar by exclaiming, “You like me!” But it seems as if Stone is starting to feel a little unnerved by all that liking, and curious about what else she can make people feel.
# Harvard Scientists Say There May Be an Unknown, Technologically Advanced Civilization Hiding on Earth
What if — stick with us here — an unknown technological civilization is hiding right here on Earth, sheltering in bases deep underground and possibly even emerging with UFOs or disguised as everyday humans?
In a [new paper](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tim-Lomas/publication/381041896_The_cryptoterrestrial_hypothesis_A_case_for_scientific_openness_to_a_concealed_earthly_explanation_for_Unidentified_Anomalous_Phenomena/links/665e2620479366623a3dbaeb/The-cryptoterrestrial-hypothesis-A-case-for-scientific-openness-to-a-concealed-earthly-explanation-for-Unidentified-Anomalous-Phenomena.pdf) that's bound to raise eyebrows in the scientific community, a team of researchers from Harvard andMontana Technological University speculates that sightings of "Unidentified Anomalous Phemonemona" (UAP) — bureaucracy-speak for UFOs,basically — "may reflect activities of intelligent beings concealed in stealth here on Earth (e.g., underground), and/or its near environs (e.g., the Moon), and/or even 'walking among us'(e.g., passing as humans)."
Yes, that's a direct quote from the paper. Needless to say, the researchers admit, this idea of hidden "crypoterrestrials" is a highly exotic hypothesis that's "likely to be regarded skeptically by most scientists." Nonetheless, they argue, the theory "deserves genuine consideration in a spirit of epistemic humility and openness."
The interest in unexplained sightings of UFOs by military personnel has grown considerably over the past decade or so. This attention grew to a peak last summer, when former Air Force intelligence officer and whistleblower David Grusch [testified in front of Congress](https://futurism.com/us-recovered-non-human-vehicles), claiming that the US had already recovered alien spacecraft as part of a decades-long UFO retrieval program.
Even NASA [has opened its doors](https://futurism.com/the-byte/nasa-studying-ufos) for researchers to explore [mysterious, high-speed objects](https://futurism.com/navy-pilot-bizzare-ufo-encounter) that have been spotted by military pilots over the years.
But [several](https://futurism.com/ufo-report-released) [Pentagon reports](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pentagon-ufo-uap-report-full-text-march-2024/) later, we have [yet to find](https://futurism.com/the-byte/seti-institute-zero-evidence-aliens) any evidence of extraterrestrial life.
That hasn't dissuaded these Harvard researchers, though. In the paper, they suggesta range of possibilities, each more outlandish than the next.
First is that a "remnant form" of an ancient, highly advanced human civilization is still hanging around, observing us. Second is that an intelligent species evolved independently of humans in the distant past, possibly from "intelligent dinosaurs," and is now hiding their presence from us. Third is that these hidden occupants of Earth traveled here from another planet or time period. And fourth — please keep a straight face, everybody — is that these unknown inhabitants of Earth are "less technological than magical," which the researchers liken to "earthbound angels."
UFO sightings of "craft and other phenomena (e.g., 'orbs') appearing to enter/exit potential underground access points, like volcanoes,"they write, could be evidence that these cryptoterrestrials may not be drawn to these spots, but actually reside in underground or underwater bases.
The paper quotes former House Representative Mike Gallagher, who [suggested last year](https://www.newsweek.com/ufo-mike-gallagher-comments-video-1809664) that one explanation for the UFO sightings might be "an ancient civilization that’s just been hiding here, for all this time, and is suddenly showing itself right now," following Grusch's testimony.
The researchers didn't stop there, even suggesting that these cryptoterrestrials may take on different, non-human primate or even reptile forms.
Beyond residing deep underground, they even speculate that this mysterious species could even be concealing themselves on the Moon or have mastered the art of blending in as human beings, a folk theory that has inspired countless works of science fiction.
Another explanation, as [put forward](https://avi-loeb.medium.com/no-high-rise-left-standing-from-early-mars-or-earth-9376389ae070) by controversial Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, suggests that other ancient civilizations may have lived on "planets like Mars or Earth" but a "billion years apart and hence were not aware of each other."
Of course, these are all "far-fetched" hypotheses, as the scientists admit, and deserve to be regarded with plenty of skepticism.
"We entertain them here because some aspects of UAP are strange enough that they seem to call for unconventional explanations," the paper reads.
"It may be exceedingly improbable, but hopefully this paper has shown it should nevertheless be kept on the table as we seek to understand the ongoing empirical mystery of UAP," the researchers conclude.
**More on UFOs:** *[New Law Would Force Government to Declassify Every UFO Document](https://futurism.com/the-byte/government-declassify-ufo-documents-bill)*
# Home of the Brave: Enduring the VA’s Homeless Veteran Crisis
If you are or know a veteran who is unhoused — or at risk of losing their home — there are resources available. Call 877-4AID-VET (877-424-3838) for free, confidential advice from trained VA counselors, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The VA has existing programs to help unhoused veterans, but this problem is far from solved. To help end the epidemic of veteran homelessness, contact your local congressional representative and tell them about the federal government’s promise to build and maintain permanent, supportive housing for disabled service members in the late-1800s — and the policies that have undermined that plan ever since.
# How the Naughty ’90s Set the Stage for Today’s Tragicomedy
You couldn’t have 2020s America—and the half-witted half-decade of Trump that preceded it—without the 1990s. **Newt Gingrich** walked so that **Donald Trump** could run. The Brooks Brothers’ Riot (okay, it happened in November of 2000, but you get the idea) was the Oxford-cloth precursor to the fur-lined, horned-hat insurrection of January 6, 2020. Everything that happened in the weird, wild, horrible, sexually repressed decade(s) we are living in now were stage-set in the weird, wild, manic, sex-charged 1990s.
You can’t understand the polarized power dynamics of 2020s Washington without understanding the culture-war standoffs (Family Values! **Dan Quayle**vs. Murphy Brown! Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell!) that defined politics in the 1990s. The Trump impeachments are merely another chapter in our country’s fraught relationship with impeachments. Obviously, having an affair in the West Wing with a White House intern is not the same as trying to overthrow American democracy. But in both cases, the congressional mechanism for punishment was the same. And so many of the wheels of American democracy that failed to hold Trump accountable for his numerous crimes were originally perverted for political purposes in the 1990s. You can’t make sense of Trump without first taking a long, hard look at Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. You can’t understand today’s 24/7, scandal-fueled, online-omniscient media without looking at the tabloid-tinged, innuendo-drenched cable news carnival that shaped it. The past is always prologue. Nothing ever makes sense in a vacuum. History repeats itself; in this case, the first act as farce, the next as tragicomedy.
I think of myself as a ’90s girl. I got sober when I was nineteen years old, on November 2, 1997. And in some ways, I never left that decade. I spent that November in a rehab facility in Minnesota, amid several feet of snow, smoking Parliament Light 100s and drinking coffee and Diet Coke. I wore a North Face parka, used jeans that I had bought downtown, and Free Lance Paris boots. I got stuck at that age—perpetually nineteen—not because it was such a great time in my life. If anything, it was a misery. But that was where my head got stuck. So this book has great resonance. All of the right vibes are in these pages (third-wave feminism, **Anita Hill**’s courage, Riot Grrrl rage, the connectivity of the Web, new laws against domestic violence, new laws promoting what were then called “same-sex civil unions”). All the wrong vibes are here as well (violent anti-abortion activism and anti-LGBTQ attacks, the online porn boom and bro culture, overmedicated patients and overhyped reality TV) forming a dense web of cautionary tales.
**Kurt Andersen** [writes](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/opinion/sunday/the-best-decade-ever-the-1990s-obviously.html) in the *New York Times*: “Nostalgia for the era in which you were young is almost inevitable, so people born between 1970 and 1990 feel a natural fetishistic fondness for that decade. But even for the rest of us, the ’90s provoke a unique species of *recherche du temps perdu*, not mere bittersweet reveling in the passage of time. No, looking back at the final ten years of the twentieth century is grounds for genuine mourning: It was simply the happiest decade of our American lifetimes.”
And for a lot of Americans, the 1990s *were* the last good time. The 1990s saw the last gasps of American prosperity, before globalization made life much more complicated for the vast majority of the nation. Household income peaked in 1999. Peace and prosperity ruled. It looked like we might finally achieve The End of History. As this book maintains, citing an observation from historian **Walter Isaacson**: “We coasted through the ’90s with irrational exuberance. Between the fall of the Berlin Wall until the fall of the twin towers, there was nothing unnerving us.”
And what a fall. While the attacks of 9/11 ended the decade with the deadly implosion of a grand citadel of capitalism, the American empire and Western civilization did not buckle—even if they are, today, in grave disarray. (Spoiler alert: History did not end.)
Amid our mourning for these losses, we also mourn the loss of the social fabric that brought us together. In many ways, we were more culturally connected during the 1990s. We watched many of the same television shows, from **Bill Clinton** blowing the saxophone on *Arsenio Hall*, to **Kim Cattrall**’s Samantha blowing one of her pickups on *Sex and the City*. The idea of watercooler television became an idea. Everyone witnessed the same things at the same time because even though satellite and cable TV were in their infancy, there were an arguably limited number of viewing options. In 1992, **Bruce Springsteen** underscored this point when he released “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On).” When *The Cosby Show* ended in 1992, its finale was seen by 44.4 million people. Later that decade, the finale of *Seinfeld* was viewed by a whopping 76 million. These numbers are many multiples more than the audience who now tune into streaming shows or cable news broadcasts or even presidential speeches and debates. We are more and more fractured—for better and, I would say, for worse.
We also were obliged to watch commercials. Advertisements were cultural experiences because we all had to sit through them. If you skip ahead to chapter 29—the first of two chapters devoted to the discovery and marketing rollout of the decade’s new wonder drug, Viagra—you’ll be reminded that many Americans’ first encounter with the medication came in 1998, in the form of a commercial often aired during football games. As the whole family sat around the TV, they heard the following phrase: *“In the rare event of an erection lasting more than four hours, seek immediate medical help.”*
Cell phones were relatively new in the 1990s. Since few possessed the ability to send or receive text messages, we had hours to fill, hours in which we did not look at our devices. Instead, we read books, magazines, and newspapers—and discussed them. We talked to one another in person, on telephones, in town, at offices and schools and places of worship. Life in the 1990s moved a lot slower. News had to be printed in newspapers or announced on the radio or broadcast on television. This meant that ideas took longer to permeate, to take shape in the public mind. As this book makes plain: Snap judgments were generally frowned upon; gossip still had a taint to it; shameful actions brought about genuine shame—not an occasion for social media exploitation.
I was eleven when the decade started, born during a patrician, old-school Yalie presidency. I started working in the late 1990s, writing freelance pieces, the articles that filled the spaces between advertisements in women’s magazines. Those magazines, with the exception of *Vogue*, are gone now, as are all those glossy advertisements. Nothing seems to fill the spaces between tweets or Instagram photos or Facebook posts. There are no gatekeepers anymore, and so we can all be girl bosses if the algorithm blesses us. For worse or, I would say, for better.
I look back on the 1990s with a kind of hazy, nostalgic fondness. I don’t think we were better off then—not by a longshot. But I do think some elements of American life that were lost with the Naughty Nineties were worth saving and, in their absence, are worth celebrating.
There is much to learn from the decade, with all of its scandal and sex, all of its lies and faux reality, all of its sound and fury and digital mayhem—much of it, in hindsight, quite hilarious. Every bit of it is here in the precious pages of **David Friend**’s epic, witty, insightful book.
We all lived it. Now it’s time to take the bull—oh, was there a lot of bull—by the horns.
# Indonesia’s Deadly Mining Complex Powering the Electric Vehicle Revolution
Aerial view of the gigantic Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park in Bahodopi, Morowali, Central Sulawesi. Photographer: Muhammad Fadli for Bloomberg Businessweek
Businessweek | The Big Take
Nickel is pouring into the supply chain from an Indonesian industrial park with a history of fatal accidents.
By Matthew Campbell and Annie Lee
Illustrations by Kaitlin Brito
Photographs and video by Muhammad Fadli
June 17, 2024, 5:00 PM UTC
Early in the morning last Christmas Eve, Chinese and Indonesian workers prepared for a maintenance operation at the [Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park](https://imip.co.id/). A complex of factories, smelters and power plants on the island of Sulawesi, IMIP erupts in a tangle of pipelines and smokestacks that belch particulates into the tropical air. The bulk of the tens of thousands of employees live just outside its walls, migrants to a hastily built city of plywood and sheet metal shanties that shelter motorbike shops and dingy rooming houses.
The workers had been tasked with fixing a submerged arc furnace, which melts nickel ore at temperatures around 1,400C (2,552F). Over time the residue of this process, known as slag, can build up, and the furnace overheats. On this day the plan was to replace heat-damaged bricks in the inner chamber and remove slag. With the furnace turned off, a technician began slicing into its steel shell with a flame cutter, to allow access to the interior. But someone had miscalculated: The slag inside hadn’t cooled enough. In fact, it was still molten.
The slag surged out from the cut, and the wall of the furnace collapsed. According to people familiar with the incident, who asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic information, acetylene canisters left nearby—used to fuel the flame cutters—started to explode from the surging temperature. The workers trying to contain the damage were hamstrung by communication difficulties, with virtually none of the Chinese staff able to speak fluent Indonesian, and vice versa.
Watch: The Dirty Secret Behind Electric Cars
As the sun rose, flames licked at the exterior of the factory building, which billowed with dark smoke. Workers tried frantically to aid their colleagues, many of whom had severe burns. Screaming for help, one group hoisted a blood-covered man into the bed of a pickup truck, which was already crowded with other victims. The onsite medical clinic was overwhelmed: Still in their tan uniforms, injured men lay on the floor, crying out in pain as nurses attended to those they could. By early afternoon, a dozen employees were confirmed dead, with [many more in need of intensive care](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-24/twelve-dead-dozens-injured-in-fire-at-indonesian-steel-plant "Fire at Indonesian Steel Plant in Morowali Kills 13 Workers"). The toll would soon rise to 21 men: 8 of them Chinese, 13 Indonesian.
One of the dead was Taufik, a 40-year-old mechanic from another part of Sulawesi. (Like many Indonesians, he used only one name.) Quiet and serious, he’d worked at IMIP for six years, and with overtime could earn about 8 million rupiah ($500) a month—a respectable wage in rural Indonesia. But he found the job exhausting and had been thinking about quitting to return to his wife, Ice Firawati, and their children, who’d stayed behind in his home village. On Christmas Eve, Ice had set out to visit him, a 15-hour journey by car and ferry. She was on the road when one of his friends called to tell her that Taufik was among the victims.
He and the others killed in the fire died in the service of one of the greatest industrial transitions in modern history. Over the past decade, Sulawesi and other Indonesian islands have been transformed into hubs for mining and processing nickel. The metal is a crucial component for making stainless steel, the purpose of the facility where the explosion occurred. It’s also essential to many electric-vehicle batteries. The government of outgoing President Joko Widodo, who’s better known as Jokowi, has enthusiastically promoted the nickel industry’s growth, seeing a chance to put Indonesia at the center of global supply chains—and to create employment for the country’s roughly 280 million people.
Controlled by Chinese metals giant Tsingshan Holding Group Co., IMIP is the product of more than $30 billion in investment. Sprawling across what was once a plain of farmers’ fields and fishing hamlets on Sulawesi’s eastern shore, a short distance from nickel-mining concessions that dot the surrounding hillsides, it boasts its own seaport and airport, along with a resort-style hotel for visiting executives. IMIP has created immense numbers of jobs, with more than 100,000 employees and contractors, and accounts on its own for a major percentage of Indonesia’s exports of nickel suitable for batteries. Overall, the nickel industry has helped deliver rapid growth for Indonesia’s economy, the largest in Southeast Asia.
That success has a dark side. December’s fire was the worst in a long series of fatal accidents at IMIP and other Indonesian nickel sites. Workers have been buried under slag, crushed by heavy equipment and killed in falls. In surrounding communities, residents complain of respiratory ailments that they blame on pollution from smelters and the coal-fired power plants that sustain them. And environmentalists accuse the nickel industry of flouting regulations intended to protect ecologically sensitive islands such as Sulawesi—while expanding production of a material critical to the EVs that Western governments [promote on environmental grounds](https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_6462 "Zero emission vehicles: first ‘Fit for 55' deal will end the sale of new CO2 emitting cars in Europe by 2035").
