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- [x] 11:34 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring Fail2ban|Fail2ban]], [[Configuring UFW|UFW]]: voir si la liste d'IP peut etre partagee avec [crowdsec](https://crowdsec.net) 📅 2022-04-30 ✅ 2022-04-16
- [x] 11:34 :desktop_computer: [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring Fail2ban|Fail2ban]], [[Configuring UFW|UFW]]: voir si la liste d'IP peut etre partagee avec [crowdsec](https://crowdsec.net) 📅 2022-04-30 ✅ 2022-04-16 ^tb7swm
- [x] 15:39 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring Caddy|caddy]]: Mettre en place le monitoring par Prometheus 📅 2022-04-03 ✅ 2022-04-02
- [x] 15:39 :desktop_computer: [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring Caddy|caddy]]: Mettre en place le monitoring par Prometheus 📅 2022-04-03 ✅ 2022-04-02 ^mxs2dm
# After the Zodiac Killer's '340' Cipher Stumped the FBI, Three Amateurs Made a Breakthrough
**The envelope arrived** at the *San Francisco Chronicle* in November 1969 without a return address, its directive to the recipient, in handwriting distinctively slanted and words unevenly spaced, to “please rush to editor.” The *Chronicle* newsroom had seen the scrawl before, on previous letters sent from the Zodiac, a self-monikered serial killer who threatened to go on a “kill rampage” if the paper didn’t publish his writing on its front page. By the time of the November letter, the Zodiac had already attacked seven people, murdering five. His most recent murder—of a San Francisco cab driver, by gunshot—had occurred just four weeks before this new envelope arrived. The Zodiac had mailed the *Chronicle* a piece of the victim’s bloodied shirt as evidence of the crime.
The Zodiac’s letters were replete with grisly imagery. He signed his “name” with a crosshairs symbol. He shared haunting details of his attacks. He promised to blow up buses of schoolchildren and unleash a “death machine” on San Francisco. But in addition to these overt threats, he included baffling ciphers for investigators to crack, troubling grids of symbols and letters that presumably masked a secret about his identity, intentions, or victims (to this day, the killer has never been found). The Zodiac’s first cipher, included in the July 31 letter, had been solved within a week by an amateur husband-and-wife team—but it had only revealed more of the killer’s raving. The second, now known as “the 340” due to the number of characters in it, would prove a much more difficult challenge. It came with a letter for the *Chronicle*, reading in part:
*PS could you print this new cipher in your frunt page? I get aufully lonely when I am ignored, so lonely I could do my Thing !!!!!!*
The paper’s editors, along with local law enforcement officials, had no reason to doubt the Zodiac’s most recent threat. They published the 340 the next day, hoping it might bring them one step closer to the serial killer’s identity, or lead them to his next victims.
But the 340 stumped both amateur and professional cryptographers alike—not just in the weeks following its publication, but for decades. The NSA couldn’t crack it. Neither could the Naval Intelligence Office or the FBI. For more than fifty years, the cipher remained an unsolvable enigma, one that grew to almost mythic proportions among codebreakers and cryptography sleuths. Some speculated that the cipher would never be solved—that it was too sophisticated, too challenging for even contemporary cryptographers.
The 340 cipher, above, reached the *San Francisco Chronicle* in November 1969. The killer’s first cipher had been cracked in a week by an amateur husband-and-wife team. Solving this one would require the eventual codebreakers to employ homophonic substitutions, period-19 transposition, the knight’s tour, and other complex cryptology schemes.
Getty Images
But then, in December 2020, the FBI announced a breakthrough: The 340 cipher had been solved. Not by its crack Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit, but instead by three computer wonks who’d found one another on an obscure online true-crime discussion board and started collaborating during the COVID-19 pandemic. The trio, who had no background in cryptology and no professional codebreaking experience, did what the world’s most powerful intelligence organizations could not. On top of the solution’s haunting opacity, the intricacies of the cipher itself brought fresh layers of insight that, forensic experts say, might help authorities eventually, finally, catch up to the killer.
> “There’s not a lot of rhyme or reason to it, which makes it very impressive that anyone solved it.”
**Dave Oranchak has** always been a puzzle geek. When he’s not running ultramarathons near his home in Roanoke, Virginia, the 47-year-old computer programmer spends most of his time working out practical solutions to problems, whether in his coding work or his passion for Shinro, a Japanese derivation of Sudoku. Around 2006, Oranchak became intrigued by the 340’s apparent resistance to a solution, a key had eluded the best efforts of professionals and experts. Tempted by the chance to unlock a slate of notorious cold cases, he started nosing around online discussion boards about the Zodiac. Before he knew it, he was down the rabbit hole, immersed in the Zodiac’s story and gaining a reputation as one of the reigning experts on the killer’s ciphers.
The Zodiac had a thick case file for amateur sleuths like Oranchak to peruse. Here was a serial killer who had gone out of his way to taunt the police. His handwriting was on file, along with a recording of his voice. Witnesses to his crimes had provided enough information for law enforcement to create a composite sketch of his face. The Zodiac had tallied his victims in marker on the side of a car, drafted homemade ciphers, and mailed scraps of evidence to newspapers. But despite the best efforts of the country’s leading intelligence agencies, no one knew who he was. The 340 cipher was one of the final threads to pull, a puzzle with seemingly no discernible rules, schemes, or internal logic.
Oranchak dedicated hundreds of hours to the 340 cipher—“way too many,” by his own measure. As his commitment deepened, he became a respected moderator on the Zodiac discussion boards and the leading authority on the 340 itself. He appeared on TV documentaries and podcasts dedicated to the Zodiac, eventually giving talks at NSA-sponsored cryptology conferences and sitting on panels with FBI agents actively working in the cryptology field.
One of the three amateurs who broke the 340 code, David Oranchak did most of his work from his home office, his dog Rosa by his side while he sat at his computer. He detailed his thought processes and methods on his YouTube channel, where he connected with others attempting to crack the cipher.
PETER MEANS/VTE
The community of amateur Zodiac hunters can be sensationalistic. “There’s a lot of chatter and nonsense and arguing about suspects,” Oranchak says. But one member of the forums struck him as level-headed and critical: Jarl Van Eycke, a reclusive warehouse worker living in Belgium who had gained respect in the cryptology community after developing his own decryption software program. “Jarl was technically minded, and \[he was\] approaching the \[Zodiac\] problem rationally,” Oranchak says.
Van Eycke declined an interview request for this story. And he’s never spoken on the record about his decryption software or the Zodiac case. Oranchak has never met him; they’ve corresponded only by email and on forums. Despite Van Eycke’s almost total obscurity, he agreed to work with Oranchak on a solution to the 340. That was a pivotal moment that would add speed to the codebreaking process; Van Eycke’s software could work through multiple solution sequences simultaneously and provide a rating for the correctness of each result.
Van Eycke and Oranchak began programming the codebreaking software to work through thousands and thousands of possible solutions to the 340 cipher. During the pandemic, Oranchak launched a YouTube channel dedicated to their work from his home office; his family vacation photos and a watercolor portrait of the late family cat, Peabody, looked on as he issued heady primers about cryptology and codebreaking.
Despite the homespun setting, the information in Oranchak’s videos was undeniably sophisticated. He used Scrabble tiles to explain substitution keys and anagrams and gave casual lectures on cipher organization strategies such as columnar transposition, in which messages are first written in columns rather than lines. Before long, videos on his channel had millions of views. Oranchak was sure that certain anomalies in the cipher pointed to a logical organizational strategy. While some dismissed the cipher as an impossible exercise from a deranged mind, Oranchak believed that a valuable solution lay behind the inscrutable symbols.
**Oranchak’s belief in** the 340’s logic stemmed from cryptography’s foundational principles. Ciphers date back at least 3,000 years. The earliest known cryptogram is from 1500 B.C., when a Mesopotamian potter devised a code to keep his glaze recipe secret from competitors, but methodologies have diversified and proliferated since then. Ancient Spartans and Chinese military leaders used the “scytale” method, writing messages that could only be read when wrapped around a specific rod, and Julius Caesar popularized the substitution cipher, in which each letter is replaced by another letter that’s a set number of positions away in the alphabet. Sir Francis Bacon favored a “steganographic” approach in which he replaced letters with binaries, and during each of the World Wars, countries used a range of cryptography methods, from simple stencils to the legendary German Enigma machine. All of these cipher varieties employ rotating substitutions that can be “brute forced” by nothing but pencil and paper, says Riad Wahby, Ph.D., whose research at Carnegie Mellon University focuses on proof systems and cryptography. This quality makes them accessible to the public despite their many layers of complexity.
By the time the Zodiac began his killing rampage in 1968, ciphers and other cryptograms had invaded pulp crime novels and detective magazines. Readers could learn organizational tricks, such as the knight’s tour or period-19 transposition, and then use them in ciphers of their own. The Zodiac himself likely came of age reading some of those detective magazines and codebooks, says James R. Fitzgerald, a forensic linguist and criminal profiler who spent much of his career at the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. “If Zodiac is ever identified and his house is ever searched, you’re going to find dozens and dozens of other codebooks, other pads of paper with other code written on them,” he says. “He had an extended interest in this kind of language usage.”
According to Fitzgerald, the Zodiac’s schematics align with popular cryptology strategies of the time. The first cipher was simple—a substitution code containing 26 symbols, each of which stood in for a letter in the English alphabet. Donald Harden, a high school teacher, and his wife, Bettye, solved it within a week of its publication. The couple estimates that they spent about 20 hours on the puzzle. They zeroed in on easy-to-find words likely to be used by a murderer; “kill,” for example, has repeating letters. Then they followed rules known to any Wheel of Fortune fan: namely, that E is the most used letter in the English language, as are certain letter pairings, such as T-H and Q-U. The solution read, in part:
I LIKE KILLING BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH FUN. IT IS MORE FUN THAN KILLING WILD GAME IN THE FOREST BECAUSE MAN IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL OF ALL. TO KILL SOMETHING GIVES ME THE MOST THRILLING EXPERIENCE. IT IS EVEN BETTER THAN GETTING YOUR ROCKS OFF WITH A GIRL. THE BEST PART OF IT IS THAT WHEN I DIE I WILL BE REBORN IN PARADICE AND ALL I HAVE KILLED WILL BECOME MY SLAVES.
At first glance, the cipher solution may seem worthless when it comes to catching a serial killer. Not so, says Fitzgerald. Instead, he points to the combination of literary allusion (most notably to Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game”) and colloquial sexual boasts as helpful context for a detailed psychological profile of the killer. So, he says, does the deliberate misspelling of “paradise” and the contrived idea of a specific afterlife awaiting the Zodiac.
“He didn’t believe any of it,” says Fitzgerald of the Zodiac’s claims. “Yet it gave him an ostensible rationale behind his killing, so he would not be seen by the public as just randomly and purposelessly choosing his victims.”
Donald G. Harden, a schoolteacher living in Salinas, California, broke the Zodiac’s first cipher sent on July 31, 1969, with his wife, Bettye June Harden
Getty Images
The code wheels and lampboard from a four-rotor German Enigma machine made during World War II, for which the user had to know the specific key settings used by the transmitter to decrypt a message
Getty Images
**Behavioral criminologists who have** worked the Zodiac case surmise that the 340’s construction was informed by the ease with which the first cipher was solved—a real blow to the killer’s inflated ego. For the 340, the Zodiac increased the number of individual characters to 50 and organized them via a far more complicated cryptogram. The cipher relied upon homophonic substitution, which assigns multiple symbols to a single letter and helps mask common letter pairings. As the cipher’s key—cryptology speak for a solution—continued to elude investigators at the FBI and NSA, cryptanalysts began to suspect that the Zodiac had somehow rearranged the order of the symbols, too, possibly including purposeful mistakes in the cipher that would confuse straightforward solutions—“a code within a code,” says Fitzgerald. He says the Zodiac, in this respect, fancied himself a kind of criminal mastermind. “The true code writer is very rare, even rarer among serial killers or serial offenders. And the ones that are difficult to break are the rarest of the rare.”
The ready solution to the first cipher might have led the killer to overcomplicate the second, including the usage of what Fitzgerald calls “false flag mistakes” to throw off codebreakers. “He wanted to become more of an enigma that he already was,” Fitzgerald says. “He thrived on that. This guy wanted to put himself above and beyond all those pedestrian-type killers.” This egotism might have also informed the Zodiac’s moniker, symbol, and costume, which eyewitnesses said resembled that of a medieval executioner. It’s also why he seemed to thrive on sending mail to newspapers and demanding airtime from TV programs. On one such show, a man claiming to be the Zodiac phoned in to say that his only worry was eventually being taken to the gas chamber, a fear inconsistent with the killer’s supposed megalomaniacal arrogance. Sure enough, the caller was later proved to be a fraud.
The Zodiac affected a persona who not only delighted in taunting authorities, but who also became bored with killing and needed to invent games to keep himself amused. The cipher is the primary symbol of the killer’s paradoxical needs to be both obsessed about and unknowable. That twisted psychology contributed to its immense difficulty, and is one reason why it took decades to unpack.
> “Zodiac killed for thrill, the ciphers only added to the thrill, once the killings became routine.”
**As COVID lockdowns** persisted in 2020, Jarl Van Eycke continued to refine his codebreaking software, AZDecrypt. He reported to Zodiac listserv users that it was becoming faster and more efficient, and he was adding features that allowed users to freeze keywords in the cipher, such as “kill,” while running permutations on the other symbols—a process called “cribbing” that can narrow the number of possible combinations a program needs to try. On his YouTube channel, Dave Oranchak theorized that the Zodiac had probably used a combination of schemes in the 340, including the knight’s move, in which a message is rearranged in a manner following the moveset of a knight in chess, and period-19 transposition, in which each character is moved 19 positions in the cipher before solving.
That video caught the eye of Sam Blake, a quantitative analysis researcher at the University of Melbourne. Burned out from his work in computing infrastructure, Blake found Oranchak’s channel a more relaxing way to problem solve. He joined the Zodiac hunt with traditional pen and paper at first, but found it “clunky” for interacting with the more complex schemes AZDecrypt was dealing with. Period-19 transposition in particular, he says, “seemed like a pain in the butt.”
Oranchak began working on the 340 in 2006 and posted his first YouTube video on his efforts in April 2020. That first video debunked writer Robert Graysmith’s proposed solution to the cipher, and in December that same year, Oranchak released the solution that he helped to obtain. That video has over 2 million views to date.
PETER MEANS/VTE
Blake commented on Oranchak’s video that it would be easy to enumerate the geometry of period-19 transposition into a computer program, but by that point Oranchak’s videos received dozens of comments a day and Blake’s mathematical suggestion was lost in the shuffle. But he kept at it until he found Oranchak’s email address and proposed his idea directly. Oranchak was impressed, and invited Blake to join him in the hunt for a solution.
