Book Review: Havana Nocturne by T.J. English

Havana Nocturne:

How the Mob Owned Cuba...and Then Lost It To the Revolution

by T.J. English

      In The Godfather Part II, a famous scene is set in Havana, Cuba. Michael Corleone is taken by his brother Fredo and some friends to a nightclub where they watch a live sex show. It is in that sleazy establishment that Michael realizes Fredo has betrayed him. At the same time, communist revolutionaries are taking to the streets to fight and soon after the Mafia flies back to America. While this is a fictional story, it isn’t far from what the situation truly was in Havana, 1959. Fidel Castro’s revolutionary 26^th of July Movement was destined to clash with the American Mob because the presence of American organized crime gangs was one of the reasons the revolution happened. It’s all explained in T.J. English’s Havana Nocturne.

This book follows two main threads, that of the Cuban revolutionaries and that of the high level Mafia operations. The latter begins with two well-known characters in Mafia lore, Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. At the end of World War II, Luciano was released from prison and ordered to leave the country. And Lansky was ambitious after having successfully opened the Flamingo hotel and casino in Las Vegas. With big plans in their minds, the two National Crime Syndicate bosses arrived in Havana and moved into luxury suites in the Hotel Nacional.

Meyer Lansky had a vision of turning the entire island of Cuba into a luxury resort packed with casinos from Matanzas to Oriente. Ex-president of Cuba. At the same time, Fulgencio Batista, was living exiled in Florida when he came into contact with Lansky who talked him into running for a second term. During the election of 1953, Batista slid behind in the polls so he launched a coup that ousted then president Carlos Prio, canceling the elections and becoming Cuba’s next dictator. The party leading in the polls was the Ortodoxos, running an anti-corruption campaign. Although unknown at the time, he most famous member of the Ortodoxo party was a young lawyer who would become the most polarizing figure in Latin American history. His name was Fidel Castro.

When Batista seized the governor’s palace, he brought the American mobsters in with him. A new era of greed, graft, tourism, and crime was initiated in Cuba. Meanwhile the common people were stuck in the redundant cycles of poverty and illiteracy, reinforced by state control through the mechanisms of torture, police brutality, and censorship. While the citizens suffered, bribery ensured that the Mafia got special treatment.

When the US government learned Lucky Luciano was comfortably living in Havana, they put pressure on the Cuban government to deport him. After Luciano made one last move to his final home in Italy, Santo Trafficante moved in to take his place. Trafficante rose to power as a Mob boss in Tampa by running the bolito racket. As a trilingual speaker of English, Italian, and Spanish, he was well suited to be a crime lord in Cuba. Even better, he was well-acquainted with Cuban cultural ways through his running of illegal gambling operations in Florida. He wasn’t on good terms with Meyer Lansky though. Despite their differences, the two oversaw a growing casino industry that was linked to the nightclub scene and the tourist trade. Lansky had an honest streak and he caused his casinos to flourish by cleaning up the business, kicking con men and corrupt pit bosses out. He knew from experience in Las Vegas that casinos where customers are treated fairly draw bigger crowds. Lansky also didn’t like violence so he kept his gang’s assassinations and strongarm tactics to a minimum. He preferred to do business the gentleman’s way through financial favors and tax evasion. He was a macro level gangster who didn’t concern himself with small rackets. Under Lanksy’s and Trafficante’s guidance, the Cuban branch of the American Syndicate also made inroads into banking, real estate, and hotels.

The narrative alternates between the story of the Mob in Havana and the story of Fidel Castro and his rise to power with the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Castro started out as a young boy with ambitions of becoming a Catholic priest. In college he joined a political gang. Later he became a lawyer then led an attack on the Moncada military barracks. The failed coup landed Fidel and his brother Raul in prison where they plotted a bigger venture in seizing power from the unpopular Batista regime. After their release, the Castro brothers fled to Mexico where they organized a militia, bought a boat, and sailed for Cuba. While hiding in the Sierra Maestra mountains and training for guerilla warfare, Fidel Castro was interviewed by a journalist from The New York Times. He also bought arms from the American Mob who possibly acted as middlemen and traffickers for the American government. Clandestine connections between American intelligence agents and Castro are hinted at by the author but never fully explored. Word of the Revolution spread rapidly throughout Cuba and soon Batista was on a plane to the Bahamas after being persuaded by the CIA to step down. This meant the end of American organized crime in Cuba as Lansky, Trafficante and pals were chased out of the country.