In most cases, auto manufacturers don’t directly source battery materials, and it’s difficult if not impossible to trace the metal in a given car to a specific nickel facility. But an extensive review of Chinese, Indonesian, South Korean and US corporate filings by *Bloomberg Businessweek*, as well as interviews with industry experts, shows that nickel from IMIP is present in the supply chain that feeds virtually every major seller of EVs.
Nickel requires extensive processing before it can be incorporated into EV batteries.
The first major step is smelting, which occurs at facilities such as the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park in Sulawesi. Raw nickel ore is heated, often to extreme temperatures, to separate out the valuable metal.
Then, companies like China’s Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt process the nickel further and provide it to battery manufacturers around the world.
Finally, assembled battery packs are installed in vehicles from companies such as Tesla and taken out onto the road.
Notably, companies processing nickel there have direct or indirect supply relationships with many of the world’s largest manufacturers of batteries and battery materials, including South Korea’s LG Chem, Samsung SDI and SK Innovation. There’s a strong chance that metal is being used, or will soon be, in at least some cars manufactured by Tesla Inc., as well as BMW, Ford, General Motors, Hyundai, Stellantis and Toyota, among others.
Each of these companies has adopted extensive pledges on responsible sourcing and markets its electric offerings as better for the planet than traditional gas guzzlers. They nonetheless depend on workers who perform dirty, dangerous jobs with few safeguards.
In a statement on behalf of itself and Tsingshan, IMIP said “safety is always our priority,” and that it “quickly required all enterprises to carry out safety risk screening and rectification” after the Christmas Eve accident. It added that companies operating in the complex “must comply with all local environmental laws and regulations,” as well as internal pollution guidelines.
LG Chem Ltd. and SK Innovation Co. didn’t respond to requests for comment about their links to IMIP; Samsung SDI Co. declined to comment. Tesla and Hyundai didn’t respond to requests for comment. Other carmakers contacted by *Businessweek* emphasized that they don’t have direct business relationships with IMIP, but said they expect companies in their supply chains to comply with labor and environmental standards. Indonesia’s Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources said it “diligently supervises” safety at nickel sites and is working to address health concerns.
The December explosion [brought considerable scrutiny to IMIP](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-05/explosion-in-indonesia-puts-china-backed-nickel-expansion-in-focus-ahead-of-vote "Explosion in Indonesia Puts China-Backed Nickel Expansion in Focus Ahead of Vote"), with Indonesian politicians declaring that nothing like it should be allowed to happen again. (That didn’t prevent another [incident in January](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-20/indonesian-mining-firm-shuts-smelter-furnace-after-slag-overflow "Indonesian Mining Firm Shuts Smelter Furnace After Slag Overflow"), when hot slag overflowed at a different smelter in the stainless-steel supply chain. No injuries were reported.)
But no one in power in Indonesia is seriously proposing curtailing the expansion of the nickel industry, which would jeopardize the investment and jobs it brings. Nor do international carmakers have much alternative to relying on it if they’re to meet their electrification goals profitably. With its cheap workers and cheap coal, Indonesia offers a dramatic cost advantage compared with other sources of nickel, which include Australia and Canada.
That’s especially important as growth in demand for EVs slows, putting pressure on manufacturers to make them more affordable. Tesla [reported a slump in deliveries](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-02/tesla-sales-miss-in-first-year-over-year-drop-since-pandemic "Tesla’s Sales Miss by the Most Ever in Brutal Blow for EVs") in the first quarter, missing analysts’ estimates by the largest margin on record; Ford Motor Co. has [slashed production of its flagship electric pickup](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-19/ford-cuts-production-of-f-150-lightning-electric-truck "Ford Cuts Workforce Making Electric F-150s on Weak Demand"), the F-150 Lightning; and companies including General Motors Co. and Volkswagen AG have delayed or shelved EV plans.
At the same time, the massive expansion of the industry in Indonesia has led to a slump in global nickel prices, forcing the shutdown of mines in Australia and [destroying the business case for new ones](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-03/from-green-hype-to-bailouts-the-nickel-industry-has-imploded "From Green Hype to Bailouts, the Nickel Industry Has Imploded") there and in other higher-cost locations. By 2030, Indonesia may account for nearly two-thirds of the global nickel supply, according to forecasts from BloombergNEF, up from about 47% last year.
That reality alarms the Indonesians trying to stop the nickel sector from leaving a trail of destroyed ecosystems and dead workers. “With every concession sold, more destruction and damage will also follow,” says Imam Shofwan, head of research at Jatam, a Jakarta-based environmental group. “We are very afraid of the future of this nickel industry.”
Nickel increases the energy density of battery cells, allowing a car to drive farther on a single charge. There’s an alternative, lithium iron-phosphate batteries—known as LFP, because of the chemical symbol for iron—which don’t use nickel at all. But their energy density is typically lower, and carmakers have hesitated to use them in higher-end vehicles. (China’s BYD Co., [which outsold Tesla](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-01-03/ev-makers-byd-overtakes-tesla-sales-has-world-in-sight "EV Makers: BYD Overtakes Tesla Sales, Has World in Sight") in the final quarter of last year, uses LFP batteries throughout its range of cars, which tend to be inexpensive.)
Nickel is a crucial component of many electric-vehicle batteries. Broadly speaking, the more nickel is used, the farther a car can drive on each charge.
The basic components of a lithium-ion battery are an anode, mostly made of graphite, and a cathode—divided by an electrolyte solution and a permeable separator.
In some high-performing modern batteries, nickel may account for more than half of the cathode material.
Indonesia’s nickel reserves are the world’s largest, but they were long considered to be too low-grade for use in batteries. Indonesians themselves received little of the benefit. With its poor infrastructure and modest industrial base, the country shipped its nickel ore overseas for processing, largely to China.
Two factors combined to change this. The first was a 2014 decision by then-President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to [ban exports](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-01-11/indonesia-eases-mineral-ore-ban-as-freeport-keeps-copper-exports "Indonesia Eases Mineral Ore Ban as Freeport Keeps Copper Exports") of unprocessed nickel ore. The initial goal was to force companies to invest in domestic processing plants, where nickel ore would be smelted in blast furnaces to separate the valuable metal. Under Jokowi, who took office later that year, the effort became more ambitious, with the government pushing for Indonesia to participate at every level of the EV industry, from mining nickel to [fabricating batteries and assembling finished cars](https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/hyundai-launches-plant-produce-indonesias-first-electric-car-2022-03-16/ "Hyundai launches plant to produce Indonesia's first electric car | Reuters").
The second development was a series of breakthroughs by Chinese companies in a technology called [high-pressure acid leaching](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-03-29/nickel-revolution-has-indonesia-chasing-battery-riches-tinged-with-risk "Nickel Revolution Has Indonesia Chasing Battery Riches Tinged With Risk"). In HPAL plants, low-grade nickel ore is placed into pressure vessels, where it’s treated with sulfuric acid and heated. After that, the nickel that separates out will be suitable for batteries, once it’s refined. HPAL requires less energy than other types of nickel processing. The downside is that it generates huge amounts of waste, known as tailings.
Indonesian nickel processors use a disposal system known as dry stacking, where tailings are dried until they can, in theory, be compacted and piled up for storage outdoors. But nothing stays dry for long in a humid tropical archipelago, and environmentalists worry that stacked tailings could leach chemicals into the soil. Earthquakes and landslides, both common in Indonesia, could tip tailings down slopes or into waterways. (IMIP said in its statement that tailings are disposed of with tools such as “anti-seepage membranes” to prevent leaks, and that groundwater is monitored for contamination.)
Indonesia nonetheless permitted dry stacking. To increasingly powerful Chinese metals producers, the nation had it all: enormous supplies of nickel ore, workers and coal, as well as generous government incentives. Research provider Wood Mackenzie [estimated last year](https://www.woodmac.com/news/opinion/rise-of-indonesian-hpal/ "The rise and rise of Indonesian HPAL – can it continue? | Wood Mackenzie") that the capital cost of an HPAL plant in Indonesia works out to about $30,000 for each metric ton of nickel produced annually, compared with “closer to $100,000” elsewhere.
The Chinese company that most aggressively took advantage of this new opportunity was Tsingshan. Based in the eastern city of Wenzhou, it’s the top producer of nickel globally. Its billionaire founder, Xiang Guangda, exerts so much influence over nickel markets that commodity traders [refer to him as “Big Shot.”](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-09/nickel-market-faces-new-shock-as-big-shot-boosts-metal-output "Nickel Market Faces New Shock as ‘Big Shot’ Boosts Metal Output") Tsingshan had first agreed to build IMIP, in a remote but nickel-rich district called Morowali, in 2013. (An Indonesian conglomerate, BintangDelapan Group, is also a minority investor in the complex.) But advances in HPAL, as well as another breakthrough by Tsingshan, which developed a method for upgrading a low-end product called nickel pig iron, supercharged its growth. In 2020, IMIP hosted 19 separate enterprises, covering an area of about 2,000 hectares (just under 8 square miles). By the middle of last year, the number of tenants had ballooned to 52, while its physical dimensions had grown more than 50%; it’s now about 10 times the size of Manhattan’s Central Park.
A nickel mine in Sulawesi.
IMIP is a self-contained industrial city. Much of the nickel ore it requires is mined in the immediate area, then trucked down hauling roads to smelting facilities. Once it’s been transformed into “intermediate” nickel products, the material is loaded onto bulk carrier vessels at IMIP’s own port jetties and sent to China for further processing. Coal for its on-site generating plants comes the other way, shipped in from other parts of Indonesia. Such “captive” plants, which serve a specific industrial site rather than the regional grid, now make up around a fifth of Indonesia’s coal power capacity.
At IMIP, Tsingshan functions in part as a landlord and contractor, supplying shared services such as power and port access. But it also operates its own smelters and other industrial facilities and has minority ownership positions in those operated by others. Workers are often hired through subcontractors or third-party staffing agencies, which may have their own ties to Tsingshan or other IMIP investors. The upshot is that it’s hard to financially disentangle any one entity operating in IMIP from Tsingshan, or from the overall operations of the complex. (IMIP said each tenant company “is an independent legal entity” that’s “responsible for its own business activities.”)
The model has worked well enough that Tsingshan is replicating it about 450 miles away on the island of Halmahera, in a development called [Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park](https://nickelmines.com.au/tsingshan-collaboration/indonesian-weda-bay-industrial-park-iwip/). Other companies are developing nickel facilities across the country. According to Project Blue, a provider of data on clean-energy raw materials, 20 HPAL projects are under development in Indonesia, dwarfing the number in every other country combined.
Respiratory illnesses are a common complaint in the community surrounding IMIP, whose industrial tenants rely on coal for power.
Waterways in the area are rusty red, a result of runoff from mining operations.
Long before arriving at IMIP, along the narrow highway that traces the shore of the Banda Sea, you see the haze—a soup of emissions from smelters and power plants, as well as dust from mine sites and coal depots. Sometimes tinted brown, sometimes a thick gray, it shrouds the nearby mountains and hovers over the water, lending the landscape the pallor of Delhi. Squint through it and you can spot the mining concessions: broad swaths of hillside where trees and soil have been torn away to access the nickel ore beneath. Downslope, waterways are rusty red from the runoff.
Closer to the complex the traffic thickens with uncountable motorbikes, their drivers wearing the yellow safety helmets that mark them as IMIP employees, heading to or from their shifts. Piles of trash line the roadside; a small stream that passes underneath is so choked with water bottles, plastic bags and takeout containers that the water can barely flow. Closer still, a maze of ramps and catwalks appears overhead, connecting the smelters, which are sited on a plateau flattened to industry-friendly dimensions, to the port. A constant procession of red dump trucks carries coal uphill from arriving ships.
Before Tsingshan invested here, this area was desperately poor. Twenty-four-hour electricity arrived only in 2011. Some local residents recall that when they were children, their families couldn’t afford rice; their staple food instead was sago, a low-nutrient starch extracted from the trunks of palm trees. The region has since undergone a boom. Government statistics show that Morowali’s economy grew almost 600% from 2015 to 2022, and IMIP has attracted workers from all over Indonesia. Thousands of Chinese staff have also arrived, often taking more specialized engineering and technical roles. Paid several times more than their Indonesian counterparts, they live onsite and rarely, if ever, go outside the IMIP perimeter.
Very little of the money invested in IMIP has filtered into the community. The main road devolves in places into tire-swallowing, water-filled potholes. Beyond that, the streets are mostly unpaved and turn to mud when it rains. IMIP’s power plants have a combined current capacity of over 5,300 megawatts—more than the largest nuclear facilities in the US—and huge piles of coal are stored in plain sight. But outside its perimeter the grid can’t meet demand, and businesses use generators to keep their lights on through frequent blackouts. They’re a luxury beyond the budget of most local workers, who crowd into closet-size rooms in makeshift dormitories and take their meals in roadside stalls selling fried chicken or offal stew.
Workers on their way to IMIP.
Even then, many struggle to earn a living that allows for more than day-to-day subsistence. Annisa, a 36-year-old single mother who works in IMIP’s catering department, explained that she makes around 6 million rupiah per month—about $370. (Like other nickel industry employees interviewed for this story, her name has been changed to protect her from repercussions for speaking to reporters.) “How to survive, trying to fulfill our needs with that number?” she asked. An unfurnished room costs up to 1.5 million rupiah per month, and daily essentials in the remote region are far more expensive than in other parts of Indonesia. A canister of cooking gas can cost 55,000 rupiah, more than double the price charged in Makassar, a city of about 1.5 million that’s Sulawesi’s largest.
Annisa said she worries that her income is coming at the expense of her health. When pollution is severe, she said, “it can be hard to breathe … the dust is the worst. It affects the face, the eyes.” But she sees little alternative to her current situation: Away from IMIP, there aren’t many jobs in rural Sulawesi. “There is no other choice,” she said. (IMIP said its wages are “much higher” than those of other local employers.)
Abdul Malik is concerned about the number of local tuberculosis infections.
While the long-term effects of exposure to [the pollutants](https://energyandcleanair.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CREA_CELIOS-Indonesia-Nickel-Development_EN.pdf "(PDF) Debunking the Value-Added Myth in Nickel Downstream Industry") at IMIP are unclear, the information available suggests residents are at risk. “The greatest impact on air quality is from the coal power plants, especially on the community around the facility … and all the communities see the dust in their homes,” said Abdul Malik, head of the community health center in Bahodopi, a town immediately adjacent to IMIP. In the lobby, families crowded into the waiting area seeking attention; respiratory illnesses are the most common complaint. Outside, a sign urged residents to “get used to wearing a mask when leaving the house” to protect from pollution.
As Malik spoke, an assistant with a laptop pulled up statistics on respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis. “TB is quite common in Indonesia, but the concern is the number” of local infections, Malik said. Based on national and regional trends, the center expected to see around 74 cases in 2022. Instead, it logged 117—58% above the estimate. While TB is caused by a bacterial infection, medical researchers have observed that it’s more common among people [who are exposed to significant air pollution](https://globalhealth.rutgers.edu/news/air-pollution-and-tb/#:~:text=Epidemiological%20research%20shows%20that%20tuberculosis,charcoal%20is%20used%20to%20cook. "Air Pollution and TB: Exploring the Connections | Rutgers University").
Still, daily life continues, albeit at a proximity to heavy industry that would be unimaginable in much of the developed world. Farther down the shore, where IMIP is aggressively expanding into a town called Labota, the gray tower of one of its coal plants hovers over an elementary school. The schoolyard, an expanse of bare rocks and dirt with a forlorn volleyball net, lies directly in the smokestack’s shadow. “Of course there are effects from the plant. It’s hard to breathe, you cough,” said Hasrawati, a 31-year-old English teacher. “If we don’t wear glasses, you feel the dust in your eyes.” Sometimes, she said, so much blows into the school that “if we walk on the floor, we can see our footprints.”
Children do their morning exercises at an elementary school in Labota, where IMIP is aggressively expanding.
With the government strongly supportive of IMIP’s growth, some of its critics are trying to appeal to international audiences. When *Businessweek* visited late last year, there were large posters, printed in English, above the main road in Labota. Their headings indicated they were addressed, somewhat optimistically, to the executive director of the United Nations’ high commissioner for human rights and UN Environment Programme. “COME & HELP US,” they said in red capitals.
In a motorcycle shop next door, the owner, Bahar, explained that the posters had been put up by an activist from Makassar. Bahar said he had no expectation that the situation would improve: “We feel like we’re alone. No one is trying to help or to hear our voice.” Between drags on a cigarette, he hiked up the leg of his trousers to reveal pink, ulcer-like sores, each surrounded by a circle of darkened skin; a local medical clinic, he said, had told him they were caused by exposure to coal residue. Despite the tens of billions of dollars spent on Morowali’s nickel industry, Bahar said, there’s “no benefit for us at all. We just get sick.”