Using the University of Melbourne’s supercomputer, Spartan, in conjunction with AZDecrypt, Blake and Oranchak parsed thousands of variations for the 340 cipher. Beyond period 19 and the knight’s tour, they tried other arrangements, such as alternating the cipher’s columns or organizing it along diagonal lines. Each new organization required multiple subvariations, such as moving each character 18 or 20 spaces instead of the traditional 19. It took hours, sometimes days, for AZDecrypt to churn through each possible solution. This methodology would’ve been impossible in 1969. “Homophonic substitution needs a really robust computer program,” says Blake. “I was able to create many different candidate ciphers because I had access to Spartan.”
Nevertheless, despite all the programming power at its gates, the cipher didn’t yield. Occasionally, AZDecrypt would reveal a single word and compel the codebreakers to dig deeper, but everything led to a dead end. The team began breaking the cipher into sections and applying different solutions to different sections, but even that failed. Months passed. The team soon amassed over 650,000 tested variations, but no answers.
While Oranchak and Blake attacked the cipher, Van Eycke kept improving AZDecrypt. Oranchak wondered if they’d actually tried the right variation already but that it just hadn’t been caught by an earlier version of the software. They began rerunning all 650,000 combinations again, with Oranchak hanging out in his wood-paneled office with the family’s Labrador, watching the program and waiting for it to produce a viable solution. About halfway through the rerun, he spotted fleeting words and phrases that hadn’t turned up during the first pass. In one variation, he found this fragment: *hope you are trying to catch me*. That seemed promising. Then he caught another phrase: *gas chamber*.
Oranchak used AZDecrypt’s crib feature to lock in those words, the same phrase the Zodiac impostor had used on TV in 1969, and then continued rerunning the variations. Eventually the program cracked the first section of the cipher. “That’s when I fell out of my chair,” Oranchak remembers. “I think I scared my dog.” The remaining two sections soon followed. They needed to be massaged and corrected in places, but at long last, the Zodiac’s message emerged before the codebreaker’s eyes:
I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME
THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW
WHICH BRINGS UP A POINT ABOUT ME
I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER
BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE ALL THE SOONER
BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME
WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE
SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH
I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE IS
LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH
**Most experts, including** the FBI’s crypto unit, agree that Oranchak and his team cracked the 340. Like the first cipher, it reveals a beguiling combination of high and low diction, spelling mistakes, and vague imaginings of immortality. Also like the first cipher, it lacks a hard clue as to the Zodiac’s identity.
But James Fitzgerald says that even the 340’s variations and mistakes hold valuable information for forensic linguists, including possible hints at the writer’s race, ethnicity, age, and gender. Criminals are better at inserting purposeful mistakes than at hiding lifelong linguistic habits. In the case of the 340 cipher, Fitzgerald believes the Zodiac tried to upgrade his language to look more sophisticated than he is, by way of antiquated diction like “all the sooner” and “paradice.”
He also suggests that both ciphers contain contraindicators, or statements that represent the opposite of what is true to the Zodiac. In other words, Fitzgerald asserts that the Zodiac never hunted wild game, never or rarely had sex, and was, in fact, terrified of dying. “Bottom line, Zodiac killed for thrill,” he says. “It was mentally, physically, and sexually empowering for him, all of which were missing from his everyday life. The ciphers only added to the thrill, once the killings became routine.” Fitzgerald predicts that behavioral scientists at the FBI will glean more information through further study of the ciphers.
Jim Clemente, a former FBI profiler, agrees. “Zodiac is nothing more than a vulnerable narcissist,” he says. “He was attempting to show how smart he is \[through the ciphers\], but he’s actually giving us evidence to take him down.”
Materials from Oranchak’s collection of cryptography texts. Oranchak, Blake, and Van Eycke combined their skills in programming and mathematics with their interest in traditional cryptography to solve the 340 cipher.
PETER MEANS/VTE
After solving the cipher, Oranchak, Blake, and Van Eycke received medals from the FBI’s cryptanalysis unit.
PETER MEANS/VTE
> “In his zeal to create a more difficult puzzle, the Zodiac overextended himself and delivered a cipher that was almost impossible to solve.”
The mechanisms of the 340 itself possibly reveal the Zodiac’s limitations as a code writer. The cipher follows a variation of the knight’s tour and period-19 transposition, but the alterations to each of these schemes are idiosyncratic and sloppy. “We almost didn’t find the solution because of them,” Oranchak says.
Francis Heaney, a puzzle expert, calls the 340 a “read-my-mind” puzzle. “Basically, \[it’s when\] you’ve got an idea for a puzzle and there’s no way to solve it unless the person has the same idea,” Heaney says.
For example, the Zodiac altered his diagonal schematic in a seemingly random manner. He intended the six characters in the center-right of the cipher, which spell out “life is,” to be extracted from the diagonal and added to the end of the translated cipher. There’s precedent for that; some puzzles have “meta-answers,” an extra step after computation to reach the complete puzzle’s final conclusion (like when themed crossword clues must be rearranged to solve a riddle). But fair puzzles communicate the need for that extra step through what Heaney calls “breadcrumbs.” The Zodiac left no such instructions. “There’s not a lot of rhyme or reason to it,” Heaney says of the 340. “It’s a little bit free-form, which makes it very impressive that anyone solved it.”
In his zeal to create a more difficult puzzle, the Zodiac overextended himself and delivered a cipher that was almost impossible to solve—not because of any masterful underlying mechanism, but because the cipher lacked a discernible logic and structure.
The best puzzles build incrementally upon themselves, explains Heaney. They may include multiple different steps, but those layers should be iterative. Zodiac’s layers were haphazard at best. Solvable puzzles, even challenging ones, hint at their schematics through “flavor text”—proactive hints at a ski slope if, say, the puzzle follows a diagonal pattern. Heaney says inventive puzzlers also build difficulty through focus. The Zodiac sprawled in his methods, shifting the 340 abruptly between simple and homophonic substitution, utilizing multiple transpositions, and inserted a baseless meta answer. Based on the Zodiac’s profile, particularly his relentless thirst for attention, he wanted his ciphers to be solved and his message of terror out in the world. These inconsistencies, in that context, constitute a failure.
Without the computing power of Blake’s supercomputer and Van Eycke’s AZDecrypt to overpower the Zodiac’s unfair schematic, the 340 probably would have remained unsolved. And even though cracking the cipher revealed little biographical information about the killer, Oranchak thinks their methodology can lead to newer, faster ways of enumerating and substituting, which will allow other ciphers to be solved more quickly than under previous methods. “We live in an age of cryptography that is virtually unbreakable,” Oranchak says. “But so are these old-school codes.” Many unsolved puzzles continue to elude simple solutions, and some of these are connected to crime. “We need a better tool that can figure out what bucket a cipher belongs in before putting all that effort into breaking it.”
Cryptological progress, Blake says, will require experts and intelligence agencies to think outside the box, collaborate and crowdsource, and be willing to test methodologies developed by amateurs and armchair detectives. That, says Mike Morford, author of *The Case of the Zodiac Killer*, is the single most exciting aspect of the 340 solution.
“It just proves that if you dig at something long enough and keep at it, whether it’s for 40 years, 50 years, there’s a chance that you can be part of the solution. These guys proved that,” he says. “Their work encourages people to keep digging into these old cases and not to give up.”
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# Donald Trump and American Intelligence’s Years of Conflict
News Analysis
## The Poisoned Relationship Between Trump and the Keepers of U.S. Secrets
The F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago is a coda to the years of tumult between an erratic president and the nation’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
Credit...Brittainy Newman for The New York Times
Aug. 11, 2022
WASHINGTON— After four years of President Donald J. Trump’s raging against his intelligence services, posting classified information to Twitter and announcing that he took the word of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia over that of his own spies, perhaps the least surprising thing he did during his final days in office was ship boxes of sensitive material from the White House to his oceanside palace in Florida.
[The F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/08/08/us/trump-fbi-raid) on Monday was a dramatic coda to years of tumult between Mr. Trump and American intelligence and law enforcement agencies. From Mr. Trump’s frequent rants against a “deep state” bent on undermining his presidency to his cavalier attitude toward highly classified information that he viewed as his personal property and would occasionally use to advance his political agenda, the relationship between the keepers of American secrets and the erratic president they served was the most poisoned of the modern era.
Mr. Trump’s behavior led to such mistrust within intelligence agencies that officials who gave him classified briefings occasionally erred on the side of withholding some sensitive details from him.
It has long been common practice for the C.I.A. not to provide presidents with some of the most sensitive information, such as the names of the agency’s human sources. But Douglas London, who served as a top C.I.A. counterterrorism official during the Trump administration, said that officials were even more cautious about what information they provided Mr. Trump because some saw the president himself as a security risk.
“We certainly took into account ‘what damage could he do if he blurts this out?’” said Mr. London, who wrote a book about his time in the agency called “The Recruiter.”
During an Oval Office meeting with top Russian officials just months into his presidency, Mr. Trump revealed [highly classified information](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/world/middleeast/israel-trump-classified-intelligence-russia.html?referringSource=articleShare) about an Islamic State plot that the government of Israel had provided to the United States, which put Israeli sources at risk and angered American intelligence officials. Months later, the C.I.A. decided to pull a highly placed Kremlin agent it had cultivated over years out of Moscow, in part out of concerns that the Trump White House was a leaky ship.
In August 2019, Mr. Trump received a briefing about an explosion at a space launch facility in Iran. He was so taken by a classified satellite photo of the explosion that he wanted to post it on Twitter immediately. Aides pushed back, saying that making the high resolution photo public could give adversaries insight into America’s sophisticated surveillance capabilities.
[He posted the photo anyway](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/02/world/middleeast/iran-space-center-explosion.html), adding a message that the United States had no role in the explosion but wished Iran “best wishes and good luck” in discovering what caused it. As he told one American official about his decision: “I have declassification authority. I can do anything I want.”
Two years earlier, Mr. Trump used Twitter to defend himself against media reports that he had ended a C.I.A. program to arm Syrian rebels — effectively disclosing a classified program to what were then his more than 33 million Twitter followers.
If there is not one origin story that explains Mr. Trump’s antipathy toward spy agencies, the [2017 American intelligence assessment](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/us/politics/russian-hack-report.html) about the Kremlin’s efforts to sabotage the 2016 presidential election — and Russia’s preference for Mr. Trump — played perhaps the biggest role. Mr. Trump saw the document as an insult, written by his “deep state” enemies to challenge the legitimacy of his election and his presidency.
Image
Credit...Saul Martinez for The New York Times
Mr. Trump’s efforts to undermine the assessment became a motif in the early years of his presidency, culminating in a [July 2018 summit in Helsinki](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/16/world/europe/trump-putin-summit-helsinki.html) with Mr. Putin. During a joint news conference, Mr. Putin denied that Russia had any role in election sabotage, and Mr. Trump came to his defense. “They think it’s Russia,” Mr. Trump said, speaking of American intelligence officials and adding, “I don’t see any reason it would be.”
Mr. Trump often took aim at intelligence officials for public statements he thought undermined his foreign policy goals. In January 2019, top officials testified to Congress that the Islamic State remained a persistent threat, that North Korea would still pursue nuclear weapons and that Iran showed no signs of actively trying to build a bomb — essentially contradicting things the president had said publicly. [Mr. Trump lashed out](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/us/politics/trump-intelligence-agencies.html), saying on Twitter that “The Intelligence people seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong!”
“Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!” he wrote.
Mr. Trump was hardly the first American president to view his own intelligence services as enemy territory. In 1973, Richard M. Nixon fired Richard Helms, his spy chief, after he refused to go along with the Watergate cover-up, and installed James Schlesinger in the job with the mission of bringing the C.I.A. in line.
Speaking with a group of senior analysts on his first day, Mr. Schlesinger made a lewd comment about what the C.I.A. had been doing to Mr. Nixon, and demanded that it stop.
Chris Whipple, an author who cites the Schlesinger anecdote in his book “The Spymasters,” said there is a long history of tension between presidents and their intelligence chiefs, but that “Trump really was in a league of his own in thinking the C.I.A. and the agencies were out to get him.”
The exact nature of the documents that Mr. Trump left the White House with remains a mystery, and some former officials said that Mr. Trump generally was not given paper copies of classified reports. This had less to do with security concerns than with the way Mr. Trump preferred to get his security briefings. Unlike some of his predecessors, who would read and digest voluminous intelligence reports each day, [Mr. Trump generally received oral briefings](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/us/politics/presidents-daily-brief-trump.html).
But for those charged with protecting secrets, there may have been no bigger challenge than the seaside resort where Mr. Trump spent so much of his time as president — and where so many boxes of classified material were stored after he left office. Besides its members, Mar-a-Lago is also open to members’ guests, who would often interact with Mr. Trump during his frequent trips to the club. Security professionals saw this arrangement as ripe to be exploited by a foreign spy service eager for access to the epicenter of American power.
One night during his first weeks in office, [Mr. Trump was at Mar-a-Lago hosting Shinzo Abe](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/11/us/politics/donald-trump-shinzo-abe-golf-mar-a-lago.html), the Japanese prime minister, when North Korea test-fired a ballistic missile in the direction of Japan that landed in the sea.
Almost immediately, at least one Mar-a-Lago patron [posted photos](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/13/us/politics/mar-a-lago-north-korea-trump.html) on social media of Mr. Trump and Mr. Abe coordinating their response over dinner in the resort’s dining room. Photos showed White House aides huddled over their laptops and Mr. Trump speaking on his cellphone.
The patron also published a photo of himself standing next to a person he described as Mr. Trump’s military aide who carries the nuclear “football” — the briefcase that contains codes for launching nuclear weapons.
Just two world leaders responding to a major security crisis — live for the members of Mr. Trump’s resort to watch in real time.
# How Bolivia’s ruthless tin baron saved thousands of Jewish refugees
Moritz Hochschild was constantly on the move. In the early 1930s, he could be found in the grand hotels of London, New York or Paris, or on the back of a mule, following rough mountain trails in search of mineral seams in the Bolivian Andes. It was on one of those trips to a remote mountain village, according to family legend, that the mining magnate came across a local man sketching. The artist was afraid to show Hochschild his drawing, which was an unflattering caricature of him. But the magnate found the parody so amusing that he decided to fund a scholarship for the artist to study draughtsmanship in Paris.
Hochschild could afford to laugh at his own expense. His shrewd risk-taking had made him one of the richest men in South America in the early 20th century, and earned him notoriety as one of Bolivia’s three “tin barons”. The trio – Hochschild, Simón Patiño and Oxford-educated Carlos Aramayo – had made fortunes trading Bolivian tin which, during the first half of the 20th century, was much in demand for aeroplane parts and food cans, and accounted for more than half of the country’s export earnings.
