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@ -118,7 +118,7 @@ This was all happening amid an influx of Asian immigrants in the 1990s, who were
The concerns of these Asian American activists dovetailed with decades of white conservative demagoguery, resulting in an almost absurd amount of quibbling over which of the highest-achieving students in the country deserved access to its most exclusive schools. “That’s one of the things I’ve always found personally disturbing about this,” said Reed. “I don’t think that most of the differences between these applicants are actually meaningful.”
Blum helped bring the case of a rejected University of Texas applicant named [Abigail Fisher](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/11-345) that ended up before the Supreme Court in 2016. Fisher’s lawyers argued that she was rejected in favor of less qualified minorities, and her defeat, amid revelations that her grades were less than sterling, was met with glee — hashtags like #StayMadAbby and pejorative nicknames like “Becky With the Bad Grades” took over social media. But Blum was already preparing his encore. He has since partnered with the ideological descendants of those 1990s Asian American activists, organizing them under the name Students for Fair Admissions, to argue that Harvard has a quota for keeping Asian applicants out. (In its less famous sister case, SFFA has claimed that the University of North Carolina’s recruitment of first-generation and low-income students discriminates against other applicants.)
Blum helped bring the case of a rejected University of Texas applicant named [Abigail Fisher](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/11-345) that ended up before the Supreme Court in 2016. Fisher’s lawyers argued that she was rejected in favor of less qualified minorities, and her defeat, amid revelations that her grades were less than sterling, was met with glee — hashtags like `#StayMadAbby` and pejorative nicknames like “Becky With the Bad Grades” took over social media. But Blum was already preparing his encore. He has since partnered with the ideological descendants of those 1990s Asian American activists, organizing them under the name Students for Fair Admissions, to argue that Harvard has a quota for keeping Asian applicants out. (In its less famous sister case, SFFA has claimed that the University of North Carolina’s recruitment of first-generation and low-income students discriminates against other applicants.)
If Blum’s challenges are successful, the effects would be devastating. Everywhere that such programs have been eliminated, their modest benefits have revealed them as far preferable to their absence: more minorities in jobs and in schools, and with greater access to the trappings of a middle-class life. It would also be a fitting, if grim, end to a policy that has been assailed and chipped away at from its very inception.
# Chariot-Racing Hooliganism? The Nika Riots of Constantinople
***Dan Billingham***
Constantinople’s Nika Riots of 532 may seem like a dark precursor to the so-called Dark Ages of the early medieval period. A tempting assumption to make is that a bout of collective madness and lack of societal restraint caused the grumbles of chariot-racing fans to escalate to the point of laying waste to large parts of the city and thousands dying. Sixth-century Constantinople was far from a place of anarchy, however. It was one of the most sophisticated cities on the planet, with a social order underpinned by a vast legal code. The Nika Riots were, in fact, more ofa sudden social implosion fuelled by mismanagement from an earnest emperor trying to do his best but failing disastrously.
Around a century after the Nika Riots, the sport of chariot racing was in terminal decline. That was anything but inevitable. It had already enjoyed a key cultural role in the ancient world for over a millennium. Its glorious era at Rome’s Circus Maximus was transported to the hippodrome of Constantinople, where it enjoyed several more centuries in the limelight.
*The ruins of the Hippodrome,* *Onofrio Panvino, 1580.*
Chariot-racing fans were, well, fanatical. Packing the great arenas to cheer on their favourite faction (team) was just one part of it. Merchandise such as statuettes of famous charioteers were popular, and curse tablets have been discovered on which fans would implore gods to wreak all manner of injustice and havoc on an opposition faction. Idolatry was granted to the brave charioteers, along with money that is staggering even in comparison to the earnings of modern sportspeople.
This level of enduring fanaticism makes the poet Juvenal’s infamous line that the people “anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses” totally understandable. The popularity of chariot racing was so extreme, however, that it would be wrong to think cynical emperors were merely orchestrating spectacles for an intellectually vacant populace. Emperors mostly sought to harness for their own benefit a powerful popular interest in the sport – an exercise which, as Justinian showed in 532, could go disastrously wrong too.
Violence would appear to be a natural consequence of such fanaticism. This wasn’t noted to be a major problem at Rome’s Circus Maximus*.* Casual violence began to become more associated with chariot racing from the fourth century, however, and continued as Constantinople assumed Rome’s mantle. By the late fifth century, gangs formed within groups of fans that resemble modern-day football ultras. Several high-profile riots occurred during the reign of the Emperor Anastasius (491–518). The toll of several of these events was significant, with around 3,000 fans of the Blue faction killed in an ambush from fans of the Green faction in 501, but still there had been nothing quite on the scale of the Nika Riots.
Their potential for organised violence made chariot-racing factions a force to be reckoned with. How this force played into Byzantine politics is subject to scholarly debate. In his 1976 work *Circus Factions,* Alan Cameron dismissed earlier suggestions that the factions were aligned with different social groups or followed the religious divides of the era. He saw them as a social ill akin to modern-day football hooliganism with limited political impact.
*Mosaic of the Reds, 3rd-century AD Rome (National Archaeological Museum of Spain, Madrid).*
The sociopolitical identity behind and between the factions does appear to have been muddled, but perhaps this is because the factions were too big even to fit within major social or religious fault lines. Blue was blue and Green was green. How people could declare allegiance to a colour is baffling for historians used to hunting for clear social explanations, but the popularity of the sport was such that people were generally confronted with that choice. Green supporters were accused of being Jews, Samaritans and blasphemers by an envoy of Justinian in the hippodrome in the build-up to the Nika Riots. That they walked out *en masse* in disgust at these accusations shows they identified as none of these.
Choosing which faction to side with became a major political decision for emperors. The varied conclusions they came to supports the idea there was no obvious social or religious dividing lines between the factions. Theodosius II (408–50) was an enthusiastic supporter of the Greens and changed the seating arrangements at the hippodrome to favour them. His successor Marcian then grew weary of the faction arrogantly thinking they could have everything their own way and barred all Greens from public office. Anastasius tried to stay neutral after taking the throne in 491 as Greens and Blues continued to bicker and riot. He eventually decided that the safest bet was to declare his support for a much less popular faction, the Reds.
There was no doubt at all which side Justinian, the emperor at the time of the Nika Riots, favoured. John Malalas, a key chronicler of the period, introduces him as follows:
In appearance he was short, with a good chest, a good nose, fair-skinned, curly-haired, round-faced, handsome, with receding hair, a florid complexion, with his hair and beard greying; he was magnanimous and Christian. He favoured the Blue faction.
There can be few examples in history of a leader’s favourite sports team being listed as such a vital characteristic. Justinian’s wife, the empress Theodora, was also a Blue, despite the fact her father had trained bears belonging to the Green faction.
*Detail of the 6th-century mosaics in the Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna, depicting the Empress Theodora; Dolce & Gabbana Fall/Winter 2013 Fashion Collection, inspired by the aesthetic.*
The imperial couple’s clear preference for one faction was perhaps the first mistake leading to the Nika Riots. Another key source, Procopius’*Secret History* (Ἀπόκρυφη Ἱστορία, *Apocryphē Historiā*), written later in the sixth century, suggests that Justinian permitted the Blues to engage in a free-for-all and plunder at will. He is almost certainly wrong; some of the claims in his sensationalist critique of the imperial couple could come straight out of a modern fake news playbook, most notably that in her younger years, the Empress Theodora gained fame in Constantinople’s theatres by filling her private parts with rice on stage and having geese pick the grains out. We do not know whether the frequent claim she had been a prostitute as well as a stage actress is correct. The veracity of the story is besides the point to some extent – it was included no doubt as an easily memorable claim that would be repeated with enthusiasm, and chimed with a suspicion that many people had about the empress, true or not.
Similarly, the claim in *Secret History* that due to Justinian’s favouritism of the Blues, “everything was everywhere thrown into disorder,” is difficult to take literally. Procopius alleges that the authorities did nothing to punish violent supporters of the Blues who killed at will, corrupted the judiciary, violated the sanctity of churches, stole property, dishonoured children and forced women to sleep with their slaves – all while the Blue supporters received funding from the imperial treasury. It seems inconceivable that Justinian should permit total anarchy in the capital city given his obsession with the Law. He had spent most of his five-year reign working on a mammoth legal code that detailed, among a vast number of things, minute details of property law, such as sub-letting rights, obstructions of sunlight from extensions, and the liability for injuries inflicted by four-legged animals. Linking all manner of hideous crimes that violated moral codes to the faction was a crude attempt to fling further muck at Justinian.
*Secret History* was written perhaps as late as two decades after the Nika Riots, giving Procopius the opportunity to concoct a narrative in which the troubles seemed an inevitable result of a policy failure. The *Chronicle* of John Malalasis an interesting counterpoint in its total omission of any mention of the chariot-racing factions between Justinian taking the throne in 527 and 532. The war with Persia is covered in detail, as are various diplomatic exercises and public works in Constantinople; a few sentences are even devoted to a travelling Italian showman who appeared on the streets of Constantinople with a psychic dog in 529. When the chronicle reaches January 532, the reader is thrust straight into the trouble, with the escape of two faction members just before their scheduled execution for murder described as a “pretext for rioting”
Malalas was receptive to trotting out the imperial line, so we cannot presume either that the riots were entirely spontaneous and unforeseen. Indeed he reports that before taking the throne himself, Justinian as a co-emperor instigated a crackdown on faction-related rioting across the Empire, which again contradicts the narrative of Procopius. That actual events were between the two contrasting portrayals seems a prudent assumption. As ludicrous as some of the details in the critique of Procopius are, that Justinian indulged the Blue faction more than he should have, despite attempts to curb the worst excesses, seems the likely kernel of truth around which his wild accusations could revolve.
That Justinian made his favouritism clear most probably emboldened the Blues. Not to the point that they turned the social order on its head in an orgy of crime as Procopius suggests, but probably to the extent that they felt entitled to push grievances to the emperor. Thus, when chariot-racing fans pleaded with the emperor to pardon the two convicts who escaped the hangman’s noose on the night of 10 January 532, they would have been confident of a response.
Justinian’s reaction was to continue to seek a middle ground between pandering to the powerful factions but showing some firmness. As Geoffrey Greatrex explains in *The Nika Riot: A Reappraisal* (1997), it proved to be a disastrous attempt to steer a way through a crisis that resulted only in turning it into something vastly more serious. Refusing to entertain the demands of the factions to pardon the convicts (his stick) added fuel to the fire, and the horrendous decision to continue to hold planned chariot races in the following days (his carrot) led to him accidentally stacking it high.
*The imperial complex in Justinian’s Constantinople*
A crowd of up to 100,000 people cried out for the release of the two convicts at the hippodrome the following Tuesday, and the unique scene then unravelled of the Blues and the Greens uniting in a call for justice. *Nika* (νίκα, the Greek imperative for “win!”) became the slogan of their struggle. Having failed to gain a response from the emperor, they simply took matters into their own hands. They marched that evening to the praetorium of the city prefect, burnt the building down and released the two prisoners held inside there.
After all of this, Justinian showed a bizarre level of blind optimism by deciding to continue with more planned racing on the Wednesday. It didn’t go well. No doubt sensing the weakness of the emperor, the supporters torched the hippodrome and made new demands. They called for the dismissal of three key imperial officials, and as the disturbances continued, Justinian eventually acquiesced.
Relenting in the face of fierce violence failed to stop the riots there though. Justinian had cut away much of his own authority with his slow and botched response, and after attempts were made to depose him for Probus, he had to battle to get it any of it back. This led to widespread destruction as troops engaged rioters and a mass slaughter of Greens in the hippodrome after the emperor had bought the Blues back to his side with gold coins.
Greatrex is dismissive of suggestions that hostile senators sought to orchestrate the trouble to dispose Justinian. The eruption of violence was organic. That the rioters did not stop after their demands were accepted shows that they were largely motivated by the power of their own destructive force. They lacked all signs of clear leadership. Getting outmanoeuvred by a rabble must have been a deep embarrassment for Justinian.
It is worth considering how an emperor who was known to be studious and enjoyed considerable military success could miscalculate so spectacularly. A firm response either to free the convicts or crush trouble at its first sign would probably have avoided such a calamitous outcome. It seems likely that Justinian received conflicting advice from his palace. Given her famous rallying cry that she would prefer death to fleeing the throne as the imperial purple “would make the noblest funeral shroud”, the Empress Theodora could have been a voice urging a confrontation with the rioters. Other advisers may have highlighted the pragmatism behind Justinian’s support for the Blue faction and urged against confrontation.
The ending of the riots showed that while the unity between the Blues and Greens made the trouble so threatening, the division between the factions, imaginary as it was in many ways, came back to doom the uprising. Justinian’s grand chamberlain, the eunuch Narses, warned the Blues that a Green was about to take to the throne and bought their loyalty with gold coins, isolating the Greens, who were promptly slaughtered in cold blood.