Nickel industry managers say they’re mitigating, and compensating for, their social and environmental impacts. IMIP said it shares electricity with the community and monitors air pollution to ensure compliance with Indonesian rules; in 2023, “all air quality tests met the standards.” The complex funds local schools and buys ambulances for nearby villages. It’s also [installing solar panels](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-24/indonesian-nickel-mine-morowali-takes-steps-to-address-environmental-concerns "Indonesian Nickel Mine Morowali Takes Steps to Address Environmental Concerns"), though they’ll provide only a fraction of the electricity needed for nickel smelting. Indeed, IMIP isn’t done building coal plants. Plans call for it to ultimately operate perhaps 6,000 megawatts of coal power, enough to meet the electricity demand of about 5 million US homes.
To Hamid Mina, IMIP’s managing director, this choice of energy source, and everything else, comes down to the cost to the ultimate end-users: carmakers and their customers. “Now everyone is concerned about the environment,” Mina said in an interview in Singapore. “OK, I use solar panels. Are you willing to buy a car with two times the price?” Mina said he resented being lectured by citizens of rich countries that had engaged in their own environmental despoliation. “Europe, United States, Canada—you already cut everything down,” he said. “Now you’re blaming us.”
Over time, Mina explained, IMIP would use its cost advantage to move up the EV value chain, taking over processing that now occurs in China—and on a site that he said could still substantially expand in size. He argued it could do so while reducing its environmental impact, thanks to future improvements such as better pollution filtering in coal plants—and that much of the responsibility for conditions beyond its walls lies with the government, to which “we pay a lot of tax.” Mina also asked critics to consider the tradeoffs. Before IMIP came to Morowali, “there were trees, forest, nothing. But sometimes they ate only once a day. Today we have industry, dust, smoke … but I give them jobs.”
Little of IMIP’s infrastructure investment has reached the surrounding communities.
Even before the fire on Christmas Eve, fatal accidents were common in Indonesian nickel facilities. Trend Asia, a nongovernmental organization based in Jakarta, compiles statistics on such deaths based on media reports. From 2015 to 2022 [it logged 53 fatalities](https://trendasia.org/en/nickel-downstreaming-leads-to-poor-conditions-and-rampant-accidents-imip-workers-declare-the-establishment-of-a-trade-union/#:~:text=In%20Trend%20Asia's%20research%2C%20during,15%20lives%20and%2041%20injuries. "Nickel Downstreaming Leads to Poor Conditions and Rampant Accidents, IMIP Workers Declare the Establishment of a Trade Union"); in the first 11 months of 2023, it recorded 17. (These figures aren’t necessarily comprehensive, since not all accidents make the news.)
In interviews with *Businessweek*, more than a dozen current and former IMIP workers expressed worry about safety conditions, or said they had personally witnessed or been affected by workplace accidents. While some said that managers had attempted to improve their conditions, the workers described an environment rife with danger—from construction sites where a moment of inattention can be fatal to growling, temperamental smelters, capable of immolating their attendants if mishandled. Among huge, sometimes ill-maintained machines and chemical processes conducted at incinerating temperatures, disaster is always possible.
One employee described an incident in which a machine operator fell into a pool of molten slag, killing him instantly; another was familiar with accidents in which workers’ hands had been crushed by machinery; another, an occasion when a worker was fatally run over by a forklift. In yet another instance, a young employee was struck and killed by a falling piece of metal. Virtually all the workers confirmed the contents of a standard policy imposed by IMIP and its tenant companies: When a serious accident occurs, employees are told not to discuss it publicly or share photos on social media, with penalties that can include termination. (IMIP said that employees can “send, forward and share any information.”)
The families bereaved by accidents in nickel facilities aren’t just in Indonesia: A substantial number of workers killed over the years have been Chinese, including some of the December victims. Last year a group of Chinese men who said they’d been employed at IMIP [filed a formal complaint](https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/chinese-nickel-workers-file-complaint-indonesias-rights-body-over-work-2023-02-24/) with Indonesian authorities, alleging they’d been forced to work excessive hours without protective equipment. The volume of accidents in Indonesian nickel facilities “points to a systematic and institutionalized pattern of poor labor practice,” China Labor Watch, a New York-based monitoring group, said in [a recent report on the industry](https://chinalabor.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Compounding-Vulnerability-Chinese-Workers-in-Indonesia.pdf "(PDF) Compounding Vulnerabilities: Chinese Workers in Indonesia | China Labor Watch").
While they face the same dangers, relations between Chinese and Indonesian staff can be tense, and some IMIP workers attribute safety failures partly to a culture clash. Chinese managers “sometimes break the Indonesian safety rules,” says Hasri Sonna, an official with FPE, a union representing IMIP staff. “There are a lot of injuries—and more injuries without data, that are not recorded.” Other issues are more practical: Until recently, according to Arnold Firdaus Bandu, the head of the government Manpower Office for the province that includes Morowali, some equipment manuals were in Mandarin, with no translations available. (IMIP said it investigates employee complaints and records all injuries; meanwhile, it said, “all documents must be bilingual in Chinese and Indonesian.”)
Agus, a safety manager at a Tsingshan-controlled company within IMIP, described a dispute with his Chinese superiors over the operation of dump trucks, which are used in huge numbers to move coal and nickel ore around the complex. The trucks sometimes developed leaks in their air brake systems, risking a brake malfunction if the vehicles weren’t repaired. Agus said that when he objected, “because of the pressure of production, they would say ‘keep using it.’” Another employee, a dump truck operator, said workers are sometimes instructed to drive vehicles with broken suspensions.
Agus had also worked on a conveyor belt that moves coal towards a power plant. There, he said, workers each received 15 respirator masks per month. But in an environment thick with coal dust, each mask would become saturated after four or five hours. By the end of a shift, Agus said, workers would often find coal residue around their mouths, suggesting they’d been inhaling it.
Other risks are more acute. Agus and a worker, Arif, from another IMIP-based company, said they’re sometimes told to perform cleaning and maintenance around conveyors while the belts are still running to avoid slowing production by shutting them down. “It’s only a few centimeters from the conveyor,” Arif said, which could result in a serious accident if, for example, clothes get caught in the machinery. The risks are compounded by a consuming pressure to move fast. “Welding or any other repairs should not be done in a hurry,” Arif said. “Everything about safety should be improved.”
In its statement, IMIP said “faulty or abnormal equipment,” including vehicles, “is strictly prohibited from participating in production,” and workers must be provided with protective equipment that “meets the requirements of laws and standards.” Moreover, “it is strictly prohibited to perform surrounding cleaning or maintenance tasks when the conveyor belt is running.”
Despite the danger, many workers told *Businessweek* they were grateful for their jobs. But even some of those who said they were generally happy at IMIP shared harrowing stories. Henry, a mechanic in a smelter, said that a few years earlier he was working around a piece of equipment called a mud gun, which is used to close the outflow hole of a furnace. Apparently unaware that Henry was there, a colleague activated the hydraulics without warning. The machine slammed into Henry’s chest, pinning him. For a month, he struggled to sleep because of the pain.
In 2022, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, Tesla’s battery supply chain team brought a report to Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk on making a major investment in nickel production in Indonesia. But Musk turned them down, the person says. He’d always resisted joint ventures, which would be the only practical strategy. He was also wary of the country’s unpredictable politics and shaky environmental record.
Despite Musk’s refusal, Tesla uses large volumes of nickel from Indonesia for its higher-end models. (Some of its entry-level cars use LFP batteries.) In 2022, Tesla [entered long-term supply contracts](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-01/tesla-inks-battery-materials-deals-with-two-chinese-suppliers "Tesla Inks Battery Materials Deals With Two China Suppliers") for battery materials with two Chinese companies, Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt Co. and CNGR Advanced Material Co. In its most recent sustainability report, Tesla [identified both companies as nickel suppliers](https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/2023-tesla-impact-report.pdf "(PDF) Impact Report 2023 | Tesla"), with China and Indonesia listed as source countries.
#### From Earth to EV
An indicative selection of supply chain relationships tracing the path of Indonesian nickel, based on *Bloomberg Businessweek*’s review of corporate filings.
A substantial proportion of that material is likely coming from IMIP, or will soon. Huayou is the majority owner of an Indonesian entity called PT Huayue Nickel Cobalt, which operates a major smelter in the facility; filings show it accounts for at least 23% of Huayou’s current operating capacity in Indonesia. CNGR is the lead investor in another IMIP smelter, PT Zhongtsing New Energy, which represents about 31% of CNGR’s planned nickel capacity in the country. Tsingshan, IMIP’s parent company, has financial connections to both: A Singapore entity it controls is an investor in PT Zhongtsing, while an Australian company with which it’s affiliated has a stake in PT Huayue. (In its sustainability report, Tesla said it has “invested significant resources” to address environmental and safety risks in Indonesia, and that “the transition to EVs will not be possible by only relying on non-Indonesian nickel.”)
Other EV manufacturers have similar connections to Morowali, through intermediaries. Huayou lists LG Chem as a key customer in filings, and the two companies have an extensive relationship, including plans for a shared nickel-smelting operation in Indonesia. Recently, LG Chem announced a roughly $19 billion [supply contract with General Motors](https://www.lgcorp.com/media/release/27326 "LG Chem inks cathode material supply deal with General Motors worth KRW 25 trillion | LG"); a subsidiary, LG Energy Solution, [is developing a joint battery plant](https://www.hyundai.news/eu/articles/press-releases/hyundai-lg-energy-solution-mou-indonesian-government-ev-battery-cell-plant.html "Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solution Sign MoU with Indonesian Government to Establish EV Battery Cell Plant | Hyundai") with Hyundai Motor Co. and [has deals to supply batteries](https://pressroom.toyota.com/lg-energy-solution-and-toyota-sign-long-term-battery-supply-agreement-to-power-electric-vehicles-in-the-u-s/ "Toyota Press Release") to car makers such as Toyota Motor Corp.
Another example begins with an IMIP smelter called PT QMB New Energy Materials, which is controlled by China’s GEM Co. The Korean company EcoPro is an investor in PT QMB, and GEM identifies it in filings as a major customer. It or its affiliates supply materials to [Samsung SDI](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-01/ecopro-samsung-sign-34-billion-battery-deal-despite-ev-slump "Ecopro, Samsung Sign $34 Billion Battery Deal Despite EV Slump") and [SK Innovation](https://skinnonews.com/global/archives/7031 "SK Innovation to cooperate with Ecopro Group to preoccupy the high-performance battery market | Press Release"); the former has made batteries for cars such as the [BMW i7](https://www.samsungsdi.com/sdi-news/3102.html#:~:text=The%20New%20i7%20is%20the,88%25%20nickel%20and%20silicon%20anode. "Samsung Press Release") and is building a US battery-manufacturing complex [with Stellantis](https://www.stellantis.com/en/news/press-releases/2022/may/stellantis-and-samsung-announce-battery-plant-in-kokomo "Stellantis Press Release"). The latter has supplied batteries for [Ford’s F-150](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-27/ford-battery-supplier-says-f-150-lightning-fire-rare-occurence "Ford Battery Supplier Says F-150 Lightning Fire ‘Rare Occurence’"). (EcoPro declined to comment.) A unit of China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., whose batteries are used in vehicles from Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen, among others, also has a stake in PT QMB, though a spokesperson said that “no CATL batteries include nickel from IMIP.”
GEM didn’t respond to a request for comment. In separate statements, Huayou and CNGR said they raised safety standards after the Dec. 24 explosion, and view preventing workplace accidents as an overriding priority. Both companies also said they comply with relevant environmental standards.
Even if carmakers wanted to, it would be challenging to ensure their vehicles don’t contain nickel from IMIP or any other specific mine or smelting complex; once it reaches processing plants in China, it can mingle with material from many sources. And for the moment, there aren’t obvious alternatives. “To exclude Indonesia from the supply chain, it would be near impossible to meet EV rollout targets,” says Jack Anderson, a research director at Project Blue. “Simple as that.”
Indonesia’s next president will be Prabowo Subianto, who won a decisive election victory in February. A former military commander and veteran of some of the country’s bloodiest internal conflicts—he was [for a time effectively banned](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/world/asia/indonesia-prabowo-subianto-us-visit.html "Indonesian Defense Chief, Accused of Rights Abuses, Will Visit Pentagon | NYTimes") from the US because of alleged involvement in human-rights abuses, which he’s denied—Prabowo is a controversial figure. He nonetheless represents a degree of continuity, not least because Jokowi’s son will serve as his vice president. (Jokowi himself was term-limited.)
On the campaign trail, Prabowo endorsed “downstreaming,” as Jokowi calls his policy of expanding nickel production. The arguments for staying the course are strong. The median age of the population is around 30, and there’s an urgent need for jobs. Downstreaming has also been lucrative for the financial and political elite. Three nickel companies went public on the Jakarta stock exchange last year, spinning off work for the capital’s bankers and lawyers. At the same time, tax revenue generated by the industry provides a resource for political patronage, in a country with a rich tradition of graft: In Transparency International’s most recent [Corruption Perceptions Index](https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2023 "Transparency International List"), Indonesia ranked 115th, behind Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Some nickel industry figures have suggested that, eventually, carmakers may insist on higher safety and environmental standards. That could mean playing a direct role in mining and refining—which would also provide more control over the supply of a critical industrial input. Ford, for example, [has partnered with Huayou and Vale SA](https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2023/03/30/pt-vale-indonesia-and-huayou-sign-nickel-agreement-with-ford-mot.html "Ford Press Release") to develop an HPAL project in Sulawesi; in a press release, a Ford executive said the plan would “better protect people and the planet.” And companies have long sought to develop technology to help end-users know the origins of their raw materials, though some tracing efforts have struggled. Either way, so-called green nickel will come at a premium to current prices, which manufacturers may not be willing to pay—or pass on to their customers.
And in even the most aggressive scenario, the introduction of such a separate supply chain is years away. For now, most carmakers will continue to get their nickel from the cheapest, most abundant sources available—with the costs borne by the mainly poor Indonesian and Chinese workers who operate mines and smelters.
In late December 2022, word began circulating on social media of a fatal explosion at PT Gunbuster Nickel Industry, one of the main operators in a smelting complex about four hours’ drive from IMIP. Two workers had been in the cab of a crane when coal dust caught fire below. Trapped, they burned to death. In another part of Sulawesi, Niluh Novi Barniarthi, 28, saw the news and was alarmed. Her 20-year-old brother, I Made Defri Hari Jonathan, had been working as a trainee at Gunbuster.
Jonathan had told Barniarthi that he was enjoying the work; he’d talked about using his earnings to expand the family’s small rice farm. Then a cousin called to tell her: Jonathan was one of the dead, along with a young female colleague, Nirwana Selle, who’d developed a following on TikTok for her cheerful videos about life at a nickel smelter.
Gunbuster arranged to drive Jonathan’s body to the farm. He was laid to rest on Dec. 26—the birthday of his mother, Ni Ketut Sunarti. “Jonathan always gave me a cake for my birthday. Instead we had his funeral,” she said in an interview in the family’s home. The concrete-floored house was decorated with photos of her son: posing for a portrait in a shirt and tie, playing the keyboard at a church service. Gunbuster provided some compensation, but the family hadn’t spent it. “The money is like Jonathan’s body,” said his father, I Ketut Bartolomius. “How could we use it?” They felt the same way about selling Jonathan’s motorcycle, which sat in the garage unused.
Jonathan’s parents in their home.
A photo of Jonathan.
The complex that hosts Gunbuster was set up by China’s Jiangsu Delong Nickel Industry Co. and is devoted primarily to producing lower-grade nickel for stainless steel. But it’s becoming part of the EV supply chain: Tesla supplier CNGR [has inaugurated a facility there](https://www.cngrgf.com.cn/en-US/gsxw/1241.html "Press Release") to produce nickel matte, which can then be processed into material for batteries. Filings indicate that its capacity for such products will be greater than CNGR’s operation at IMIP.
It’s entering a site with a dismal safety record. After the accident that killed Jonathan and Selle, workers at Gunbuster staged protests over conditions. These soon turned violent, and two people were killed [in the ensuing melee](https://go.kompas.com/read/2023/01/17/093724774/riot-at-chinese-funded-nickel-plant-in-indonesia-kills-two "Riot at Chinese-Funded Nickel Plant in Indonesia Kills Two | Kompas"). Indonesia’s national human-rights agency, Komnas HAM, investigated the clashes and the events that preceded them. In a report, the watchdog wrote that “unsafe working conditions, lack of protection for workers’ health and welfare, and disregard for corporate responsibilities make this situation extremely serious and unacceptable.”