The barons were seen as a cartel: “a circle of oligarchs who negotiated between themselves and had more power than the state,” the Bolivian historian Robert Brockmann told me. Tin was Bolivia’s principal mineral export in the 1930s, and the tin barons controlled 72% of the nation’s tin exports, while paying just 3% of their profits to the government. The three mining barons are chiefly remembered for their ostentatious wealth, their influence over Bolivian politics and their exploitation of mineworkers. “\[Hochschild\] was a cruel businessman; the toughest of the three,” Edgar Ramírez, former union organiser and archivist, told me. “The president of Bolivia wanted to have him shot.”
Hochschild, the youngest “baron” by decades, was the only one who was not a Bolivian citizen. A middle-class German Jew born in 1881 in Biblis, a small town south of Frankfurt, Hochschild sought his fortune in Australia and Chile before the first world war, returning to South America as soon as the war ended to build his metals and mining empire. During the 1930s and 40s, Bolivia was swept by waves of social upheaval. Amid mass demonstrations for state control of resources, Hochschild was twice thrown in jail and threatened with execution. He escaped with his life, but fled into exile. As the country hurtled towards the National Revolution of 1952, one of its chroniclers, Augusto Céspedes, described Hochschild as a “grand pirate of mining finances”.
But evidence has since come to light that has forced Bolivia to reappraise its view of Moritz, known as “Mauricio” Hochschild. In 1999, several tonnes of rotting papers were found in warehouses owned by the state mining company, Comibol, which had taken over all of Bolivia’s mines when the industry was nationalised following the 1952 revolution. Documents from Hochschild’s companies [were discovered](https://networks.h-net.org/node/23910/blog/research-corner/5679375/el-alto-bolivia-ex-miners-rescue-their-history-part-i-s) piled in cardboard boxes, stuffed into barrels or dumped outside, exposed to the elements. Bolivia’s congressional library recognised the historical value of the archive, and a team was hired to organise the documents under the direction of Edgar Ramírez and the historian Carola Campos, who is now the archive’s director.
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In 2004, after five years of sorting through thousands of pages of correspondence with consulates, businesses and international Jewish organisations, the team revealed their astonishing discovery. The papers demonstrated that Moritz Hochschild had helped to rescue as many as 22,000 Jews from Nazi Germany and occupied Europe by bringing them to Bolivia between 1938 and 1940, at a time when much of the continent had shut its doors to fleeing Jews. The documents, which included work permits and visas for European Jews, tracked Hochschild’s efforts not only to ensure Jews escaped Europe but also to resettle them in Bolivia, investing his own fortune and using his influence with the country’s elite to secure protection and employment for as many refugees as possible.
“This aspect of the man was unknown until we discovered these papers,” Edgar Ramírez told me in October 2020. Ramírez, a union man of 74 who still wore his flat cap and workman’s overalls, grew up in Potosí, a mining town where Hochschild employed hundreds of miners on near-starvation wages. “\[He\] was known in Bolivia as the worst kind of businessman. The worst!” Ramírez growled. “But who was the real Hochschild?”
---
After the first publication of their findings in 2004, Edgar Ramírez’s team of investigators continued to make more discoveries, and in 2005, documents surfaced in warehouses in El Alto, the satellite city of Bolivia’s administrative capital La Paz. In 2009, further south, in the mining towns of Oruro and Potosí, work permits for Jewish refugees were found scattered among the files of Hochschild’s multiple companies. In 2016, Unesco recognised the archive’s historic value and added it to the Memory of the World Register; as a result, Hochschild’s humanitarian work became more widely known. The legacy of Mauricio Hochschild, until then, had been his immense wealth; his villainous reputation, according to Brockmann, had served the architects of the 1952 revolution as a “necessary part of the nation-building myth”.
Hochschild was a towering figure. Bald-headed and moustachioed, with bushy eyebrows that framed expressive brown eyes, he resembled an “Old Testament patriarch” according to his employee and later biographer, Gerhard Goldberg. When he first started his mineral explorations, Bolivia was underpopulated and much of the country was not industrialised. Don Mauricio, as he was known, belonged to a generation of early 20th-century Europeans who believed nations could be transformed through capitalism. He mingled with Bolivia’s patrician classes and its military top brass, and sought favour with the clergy by generously donating to Catholic charities. “He possessed enormous charm and a great ability to attract people. Of this he was well aware,” wrote Goldberg. “When there were problems, his favourite reaction was ‘Let me talk to him’, and most of the time he proved capable of persuading people, often against all expectations.”
In 1929, Hochschild founded the South American Mining Company. Demand boomed from Europe and the US for metal ores, and by 1937, he controlled around a third of Bolivia’s tin production, and around 90% of lead, zinc and silver exports. He used European connections to push markets in London, Germany and the Netherlands and made frequent trips to the old continent.
A disused tin mine on the Cerro Rico mountain, Bolivia. Photograph: Sebastien Lecocq/Alamy
As Hochschild’s business went from strength to strength in South America, the systematic persecution of German Jews was intensifying. Between 1933 and 1935, he was approached by international Jewish organisations for help, according to Brockmann, and told them that Bolivia did not have the economic capacity to receive a large number of refugees. The political turmoil in Bolivia at that time was intense, and he may have suspected – as indeed it turned out – that his own position was not secure.
But when the young war hero Lt Col Germán Busch took power in a military coup in July 1937, the two men formed a bond. “They met many times. In fact, Hochschild considered him a friend,” said Brockmann. “\[Hochschild\] was a man very close to power. He was sent to the US to negotiate the price of tin, invested with diplomatic status.”
By then, much of South America was aligned with Europe’s fascist leaders. Busch, aged just 34 when he became president, was half German, and his father, a German doctor, supported Hitler. Still, Hochschild managed to persuade Busch that Bolivia’s economy could gain from opening its doors to Jewish fugitives – although Busch insisted his country did not need city folk, but farmers. In March 1938, Busch signed a resolution ordering consular officials to allow Jews to enter Bolivia, particularly if they could be “useful to national activities”. Three months later, he issued a decree permitting “all men of sound body and spirit” to enter Bolivia, offering farmland and inviting immigrants to populate its “barren lands”. “In Bolivia, we should not partake in hatred and persecution,” the decree read.
“When the news reached the cities of Europe occupied by the Nazis, enormous queues immediately formed outside the Bolivian embassies and consular offices,” said Brockmann. A network of corrupt consular officials, led by the Bolivian foreign minister, took advantage of the wave of Jewish families desperate to leave Europe to charge thousands of dollars for visas and passports. (When the scandal became public in 1940, the foreign minister was forced to resign.) “Between 1938 and the first months of 1940, a breathtaking number of Jews arrived in Bolivia - somewhere between 7,000 and 22,000,” Brockmann added. A letter written by Hochschild to Edwin Goldwasser of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in March 1939 said Busch had agreed to “gradually receive 10 to 20,000 German Jews, with the priority of colonization, on the condition that enough money is made available \[by the committee\]”.
Hochschild leaned on Busch to ensure that the visas would be respected once refugees arrived in South America. Ramírez said that the tycoon, who was unable to travel to Europe in person, “bribed \[officials\] to buy blank passports”, and through his links with anti-fascist resistance groups, oversaw the creation of false agricultural work permits and identities for fugitives.
Correspondence with Hochschild’s staff in 1939 showed detailed plans for a *Hilfsverein*, or a welfare association for Jewish migrants, and the disposal of $30,000 of company funds for the arrival of an initial 1,000 people. Adding a $137,500 donation from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Hochschild created the Society for the Protection of Israelite Immigrants, known as Sopro in its Spanish acronym. The funds paid for a 20-bed hospital, a children’s home and a kindergarten in La Paz, and even a retreat in Cochabamba for Jews suffering from altitude in the city.
[Map of Bolivia and neighbouring countries showing the rail route carrying refugees](https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2022/08/bolivia-refugeesmap/giv-65628pCjnPYSEjdg/)
Thousands of European Jews appeared in the steep, narrow streets of La Paz and Cochabamba, where the refugees started businesses selling hot dogs, tailoring or dry-cleaning. When local people found themselves having to compete for jobs, or being priced out of rented accommodation by the new arrivals, an antisemitic backlash began. [Refugees](https://www.theguardian.com/world/refugees) were abused on the streets, and the attacks were fuelled by antisemitic editorials in the press. Under pressure from Busch to ease tensions in the cities, Hochschild bought three agricultural estates in the high jungle region of Yungas, and founded the Bolivian Settlers Society, which managed farming projects for Jewish immigrants relocated to the countryside. The archive contains dozens of work permits registering German and Austrian Jews as agricultural labourers. But many of the new arrivals were merchants, doctors, lawyers, teachers or musicians who had no idea how to farm.
Hochschild’s immigrant farming venture was ultimately a failure but it served a short-term purpose – the deliverance of thousands of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Most longed to return to life in the city, and after the war left Bolivia for Israel, the US or cities in Brazil and Argentina. A smaller number of Jews were already working for Hochschild’s mining companies on meagre wages, as León E Bieber, 79, a Jewish Bolivian historian and author of a 2015 book about Hochschild, told me when we met in Santa Cruz de la Sierra. “They worked mostly administrative posts,” Bieber said, “and for Hochschild, this was important because he trusted in these people’s honesty. He paid miserable salaries compared to what he could have paid. This shows he was first and foremost a businessman who wanted to get the best out of his people.”
---
One of the children that Moritz Hochschild saved from the Nazis was Ellen Baum de Hess, now 94. “He was a true hero,” she told me over the phone from Buenos Aires, where she has lived for the past 80 years. In 1938, when she was just 10, Baum de Hess and her mother fled Berlin, having recently witnessed Kristallnacht, the infamous pogrom against Jews, which heralded what the future held for them in Germany. She recalls walking home from school and seeing “a synagogue burning and the broken windows of many Jewish businesses” in Berlin the following day. “That was when my mother realised that we had to get out of Nazi Germany,” she told me.
At the time there was a two-year waiting list for US visas, which also required an American financial sponsor, preferably a relative. Baum de Hess’s parents were separated, and all she and her mother were able to get was a tourist visa for Uruguay. In late December 1938, they boarded a steamship, the General San Martín, in Boulogne, in northern France. But when they arrived in Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo, more than a month later, customs officials refused to let them disembark, claiming their tourist visas were fake. Baum de Hess remembers the adults pleading, desperate to be allowed ashore, even though they suspected that the country’s government sympathised with the Nazis, or had been ordered by Nazi Germany to turn back Jews fleeing Europe. “Many of the 28 people \[on board\] wanted to throw themselves into the ocean because we were desperate. We didn’t want to go to a concentration camp,” she said. From Montevideo, they sailed to Buenos Aires, arriving in late February 1939, where they were held in port for three weeks before being sent back across the Atlantic.
Ellen Baum de Hess with her family in Mar de Plata, Argentina, 1957. Photograph: Courtesy of Ellen Baum de Hess
The ship docked in Lisbon in April 1939, and while awaiting news of their fate, the passengers received reason to hope. There were rumours aboard about a mysterious well-wisher who had managed to get them visas to Bolivia. “People said there was a benefactor,” Baum recalls, “who, through his friendship with the Bolivian president, had managed to get visas for us. We were told that the only one who could have achieved that was Moritz Hochschild.”
After another three weeks in Lisbon, the passengers got word that they had been granted safe passage. They were ferried to the Italian port of Genoa and, from there, aboard another ship, the Orazio, set sail once again for South America. The refugees docked at Arica in northern Chile, the main port of entry for landlocked Bolivia, in the middle of June 1939. From there, they reached Cochabamba by train, said Baum de Hess. The rail route into Bolivia became known as the *Express Judío*, or Jewish Express, due to the huge influx of refugees. (Months later, in January 1940, the Orazio – carrying more than 600 mostly Jewish refugees – caught fire and sank in the Atlantic Ocean. Passing ships were able to rescue most of the passengers, but more than 100 died.)
Baum de Hess and her mother stayed in a village near Cochabamba for more than a year before making their way to Argentina, where her aunt awaited them. They did not have a visa, but crossed Bolivia’s southern border into Argentina where they boarded a train bound for Buenos Aires in December 1940. Her family could not afford to pay for her schooling beyond the age of 13, but she trained as a secretary and, owing to her command of German, Spanish and English, worked as a translator. “With very little schooling, I became self-educated,” she declared with a triumphant laugh. “I, my mother and the other 26 people owe \[Hochschild\] our lives, although no one knew at the time.”
---
A year after the president had opened Bolivia’s doors to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, as Europe was on the brink of war, Busch and Hochschild’s relationship soured. In June 1939, Bolivia’s mining companies were given four months to hand over their foreign currency reserves to the national mining bank, which would return the funds in local currency. Hochschild, the most stubborn of the tin barons, refused to comply. Busch had an “attack of rage”, according to historian Herbert Klein, and sentenced the tycoon to go before a firing squad, before intercessions from his ministers, the US and Argentina spared Hochschild this fate.
Two months later, Busch, who had a history of depression, shot himself. Earlier that night, he had reportedly complained about the number of Jews in the cities when he had expected farmers in the fields, Brockmann said. Busch’s supporters, made suspicious by the violent circumstances of his death, accused Hochschild and the other tin barons of plotting his murder. Half a year after Busch’s death, the country’s immigration commissioner suspended the visas allowing Jews into Bolivia but, despite heated – often antisemitic – debate over their status, the proposal was not ratified in the legislature. As late as March 1943, the government issued visas to around 100 Jewish orphans in France, according to historian [Florencia Durán](https://books.openedition.org/ifea/7298?lang=en), though by that stage, they were unable to get out of Europe.
During the war, Hochschild’s metals business became key to consolidating Bolivia’s strategic support for the Allies. He was already a key broker for Bolivian tin with the US, so was well placed when vast quantities of the metal were needed to make ammunition boxes, aeroplane instrument panels and syringes to administer morphine. In 1940, Hochschild brokered a deal between Bolivia and the US Metal Reserve Company to supply tin at 48.5 cents per pound, which boosted production but soon fell below market price. In 1942, the price rose to 60 cents, and Bolivia’s profits fell.
Another cache of documents indicates that Hochschild himself was a committed supporter of the Allied war effort. Comibol archivists showed me a blacklist of hundreds of Bolivian-based businesses with German, Japanese and Italian names. Dated from November 1939 to August 1946, the file, labelled “Trading with the Enemy”, compiled by the US embassy and the British legation in La Paz, contained a regularly updated list of firms with possible fascist sympathies or ties. Letters show Hochschild was an enthusiastic enforcer of the veto, writing cordial but forceful letters to trading partners to ensure they upheld the ban or lose his business.