*Bas-relief of a chariot race, 3rd century AD, Circus Maximus, Rome.*
In an era when protest movements can seem to develop rather suddenly, it is worth considering what lessons may be drawn from the remarkable events of Constantinople in 532. One that may frighten leaders in any age is the incredible momentum the riots developed. Given that there was no major existential threat to the Byzantine Empire at the time, it is difficult to ground the violence in a particular historical context. The spectacular failure of Justinian to get a grip on events is a lesson to heed in any crisis situation. Being ahead of events and making firm and clearly communicated decisions are all key. Indecision in the hope that things blow over does not help.
If Procopius’ portrayal of the sinister power of the Blue faction has a modicum of truth, Justinian also seems to have fallen into a trap of a poor, or at least unreliable, choice of political bedfellows. Their influence on the streets of Constantinople must have been extremely useful to the future emperor when he was an heir to his uncle Justin’s throne and was thus seeking to secure a platform of power. Justinian’s failed attempt to push back against their influence shows that by the time he had realised that a confident bunch of street gangs could also be a nuisance, it was too late.
While the disaster of the riots pushed him to the brink, the wider record of Justinian’s reign provides a cheerful footnote: however astonishing a setback is, you can work to redeem yourself. Constantinople was largely laid to waste by the riots, with the Hagia Sophia among the many buildings destroyed. Justinian’s restoration of the church gave it the magnificentstructure that survives today – a feat he repeated across the city by initiating other grand works. Having vanquished the rebellion in horrific circumstances, Justinian secured his place on the throne. The military successes later in his reign saw the Byzantine Empire recover lost territories in Italy and North Africa. After the blot to his early record, he presided over a golden age.
*Dan Billingham is a journalist and Durham University history graduate. He recently completed an unpublished novel based on the dramatic events of the Nika Riots.*
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**Further Reading**
Beyond the ancient accounts of Procopius and John Malalas, the following works give ruther details about the Nika Riots and their broader content.
Fik Meijer, *Chariot Racing in the Roman Empire* *(Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, Baltimore, MD, 2010).*
*Geoffrey Greatrex,* *“The Nika Riot: A Reappraisal”,**JHS**117**(1997) 60*–*86.*
*Alan Cameron, Circus* *Factions:**Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium* *(Oxford UP, 1976).*
*S**tella Duffy, The Purple Shroud* *(Virago, London, 2012).*
*Jeffrey Larson, The Emperor, the Church, and Chariot Races: the Imperial Struggles with Christianity and Entertainment in Late Antique Constantinople* *(Masters thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2012).*
# He Sought A New Life Outside A War Zone. Bullets Still Found Him.
Taj Bibi Ahmad Zai’s eyes are focused on the ornate red carpet. It’s one of the few things that reminds her of her old life—nearly everything has changed in the past six months.
Most of her 38 years were spent in a nomadic and rural province in eastern Afghanistan. Now, she finds herself in a third-floor apartment in Durham, surrounded by boxes, duffel bags, plastic containers, and an imposing tower of 24-packs of bottled water.
Ahmad Zai’s thin fingers fidget with eight dark-green Afghan passports, while her children vie for her attention. Five-year-old Asma clings to a large brown teddy bear in one hand and balances an overflowing bowl of Lucky Charms with the other. Nearby, 1-month-old Ayeshah rocks in a bassinet.
The apartment was already home to her husband’s cousin, Yousaf Mangal, his wife Raayata, and their five kids. After Ahmad Zai and her seven children arrived on February 10, the number of people living here grew to 15. Mangal and his wife picked them up from Raleigh-Durham International Airport—a reunion years in the making, but hardly what they’d pictured.
Ahmad Zai’s husband Ainzargul Totakhil had been living in the United States since 2016, working to save up enough money to bring her and the kids over. He’d recently earned American citizenship, and the couple had plans to build a new life together.
Taj Bibi Ahmad Zai ties Bibi Asma’s dress in the family’s Durham apartment. (Andrea Bruce for *The Assembly*)
But Totakhil was [shot and killed on December 30](https://www.wral.com/story/man-murdered-in-durham-was-afghan-refugee-who-risked-life-to-help-american-troops/20664228/) while driving for Uber. According to Durham Police, the 40-year-old was found dead in his car around 11:00 p.m. at the intersection of Holloway Street and South Adams Street in East Durham, a predominantly residential area. There were no suspects, and six months later, the police say there still aren’t any leads.
It was Mangal who first learned of his cousin’s seemingly random murder when an officer called with the disturbing news on New Year’s Eve. For days, dread consumed him. He kept the information from the rest of Totakhil’s family. He made up excuses about why Totakhil wasn’t answering his phone. Could the news trigger a miscarriage for Ahmad Zai or a heart attack for Totakhil’s elderly parents?
But the family’s suspicions were growing.
“I think you’ve been lying to us,” Totakhil’s father told Mangal over the phone. “Because we’ve been having bad dreams.”
His loved ones knew something was wrong. But how bad could it be? Totakhil was in America, the land of opportunity.
## The American Idea
Totakhil had come to the United States seeking the promise of safety and security for his wife and children, a priceless commodity for someone who witnessed every botched phase and broken promise of America’s longest war.
But Totakhil believed in America. In 2007, as the United States dug its heels deeper into Afghanistan, he signed up to work for coalition forces. For nearly a decade, he and Mangal both served alongside U.S. Green Berets on a remote outpost near Paktia Province, filling various roles from base barber to interpreter.
The trust built between a soldier and their interpreter is understood only by those who have experienced it firsthand. “They are a different breed. I expected him to fight alongside me just like anyone else,” recalled an active-duty U.S. Special Forces officer who worked with the cousins in 2011.
The Green Beret, who served five tours in Afghanistan, asked not to be named for security reasons, and says his Afghan interpreters saw more combat action than most American servicemembers. “We were breaking bread with them. We were burying their dead,” he said. “When we were in an ambush, my Afghans were right next to me.”
Which is why as the war entered its second decade, life in Afghanistan became more dangerous for Mangal and Totakhil. By 2013, four other cousins had been killed in combat while working for American troops. Countless friends and comrades had lost their lives in the war, and many of those still living endured a near-constant state of fear. Totakhil and Mangal’s devotion to the war effort made them, and their loved ones, enemies of the Taliban.
Ainzargul Totakhil’s cousin Yousaf Mangal, surrounded by family. (Andrea Bruce for *The Assembly*)
In June 2016, Mangal and his family were able to get Special Immigrant Visas (SIV), a program established to provide a pathway to legal permanent residency for America’s wartime allies in Iraq and Afghanistan. They settled in Durham, and Totakhil joined him the following November. From 2009 to the beginning of 2021, the U.S. Department of State issued [just over 22,000 SIVs](https://www.stateoig.gov/report/aud-mero-22-38#:~:text=From%2020095%20through%202021,15%20percent)%20applications%20remained%20pending.) to Afghans, most of whom had experienced immediate threats to their safety.
The process wasn’t easy. Mangal’s Green Beret commander spent five years navigating bureaucratic red tape to get his visa approved. Many soldiers across Fort Bragg were doing the same for their former interpreters—filing paperwork was the least they could do for the Afghans who’d risked their lives to support them.
Ahmad Zai and her children stayed behind when Totakhil left; he insisted on building a more stable life before bringing his family to the U.S. And he did.
Bibi Asma, 7, and Bibi Asiya, 9, play in the yard. (Andrea Bruce for *The Assembly*)
In the six years leading up to his death, Totakhil bounced between jobs in and around Durham. He drove for an airport taxi company then found a job at a Japanese steak house. Totakhil eventually made his way into food delivery, working for Grubhub and Uber Eats, a marginally more lucrative position.
By 2021, Totakhil and Mangal were both driving full time for Uber. Mangal, the more seasoned driver, had picked up a useful trick behind the wheel. He realized sharing stories of his military service with his passengers consistently earned him five-star ratings.
Totakhil adopted the tactic; every ride got him closer to reuniting with his family.
## The Wait
As Ahmad Zai waited with their children in rural Paktia Province, America’s military investments fell deeper out of political favor. When the U.S. finalized its hasty troop withdrawal in [April 2021](https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/2573268/biden-announces-full-us-troop-withdrawal-from-afghanistan-by-sept-11/), the Taliban quickly moved into desolate areas like Paktia, easily appropriating land from a crumbling government.
By August, they were approaching Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital and largest city. Many citizens still hoped for a compromise between the government and the Taliban. But on August 15th, then-president [Ashraf Ghani fled the country](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/15/afghan-president-ghani-flees-country-as-taliban-surrounds-kabul), signaling the official end to talks of a coalition government. Hours later, the Taliban entered Kabul without opposition.
For many Afghans, there was nowhere left to go. Ties to coalition forces or diplomatic efforts placed targets on the backs of America’s wartime allies. Scenes of chaos ensued at Hamid Karzai International Airport as desperate crowds waited outside heavily fortified walls, battling heat and fatigue and constant abuse from Taliban soldiers.
Left to right: Bibi Asiya, Abdul Wahab Totakhil, Hayatullah Totakhil and Jahab Gul Totakhil in the family’s Durham apartment. (Andrea Bruce for *The Assembly*)
The chaos did not let up inside. On August 16, three days into the evacuation, [at least two people fell to their death](https://apnews.com/article/soccer-sports-afghanistan-middle-east-kabul-58a4e0a9c6343ab78a1985df31e2d729) while clinging onto the wheel well of a U.S. Air Force C-17. A teenager was crushed by the same plane on the tarmac. On August 26, [a suicide bomber detonated his vest](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/us/politics/kabul-airport-attack-report.html), killing 169 Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. service members.
Mangal’s former commander likened the evacuation to Saigon, except much worse.
In the two weeks following the Taliban takeover, more than 120,000 Afghans managed to fly out of Hamid Karzai. Since August 2021, the effort dubbed “Operation Allies Welcome” has resettled [nearly 90,000](https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/09/27/operation-allies-welcome-announces-departure-all-afghan-nationals-national#:~:text=To%20date%2C%20approximately%2088%2C500%20Afghan,behalf%20of%20the%20United%20States.) in the United States, according to the State Department. [More than 1,600](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/afghan-evacuees-resettled-us-texas-california-virginia/) have come to North Carolina.
Ahmad Zai and her children waited more than a year under the Taliban’s tightening grip, quietly planning their escape.
In Durham, Totakhil’s financial outlook slowly brightened. While he went home to visit several times, the family was separated for six years before he decided it was time to bring his wife and children to the U.S. Last July, he flew back to Afghanistan to solidify their plans. He waited for months for their visas to be approved, calling Mangal, his former U.S Army contacts, and the State Department weekly. By October, Afghanistan had become too dangerous for Totakhil to stay any longer.
He said goodbye to his newly pregnant wife and flew back to North Carolina. The baby they were expecting in the spring might be an American citizen if all goes according to plan, Totakhil told his cousin over the phone.
Just one day after Totakhil left Afghanistan, the State Department approved eight Special Immigrant Visas for his wife and children. They soon boarded a flight to a U.S. base in Qatar for their final processing.
Life as a family in the United States seemed to be within reach, and it came with help. SIV candidates are eligible for various short-term government assistance programs when they arrive. Cases are assigned to local resettlement agencies through the State Department. In North Carolina, two federally funded Department of Health and Human Services programs offer financial, medical, and employment services for up to 12 months.
Taj Bibi Ahmad Zai holds her newborn daughter, Ayeshah, surrounded by her other children. (Andrea Bruce for *The Assembly*)
But they wouldn’t need much help. Totakhil had been working hard.
Ahmad Zai waited in a large barracks room at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar for her daily call with Totakhil. In Durham, Mangal overheard his cousin’s end of the conversations. “I’m doing everything I can,” Totakhil would tell his wife. “It’s not in my hands.”
On November 15, he called with good news: He’d become an American citizen. He was hopeful his wife and children would soon join him in experiencing the same joy.
Each day at Al Udeid mirrored the one that came before. Ahmad Zai tried to keep the children entertained the best she could, but the months passed slowly as she and dozens of other hopeful Afghans worked to clear the necessary medical and security screenings before they could enter the United States. Her hope that what was waiting on the other side would be worth it carried her forward.
But on December 30, Mangal answered that late-night call from a Durham Police officer.
“I was totally shocked. I thought he might be joking,” Mangal said. “This is America.”
It seemed unspeakably cruel that Totakhil had survived the brutality of war only to be shot and killed where he sought refuge.
When she learned his fate, Ahmad Zai wanted to return to Afghanistan—how could she live in a strange land without her husband by her side?
Their evacuation effort, however, was well under way. Mangal convinced Ahmad Zai, then seven months pregnant, to continue. The U.S. still seemed like the safest option, especially given her fast-approaching delivery.
Totakhil’s death helped convince the State Department to expedite the effort. On February 10, Ahmad Zai and her children arrived in North Carolina. It had been 42 days since Totakhil’s murder.
## The Labyrinth
Ahmad Zai tries to maintain hope her children will have more than she ever did, something her husband believed. She’d never learned to read or write, and under the Taliban’s ban on educating girls, her three daughters likely would not have either.
Asked what she wishes she could have learned in school, Ahmad Zai replies: “Everything.”