In a cafe nearby, Gunbuster workers told *Businessweek* that they feared constantly for their safety. Periodically the power went out, pitching the cafe into darkness for the few seconds it took for patrons to switch on their phone flashlights. Agung, a mechanic, explained that he wasn’t provided with protective goggles; if he wanted them, he would have to buy them for as much as 1 million rupiah, out of his monthly salary of just 3.7 million rupiah. His large eyes were red and watery—the result, he said, of welding without eye protection. Some months earlier, a colleague had lost an eye when a splash of hot metal hit his face.
A community near Gunbuster.
Agung, a mechanic, said that if he wanted protective goggles, he had to pay for them himself.
Gunbuster said in a statement that employee welfare is “our utmost concern,” and that it complies with safety rules and is seeking to improve conditions. “However, work accidents are a risk that can occur in various industries and work situations, without exception.” CNGR said it’s committed to “continuous improvement” of safety in its new project.
As at IMIP, workers at Gunbuster are told not to share information after accidents. But such mandates can’t match the speed of the internet, and photos circulate in employee WhatsApp groups. Agung shared an image dated June 26—the day of a deadly smelter explosion at Gunbuster that Indonesian media reported on. It showed two shirtless workers receiving medical attention. One, slumped on a plastic chair, had frayed bandages on both arms and his face. The other was sitting upright, with strips of bandages across his eyes, nose and cheeks, as well as his left hand.
Chinese staff, working in an unfamiliar country, can be vulnerable in different ways. Zhou, a worker in his late 50s, came to Gunbuster in 2021 from Hunan province to work in construction. Soon after he arrived, he said, he was struck by a rock falling from an excavator. (Gunbuster said it had no comment on Zhou’s account.) Bleeding, he took the day off work—and later learned that his pay had been docked. Zhou said that after he complained, three men woke him and began beating him until he passed out. He eventually went to a hospital; a medical report he shared with *Businessweek* indicated that he was diagnosed with a suspected skull fracture. But Zhou said that his superiors refused to let him stay for treatment. He eventually made it back to China, where he sent a letter to local officials describing his experience. He said he never received a response.
The nickel processed at Gunbuster, and by CNGR at the same site, is mined from high above the smelter complex, accessible by hauling roads that wind up the hillsides.
The extraction of lateritic nickel, the type that’s available in Sulawesi, looks nothing like what most people picture when they think of a mine. The ore lies [just below the surface](https://www.geologyforinvestors.com/nickel-laterites/ "Nickel Laterites: The World’s Largest Source of Nickel | Geology for Investors"), so there’s no need for a deep pit, let alone a tunnel descending to underground deposits. Instead, crews clear-cut broad areas of forest and remove the top layers of earth, exposing nickel-containing material that can then be carried out. New concessions are appearing up and down the coast of Sulawesi as the smelters expand, leaving jagged gaps in the tree cover. Mining companies are supposed to restore the forest when they’re done, but environmental groups are skeptical that this will ever make up for the losses.
On a recent morning at a mine site near Gunbuster, an orange excavator chewed away at a mound of dirt as a dump truck waited nearby. The sun was punishing, and a pair of workers on a break sat under a crude shelter, erected from sticks and a tarp. Just down the slope, it was possible to make out the smelters in the hazy distance, accessible by an unpaved hauling road. Columns of trucks flowed toward it and away, throwing up clouds of dust. Beyond, on the Banda Sea, the nickel ships were waiting for their cargo. *—With Mohammad Jafar Bua, Alfred Cang, Regif Asri Ibrahim, Eko Listiyorini and David Stringer*
# Inside the Slimy, Smelly, Secretive World of Glass-Eel Fishing
The Sargasso Sea, a warm, calm expanse of the North Atlantic Ocean, is bordered not by land but by four strong currents—a gyre. Vast mats of prickly brown seaweed float so thickly on the windless surface that Christopher Columbus worried about his ships getting stuck. The biodiverse sanctuary within and beneath the sargassum produces *Anguilla rostrata*, the American eel. Each female lays some eight million eggs. The eggs hatch as ribbonlike larvae that drift to the Gulf Stream, which carries them to the continental shelf. By the time they reach Maine, the larvae have transformed into swimmers about the length of an index finger, with the circumference of a bean sprout and the translucence of a jellyfish. Hence their nickname, glass eels, also known as elvers. The glass eel is barely visible, but for a dark stripe—its developing backbone—and a couple of chia seeds for eyes. “Ghosts on the water,” a Maine fisherman once called them. Travelling almost as one, like a swarm or a murmuration, glass eels enter tidal rivers and push upstream, pursuing the scent of freshwater until, ideally, they reach a pond and commence a long, tranquil life of bottom-feeding. Elvers mature into adults two to three feet in length, with the girth and the coloring of a slimy bicycle tire. Then, one distant autumn, on some unknown cue, they return to the Sargasso, where they spawn and die.
Maine has thirty-five hundred miles of coastline, including coves, inlets, and bays, plus hundreds of tidal rivers, thousands of streams, and what has been described as “an ungodly amount of brooks.” Hundreds of millions of glass eels arrive each spring, as the waters warm. Four hundred and twenty-five licensed elvermen are allowed to harvest slightly more than seven thousand five hundred pounds of them during a strictly regulated fishing season, which runs from late March to early June. Four Native American tribes may legally fish another two thousand or so pounds, with more than half of that amount designated for the Passamaquoddy, who have lived in Maine and eastern Canada for some twelve thousand years. Maine is the only state with a major elver fishery. South Carolina has a small one (ten licensed elvermen), but everywhere else, in an effort to preserve the species, elver fishing is a federal crime.
The elvermen sell their catch to state-licensed buyers, who in turn sell to customers in Asia. The baby eels are shipped live, mostly to Hong Kong, in clear plastic bags of water and pure oxygen, like a sophisticated twist on pet-store goldfish. They live in carefully tended tanks and ponds at aquaculture farms until they are big enough to be eaten. Japan alone annually consumes at least a hundred thousand tons of freshwater eel, *unagi*, which is widely enjoyed *kabayaki* style—butterflied, marinated, and grilled.
The American eel became a valuable commodity as overfishing, poaching, and other forms of human interference led to the decline of similar species in Japan (*Anguilla japonica*) and Europe (*Anguilla anguilla*). Those species are now red-listed as, respectively, endangered and critically endangered. The U.S. has not declared the American eel endangered, and fishermen want to keep it that way.
In March, 2011, just before elver season started in Maine, a tsunami in Japan decimated aquaculture ponds, driving the price of American glass eels from about two hundred dollars per pound to nearly nine hundred by the season’s closing day. The next year, the price reached one thousand eight hundred and sixty-nine dollars per pound, and soon topped two thousand. *National Fisherman* calls glass eels “likely the most valuable fish in the United States on a per-pound basis.” A recent issue of *Marine Policy* cited “unprecedented demand” for American eel. Only lobster outranks it in Maine.
During a favorable market and a hard elver run, a Mainer may earn a hundred thousand dollars in a single haul. Each license holder is assigned a quota, ranging from four pounds to more than a hundred, based partly on seniority. Even the lowest quota insures a payout of six thousand dollars if the price per pound breaches fifteen hundred, which happens with some regularity. Maine is the only place in the country where a kid can become eligible for an elver license at fifteen and win a shot at making more money overnight, swinging a net, than slinging years’ worth of burgers. Elvermen have sent their children to college on eels, and have used the income to improve their homes, their businesses, their boobs. This year, more than forty-five hundred Mainers applied for sixteen available licenses.
One frosty evening in April, an elverman named Sam Glass turned onto a dead-end road in the state’s northernmost coastal region, Down East, and parked beside a stream. The water was about thirty feet wide, with boulders across it and trees on the other side. The stream feeds West Bay, which leads to the Atlantic, whose tide swells and then shrinks the river’s volume every twelve hours. Glass, a tall, reserved fifty-year-old with dark, curly hair and a trim beard, pulled five hand-chopped maple poles from the bed of his pickup truck and carried them down the riverbank. Next, he fetched a plastic bucket, nylon cord, coils of rope, two boat anchors, and a fyke net. Unfurled, the net, made of pale, fine-gauge mesh, resembled a Chinese lantern trailed by two oversized streamers, or a mutant sea creature with a barrel-shaped head.
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a26380)
Cartoon by Carolita Johnson
Glass, wearing waders, sloshed into the water and fastened a rope around a boulder, securing the barrel, called the tail bag, at the foot of a gentle rapids. Back on land, he hooked a streamer to one of the maple poles, which he’d stabbed into the earth as a stanchion. The streamer now resembled a wing, hemmed at the top with tubular buoys and weighted at the bottom with chains and one of the boat anchors. To pull the wing taut, Glass roped it to a spruce, then went to work on the other streamer. The net took shape as an ocean-facing funnel, hugging the shore.
The high-tide line showed on the riverbank like a shadow on a wall. In about six hours, the water would rise again, submerging the tail bag and the bottom half of the wings. Glass was working to beat the setting sun and to harness the pull of the moon. If he had set a good net, baby eels would swim right into his trap.
Elvers avoid strong currents by keeping to the sides of rivers, the way mice follow baseboards. Glass long ago learned to look for “pinch points,” where the eels are likely to pass within two feet of shore. For the better part of two hours, he cut cord, tied clove hitches, positioned the anchors, tweaked the lean of the stanchions. Hawks and bald eagles were circling, and watching from tree branches. He finished after sundown, his exhalations visible in the beam of his headlamp. “That’s about it,” he said, and walked back up the riverbank, through the bulrush and thorn. A block of dislodged snow slipped downstream, pinballing through the boulders and passing beneath a bridge, beyond which other elvermen had just finished setting their nets. Glass went home to wait for high water.
Glass grew up in a cedar-shingled house on ten acres near Dyer Bay, and still lives there today. He keeps fyke nets strung up near his apple trees and piled in a greenhouse, where he’s been restoring his late father’s lobster boat. He got burned out on lobstering a while ago and fantasizes about piloting the boat to the Bahamas. He prefers eeling to lobstering, and travelling to almost anything.
A couple of years ago, Glass and another elverman, Ryan Loughran, went into business together as licensed elver buyers. They partnered with a Korean businessman who wanted to stake a local broker and guarantee a shippable supply. Loughran and Glass augmented their own fishing by taking a commission on each transaction. When I asked why not sell directly to Hong Kong, bypassing the middlemen, another fisherman who overheard the question said, “It isn’t done.”
Glass has other entrepreneurial interests, including turning a cottage that he built when he was twenty into an Airbnb property. Aside from a shipyard pension, eeling constitutes Loughran’s entire livelihood. He is a gregarious father of three in his forties who always wears a baseball cap and, because of a nerve disorder, walks with a cane. When he was a boy, his father, an eeler, advised him to get a fishing license in case glass eels ever became valuable, never expecting a disaster on the other side of the world to produce Florida-condo money, comfortable-retirement money. In the early boom days of eeling, armed buyers roamed the coast with aerated tanks and a tantalizing amount of bundled cash, paying for elvers straight out of the water.
The Maine Department of Marine Resources now required fishermen to sell their catch at a fixed address. Glass’s home wasn’t particularly conducive to handling customers, so he reached out to the patriarch of a respected fishing family who lived in a more convenient location, with a wide gravel driveway and a stand-alone garage. Glass had known the patriarch’s wife since grade school. The patriarch captained a range of vessels and wore jackets embroidered with the name of his forty-two-foot Duffy. “I scallop, I lobster, I eel,” he told me one night. I wondered what happens when two competing boats show up at the same fishing grounds—who wins? The patriarch said, “Whoever’s got the biggest balls and the biggest red knife.” A lobsterman standing next to him nodded solemnly.
The patriarch agreed to rent Glass and Loughran his garage as a buying station. (His name isn’t mentioned here because he wouldn’t allow it, but he tolerated my hanging around.) This year, in late March, they brought in tanks, aerators, nets, buckets, folding tables, and a portable scale. In one corner, near a “*TRUMP* 2020” banner, they installed a chest-high tank, which resembled a one-person hot tub. Someone chalked “$900” on a blackboard.
Demand in Asia drives the price, but the floor is set locally by a small group of buyers whose names are known and whose conversations, I was told, are private. Nine hundred dollars per pound was the lowest opening price in years. (Loughran had heard that there was a “bottleneck” in Hong Kong.) As the season progresses, the price climbs in twenty-five- or fifty-dollar increments. Each change is posted in Elverholics, a popular fishing forum on Facebook. Some fishermen sell early and low, just to get money in hand. Those who won’t even consider taking less than fifteen hundred dollars a pound respond with yawn emojis and exhortations to “HOOOLLLDDDD!!!!” as they wait for the price-setters to turn on one another.
In early spring, there’s little for fishermen in Maine to do other than catch bait herring and prepare boats and drags. The clam flats are still thawing. Eeling, theoretically, bridges the gap between seasons. Glass eels hate turbulence, and cold water stupefies them. They seem to run hardest under a full or new moon, in warmer weather, which may not come until May or June, by which time the season is nearly over. This year, rain and snow had left the rivers frothy and high. Eelers were pulling their nets to avoid losing them to the blow. Leaving baby eels trapped in churn was “like puttin’’em through a washing machine,” the patriarch told me.
Loughran set up a makeshift bar in the garage. One night, he invited a bunch of people over. I walked in to find about a dozen fishermen, drinks in hand. Loughran was sitting behind his scale, his laptop open. School had been cancelled for the next day, because of another incoming snowstorm. Bottles of Bacardi Limón and Skrewball peanut-butter whiskey were being drained.
In the corner, Glass was running an aquarium net through the holding tank, cleaning out dead eels and searching for killers. The elver’s mortal enemies include trout and raccoons, but eelers most despise sea lice, fingertip-size crustaceans that look as lovely as their name. The lice bite the eels; the eels die. The patriarch fished a brown louse from a garbage barrel, where it had been clinging to the side of an empty Miller Lite box, and showed it to me: “Even that *one* will cause mass destruction.”
The patriarch often eats scallops out of the shell on his boat. He plucked a baby eel from the tank and swallowed it alive. Glass, who is known for his ability to stomach anything, did the same, and said, “Not much taste to ’em.” This was an old trick sometimes performed for nosy outsiders. Eleven years ago, an elverman downed a live eel in front of a BuzzFeed reporter and claimed that it tried to crawl back up his throat.
In the human palm, a living mass of glass eels feels like a cold pile of squirm. In captivity, they resemble restless black threads, or pepper that has learned how to move. Eels enjoy density, and often cuddle up in piles. With each scoop of the net, elvers wriggled onto Glass’s wrist before appearing to leap back into the water. Glass said, joking a little, “This was the funnest business in the world, but the government doesn’t want to see you have fun *or* make money. We used to be able to go at it unlimited.”
“A free-for-all,” the patriarch said.
Licensed fishermen could once set as many fykes and catch as many glass eels as they wanted, using a net of any size or type. The patriarch showed me a cell-phone video of someone dumping a funky gumbo of overage back into a river, to comply with the state’s limits. The price at the time was twenty-two hundred dollars per pound. The eels would have fetched more than ninety grand.
Like lobster, eel was popular for its affordability and protein before it became an expensive delicacy. In the U.K., elvers are scrambled with eggs. In the Basque country, elvers *a la bilbaína* are fried in olive oil with chili peppers and garlic. The Scandinavians smoke eels. The Maori roast them in leaves. *The Economist* once noted that the cooking encyclopedia “Larousse Gastronomique,” published in 1938, contains forty-five different recipes for eel. (“To kill an eel, seize it with a cloth and bang its head violently against a hard surface.”) Cocktail garnishes are typically inanimate (and non-sentient), but I recently saw a Facebook video of glass eels wriggling around in, supposedly, a cup of sake.
Years ago, John Wyatt Greenlee was working on a doctorate in medieval history when he became intrigued by seventeenth-century maps of London, which showed images of “eel ships” anchored in the Thames. The Dutch had been selling salted eel to England since at least the fourteenth century, and now delivered them live. Calling himself “Surprised Eel Historian, PhD,” Greenlee took his findings to Twitter, attracting tens of thousands of followers with trivia (early Britons could pay their rent in eels), cheek (“Eel on Twitter > Elon Twitter”), and activism (“Eels are also a super-important part of stream ecologies”). Greenlee told me, “It’s not a panda, or something big and majestic, and it’s not a cute otter. Eels are slimy, weird, snakelike things. But they’re an umbrella species. Saving them means saving broad swaths of habitat from the ocean all the way up to the headwaters.”