In 1943, a pro-fascist military dictator, Col Gualberto Villarroel, took power in a coup, and pushed for Bolivia to switch from supporting the Allies to the Axis powers. One of the reasons Villaroel toppled his predecessor was the unfavourable tin price that the mining magnate had negotiated with the US. Hochschild became one of Villaroel’s “bêtes noires”, said Brockmann, “because he was rich, capitalist, Jewish and foreign”. In May 1944, Villarroel had Hochschild arrested, accused of treason and threatening the stability of the government, and he was jailed for 45 days, along with one of his managers, Adolf Blum. But “even behind bars”, [Time Magazine](https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,850499,00.html) reported, “Don Mauricio was still a power-center of Bolivian politics”. After pressure from the US, Chile and Argentina, he was released. In July 1944, an ultra-nationalist, pro-fascist military faction, known as Razón de Patria, kidnapped him, and Blum, and held them for 17 days. “The rebels were inspired by mixed motives of nationalism and social reform. \[Hochschild\] has been unpopular on both counts,” reported Newsweek.
Moritz Hochschild (left) and Adolf Blum after being released by kidnappers in La Paz in 1944. Photograph: Leo Baeck Institute, New York
“They kidnapped him with the intention of killing him, to send a message to the world: ‘This is what we do with the Jewish capitalist foreigners’,” said Brockmann. For Hochschild, it was the second time he had faced death after falling foul of a military president. After the kidnappers released him, in August 1944, he fled Bolivia on a Chilean government plane, never to return. A few days later, he told the [New York Times](https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1944/09/06/87467325.html?auth=login-email&pageNumber=11) he could not discuss the details of his release, only that no ransom had been paid. He made a statement to the effect that he had never plotted against the Bolivian government and “he hoped to help Bolivia adjust its postwar social and economic problems”. He also wanted to reassure the US that the kidnapping incident would not interfere with the “steady flow of Bolivian tin from his mines to American smelters”.
Hochschild’s company retained control of his Bolivian mines, and his international business continued to thrive. He moved to Chile, where years later he opened Mantos Blancos, a hugely successful copper mine in Antofagasta.
“When Bolivia turned against him … it must have been extremely painful,” said his grandson Fabrizio Hochschild Drummond, 59 – a former UN official whose employment recently ended after [allegations](https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-united-nations-antonio-guterres-cb2ccc5bbe049a3fe17c62c026551df0) of bullying – speaking to me on the phone from New York. “He had tried to give his heart and soul in turning this country around and it kicked him out, short of killing him.”
---
When I visited the neat, air-conditioned Comibol archive in El Alto, under a sign reading “Out of the trash, into the memory of the world”, three Bolivian archivists wearing blue rubber gloves and face masks were sifting through hundreds of yellowing pages of typed correspondence in German, Spanish, Hebrew and English. Among them, Ramírez, pointed out a handwritten letter addressed to Hochschild in neat calligraphy from a Jewish kindergarten in La Paz, asking for funds to build a second floor “in view of the number of children who are here and others who want to come”. He was already known to the children as the benefactor: the first floor of the school had been built by his charitable organisation. The letter, which is believed to date from 1944, includes a black-and-white photo of the students and staff, and is signed by “the children”.
After years of poring over evidence of Hochschild’s good works, Edgar Ramírez had revised his opinion of Hochschild’s legacy. He told me he now considered Hochschild a heroic figure. It was his view that the tycoon concealed his “true face” – that Hochschild was, in fact, an unsung leader in the international anti-fascist resistance. Months after my visit to El Alto, Ramírez, the driving force in the Comibol archive, died from a Covid-related illness. For more than two decades, he had led the team of archivists that conserved and restored hundreds of thousands of work and personal documents relating to Hochschild, which now fill 50 metres of specially constructed shelves.
Edgar Ramírez, then director of the Bolivian mining archive in El Alto, in 2017. Photograph: Dpa Picture Alliance/Alamy
Researchers are still puzzling over the apparent disparity between the public businessman and the private humanitarian. Ricardo Udler, a spokesman for Bolivia’s small Jewish community, believes Hochschild deliberately kept his activities quiet in order to operate more effectively. “Many people whose families arrived in Bolivia didn’t know that their benefactor was Hochschild. When the Comibol archive was opened, only then did many people in the community begin to investigate and realise what this figure, Hochschild, had done. He had been working silently, bringing many, many people. By keeping a low profile, he probably managed to get more people out.”
Before the second world war, records show there were no more than 100 Jews in Bolivia, yet by the 1940s there were some 15,000, according to Udler, a medical doctor and president of El Círculo Israelita de Bolivia, the association of the once-thriving Jewish community. The country’s current Jewish population stands at little more than 300 and is shrinking, he explained, and there is now just one rabbi in the whole country. “It is important that our children know about one of the great saviours of our history,” said Udler, 64, whose French-Polish mother survived four concentration camps before escaping across the Atlantic to Bolivia.
---
Just down the corridor from the Comibol archive is an imposing mural by local artists William Luna Tarqui and Jesús Callizaya, which commemorates the 1952 Nationalist Revolution. The fresco, which lionises socialist ideals, revolutionary leaders and ordinary workers, follows a Latin American tradition exemplified by the Bolivian *Indigenista* painter Miguel Alandía Pantoja, whose art was, by turns, glorified and vilified by successive dictatorships. The revolution resulted in the nationalisation of the tin barons’ mines – including Hochschild’s – who was compensated with 30% of the company’s prior assets.
During the revolution, Hochschild was portrayed in plainly antisemitic terms, cast as the capitalist villain who used “Judaic trickery to stretch his hand over the biggest mines,” in the words of Augusto Céspedes, a writer who championed the upheaval. While Hochschild had “unmatched personal influence with Bolivian authorities in the highest ranks of government and the armed forces”, writes Leo Spitzer, in Hotel Bolivia, a book about his childhood in Bolivia as the son of Austrian Jews, “his foreign birth – and, no doubt, the fact he was also a Jew (albeit a non-practising one) – also generated intense jealousy and dislike among some Bolivian nationals.”
A mural depicting Bolivia’s 1952 revolution at the Comibol archive in El Alto, Bolivia. Photograph: Vanett Graneros/Wikimedia
Among the hundreds of Jewish families that Hochschild gave new life and hope, many did not realise until recently that they were part of a bigger group of beneficiaries. One of them is Fred Reich, 73, a retired businessman and an important figure in Peru’s 2,500-strong Jewish community in Lima. His father, Kurt Reich, was an Auschwitz survivor from Austria who got his first job, aged 26, as a messenger boy for Hochschild’s company in La Paz, in March 1947. “Only after Mauricio’s death, people have realised the amount of fantastic work he did to save Jews from the horror of Europe,” said Fred Reich at his home overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Lima’s bohemian Barranco neighbourhood. “At that time, to the best of my knowledge, it was only known that he was very sympathetic to hiring Jewish people in Bolivia.”
While working for Hochschild, Kurt Reich had discovered that one of the accountants had been stealing from the company, and reported the theft. When he heard about Reich’s action, Hochschild, who was in Paris at the time, invited him for lunch. “Going to Paris would be like going to the moon today,” Fred recounted proudly. “You have to imagine: La Paz to Rio, Rio to Casablanca, Casablanca to Lisbon, Lisbon to Paris – in small planes!” Hochschild was impressed that his father had survived the camp, said Fred. “At one point he \[had\] weighed 32kg, so it was quite a miracle for him to be alive.”
Hochschild promised to pay for Kurt Reich’s son’s education anywhere in the world, and Kurt went on to have a long and successful career at the company. Hochschild’s pledge was fulfilled after his death when Fred went to study at Alfred University in New York state. Fred Reich still has the letter Hochschild wrote to his father in German, telling him of his plans to visit the family in Arequipa, Peru. But Fred never got the chance to thank the man he calls the “Bolivian Schindler”. Hochschild died alone aged 84 in June 1965 in Le Meurice, a five-star hotel in Paris. His remains were interred in the Père Lachaise cemetery.
Even Hochschild’s family did not seem to have made much of his humanitarian work. Growing up in wealthy circles between London and Santiago de Chile, Fabrizio Hochschild Drummond remembers his grandfather’s achievements on the mining front were vaunted, but what he had done on behalf of the Jews was “really barely mentioned”. “I had heard stories of how he brought Jews from Germany,” said Hochschild Drummond, “but it was always presented to me, when I was a child, that it was more \[for\] self-interested business reasons rather than \[something\] altruistic and praiseworthy. So when the story came fully to light about five years ago, I was taken aback, not by the fact but by the scale.
“I remember in Chile coming across many strangers who, once they had my surname, would tell me how my grandfather had helped them at this or that time in their life.” He believes his grandfather’s deliverance of thousands of Jews from the Nazis was a “great act which has never fully been recognised”.
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This article was amended on 12 August 2022 to revise reference to the allegations against Fabrizio Hochschild Drummond.
Credit...Photo illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban
Published Aug. 3, 2022Updated Aug. 11, 2022
### Listen to This Article
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The Original Beef of Chicagoland is the fitting name of the restaurant at the heart of the acclaimed FX series [“The Bear,”](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/dining/the-bear-fx-hulu.html) which stars Jeremy Allen White as Carmy, a world-class chef who returns home to run his family’s sandwich shop after his older brother’s suicide. Of all American cities, Chicago is the one whose mythos is most closely associated with a particular kind of work: honest, meaty, broad-shouldered labor that forges you into something bigger, nobler. Like the city it’s set in, the restaurant in “The Bear” is an unpretentious place, humbly catering to “the working man.” But “the working man,” we soon learn — as a young, Black, female sous-chef mocks an older, white, male manager’s use of the label — is a contested term, especially in an environment where nobody does anything but work, and pretty much nobody has anything to show for it.
It’s unclear, at first, why Carmy, once named one of Food & Wine’s “Best New Chefs,” has come back to the sandwich shop, but we’re gradually made to understand that he is returning, compulsively, to a traumatic site. Food was the thread that connected him to his brother, but his brother wouldn’t let him in the kitchen, and so off to Sonoma and New York he went, to make something of himself. The Original Beef of Chicagoland is also *Carmy’s* original beef — the core wound that ignited his ambition, the site of his connection to his family as well as his estrangement from it.
The story of the prodigal son returning from some summit of achievement to his salt-of-the-earth hometown is a beloved American narrative, most often seen in Christmas movies about frazzled executives returning to their roots. They are intended to reify the comforting notion that work isn’t everything — that the real America is slow, simple, cozy and (above all) fair, a place that rewards you for your efforts, full of wise, avuncular coots and simple, patient girls who’ve been waiting all along. But when Carmy returns to Chicago, he finds his elders are either absent or trying to exploit him, and the only girl who’s interested in his feelings is his sister. Just as success failed to save him, honest work won’t either; it won’t even generate enough money to get by. The Original Beef may signal noble, can-do labor, but it’s also a decompensating system on the verge of structural collapse. A few episodes in, the toilet explodes, unleashing a geyser in Carmy’s face. An industrial mixer blows a fuse, knocking out the power. The gas goes out, forcing the kitchen staff to build makeshift grills outside. They have no choice; one missed lunch service could take them out. A 1980s arcade game called Ball Breaker blares stupidly, violently from one corner, handily summarizing the experience. “Your balls have been broken!!” its screen announces. “Continue?”
**“The Bear” has** been praised for its visceral depiction of the stress of a professional kitchen, but you don’t have to have done restaurant work to recognize the chaos, panic and precarity the show captures so convincingly. In “The Bear,” work is a dumb, sadistic game that has left Carmy with unchecked PTSD. Intrusive thoughts and flashbacks fracture his consciousness; he even cooks in his sleep, almost setting his house on fire. Richie, the restaurant’s manager, takes Xanax because he suffers from “anxiety and dread.” (“Who doesn’t?” Carmy snaps.) Sydney, the sous-chef, has a cabinet stuffed with medication for heartburn and ulcers, problems that may have been sparked by a failed attempt to run her own business. (“It was the first time I didn’t have a complete and utter psychopath behind me screaming,” she says. “And I thought I wanted that, you know? But look where that got me.”) The restaurant is drowning in bills. When the characters aren’t yelling at one another at top volume, they’re often shutting down to cope with all the yelling. Their customers are like kids stuck in a car with warring parents. The word you see most frequently in writing about the show is “stressful,” but it’s often accompanied by descriptions of the workplace as “soul-crushing,” “toxic” or “abusive.” All this is intended as praise — the idea is that, despite its occasional excesses, the show has captured something relatable and true.
Hustle has always been romanticized in American culture, which promises that nobly sacrificing yourself on the altar of endless work will pay off in the end. But it’s increasingly clear that for most people, it won’t. Twenty-two years ago, when Anthony Bourdain published “Kitchen Confidential,” he glamorized the kitchen as a kind of foxhole, populated by wild, dysfunctional hard-asses yelling profanities at one another while managing to crank out hundreds of plates every night. This may once have seemed exotic or picturesque, but that pressure-cooker environment has come to feel familiar to more and more workers in more and more industries. The American economy soared over the past decade, but life for most became harder: “In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry by landlords, hospital administrators, university bursars and child-care centers,” [Annie Lowrey wrote in The Atlantic in 2020.](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/great-affordability-crisis-breaking-america/606046/) “For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible.” “The Bear” is compelling not because of how it recreates a kitchen but because it captures something about modern work in general.
> ## ‘The Bear’ is compelling not because of how it recreates a kitchen but because it captures something about modern work in general.
Carmy and Sydney work insane hours, rising at dawn and waiting for ‘L’ trains on dark platforms, too exhausted to think about anything else. At times it seems as if work is how they escape from having to think about what is happening to them. Sydney tells someone her goal is simply to do her job and live her life, but it’s abundantly clear that, outside her job, she has little life to speak of. These conditions don’t spur creativity; on the contrary, they’re counterproductive. Carmy can’t spare time to listen to Sydney’s ideas about the dinner menu or encourage the pastry chef’s experiments with doughnuts. Exploring your talent, in this environment, might turn out to be another luxury the “working man” can’t afford, something that belongs exclusively to narcissists with financial backing. This inequality comes into focus early in the show: We see Carmy abused by an arrogant chef and, in Chicago, paid a visit by his mobster uncle, who talks down the restaurant — the place is unfixable, he says — before trying to buy it for himself.
Carmy is furious to learn that Richie has been dealing cocaine in the alley behind the restaurant to keep it afloat, but Richie justifies his actions by co-opting the language of entrepreneurship, crediting this side hustle with getting the place through Covid. “That’s the kind of stick-to-it-iveness and ingenuity and out-of-the-box thinking that we look for in employees,” he says. “But that ship has sailed, my friend.” This is the startling milieu and message of “The Bear,” the thing that has struck a chord. The notion that hustle will eventually pay off is an insidious pipe dream. Everyone is in survival mode all the time. The system has failed. The place is unfixable.