She looks down at her baby girl, a new American born nine days after she arrived. “She can do everything,” Ahmad Zai whispers.
Bibi Asma, 7, with baby Ayeshah. (Andrea Bruce for *The Assembly*)
But her hope is slowly languishing in a system struggling to keep up with their needs. Setting aside the unresolved police investigation, more immediate needs arise like providing for eight children in a new environment that couldn’t be more foreign. The support they expected and benefits often allocated to those with refugee status have not come.
Newly arrived refugees are often assigned to local resettlement agencies, private nonprofit organizations tasked and funded by the federal government to facilitate a family’s transition to the U.S. In the Triangle area, four refugee resettlement organizations serve families.One is World Relief Durham, the agency that worked with Mangal and Totakhil. Their case workers coordinate housing assistance, school enrollment, and other essential services like a temporary, government-funded stipend to ease a family’s adjustment to the U.S.
Mangal expected the same assistance would be offered to Ahmad Zai and her children once they arrived, especially given the horrifying circumstances. Day after day, he waited for their caseworker to call back. When the phone didn’t ring, he became Ahmad Zai’s only lifeline. He gave up driving for Uber almost completely as he spent days applying for social security cards, attempting to enroll the kids in school and searching for rental properties.
After a month, Mangal learned his cousin’s family wasn’t eligible for the same assistance. As Adam Clark, World Relief Durham’s executive director, explains, Totakhil’s family is known as a “walk-in” since they entered the country “independently and not through traditional pathways.”
While the State Department initially granted the family SIVs, when Totakhil received his citizenship in November Ahmad Zai and her children became eligible for a family-sponsored visa instead. Entering as the family of a citizen meant they did not have access to the aid refugee resettlement organizations like World Relief typically provide. Totakhil’s untimely death left his family navigating a peculiar predicament.
The family’s third-floor apartment in Durham buzzes with the activity of many little feet. (Andrea Bruce for *The Assembly*)
The State Department’s [Reception and Placement Program](https://www.state.gov/refugee-admissions/reception-and-placement/) offers $2,375 in assistance to qualified SIVs and refugees during their first three months in the United States. The funds are distributed through local agencies such as World Relief and can be used for resettlement costs such as rent, food, employment assistance, school enrollment, and legal services. A State Department spokesperson told *The Assembly* that recipients “must be determined eligible based on the type of visa issued.”
Aid also exists for qualifying new arrivals from programs funded by both state and private organizations and can sometimes offer assistance for up to five years.
Ainzargul’s family’s initial request for any type of aid was denied, but Clark said his organization is still actively attempting to help. “Once given the go-ahead, we plan to do so.”
Legal challenges are nothing new for World Relief, which like many resettlement organizations has been inundated with new Afghan arrivals since the August 2021 withdrawal. “We’re designed for longterm resettlement support, not disaster assistance,” said Clark. World Relief had to quickly overhaul its meticulously crafted resettlement plans; every week, a new family was arriving, most of them with small children.
Clark says the system wasn’t well set up for the influx; changes in immigration policy under the Trump administration led several refugee resettlement organizations to [downsize or close altogether](https://www.americanprogress.org/article/rebuilding-u-s-refugee-program-21st-century/).World Relief Durham stayed afloat by offering new programming and diversifying services. They’ve provided aid to more than 200 new Afghan arrivals in the last two years.
## Strength and Survival
When Mangal arrived in 2016, the Special Forces officer he served alongside in Afghanistan would often visit. He and his wife would drive from Fayetteville and pick up Mangal and his family for a day at Carowinds.
He proudly watched his former interpreter’s children quickly learn English and embrace life in the United States. He knows the same will happen for Totakhil’s family if they’re given the chance. “The investment is absolutely worth it,” he said. “They’re little American kids now.”
The kids play outside in the apartment complex. (Andrea Bruce for *The Assembly*)
Following Totakhil’s death, Mangal [started a GoFundMe page](https://www.gofundme.com/f/donate-to-help-the-funeral-of-shaheed-ainzargul) to cover funeral costs and assist the family. After his death made local news, they were able to raise over $70,000. But the money won’t last forever, and support isn’t only needed in the form of cash.
Two months after her arrival, Ahmad Zai and her children moved out of the cramped three-bedroom apartment when Mangal was able to co-sign for another unit in a nearby building. He pieced together all the paperwork to get the family approved for food stamps and Medicaid. And in late April, her younger children finally started school in Durham.
Ajeer, the oldest, is 19 now and too old for school. His uncle said he feels he must now carry the family’s burden, though four job interviews have yielded no offers—likely because he’s still learning English. While he hopes to become a mechanic, he’ll take any work he can get.
Most days, Ahmad Zai stays home with the baby. Her eyes are tired, but she rarely shows emotion—there’s little time when tiny hands pull at her veil and the baby begs to be nursed.
Mangal says he’s only seen her cry only twice: First, when he and his wife greeted the family at the airport in February. He remembers her asking, “Where is Ainzargul?” She knew. They all did. But she needed to acknowledge his absence.
The second was when she first visited her husband’s grave. Standing in front of a small stone positioned near the back of a Durham Islamic cemetery, she allowed herself a moment to grieve.
When asked where Ahmad Zai finds strength, her demeanor changes. She glances down, then up, and opens her arms wide to show the size of her heart.
Strength, she says, is ingrained in Afghan women. It was necessary to survive decades of war. She’ll need it in America, too.
Taj Bibi Ahmad Zai and her children have moved into their own unit not far from Mangal and his family. (Andrea Bruce for *The Assembly*)
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*Sarah Blake Morgan is a Charlotte-based journalist who spent over a decade reporting across the country and around the world for local and international news organizations. Her work has won an Edward R. Murrow Award and eight Emmy nominations. At 31, she attended Basic Combat Training and Officer Candidate School and is now a Military Intelligence Officer in the U.S. Army Reserve.*
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*Vibhav Nandagiri is a freelance reporter from Durham. A lifelong resident of North Carolina, his work has also appeared in the INDYWeek.*
# Hey Dad, Can You Help Me Return the Picasso I Stole?
The Great Read
A painting that went missing in 1969 turned up at a museum’s doorstep before the F.B.I. could hunt it down. No one knew how or why — until now.
Credit...
- June 15, 2023
The Picasso fell off the proverbial truck. It vanished from a loading dock at Logan International Airport in Boston and wound up where it didn’t belong, in the modest home of one Merrill Rummel, also known as Bill.
### Listen to This Article
In fairness, this forklift operator had no idea that the crate he tossed into his car trunk contained a Picasso until he opened its casing. In fairness, he didn’t care much for it; he preferred realism.
But now things had turned all too real. F.B.I. agents were hot on the trail of a hot Picasso unavailable for public viewing, as it was hidden in Rummel’s hallway closet. He and his fiancée, Sam, began to panic.
“How do we get rid of it?” she recalled thinking. “We couldn’t just give it back. It was a pain in our butt.”
Fortunately, Rummel knew a guy. Someone particularly skilled at making problems melt away. A fixer.
He dialed a number he knew by heart.
The Case of the Missing Picasso, revealed here for the first time, goes back. Back before the much more [notorious theft of 13 works of art](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/arts/design/isabella-stewart-gardner-heist-25-years-of-theories.html) from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. Back, in a sense, to a time before Picasso had even painted the piece in question.
Back to the 1950s of Waterville, Maine, where the Rummel boys — Bill and his younger brother, Whit — were testing their hometown’s Yankee forbearance. If one was looting parking meters for his coin collection, the other was pilfering pens from Woolworth’s. If one was stealing radios from junked cars, the other was racing his car so recklessly that it seemed destined for the junkyard.
Image
Merrill “Bill” Rummel, left, and his brother, Whit, in 1958.Credit...via Whitcomb Rummel Jr.
But their father, Whitcomb Rummel Sr., always managed to calm the aggravated constabulary with assurances that he would handle it. And he did: When 12-year-old Whit — known in the family as “Half-Whit” — was caught stealing from Woolworth’s, his father forbade him from entering any shop for a year.
“Not even into the corner store for a Coke,” the son, now 76, recalled. “This meant my mother had to bring clothes out to the car so I could try on pants because I couldn’t go into the store.”
Neither son dared to cross their father. “He was all-knowing, all-seeing, all-hearing,” Whit Rummel said.
Rummel the elder never spoke of his own childhood; too painful, perhaps. His mother died of influenza when he was 9, after which his father sent him away to an affection-averse aunt. “It wasn’t until after high school that he reconnected with his father,” Whit Rummel said.
He attended college, did some acting, married, served with the Navy Seabees in Africa during World War II and moved to Waterville, where he bought and spiffed up a local ice cream stand. His frozen treats became a favored local delight, available at Gustafson’s market, the Chicken Coop restaurant, Bea’s Candy Kitchen — even Mid-State Motors, where a gasoline purchase came with a pint of Rummel’s.
Image
Whitcomb Rummel Sr., whose ice cream store was a fixture in Waterville, Maine, and whose boys also made themselves known.Credit...via Whitcomb Rummel Jr.
The man behind the brand was just as ubiquitous, a Chamber of Commerce leader, Kiwanis bigwig and Shriner poobah. He donated a scoreboard to the town gymnasium, presented the police with a trained German shepherd, sponsored a semipro baseball team and gave away banana splits to children for civic spirit, or academic success, or just for being kids.
At home he was a quirky dad, sometimes fun and even zany, but often stern. “He never hugged us,” Whit Rummel said.
To Waterville’s relief, the Rummel boys moved on. Whit went to Tulane University in New Orleans. Bill served with the Coast Guard in Michigan, where he fell in love with a bowling-alley bartender whose customers called out “Play it again, Sam” so often that her given name, Evelyn, became a gutter ball.
When his Coast Guard hitch ended in 1968, Bill joined Emery Air Freight, then the country’s largest cargo airline. He worked nights on the company’s loading dock at Logan airport, where, in early 1969, a crate arrived from Paris.
Inside, a Picasso: “Portrait of a Woman and a Musketeer.”
Image
“Portrait of a Woman and a Musketeer,” the recovered Picasso, was sold and a Milwaukee museum later featured it in a 1971 exhibition.Credit...via Whitcomb Rummel Jr.
Pablo Picasso, then in his late 80s, had become intrigued by the musketeer as evocative of the old masters, especially Rembrandt, and returned to the theme again and again. “It was the idée fixe of his very late work,” said Pepe Karmel, a professor of art history at New York University. “I think he was asking himself: ‘Where does my art stand in relation to the old masters?’”
The painting, completed in 1967, was to be forwarded from Boston to a Milwaukee gallery owned by Irving Luntz. His son, Holden Luntz, recalled that his late father bought the piece from Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, a prominent dealer in Paris known for championing Picasso. Since negotiations took place on his father’s 40th birthday, he said, Kahnweiler agreed to sell the work for $40,000.
“A gesture of generosity,” said Holden Luntz, who owns a photography gallery in Palm Beach, Fla.
But the Picasso never made it to Milwaukee. An anxious Irving Luntz contacted Emery to complain, but the cargo company had its own emerging problem, with what came to be known in New England as the [100-hour storm](https://www.globalweatherclimatecenter.com/weather-history-topics/looking-back-at-the-1969-100-hour-new-england-snowstorm-credit-this-day-in-weather-history).
Image
Investigators who tried to track the missing Picasso suspected that a professional thief, not an airport forklift operator, was involved.
The protracted late February snowfall paralyzed Boston, including the airport, where more than two feet of snow disrupted passenger flights and cargo deliveries. Large containers littered the tarmac, while boxes and packages clogged the docks.
“Our dock was a mess,” Bill Rummel said in a 2007 interview with Ira Glass for an ultimately shelved episode of the “This American Life” radio program.
With outbound crates at the front and inbound crates at the back, Emery executives demanded a decluttering of the dock. Under pressure, Rummel said, his supervisor pointed to a crate with a missing label and said: Take that with you when you go home tonight.
It should be noted that, according to Rummel, this supervisor was later fired. For stealing.
Rummel angled the crate into the trunk of his 1962 Chevy Impala and, a few days later, lugged it into his half of a two-story home in Medford, Mass. He pried it open with a hammer to discover that he was now in possession of a Picasso.
Image
Sam Rummel, left, recalled that she and Bill left the painting in a hallway closet, shoved well to the back. Credit...via Whitcomb Rummel Jr.
Its artistry underwhelmed him, he told Glass. “Not a Wyeth, put it that way.”
Rummel called his fiancée, Sam. “You’ll never guess what I’ve got,” Ms. Rummel, now 79, recalled him saying. “A Picasso!”
“What are you, drunk?” she asked.
She returned to their home to find a big crate leaning against the wall.
“You want to see it?” he asked.
“Hell, no,” she said.
The couple hid the crate in the closet beneath the stairwell. “We shoved that thing so far back there, and then shoved stuff in front of it,” Sam Rummel said. “We never talked about it.”
But someone *was* talking about it: Irving Luntz, the Milwaukee gallery owner. After weeks of being Picasso-less, he contacted the F.B.I., which began snooping around Logan. This unnerved a certain affianced couple in Medford.