Aside from these main threads, there are a lot of side stories. A brief but detailed account of the history of the Mafia from the Castellamarese War to the forming of the National Crime Syndicate to the Kafauver Committee congressional hearings and beyond are all told. A lot is also said about the Cuban music scene and the culture of hotels, casinos, and nightclubs like the legendary Tropicana. Also of legendary Cuban lore is the unregulated underworld of vice that mostly catered to tourists. During the Prohibition era in America, Havana became a haven for lushes. Along with that came a seedy underbelly of whorehouses, cocaine dealers, hit men for hire, and pornographic movie theaters. Slightly more respectable were the fully nude dancers and live sex shows. The character called Superman, who gets it on with a lady tied up on a stage in The Godfather Part II, is actually based on a real person. The real Superman was an Afro-Cuban man who was hung like a horse. He made a living by perfoming in sex shows, pornos, and working as a gigolo to pleasure white female tourists from El Norte. And he did all this for a living even though he was gay. According to the author, the Mob didn’t actually having anything to do with this kind of sordid, street level sleaze. Their sights were set higher on bigger fish to fry like gambling, hotels, and politics.

These side story passages are interesting, but they amount to little more than padding to fill in a thin story. Most of these passages aren’t directly related to the Lansky-Trafficante activities. However, they do give some context and information that isn’t easily available in other sources. These are some of the most vivid and detailed accounts of Havana night life before the Revolution that I’ve encountered so far. But actually the Mob wasn’t in Cuba long enough to do anything too exciting. Fidel Castro killed Meyer Lansky’s dream of a gambling and offshore banking paradise long before he got a chance to build anything more than one ultramodern hotel on the Malecon. The strongest part of this book is its account of the Cuban Revolution which is short on fine details, but direct and comprehensive enough to be of value to someone who wants to learn what happened without plowing through dense historical tomes like those of Hugh Thomas or Tad Szulc.

There are a number of stray details I find questionable. T.J. English, for example, claims Fidel Castro was a Marxist from the start. A lot of other sources that go into greater detail about the dictator’s biography say otherwise. While Castro had studied Marx, he didn’t actually embrace communism as a political system until after he seized power. In the beginning he wanted to maintain trade and diplomatic relations with the USA, but John F. Kennedy snubbed him so he turned to the USSR for support and recognition instead. Fidel Castro was a puritan, a moralist, and an orator, but he was no ideologue. He was an adventurist, a man of action, and a narcissist more than anything else. Tad Szulc covers this extensively in his biography of Castro, which English uses as a source for this book, so it is surprising that this error was made.

Also questionable are some anecdotes about Frank Sinatra and John F. Kennedy. English claims Sinatra worked as a courier fro the Mob, carrying suitcases full of money and guns from New Jersey to Havana. He also claims that when Kennedy was a senator, Meyer Lansky arranged for him to have an orgy with three Cuban prostitutes in a hotel while Lansky watched through a two-way mirror in the next room. Given Kennedy’s reputation as the Don Juan of the Democrats, it wouldn’t surprise me if he went to Cuba for sex, but the part about Lansky watching doesn’t ring true. These stories sound like yellow journalism or conspiracy theory fodder more than fact, but of course I can’t know what’s actually true. In these days of the Epstein files being released, it’s hard to know what to believe about people in power. Still, stories like this seem too sensationalistic to be true.

This book also leaves a giant gap in accounting for the relationship between Lansky and Batista. The exact nature and depth of their relationship is not disclosed. Nor is Batista’s relations with American corporate businessmen, American intelligence agencies, and the American government. The details of why the Americans persuaded Batista to abandon his dictatorship are murky by all accounts, especially considering they had supported him for so long. Also murky are details about Fidel Castro’s relations with the USA; he went on fundraising campaigns up north, but details of who actually gave him money for the Revolution haven’t been examined in any books I’ve read.

Havana Nocturne isn’t great, but it’s interesting. There is a lot of filler, but at least the filler is informative even though the bulk of it isn’t directly related to the story. It is good for filling in some details about organized crime in Cuba before the Revolution. While books on that particular turning point of the Cold War in the Caribbean always mention the Mob presence in Cuba, the actual story of what they were up to hasn’t been thoroughly examined in any book I know. It’s also a good read for Cubanophiles and those who want to understand how a small group of underworld criminals had a major impact on world affairs. But is there a moral to this story? Yes. The next time you are at a live sex show, be aware that commies might be coming to chop off your head. Be careful and don’t be a Fredo.

 

Book Review: Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America's Most Dangerous Amusement Park by Andy Mulvihill with Jake Rossen

Action Park:

Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of 

America's Most Dangerous Amusement Park

by Andy Mulvihill with Jake Rossner

      They say a personal library is like an amusement park for your mind. If that’s the case then my personal library is like Action Park in New Jersey. It’s a place that’s exciting, maybe even liberating, because all caution gets thrown to the wind. It’s a place that’s entertaining because it’s full of unsavory characters and being out of control is the whole point. But the real Action Park existed outside of New York City, not in the pages of my book collection, and Andy Mulvihill’s Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park tells the whole story of this notorious business dedicated to rowdy leisure time and the total suspension of self-preservation or common sense.