Previous eel obsessives have included Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Linnaeus, and Freud, who published one of his first papers, in 1877, on eels. (He dissected hundreds of them in a futile search for clues to how they reproduce.) Contemporary biologists know more about the eel’s reproductive system than Freud did, but the sex life of eels is still a secret that plays out within the pressurized depths of the Sargasso. Despite numerous attempts, no one has ever seen them mate in the wild, or managed to document the hatching of eggs outside of captivity.
The freshwater eel “has a complex life history, parts of which are still shrouded in mystery,” Jonna Tomkiewicz, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Aquatic Resources, in Denmark, explained in one of many papers she’s written on the subject. Do the larvae live on gelatinous plankton? Marine snow? Where in the water column do they feed? Without this kind of knowledge, researchers are “often operating in the dark.” In “Under the Sea-Wind,” Rachel Carson observed that when the American eel returned to its sargassum patch to die it “passed from human sight and almost from human knowledge.” In his book “Eels,” James Prosek, whom the *Times* has dubbed “a kind of underwater Audubon,” calls this final swim “among the greatest unseen migrations of any creature on the planet.”
Sam Glass tends to his fyke net. “We used to be able to go at it unlimited,” he said.Photograph by Jocelyn Lee for The New Yorker
For adult eels, the trip often involves surviving the turbine blades of hydroelectric dams. A Maine elverman named Randy Bushey once reported finding migrating eels “chopped up in perfect, one-foot chunks.” Brian Altvater, Sr., a member of the Passamaquoddy Tribe who is working to restore healthy fish runs to the Schoodic River, on the Canadian border, has pushed for the removal of dams by arguing that “they generate very little electricity compared to the damage that they do to the entire ecosystem.”
Elvers are the key to eel aquaculture farming, given the difficulty, as yet, of captive breeding and scalable hatcheries. Japan, which now imports two-thirds of its eel stock, was eying the American eel as early as 1970. The following spring, William Sheldon, a young employee of the Maine Department of Marine Resources with a new degree in wildlife management, embarked on a study to see if the state’s elver numbers could support a fishery. He found more than enough, and in a report that is still referenced today, he detailed his observations along with one of his fishing inventions, the “Sheldon trap.” (A net with a mesh size “somewhat smaller than ordinary window screening” appeared to work best.) Sheldon also described how to harvest, hold, and transport elvers without killing them. The document was foundational to the fishery that exists today.
When Maine’s elver season starts, every March 22nd, eelers pray for warm weather. Some toss a coin in their chosen river, for luck. A couple of days before the opening in 2012, the year after the tsunami in Japan boosted prices, the temperature reached the low eighties, far above average. Julie Keene, a veteran eeler from Lubec, at the northeastern tip of the contiguous United States, got a sunburn and fourteen glass eels. That time of year, the typical number was zero, because the rivers were usually still full of ice. Within a couple of days, she had caught about forty-five thousand—eighteen pounds, a personal best. On the Union River, in Ellsworth, the capital of Down East eeling, fishermen were said to have caught more than a million dollars’ worth of glass eels in a single night.
The next year, the fishing was still so good that one elverman tattooed his forearm with an eel, dollar signs, and “2013,” memorializing a record season that afforded him, among other things, a new four-wheeler. Rural Mainers could work their entire lives and never see big money, especially all at once, especially Down East, where the median household income was about thirty-six thousand dollars.
Jackpot payouts, in cash, fomented a wild period of interstate elver poaching. Saboteurs sliced their competitors’ nets. Untended buckets got taken. Thieves would detach entire tail bags and run off with them. Loughran’s father used to have him camp beside their “honey hole” around the clock. A splash in the night, or “hootin’ and hollerin’,” as one eeler put it, was the sound of fishermen throwing one another into the drink. “There were just *hundreds* of people poaching,” Darrell Young, a prominent elverman, told a filmmaker. Another, Rick Sibley, said that eeling “didn’t bring the community together—it tore people apart.”
By 2014, the state had imposed its quota, capped the number of elver licenses, limited eelers to two nets, banned cash transactions (buyers must pay with checks), and implemented a swipe-card system to monitor eelers’ individual hauls in real time. The regulations were devised in collaboration with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, a long-standing interstate body that works with federal agencies to maintain a sustainable industry. Poaching quieted down. Fishermen who had let their license expire kicked themselves when, in 2018, the price of elvers peaked at twenty-eight hundred dollars a pound. Now it was possible to get back in only through a state lottery.
A fourth-generation sardine packer, Keene started fishing glass eels decades ago, when it paid barely twenty dollars a pound. After the price spiked, she and her longtime boyfriend were able to buy two new trucks, plant an orchard, and build a barn and a garage. “It’s changed our life,” she said, in an interview for an oral-history project in 2014. “And then let’s look at how it’s contributing to the rest of the state. We paid sixty thousand dollars in taxes last year. That’s enough money to support five families on welfare.”
Keene, who considered herself a good steward of Maine’s natural resources, told the historian that she had watched “a complete gold rush” nearly destroy sea urchins in the late eighties and early nineties, and that she didn’t want to see the same thing happen to eels or any other species. “I believe in having a future,” she said. That future already seemed compromised by factors unrelated to conservation. Keene described pervasive drug abuse and a “lot of alcoholism” Down East, where, as in many rural areas, it can be hard to get help. (A record seven hundred and twenty-three Mainers died of overdoses in 2022.) Keene said, “How does a local community hold on just by their fingernails, you know?”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a26692)
“They say it gets easier after the third demon child.”
Cartoon by Dan Rosen
Responsible fishermen don’t disapprove of rules; they simply want more of a say in making them. Regulators were worried about the American eel’s decline, but fishermen were seeing elvers in what Keene called “Biblical” numbers. Eelers wondered if the regulators were perhaps looking in the wrong place, or conducting their census on nights when eels didn’t “go.” Keene said, “Just because they didn’t go doesn’t mean they’re not there.” No one seemed to know exactly how many elvers there were, or whether any decrease in population was caused by overfishing or more properly attributable to the turbine gantlet and other hazards. Jason Bartlett, a Maine Department of Marine Resources biologist who specializes in eels, told me that he is increasingly worried about a swim-bladder parasite that messes with an eel’s buoyancy: “If they can’t get off the bottom, they’re going to die before they get back to the Sargasso.” The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in its most recent significant assessment of *A.**rostrata,* acknowledged a decline but indicated that “the American eel population is not subject to threats that would imperil its continued existence.”
The A.S.M.F.C. has never increased Maine’s over-all quota. Individual quotas are not made public, and fishermen reveal their number about as quickly as they give up their favorite fishing spot. Some of those who remember the unregulated days bristle at any limit (“Fishermen always grumble,” one elverman told me), but they were especially infuriated when the lottery was introduced, in 2013, and their quotas stagnated while the state admitted newcomers. Keene said, at the time, “How is that rewarding someone that’s been in this fishery, that breathes that fishery? That makes their own gear, that is dependent on it, that understands it, that respects it? I still have a license because I obey the law. How is that rewarding good faith?”
Glass eels are an ideal target for subterfuge, because they run at night and because once they’re out of the water it is impossible to prove where they came from. The risk-reward ratio makes them irresistible. Eel smuggling, reportedly a four-billion-dollar-a-year trade spanning at least three continents, has been called the world’s least known but most profitable wildlife crime. (The G-7’s Financial Action Task Force, a watchdog federation of thirty-nine countries, has identified wildlife trafficking as a “major transnational” racket, on par with arms dealing and drug running.) Glass eels are among the most bootlegged protected species in Europe. In 2021, an investigation into the assassination of the Haitian President Jovenel Moïse revealed that his government had been bearing down on traffickers of narcotics, weapons—and eels. Moïse believed that the eel trade should be regulated and taxed, the *Times* reported, noting, “Many of the eels go to China, but the Haitian police are investigating the industry as a way to launder illicit profits.”
Glass eels have been found in passengers’ luggage at airports in Amsterdam and Brussels. In 2017, British border agents checked cargo bound for Hong Kong and discovered, hidden beneath a batch of iced fish, four hundred and forty pounds of illicitly harvested elvers. Half were dead. The smuggler had allegedly spent two years trafficking more than five million eels, with a market value of nearly seventy million dollars. He used a warehouse in Gloucestershire as a way station, and the eels had been sourced in Spain. Smugglers there have operated in Algeciras and Tarifa, at the southern tip of the continent, just across the Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco, which has restricted elver fishing since 2011.
Although *A. anguilla* tends to be the most trafficked eel species, in 2022, Hong Kong alone imported almost twenty-eight thousand pounds of *rostrata* from the United States, according to Hiromi Shiraishi, a researcher at Chuo University. The amount far exceeded the quotas in Maine and South Carolina combined. When I asked Maine’s fishing commissioner, Patrick Keliher, to explain the discrepancy, he told me, through a spokesperson, “Elvers from Maine are being tracked very closely, and it’s our belief that if there are additional elvers entering the supply chain, it’s because of the illegal activity that has been so prevalent in Canada the last two years.”
In Canada, glass eels are the most valuable seafood by weight. Last year, a woman who lived near Hubbards Cove, in Nova Scotia, was alarmed to wake at three in the morning to see men outside, in balaclavas, taking glass eels from a stream. In another incident, a dispute over eels ended with one man reportedly assaulting another with a pipe. Canada’s minister of fisheries and oceans temporarily shut down the country’s fishery, saying, “It was simply too dangerous to let this continue.”
Elver fishing in Canada was cancelled again this year, but eelers went on eeling. (By late April, the authorities had charged ninety-five people with doing so, including five Mainers.) First Nation members argued that treaty rights exempted them from federal regulations. In a Facebook video, a First Nation fisherman named Cory Francis announced plans to set fykes on the Annis River in Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia, a hundred and twenty-two miles across the Gulf of Maine, and declared Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans a “criminal element” and a “rogue group.” Accusing the agency of “racially profiling Indigenous people,” he said, “You can go fuck off.”
Not long after conducting his seminal elver study, Sheldon, the Maine Department of Marine Resources employee, left government service to become a lobsterman. His boat sank, and he turned to eeling. He both fished and operated as a buyer, once explaining to a TV news station, “The small man can get into it.” The license plate on his truck read “*EEL WAGN*.” A sign in his headquarters, in Ellsworth, said “Smoking is permitted here in the shop. Lying is to be expected. Everyone welcome here.”
Sheldon often talked to the media. He was the one who swallowed a live eel in front of the BuzzFeed reporter. In that reporter’s profile, published in 2013, we find Sheldon in his sixties, with both a flare gun and a 40-calibre Glock, serving bucket-bearing customers at a temporary headquarters set up in a cheap motel room. He’s on the phone with “Chinese guys who wired him $600,000 on handshake deals.” The year before, Sheldon had “paid his fishermen $12 million for elvers (about a third of the estimated $40 million paid out in Maine over the season).”
What few knew then was that federal agents had launched an interstate poaching investigation, called Operation Broken Glass. Baby eels were being harvested up and down the East Coast in places that banned elver fishing, and passed off as having come from Maine. Dealers were knowingly buying and selling illicit elvers, learning only too late that they’d been talking to undercover officers. Twenty-one men were ultimately charged with trafficking more than five million dollars’ worth of glass eels.
Sheldon was one of them. By the time federal agents raided his business, he was considered the grandfather of the industry in Maine. Sheldon had “cornered the market, basically,” a fellow-elverman later said. In federal court, a prosecutor noted, “By his own pronouncement and by the consensus of the community, he knows more about elver fishing than anyone.”
In October, 2017, Sheldon pleaded guilty to trafficking two hundred and sixty-eight pounds of glass eels from states where elver fishing is illegal. “Bill Sheldon not only facilitated a black market in illegal elvers—he encouraged it,” the federal prosecutor said, at sentencing. “He didn’t just buy illegal elvers—he provided poachers with advice and equipment. He didn’t just dodge the law himself—he told other people what to say if they got caught.” The prosecutor told the judge, “This was just greed.”
In court, Sheldon minimized, as defendants do. He claimed to have made, at most, thirty thousand dollars on his crime, and expressed shame and regret for “poor judgment.” His lawyer requested home confinement instead of incarceration, arguing that Sheldon was a good, stable person: married for nearly fifty years, a father of two, a grandfather of four, no prior felonies. Hardships were enumerated: a sick father, the sunk boat. Worst of all, Sheldon’s daughter Deb had killed herself as his case unfolded. Sheldon told the judge, “I will forever feel like I was responsible.”
Sheldon was sentenced to six months in prison and three years of probation—a fitting punishment, the judge said, for “significant deception” and for helping to create and clandestinely support a black market. His probation ended a few years ago. He gave up his dealer license but was allowed to keep fishing, and went to work for a Maine-based company co-owned by Mitchell Feigenbaum, a former Philadelphia lawyer who moved to Canada decades ago to become an eel exporter. Feigenbaum had testified on Sheldon’s behalf at sentencing, and tried to differentiate him from the “rough, tough, mean, nasty, hard individuals” typical of their industry. He told the judge, “Our product is all going to one place. It’s the Chinese government. State-owned industries are pretty much our sole consumer for this product. They want it as cheap as possible. They will engage in predatory practices that would make your head spin, including a lot of the poaching.”
Although Sheldon remains an influential figure in eeling, he no longer takes questions. (He did not respond to mine.) He and his supporters blamed “the media” for the death of his daughter—a mother of two, a registered nurse, a Steelers fan who refused to shit-talk the Patriots, a smoker who was trying to quit, an alcoholic who already had. “The various stories about Bill and the stress it brought to the family had a negative impact,” one of his defense documents said.
The Sheldon case left a lot of fishermen even more wary than usual. Loughran told me, “It’s a fragile industry, and bad publicity could be very detrimental to it.” Last year, when I initially expressed interest in writing about glass eels, someone posted on Facebook, “I smell Fed.” One person liked the comment: Sheldon.
On a recent night, the patriarch and his son drove to a back-road bridge north of Acadia National Park and parked downslope on a concrete boat ramp. The headlamps of their truck illuminated little more than a wedge of flotsam. The only other light was the sickly twinkle off a scattering of stars. As I crossed the bridge on foot, it was so dark that I could have walked into an elephant.
The men were wearing waders, hoodies, and yellow rubber gloves up to their elbows. One of them flicked on a powerful flashlight. From the bridge, I watched them traverse an inhospitable stretch of beach and climb the jagged riprap, moving toward the bridge piling where their fyke net was tethered. The outgoing tide churned between the pilings with the noisy velocity of floodwaters. Grasping one of the tethers, the patriarch waded into the buffeting rush. He untied one end of the tail bag and emptied it into a plastic bait bucket that his son was holding. Then he re-tied the bag and secured the tether, and the two of them returned to the truck.
Back home, they found Loughran waiting at the garage. It was one-thirty in the morning. Eelers on the Presumpscot River, another elver stronghold, further south, were “*slaughtering*,” Loughran reported. That meant having a good night.
Glass eels are so translucent that a Maine fisherman once called them “ghosts on the water.”Photograph by Jocelyn Lee for The New Yorker
The patriarch’s son set an aquarium net over the top of an empty bucket and strained the first of their sludge. The pour revealed sea lice, krill, a needlefish, and a bunch of twitchy sticklebacks, as silver as store-bought fishing lures—bycatch, all of which gets returned to the river. Cupping the net from the bottom, the patriarch teased the few glass eels into view and plucked them out, the way you’d pick lint off a sweater. He said, “We have to work harder for ours than they do down in southern Maine. They don’t get out of bed for this little bit.” I understood what he meant when I later saw a video in which two eelers struggled to lift a tail bag so full that they might as well have been trying to move a body. “Holy mackerel,” one said. The other said, “Oh, my word.”
The second pour of the patriarch’s bucket writhed with eels—a pound and a half’s worth, all told. They moved the elvers into their holding tank and prepared to wait out the price the way an investor sits on a promising stock. The blackboard now said “$950.” It was hard to know what kind of payout they could ultimately expect, given the caginess surrounding pricing and quotas. (Buyers sometimes pay more than the publicized rate.) I’d once asked Loughran why all the secrecy, and he’d said, “If you’re pullin’ a hundred pounds a night, you ain’t showing *nobody* that.” Rivals would “set nets around every fucking inch of you.” Elvermen don’t like others watching their weigh-ins, either. Nobody wants the world to know that he just banked fifty grand.