“Worried? Are you kidding?” Sam Rummel said. “We were young. We didn’t want to go to jail.”
Image
Sam said she and Bill became frightened when they learned that the F.B.I. was investigating the painting’s disappearance.Credit...Travis Dove for The New York Times
Unsure of what to do, Bill Rummel called his brother, Whit, who was more knowledgeable about art. He had once torn a photograph of a Picasso out of a library book to hang in his bedroom.
In effect, Whit’s first question was: Have you called the fixer?
Of course. Dad.
The elder Rummel listened to his older son’s predicament and then offered two options with all the calm of a soda jerk asking: whipped cream or hot fudge?
1\. They could bury the Picasso in the foundation of a Waterville restaurant under renovation that his father co-owned. (Its name, The Silent Woman, seemed apropos.) Unearth the painting in 30 years and maybe sell it for a small fortune.
Or:
2\. Return it.
When Bill Rummel asked his father what he thought he should do, the elder Rummel said that this was a life choice he had to make for himself.
“So I said, ‘I’ll give it back,’” the son told Glass. “And he said, ‘I’ll help you.’”
The elder Rummel telephoned Whit in New Orleans and gave him detailed instructions for a handwritten note that could not be traced. Use high-end stationery. Since you’re left-handed, write it out with your right hand. And since you’re studying creative writing, make it sound artsy. Then send it by airmail to your brother in Medford.
Meanwhile, the F.B.I. was turning up the heat, issuing a bulletin to law-enforcement agencies throughout the Northeast. *Picasso stolen from Logan airport. Be on the lookout.*
Days later, the ice cream king of Waterville arrived in Medford with his wife, Ann, a new trench coat, and a plan. He rubbed the painting’s packaging and crate with Vaseline, for reasons that evaded his son. He attached the handwritten note. He donned the trench coat, a brimmed hat, and gloves. Go time.
Three years after this escapade, Whitcomb Rummel would die, suddenly, at 63; in his honor, his restaurant would stay closed until the evening ice cream rush. His son Bill would spend the next 30 years with Emery, rising to regional manager before retiring to South Carolina and dying, at 71, in 2015.
But on this April Fools’ Day in Boston, 1969, father and son were sharing an unforgettable moment: loading a purloined Picasso into a Chevy Impala.
Bill Rummel, wearing a black watch cap and sunglasses, drove them into Boston and, at his father’s direction, parked on Huntington Avenue. His father got out and carried the crate a few car lengths ahead.
The elder Rummel loaded the painting into a taxi, handed the driver a $20 bill and told him to deliver the package to the Museum of Fine Arts, just down the avenue. He returned to his son’s car and, on the drive back to Medford, tossed the coat, hat and gloves in separate garbage cans.
Newswire services were soon circulating photographs of Perry T. Rathbone, the museum’s esteemed director, posing with both the recovered Picasso, worth an estimated $75,000, and a mysterious handwritten note, which read:
“Please accept this to replace in part some of the paintings removed from museums thruout the country.”
It was signed “Robbin’ Hood.”
Luntz, the Milwaukee gallery owner, told a television station that he was “absolutely delirious and delighted to get this painting [back](https://uwm.edu/wtmjsearch/wtmjnewsarchive/9416/).” And yes, he said, prospective buyers were lining up.
A few days later, on the Emery loading dock at Logan, Bill Rummel’s boss called him over and motioned to a certain crate in the middle of the floor, bound for Milwaukee.
They found it, his boss said.
Oh, he answered.
Image
Whitcomb Rummel Jr. said that while his father had rescued him and his brother from various scrapes, nothing topped his central role in returning the Picasso.Credit...Travis Dove for The New York Times
Whit Rummel, also known as Robbin’ Hood, is a filmmaker in Chapel Hill, N.C. He has long thought that his family’s Picasso story had the makings of a movie, and kept all the news clippings as proof of a tale that for decades could not be told. But he sensed a potential plot hole:
Where did the Picasso wind up?
A couple of years ago he hired Monica Boyer, an editor and financial writer, to track it down. She could not find mention of the work in auction-house records or in various Picasso databases, and, of course, the artist had created many musketeer-themed paintings.
Still, by drawing on a few clues — Milwaukee, for example — she found a catalog for a 1971 exhibition called “Picasso in Milwaukee.” Among the works on display: “Portrait of a Woman and a Musketeer,” courtesy of Sidney and Dorothy Kohl.
Sidney Kohl, 92 and living in Palm Beach, Fla., is a member of the family behind the Kohl’s department-store chain. He is an extremely wealthy developer, investor and art collector; in 2012, eight pieces from the Kohl couple’s collection sold at auction for [$101 million.](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sothebys-scores-its-bigge_b_2131259)
That sale did not include the Picasso, and the Kohls did not respond to several requests to confirm that the painting — no doubt worth millions of dollars — is still in their private collection.
Wherever it is, this work by the most celebrated artist of the 20th century remains as shielded from public view as if it had stayed hidden in the hallway closet of a forklift operator. But that working stiff had at least tried to return it to the world, with some help, of course, from the ice cream king of Waterville, Maine.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro.
Dan Barry is a longtime reporter and columnist, having written both the “This Land” and “About New York” columns. The author of several books, he writes on myriad topics, including New York City, sports, culture and the nation. [@DanBarryNYT](https://twitter.com/DanBarryNYT) • [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/danbarry.author)
A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: To Help Return Stolen Picasso, He Needed Dad. [Order Reprints](https://www.parsintl.com/publication/the-new-york-times/) | [Today’s Paper](https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper) | [Subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY)
# How a Grad Student Uncovered the Largest Known Slave Auction in the U.S.
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Sitting at her bedroom desk, nursing a cup of coffee on a quiet Tuesday morning, Lauren Davila scoured digitized old newspapers for slave auction ads. A graduate history student at the College of Charleston, she logged them on a spreadsheet for an internship assignment. It was often tedious work.
She clicked on Feb. 24, 1835, another in a litany of days on which slave trading fueled her home city of Charleston, South Carolina. But on this day, buried in a sea of classified ads for sales of everything from fruit knives and candlesticks to enslaved human beings, Davila made a shocking discovery.
On page 3, fifth column over, 10th advertisement down, she read:
“This day, the 24th instant, and the day following, at the North Side of the Custom-House, at 11 o’clock, will be sold, a very valuable GANG OF NEGROES, accustomed to the culture of rice; consisting of SIX HUNDRED.”
She stared at the number: 600.
A sale of 600 people would mark a grim new record — by far.
Until Davila’s discovery, the largest known slave auction in the U.S. was one that was held over two days in 1859 just outside Savannah, Georgia, roughly 100 miles down the Atlantic coast from Davila’s home. At a racetrack just outside the city, an indebted plantation heir sold hundreds of enslaved people. The horrors of that auction have been chronicled in books and articles, including The New York Times’ [1619 Project](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/12/magazine/1619-project-slave-auction-sites.html) and “[The Weeping Time](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/weeping-time/5508CF20D6430EA872C661B8E0BC7995): Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History.” Davila grabbed her copy of the latter to double-check the number of people auctioned then.
It was 436, far fewer than the 600 in the ad glowing on her computer screen.
She fired off an email to a mentor, Bernard Powers, the city’s premier Black history expert. Now professor emeritus of history at the College of Charleston, he is founding director of its Center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston and board member of the [International African American Museum](https://iaamuseum.org/), which will open in Charleston on June 27.
If anyone would know about this sale, she figured, it was Powers.
Yet he too was shocked. He had never heard of it. He knew of no newspaper accounts, no letters written about it between the city’s white denizens.
“The silence of the archives is deafening on this,” he said. “What does that silence tell you? It reinforces how routine this was.”
The auction site rests between a busy intersection in downtown Charleston and the harbor that ushered in about 40% of enslaved Africans hauled into the U.S. In that constrained space, Powers imagined the wails of families ripped apart, the smells, the bellow of an auctioneer.
Traffic drives along Broad Street toward the Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon in Charleston, the site of slave auctions Davila researched. Public auctions were held outside on the building's north side.
When Davila emailed him, she also copied Margaret Seidler, a white woman whose [discovery of slave traders](https://www.postandcourier.com/news/a-white-woman-bridged-the-races-then-she-found-slave-traffickers-in-her-family/article_7b395e16-3dc8-11e8-aa1e-7308ef7578b4.html) among her own ancestors led her to work with the college’s Center for the Study of Slavery to financially and otherwise support [Davila’s research](https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/81875680c644cb589d4a46c28dcb527f/domestic-slave-trading-in-charleston-sc-1820-1855/index.html).
The next day, the three met on Zoom, stunned by her discovery.
“There were a lot of long pauses,” Davila recalled.
It was March 2022. She decided to announce the discovery in her upcoming master’s thesis.
A year later, in April, Davila defended [that thesis](https://avery.cofc.edu/public-memory-of-the-domestic-slave-trade-in-charleston-south-carolina-street-by-lauren-davila/). She got an A.
She had discovered what appears to be the largest known slave auction in the United States and, with it, a new story in the nation’s history of mass enslavement — about who benefited and who was harmed by such an enormous transaction.
But that story initially presented itself mostly as a great mystery.
The ad Davila found was brief. It yielded almost no details beyond the size of the sale and where it was being held — nothing about who sent the 600 people to auction, where they came from or whose lives were about to be uprooted.
But details survived, it turned out, tucked deep within Southern archives.
In May, Davila shared the ad with ProPublica, the first news outlet to reveal her discovery. A reporter then canvassed the Charleston newspapers leading up to the auction — and unearthed the identity of the rice dynasty responsible for the sale.
### The Ball Dynasty
The [ad Davila discovered](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23848817-full_page__charleston_courier__february_24_1835__p3) ran in the Charleston Courier on the sale’s opening day. But ads for large auctions were often published for several days, even weeks, ahead of time to drum up interest.
The ad (see bottom left of screenshot) that Davila found was buried in the middle of a sea of classifieds in the Charleston Courier on Feb. 24, 1835. The handwritten marks on preserved copies of old newspapers were made by typesetters or printers at the time for their records. Credit: NewsBank/Readex
A ProPublica reporter found the original ad for the sale, which ran more than two weeks before the one Davila spotted. Published on Feb. 6, 1835, it revealed that the sale of 600 people was part of the estate auction for John Ball Jr., scion of a [slave-owning planter regime](https://lowcountryafricana.com/ball-family-slaveholder-index/). Ball had died the previous year, and now five of his plantations were listed for sale — along with the people enslaved on them.
The Ball family might not be a household name outside of South Carolina, but it is widely known within the state thanks to a descendant named Edward Ball who wrote a bestselling book in 1998 that bared the family’s skeletons — and, with them, those of other Southern slave owners.
“[Slaves in the Family](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374534455/slaves-in-the-family)” drew considerable acclaim outside of Charleston, including a National Book Award. Black readers, North and South, praised it. But as Ball explained, “It was in white society that the book was controversial.” Among some white Southerners, the horrors of slavery had long gone minimized by a Lost Cause narrative of northern aggression and benevolent slave owners.
Based on his family’s records, Edward Ball described his ancestors as wealthy “rice landlords” who operated a “slave dynasty.” He estimated they enslaved about 4,000 people on their properties over 167 years, placing them among the “oldest and longest” plantation operators in the American South.
John Ball Jr. was a Harvard-educated planter who lived in a three-story brick house in downtown Charleston while operating at least five plantations he owned in the vicinity. By the time malaria killed him at age 51, he enslaved nearly 600 people including valuable drivers, carpenters, coopers and boatmen. His plantations spanned nearly 7,000 acres near the Cooper River, which led to Charleston’s bustling wharves and the Atlantic Ocean beyond.
ProPublica reached out to Edward Ball, who lives in Connecticut, to see if he had come across details about the sale during his research.
He said that 25 years ago when he wrote “Slaves in the Family,” he knew an enormous auction followed Ball Jr.’s death, “and yet I don’t think I contemplated it enough in its specific horror.” He saw the sale in the context of many large slave auctions the Balls orchestrated. Only a generation earlier, the estate of Ball Jr.’s father had sold 367 people.
“It is a kind of summit in its cruelty,” Ball said of the auction of 600 humans. “Families were broken apart, and children were sold from their parents, wives sold from their husbands. It breaks my heart to envision it.”
And it gets worse.
After ProPublica discovered the original ad for the 600-person sale, Seidler, the woman who supported Davila’s research, unearthed another puzzle piece. She found an ad to auction a large group of people enslaved by Keating Simons, the late father of Ball Jr.’s wife, Ann. Simons had died three months after Ball Jr., and the ad announced the sale of 170 people from his estate. They would be auctioned the same week, in the same place, as the 600.
That means over the course of four days — a Tuesday through Friday — Ann Ball’s family put up for sale 770 human beings.
In his book, Edward Ball described how Ann Ball “approached plantation management like a soldier, giving lie to the view that only men had the stomach for the violence of the business.” She once whipped an enslaved woman, whose name was given only as Betty, for not laundering towels to her liking, then sent the woman to the [Work House,](https://discovering.cofc.edu/items/show/31) a city-owned jail where Black people were imprisoned and tortured.