Andy Mulvihill is the son of Gene Mulvihill, the visionary and evil genius who put together Action Park in a bid to be the Disneyworld of the Northeast. While renting and operating a ski slope on a hill in New Jersey, he schemed up ways to use the hill and its empty surrounding areas during the summer season. Initially he started with the Alpine Slide, a concrete track that could be navigated by fearless but not-too-wise people in sleds using a foot pedal and brake to control the speed. Injuries like bruises and abrasions were common, but as long as people knew the risks before going down, Gene Mulvihill had no worries. Throughout the 1980s he expanded Action Park to include race cars, go karts, water slides, a wave pool and all kinds of other attractions that were enticing because they were dangerous. They even boasted of having one of the first bungee jumps in America. Mulvihill’s whole philosophy was that he put the individual in the center of the action. Other amusement parks would strap people into rides like roller coasters or tilt-a-whirls that were controlled by ride operators. Mulvihill, on the other hand, believed in giving control of the vehicles over to the participants while letting each individual decide on their level of comfort and safety.

As you can guess, things didn’t always work out for the best. Action Park gained a reputation for being treacherous and people jokingly referred to it by names like “Traction Park” and “Class Action Park”. Injuries of all kinds were frequent. Food and beer from vendor stands were poor quality, restroom sanitation didn’t meet minimum standards, and sometimes gang fights broke out. Safety regulations were posted, but Spanish speakers couldn’t read them. The park’s most notorious ride, the Cannonball Loop, barely made it past the experimental stage. It was a waterslide in an enclosed loop and people often got stuck somewhere inside due to lack of momentum. Those who did make it to the end came out with broken bones, head wounds, or missing teeth. Every now and then, people even died on various rides, though ironically most of those cases were found to be the fault of the deceased for not following safety guidelines. Most injury cases were settled out of court and the ones that did get adjudicated were often won by Gene Mulvihill because he had an ultra-slick lawyer. The one case that almost did Action Park in involved Mulvihill taking out a fake insurance policy with a company that didn’t exist.

The patrons and employees could be a sociological case study unto itself. Due to a successful advertising campaign that was innovative for its time, Action Park attracted huge weekend crowds of working class families and teenagers from inner city Manhattan and the outer boroughs of Queens and the Bronx. New York City in the pre-Giuliani 1980s was nothing like it is now. It possibly was one of the most dangerous cities in the world at the time. So it was a pretty tough crew that came out to New Jersey for fun in the summer. Employees trying to limit overcrowding in the wave pool were often greeted with a middle finger in their faces when they tried to prevent too many people from going in. Fights were common and many children were conceived at various places away from the park. It was a popular hangout for knuckleheads.

The employees could be interesting too. Lifeguards at the wave pool were overworked since so many of the people there did not know how to swim and were often on the verge of drowning. Injuries happened when clueless people with dove into the shallow end and the wave maker was cranked up to the maximum so that people, especially young kids, kept going under after being whacked in the face by a high-intensity wall of water. Due to overcrowding, they often struggled to get back up to the surface. Meanwhile, one of the lifeguards had decked out the wave control shack with a cot, a mini bar, and a stereo system so he could use it as a shag pad. Gene Mulvihill came up with the great idea of hiring underprivileged kids from the hood as employees, but they refused to do any work and spent all their time smoking weed and going on the rides.

Action Park reads like a memoir put together by Andy Mulvihill. Although he does include some anecdotes about his life and the family business, its central theme is not him but the park itself. Gene Mulvihill gets plenty of biographical attention too as he should. Outsiders to this story may think he sounds like little more than a sleazy creep of a businessman, and they might be right, but this is also a portrait of an artist and a visionary. The way son Andy portrays his father Gene is as a man who thought of this pet project as so much more than a way to make money. He went about building Action Park the way some hobbyists build model railroads. Ultimately he loved seeing people having fun and, believe it or not, the park’s patrons did just that. Kids in the 1980s were a lot tougher than they are now and bruises, fractured bones, and bloody cuts were worn as badges of honor. Veterans and survivors of Action Park used to show off their wounds the way soldiers show off their battle scars after a war. I can relate to this mentality myself considering the time I fell off a motorcycle in Phuket and slid down a rain-slicked hill; afterwards I photographed my bloody arm and posted it on Facebook to the delight of some of my friends. Some might criticize Andy Mulvihill for being too sentimental and painting an overly rosy picture of his father, but the guy does come off as quite a character and a fun, charming guy with warm personality. Really though, it is Andy Mulvihill’s gallows humor that makes this book so much fun to read. It’s packed from cover to cover with the grim ironies of growing up and working in such a place. Any attempts at describing his hilarious dark comments would fail. You just have to read it to see what I mean.

