I didn’t think too much about the news because, like most people, I knew the Olympic bomber was an overweight guy with a mustache. Then I remembered – the fat guy, Richard Jewell, had been the victim of a rush to judgment by both police and the press. The real bomber was Eric Rudolph.
Read MoreThe Journal’s editorial page is reliably conservative, and its denunciation of Trump reflects the growing fear that his candidacy will imperil Republican candidates across the country.
Read MoreWinston Moseley died last week. He was 81 and had spent the last 51 years in prison for killing Kitty Genovese the night of March 13, 1964 in Queens, N.Y. It was a murder that seared America. Dozens of people heard Kitty’s screams but “didn’t want to get involved,” a response now known as the “Genovese syndrome,” which led to the adoption of 911. The original reports are in dispute, but not the horrific rape and murder (and not necessarily in that order) nor the hours-long agony of the 28-year-old woman. Kitty’s brother Bill was 16, and the murder of the sister he adored affected every aspect of his life. Not wanting to be an 'apathetic bystander,' he enlisted in the Marines out of high school and lost his legs in Vietnam. He spent the rest of his life trying to understand what happened that night in Queens, always seeking closure.
Yesterday his search came to an extraordinary end, which I lift verbatim from The New York Times.
To the Editor:
With Winston Moseley’s death comes, maybe, the final chapter in the tragic story of the events of the early morning of Friday, March 13, 1964.
As my mother would have wished, my family’s “better angels” do now express our condolences to the Moseley family, most especially to the Rev. Steven Moseley, one of Winston’s sons, a man of faith, love and courage, who struggled in his formative years with a stain and dilemma undeservedly forced onto his being.
May the spirit, in whom I believe that Kitty, and now Winston, reside, help resolve the eternal question: What do we owe to all our fellow beings? This is a question that each human being must strive to answer, one moment at a time. Let us join with the hope of shared egalitarian equanimity.
William J. Genovese
Washington, Conn.
“All rise,” said the clerk, and they all rose, including the defendant, whose slight build and guileless face belie the horrific things he had done. That contrast is at the core of the defense’s strategy to save the life of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, whose trial entered its sentencing phase this week. The trial had been heading here since the opening statement, when Judy Clarke said, “It was him,” acknowledging in three syllables that her client had committed the crimes of which he stood accused – that he was one of two men whose knapsacks filled with bombs brought carnage and never-ending grief to the Boston Marathon two years ago. Clarke’s aim was not to assert Tsarnaev’s innocence, but to save his life. On Monday, the defense team cut right to the chase: Spare our client the death penalty, said attorney David Bruck, because life in prison without the possibility of parole is far worse. “One punishment is over quickly, the other will last for life,” condemned to a solitary existence 12x7-foot cell at Colorado’s super max prison, described by its former warden as “a clean version of hell.”
The defense’s portrait of Tsarnaev as a lost teenager – “a good kid” from a disintegrated family, overwhelmed by his murderous and fanatical brother – points to the possibility of rehabilitation.
“When it’s 23 hours a day in a room with a slit of a window where you can’t even see the Rocky Mountains,” ex-warden Robert Hood told Mark Binelli, “let’s be candid here. It’s not designed for rehabilitation.”
The defense relentlessly builds its case of humanizing Jokar.
He was an incredibly hard worker who “always wanted to do the right thing,” his third-grade teacher told the jury.
“He looks around the room,” said a spectator, “and maybe it’s the last time he sees a woman in his life.”
“Jokar was super smart, very kind . . . a really lovely person,” said his fifth-grade teacher.
“This is where the government keeps other terrorists who used to be famous but aren’t anymore,” Bruck told the jury, “He goes here and he’s forgotten. No more spotlight like the death penalty brings . . . no martyrdom . . . no autobiography . . . no nothing.”
“He was quiet, friendly, humble,” said his eighth-grade teacher. “All the teachers loved him.”
“He’ll be crazy in a couple of months,” said a spectator.
In their determination to save his life, have his lawyers condemned Tsarnaev to a living death?
“Why don’t they just ask him?” said a spectator.
“When are you going to write about Farkhunda?” my daughter Gayley asked me. Today.
I hadn’t written about the 27-year-old woman who was beaten to death two weeks ago in Kabul because I had nothing to add to yet another story of murderous fanaticism and the diminished lives of women in the Middle East. This one seemed particularly horrific: I pictured a deranged woman wandering in rags, muttering incoherently, maniacally setting fire to a book, suddenly set on by a frenzied mob.
Like too many news stories these days, everything I knew turned out to be wrong. Everything and yet nothing. Farkhunda was not mentally ill, although her terrified family said she was. She was a law student who became incensed at the behavior of mullahs selling worthless charms to the gullible poor. She condemned the men, was falsely accused, and killed. Another victim.