A week before the first auction ad appeared for Ball Jr.’s estate, a friend and business adviser dashed off a letter urging Ann Ball to sell all of her late husband’s properties and be freed of the burden. “It is impossible that you could undertake the management of the whole Estate for another year without great anxiety of mind,” the man wrote in a letter preserved at the South Carolina Historical Society.
Ball did what she wanted.
On Feb. 17, the day her husband’s land properties went to auction, she bought back two plantations, Comingtee and Midway — 3,517 acres in all — to run herself.
A week later, on the opening day of the sale of 600 people, she purchased 191 of them.
### More Than Names
In mid-March 1835, the auction house ran a final ad regarding John Ball Jr.’s “gang of negroes.” It advertised “residue” from the sale of 600, a group of about 30 people as yet unsold.
Ann Ball bought them as well.
Given she bought most in family groups, her purchase of 215 people in total spared many traumatic separations, at least for the moment.
As she picked who to purchase, she appears to have prioritized long-standing ties. Several were elderly, based on the low purchase price and their listed names — Old Rachel, Old Lucy, Old Charles.
Many names included on her bills of sale also mirror those recorded on an inventory of John Ball Jr.’s plantations, including Comingtee, where he and Ann had sometimes lived. Among them: Humphrey, Hannah, Celia, Charles, Esther, Daniel, Dorcas, Dye, London, Friday, Jewel, Jacob, Daphne, Cuffee, Carolina, Peggy, Violet and many more.
Most of their names are today just that, names.
But Edward Ball was able to find details about at least one family Ann Ball purchased. A woman named Tenah and her older brother Plenty lived on a plantation a few miles downriver from Comingtee that Ball Jr.’s uncle owned.
Edward Ball figured they came from a family of “blacksmiths, carpenters, seamstresses and other trained workers” who lived apart from the field hands who toiled in stifling, muddy rice plots. Tenah lived with her husband, Adonis, and their two children, Scipio and August. Plenty, who was a carpenter, lived next door with his wife and their three children: Nancy, Cato and Little Plenty.
When the uncle died, he left Tenah, Plenty and their children to John Ball Jr. The two families packed up and moved to Comingtee, then home to more than 100 enslaved people.
Life went on. Tenah gave birth to another child, Binah. Adonis tended animals in the plantation’s barnyard.
Although the families were able to stay together, they nonetheless suffered under enslavement. At one point, an overseer wrote in his weekly report to Ball Jr. that he had Adonis and Tenah whipped because he suspected they had butchered a sheep to add to people’s rations, Edward Ball wrote in his book.
After her husband’s death, Ann Ball’s purchase appears to have kept the two families together, at least many of them. The names Tenah, Adonis, Nancy, Binah, Scipio and Plenty are listed on her receipt from the auction’s opening day.
Yet, hundreds more people who remained for sale from the Ball auction likely “ended up in the transnational traffic to Mississippi and Louisiana,” said Edward Ball, now at work on a book about the domestic slave trade.
He noted that buyers attending East Coast auctions were mostly interstate slave traders who transported Black people to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, then resold them to owners of cotton plantations. In the early 1800s, cotton had taken over from rice and tobacco as the South’s king crop, fueling demand at plantations across the lower South and creating a mass migration of enslaved people.
### Birth of Generational Wealth
Although the sale of 600 people as part of one estate auction appears to be the largest in American history, the volume itself is hardly out of place on the vast scale of the nation’s chattel slavery system
Ethan Kytle, a history professor at California State University, Fresno, noted that the firm auctioning much of Ball’s estate — Jervey, Waring & White — alone advertised sales of 30, 50 or 70 people virtually every day.
“That adds up to 600 pretty quickly,” Kytle said. He and his wife, the historian Blain Roberts, co-wrote “[Denmark Vesey’s Garden](https://thenewpress.com/books/denmark-veseys-garden),” a book that examines what he called the former Confederacy’s “willful amnesia” about slavery, particularly in Charleston, and urges a more honest accounting of it.
Slavery was a form of mass commerce, he said. It made select white families so wealthy and powerful that their surnames still form a sort of social aristocracy in places like Charleston.
Although no evidence has surfaced yet about how much the auction of 600 people enriched the Ball family, the amount Ann Ball paid for about one-third of them is recorded in her bills of sale buried within the boxes and folders of [family papers](https://schistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Ball-family-papers-1134.00.pdf) at the South Carolina Historical Society. They show that she doled out $79,855 to purchase 215 people — a sum worth almost $2.8 million today.
The top dollar she paid for a single human was $505. The lowest purchase price was $20, for a person known as Old Peg.
Enslaved people drew widely varied prices depending on age, gender and skills. But assuming other buyers paid something comparable to Ann Ball’s purchase price, an average of $371 per person, the entire auction could have netted in the range of $222,800 — or about $7.7 million today — money then distributed among Ball Jr.’s heirs, including Ann.
They weren’t alone in profiting from this sale. Enslaved people could be bought on credit, so banks that mortgaged the sales made money, too. Firms also insured slaves, for a fee. Newspapers sold slave auction ads. The city of Charleston made money, too, by taxing public auctions. These kinds of profits helped build the foundation of the generational wealth gap that persists even today between Black and white Americans.
Jervey, Waring & White took a cut of the sale as well, enriching the partners’ bank accounts and their social standing.
Although the men orchestrated auctions to sell thousands of enslaved people, James Jervey [is](https://charleston.com/charleston-insider/diary-of-a-charleston-tour-guide/55-laurens-street-james-jervey-house) [remembered](https://charleston.com/charleston-insider/diary-of-a-charleston-tour-guide/55-laurens-street-james-jervey-house) as a prominent attorney and bank president who served on his church vestry, a “generous lover of virtue,” as the South Carolina Society described him in an 1845 resolution. A [brick mansion](https://charleston.com/charleston-insider/diary-of-a-charleston-tour-guide/55-laurens-street-james-jervey-house) in downtown Charleston bears his name.
Morton Waring married the daughter of a former governor. Waring’s family used enslaved laborers to build a [three-and-a-half story house](https://www.charlestonmuseum.org/research/collection/morton-waring-house/F4D7A4E3-8C3B-4197-B073-033417052370) that still stands in the middle of downtown. In 2018, country music star Darius Rucker and entrepreneur John McGrath bought it from the local Catholic diocese [for $6.25 million](https://www.postandcourier.com/news/south-of-broad-neighbors-upset-by-darius-ruckers-pool-house-plans/article_48b72a5a-1cc5-11ed-8fb5-4f50356f743d.html).
[Alonzo J. White](https://eveningpostindustries.cmail19.com/t/ViewEmail/j/E0C46EFF9C5C5426/66255C132D7DD1B7B4B1B1F623478121) was among the most notorious slave traders in Charleston history. He also served as chairman of the Work House commissioners, a role that required him to report to the city fees garnered from housing and “correction” of enslaved people tortured in the jail.
“Yet, these men were upheld by high society,” Davila said. “They are remembered as these great Christian men of high value.” After John Ball Jr. died, the City Council passed a resolution to express “a high testimonial of respect and esteem for his private worth and public services.”
But for the 600 people sold and their descendants? Only a stark reminder of how America’s entrenched racial wealth gap was born, Davila said, with repercussions still felt today.
@ -60,12 +60,8 @@ Toffler worried about all kinds of change, but *technological* change was the ma
During his brief stint at *Fortune* magazine, Toffler often wrote about tech, and warned about “information overload.” The implication was that human beings are a kind of data storage medium—and they’re running out of disk space.
It’s not clear that Toffler invented either of those terms—“future shock” or “information overload.” Back in 1963, the former phrase had shown up in a talk delivered to a group of educators by Charles Weingartner and Neil Postman. They defined “future shock” as the “social paralysis induced by rapid technological change.” Two years later, Toffler published an article in *Horizon* magazine entitled “The Future as a Way of Life,” which showcased some of the key points.
@ -122,12 +118,8 @@ Musical genres don’t change much from year to year, or even from decade to dec
Many of the biggest names in commercial music are the same ones who were popular when Toffler peddled his *Future Shock* concept back in the 1970s. For example, here’s what a search engine told me when I asked about the bestselling rock artists in the year 2023.
# The Great Grift: How billions in COVID-19 relief aid was stolen or wasted
WASHINGTON (AP) — Much of the theft was brazen, even simple.
Fraudsters used the Social Security numbers of dead people and federal prisoners to get unemployment checks. Cheaters collected those benefits in multiple states. And federal loan applicants weren’t cross-checked against a Treasury Department database that would have raised red flags about sketchy borrowers.
Criminals and gangs grabbed the money. But so did a U.S. soldier in Georgia, the pastors of a defunct church in Texas, a former state lawmaker in Missouri and a roofing contractor in Montana.
All of it led to the greatest grift in U.S. history, with thieves plundering billions of dollars [in federal COVID-19 relief aid intended to combat the worst pandemic](https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-pandemics-bills-legislation-coronavirus-pandemic-2d5b0ce9771b0ad88c607123b3bad8ee) in a century and to stabilize an economy in free fall.
An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.
That number is certain to grow as investigators dig deeper into thousands of potential schemes.
How could so much be stolen? Investigators and outside experts say the government, in seeking to quickly spend trillions in relief aid, conducted too little oversight during the pandemic’s early stages and instituted too few restrictions on applicants. In short, they say, the grift was just way too easy.
“Here was this sort of endless pot of money that anyone could access,” said [Dan Fruchter](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-fruchter-b2640b22/), chief of the fraud and white-collar crime unit at the [U.S. Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Washington](https://www.justice.gov/usao-edwa). “Folks kind of fooled themselves into thinking that it was a socially acceptable thing to do, even though it wasn’t legal.”
The U.S. government has charged more than 2,230 defendants with pandemic-related fraud crimes and is conducting thousands of investigations.
Most of the looted money was swiped from three large pandemic-relief initiatives launched during the Trump administration and inherited by President Joe Biden. Those programs were designed to help small businesses and unemployed workers survive the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic.
The pilfering was wide but not always as deep as the eye-catching headlines about cases involving many millions of dollars. But all of the theft, big and small, illustrates an epidemic of scams and swindles at a time America was grappling with overrun hospitals, school closures and shuttered businesses. Since the pandemic began in early 2020, [more than 1.13 million people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19](https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Michael Horowitz, [the U.S. Justice Department inspector general](https://oig.justice.gov/) who chairs the federal Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, told Congress the fraud is “clearly in the tens of billions of dollars” and may eventually exceed $100 billion.
Horowitz told the AP he was sticking with that estimate, but won’t be certain about the number until he gets more solid data.
“I’m hesitant to get too far out on how much it is,” he said. “But clearly it’s substantial and the final accounting is still at least a couple of years away.”
Mike Galdo, the U.S. Justice Department’s acting director for COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement, said, “It is an unprecedented amount of fraud.”
Before leaving office, former President Donald Trump approved emergency aid measures totaling $3.2 trillion, according to figures from the [Pandemic Response Accountability Committee](https://www.pandemicoversight.gov/). Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan authorized the spending of another $1.9 trillion. About a fifth of the $5.2 trillion has yet to be paid out, according to the committee’s most recent accounting.
Never has so much federal emergency aid been injected into the U.S. economy so quickly. “The largest rescue package in American history,” U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro told Congress.
The enormous scale of that package has obscured multibillion-dollar mistakes.
An $837 billion [IRS](https://apnews.com/article/www.irs.gov) program, for example, succeeded 99% of the time in getting economic stimulus checks to the proper taxpayers, according to the tax agency. Nevertheless, that 1% failure rate translated into nearly $8 billion going to “ineligible individuals,” a Treasury Department inspector general told AP.
An IRS spokesman said the agency does not agree with all the figures cited by the watchdog and noted that, even if correct, the loss represented a tiny fraction of the program’s budget.
The health crisis thrust the [Small Business Administration](https://apnews.com/article/www.sba.gov), an agency that typically gets little attention, into an unprecedented role. In the seven decades before the pandemic struck, for example, the SBA had doled out $67 billion in disaster loans.
When the pandemic struck, the agency was assigned to manage two massive relief efforts — the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan and Paycheck Protection programs, which would swell to more than a trillion dollars. SBA’s workforce had to get money out the door, fast, to help struggling businesses and their employees. COVID-19 pushed SBA’s pace from a walk to an Olympic sprint. Between March 2020 and the end of July 2020, the agency granted 3.2 million COVID-19 economic injury disaster loans totaling $169 billion, according to an SBA inspector general’s report, while at the same time implementing the huge new Paycheck Protection Program.
In the haste, guardrails to protect federal money were dropped. Prospective borrowers were allowed to “self-certify” that their loan applications were true. The CARES Act also barred SBA from looking at tax return transcripts that could have weeded out shady or undeserving applicants, a decision eventually reversed at the end of 2020.
“If you open up the bank window and say, give me your application and just promise me you really are who you say you are, you attract a lot of fraudsters and that’s what happened here,” Horowitz said.