Action Park is an easy, engaging, and fun book. Maybe it will even make you think about what it means to be human. If you need a break from reading heavy or serious books, or if you are in the mood for some kind of nostalgia trip, taking you back to a time before Americans became safety obsessed and the bland culture of corporate sterility set in during the 1990s, then it is a great diversion. It definitely reminded me of what it felt like to be young, reckless, carefree, and a little bit stupid. Life is more fun and rewarding when you take risks. Damn the consequences. 

 

Book Review: Two Of a Kind: The Hillside Stranglers by Darcy O'Brien

Two Of a Kind:

The Hillside Stranglers

by Darcy O'Brien

      By the late 1970s, America was in the grip of a new source of anxiety. Along with the cult scare of the time there was also a serial killer scare. Lone wolf killers who mostly preyed on vulnerable women were showing up more and more in the news. The media, always hungry for stories that shock and disturb people for the sake of attention grabbing, latched on to this trend, bringing it further into the public eye and possibly influencing an unprecedented number of copycat homicides. One of the early fascinations for serial killers was for the Hillside Strangler, then written in the singular because no one knew the killings were done by a pair of men. Darcy O’Brien’s Two Of a Kind: The Hillside Stranglers is the definitive account of this pair that came into prominence as the serial killer scare of the time began taking off.

The first thing to note about this true crime book is its lucidity, it polished prose, and its clear writing style. The author was obviously aiming to write another novelization of murder the way Truman Capote did with In Cold Blood. This book includes everything you would find in a formulaic, mainstream novel including character development, a plot arc, subplots, a conflict resolution as a climax, and moral commentary. This is all good for the sake of readability, but in a detrimental sense, reality is messy and fitting it into the template of a novel makes this book a little too slick. There are times when you might doubt the reliability of the narration just because the pieces of the puzzle’s plot fit together a little too securely to be believable.

Then something else strikes a sour note at the beginning. O’Brien apologizes to the readers for his graphic descriptions of the Hillside Strangler’s crimes. This might be a small point of contention, but seriously, are you kidding me? Apologizing? Call me naive if you want, but I’d assume that anyone who picks up this book does so because they want all the gory details. Why else would anybody want to read this? Well, I can think of one or two other reasons having to do with the legal system and the trial, but we’ll return to that later.

The Hillside Stranglers were two cousins from my hometown of Rochester, New York. (I actually attended the same grammar school as them, although they were there a good ten years before I was) Actually, they weren’t cousins by blood since the younger of the two was adopted. Angelo Buono left the great city of Rottenchester for the greener pastures of Hollywood. Never mind that Hollywood is in a desert. You know what I mean. Buono bought a house and opened a car upholstery shop back when they had things like that. His younger cousin Ken Bianchi followed him out there and moved in while trying to get his feet on the ground. Bianchi tried to make money by opening a fake psychotherapy clinic, offering counseling services at discount prices even though he never graduated from college.

Angelo Buono had a rough childhood. Violent from the start, he had a long criminal record and spent most of his youth in trouble with the law and other kids his age. When married he molested his step-daughter and step-son. Ken Bianchi, on the other hand, was less prone to violence, but he had been a compulsive lair from the time he could speak. He was impressed by the older Buono’s ability to pick up women for casual sex, effortlessly and with ease. Bianchi looked up to Buono and thought of him as a mentor. The bad childhood doesn’t serve as a sufficient explanation for what went wrong. Lots of people have bad upbringings and most of them don’t become mass murderers. The author never grapples with why the Hillside Stranglers diverged from the rest of us.

Since Bianchi was failing to make a sufficient income, mostly due to his unwillingness to engage in any real work, the two psychos decided to enter the profession of pimping. They kidnapped two fourteen year old girls from Denver and forced them to work as prostitutes. But as the gangsta rapper MJG says, “pimpin’ ain’t easy.” The two girls escaped and the sad sadists, Buono and Bianchi, were so emotionally distraught that they decided to vent their frustrations by posing as cops, abducting a girl, raping her, torturing her, and then strangling her. They dumped her body in a public place with the intention of it being seen. Serial killing became a hobby for the two and they used a similar routine every time. They began referring to their nights out on the town as “The Scam”. They went about their work as casually as two guys shopping for sports equipment at the mall. Or at least that’s how the author makes it look.