Several days later, Loughran and Glass brought kimchi (a gift from their business partner) and fresh crabmeat over to Glass’s house. They were making crab rolls when I arrived. Glass stoked a fire in a woodstove and handed me a Heineken in a jelly jar. We ate some dried haddock as he prepared the rolls, which he served on square porcelain plates at the dining table, whose centerpiece was a chessboard. Afterward, Glass walked me out to the greenhouse and showed me his dad’s lobster boat, the Don’t Know. He was thinking of renaming it the Andromeda. In the distance we could hear the ocean. He said, “When it’s *real* rough, it sounds like a lion’s den.”
When we got back to the house, the patriarch and his wife were there, sitting with Loughran in Glass’s living room. Loughran told a story about killing twenty-seven rats in one night in his father’s barn and lining them up as evidence of an infestation; the corpses were gone by morning, having presumably been carried off and eaten by other rats. This led to talk of wharf rats, New York City rats, black widows, brown recluses, and the redback spiders of Australia, but, as inevitably happens with elvermen, the conversation returned to eels.
Like hunters, elvermen study and admire the animals that provide their livelihood. Glass and Loughran had recently asked Alexa about the lifespan of the American eel, marvelling that the answer was as many as forty-four years, the same age as Loughran. Because eels absorb oxygen through their skin, they can skirt a strong current by leaving the water briefly to climb rocks or scale a concrete dam. They may rest in a river’s calm pockets, waiting for the rising tide to help push them past white water before the next lunar cycle drags them back.
Loughran told me, “In China and Japan, there’s whole families that rely on this seed fish for *their* livelihoods as well.” (Aquaculture farming has existed in Asia since antiquity.) On Glass’s television, he cued up a YouTube video of an eel-farming operation in Taiwan. A doughy mass oozed out of a machine and hit the concrete floor like a dense blob of poo. Glass eels eat nothing—they don’t even have a mouth—but in the next stage of development, when they start to resemble garter snakes, they can be taught to expect “eel chow,” often some amalgam of fish proteins, oils, and blood. (This garter-snake stage is when glass eels technically become elvers, though fishermen almost always refer to the two interchangeably.) We watched a farmer quarter the blob and drop one of the chunks into a pond. It floated. Hundreds of mature eels attacked it from all sides. They were large and ropy, and you could hear them smacking. It was hard to believe that the baby eels in the patriarch’s garage would grow up eating the stuff in this video. “Yep,” the patriarch said, “and then we’re gonna eat them.” The U.S. imports eleven million pounds of eel annually, mostly from China. The elvers that get shipped to the other side of the world may wind up right back in Maine.
In the United States, according to a census conducted in 2018, there are seven eel farms—two fewer than there are frog farms. The only land-based eel aquaculture operation, American Unagi, is in Midcoast Maine. Sara Rademaker, an Indiana native who studied aquaculture at Auburn University, started the company ten years ago by test-raising elvers in her basement. She had been looking for a fish to farm when she realized how ludicrous it was that the only state with a major elver fishery had no one growing, processing, and selling its own valuable catch. Establishing such an enterprise would theoretically keep jobs and money Stateside, shrink the trade’s environmental footprint, and, if done right, provide accountability. (Rademaker told me that American Unagi uses no antibiotics or chemicals.)
Aquaculture farming, the fastest-growing sector of food production, is a global industry valued at more than three hundred billion dollars. It already provides half the world’s food and is projected to account for more as the planet’s human population hurtles toward ten billion in the next couple of decades. Twenty million people work in the aquaculture trade, many of them in developing nations. When someone recently asked Loughran why Maine elvermen don’t try to get a piece of the farming, he replied, “You’d need several million dollars just to gear up.”
A successful eel farm requires the careful balance of environmental factors: warmth, diet, oxygen, pH levels. In Maine, the right conditions must be simulated. An indoor operation such as Rademaker’s requires, to start, square footage, tanks, feeders, pumps, temperature control, filtration, and clean water flow. As the eels mature, workers continually separate the stock by size, so that they’ll feed correctly—and not on one another.
The Maine Department of Marine Resources assigned American Unagi a quota of two hundred pounds. Rademaker also buys elvers from local harvesters. She told me that black-market fishing is no longer a concern locally because of the state’s strict regulations and enforcement, and that eelers police themselves: “They’ll turn people in at the drop of a hat.”
American Unagi is headquartered in a new ten-million-dollar facility at an industrial park in the small town of Waldoboro. The company has twelve employees, one of whom, Liam Fisher, is trying to turn eel innards into a marketable condiment. On the day that I met him, he was carrying a tiny fish-shaped bottle of prototype behind one ear. He produced it like a magic nickel and squeezed an oily drop onto my finger. It tasted like liquid fish. Co-workers were preparing to run dead eels through a butterfly machine. The company, which sells fillets and smoked eel to restaurants and grocery stores, expects to hit a production record of half a million pounds next year.
Rademaker led me through a laboratory, where she and her staff monitor the health of their eels by microscope. “We look at their gills, we look at their skin, we look at their fins,” she said. The company spends two years growing each new class of elvers into processable adults. We stopped in the doorway of a room the size of an airplane hangar, where nearly two million eels were living in dozens of gurgling, futuristic tanks. Another half a million glass eels were quarantined. Rademaker explained, “We keep things super biosecure, because we have one time of year to get them.”
When an elver permit is not renewed, or the licensee dies, a newcomer gets the slot via the state’s lottery. “The lottery’s good,” a fisherman named Randy insisted one night in the patriarch’s garage. Loughran countered, “You have families that have been doing this for fucking generations, and instead of being able to pass on their fucking livelihood they have to put it up for a lottery, for anyone and their brother to take a piece of it.”
“So, yes, then *you* end up like the Rockefellers,” Randy, who was getting red in the face, replied.
“He’s disgusted because he wants a piece of this,” Loughran said.
“I’m fuckin’*pissed*,” Randy said. A lot of Mainers want badly to win the lottery. “It’s an industry, not a fucking cult.”
“Randy, chill.”
“It’s like lobstering,” Randy said. Down East, a commercial lobster license is one of the few paths to a middle-class income. (“It’s not like there’s a lot of accounting jobs around here,” one elverman told me.) Certain lobster permits can be legally transferred, and they often sell for tens of thousands of dollars. Feigenbaum, the exporter who co-owns the company that Sheldon went to work for after prison, and who once served on the A.S.M.F.C., has pushed for transferrable quotas for glass eels. He pitches eelers by asking, Wouldn’t you like to be able to leave something to your grandchildren?
In Canada, quotas are distributed basically evenly among nine companies. Feigenbaum runs one of them; it controls about twenty-six hundred pounds of quota, according to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Some Mainers worry that transfers could lead to a few entities dominating the industry in the U.S., too, and force formerly independent elvermen to work for someone else, for an hourly wage. “If you could buy up quotas in Maine, you’d be sitting back like any other corporation, where only a few people make all the money,” an elverman told me. “It would be horrible for the fishery.” (Feigenbaum told me that such fears are “unwarranted,” and that elver quotas should be transferrable only under certain conditions, mostly related to aquaculture.)
This year’s elver season closed at just over fifteen hundred dollars per pound. The elvermen pulled their nets. The alewives were running now, and the lobster boats were going out, though lobstering, for some, had started to feel like more trouble than it was worth. The warming oceans are pushing lobsters north, and the industry has already collapsed in southern Maine. Last year, the statewide catch fell to ninety-four million pounds, the lowest level since 2009. Fishermen’s prospects are further hampered by efforts to erect windmill farms and to save the planet’s last three hundred and sixty or so North Atlantic right whales, which can get tangled in fishing ropes. In the patriarch’s garage, a sternman named Tristan told me, “Kids growing up now, I’d tell them *not* to try working on the water.” Mainers whose families have been fishing for generations are pushing their children toward contracting, or trucking—toward land.
Several days ago, I called Keene, the fisherwoman from Lubec. Her family has lived in Maine since it was Massachusetts. An ancestor, Richard Warren, came over on the Mayflower, she told me. (“I have my certificate!”) His progeny supposedly also includes Ulysses S. Grant, Sarah Palin, and Taylor Swift. In addition to packing fish, Keene’s forebears founded community newspapers and served in the Coast Guard. Both her grandfather and her father were keepers of the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse, a peppermint-striped tower with a fog bell and a beam visible eighteen miles away, across the Quoddy Narrows.
Keene’s college degree involved computers, but she prefers being outdoors. She has dug clams for a living and picks periwinkles on winter beaches, making sure to leave the smallest ones alone, giving them the “chance to grow up.” She has urged people not to overharvest rockweed, a marine algae that farmers add to their soil. Cherry and apple trees that she planted after the elver windfall haven’t borne much fruit, but that was all right. “We have a nice little garden, and some chickens and stuff,” she told me.
This fall, not long after she picks the last of her cucumbers, Keene will turn sixty-six. It pains her to know that state law prevents her from bequeathing her elver license to her children or grandchildren. It will, in a sense, die with her.
When I first rang Keene, she answered with a bark worthy of Olive Kitteridge: “What do you want?” Like most everyone else Down East, she had zero interest in talking to another reporter about elvers. “You get hit over the head every time you do,” she said. The articles always seemed to dwell on venality and crime. Keene much preferred talking about the sight of a baby seal, or that night when she was out clamming alone and sat on a bucket to smoke a cigarette, and a fox strolled by. She told me, “It’s not just about how much money you can make. It’s about seeing the alewives trying to get upriver, and an eagle fishing for them. And hearing the river at night. When you see millions and millions and millions of elvers, it’s mind-blowing. You see full moons. You see rings around the moon. You see fog. If you see garbage, you pick it up. You want passage for all the things that are trying to get into the lakes to spawn. You want it to be—*not ruined*.”
One night when Keene was about fifteen, she begged to go out on the water with her grandfather, a lifelong fisherman with one eye. They put on warm clothes and crossed Johnson Bay in a skiff, to see how the herring were running in a certain cove. Volume was measured by the hogshead, a cask or a barrel that holds sixty-three gallons.
Keene’s grandfather cut the outboard motor and put a finger to his lips. Using a cloth-wrapped oar, he rowed quietly into the cove. Keene watched, mystified, as he lowered a long piano wire into the water, and waited. “What was *that*?” she recalled asking him on the way home. “He said, ‘I could tell how many hogshead of herring there were by how hard they were hitting the wire.’ I knew I wanted to be a fisherman after that.” ♦
# New Yorkers Were Choked, Beaten and Tased by NYPD Officers. The Commissioner Buried Their Cases.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive [our biggest stories](https://www.propublica.org/newsletters/the-big-story?source=www.propublica.org&placement=top-note®ion=national) as soon as they’re published. This article was published in partnership with The New York Times.
Brianna Villafane was in Lower Manhattan protesting police violence in the summer of 2020, when officers charged into the crowd. One of them gripped her hair and yanked her to the ground.
“I felt someone on top of me and it was hard to breathe,” she said. “I felt like I was being crushed.”
The New York City civilian oversight agency that examines allegations of police abuse investigated and concluded that the officer had engaged in such serious misconduct that it could constitute a crime.
Villafane received a letter from the agency about its conclusions. “I was happy and I was relieved,” she recalled. The next step would be a disciplinary trial overseen by the New York Police Department, during which prosecutors from the oversight agency would present evidence and question the officer in a public forum.
New York’s civilian oversight agency found that an NYPD officer engaged in misconduct when he grabbed Brianna Villafane by the hair during a protest. Credit: Stephanie Mei-Ling, special to ProPublica
Then last fall, the police commissioner intervened.
Exercising a little-known authority called “retention,” the commissioner, Edward Caban, ensured the case would never go to trial.
Instead, Caban reached his own conclusion in private.
He decided that it “would be detrimental to the Police Department’s disciplinary process” to pursue administrative charges against the officer, Gerard Dowling, according to a letter the department sent to the oversight agency. The force that the officer used against Villafane was “reasonable and necessary.” The commissioner ordered no discipline.
Today, Dowling is a deputy chief of the unit that handles protests throughout the city.
Video Taken by a Civilian Shows NYPD Officer Gerard Dowling Grabbing Brianna Villafane’s Hair During a Protest
Credit: Courtesy of Brandon Remmert
His case is one of dozens in which Caban has used the powers of his office to intervene in disciplinary cases against officers who were found by the oversight agency to have committed misconduct.
Since becoming commissioner last July, he has short-circuited cases involving officers accused of wantonly using chokeholds, deploying Tasers and beating protesters with batons. A number of episodes were so serious that the police oversight agency, known as the Civilian Complaint Review Board, concluded the officers likely committed crimes.
As is typical across the United States, New York’s police commissioner has the final say over officer discipline. Commissioners can and often do overrule civilian oversight boards. But Caban’s actions stand out for ending cases before the public disciplinary process plays out.
“What the Police Department is doing here is shutting down cases under the cloak of darkness,” said Florence L. Finkle, a former head of the CCRB and current vice president of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement. Avoiding disciplinary trials “means there’s no opportunity for transparency, no opportunity for the public to weigh in, because nobody knows what’s happening.”
Indeed, the department does not publish the commissioner’s decisions to retain cases, and the civilian oversight agency makes those details public only months after the fact. Civilians are not told that the Police Department ended their cases.
To piece together Caban’s actions, ProPublica obtained internal records of some cases and learned details of others using public records, lawsuits, social media accounts and other sources.
Retention has been the commissioner’s chief method of intervention. He has prevented the cases of 54 officers from going to trial in his roughly one year in office — far more than any other commissioner, according to an analysis of CCRB data. His predecessor, Keechant Sewell, did it eight times in her first year, even as she faced more disciplinary cases.
In addition, under Caban, the Police Department has failed to notify officers that the oversight agency has filed charges against them — a seemingly minor administrative matter that can actually hold up the disciplinary process. The rules say that without this formal step, a departmental trial cannot begin. Seven cases have been sitting with the department since last summer because it has never formally notified the officers involved, according to the CCRB.
These cases are particularly opaque, as there is no publicly available list of them.
In one episode, the CCRB found that an officer had shocked an unarmed man with a Taser four times while he was trying to back away.
William Harvin Sr. was shocked with a Taser by an NYPD officer four times while trying to back away. Credit: Stephanie Mei-Ling, special to ProPublica
“He Tased me for no reason,” recalled William Harvin Sr. “He was coming to me, Tasing my legs, my back.”
The review board found that the officer, Raul Torres, should face trial. But the Police Department has yet to move the case forward, a fact Harvin learned from a reporter. “They take care of their own,” he said, shaking his head. (Torres, who has since been promoted to detective, declined to comment and his lawyer said the officer had “no choice” but to use force.)
Video Shows an NYPD Officer Shocking William Harvin Sr. Four Times With a Taser
Credit: Video obtained by ProPublica
In more than 30 other instances, Caban upended cases in which department lawyers and the officers themselves had already agreed to disciplinary action — the most times a commissioner has done so in at least a decade. Sewell set aside four plea deals during her first year as commissioner.
For one officer, Caban rejected two plea deals: In the first case, the officer pleaded guilty to wrongly pepper-spraying protesters and agreed to losing 40 vacation days as punishment. Caban overturned the deal and reduced the penalty to 10 days. In the second, the officer pleaded guilty to using a baton against Black Lives Matter protesters “without police necessity.” Caban threw out the agreement, which called for 15 vacation days to be forfeited. His office wrote that it wasn’t clear that the officer had actually hit the protesters, contrary to what the officer himself already admitted to in the plea. The commissioner ordered no discipline.
The under-the-radar moves run counter to Mayor Eric Adams’ pledge during his candidacy to improve policing by “building trust through transparency.” This year, in his State of the City address, Adams also [promised that cases of alleged misconduct](https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/067-24/mayor-adams-lays-out-future-focused-vision-working-class-new-yorkers-third-state-the-city#/0) would “not languish for months.”
In a statement to ProPublica, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office defended the Police Department and Caban’s record: “Mayor Adams has full confidence in Caban’s leadership and ability to thoroughly review all allegations of police misconduct, and adjudicate accordingly.”
A Police Department spokesperson declined to answer detailed questions, responding instead with a one-sentence statement: “The NYPD continues to work closely with the Civilian Complaint Review Board in accordance with the terms of the memorandum of understanding.”
That memorandum stemmed from a political compromise reached about a decade ago. Concerned that the department’s policing tactics were too aggressive, members of the City Council pushed for the CCRB to be able to prosecute cases rather than simply make recommendations to the police commissioner.
[The final memorandum](https://www.nyc.gov/assets/ccrb/downloads/pdf/about_pdf/apu_mou.pdf), produced after protracted negotiations with the Police Department, included the mechanism that has since allowed Caban to intervene in disciplinary cases. The agreement states that the commissioner may take cases away from CCRB prosecutors if the commissioner determines that allowing the agency to move ahead will be “detrimental to the Police Department’s disciplinary process” or if the “interests of justice would not be served.”