Then I watched the video: young men with boots, sticks and boulders snuff out Farkhunda, as others cheer, laugh and record her death on their cell phones. It is a celebration.
I don’t know why Farkhunda baited the mullahs in their den. But her life reminds me that women are more than victims in much of the world. From the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to Malala Yousafzai to Pussy Riot to the Chinese feminists, they are those with the courage to confront the bullies.
Not long ago we debated women in combat, failing to acknowledge how often they are on the front lines.
Last month the Colorado River crossed the Mexican border for the first time in years. It is on its way to the Gulf of California amid hopes that it will revive its delta, which Aldo Leopold described in 1922 as an ecological paradise but which is now a barren, saline desert. In the midst of the worst drought in the region’s history, prolonged negotiations between the U.S. and Mexico – spurred by scientists and environmentalists – have brought water back to the southern Colorado, and there is hope that the once-grand river, destroyed by economic forces bent on extracting every drop of its water, will flow again to the sea. For the past 13 years, John Trotter has been documenting that story in his photographs. He first went to the Colorado after the attempted-murder conviction of a street gang leader, who had orchestrated a beating so severe that John was “left for dead in a pool of blood.” He had been taking pictures of children playing for the Sacramento Bee.
Still traumatized, he sought relief in something “bigger than my own experience.” He started at the bottom, in the delta where the river is only a dry bed, and he found a landscape as damaged as he was, its people eking a living out of dead land. He empathized. He taught himself Spanish. He kept returning. He watched people working for years to bring water to the delta. It had become, for the Colorado and for his own life, “a redemption story.”
Advised that Italy had joined forces with Hitler’s Germany, Churchill allegedly responded, “Seems only fair. We had them in the last war.” We tend to equate valor with military bravery – and overlook the violence just below the surface of our relatively safe and peaceful lives. This is not possible in Sicily, where I am headed today. In anticipation, I read Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily, which tells the history of La Cosa Nostra and its intricate ties with the Christian Democrats, Italy’s major political party. It is a frightening tale, guaranteed to cure any visitor’s narcolepsy. Unfortunately, I have insomnia.
Robb shatters the image of a mafia operating in the shadows, imposing a corrupt peace and killing only its own dissidents, describing a “Palermo destroyed like Beirut by a war that’s lasted over forty years, the war of mafia power against the poor,” one that caused 10,000 deaths in a decade, stole billions, and came to America with Lucky Luciano, who left Sicily in 1919 and returned with US forces in 1946.
It has been a war with authentic heroes, men who sought justice knowing they would be killed in its pursuit: Alberto Dalla Chiesa, prefect of Palermo, murdered with his wife; Giovanni Falcone, magistrate, murdered with his wife; Rocco Chinnici, chief prosecutor, murdered; Paolo Borsellino, deputy prosecutor, murdered; Mino Pecorelli, journalist, murdered. These and countless others, including Sicily’s current president, Rosario Crocetta, knew the cost we pay by keeping silent and looking the other way. They are truly brave men.
I will try to report on my trip, but I don’t know if I will be able to, so this may be my last post until I get back in mid-April.
Lost among the avalanche of headlines on the government crisis last week was the heartbreaking story of Anjelica Castillo. For 22 years she was known only as “Baby Hope”, and the New York City Police Department continues to piece together the details of her short life and violent death. It’s a story that probes the depths of the human capacity for evil and our equally strong capacity for love – even the love of an unidentified four-year-old child whose decomposed body was found in a blue picnic cooler just below the Henry Hudson Parkway on a sweltering July day in 1991. Two years later, after an investigation in which every lead hit a dead end, the officers of the 34th precinct buried Baby Hope in a Bronx cemetery. “We are her family,” said Jerry Giorgio, the detective leading the investigation. “We are burying our baby.” But they never forgot her. They kept watch over her grave, which had a toll-free number for tips. They kept the investigation open. And this weekend they charged her cousin with rape and murder. No one ever reported Anjelica missing. No one who had seen anything came forward to report it. Even Anjelica’s body revealed no clue of her identity. I don’t think any other species treats its own kind with the malevolent cruelty that marked her life. But I also don’t think any other species has the devotion that drove Giorgio, now 79, and his colleagues all those years. Who else would have named such a child “Hope”?