---
Source photographs: Screen grabs and photographs from FX
# The Unlikely Rise of Slim Pickins, the First Black-Owned Outdoors Retailer in the Country
A nighttime stroll through downtown Stephenville evokes a certain small-town Texas vibe. All around the square, string lights illuminate weathered brick storefronts. The Erath County courthouse, with its thick limestone walls and Romanesque arched windows, was completed in 1892. Its pointed clock tower remains one of the tallest structures around. On the courthouse lawn is a Confederate memorial, dedicated in 2001, that pays tribute to the more than six hundred soldiers who now “rest beneath the rich soil of Erath County.” Nearby, on a corner of the square, stands a life-size statue of a dairy cow. The black-and-white Holstein, erected in 1972 and known locally as Moo-La, is a nod to the county’s state-leading dairy industry. The fire department has been known to hose her down, and she’s sometimes costumed in relevant attire: a flower necklace for the annual Moo-La Fest, a cloth mask at the height of the pandemic.
The town lies seventy miles southwest of Fort Worth and is home to Tarleton State University. The school, which has 14,000 students, has claimed 37 championships at the College National Finals Rodeo. The best ropers and riders often stick around after graduation. More pro rodeo cowgirls and cowboys reside in Stephenville, population 20,897, than anywhere else, giving the town a solid claim to the title Cowboy Capital of the World.
Across the street from the courthouse, a bright orange awning draws attention to a vintage Rexall Drugs sign. The long-gone pharmacy once sold various feel-good remedies, including a tonic containing alcohol and cod-liver oil. Today the space is occupied by an outdoors store called [Slim Pickins Outfitters](https://slimpickinsoutfitters.com/). The owner, Jahmicah Dawes, is the son of a Jamaican immigrant father and a Miami-raised mother. He’s a big guy, six foot one, with an easy smile and a contagious laugh.
One recent evening, Dawes, wearing a Slim Pickins–branded beanie over his short dreadlocks and gray wool socks beneath his mustard-yellow sandals, gave me a tour of his shop. A record player spun an album by country singer Charley Crockett, who crooned about hard times. Slim Pickins caters primarily to adventurous types, such as hikers and climbers, but it’s far from a standard camping store. Dawes’s personal touches are evident everywhere: Patagonia T-shirts and jackets hang from walls lined with reclaimed wood and corrugated steel. Cast-iron pipes support shelves displaying high-end Osprey packs. A repurposed 1950s refrigerator, its door ajar, showcases running shoes made by the Swiss brand On.Hats and mugs feature the silhouette of Bill Murray—not the actor but the Dawes family’s floppy-eared basset hound, who is also the shop’s mascot. His image, Dawes said, “outsells the Patagonia stuff.”
Dawes started the shop in 2017 with his wife, Heather, in hopes of building a community of like-minded enthusiasts of natural spaces, what he would come to call the “Slim Pickins tribe.” At the back of the shop, the couple created a studio for various classes: all-abilities yoga and hunting-certification courses were among the offerings. A weekly bike ride began at the shop and rolled along Stephenville’s Bosque River Trail before finishing at the farmers’ market on the square. Heather’s dad, a Baptist preacher, sometimes joined. It wasn’t unusual for Dawes to spend hours listening to the life story of a drop-in customer.
For the first few years, Slim Pickins grew modestly. But like thousands of other small businesses, it struggled to stay afloat during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Then everything changed in February 2021, when the [Outbound Collective](https://www.theoutbound.com/), an online hub for outdoorsy types, released a short film touting Dawes as the only Black owner of an outdoors retailer in the country. The video made Dawes something of a celebrity in the outdoors world. Slim Pickins–branded clothing gained a certain cachet, and this February, the outdoor-gear chain Public Lands, which is owned by Dick’s Sporting Goods, began carrying a line of Slim Pickins merch.
All of this led to one significant measure of success. “Our doors are still open,” Dawes said. But the boom in sales also rang a little hollow. He and Heather began to reconsider what real success might look like. They decided to use their newfound fame to help diversify participation in the outdoors and within the outdoors industry.
According to a 2018 study published by the conservation organization George Wright Society, a mere 2percent of visitors to national parks are African American. By comparison, African Americans made up about 13percent of the U.S. population that year. In Texas, data remains limited, but a 2009 study from Sam Houston State University and the Parks and Wildlife Department found that 1percent of state park visitors identified as Black. Minority groups as a whole accounted for 15percent of state park visitors, versus 46percent of the state’s total population. More recently, a 2016 study of Cedar Hill State Park, a popular escape southwest of Dallas, showed that while roughly half the surrounding community was African American, only 11percent of the park’s visitors identified as such.
Growing up in Wylie, near Dallas, Dawes wasn’t active in many traditional outdoor activities. It wasn’t until later, while in college at Tarleton, that he took a transformative road trip across the Southwest. One day, he went hiking at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, looked out across the vast Arizona desert, and was hooked.
Part of Dawes’s charm comes from his earnest excitement for learning more about the outdoors, something I would experience firsthand the day after visiting his shop. He took me camping near his home, and in a meadow made ocher by the morning light, we discovered how not to boil water in the wild.
Dawes fishing near Strawn on July 25, 2022.Photograph by Arturo Olmos
Dawes and I, along with his older brother, Jahdai, and his close friend Ben Tabor, were in the Palo Pinto Mountains, the rugged hills that rise alongside State Highway16 about fifty miles northwest of Stephenville. Dawes had hauled boxes of new gear to the campsite for us to test, and most of the products—including solar-battery-powered lights and campfire cooking utensils—had worked as advertised the previous evening as we sat round a roaring fire, swapping stories.
But this morning, with the fire kicked back to life, we were craving coffee and carbs. Dawes looked up from an instruction manual and assured us the device he was fiddling with, from a not-to-be-named manufacturer, could boil water using just grass and twigs as fuel. An hour passed. We watched an instructional YouTube video. No luck.
Tabor, a fly-fishing guide who leads week-long floats on rivers all across the state, stood up and set his cast-iron kettle right down in the campfire’s licking flames. A few minutes later, he poured us steaming cowboy coffee—the grounds thrown right into the kettle, a splash of cold water added at the end to make them settle. He gave us a look, like, *Cute toy, boys*.
While we sipped coffee, Dawes ruminated on books that have inspired him, such as *The Adventure Gap* and *Black Faces, White Spaces,* which chronicle the history and causes of segregation in the outdoors. “For the longest time, people of color, we were on this land first, or we were brought here to cultivate the land, and there was always this connection. We were just never given ownership. And if we were, we were constantly reminded that it could be taken away like *that*,” he said, snapping his fingers. “You’re warned by your great-aunts, your grandparents, ‘Don’t go in the woods—bad things happen in the woods. Don’t go over there where those white people are enjoying themselves.’ ”
The Dawes family at their home.Photograph by Arturo Olmos
Then the civil rights era arrived, and, Dawes said, “there is better
opportunity—not equal, better—and you can start working in the city, in offices. And it’s like, my family suffered too long, too hard, for me to go out and frolic in the woods.” Along the way, he said, the history of many influential figures, such as the Buffalo Soldiers, who served as the first national park rangers, was lost. “Then, those same people, and descendants of those people, weren’t even allowed in national parks anymore. Now, when I think ‘leisure,’ when I think ‘activity,’ when I think ‘relaxation,’ I’m going to go think of a million other things to do before I go hiking, before I go fly-fishing.”
As a kid, Dawes was on a basketball team and played the cymbals in his high school marching band. He also loved working with animals. He raised hogs and judged horses through his school’s Future Farmers of America program. Every year his dad, Locksley Dawes, would take him to the stock show in Wylie and buy him a book. Invariably, he would get one on horses, dreaming of someday becoming a horse trainer.
Locksley was a high school teacher who worked as a massage therapist on the side. He once took Dawes to an expo in Dallas focused on Black entrepreneurs. There, Dawes met athletes and performers who were also business owners, including Dallas Cowboys cornerback Deion Sanders.
When it came time to go to college, Dawes settled on Tarleton State because of the school’s well-regarded equine science program. While there, he worked at Upward Bound, a college-readiness program for disadvantaged kids, and helped lead a campus ministry, where he met Heather. She’d grown up in tiny Strawn, in the Palo Pinto Mountains, and graduated at the top of her twelve-student high school class.
Dawes ended up studying at Tarleton for eight years, which he attributes to his wide-ranging curiosity and, more frankly, a lack of focus. “I never really followed a prescribed course of study,” he explained. He’d be registering for his animal-science classes when Introduction to Theater would catch his eye. “Well, if I don’t take it now,” he figured, “when am I going to do it?”
One day, an equine science professor named Don Henneke—“an old cowboy,” Dawes said—sat him down and told him, “You’re book smart, but there’s a problem. You’ve never owned a horse.” Dawes considered what else he might study, and he thought about his grandmother, who’d been a seamstress and home economics teacher. As a kid, he’d promised her he would learn to sew. He signed up for an introductory sewing class, which kicked off a fascination with textiles.
He began scouring thrift shops and ran a clothing retailer out of his dorm room, selling his finds: retro collegiate jackets, quirky caps, faded Levi’s. He called his pop-up Slim Pickins Vintage, an homage to his grandpa Curly, who was known as a sharp dresser, despite what some family members called the “slim pickings available for big guys like us.”
After graduating in 2012, Dawes worked a series of jobs, including at a sneaker shop and a national clothing chain, where he considered going into corporate management. After getting married, in 2014, he and Heather planned to move to a bigger city—somewhere with more opportunity and greater diversity (a place where, for example, people might not assume Dawes was a college athlete). But other dreams took hold instead.
The evolution of his business aspirations, from running a clothing company to owning an outdoors outfitter, started on a whim. Dawes and some buddies were headed to Fort Worth to stock up on gear for upcoming mission trips to places as far-flung as the rain forests of Venezuela. They started kicking around an idea: “If someone opened a gear shop in Stephenville, they’d kill.”
One day after that, driving with Heather, Dawes brought up the concept in earnest. “Okay,” Heather told him, “but when this fails, it’s time for us to get out of Stephenville.”
He attended an industry show in Austin and met Koby Crooks, a local rep for several major outdoors brands, including Osprey. “Every few years, a young person approaches me about opening up a store in a college town with a redeveloping downtown,” Crooks told me. “And generally they do pretty well.”
Dawes presented a business plan to local investors and started scouring garage and estate sales for design inspiration. He once came home with a set of lacquered wooden paddles. Heather looked askance at him and asked, “Why’d you buy those?”
“For my shop,” he told her.
“But you don’t own a shop,” she reminded him.
Heather helped him turn Slim Pickins into a reality.The couple built the business on their hands and knees, alongside friends and family, scraping and peeling back decades of grime from the pharmacy’s old floor. Dawes remembers the tattered prescriptions they found, “lots for opium.” They stuck them in a frame alongside the store’s business license.
> Though the outdoors industry in general boomed during the pandemic, small shops like Slim Pickins often couldn’t stock popular items because of supply-chain issues.
The shop attracted Tarleton students as well as locals seeking to explore the nearby Brazos River and Palo Pinto Mountains. In 2017 the couple had the first of their two boys. October 2019 brought more good news: Slim Pickins was named one of fifteen “cool shops” in the U.S. by the *Outside Business Journal*.
Around this time, Dawes and Heather decided to promote Slim Pickins as the first Black-owned gear shop in the U.S. Dawes admits he wasn’t certain the claim was true. “Oh, I was prepared to publicly apologize,” he said. “I had the whole thing scripted in my head.” But no one stepped forward.
When the pandemic started, Slim Pickins was forced to close temporarily. Even after the store reopened, things were slow. Tarleton had shifted to remote learning, so there were few college kids around, a blow to local businesses. And though the outdoors industry in general boomed during the pandemic, small shops like Slim Pickins often couldn’t stock popular items because of supply-chain issues.
Then came the murder of George Floyd. The couple discussed how they and their business could support the racial justice movement that followed. They knew how explosive racial tensions in their community could become. While Dawes was at Tarleton, a group of mostly white students had thrown a Martin Luther King Jr. Day party and worn outfits that propagated racist tropes. One dressed as Aunt Jemima; another donned a T-shirt that read “I Love Chicken.” Facebook images of the event made national news, and the school opened an investigation. “We have to determine, is this a violation of university rules or is it free speech?” Wanda Mercer, then the vice president of student life, told the press. In response, Klan members congregated downtown, calling Tarleton’s administrators “spineless.”
More than a decade had passed, but the incident still felt fresh in Dawes’s memory during the summer of 2020. Slim Pickins was already struggling. Would speaking out now cost the Daweses their livelihood? “We had tense conversations,” Heather said.
They decided it was worth the risk. Dawes helped organize a protest, and a thousand participants streamed through Stephenville in the summer heat, holding signs aloft. “It was crazy surprising,” he said. “Some of that support came from outside Stephenville, people in Dallas and Fort Worth and Arlington. But there were also a lot of local young people—kids in junior high, high school, and college—whose parents and grandparents came out and walked with them.”
Ahead of the protest, Dawes, along with other local Black leaders, convened with police to discuss race and law enforcement in Stephenville and address concerns by some in the community that the protests would devolve into riots. Following those conversations, many local officers decided to march alongside the protesters. His discussions with cops were “transformative conversations I never thought I’d be able to have,” he said. “That meant a lot to me—and also was difficult to reconcile in my mind.”
Dawes’s distrust of the criminal justice system runs deep. His brother Jahdai had been arrested during his senior year at Howard University because he “fit the description” of a suspected burglar. The charges were later dropped.
When Dawes was in high school, a white woman, a massage client of his father’s, accused Locksley of sexual assault. Locksley was arrested and charged with one count of sexual assault, as well as three counts of attempted sexual assault, a lesser charge. He and his family have always maintained his innocence, and he fought the charges for three years. One charge of attempted sexual assault was ultimately dropped; the other three were reduced from felonies to misdemeanors. He was required to pay a small fine.
But Locksley was punished in other ways. The State Board for Educator Certification revoked his teaching license not long after the trial. Dawes said the jobs his dad got were different after that. Dawes helped him deliver newspapers and clean up HUD homes where residents were living in poverty. “No work is beneath you,” Locksley would tell him. The teenage Dawes wondered why his dad didn’t just give up and move away, start fresh elsewhere. “But that’s not my dad,” Dawes said. “And I’m grateful for it.”
In hindsight, he said, that experience was the most formative of his youth, and his dad’s resolve informed his decision to stay in Stephenville when things got tough, and to focus Slim Pickins’ mission around race in an area “where racism is blatant and out in the open,” he told me. “That’s why we’re here.” But his family’s trauma also haunted him.He feltvulnerable even when his business was doing well. “I’mterrified,” he said, “because it could be taken away.”