The SBA inspector general’s office has estimated fraud in the COVID-19 economic injury disaster loan program at $86 billion and the Paycheck Protection program at $20 billion. The watchdog is expected in coming weeks to release revised loss figures that are likely to be much higher.
In an interview, SBA Inspector General Hannibal “Mike” Ware declined to say what the new fraud estimate for both programs will be.
“It will be a figure that is fair, that is 1,000% defensible by my office, fully backed by our significant criminal investigative activity that is taking place in this space,” Ware said.
Ware and his staff are overwhelmed with pandemic-related audits and investigations. The office has a backlog of more than 80,000 actionable leads, close to a 100 years’ worth of work.
“Death by a thousand cuts might be death by 80,000 cuts for them,” Horowitz said of Ware’s workload. “It’s just the magnitude of it, the enormity of it.”
A 2022 study from the University of Texas at Austin found almost five times as many suspicious Paycheck Protection loans as the $20 billion SBA’s inspector general has reported so far. The research, led by finance professor John Griffin, found as much as $117 billion in questionable and possibly fraudulent loans, citing indicators such as non-registered businesses and multiple loans to the same address.
Horowitz, the pandemic watchdog chairman, criticized the government’s failure early on to use the “Do Not Pay” Treasury Department database, designed to keep government money from going to debarred contractors, fugitives, felons or people convicted of tax fraud. Those reviews, he said, could have been done quickly.
“It’s a false narrative that has been set out, that there are only two choices,” Horowitz said. “One choice is, get the money out right away. And that the only other choice was to spend weeks and months trying to figure out who was entitled to it.”
In less than a few days, a week at most, Horowitz said, SBA might have discovered thousands of ineligible applicants.
“24 hours? 48 hours? Would that really have upended the program?” Horowitz said. “I don’t think it would have. And it was data sitting there. It didn’t get checked.”
The Biden administration put in place stricter rules to stem pandemic fraud, including use of the “Do Not Pay” database. Biden also recently proposed a $1.6 billion plan to boost law enforcement efforts to go after pandemic relief fraudsters.
“I think the bottom line is regardless of what the number is, it emanates overwhelmingly from three programs that were designed and originated in 2020 with too many large holes that opened the door to criminal fraud,” Gene Sperling, the White House [American Rescue Plan](https://apnews.com/article/biden-covid-business-health-congress-310542ef5cddc914104960a00ae356e0) coordinator, said in an interview.
“We came into office when the largest amounts of fraud were already out of the barn,” Sperling added.
In a statement, an SBA spokesperson declined to say whether the agency agrees with the figures issued by Ware’s office, saying the federal government has not developed an accepted system for assessing fraud in government programs. Previous analyses have pointed to “potential fraud” or “fraud indicators” in a manner that conveys those numbers as a true fraud estimate when they are not, according to the statement.
Han Nguyen, a spokesman for the SBA, said Monday that “the vast majority of the likely fraud originated in the first nine months of the pandemic programs, under the Trump administration.” For the COVID-19 economic injury disaster loan program, Nguyen said, SBA’s “working estimate” found $28 billion in likely fraud.
The coronavirus pandemic plunged the U.S. economy into a short but devastating recession. Jobless rates soared into double digits and Washington sent hundreds of billions of dollars to states to help the suddenly unemployed.
For crooks, it was like tossing chum into the sea to lure fish. Many of these state unemployment agencies used antiquated computer systems or had too few staff to stop bogus claims from being paid.
00:00
<p>AP correspondent Donna Warder reports on Pandemic Aid Great Grift; the plundering of billions of dollars during the worst pandemic in a century.</p>
“Yes, the states were overwhelmed in terms of demand,” said Brent Parton, acting assistant secretary of the U.S. Labor Department’s Employment and Training Administration. “We had not seen a spike like this ever in a global event like a pandemic. The systems were underfunded. They were not resilient. And I would say, more importantly, were vulnerable to sophisticated attacks by fraudsters.”
Fraud in pandemic unemployment assistance programs stands at $76 billion, according to congressional testimony from Labor Department Inspector General Larry Turner. That’s a conservative estimate. Another $115 billion mistakenly went to people who should not have received the benefits, according to his testimony.
Turner declined AP’s request for an interview.
Turner’s task in identifying all of the pandemic unemployment insurance fraud has been complicated by a lack of cooperation from the federal Bureau of Prisons, according to a September “alert memo” issued by his office. Scam artists used Social Security numbers of federal prisoners to steal millions of dollars in benefits.
His office still doesn’t know exactly how much was swiped that way. The prison bureau had declined to provide current data about federal prisoners. The AP reached out to the bureau several times for comment, starting June 2. Bureau spokesperson Emery Nelson said on Monday the agency had provided in February and March “all the necessary data” to the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. Turner is a member of the committee.
Ohio State Auditor Keith Faber saw trouble coming when safeguards to ensure the unemployment aid only went to people who legitimately qualified were lowered, making conditions ripe for fraud and waste. The state’s unemployment agency “took controls down because on the one hand, they literally were drinking from a firehose,” Faber said. “They had a year’s worth of claims in a couple of weeks. The second part of the problem was the (federal government) directed them to get the money out the door as quickly as possible and worry less about security. They took that to heart. I think that was a mistake.”
Ohio’s Department of Job and Family Services reported in February $1 billion in fraudulent pandemic unemployment claims and another $4.8 billion in overpayments.
The ubiquitous masks that became a symbol of the COVID-19 pandemic are seen on fewer and fewer faces. Hospitalizations for the virus have steadily declined, according to CDC data, and Biden in April ended the national emergency to respond to the pandemic.
But on politically divided Capitol Hill, lawmakers have not put the pandemic behind them and are engaged in a fierce debate over the success of the relief spending and who’s to blame for the theft.
Too much government money, Republicans argue, breeds fraud, waste and inflation. Democrats have countered that all the financial muscle from Washington saved lives, businesses and jobs.
The GOP-led House Oversight and Accountability Committee is investigating pandemic relief spending. “We must identify where this money went, how much ended up in the hands of fraudsters or ineligible participants, and what should be done to ensure it never happens again,” the panel’s chairman, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, said in a statement Tuesday.
Republicans and Democrats did, however, find common ground last year on bills to give the federal government more time to catch fraudsters. Biden in August signed legislation to increase the statute of limitations from five to 10 years on crimes involving the two major programs managed by the SBA.
The extra time will help federal prosecutors untangle pandemic fraud cases, which often involve identity theft and crooks overseas. But there’s no guarantee they’ll catch everyone who jumped at the chance for an easy payday. They’re busy, too, with crimes unrelated to pandemic relief funds.
“Do we have enough cases and leads that we could be doing them in 2030? We absolutely could,” said Fruchter, the federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Washington. “But my experience tells me that likely there will be other priorities that will come up and will need to be addressed. And unfortunately, in our office, we don’t have a dedicated pandemic fraud unit.”
Congress has not yet passed a measure that would give prosecutors the additional five years to go after unemployment fraudsters. That worries Turner, the Labor Department watchdog. Without the extension, he told Congress in a late May report, people who stole the benefits may escape justice.
Sperling, the White House official, said any future crisis that requires government intervention doesn’t have to be a choice between helping people in need and stopping fraudsters.
“The prevention strategy going forward is that in a crisis, you can focus on fast delivery to people in desperate situations without feeling that you can only get that speed by taking down commonsense anti-fraud guardrails,” he said.
# ‘Jurassic Narcs’: The Vietnam Vets Who Supersized the War on Drugs
On the muggy summer night of July 31, 1980, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) organized a sting operation at the Pompeii Warehouse south of Miami. Five undercover agents waited inside the warehouse with the drugs—15,000 [pounds of marijuana](https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-colombias-deadly-golden-triangle-where-guerrilla-dissidents-now-rule?ref=topic) in the back of a GM rental truck, which they planned to sell for $1 million cash.
Leading the sting was group supervisor Frank White, a 37-year-old Vietnam war hero. He and fellow agents were parked near the warehouse in unmarked sedans providing perimeter security.
At 9 p.m., a green Chevy with two antennas on the trunk pulled up to the warehouse and three men filed inside, carrying guns and police radios, and flashing police badges. “Police,” one of them yelled at the undercover agents. “You’re under arrest!”
The DEA agents, confused, lifted their hands. “I’m a DEA agent,” one said.
The gunmen searched the agents, took their guns, zip tied their hands, and forced them to lay face down on the concrete floor of the warehouse. The three gunmen weren’t really cops. It was a strange twist: drug dealers posing as lawmen, robbing lawmen posing as dealers.
The leader of the gunmen, a pudgy pot dealer named Walter Bostick, climbed into the marijuana-filled rental truck, as his colleagues lifted the overhead warehouse door. One of the DEA agents broke out of his cuffs, fired at the truck, and shouted over the radio, “It’s a rip-off!”
White flashed back to his partner, Frank Tummillo, killed in a rip-off in Times Square eight years earlier. President Nixon used the young agent’s death to rally support for his fledgling “war on drugs.” “We cannot bring Frank Tummillo back again any more than we can bring back the American soldiers who have given their lives in Vietnam,” President Nixon said in a radio address. Five months later, Nixon would escalate the war on drugs, launching the DEA.
Frank White's partner, Special Agent Frank Tummillo.
#### Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/DEA
White heard a burst from a DEA machine gun, shotgun blasts, then saw the rental truck ram through the partially closed warehouse gate, creating a shower of splinters. White, in his sedan, drove straight at the oncoming truck. He was moments from slamming into the heavier, narcotics-loaded vehicle, when the truck veered off the road and crashed into a ditch.
White jumped from his car and moved toward the rental truck’s passenger side. A fellow agent advanced toward the driver side. White spotted the driver—Bostick—lift a black Browning high power pistol. He yelled to the other agent, “Get down! Get down!”
Bostick heard him and aimed his pistol at White’s head. White gripped his 1911 pistol with two hands and fired seven rounds through the rental truck’s side window. Glass rained down, as White crouched next to the truck, checking his body for wounds and slamming a new clip into his pistol.
Bright muzzle flashes illuminated the night sky as White’s teammates emptied shotgun slugs and buckshot into the truck’s cab. Leaning against the truck, White could feel the bullets pound into the sheet metal. Figuring the driver was still a threat, White leaped onto the truck’s running board, grabbed the passenger door handle with his left hand, swung his pistol around with his right, and fired another clip at the dealer. Through the gun smoke, White saw the dealer’s body slumped over the steering wheel, with 32 bullet holes in him.
*The Miami Herald* called it a “Bonnie and Clyde” style massacre. “He had more bullet holes in him than if he’d run into a machine gun,” the Dade County medical examiner told the newspaper. White became the focus of a homicide investigation launched by the office of the local state attorney, Janet Reno. But when homicide investigators arrived at the warehouse, the DEA was cleaning up the evidence, without having photographed the scene. Agents testified Bostick had fired first, but it turned out he hadn’t fired a shot.
When asked in court why he’d shot the fleeing dealer nine times, White is said to have replied: “Nine? Because I ran out of bullets.”
## Surviving two wars
When I reached out to the Association of Federal Narcotics Agents, asking about the Vietnam veterans who helped shape the early DEA, a contact immediately recommended Frank White. “I swear the first time I saw Frank walk into a room,” he told me, “I could hear the sound of a Huey’s rotor blades.”
I tracked down White just south of Chicago. He’d retired from the DEA three decades earlier, but continued his daily workouts and made regular visits to the Glen Park Izaak Walton pistol range, where he was known for his pinpoint accuracy (his Colt Combat Commander pistol, a gift from George H.W. Bush with ivory grips and engraved with White’s initials, FEW, is on display in the NRA Museum). He wrote a blog called “The White Report,” where he shared lessons in gun tactics, commented on police deadly force incidents, and advocated for better training of officers to reduce the danger to themselves and others during high stress encounters.
““The Citadel gave me a rich scholastic experience, a sense of order and a disciplined approach to life….””
— Frank White
His voice surprised me: His thick New York accent and short nervous sentences combined to create a Woody Allen effect. But his philosophy and diction were that of a soldier. Instead of using my name in emails, he addressed me (in ALL CAPS) as “WARRIOR.” Instead of “OK,” he wrote, “10-4.” Instead of “keep me posted,” he wrote, “I’LL STAND IN THE DOOR AND AWAIT YOUR GREEN LIGHT.” Instead of “All the best,” he signed off with that old warrior’s promise: “SEMPER FI.”
A DEA agent stirs cocaine paste in December 1989 during an operation in Peru.
#### Patrick Aventurier/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
“There is a direct translation of some of \[Vietnam’s\] battlefield tactics into law enforcement,” says Matthew Pembleton, author of the book *Containing Addiction* about the early years of the war on drugs. “You’ve got the same pilots who were flying helicopter missions in Vietnam buzzing marijuana fields in California’s Emerald Triangle in the 1970s.”
Around the DEA, they’re called the Jurassic Narcs: the hard-charging Vietnam veterans like White who formed the core of the early agency. They were sent to fight an un-winnable and unpopular war abroad, only to be recruited to fight the un-winnable war on drugs back in the U.S. The agents applied their Vietnam experience to dangerous undercover operations in drug-infested urban environments. “The tactics you learn in Vietnam,” White told me, “it’s often eyeball to eyeball. Up close. That’s what it’s like being an agent.”