America has long loathed its big cities. At least since Thomas Jefferson’s vision of sturdy yeoman farmers as the backbone of the nation (never mind that Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves), we have looked on our cities as places of filth and disease, low morals and high crime. So obviously, those places where Americans are most fearful are our big cities. Or not. On a list of the 10 cities where people feel least safe, published by 24/7 Wall Street, New York cannot be found, nor Chicago, Los Angeles nor any of America’s largest cities. Instead, we find Beaumont, Texas; Rockford, Illinois; Yakima, Washington; Stockton, California. The average population is 385,555, and only Memphis has more than a million people. Forbes list of the most murderous cities is less surprising: Washington, New Orleans, Detroit are on it. But even here, the average population is 561,546, and only Philadelphia exceeds a million.
We have too long overlooked the roles our large cities play. They are centers of art and culture, commerce and education. For immigrants, the small-town restless and artists, they are destinations, places of opportunity and personal independence. “City air makes men free” went the old adage, and serfs could actually claim their freedom in medieval cities. And cities are not just composed of millions of rootless people. They are characterized by communities, both of interest and ethnicity. Dynamic cities do not fail; stagnant cities do – and it is in our smaller and declining cities, where opportunity has disappeared and communities have eroded, that fear rules the streets.
The tragic death of Reeva Steenkamp, the model and law school graduate, has brought into focus a host of clichés about big time sports, the rise and fall of heroes, the link between domestic violence and the proliferation of guns, and the emergence of post-apartheid South Africa as one of the world’s most violent countries. Steenkamp was shot by her boyfriend, Oscar Pistorius, the sprinter who was born with no fibula and became the first double amputee in Olympic history. His inspiring story of rising above adversity to become a hero to millions has become the all-too-familiar sports story of those we lionize turning into clay. But this story has an extra dimension: the level of violent crime in South Africa and the image of white people barricaded in their houses at night, armed to the teeth. It is an image that sits uncomfortably with that of a country that overcame the most oppressive colonialism and racial apartheid to itself become an inspiration for a continent. Is this too in question?
No. Last month 27-year-old Pretty Yende made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera. That a young black woman could come from a South African township to one of the world’s largest stages would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Her triumph, though, is not only personal because her voice really is a gift to the world. Perhaps we look in the wrong places for hope and inspiration. It is in art that we find the beauty that expresses our common humanity.
Before offering even the most minor restriction on guns in America, advocates must genuflect to “the hunter.” Alone in nature, with only his rifle for food, survival and protecting the vulnerable, the hunter has become an icon of America’s mythic past and a guardian of its present values. I have no quarrel with hunters, although I don’t see why the attitudes of those who shoot animals – that are often beautiful and that do not shoot back – should be the sacred touchstone of gun policy. In one of my favorite old New Yorker cartoons, two young bucks look over a woods teeming with men with guns, and one says to the other, “Why don’t they thin their own damned herds?” And so Congress has cast a cold eye on the regulations the president proposed yesterday, addressing an issue that no candidate dared even to touch in the last election. Obama’s “sweeping” package seems a modest list, which includes renewing the 1994 assault-weapons ban; prohibiting the sale of magazines with over 10 rounds; banning the possession of armor-piercing bullets; toughening gun-trafficking laws; and requiring background checks for all gun sales. The NRA responded with a repellant video that called Obama an “elitist hypocrite” because his daughters have secret-service protection in their school.
The proposals do not seem to gut the Second Amendment. Whether they will help thwart future killing sprees, I don’t know; but restricting some people’s access to some weapons seems a more hopeful step than arming everybody in sight.
One of the great pleasures of reading Dashiell Hammett is that his plots are so convoluted that I have to focus on the memorable characters (Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, the Continental Op) and the murky, smoke-filled backgrounds that become characters themselves. The novels bear almost endless rereadings as I try to unravel the intricacies of the story. The closest thing to Hammett’s fiction is Chinese reality, where two current law cases would do Dashiell proud. They have everything: lust for power, greed, bribery, corruption, magnificent names, murder – everything, oddly, but sex, which lurked ever below the surface in Hammett’s work.
The first case involves the fall from power of Bo Xilai (think French wine), amid revelations of extraordinary wealth and corruption among the ruling elites, and the imminent conviction of his wife Gu Kailai for the murder of a shady British character who made the fatal miscalculation of threatening Gu’s only child. The trial lasted a few hours. China’s conviction rate is 98 percent.
The latest case involves Sheldon Adelson, the ubiquitous billionaire who has poured over $35 million into Republican campaign coffers. He recently accompanied Mitt Romney to Israel to make sure he toed the hard line there, but it also turns out that two-thirds of Adelson’s fortune derives from his casinos in Macau, an island noted for mob activity and the only legal gambling in China. The case, which involves a socialite named Bao Bao and a frantic call to Tom Delay to bury a resolution condemning China, is but one more example of the global scale of corporate greed, political corruption and organized crime.