As you might imagine, leaving corpses around the Hollywood hills captured the attention of the police. LAPD detective Bob Grogan sits at the center of the story since he was the only one who agreed to collaborate on this book. Other than being a detective on the case, Bob Grogan is not an especially interesting person. He hangs out in bars, he cheats on his wife, he has a boat, and plays cheesy music on the electric Hammond organ he has at home. He’s also a jerk who thinks he’s superior to everybody else. He spouts off a lot of shallow right wing ideas and laments the fact that the American criminal justice system was simpler 100 years ago without realizing that America probably wasn’t any safer then than it is now. It just seems that way to him because he doesn’t know that forensic science at that time was rudimentary, meaning a lot more crimes went unsolved or undetected and a lot more criminals got away with murder. And that also means that a lot more innocent people were imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit. Back in those days, a knife wound in the hand could be just as deadly as a bullet in the brain because they had no penicillin to stop deadly infections. Blood feuds were common in rural areas. Lynch mobs were certainly never convicted for murder either. So 100 years ago, everything was better? Don’t be so naive, Bob Grogan. If you think life was simpler in the 1880s, you’re just displaying your own ignorance of history and the simplicity if your own mind. The author Darcy O”Brien could have spared us the details of this cop’s private life and thoughts. Grogan deserves any credit he gets for catching the killers, but other than that he’s neither here nor there.

Despite some small annoyances on the author’s part, the first third of this book is good and definitely the best section of it all. Abd, yes, the murders as they are described are nothing short of disgusting.

Ken Bianchi decides Hollywood is heating up too much for him so he runs off to a hick town in Oregon where he gets arrested after strangling two college students. The LAPD sees a connection to the case of the Hillside Stranglers and it doesn’t take long to get a confession out of Bianchi. Being the sociopath he is, Bianchi is a pathological liar. Under hypnosis, he confesses to his crimes, but convinces a team of psychiatrists he has multiple personality disorder. Of course, hypnosis is considered by some to be a pseudo-science and the existence of multiple personality disorder is also in dispute. Deeper scientific inquiries prove that Bianchi is faking and this is a big relief to the detectives of LAPD since a plea of insanity could have kept him out of prison. Bianchi realizes his only way out would be a plea bargain, sparing him the death penalty in exchange for testifying against Angelo Buono. While not as gripping as the accounts of the murders and the police investigations, this second section of the book is still interesting since it gives some insight into the mind of Ken Bianchi, or at least what little is actually in the empty space between his ears. He is a man of superficial charm, but entirely lacking in substance, a textbook case of psychopathy.

In the final stretch, the two year long trial is examined in detail. While the trial itself is interesting, O’Brien’s account of it is marred by his constant quips about how terrible America has become because of Liberal politicians. His portrayal of the team defending the Hillside Stranglers is so negative that it’s hard to take seriously. Predictably, Bob Grogan whines about due process of law and believes the killers should be executed without a trial. Forget about the Constitution. It’s funny how a cop can claim to be upholding the law while expressing disgust over the legality of due process, something which exists for a definite purpose. Without due process, courts would be nothing more than kangaroo courts and arenas for scapegoating. As wrong and faulty as due process sometimes is, it acts as a guardrail against innocent people being thrown in jail or executed. It doesn’t always work, but it is the best we have as of now. Bob Grogan wants to condemn a criminal for murdering a woman, but if the same woman were sent to the electric chair in error because there was no due process, he would be celebrating because someone was found guilty. That is sick minded hypocrisy on a grand scale.

The author’s portrayal of the criminal defense team doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny either. Hating criminal defense lawyers because they represent criminals is a cheap shot and betrays a poor understanding of due process. The point of criminal defense is to point out all the weaknesses in the prosecution’s case. The jury therefore has to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of the evidence provided to evaluate whether the criminal charges are justifiable or not. Without defense attorneys, the prosecutors would have a free ride to convict anybody brought to trial whether there was a justifiable cause for conviction or not. As stated before, the criminal defenders act as a guardrail against innocent people getting convicted. Just because it doesn’t work 100 percent of the time doesn’t mean it isn’t legitimate. If people in law enforcement truly respect the law, then they should respect the fact that everybody who gets brought to trial, no matter how egregious the charges may be, deserves a fair trial. By not respecting that right, law enforcement loses its moral high ground and sinks to the level of the criminals they prosecute.

O’Brien portrays the defense team as conniving, lying, cheating, conspiratorial, and evil with personalities to match all their negative character traits. He makes them resemble characters in a bad TV series that didn’t survive past its first season. This is done on purpose to manipulate the reader’s emotions, making you hate them. He wants the reptilian part of your brain to override your rational faculties as if it isn’t enough that we hate the killers already. But it’s such a transparent literary technique, straight out of the most shallow genre fiction, that it makes the whole portrayal look fake. It’s possible that it might be an accurate portrayal; I don’t know because I wasn’t there. But with all the cheap shots O’Brien and the windbag Bob Grogan take at Liberals throughout the story, it casts doubt over O’Brien’s credibility.