Chris Dunn, the legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, objected at the time to that veto power. Shown the number of cases that Caban has retained, he told ProPublica, “This is exactly why we were so concerned about this authority.”
The agreement stipulated that retentions can be used only on officers with “no disciplinary history,” a limitation that Caban and other commissioners have not always followed. Caban has on three occasions retained cases of officers who the CCRB had previously found engaged in misconduct.
While commissioners can still choose to impose significant punishment after retaining a case, they often don’t. In 40% of the cases that Caban has retained, he has ordered no discipline. In the cases in which he has ordered discipline, it has mostly been light, such as the loss of a few vacation days. The most severe punishment, ProPublica found, was docking an officer 10 vacation days for knocking a cellphone out of the hand of someone who was recording him.
Adams appointed Caban as his new NYPD commissioner at a press conference in New York City last year. Credit: David Dee Delgado/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Disciplinary trials can produce significant consequences for officers — if they’re allowed to proceed.
In 2018, CCRB prosecutors brought charges against the officer who killed [Eric Garner](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/nyregion/eric-garner-police-chokehold-staten-island.html), the Staten Island man whose cries of “I can’t breathe” helped ignite the Black Lives Matter movement. It would be a last chance to hold the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, accountable after a grand jury had declined to indict him. The commissioner at the time, James O’Neill, moved to handle the case internally, according to multiple current and former review board officials. (O’Neill did not respond to a request for comment.)
The CCRB, however, pushed back. “I went to war,” recalled Maya Wiley, the chair of the board at the time, who went to City Hall to argue against the Police Department’s plans. Officials in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration overruled the commissioner and let the trial move ahead. Pantaleo was found guilty of using a banned chokehold. Amid huge public interest and scrutiny, the police commissioner then fired him.
The current approach to police discipline under Caban is something civil rights advocates attribute to his boss, Adams, a former police captain who has struck a tough-on-crime image and opposed policing reforms since taking office two years ago. “We cannot handcuff the police,” Adams told reporters when vetoing two criminal justice reform bills in January.
Last year, the mayor reportedly urged Sewell to [reject recommended disciplinary action](https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/06/29/keechant-sewell-eric-adam-jeffrey-maddrey-nypd/) against a top uniformed officer, who was also an Adams ally. She declined and pushed to discipline the officer, resigning shortly afterward. Mr. Adams then appointed another close ally to the position: Caban.
Caban has his own history with the disciplinary process. Over his 30 years on the force, he has twice been found by the CCRB to have engaged in misconduct, making him an outlier in the department. The vast majority of officers have never been found by the oversight agency to have committed any misconduct.
In one case, he was ordered to complete more training after he arrested a civilian for not providing ID. In the other, related to refusing to provide the names of officers to a civilian who said they had mistreated her, there is no record of discipline.
The Police Department did not comment on Caban’s record, but [it previously said](https://nypost.com/2022/05/08/top-nypd-official-edward-caban-once-involved-in-cheating-scandal-disciplinary-records-reveal/), “Caban’s awareness of that process will only help him bring a fair and informed point of view to those important decisions.”
Caban recently rejected discipline in [a case in which two officers had killed a man in his own apartment](https://www.propublica.org/article/it-wasnt-the-first-time-the-nypd-killed-someone-in-crisis-for-kawaski-trawick-it-only-took-112-seconds) during a mental health crisis. The chair of the review board criticized the decision, a move that [earned Adams’s ire](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/nyregion/adams-ccrb-chairwoman.html). She also requested more resources to investigate complaints, which rose 50% last year. Instead, the Adams administration imposed cuts, forcing the board to stop investigating various kinds of misconduct, including officers who lie on the job.
“In this administration we have a mayor who runs the Police Department,” said Dunn, of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “He sets the tone, and the tone is ‘we’re cutting police accountability and discipline.’”
The police union, the Police Benevolent Association, disagrees, saying Caban’s actions are a critical counter to what it sees as frequent overreach by the civilian oversight board. “The police commissioner has a responsibility to keep the city safe,” the union’s president, Patrick Hendry, said in a statement. “CCRB’s only goal is to boost their statistics and advance their anti-police narrative by punishing as many cops as possible.”
Last fall, Caban sent his own signal. He gave one of the department’s top positions to an officer who tackled and shocked a Black Lives Matter protester with a Taser in the summer of 2020. Tarik Sheppard, a captain at the time, was heading to a disciplinary trial when his case was retained a year later, with no discipline given. Sheppard is now deputy commissioner for public information. He regularly appeared on television this spring to talk about the Police Department’s response to campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war.
Tarik Sheppard, center, NYPD’s commissioner of public information, speaks at a press conference in New York City on April 19. Credit: Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images
The outcomes have been different for the victims. Destiny Strudwick, the protester who was tackled and shocked with a Taser, has struggled since the encounter nearly four years ago. “Sometimes I feel like the human psyche is only made to handle so much,” she said. “And what happened to me, it just was too much.”
Sheppard did not respond to requests for comment.
The Police Department never informed Strudwick or Villafane that the cases against the officers who hurt them had been upended. After learning what had happened, both felt that the department had denied them justice.
“That makes my heart sink,” said Strudwick, after ProPublica told her of Sheppard’s retention.
As for Villafane, she gasped when she was shown the Police Department letter wiping away the case against Dowling, who did not respond to requests for comment. She slowly read a line out loud, “His actions therefore do not warrant a disciplinary action.”
She shook her head. “He’s supposed to be protecting us and he’s hurting us,” Villafane said. “Who am I supposed to call to feel safe now? Not him.”
Do you have information about the police we should know? You can email Eric Umansky at [\[emailprotected\]](https://www.propublica.org/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#7f1a0d161c510a121e110c14063f0f0d100f0a1d13161c1e51100d18) or contact him securely on Signal or WhatsApp at 917-687-8406.
## Christopher Pence kept adding to his family. Then he decided to remove two people from the mix.
Christopher and Michelle Pence on the day of the adoption. The five new members of the family are smiling broadly — but within three years, Christopher would seek to end their biological parents’ lives. Photo: YouTube/@candmpence
Christopher and Michelle Pence on the day of the adoption. The five new members of the family are smiling broadly — but within three years, Christopher would seek to end their biological parents’ lives. Photo: YouTube/@candmpence
Christopher and Michelle Pence on the day of the adoption. The five new members of the family are smiling broadly — but within three years, Christopher would seek to end their biological parents’ lives. Photo: YouTube/@candmpence
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One weekday in the summer of 2021, Christopher Pence entered his home office in Cedar City, Utah, and plugged a USB stick into his computer. He booted up Tails, an operating system designed to optimize privacy, and used it to access the dark web —a marketplace teeming with illicit goods and services like child pornography, weapons, and drugs. Christopher, who was 41 and worked for Microsoft as a systems engineer, wanted to hire a hit man to kill a young couple he had met on only a handful of occasions.
Christopher was an unlikely client in the murder-for-hire trade. He was not violent and had no criminal record. When he wasn’t logging ten-to-12-hour days working, often while listening to one of his favorite Christian rock bands, he was helping his wife, Michelle, raise their 11 biological and five adopted children. The entire family, along with Christopher’s retired parents, lived in a 5,800-square-foot home on the northern edge of the Mojave Desert, surrounded by wind-raked brushland and snow-capped mountains in all directions. They were building greenhouses on the property and had plans to buy cows.
The Pences were committed Evangelical Christians, and on Sundays they would pile into their 15-passenger Ford Transit and drive north to worship at Valley Bible Church. Afterward, they’d invite church members to their home for fellowship. “If you met them and saw the way that their house was run, it was a joyous, happy atmosphere,” says Tom Jeffcott, the senior pastor of the congregation. “There was a lot of love. It was a structured home, a model of learning, of support, of understanding.” The eldest Pence daughters sometimes harmonized while they washed the dishes.
The Pences had arrived in Cedar City in 2020, and before long Christopher and Michelle confided something troubling to their new pastor. They said they were being hounded by Christina and Francisco Cordero, the biological parents of their five adopted children. The two couples had worked out an agreement that allowed the Corderos some contact with their kids —emails, one phone call a month, two in-person visits a year. But recently, in Christopher’s view, the Corderos had been pushing it. They’d even moved across the country to live closer to the children they’d given up. Jeffcott saw the toll the pressure was taking on his new congregants. To help them find a legal remedy, he introduced them to an attorney.
At the same time, Christopher was looking into an extrajudicial approach. He learned about Tails while reading about Edward Snowden, who used the operating system to hide his activities from the National Security Agency. In July 2021, with the software running, Christopher called up Ahmia, a darknet search engine, and looked for a website offering to connect customers with assassins. He settled on a site called the Sinaloa Cartel Marketplace.
Christopher created an extravagantly cryptic username, mjd210eKd69BxG4IsJD, and began messaging other users. “Good day Admin! I have a couple targets—husband wife—that I am needing removed,” he wrote. “However, it is known that they and I don’t quite see eye-to-eye on something. I am a couple days away from submitting the job as an ‘accident,’ but before I do, I was wondering, in your experience, even if it is an obvious ‘accident,’ what kind of investigation will be run against me, knowing that we are not on the best of terms?” Two weeks later, Christopher transferred $16,000 worth of bitcoin and submitted orders to kill the Corderos.
Christopher and Michelle Pence hadn’t planned on having an enormous family. They met as teenagers in a community just north of Seattle and married in 1999, when Christopher was 19 and Michelle was 20. The next year, Michelle gave birth to twin girls. Christopher’s dream was to make a fortune in finance and real estate and live in a penthouse in downtown Seattle. He imagined Michelle would have her own high-powered career. After she became pregnant with their fourth child, he had a vasectomy.
Christopher had been raised religious, and in his mid-20s he began to lean more on his faith for guidance on life’s biggest questions. He thought less about his career and more about his higher calling. “God changed my thinking about how a man is to be the leader of his family and how children are actually blessings and rewards,” he said in a speech at his church. “There are many biblical examples about how our dreams may not be what God wants for us. Job did not want his children to die or his storehouses to be destroyed or his health to be impaired, but God’s perfect will allowed this to happen. Jeremiah wanted to marry a nice girl and have a family, but instead God used him as a prophet of death.” Exactly one year after his vasectomy, Christopher had it reversed.
Michelle documented the family’s life on a blog, and she described how her sense of self, and her role in her marriage, changed as she read books like *Created to Be His Help Meet* and *The Power of Motherhood: What the Bible Says About Mothers*. “I entered marriage thinking of it as an equal partnership, knowing but not understanding what it meant that my husband is my head,” Michelle wrote. “I had NO idea the importance of my role as a mother, and the significance God placed on motherhood. I had no idea that God called barrenness a CURSE, and children the greatest blessing he can bestow. I had no idea that God said so much about children in the Bible, they are heritage, a REWARD, a blessing, precious little lambs, arrows in the hands of a mighty warrior and so much more.”
Michelle Pence used her blog and social-media accounts to portray her marriage to Christopher as happy and conventional. Photo: YouTube/@candmpence
The Pences came to “trust God to open and close the womb as He sees fit.” By 2017, Michelle had given birth to ten children. One died at five months from sudden infant death syndrome; there were also several miscarriages. Another child was born with cerebral palsy. Needing space, the family had gone to live with Christopher’s parents in a semi-rural town 25 miles northeast of Seattle. They turned their property into a homestead with gardens, beehives, dogs, chickens, turkeys, a lilac-crowned parrot, and a succession of cows named Steak, Dinner, Beef, Burrito, and Norman. The kids slept in bunk beds, and everyone traveled to appointments and church in a short bus.
Michelle chafed when doctors advised her to stop having kids; when a social worker questioned her ability to effectively homeschool a child with a disability; when someone at the grocery store casually remarked on the size of her family. She was passionate about educating her children herself and valued, above all, the freedom to teach a curriculum focused on the Bible. The Pences considered the text a straightforward account of history, and every morning, before sunrise, Christopher led the family in studying Scripture.
To Michelle, Christopher was “the handsome man who makes it all happen around here” and “a fantastic example of loving me as Christ loved the church, even when I am very much unlovable.” He was the breadwinner and had a succession of technology-related jobs, including managing a computer store and working as a network architect, before landing a job at Microsoft. Michelle described him with devotion as “a great priest, prophet, provider and protector for his family” who “truly lives out what it means to be a follower of Christ, to deny himself and live for his God, and his family.”
Even as they continued to have children, the Pences wanted to accelerate the growth of their family through adoption. They were motivated in part by religion, believing that the process was a form of “making the same commitment to a child (or children), that God made to us … to take us in our filth, our sin, our depravity, and bring us to a place of being a beloved child.” But the choice was also deeply personal. Michelle came from a troubled home. She had met her father only three times. She was one of six half-siblings, all from different fathers, who were split up by the foster-care system. “I know all too well what loss, abandonment, neglect, and abuse do to a child … because I was that child,” Michelle wrote around the time she and Christopher began submitting applications. They hoped to adopt an entire “young sibling group, who are having trouble staying together because of size,” she wrote on one listings website, adding that they would not mind remaining in contact with the children’s biological parents.
The Pences worked with traditional agencies, submitting to hours of training, interviews with social workers, psychological reviews, and home studies. Opportunities in Colombia and Florida didn’t pan out. One organization blocked them from adopting a group of five siblings because the Pences already had children of similar ages —not optimal, in the agency’s view.
After a few years of dashed hopes, Michelle gave birth again in 2018. That September, taking advantage of Microsoft’s six-week paternity-leave policy, the Pences packed into a motor home and headed east. They saw the Mammoth Hot Springs, worked a miniature Model T production line at the Henry Ford Museum, and stood on a beach in Acadia National Park while the Atlantic rushed over their feet. At some point along the journey, Michelle logged on to a message board for parents with large, homeschooled families. A mother of six in Massachusetts had posted that she and her husband were looking for someone to take care of their children temporarily while they worked through some marital issues. Michelle sent her a message.
The woman, Christina Cordero, and her husband, Francisco, were struggling. They’d had a single-story, four-bedroom house in Chicopee, in Western Massachusetts, but had recently sold it and moved into an RV. Their oldest child was developmentally disabled, and finding adequate housing “proved impossible with such a large family,” Christina told me in a Facebook message. Cisco, as her husband was known, could only find work as a temp. “I was offering six months rent up front, but no landlord would consider us.”
Cisco had personal problems that compounded their troubles. He admitted to the authorities at one point that his sexual behavior was a continuous challenge for his family. He had fought an addiction to pornography since he was a teenager, and the Massachusetts Department of Children & Families (DCF) had investigated him for looking at child porn and showing sexual images to his children. He denied the allegations, and the state took no action.
The Pences arranged to visit the Corderos at their RV in Massachusetts and pray with them. Christopher Pence later said that when they arrived, Christina confided that she didn’t think her children were safe with Cisco. (Christina disputes this.) The Pences said they were open to taking them but suggested that Christina mull it over while they continued on their road trip. When the Pences traveled back through Massachusetts a few days later, the Corderos said they wanted to go through with the arrangement.
The two families agreed on a plan for the next few months: The Corderos would keep their child with special needs while the other five went to live with the Pences. The Corderos signed a caregiver-authorization affidavit, a notarized contract that granted the Pences the right to make medical and educational decisions for the children. And then the Pences, their children, and the five Cordero children all crammed into the motor home and left. Christopher Pence later said, “We got to Massachusetts with ten children and left there with 15.”
Almost immediately, it became clear that integrating the five Corderos, ages 1 to 9, with the Pence kids, who spanned from less than a year old to 17, was going to be awkward. In Mount Vernon, where they stopped to visit George Washington’s estate, an employee asked if they were all one big family. One of the Pence girls answered “yes.” Then a Cordero child interjected: “No, there’s ten of them and five of us, and they took us from our parents in Massachusetts.”
On the way back across the country, the Pences stopped at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, where the exhibits show humans coexisting with dinosaurs. They also dropped by Ark Encounter, where the entire group posed for a portrait in front of the doors to a model of Noah’s Ark. In the photo, Christopher and Michelle, who were still in their 30s, could just as easily have been the eldest cousins bookending an extended family photo instead of the parents and guardians of the 15 children huddled between them. Most of the kids seem upbeat despite the long hours on the highway. One of the eldest Pence daughters has her youngest sibling strapped to her chest. On Christopher’s back, in a baby carrier, is the youngest Cordero child, his face fixed in an observant gaze.