With little in the way of an overarching strategy, the DEA adopted an uncomplicated approach: hunt the bad guys, cut off their suppliers, and seize contraband. If a sledgehammer is a blunt tool for solving a problem, the DEA’s first agents were wrecking balls. Motivated by a hatred of drugs and often tormented by wartime demons, these agents became crusaders, a ’70s and ’80s version of *The Untouchables*.
“I genuinely think it’s less about blood lust than the joy of the hunt and the thrill of the caper,” says Pembleton. “In depicting drugs as a terrible menace, they convinced themselves and everyone else that what they were doing—all the rules that they were breaking, and all the power that they were accruing—was absolutely necessary.”
They were agents like Billy Mockler, who in the 1980s tracked and busted a giant Medellín Cartel cocaine lab in the Colombian jungle; or Hector Berrellez, who kidnapped a Mexican doctor suspected of involvement in the murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena; or Cellerino Castillo, who joined the agency because of his experience watching heroin kill a fellow GI. “His death scene gave me a purpose,” Castillo later wrote in his memoir. “If ever I left Vietnam, I would put all my energy into fighting America’s drug habit.”
From the outset, the DEA had a reputation as a rogue outfit among federal law-enforcement agencies. In 1977, according to *The Washington Post*, the Justice Department considered shutting the agency down, given concerns over its disregard for suspects’ civil rights, its focus on ineffective “street busts,” and its warlike tactics. Indeed, the 1970s saw a spike in violent drug busts, and the DEA was often involved in risky undercover stings, car chases, and daylight shootouts. Some argued that the aggressive approach was necessary because the organizations controlling the drug trade were becoming ever more sophisticated, powerful, and deadly. But to critics, the DEA’s penchant for violence was counterproductive.
The debate rages on, some 50 years later. The ACLU has warned about the excessive militarization of American policing, pointing to a classified DEA memo that “all but confirms the blurring of the lines between the drug war and the U.S. military.”
Criminal justice scholars agree. “The assumption is that if the cops are in a war on drugs… they’re being outgunned,” says Scott Phillips, a professor of criminal justice at Buffalo State College. “I’m old enough to remember when George H.W. Bush held up an Uzi \[and\] said this is the gun of choice of the drug dealers. I was a police officer in Houston in the mid-’80s, and I had a six-shot revolver, which was perfectly fine at the time, and perfectly fine now.”
President George H.W. Bush holds up a bag of crack cocaine seized by DEA agents during his first address to the nation from the Oval Office in 1989.
#### Mark Reinstein/Corbis via Getty Images
Mirroring the heroin epidemic of the 1970s, the DEA’s new target is another opioid: fentanyl. Last year, the agency launched a 23-state initiative called Operation Overdrive to crack down on the powerful drug, conducting raids, making arrests, and seizing contraband.
The ACLU refers to these tactics as “stale and warmed-over war on drugs leftovers,” arguing that instead, “lawmakers should be laser-focused on rapidly scaling up evidence-based solutions that have proven effective at saving lives: overdose prevention centers, fentanyl test strips, safe supply, drug decriminalization, public education campaigns, and low-barrier access to naloxone and other rehabilitative and life-saving therapies.”
American voters, meanwhile, have lost confidence in the government’s approach to drug enforcement. Eighty-three percent of Democrats, 85 percent of Independents, and 82 percent of Republicans believe “the war on drugs has failed.”
“Despite excelling as a frontline commander, White had no desire to become a career military man.”
Jeremy Kuzmarov, author of the book *The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs*, argues the premise of the war on drugs, like the war in Vietnam, was faulty from the outset. “Vietnam was a quagmire and the war on drugs is a quagmire,” he says. “People often live dreary lives and it’s human nature to seek intoxication of some kind. By fighting a war on drugs, you’re fighting a human impulse. So, the war on drugs will never succeed.”
White was a veteran of two failed wars, Vietnam and the war on drugs. But he remained proud of his service in both and considered the war on drugs a righteous one. “Part of it was continued service to your country,” White said. “It did feel something noble.”
## Toy soldiers
The first time Frank White wanted to be a soldier was when he was 9 years old. Growing up in Manhattan, where his father owned a liquor store and his mother worked at Columbia University, he became friends with a middle-aged man who lived in the same apartment building. The man would often talk about his son, who’d been killed at the Battle of the Bulge near the end of World War II. The grieving father gave White his son’s old toy soldiers; and as White played with the little figurines on the carpeted floor of the quiet apartment, he’d listen to the man’s stories about his son, who’d won a Silver Star fighting the Germans. “If he could do it,” White thought, “I wanted to do it.”
He started training in high school, forgoing alcohol to keep his body clean, and waking up at 3:30 every morning for a three-hour workout. At 18, he enrolled at The Citadel, the state-run military college in South Carolina. The training was Spartan-like, with grueling physical conditioning and rampant hazing, all to instill discipline, humility, and mental fortitude in the cadets. White remembered, “The Citadel gave me a rich scholastic experience, a sense of order and a disciplined approach to life…”
White counted himself lucky to graduate in 1965, just as the Vietnam War was heating up. He believed that America would lose in Vietnam, having studied the experience of the French, but that mattered less to him than putting his training to the test. “I was 22 years of age, I was a paratrooper, and I wanted to lead men in combat,” White recalled. On the flight to Vietnam, however, he worried about how he’d react under fire, whether he’d freeze up.
His first commander in Vietnam, whose actual name was Colonel Fear, sensed White’s apprehension and looked him hard in the eyes. “Soldiers may die as a result of your decisions, but if you fail to make a decision, I will court-martial you,” Fear growled. “Now get out and lead.”
Lieutenant White’s first crucible came on Thanksgiving, 1966, when his team of riflemen deployed in choppers to the Laotian border with orders to blow up a North Vietnamese base camp they thought was abandoned. Humping through the dense, triple-canopy jungle, a couple of hundred yards from the camp, White’s sergeant grabbed him by the sleeve. “They’re here,” he whispered. “They’re all around us.”
They crossed a gentle stream and were climbing the slope to the other side when the enemy opened fire. The battle lasted two days, with White’s team surrounded by about 200 enemy soldiers. On the second day, with his battered, shrinking team pinned down by a nearby machine gun, White climbed out of his foxhole and ran in a crouch toward the gun. The thick jungle made it difficult to see, but White had a good sense of the gun’s location, since it had killed several of his men. He arrived near the muzzle of the big belt-fed machine gun, where he watched a pair of enemy soldiers climb into a hole next to the weapon. He lifted his shotgun, leaned into the hole, and fired. He heard muffled screams under the ground, then more movement, so he reloaded the shotgun and kept firing until everyone in the hole was dead. (White was awarded a medal for his decisiveness and gallantry.)
Despite excelling as a frontline commander, White had no desire to become a career military man. After serving for a year in Vietnam, all of it spent in the jungle, he was debating what to do next when a Huey helicopter landed at his team’s jungle camp, flattening the tall grass with its propwash. There was a mailbag on board, with a letter from White’s father. The letter contained a newspaper clipping about a team of daring federal narcotics agents busting drug dealers in New York. White’s father—who knew his son’s appetite for adventure and derived a vicarious thrill—had written in the margin, “Take a look at this.”
A DEA agent stands with a blindfolded prisoner following a raid on a cocaine lab in the Peruvian jungle.
#### Gregory Smith/Corbis via Getty Images
## In the street
Four years later, back home in Manhattan, White stalked through the darkness toward an idling Cadillac. It was boxed in, with White’s car parked in front of it, and several follow cars behind it. Gripping his .380 Walther PPK, White squinted through the windshield at the driver: Zack Robinson. A major heroin dealer, Robinson was an associate of Frank Lucas, the king of the Harlem heroin scene.
The city’s five boroughs were witnessing a surge in heroin addiction, murder and crime that summer, which would earn New York the nickname “Fear City.” The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) had been after Robinson for years. *Now’s our chance*, thought White.
White was approaching the Cadillac when it accelerated in reverse and crashed into one of the BNDD cars boxing it in. As metal crunched and glass showered, White spotted Robinson lift a long-barreled handgun above the steering wheel.
White fired through the windshield, the bullet piercing the glass and striking Robinson in the chest. Another agent fired through the Cadillac’s rolled-down driver’s window, hitting Robinson twice, then White fired six rapid shots into Robinson’s body.
Even with nine slugs in him, the former heavyweight boxer dragged himself across the center console and opened the passenger’s side door. Looking out, drenched in blood, Robinson saw White’s rookie partner, Frank Tummillo, pointing a revolver at him.
Far from a Vietnam hero, 24-year-old Tummillo joined the BNDD after 16 years of Catholic schools and still lived with his parents. The bloody Robinson staggered a few steps toward the young agent. Tummillo lowered his gun, then Robinson collapsed. (Remarkably, despite being shot nine times, Robinson survived the assault).
The New York City narcs worked on the 14th floor of 90 Church St., a squat, blocky building that shared offices with the Post Office, the IRS, and the Treasury Department, which back in Prohibition days had held the mandate to root out smugglers and bootleggers. As a rookie agent, White had trained under World War II veterans—“kick-ass guys,” he remembered—and worked alongside the agents who severed the French Connection. Most of the men in White’s group were military veterans: a captain in military intelligence who’d served in Vietnam, an Air Force radar captain, and a lieutenant in the Coast Guard. Supervising the office was Jim Hunt, an Army veteran like White who’d been wounded in the legs by a German machine gun in World War II.
Just as in Vietnam, where hawks called for the government to “take the handcuffs off” the soldiers and let them win the war, many agents in White’s group deplored judges who were soft on crime, nicknaming them “Weak Annies.” One agent told *The**New York Times*, “Do you know what it’s like to risk your life on a job and then see a guy walk?” The agent said he’d voted for President Nixon—“to get rid of most of the Weak Annies in the courts.”
Tummillo represented a more restrained model of drug enforcement, as when he’d lowered his pistol during the Robinson shootout. “He was unique as an agent,” White would recall. “Quiet, considerate. Most people are more boisterous, loud, more cop‐type, aggressive.” White added, “Everybody had dignity, to \[Tummillo\]. Many times he said he was sorry for \[the dealers\], they’d grown up in ghetto conditions, where the only people they could look up to were peddlers driving their Cadillacs. He’d say it was too bad they didn’t have the strength of family he had.”
“Roy Kahn, an assistant state attorney under Janet Reno, lambasted White in the press, calling him negligent and out-of-control: “The man should not be in the position he’s in.””
Tummillo’s empathy and good nature made him a natural for undercover work, winning him the affection and trust of even the most hardened drug traffickers. A rising star within the agency, his pay shot up from $12,000 to $19,000 and he even got to meet President Nixon in a bureau event at the White House. Team members often borrowed him to conduct undercover busts, exposing him to longer hours and more danger.
At 10 p.m. on October 12, 1972, White was at his desk, clacking out a report on his typewriter, when he got the call that his partner, Tummillo, had been gunned down by a suspected drug smuggler and was in critical condition at a local hospital.
Tummillo had been conducting an undercover buy-bust at the Sheraton Midtown Motor Inn, a seedy Times Square hotel favored by pimps and drug dealers. Tummillo showed the two traffickers the money, and they said they’d come back with the drugs. Instead, they came back with guns drawn—a “rip-off.”
White sped to the hospital in his sedan, his mind swirling. Earlier that day, Tummillo had told White that he was nervous about the operation and planned to back out. The young agent was less experienced with a gun than combat-savvy White. Set to marry his high school sweetheart in a couple months, Tummillo had confessed to White that he might not be cut out for the dangerous work of an undercover narc. White had promised his young partner that whenever a shootout went down, he’d have his back. But a different group of agents had organized the Sheraton operation, so White hadn’t been there to fulfill his promise.
Arriving at the hospital, White was directed to the emergency trauma center. It was quiet inside as he walked alone to the steel table in the middle of the room. There lay a body bag. White pulled up the zipper slowly and looked down on the lifeless face of his partner. Tummillo had a thin mustache, wispier than White’s fuller one. His expression was blank, and the two bullet holes in his chest were dark. Tummillo was gone.
DEA agents and Peruvian special anti-narcotics police attack and destroy cocaine paste processing plants in the Huallagua valley from a base in Tingo Maria, Peru.
#### Greg Smith/Corbis via Getty Images
## Family man
Immediately after Tummillo’s death, White was put in charge of a DEA group. He recruited agents like him and Tummillo: hard-working, self-motivated, willing to take risks and make busts. “I had a motto,” White said: “Be good or be gone.”
White’s responsibilities also expanded on the home front when he and his wife decided to adopt a child. White had the idea to adopt from Vietnam, given his connection to the country and the fact so many children were being killed in the war. The couple went through the lengthy adoption process. Finally, a child services adviser informed them who their son would be: a young boy in an orphanage outside Saigon. The boy’s parents had been killed in the fighting, and he’d suffered a shrapnel wound to the neck that destroyed part of his hearing. White contacted a fellow narcotics agent in Vietnam and shipped over some toys to deliver to the boy’s orphanage: building blocks, toy trucks, a baseball bat and glove. Soon after, the boy was on a plane to New York’s La Guardia Airport, where he met his new parents.