Throughout the summer of 2020, Dawes would look at his young sons and wonder, *How am I going to keep them safe?* Stress mounted. The shop continued to struggle. To make payroll, Dawes took night shifts at Home Depot and H-E-B, stocking shelves. Heather, who at the time ran a nonprofit pregnancy support clinic, found herself looking around their home, thinking, *Okay, what can we sell?* When Dawes fell asleep driving home from an evening shift, Heather knew he needed help. At a mental health check, Dawes was diagnosed with depression.
> These days, people travel from across the state, even across the country, to meet the Daweses and their staff.
The couple reached out to Crooks about selling their business, but he asked them to hold on a little longer. He connected them with a PR firm, which called up the Outbound Collective. That group often produces films highlighting diversity in the outdoors. A few months later, a video production crew arrived in Stephenville.
The fifteen-minute film, titled simply “[Slim Pickins](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHnd2aj61G8),” premiered on YouTube in February 2021 and quickly racked up 20,000 views. The Outbound Collective encouraged Dawes and Heather to set up a GoFundMe page, which received more than four thousand donations from as far away as New Zealand. The donations might’ve kept coming, but after hitting their goal of $172,000, they turned off the fundraiser. They used the money to buy out their investors so they could become sole owners of the shop.
Slim Pickins’ online following increased exponentially after the film. A photo of the Dawes family, on their front porch with Bill Murray, was posted to Instagram’s official account. It got nearly half a million likes. And at the 2021 national Outdoor Retailer conference in Denver, Slim Pickins was named Retailer of the Year.
Big-name brands came calling. Did the shop need an overland camping trailer? Would Slim Pickins like to sell the world’s best bikes? How about a partnership with Union LA for the release of the Air Jordan 4 Tent and Trail line of athletic shoes?
Business was, for the time being, steady again.
The couple also looked for ways to directly advance Slim Pickins’ diversity mission. Dawes moderated a panel at a summit organized by the nonprofit Outdoors for All. He was also invited to serve on a diversity advisory group called Together Outdoors, for which he helped develop educational materials on a range of topics, including how to recruit, hire, and support employees from different backgrounds.
The results of these efforts have been mixed, he told me. While many brands and organizations remain committed to “doing the work”—investing time and resources to make meaningful change, even if it initially hurts the bottom line—he felt others were engaged in a more performative show of support. “We’ve had discussions on the committee about what real change looks like, how quickly we should expect it, and if change doesn’t occur, what’s the recourse?” Dawes said. “I’m like, when brands and organizations are posting online about their support of diversifying the outdoors but not committing actual resources to the effort, calling them out is not shaming. It’s providing accountability.”
Today Slim Pickins sells gear supporting organizations such as [Black Outside Inc.](https://www.blackoutside.org/), a San Antonio nonprofit that connects Black youth with culturally relevant outdoor experiences. (Meaning you don’t need to wear performance gear or participate in rock climbing or hiking to enjoy the outdoors. Grilling out in a park, or however you best connect with nature, counts too.) Dawes is also proud that there are now two other Black-owned outdoors gear shops in the U.S.: Wheelzup Adventures, in Cumberland, Maryland, and Intrinsic Provisions, in Hingham, Massachusetts. Dawes and Heather often connect with both shops’ owners to share stories of successes and failures.
These days, people travel from across the state, even across the country, to meet the Daweses and their staff. One such person was Caziah Franklin, a 21-year-old college student and the son of Kirk Franklin, the Dallas-based Grammy-winning gospel musician. Caziah, an avid climber and cyclist, began researching Black history following the murder of Floyd, learning why so few people of color participate in outdoor sports. He then started looking around Texas for those pioneering change. He found Slim Pickins, sent the shop an Instagram message, and headed to Stephenville. When he pulled up to the store, he spotted Dawes wearing Topo Designs clothing with “the dopest sneakers I’ve ever seen. It was so cool to see this Black guy inhabit both cultures and not be afraid to clash. Like, ‘No, I can be Black and granola at the same time.’ ” For the better part of the day, they sat at the back of the shop and talked. They’ve since become close friends.
Of course, Dawes still has the actual business to worry about, and success isn’t guaranteed, despite Slim Pickins’ fame. “We’re not where we need to be,” he told me.
But he’s hoping he’ll get some help from the verdant hills, limestone bluffs, and sandstone-lined creeks where we’d gone camping together. They’re all part of [Palo Pinto Mountains State Park](https://tpwd.texas.gov/state-parks/palo-pinto-mountains), the first new state park in decades, tentatively scheduled to open to the public late next year. For the millions of Texans living in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, the five-thousand-acre park is no more than a couple of hours away. Parks and Wildlife anticipates 75,000 annual visitors. Heather and Dawes live just a few miles from the park entrance, in Heather’s hometown of Strawn, and are weighing how their business might best serve those explorers.
One day, Dawes and I rumbled down a dirt road that leads to a boat ramp at Tucker Lake, the jewel of the park. We boarded a small flat-bottomed craft and began motoring up a narrowing creek, looking for carp. The water was murky from recent rains, and the only fish we saw burst from a shallow rapid and disappeared before we could cast. The cedar forest closed in on both sides. The sky was gray, the wind calm. Dawes looked off toward the cascading green ridges surrounding us, which he said reminded him of the Rockies in places like Gunnison, Colorado—revered spaces where Texans passionate about hiking or mountain biking or fly-fishing often escape to. “Why leave Texas,” he asked, “to live an outdoor lifestyle?”
*Ian Dille is a writer and producer based in Austin.*
*This article originally appeared in the September 2022 issue of*Texas Monthly*with the headline “Slim Pickins: An Underdog Saga.”*[*Subscribe today*](https://www.texasmonthly.com/subscribe/?ref=end-article)*.*
A framed document, which was alleged to be a note written by a dying man in 1500s Vermont, sits atop a case at the Highgate Historical Society. Photo by Mark Bushnell
If you were looking for one of the most significant documents in Vermont history, this building is hardly the first place you’d look. Drive north, just shy of the Canadian border, to the town of Highgate. You are looking for the trim brick building in the center of town, the Highgate Historical Society.
Upstairs, past a display honoring the local lodge of the Order of Odd Fellows, which for decades owned this former home, you’ll find the document hanging beside old photographs from the town’s history. It is a handwritten note mounted in an ornate frame. In an antiquated, looping script, the writer’s words, now brown with age, read:
*“This is the solme \[solemn\] day*
*I must now die this is*
*the 90**th* *day sine we*
*lef the Ship all have*
*Parished and on the*
*Banks of this river*
*I die so farewelle*
*may future Posteritye*
*knowe our end”*
It is signed “Johne Graye.” But what is odd, and potentially hugely significant about it, is the date at the top: “Nov. 29 AD 1564.”
The note was supposedly found in neighboring Swanton. If genuine, the date would suggest that Johne Graye was the first European, by 45 years, to see Lake Champlain and Vermont, not French explorer Samuel de Champlain. And unlike Champlain, Graye wasn’t the harbinger of devastation for the region’s Indigenous population.
In the years after 1853, when two workers, Orlando Green and P.R. Ripley, showed people the amazing document they said they found while digging sand along the Missisquoi River, experts have debated the note’s veracity. Learned men examined the document, as well as the lead tube that Green and Ripley said it was buried in, and came to conflicting conclusions. The tube has since vanished. Along with it, so too perhaps has the original document. The parchment hanging in Highgate may be only a duplicate.
A handwritten document, which came to light in Swanton in 1853, purports to be a note written by a dying sailor in 1564, nearly a half-century before the arrival of Samuel de Champlain. Photo by Mark Bushnell
As you might expect, news of the discovery spread quickly. On Dec. 6, 1853, days after Green and Ripley announced their find, the New-York Tribune carried a story detailing how the two workers had unearthed a 4-inch metal tube containing a piece of coarse paper bearing the sailor’s farewell message.
Our first glimpse of the town’s reaction comes from the Rev. John B. Perry, who wrote about the incident for the Vermont Historical Gazetteer in 1869. Though he was writing from a distance of 16 years, he seemingly lived in Swanton at the time of the discovery and knew the men involved.
Reading between the lines, there doesn’t seem to have been any great hullabaloo over the find — no mention of public debates or large gatherings to display the document. For a time, it was apparently attached with a bit of wax to an office wall somewhere. That’s as public an exhibition as we have record of from the period of the find.
Still, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t the talk of the town, and apparently the wider historical community. Among Perry’s friends and acquaintances, at least, it was clearly a major source of conversation. Throughout the text, he mentions arguments made by others, for and against the legitimacy of the document.
Perry was in the believers’ camp. He offered no definitive proof, just a fair dose of circumstantial evidence. For him, that was enough.
## The Frobisher connection
Perry looked at the ships of mariner Martin Frobisher, who was seeking a faster route to China, as a possible source of the ill-fated sailors. Adjusting for changes made to the calendar since the 16th century, Perry was able to place Frobisher in what would become northeastern Canada in the month the men became separated from their shipmates.
The problem is the year. Frobisher’s voyage came 12 years after the date on the note.
Perry breezed past the discrepancy. He said people make mistakes all the time in writing dates. “Even a letter in my possession, which was written in respect to this very manuscript, is misdated…” he noted.
“(N)eed we be surprised that such may have been the case with a relation made by a common sailor in the 16th century, when writing was far more rare than now(?)”
Others had suggested to Perry that it was unlikely a common sailor would happen to have pen and ink handy at the moment of his imminent demise. To this, Perry offered a more convincing answer. He quoted an account of Frobisher’s voyage, which said that men were given “pen, yncke and paper” in order to make notes about the location of gold or other valuable minerals they found while walking on land, or to leave messages for men who became separated from the main party.
Charles Nye, curator of the Highgate Historical Society, studies the John Graye document at the society’s museum. Photo by Mark Bushnell
## The scientific view
Someone, perhaps Perry, asked Dr. Augustus Allen Hayes to weigh in on the case. Hayes was a Vermonter and a prominent scientist, who was then working as Massachusetts state assayer, performing chemical tests to assure the metal content of coins.
Hayes studied the objects as a scientist would and refused to render a verdict. He found that the tube contained carbonate of lead, which suggested that it had been in the sand for a long time. The paper itself was made of either hemp or flax. To Perry, the physical analysis supported his theory.
In addition to using scientific and historical evidence to study the scroll, Perry also considered it from a personal level. If this were a forgery, who could have done it? “(N)ot many people in any of our country towns are capable of such a forgery,” he declared.
And only a tiny number of people could manage to make all the details plausible, from the type of paper used to the rambling, unpunctuated text, to the use of the redundant expression “future posteritye,” which might be expected of a common sailor.
Furthermore, he asked, if someone had gone to so much trouble to fake the document, why wouldn’t he or she have made it match a known voyage and made the sailor someone whose name appears in one of the ship’s logbooks?
## A fresh look
Interest in the note seems to have lain dormant for almost a century. Then in the 1950s, John Clement, a past president of the Vermont Historical Society, sent the document to experts for analysis.
He had found it hanging in the Highgate Library, which had received it from the estate of local doctor Henry Baxter, who had framed the document in 1853. Clement suspected it was merely a copy of the original — it is the same document displayed today at the town historical society — but sent it anyway. Clement apparently accepted that the original parchment and tube were lost.
The experts found the paper to be of 19th-century origin. If it was just a copy, that would make sense. More damning was the opinion of a document expert, who declared the script “impossible for the 16th century, and the spelling equally phony,” Clement reported. “He called it a hoax.”
Dennis Nolan, president of the Highgate Historical Society, hangs the framed John Graye document back up after examining it. Photo by Mark Bushnell
Today, the matter seems settled among Vermont historians. Samuel de Champlain is in no danger of being deposed as the first European to see Vermont.
To understand this bizarre document and how it came to be, it might help to remember that the mid-1800s was a time of hoaxes, when enterprising tricksters could dupe a gullible public — not that that hasn’t been a part of every era, including our own.
But the Graye document appeared at a time when Phineas Taylor Barnum, commonly known as P.T., had turned hoaxes into an art form. Barnum’s American Museum in Manhattan was drawing nearly a half-million visitors a year to see the supposed skeleton of a mermaid and other oddities.
Barnum concocted his cons for fun and profit. If the Graye document is a forgery, it was seemingly created for fun; there’s no evidence anyone profited from it.
And just because in all likelihood it is a forgery doesn’t mean it’s worthless. At least that was the view of Alan Cooke of the Scott Polar Research Institute. Cooke, a Vermonter working in England, was asked in 1964 by Vermont Life editor Walter Hard Jr. to see what he and some British scholars thought of the note.
In reporting their findings, Cooke seemed sad that it appeared the document was fake. “Rather a disappointment, I know,” he wrote, but then added: “Even if it were a fake, it has a certain interest of its own.”
## Did you know VTDigger is a nonprofit?
Our journalism is made possible by member donations. If you value what we do, please contribute and help keep this vital resource accessible to all.
It’s been a while since I’ve sent out a newsletter, and it’s nice to be back! I’ve been hard at work on finishing up my novel *The Terraformers* (coming in January), while simultaneously researching and writing my next book, a nonfiction history of psychological warfare in the United States. And I’ve also been thinking a lot about Twitter.
That’s because the collapse is coming to Twitter. I’ve seen it before: I watched Friendster and MySpace die at the turn of the century, their once-vibrant memes decaying in abandoned accounts, comments rotting into spam. If you’ve been on Twitter as long as I have, which is going on fifteen years, you’ve seen the signs too.
People who were once major Twitter personalities have abandoned it for other platforms – they’re blowing up on #booktok or writing paywalled newsletters or dishing out the mainstream media op-eds. Accounts with the most followers, like Barack Obama and Katy Perry, [lost hundreds of thousands of followers](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/twitter-deactivations-elon-musks-takeover-1235136168/) after Elon Musk announced his takeover bid.
Still, you might say, there are a few growing communities on Twitter, like the Zack Snyder fans who lobbied for the “Snyder cut” of the Justice League movie and descended in howling troll maelstroms on anyone who dared question them. Unfortunately, [a WarnerMedia investigation has just revealed](https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/justice-league-the-snyder-cut-bots-fans-1384231/) that Snyder paid at least two consulting firms to create a bot army of shitposters for him. So I would take any report on the growth of certain segments on Twitter with a major grain of salt. At this point, the platform seems as if it’s optimized for paid trolls and automated “movements.”