The ad hoc nature of the arrangement drew the attention of the child-welfare system. According to police records, soon after the Pences returned to Washington, a deputy with the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office performed a welfare check at the request of the Massachusetts DCF. “All were healthy and appeared happy … home is large and very clean … Michelle is researching how to obtain financial aid for kids as she has been paying out of pocket for their care,” the deputy wrote in his report.
Michelle was feeling stressed, though, and she used her blog to vent about her new reality. “Keeping everyone busy has been an essential around here because the Corderos miss their parents like crazy!” she wrote. She seemed frustrated to realize how different the Cordero children were from her own and overwhelmed by the behavioral problems that followed the siblings’ abrupt separation from their parents. Michelle wrote about the newfound “disharmony” in her house and “epic proportions melt downs”: “Never have we had anyone struggling with sharing, and now it is a huge problem. Never have we had anyone seeking to undermine anyone else or using the level of sharp words and unkind attitudes that we see here now. Never have we seen anyone give an eye roll before this experience … Not to mention the screeching, yelling and whining that accompanies the above.”
Ten days before Thanksgiving, Michelle announced that each night, the children would have to say one thing they were thankful for before they could eat dinner. “We had tears and one saying that she wouldn’t be able to eat until after Thanksgiving because there was nothing to be thankful for,” Michelle wrote. “I am thankful that my bio children are able to help show others how richly blessed we are even when life isn’t going how we want it to.”
As Christmas approached, Michelle and Christopher gathered the children to play a game that would teach them about labor and wages. They explained that sometimes, wages are good. (The wages for making beds that day was lava cake.) Other times, wages are levied for wrongdoing. (The Bible says the wages of sin is death.) They asked the children to talk about the sins they had recently committed; they then announced that the wages would be either $10,000 per child or the loss of their Christmas presents. Some of the children “thought we were joking,” Michelle wrote on her blog. “But we finally got it across that we were not. Anyone who couldn’t pay the penalty would have no Christmas.” Then Christopher stood up and said he would pay for the children. Michelle wrote: “Because of his great, willing sacrifice, everyone else will get presents, but Christopher will not. We made the comparison that Jesus took our sins upon himself and paid the penalty for us.”
At some point, the Corderos and Pences agreed to extend their temporary custody arrangement. The Pences decided that their home, at just 1,900 square feet, was not large enough. Christopher took to Zillow. Microsoft allowed him to work from anywhere, and he found a 4,150-square-foot house on eight heavily wooded acres in Hawkins, Texas, for $325,000. They moved in June 2019.
During this period, according to legal filings, the Corderos were under investigation by the Massachusetts DCF. It is unclear what the agency was looking into, but the Snohomish sheriff’s office attempted at least two additional welfare checks on the children at DCF’s request. The agency eventually told both families that it intended to take custody of the Cordero children and bring them back to Massachusetts, where they might be split up in foster care. (A spokesperson declined to comment.) To keep the siblings together, the Corderos and Pences agreed to make the adoption permanent. In December 2019, the Pences traveled back to Washington to go before a judge and make it official. A picture from that day shows the Pences with all 15 children smiling broadly as they crowd together behind the judge’s bench.
The Corderos had made three cross-country trips to visit their children —twice in Washington, once in Texas —and knew they could not afford to keep doing so. They decided to move to Texas as well. “It was the logical step,” Christina told me. But it unsettled Christopher and Michelle, who started to feel that the Corderos were using them to hide their children from the Massachusetts child-welfare system. Christopher later claimed that the Corderos asked if they could permanently park their trailer home on the Pences’ property. (Christina told me she had asked to park there only during sanctioned visits.) Eventually, the Corderos rented a space at Good Luck RV in Dallas, a two-hour drive from the Pences’ home in Hawkins.
Christina and Cisco Cordero continued having children after giving five of their six to the Pences. In Texas, they posed with all of them; one child is shown in an inset. Photo: Facebook/christina.cordero
The Pences had a series of difficult conversations with their newly adopted children. One was especially excited that Christina and Cisco had moved to the same state because he thought he would see them more often. “That was a little challenging to work through — that no, even though your birth parents are in Texas, they can’t come over any time they like to, because we need to maintain structure and order to family life,” Christopher said. The Cordero children were also wounded by the fact that their parents were continuing to have more kids. A few months into the arrangement with the Pences, Christina gave birth to a seventh child, and in Texas they told the children they were expecting an eighth. “The oldest girl, she’s kind of hurt that they would have more children after giving up five,” Christopher later said.
Everything was in flux. After little more than a year in Texas, the Pences were ready to leave. The eastern part of the state felt like something out of Exodus with extreme weather and scorpions in the bathtub. “Everything down there is trying to kill ya,” Christopher said. “Bugs, snakes, spiders. We got to the point where the children couldn’t really play outside much.” He went back to Zillow and found a seven-bedroom house in Cedar City, Utah, and purchased it for $659,000 in November 2020. Soon after they moved in, Christopher’s sister visited and took pictures of the entire family playing in the snow, including a newly born 11th biological child.
The Pences never shared their new address with the Corderos. When the five adopted children sent mail to their birth parents, the Pences wrote in a post-office box for a return address.
It is not entirely clear why Christopher Pence wanted the Corderos dead. In Utah, he quickly convinced the family’s new pastor, Jeffcott, that both Christina and Cisco loomed over their household like specters. “They really were creating problems for the children,” Jeffcott told me. “I mean, wetting the bed — just really bad consequences from exposure to the birth parents.” But the Pences’ concern was vague. It also did not seem to involve fears of sexual abuse. Christopher considered Cisco a Lothario but did not think his behavior in that regard involved the children.
A turning point apparently came in May 2021. The Pences returned to Texas to meet with the Corderos. After that meeting, according to Christopher, one of the Cordero children claimed to have seen bruises on the arm of her eldest sibling, the one with developmental problems; when asked where the bruises had come from, he claimed Cisco held him down. (Christina disputes this.)
A screengrab of the website Christopher Pence used to find a hit man. Photo: Christopher Monteiro
Two months later, Christopher logged on to the Sinaloa Cartel Marketplace. He spent weeks lingering on the site, looking closely at its FAQ, which offered half-baked answers to questions like “Could this be a honeypot operated by law enforcement?” and “Do you murder children?” (The answer to the latter: “Yes.”) At one point, Pence created a new thread to ask other users if the site was real or a scam. Sinaloa Cartel Marketplace listed rates that ranged from $5,000 to $200,000, and Christopher wrote the administrators to get clarity. Seeing as his targets lived at the same address, could he receive a discount? Christopher also wanted to be sure the hit man knew the Corderos lived with three children: “I am really trying to avoid them from being hurt. I’m wondering if a mugging-gone-wrong might be an option. Or maybe you have another suggestion? One of the children is 13 or so, but slow, so maybe his testimony could help avoid scrutiny/investigation.”
Two site administrators provided short responses. In late July 2021, Christopher began transferring bitcoin into an escrow account and, eventually, ordered the hit. He entered Christina and Cisco’s address and attached photos of the couple he had taken from their biological daughter’s baby book.
Hours later, Christopher messaged the administrators that he wanted the murder order canceled. The next day, he resubmitted it, repeating his request to “please make it look like an accident, or a mugging-gone-wrong, or something of the sort.” In the days to come, he sent a flurry of messages asking for some confirmation that the Sinaloa Cartel Marketplace had received them. He never heard back.
Six thousand miles away from Cedar City, somewhere in Romania, a small band of internet scammers got a payday. Since at least 2016, the group had run a stable of sites on the dark web, including Sicilian Hitmen and Yakuza Mafia, offering bogus murder-for-hire services. They took money from users who wanted people killed, but they never acted on the jobs. The mastermind behind the operation was a fraudster who went by the name Yura. In 2022, at the urging of the United States, Romanian authorities reportedly arrested Yura and his crew, but it’s unclear if they were ever prosecuted.
Yura claimed to [*Wired*](https://www.wired.com/story/kill-list-dark-web-hitmen/) that he is an FBI informant. Whether or not that’s true, law-enforcement agencies have gotten a detailed view into his operation and its thousands of clients thanks to the efforts of Chris Monteiro, a British hacker. In 2016, Monteiro discovered a vulnerability in one of Yura’s websites that allowed him to scrape its data, including direct messages and payments. Since then, he has used similar techniques to repeatedly intercept the network’s traffic and feed it to governments and journalists.
“There’s a lot to say about what I’m doing. Is justice being done? Is it good? Probably. But also, could it be done better? I think so,” Monteiro told me over Zoom, sitting at his workstation in the living room of his South London flat. He is in his early 40s, and his long hair was pulled back in a ponytail. He wore a T-shirt that read “THERE. Now I’m not naked anymore.”
Even though the hit men are fictitious, the danger is real. In 2016, Stephen Allwine, a Minnesota IT specialist and a deacon at his church, paid at least $6,000 on a Yura site to have his wife killed; after the hit failed to happen, he murdered her himself. (Allwine is serving a life sentence.)
Monteiro doesn’t always send tips directly to law enforcement because he finds investigators can be put off by the complexity of the cases and the fact that they’re based on hacked information. But in 2021, he managed to get the FBI’s full attention. Monteiro was working with a podcast-production company on a murder-for-hire program for the BBC. The show’s producers began feeding the FBI details of murder orders that Americans were placing on Yura’s sites. Agents arrested a woman in Wisconsin who had tried multiple times to hire someone to kill her ex-husband; a physician in Spokane who wanted someone to take his estranged wife hostage; a man in Tennessee who sought to snuff out his wife; and an accountant in Tampa who paid $12,000 in bitcoin to kill her ex’s new spouse.
On September 2, one of Monteiro’s tips landed on the desk of Brian DeCarr, an agent in the FBI field office in Albany. The Corderos were now living in nearby Hoosick Falls. The next day, DeCarr drove out to tell Christina that someone was trying to kill her. When she found out that Pence was a suspect, she couldn’t believe it. She and Cisco had plans to visit the Pences in Utah at the end of the month; they were supposed to meet at the Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City. “I was like, ‘No, there’s no way,’” she said. “‘Please make sure my children and their adoptive family are safe, because whoever wants me dead might go after them too!’”
On October 27, exactly three years after picking up the Cordero children in Massachusetts, Christopher Pence’s alarm went off, as always, at 5:55 a.m. Lights flicked on, first in his en suite bathroom as he left Michelle in bed to nurse their infant daughter, then in the rest of the house as he woke his children in turn. He gathered most of them on the first floor for Bible study. (The three oldest Pence daughters were spending the year at Jackson Bible College in Wyoming.) They took a moment to sing “Happy Birthday” to one of the children and said an opening prayer. Twenty minutes later, there was a loud bang on the front door. At the same instant, the house was flooded by emergency lights.
Before the raid, the FBI conducted aerial surveillance of the Pence home in Utah. Photo: FBI
Christopher opened the door to see a black shield and more than a dozen officers wearing body armor, some holding assault rifles. “It felt like Armageddon had come to my front door and I was the only one standing in the way,” he later said.
If Christopher knew why the FBI was there, he didn’t show it. A few minutes later, he agreed to speak with DeCarr in the privacy of a Chevy Tahoe parked in the driveway. The sun was still hidden behind mountains to the east and the temperature was near freezing as the men got inside. Chris Andersen, a Utah-based FBI agent, climbed into the back row while DeCarr and Pence sat side-by-side in the middle.
“I’d love to know what’s going on,” Christopher said as a recorder captured the conversation.
“You’re not under arrest at all. That’s not what we’re doing,” DeCarr replied. “You’re under no obligation to talk to us. We would appreciate your help, okay?” They started by asking Christopher about his job at Microsoft, life in Washington, his marriage. Shy by nature, Christopher seemed almost to enjoy the agents’ company, talking as if they were three dads standing around a grill on a Saturday afternoon. How much did Christopher pay to pave this driveway? Do the AC units on top of the motor homes need Freon? Does Christopher plan to fix up the ’66 Mustang sitting over there? Did he catch babes in that thing?
Christopher seemed especially interested in telling the agents about the adoption. “Do you want the long story or the short version?” he asked them. “Give me the long one,” DeCarr said. Pence described his and Michelle’s desire to adopt, the road trip to Massachusetts, locusts in Texas, how the Corderos became too big a presence in their lives. The agents seemed sympathetic to Christopher’s frustrations. As the sun came up and warmed the Tahoe, Christopher unlocked phones and provided passwords to his computers and tablets.
After about 90 minutes, DeCarr presented Christopher with a mountain of electronic evidence connecting him to the murder-for-hire payments. “You are the protector of these kids, okay? You are the savior of these kids, and you do this for the family. And it’s clear to me — I didn’t understand why before — but it’s very clear to me that you would do anything for these children,” DeCarr said. “What got you to the point where you felt like you needed to have them killed?”
Christopher fought back tears. His deep voice splintered. “On more than one occasion the children have been abused, um, through discipline, through the birth parents …” Gasping and choking back sobs, he strung together half-allegations against the Corderos and again tried to come up with an answer.
“You were doing what you had to do,” DeCarr said. Satisfied he had a confession, he read Christopher his rights and exited the Tahoe to call New York for an arrest warrant.
Even after it was clear the FBI had deceived him into talking, Christopher thanked the agents for “doing what you’re doing.” He continued to be unfailingly polite, exuding the same eerie cheeriness that tinged his messages on the murder-for-hire website.
As they waited, an officer marveled at the children inside Christopher’s house, who were playing music and helping cook breakfast. “Maybe there is something to be said about not letting all the outside influences corrupt their minds, right? I mean, I don’t know what my daughter would do without TikTok on her cell phone,” he said. Christopher laughed.
DeCarr returned to inform Christopher that he was under arrest. “Have I ruined my life?” he asked.
Christopher Pence’s mug shot. Photo: Iron County Sheriff - Jail Division, Cedar City, Utah
In late 2023, Christopher Pence pleaded guilty to one count of soliciting murder via the internet. Christina told me that since Christopher’s arrest, Michelle has refused to allow her or Cisco to have any contact with their biological children. In April, however, the Corderos got a brief glimpse at Christopher’s sentencing. Their kids were seated with Michelle as if in support of the man who’d tried to have their biological parents killed.
At the hearing, which was held in Utica, U.S. District Judge David Hurd said he was troubled by how much the case stood out from past murder-for-hire affairs he’d seen. “Each one involved a defendant who was a longtime criminal, who had a bad record, and it was not particularly surprising that he or she would hire somebody to kill others. This case is different,” he said. “It’s a very difficult case.”
Hurd sentenced Christopher to seven years. He could be released from prison toward the end of 2028. He will have missed 112 of his children’s birthdays, but at 48, with his youngest child just 7 years old, he could have a lot of fathering left.
Whether he will be allowed to leave prison and pick up where he left off, fathering his adopted children, is complicated. Michelle and Christopher are still the children’s legal guardians, but it would take one phone call to child welfare upon his release to trigger an investigation into the safety of the children under his care. Such an investigation is unlikely to consider that Christopher’s purported motive for committing the crime was the children’s welfare. If a judge believed the children under Christopher’s care were in danger, they could place the underage kids, both biological and adopted, in foster care. Just as likely, a judge could give Michelle an ultimatum: the kids or Christopher.
For the time being, Michelle is caring for all of the children. When I called her on a recent school day, she declined to speak with me, saying there were too many demands on her time. (She didn’t respond to follow-up requests or fact-checking queries.) She tried, briefly, delivering groceries and now depends on donations from the Cedar City community. A few of her children have found work at a small manufacturing plant in town. “For now the plan is to continue homeschooling. For now the plan is to keep things as stable as possible. For now the plan is to take the next step in faith and accept the grace God gives at each turn,” Michelle wrote on Facebook shortly after Pence’s arrest. “God is good all the time.”
<spanclass='ob-timelines'data-date='2024-06-29-00'data-title='Fungal treatment'data-class='green'data-type='range'data-end='2024-10-29-00'> Fungal treatment started on 29/06/2024
</span>
```toc
style: number
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Fungal treatment started on [[2024-06-29|29th June]].
plot: Kiss the Future celebrates the underground art and music scene that thrived during the siege of Sarajevo. The biggest band in the world, U2, paid attention and shined a light on the crisis in an effort to support the besieged Sara...
- [ ] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2024-06-29
- [ ] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2024-07-06
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2024-06-29 ✅ 2024-06-29
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2024-06-22 ✅ 2024-06-21
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2024-06-15 ✅ 2024-06-16
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2024-06-08 ✅ 2024-06-07
- [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 📅 2024-06-29
- [ ] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2024-07-06
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2024-06-29 ✅ 2024-06-29
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2024-06-22 ✅ 2024-06-21
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2024-06-15 ✅ 2024-06-16
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2024-06-08 ✅ 2024-06-07
iOS
5 months ago