The crux of the matter is that this book is supposed to be about the Hillside Stranglers. No matter how smooth and lucid the writing is, using it as a platform for pushing right wing politics down our throats nearly ruins it. Even worse, O’Brien dishes out insults to Liberals without ever building a systematic argument in favor of his conservative beliefs. He offers nothing more than petty put downs. It’s like being kicked in the shin by a dwarf who then brags about beating you up. He underestimates the intelligence of his audience which is insulting to say the least. I gather Darcy O’Brien thinks Liberal politicians have turned America into a crime ridden hellhole because their compassion has led the country astray and yet he also wants us to believe that Liberals believe in due process because they are vicious, sadistic, criminal sympathizers who want to destroy the world. Compassionate and cruel? You can’t have it both ways, Mr. O’Brien. There is a time and a place for political discourse and I’d say a biography of serial killers is not the right one. If the author wanted to push his politics on people, he should have written a scholarly work on conservative interpretations of legal theory instead.

Two Of a Kind is not as good of a book as it should have been. Darcy O’Brien is obviously skilled at his craft, but he doesn’t know when to keep his opinions to himself. Thankfully, the Hillside Stranglers went to prison for life and Angelo Buono is now dead. Thankfully also, the number of serial killers in America peaked in the 1990s. According to the FBI, there are currently only about 20-30 known serial killers at loose in America. On a much darker note, America also has far more serial killers per capita than any other country on Earth. Most likely, there is something about American culture that is causing this to happen. Liberal politics are an unlikely cause. The majority of serial killers are white heterosexual males, middle class, between the ages of 25-40, and holding conservative political and religious beliefs. You might want to look beyond the weakness of Liberals for causes. It’s more likely a problem with the character and toxic cultural climate of the American people. We are a nation that breeds assholes like no other. And if you ever meet Bob Grogan in real life, shake his hand for catching the Hillside Stranglers, but walk away as soon as he starts to speak.

 

Book Review: Attention, MOVE! This Is America!

Attention, MOVE! This Is America!

by Margot Harry

      By the 1980s, the number of radical political activist groups in America had begun to dwindle. Those who were most serious about change got more involved in things like lobbying, holding public office, and working in the educational system. Urban guerilla movements like the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground might have been exciting to other radicals, but they largely scared mainstream America away from the Revolution. As African American people moved into the middle class and the mainstream, the Black Panthers and other Civil Rights and Black Power organizations began falling by the wayside. But there were some diehard, holdout groups that refused to go away. One was MOVE, a predominantly African American anarchist faction based in Philadelphia with several communal houses around the city. MOVE did not get along with their neighbors and the conflict ended in deadly violence, perpetrated by the police and the city government. Activist journalist Margot Harry in Attention, MOVE! This Is America! gives an account of the police’s acts against MOVE in a style that is both analytical and incendiary.

In Harry’s book, not much is said about MOVE’s history, beliefs, or practices. They started in the 1970s as a Black Power group, practiced communal living, vegetarianism, organic farming, and preached an ordinary message of ending racial inequality. They wore their hair in dreadlocks, each member changed their last name to “Africa”, and were led by an obscure man named John Africa. They had the outward appearance of a political cult, a perception reinforced by their unwillingness to socially engage with people outside their group. Although they had communal houses in several locations around Philadelphia, it was the one on the south side, located in an upwardly mobile African American middle class neighborhood, where the violent confrontation with the police occurred. Neighbors complained about them to the police because their yard was messy and vermin-infested due to the compost heaps the kept for growing their own organic food. Some neighbors made accusations of child abuse and neglect against MOVE because the four children living in the house were often seen wearing ragged clothes. The worst of it was that MOVE boarded up their windows, built a barracks on top of their roof, and set up a loudspeaker so they could give obnoxious sounding speeches, loaded with profanity, about armed revolution that the whole neighborhood could hear. Sometimes these amplified rants went on all night long. In short, they were bad neighbors and many feared they were planning some kind of violent confrontation with the government.

The conflict ended with the police fire bombing the MOVE house, killing all its members except for one child who escaped.

There are no spoilers in this story. Harry starts her book with the bombing of the MOVE house and most of the story isn’t linear. Most of this book is her investigation into how the government planned the attack, what happened during the day of the attack, and how the government responded to the public outcry that resulted. The whole issue started in 1978 when police raided a MOVE house in another part of the city. The result of the raid was humiliating to the police and Harry’s unproven claim is that the bombing, which happened in 1985, was a retaliatory attack for that humiliation. The whole story is complicated by the fact that the mayor of Philadelphia at that time was Wilson Goode, the city’s first Black mayor who also organized the military-style assault on the MOVE house. The author tests Goode’s claims that the operation was poorly executed, the bombing was a mistake, he had no knowledge of the bombing when it happened, and he had not worked with the police in any way to plan an attack the group. She digs deeply into publicly accessible records to disprove all of these claims. Not only had the mayor lied about his role in organizing the action, but he had also been planning and preparing it with the police for over a year before the killings took place. She also digs deeply into why the local police force had access to military grade weapons, including bomb making materials, that were heavily restricted to anybody outside the armed forces.