And it’s not as if there is some new, different community arriving to pick up the pieces. I know because I’ve witnessed that happen, too. I was once, long ago, very into Orkut. It was a pre-Facebook social network created by product manager Orkut Büyükkökten at Google, with all the typical first-gen social media shit: you got a cute little personal page, where you posted pics, updates, quotes, links to your friends and websites. At first, its users were mostly English-speaking. But then more and more Portuguese-language memes flooded in. Every tenth new friend request came from someone in São Paulo. It was not the same Orkut, but the social network was bigger than ever, and arguably more fun. It just wasn’t a useful social platform for people who didn’t live in Brazil or read Portuguese.
This is not what’s happening on Twitter. I’m not seeing a flood of new people arriving, spouting memes I don’t understand. I’m just seeing less of everything. The point is, Twitter isn’t becoming a vibrant but different social space that belongs to a new group of people; it’s being abandoned.
As someone who has written a lot about urban abandonment (in my book [*Four Lost Cities*](https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393652666) and [elsewhere](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/seductive-appeal-urban-catastrophe/617878/)), many of the Twitter abandonment patterns are startlingly familiar. In cities, people usually start to leave when there’s a combination of political instability and infrastructure decay. On Twitter, you’ve got the corporate media equivalent of political instability with Elon Musk’s botched takeover attempt, coming right on the heels of the difficult transition from founder/CEO Jack Dorsey’s reign to current CEO Parag Agrawal’s. And if you think of the Twitter user experience as its social infrastructure, that too is falling apart. There’s the lack of moderation and selective rule enforcement, plus the company’s longtime inability to address user concerns about everything from edit buttons to abuse. (Its technical infrastructure [has also had many problems](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-technology-202/2020/07/16/the-technology-202-twitter-just-proved-it-can-t-keep-the-accounts-of-global-leaders-safe/5f0f4d1c88e0fa7b44f75526/).)
While Twitter’s leadership wobbles, all those social infrastructure problems are exacerbated. And then layoffs start – in Twitter’s case, [the first round of cuts was in its recruitment team](https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/08/tech/twitter-recruiting-layoffs-elon-musk/index.html), which was part of the company’s “pause” on hires this past spring. Around the same time, senior employees were [starting to quit](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/17/twitter-loses-three-more-senior-employees-ahead-of-musk-deal.html). At this point, it doesn’t matter that Musk isn’t taking over. [The lawsuits between Musk and the company will continue](https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/05/tech/elon-musk-twitter-suit-answer/index.html), making both Twitter users and employees feel as if their future is uncertain.
If the pattern holds, and it likely will, we’ll see more people quitting the platform and the company over the next year. Some will be Musk acolytes who believe (not without cause) that thirty percent of the platform’s accounts are run by bots. Others will be disappointed by the ongoing loss of interesting voices on the platform. All of us will be moving to other social platforms, like Discord or TikTok (or, gulp, LinkedIn). We’ll leave residual pieces of ourselves behind – you’ll start to see more Twitter pages that say “I’m not here anymore – go to this URL to find out what I’m up to.” Some people will continue to post infrequent work-related updates, while influencers will cross-post their Insta and TikTok videos for legacy followers.
Imagine that Twitter is a city whose corrupt government and potholed streets are pushing residents out. Slowly you’ll start to see more “for rent” and “we’ve moved” signs in shop windows. As city workers leave and budgets are slashed, the potholes will get worse. Water quality will go down. When power lines are damaged, it might take weeks to repair them. The more people leave, the worse it gets, in a spiral of loss that speeds up as time goes on.
Eventually, Twitter will be useful mostly for data-mining and archaeological reconstructions of the early twenty-first century.
\*\*\*
**Things I’ve been up to:**
I’ve done some guest hosting for *On the Media*, which is one of my favorite shows. Listen to me discussing [the myths of Hong Kong’s history](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-hong-kongs-rewritten-histories) with journalist Louisa Lim, and [the joys of queer country life](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/country-queers-who-dont-want-flee-rural-america-on-the-media) with archivist Rae Garringer, host of the Country Queers podcast. I also co-hosted an episode [all about Neanderthals](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-humans-being?tab=summary).
I wrote an article about [anticipating the abortion ban in my fiction](https://slate.com/technology/2022/06/science-fiction-abortion-future-of-another-timeline.html) for *Slate.*
Here’s my [column about Elon Musk and the American myth of “free speech”](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25433880-100-twitter-and-the-dangers-of-the-us-myth-of-free-speech/) for *New Scientist* (I had to take my Twitter account private for a couple of weeks afterwards because I was being attacked by ~Musk fans~ bots.)
I’m also getting ready to be [a co-host with Charlie Jane Anders at the Hugo Awards](https://chicon.org/home/whats-happening/events/) during Worldcon this September!
And finally, my new novel *The Terraformers* [is available for preorder (it comes out in January](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250228017/theterraformers)). But in the meantime, you can pick up the e-book of my first novel *Autonomous*, which is [on sale everywhere this month for $2.99](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765392091/autonomous).
# YouTube Fraud Led to $23 Million in Royalties for 2 Men, IRS Says
It was hard to miss **Jose “Chenel” Medina Teran** driving a lime-green Lamborghini Aventador around West Phoenix. With its butterfly doors and leather interior, the garish sports car, which costs upward of $390,000 new, could often be spotted parked outside nightclubs, restaurants and even Walmart. For locals, it served as a quasi-tracking device for Teran’s whereabouts and was a neon reminder of his sudden, outsize wealth. “You knew where he was eating \[by where\] he was parked,” says Ricardo (a pseudonym to protect his identity), an accomplished entrepreneur in the Arizona city’s growing Latin music business.
Teran’s rise from middle-class comfort to Lamborghini-level luxury represented a stark shift for those who knew him as a small-time music producer, engineer and the owner of Digitlog, a local recording studio. They thought the same about his business partner, Dominican Republic-born **Webster “Yenddi” Batista Fernandez**. Like Teran, Batista went from getting by as a local bachata artist and music video director to driving his own Lamborghini — albeit a comparatively subdued gray model — and sporting diamond-encrusted chains made by Bad Bunny’s jeweler du jour, El Russo.
Their newfound flashy lifestyles understandably sparked considerable gossip among those who work in Phoenix’s music business, like Ricardo, who couldn’t fathom why Teran and Batista were suddenly living so much larger than everyone else. “Phoenix is one of the main points for drug smuggling. So my first thought was, ‘Oh, they’re doing something like that,’ or maybe they won the lottery and they’re not telling people,” Ricardo remembers. “It just didn’t make any sense to me.”
In November 2021, the source of the duo’s newfound wealth was revealed: according to the government, Teran and Batista had been running what is now one of the largest – if not the largest – known YouTube music royalty scams in history, one that led to an investigation by the IRS and their indictment that month on 30 counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft.
According to documents filed in Arizona federal court, over about a four-year period, Teran and Batista (along with a number of alleged conspirators) devised a company they called MediaMuv to siphon off $23 million in master and publishing royalties for Latin music copyrights they did not control. Much of these royalties were claimed through the popular rights management company AdRev, which is owned by Downtown Music Holdings. Teran, whose attorneys did not respond to requests for comment, pleaded not guilty and awaits trial in November. Batista, on the other hand, took a plea deal on April 21, admitting guilt to one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy. As part of the plea agreement, he revealed key insights to the court as to how the MediaMuv scam was committed. Batista’s attorney and an IRS representative declined to comment on this story because the case is still ongoing.
The indictments and Batista’s plea deal took some in the Latin music industry by surprise. A representative from Puerto Rican rapper-singer Anuel AA’s camp had not even been aware that MediaMuv had stolen tens of thousands of dollars of royalties for the artist’s music until *Billboard* inquired with Anuel AA’s team about the case. Though AdRev and YouTube have not been accused of any wrongdoing, sources in the rights management business who were interviewed for this story expressed incredulity that theft of this magnitude happened on AdRev’s watch.
At press time, YouTube had not responded to several requests for comment. (This story will be updated if that changes.) An AdRev spokesman said in a statement that the company “has fully cooperated with the investigation into this matter conducted by the IRS and the District of Arizona U.S. Attorney’s office as set forth in the indictment. This matter is ongoing — pending sentencing for Webster Batista Fernandez and trial for Jose Medina Teran. AdRev employees may be called as witnesses at trial or sentencing. As such, AdRev will not be commenting publicly on any facts related to the indictment until the conclusion of the criminal matter.”
### **‘Hotbed of Piracy’**
Batista’s plea agreement revealed that it didn’t take a criminal mastermind to rob music creators of their rightful royalties. According to multiple industry sources, hustles similar to MediaMuv’s are well-known among those in the music business who work in digital rights management, but Teran and Batista’s scheme was particularly brazen, both for the tens of millions of dollars the IRS says they stole from Latin acts and the way they did it.
Sources say YouTube scammers commonly claim small fractions of songs that they suspect have not been claimed properly and might not be noticed. This is especially prevalent on the music publishing side, where there are usually more rights holders — particularly on contemporary songs that credit many songwriters — so the division of ownership and royalties can be more difficult to track. If one or more of the songwriters is known to be without a publisher, there is a strong chance that the writer does not know if their share of the composition is being claimed correctly. MediaMuv, in contrast, often claimed 100% of royalties for master recordings or publishing.
YouTube’s content management system (CMS), or “content manager,” and its Content ID tool, which identifies matching sound recordings, enables larger rights holders — including labels, publishers and multichannel networks — to monitor royalty collection and metadata for their musical copyrights. “These scams happen all the time in every sector, on every service, and also within music rights collections agencies around the world,” says Jeff Price, founder of TuneCore, a global distributor and music publishing administrator; Audiam, a rights management company; and founder/CEO of Word Collections, a global copyright administration company. “The upside is when they happen on YouTube, the system they built allows for greater transparency and the ability to identify and potentially fix the problem.”
However, that transparency is not accessible to everyone. YouTube’s CMS and Content ID tools are available only to select users approved by the video-sharing platform. This means that many artists, songwriters and their teams — especially less established ones — are not able to monitor their copyrights and royalty collection on YouTube on their own.
“It was nearly impossible for us to know we were stolen from,” says Edgar Rueda, manager for Latin acts Samuray, Celso Piña and Los Chicos de Barrio, who also were victims of MediaMuv. Rueda did not have access to YouTube’s CMS or Content ID to monitor his artists’-controlled works on his own. “Samuray had something like $65,000 stolen by MediaMuv, but we didn’t even know there was money there,” he says. It’s a common complaint from managers and artists targeted by MediaMuv, most of whom assume that once their music was distributed to audio streaming platforms, their metadata would be automatically correct, ready for YouTube royalty collection.
In an effort to remove some of these barriers, Maria Schneider, a Grammy-winning jazz musician and advocate for independent artists, and a company called Pirate Monitor filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against YouTube in July 2020, alleging that ordinary creators of copyrighted works are “left behind by YouTube’s copyright enforcement system” and that they are forced to police their own copyrights, yet “provided no meaningful ability” to do so because they are often not able to use YouTube’s Content ID themselves. As a result, the lawsuit claims YouTube has become a “hotbed of piracy.” (Pirate Monitor dropped out of the case last year after YouTube countersued the company for using “deceptive behavior” to gain access to Content ID.)
YouTube filed a motion to dismiss this lawsuit, but on Aug. 2, a federal judge [refused to toss the case](https://www.billboard.com/pro/youtube-class-action-anti-piracy-tools-major-labels/), calling YouTube’s various arguments “unavailing” and “not well taken.”
To serve the needs of rights holders who do not have access to YouTube’s tools on their own, a cottage industry of rights management companies like AdRev sprang up during YouTube’s adolescence. These companies have access to CMS and Content ID, and specialize in the collection of royalties and police content for independent talents as well as labels and publishers, looking to outsource the often time-intensive labor of monitoring copyrights. Though YouTube’s creator support information includes a services directory of rights management companies, sources say many copyright owners remain unaware or choose not to use these third parties.
“They don’t give access to their CMS to everyone for a reason,” argues Gabriel (also a pseudonym), who works for a different rights management firm and who represents a number of MediaMuv’s victims. “YouTube wants to have trustworthy partners, understandably.” In the wrong hands, sources say, the transparency of the CMS and Content ID tools can be exploited.
Ry Boelstler, head/director of rights manager The District, says he has noticed that YouTube has tried to tighten access to its CMS over the years to better ensure only good actors can use it. He even recalls that a few rights management firms temporarily lost access because of too many bad claims. And the platform’s creator support pages warn that submitting false information or misusing their tools could “result in the suspension of your account or other legal consequences.”
Despite YouTube’s gatekeeping of its CMS, Batista said in his plea agreement that MediaMuv had been granted direct access to YouTube’s CMS in addition to its access through AdRev. And while by-the-book rights managers have been duped by bad actors claiming to be copyright owners, sources in this field say that some of their competitors are not diligent about corroborating clients’ copyright ownership before claiming royalties for them. With clients paying fees of 10%-25% of the royalties that are collected, rights managers are incentivized to collect as much money as possible.
### **“MediaMuv: A Detestable Company”**
According to his plea deal, Batista explained that MediaMuv initiated the scam by signing a CMS administration agreement with AdRev “to assist \[MediaMuv\] in administering the music \[it\] fraudulently claimed” in the spring of 2017. As part of this agreement, MediaMuv represented and warrantied that it held “valid and sufficient rights” over its supposed catalog, and AdRev started claiming royalties for MediaMuv in early May 2017.
Batista admitted to sending three falsified contracts with companies that “purportedly” managed artists to AdRev and YouTube “for the purpose of deceiving \[them\] into allowing \[MediaMuv\] to continue \[its\] fraudulent operation” in July 2017. According to his plea deal, these three forged management contracts were provided to support MediaMuv’s assertion that it controlled a vast Latin music catalog of both master recordings and compositions — 50,000 copyrights ultimately, which they claimed were released by both hitmakers Daddy Yankee, Julio Iglesias, Anuel AA, Prince Royce and Don Omar, and smaller regional talents. Reps for Yankee, Iglesias, Royce and Omar did not respond to *Billboard’s* requests for comment. Anuel AA’s representative said only that his camp had not been aware that his royalties had been stolen.
On May 4, 2017, AdRev co-founder and then-president Noah Becker and vp of operations Andrew Korn attempted to get YouTube to automatically confirm MediaMuv’s claimed copyrights in bulk because inputting the information for tens of thousands of songs individually was “too onerous” for AdRev to handle. (Korn told federal investigators he was acting at the directive of Becker.)
During the same month AdRev began claiming royalties for MediaMuv, Gabriel, who handled rights management for a number of the MediaMuv victims, says he caught AdRev and MediaMuv claiming a copyright owned by one of his clients. “Every day, we see conflicts and mis-merges of songs on YouTube,” Gabriel explains. “They are usually not in bad faith. It’s just bad data. A mis-merge is when two different songs are named ‘I Love You’ and get confused in the system.” So, without thinking too much about it, he reached out to the AdRev team to ask it to correct the error.