White’s son was his last connection to Vietnam. He didn’t keep up with any fellow veterans—“the ones that I got close with all died,” he said—and he’d avoided taking pictures. “I was hesitant because I didn’t want pictures of people I knew that was going to get killed; and also I figured I was going to get killed. So I just lived that day… I just stayed away from pictures, memories.” It is a symptom of PTSD—dodging distressing feelings, thoughts, and memories—and yet White told me he never believed in PTSD. “People that get it, they break along a fissure that’s already there before the fight,” he argued. “Combat never affected me.”
After eight years leading DEA groups in New York, White was told by his supervisor that his tactical expertise was needed elsewhere. Cocaine was flooding into South Florida, triggering a spike in violence and murders. “We’re sending you to Miami,” White’s supervisor said.
Following his shootout at Miami’s Pompeii warehouse, newspaper reporters grappled with whether White’s actions had been reckless, or necessary. “Depending on whom you talk to,” reporter Carl Hiaasen wrote for *The Miami Herald*, “Francis White is either a trigger-happy renegade, or one of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s elite super-agents.”
When agents in White’s group spoke to the media, they routinely praised him for his skill, leadership, and instinct. “Frank is an agent’s agent, always first through the door,” one team member would later recall. “His body hums when he’s on the street. He knows what’s going on, he knows his prey and when to anticipate trouble.”
“He was 52 years old and couldn’t envision how he’d spend the rest of his life, stripped of his purpose waging the war on drugs.”
Agents appreciated White’s steady hand during gun fights, which can wreak havoc on the nerves of the uninitiated. One of the agents handcuffed in the warehouse told a reporter that he went home and “screamed, cried, and cursed until I got it out of my system.” He added: “If you don’t, you’re liable to get aggressive or paranoid and hurt someone.” Another Miami DEA agent told a reporter, “Do you know what the adrenaline is like when you pull a gun on somebody? After it’s over, your heart is pounding… That night you can’t sleep, your muscles twitch while you’re lying in bed.”
But others argued White’s tactics had no place in a civilized democracy. Roy Kahn, an assistant state attorney under Janet Reno, lambasted White in the press, calling him negligent and out-of-control. “The man should not be in the position he’s in,” Kahn told *The Miami Herald*.
Despite the scrutiny, White refused to alter his tactics. A year after the warehouse operation, his squad tracked drug fugitive Miguel Miranda to a restaurant in South Miami. Miranda—one of the city’s infamous “Cocaine Cowboys”—tried to escape in his car, ramming into other vehicles then crashing into a wall. For at least one of White’s team members, it was a predictable scenario: “Things always seemed to gravitate toward us, especially when Frank was around,” he’d recall.
White leaped from his vehicle, fired from behind Miranda’s car and hit him twice in the head. The DEA conducted an internal probe, and Reno’s office launched a second homicide investigation. “It was known that Janet Reno… wanted to charge him,” a state attorney would recall.
White, in a *Miami Herald* interview, defended his actions: “I have no badge of shame about what happened… How *do* you arrest a guy like that?” In a search of Miranda’s compound, DEA agents found machine guns, shotguns, and pistols; a silencer-equipped .22 linked to 10 dead bodies found around Miami; jars of cocaine and other drugs; bullet holes in the walls; a sex room equipped with handcuffs, chains, and an examination table; and a backyard animal sacrifice altar. “A bunker Hitler would have been proud of,” White told the newspapers.
White was cleared in both homicide probes and the DEA investigation. In 1984, Vice President George H.W. Bush appointed him to lead the Joint Task Force on Drugs, which came with a desk job in D.C. It was an honor, but White loathed putting on a suit and sitting in an office. His mindset remained that of a street agent, even in his choice of office décor: He kept two submachine guns against the wall with boxes of extra ammo stacked nearby. On one occasion, when a visitor asked about the high-caliber weapons, White replied: “I survived Vietnam and if the Colombians storm this place, I will be ready.”
Around that time, in the mid-’80s, White’s marriage fell apart. He and his wife divorced, and their son stayed with his wife.
In 1988, White was summoned for one last mission, an elite clandestine operation in Peru called Operation Snowcap. The objective was to seek out and destroy cocaine laboratories on the drug lords’ home turf. Riding in a Huey helicopter over the dense Peruvian jungle, armed with a machine gun, ammo clips, and fragmentation grenades, White felt like he was back in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, back where he belonged.
Two years later, he grudgingly left Peru and was transferred to the DEA’s Chicago field office. There, as Associate Special Agent in Charge, he openly criticized President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno for what he saw as their lack of resolve in the war on drugs.
By the mid-’90s, most of the Jurassic Narcs had retired or had been pushed out, as the DEA shifted from the “kick down the door” tactics of its early days to an emphasis on technology and wiretaps. White drew frequent criticism for his anachronistic attitude and militaristic approach to drug enforcement, and in 1995, he was pressured to retire.
He was 52 years old at the time and couldn’t envision how he’d spend the rest of his life, stripped of his purpose waging the war on drugs, stripped of his lifelong identity as a soldier. Boxing up his office, White flashed on that melancholy line from General Douglas MacArthur’s farewell speech at West Point: “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”
Specially trained U.S. Drug Enforcement agents and Peruvian special anti-narcotics police attack and destroy cocaine paste processing plants in the Huallagua Valley from a base in Tingo Maria, Peru in the 1980s.
#### Greg Smith/Corbis via Getty Images
## The rifleman
Had White fought in the days of MacArthur, his warrior spirit may have been celebrated. But as the veteran of two controversial, failed wars, there were no newspaper obituaries to mark his passing on Dec. 15, 2022. Tributes did, however, pour in on White’s online memorial page. Without exception, the commenters celebrated him for his bravery, leadership, and patriotism.
“One of a kind,” wrote George Whelan. “Made decisions, stuck by them and supported his subordinates to the hilt. Saved my butt more than once and never brought it up. Controversial for sure but effective. Did whatever he instructed subordinates to do.”
“I always looked up to him,” wrote Brian Chobot. “From Frank I learned the meaning of my love for my country, my love for the US Army and my career in law enforcement.”
“May his memory not fade away,” wrote Guadalupe Sanchez. “A true leader and warrior in his time.”
His body was interred at his old college, The Citadel. I visited the school in late May, around Memorial Day. It sits on the outskirts of Charleston, where Spanish moss hangs low over cobblestone streets lined with old antebellum homes, and out on the harbor, a giant American flag flutters over Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired. With the Citadel’s student body on summer furlough, there were no recruits marching in formation or spilling out of the school buildings, built to resemble a castle’s tower and fortifications. Sprinkled around the wide grassy parade grounds, on display, were a pair of gold cannons, a World War II Sherman tank, and a Vietnam-era F4 Phantom fighter jet. In the eerily empty school, the old artifacts of war reminded me of dinosaur skeletons at a natural history museum, awe-inspiring in their time, now relics of the past.
White’s ashes are housed inside the belltower of the Citadel's old church, Summerall Chapel. In front of the belltower stands a plaque of dark granite, engraved with the words: “Duty Done, they rest, so we may live free.”
I entered the belltower alone and searched its four walls for the vault containing White’s ashes. His simple bronze nameplate was difficult to find among the rows of identical nameplates. Knowing White’s story, I felt he deserved more fanfare—a short writeup perhaps, or at least flowers or a flag. Then again, he never aspired to fanfare, to high rank or fancy titles. Of his many nicknames—“Dirty Harry” and “The Wizard” among them—he told me his favorite was “The Rifleman,” because that’s how he saw himself: as a humble rifleman. And there, in the dimly lit crypt at the Citadel, scanning the names of other warriors past, I decided this was the perfect resting place for Frank White, the Rifleman. He was with his men.
*Andrew Dubbins is an award-winning journalist and author of* [*Into Enemy Waters: A World War II Story of the Demolition Divers Who Became the Navy SEALs*](https://www.amazon.com/Into-Enemy-Waters-Demolition-Divers/dp/1635767725/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=)*. His Alta Journal story, “When the Mafia Came to Lodi,” is in development as an Amazon series starring Ewan McGregor. His Daily Beast story, “Snow Fall,” is in development as a feature film. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian, Men’s Health, and other publications.*
Différentes pistes d’investissement pour le pécule paternel.
 
#### Metaux
Achat de métaux précieux + potentiellement de métaux industriels
Ok pour Vincent
 
#### Transition Energetique
Private Equity: Seedrs
[Invest online in startups via equity crowdfunding | Seedrs](https://www.seedrs.com/)
 
#### Pierres Précieuses
Voir avec Virginie
 
#### Forêt
[Investir en groupement forestier : GFI et GFF - AVENUE DES INVESTISSEURS](https://avenuedesinvestisseurs.fr/investir-groupement-forestier-gfi-et-gff/)
**Les forêts sont un actif à part entière et une valeur refuge**qui a prouvé sa résistance face aux différentes crises économiques de ces dernière décennies. Car les arbres continuent de pousser lors des krachs boursiers, krachs immobiliers, COVID, etc. En pratique, il est possible d’investir sur des groupements forestiers d’investissement (GFF ou GFI)**à partir de 1 000 €**et d’obtenir des parts. Sachant que**les groupements forestiers sont diversifiés sur des dizaines de forêt dans différentes régions**.
**Le rendement sur dividende visé est de 1,5 % par an environ**, selon les résultats de la coupe du bois et des droits de chasse. À cela s’ajoute l’évolution de la valeur des forêts (tendance à la hausse ces dernières décennies, ceci dit il existe un risque de perte en capital). Il s’agit d’un investissement à long terme qui peut avoir toute sa place dans un patrimoine bien diversifié.
En investissant dans les groupements fonciers forestiers ou groupements forestiers d’investissement (GFF ou GFI),**vous obtiendrez 3 avantages fiscaux :**
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---
 
### Immobilier
 
[Sphère Immo : Tout l'immobilier neuf pour habiter ou investir](https://www.sphere-immo.com)
Cook the chicken and onions: Position a rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 350 degrees.
2. ### Step 2
In a large skillet over medium-low heat, combine the olive oil, onions and 1 teaspoon of the salt and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onions soften considerably but do not brown or caramelize, 30 to 40 minutes.
3. ### Step 3
Meanwhile, in a large saucepan over medium heat, combine the chicken, 1 teaspoon of the salt, the bay leaf, allspice berries and enough water to cover. Bring to a bare simmer, then reduce the heat to low and cook until the chicken registers 165 degrees on an instant-read thermometer, 15 to 20 minutes. Remove from the heat, then drain and rinse the chicken. Transfer to a bowl, cover and set aside until cool enough to handle, then shred the chicken using your hands or two forks.
4. ### Step 4
Arrange the pita squares on a large, rimmed baking sheet, transfer to the oven and toast for about 15 minutes, or until dry and crisp and starting to darken, stirring occasionally. (If using store-bought pita chips, skip this step.)
5. ### Step 5
When the onions have softened, add the shredded chicken, sumac, cumin, pepper and cinnamon and stir to incorporate. Continue to cook, stirring frequently, until the flavors meld, 3 to 5 minutes. Taste, and season with the remaining 1 teaspoon of salt, if desired. Add the pine nuts, and toss or stir to combine.
6. ### Step 6
Make the yogurt sauce: While the onions and chicken cook, in a large bowl, whisk together the yogurt, lemon juice, tahini, garlic and salt until fully combined. Set aside until ready to assemble.
7. ### Step 7
Assemble the dish: Place the toasted pita on the bottom of a large, rimmed serving platter and top with the chicken-and-onion mixture. Evenly spoon the yogurt sauce over, smoothing it out if necessary. Sprinkle with your chosen combination of garnishes and a drizzle of olive oil, and serve.
1. Season steaks with salt and pepper and rub with a ½ teaspoon olive oil. Let rest for at least 15 minutes.
2. In a large bowl, toss frisée, endive, pistachios and cheddar. Halve fruit and discard pits. Slice into wedges, about ¼ to ½ inch-thick, and toss into the salad.
3. Add 2 tablespoons oil to a large, heavy skillet and heat over medium-high. Once hot, sear steaks until a golden crust forms, about 2-3 minutes. Flip and sear reverse side, 2-3 minutes more. Transfer to a plate and rest for at least 10 minutes. Slice steak thinly across the grain.
4. Meanwhile, make vinaigrette: In a small bowl, combine vinegar, shallot, mustard and honey. Season with salt and rest for at least 5 minutes. Slowly whisk in 3 tablespoons of olive oil.
5. Spoon half the vinaigrette onto the salad and toss until evenly coated. Season with salt and pepper and add more dressing if necessary. Divide salad between four plates and nestle sliced steak in and over the leaves. Scatter any bits of nuts and cheese that are remaining in the salad bowl over the top.
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iOS
1 year ago