Harry’s account of the police attack is just as harrowing as you can imagine. They raided the house before sunrise with snipers located all over the neighborhood. They used water hoses, tear gas, and explosives to drive MOVE out of their home. It is impossible to know why they decided to hide in the basement rather than come out, but one can conjecture that since the house was surrounded by cops with rifles pointed at them, they were probably afraid of getting killed. Such fears could later be justified since after the bombing, the house caught fire and the four children ran out the back door to escape, only to be shot dead by police in the back yard. Fortunately, one boy did survive the shooting and ultimately was the only survivor of the massacre. The fire then spread from the MOVE house, burning down 66 other homes in the neighborhood. And all this happened while the fire department was on the scene with firehoses ready to be used. The police later claimed that they were afraid of an armed confrontation with MOVE, but after looking through the wreckage, investigators found only four guns, not the arsenal they claimed would be there and certainly not enough fire power for eleven adults and four children to use against an army of police using military tactics and weapons.

Margot Harry can’t be accused of not taking her opponents’ positions into account. In fact, almost this whole book is an examination of their accounts and her dismantling of their excuses for the onslaught. If anything, Harry can be accused of not taking her own side into account, at least not to the extent that she could have. She says very little about MOVE as an organization. She doesn’t say much about who they are, their history, their beliefs, or their practices. That’s not to say she portrays them in a positive light either since she never holds back in saying that they were not the kind of people you would want to live next door to. A more complete explanation of MOVE would have done more to make this book more rounded and probably would have made it more gripping as a story too. But her intention in writing this was to prove the government’s role in the injustice and that is something she accomplishes with ease.

So MOVE were bad neighbors. There is no death penalty for being a bad neighbor. Even if there was, the members of MOVE still have a Constitutional right to due process of law. Their neighbors should not have had their houses burned down. And no matter what crimes the adults in MOVE might have committed, there is no justifiable reason for murdering three of their children when they tried to escape the burning house. Even worse, there are so many other non-violent ways the police could have gotten MOVE to vacate their home. Negotiation with them was never even considered. In the end, nobody from the police or the government who were involved in the attack were found guilty of any crimes and many of them even claimed to be proud of what they did. If you can read Attention, MOVE! This Is America! Without getting angry, then obviously there is something wrong with you.

 

Book Review: Vesco by Arthur Herzog

Vesco:

From Wall Street to Castro's Cuba

the Rise, Fall, and Exile Of the King of White-Collar Crime

by Arthur Herzog

      The world of big business and corporate finance is a shady place. When profits and personal gain are the primary motivations for success, then inevitably a company will attract some questionable characters. Greedy, sharky narcissists and grifters sometimes claw their way to the top. Slick deal makers invade the boardrooms and moral guardrails get flushed down the toilet. Our culture of economics celebrates those who accumulate the most wealth regardless of their character or usefulness to society as a whole. Organized crime syndicates are little more than the shadow side of big business. It is no surprise that such an environment would attract some pathological predators. It is also no surprise that some libertarian lunatics will lionize these scumbags for being an exotic breed of amoral heroes. Vesco by Arthur Herzog gives a biographical account of one such sleazy businessman who eventually ended up on the lam.

Robert Vesco had an unimpressive childhood. His family were part of the Midwestern blue collar class, living without frills or fortune. After getting bored with mundane factory work, Vesco got into the habit of buying businesses. He developed a talent for buying failing businesses and turning them around to be either resold or else used to buy other businesses. He built up a network of them and then set his sights higher, using the profits to buy his way onto the board of the Investors Overseas Service or IOS. This high-finance corporation was already being run by some shady people and had actually been banned from doing business in America. So Vesco tried to take over IOS and along the way, stashed investors’ money in offshore bank accounts and shell companies in the Caribbean and Central America. The American SEC caught on to what he was doing and tried to take him down. After a joke of a trial in which the government struggled to define what crime Vesco had committed, let along prove their case, the rogue businessman had already become one of the richest men in the world. Instead of risking more harassment from the government, Vesco fled the country, spending most of his time making banking and business deals in the Bahamas and then making a semi-permanent move to Costa Rica.

That much of the biography is interesting if you can manage to extract so much meaning from Herzog’s text. Unfortunately, there are three identifiable problems that muddy up the narrative waters. One is that a lot of space is taken up with details of banking and corporate business management. There is nothing inherently wrong with that and it would be expected in a book about white collar crime. The problem is that it is alienating to readers who are not familiar with these business practices which can be assumed to be most people. Herzog doesn’t explain this side of the story sufficiently enough for those of us who have never been inside a corporate boardroom. Another problem is that Robert Vesco disappears for a long stretch from his own biography. Herzog goes into too much detail about the lifestyles of the IOS managers, especially that of Bernard Cornfeld who dominates such a long portion of the writing that you might forget who this is meant to be a biography of. And that is not the only time that happens in this book. The third major error is that the author writes about how Vesco has such a charming and attractive personality, but this never comes across in the writing. The book actually lacks sufficient detail to drive this point home. Herzog could have included more personal testimony or anecdotes from people who knew Vesco to make him come to life more as the central figure of the story rather than being so one dimensional.