Mis-merges are a major reason companies like Gabriel’s and AdRev are an important part of the YouTube ecosystem. Metadata errors for musical works are not unique to YouTube and can be found on any streaming service or social media platform, but given the breadth of the video-sharing site’s offerings and the complexity of licensing for a service that streams so much user-generated video and audio content, YouTube requires close management. Hiring a company seasoned in catching and correcting these accidental errors can be pivotal for royalty collection.
Gabriel says that the initial error that he wrote off as innocent turned out to be the first of “hundreds” of incorrect royalty claims made by AdRev and MediaMuv for music that his clients controlled. He says he has seen small-time scams in his line of work before but nothing as flagrant as MediaMuv’s royalties grab.
His suspicions about MediaMuv grew after some independent digging: the company’s “sketchy” website, as he put it; its disconnected phone line; and its 2-day-old Facebook page struck him as red flags. On May 24, 2017, he wrote to YouTube, urging the platform to “investigate \[MediaMuv\] and immediately remove them if they are indeed making fraudulent claims.”
In an email sent to Gabriel, a representative from YouTube replied, thanking him and saying that it would assist with looking into it. Gabriel says he has “no idea” if YouTube conducted a further investigation after that.
Near the end of 2017, MediaMuv’s royalties claims escalated. That December, Gabriel found another incorrect claim and emailed AdRev’s Becker to ask him to correct the error and provide his client with retroactive payment. Becker added AdRev’s then-vp of rights management, Jesse Worstell, to the email chain and characterized MediaMuv’s claims as “clerical errors” that were “not done with any malice.”
The next month, Gabriel caught five more erroneous claims, including one instance in which MediaMuv claimed 15 of his client’s copyrighted songs at one time. With each discovery, he emailed Worstell and Becker, and at least one would reply that these were errors on MediaMuv’s part and that AdRev would provide retroactive payment and fix the mistake. On Jan. 19, 2018, Becker emailed Gabriel privately to say, “None of this is a product of MediaMuv trying to land-grab revenue or doing anything with mal intent — more miscommunication, misunderstanding and having inaccurate metadata than anything else on our part.”
In an email, Gabriel asked AdRev’s Worstell and Becker if their company would ever ask MediaMuv to provide proof of ownership for its catalog, writing, “It seems that MediaMuv may not have rights to much of the content it has been claiming.” Worstell replied that MediaMuv was “fully aware” of its publishing errors and that it wouldn’t happen in the future. Once again, he said AdRev would provide retroactive payment to Gabriel and to work with him to fix incorrect claims “as these instances occur.” These email exchanges continued through February and March: Gabriel reported incorrect royalty claims, and AdRev promised to fix them and provide back pay.
By March 2018, Gabriel, perplexed and frustrated by the situation, delved deeper into who was behind MediaMuv and why they were trying to claim royalties that should go to his clients. Ironically, some of these answers were just a YouTube search away. Gabriel says he soon found a video, which has since been deleted, revealing that other people were getting false copyright claims from MediaMuv, too. He sent the video to Worstell, and Gabriel noted that many user comments also pointed fingers at AdRev. “I asked if they had ever considered dropping MediaMuv as a client,” he recalls.
Soon, more YouTube videos about MediaMuv surfaced, including one, also posted in 2018, titled “MediaMuv: Una Empresa Destestable” (MediaMuv: A Detestable Company) that made the same allegations. The video’s comment section is riddled with complaints from desperate artists, including comments like, “It happened to me too and what can be done?,” and “I hate injustice, I have also seen that they steal music.” (Both comments were translated from their original Spanish.)
About the same time that Gabriel began dealing with MediaMuv’s false claims, an anonymous Twitter whistleblower, going by the handle @FuckMediaMuv, and a Facebook page called STOP de MediaMuv ‘Musika Inc’ ladrones de contenido (content thieves), also took aim at the company. The Twitter account, arguably the most detailed and dogged of the whistleblowers, posted photos of Batista, Teran and their alleged accomplices, along with information gleaned about their operation. The account did not amass much of an audience but continued its crusade against MediaMuv for the next four years. Below most posts, the account would tag local news outlets in Phoenix and Miami (where Batista eventually moved), along with the IRS, in hopes of catching someone’s attention. For the most part, however, these videos and other callouts became little more than gathering spaces for fellow victims to commiserate.
Meanwhile, Gabriel kept prodding AdRev for corrections, back pay and an explanation as to why the company continued to work with MediaMuv. In March 2018, Becker replied to one of Gabriel’s emails, writing, “Given the volume of repertoire \[MediaMuv\] deal\[s\] with vs. issues, we feel pretty comfortable. Plus, we are just the admin, and there’s already so much negative crap out there about us that’s not true, so we just let this stuff bounce off our backs. But we keep a tight eye on this account and lately have been only increasing in comfort level.”
### **The Godfather**
Although it’s unclear what prompted the IRS to investigate MediaMuv, the federal agency began taking a hard look at the company since at least August 2019. In the process of the investigation, it discovered that while MediaMuv is the name most associated with Teran and Batista’s dealings, the duo provided AdRev with four additional bank account names and five account numbers for money transfers from 2017 to 2019 — most of which were communicated to AdRev’s vp of finance, Peter Amloian. According to documents in the case against Teran and Batista, the additional account names were Eniel Gaetan Hernandez, an alias that matched a fake New Jersey ID obtained by Batista; Elegre Records, which had two account numbers; and MuveMusic. MediaMuv once also changed its bank account name to Loris Cleaning, an ironic choice for a duo that would later be charged with seven counts of money laundering.
Gabriel says it’s common for rights management clients to change their banking information once or twice every few years due to extenuating circumstances, but he believes the frequency with which MediaMuv changed accounts should have raised a red flag with AdRev.
While Batista admitted in his plea that there were “over five co-conspirators” who were paid “a portion of \[MediaMuv’s\] royalties” for finding new songs to steal, the conspirators’ names are not explicitly revealed in court documents. Court documents did, however, point to the duo’s ties with a network of people who seem to have financially benefited from MediaMuv’s fraudulent endeavors.
Most notably, Batista’s wife, Omeida Yadira “Yadi” Batista, purchased a $590,000 house in Phoenix, paid for entirely in cash with money originally routed to a MediaMuv-associated bank account, according to a court document filed by prosecutors. Omeida also sent multiple emails from MediaMuv’s web address and is listed on the articles of organization for Elegre Records. Additionally, court documents allege that she issued the 2017 and 2018 1099-MISC tax forms for MediaMuv in her own name, for $3.5 million and $5.07 million, respectively. (She told investigators that this was done because Batista did not have legal status in the United States.) Although the IRS filed a verified complaint for forfeiture against Omeida’s home on Nov. 5, 2021, in hopes of seizing the property, she has not been charged with any crime connected to the MediaMuv case. In his plea agreement, Batista claimed he “transferred some assets that were acquired with proceeds of \[his\] offenses” to Omeida, but Omeida herself did not “\[pay\] anything” for the house, as a previous court document indicated. Asked to comment, Omeida’s attorney claimed that based on *Billboard’s* questions, he suspected the story was missing critical facts but did not respond when asked to elaborate.
After Batista separated from Omeida, he moved to Miami and began dating Nizza Peña Gomez, the CEO of a small fashion business, ByNizza. Around this time, approximately $3.6 million was routed to a bank account under the name Xpace World Music from an account tied to MediaMuv. Registered as an LLC in Florida, Xpace World Music has no online footprint and is listed under the names of two individuals, including Gladys Gomez Ruiz, who co-manages ByNizza with Gomez. The two also appear in social media photos together. Xpace is also listed alongside Gomez’s company ByNizza as part of a larger collection of LLCs, titled INUSA, suggesting a possible link between Batista’s romantic partner and MediaMuv’s money. In November 2021, the IRS confiscated Xpace World Music’s bank account, according to a warrant to seize property. Gomez did not reply to requests for comment. Gomez Ruiz could not be reached for comment.
Paper trails also lead to Jose Juan Segura Padilla, a prominent artist, manager and record label owner in the regional Mexican music space who is from Mexico but operates out of Phoenix. Segura has managed a number of famous narcocorrido (a regional Mexican subgenre that depicts the culture of drug cartels), banda (a regional Mexican subgenre, featuring brass and heavy beats) and sierreño (a regional Mexican subgenre, powered mainly by traditional acoustic guitars) acts during his multiple decades in the music industry, including Los Cuates de Sinaloa — who appeared in an episode of *Breaking Bad* — and El Tigrillo Palma. Segura also founded El Padrino Records, which translates to “The Godfather.” He released his own records under the label, using the stage name El JJ El Padrino de la Sierra (El JJ, The Godfather of the Sierra), likely a reference to the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountain range, which runs down Western Mexico, bordering the areas of Jalisco, Sinaloa, Western Chihuahua, Durango and more.
Segura’s success has come with its share of misfortune. He was [nearly killed](https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/jose-juan-segura-regional-mexican-manager-survives-shooting-in-sinaloa-1158001/) in 2011 when he was shot numerous times while driving in Sinaloa, and his son, Aaron Saucedo, is awaiting trial later this year for allegedly killing nine people in Arizona, including his mother’s boyfriend, beginning in 2015. Dubbed by locals as “the serial street shooter” case, prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. According to news outlet AZ Central, law enforcement does not suspect his father of being involved with the crimes.
In an interview with investigators, Teran described Segura as “a shark in the Mexican business” and El Padrino Records as simply a client of Elegre Records (which does business as MediaMuv) — to date, it is MediaMuv’s only confirmed client.
According to a warrant to seize the contents of a MediaMuv-associated bank account, Segura’s El Padrino Records provided investigators with a list of 10 artists who were allegedly working with the MediaMuv duo to prove the validity of its relationship. Upon inspection, the IRS found that Segura and El Padrino Records received $367,995 as payment for YouTube royalties. Based on the IRS’ calculations, however, they should have received a fraction of that: $33,386. A representative for Segura and El Padrino did not respond to requests for comment.
In a traditional business relationship of this kind, only one bank account would likely be routing this money to its client. But the investigation found that money routed to El Padrino and Segura came from several sources, including bank accounts titled MediaMuv, Elegre Records, Eniel Gaetan Hernandez, Loris Cleaning, MuveMusic, VA Music and Xpace World Music — all of which are tied to Teran and Batista’s MediaMuv scheme.
### **‘The Worst Movie I’ve Ever Seen’**
Nearly every person that court documents connected to MediaMuv also shared another unlikely connection: a low-budget horror flick called *Anomaly* that was made in early 2016, just a year before Batista and Teran got rich quick with their YouTube endeavor. *Anomaly*, a Phoenix-based production written, directed and produced by Batista, with photography direction and production by Teran, told the story of a widower who moves his new wife and two children into a house that turns out to be haunted, and it offers a glimpse into Batista and Teran’s business acumen pre-MediaMuv. It is still available to stream on Tubi.com.
“I swear on my life *Anomaly* is the worst movie I’ve ever seen,” wrote one armchair reviewer on IMDb.com. Another added, “This movie was so bad I created an IMDb account to prevent others from suffering as I have through it.” Most of the 32 reviews echo similar thoughts.
For the actors in the film, the production was quite haphazard. Its female lead, Lara Jean Mummert-Sullivan, remembers getting the role just a few days before filming began when the original lead dropped out at the last minute. She says that the only accommodation provided to her was to live in the house where they were filming, which was “very dirty.” She also recalls that there was no toilet paper, which Batista kept promising to restock but never did and that there was so little food she had to pay out of pocket for her own provisions. “If I look back and do the math on what I bought versus what I got paid, it probably equaled out or I got maybe like 200 bucks profit \[for the lead role\],” she adds.
Though the cast members interviewed by *Billboard* describe Batista as amenable to work with, they remember him struggling to pay actors on time. The film’s composer, Mark Kueffner, says he was never paid for his work at all. When interviewed, Kueffner excitedly asked, “Wait, do you think I could get paid now?”
On set, Batista’s wife, Omeida, acted as the movie’s production accountant, and El Padrino Records’ founder Segura is also listed as producer/production accountant as well. Records indicate, however, that Segura’s relationship with Batista went beyond what was listed in the credits. Segura and Batista were listed as members of Traintum Films. Traintum is not listed in the credits for *Anomaly* and appears, based on an online search, to not have any film credits to date, but this LLC was registered in Phoenix about two weeks before filming began.
### **Versace Robes, Vuitton Luggage**
Accounts of *Anomaly’s* haphazard, poorly funded production strike a stark contrast from Batista and Teran’s social media photos, showing them flexing in Versace robes on yachts and one touting a set of Louis Vuitton luggage in the lobby of Caesars Palace Las Vegas Hotel and Casino just a year or two later. However short-lived their riches, Batista and Teran’s apparent ability to steal $23 million from artists and songwriters on YouTube possibly highlights the shortcomings of the current system for digital royalty collection.
But now, with MediaMuv on the ropes, its victims want their money back. “It’s going to take months or probably years, but we are definitely going to follow up on it,” says artist manager Edgar Rueda. Gabriel is less optimistic. “I’d like to see as much restitution as possible, but I don’t expect to get it all back. I’m sure they spent a lot of it on cars and travel and stuff.” At the very least, he says, “I hope, as a deterrent to others, these guys go to jail for what they’ve done.”
In the wake of Batista’s plea deal, Gabriel says he thinks AdRev should repay “every penny they earned in commission” from its relationship with Teran and Batista. Though the rate MediaMuv paid AdRev for its services is not known, a conservative estimate of 10% of the royalties it collected would have generated over $2.3 million for the company. However, a footnote in a warrant to seize one of MediaMuv’s associated bank accounts, dated Jan. 5, notes that “further investigation into AdRev is underway,” though no charges have been filed thus far, and Becker is no longer the company’s president. According to his LinkedIn page, Becker became a “strategic advisor” for AdRev one month after the indictment against Teran and Batista was filed.
Though a federal grand jury in Arizona indicted Teran and Batista for 30 counts of wire fraud, conspiracy, money laundering and aggravated identity theft on Nov. 16, 2021, investigators found that AdRev made another direct deposit of $285,344 to a MediaMuv-associated bank account two weeks later. That same day, Nov. 30, 2021, the bank account was emptied and a cashier’s check for $191,449 was made payable to Teran. The check was deposited into his newly opened business account at the National Bank of Arizona. Even after the duo had been caught, Teran still pocketed money from AdRev.
Back in Phoenix, music business entrepreneur Ricardo says he hopes “this story can finally make some noise in the music industry … They are robbers,” he says of MediaMuv. “They didn’t sweat and work and put in the hours to earn the things everyone else works hard for … It hurts both financially and emotionally.”
iOS
2 years ago