Robert Vesco settled in Costa Rica after the American government put pressure on the Bahamas to extradite him. There he made friends with the president Jose Figeres Ferrer. Vesco was the wealthiest man in that tiny, impoverished nation and Figeres urged him to invest money in the national infrastructure. Subsequent presidents warmed up less to Vesco but tolerated his presence as long as he didn’t meddle with the national media. Public opinion in Costa Rica was divided and the presence of Vesco was a prominent news item for several years. Despite living lavishly, Vesco’s fortunes were growing smaller and he began investing in more dangerous business ventures like drug smuggling and arms running to keep himself afloat. He got too hot for the Costa Ricans to handle, so after secretly bouncing around from Antigua and Panama to Nicaragua, he eventually settled in Cuba. It can be said that the communists allowed him to stay in Havana simply to annoy the American government, but they probably wanted some of his money and access to his business contacts as well. The sections about Vesco’s life in exile are somewhat interesting, but again, he disappears from the story for unnecessarily long periods including passages about an illegal arms deal with Libya in which Vesco only had a tenuous connection.

As far as the writing quality goes, the best part, meaning the clearest and easiest to follow, comes in the final chapter when Herzog goes to Cuba to interview Robert Vesco and show him a transcript of his biography. Actually nothing especially interesting happens there and the chapter does almost nothing to add to the bigger picture of who Vesco really was, but it is the best written part of the whole book. This is important because Herzog wrote about what he saw in Cuba. The rest of the book lacks that kind of vision. Herzog can’t be faulted for not being in the room with Vesco throughout his entire life, but the author never actually sees what he writes about. There are lots of listed details, but he never actually puts you, as a reader, right into the action the way a good writer does. Reading this book has the feel of trying to follow a TV show while sitting in a separate room and listening to it through the wall without any visual input.

Robert Vesco was a man who got into too much too soon. He obviously had a natural talent for business, but he moved too fast for his own good. He didn’t learn the lesson of Icarus whose wings made of wax melted when he flew too close to the sun. If Vesco hadn’t been so reckless he might have survived longer in the world of corporations and banks. Maybe he would have even gotten away with squirreling some money in offshore bank accounts. White collar crime is just as common as kids stealing candy from the supermarket and probably gets prosecuted less often.

Arthur Herzog’s Vesco doesn’t qualify as a great biography. It has too much detail about things I don’t understand without sufficient explanation to make them comprehensible and not enough detail about the things that make Robert Vesco interesting even though he can’t be sympathized with. Unless you have a burning passion for corporate business, financial institutions, and white collar crime, this probably isn’t a book worth your time.

 

Book Review: The Rajneesh Chronicles by Win McCormack

The Rajneesh Chronicles

by Win McCormack

     The USA had a lot going on in the 1960s and 1970s. Aside from the social changes initiated by the hippy counter culture and the New Left, American political hegemony and newly relaxed immigration restrictions resulted in an influx of exotic ideas, lifestyles, and practices. One result of this was the Cult Scare of the 1970s. Disillusioned with failed utopian dreams and an unfulfilled desire for structure and meaning, a lot of counter culturalists turned to new religious movements like the Hare Krishnas, the Unification Church, and The Family International. Traditional Christianity had proven to be dull and lifeless and people craved something new to reflect their changing values. But not all was well in cult land. Within one decade there were the Manson Family murders and the mass suicides of the People’s Temple in Jonestown, Guyana. Some high profile cults were accused of brainwashing, kidnapping, and dishonestly appropriating people’s money. The big Cult Scare was upon us. Within only a couple years after the Jonestown massacre, a new cult arrived on the scene and red flags were flying all over the place. They were the devotees of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their leader’s intentions were no more noble than the aforementioned scoundrels. Win McCormack’s The Rajneesh Chronicles is a colleciton of magazine articles written contemporaneously to Rajneesh’s invasion and his eventual expulsion from America. 

     This book is somewhat annoying from the start. It begins with a timeline of events in the rise and fall of the cult. Reading lists like this can rarely be fun, especially when you know nothing about the people involved. It just is not an engaging way of telling a story. But it is necessary since the magazine articles that make up the bulk of the book do not run in chronological order. Reading them on their own would be messy and confusing without the timeline to guide you. 

     But anyways, the story starts at a controversial ashram in Pune. India where Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh attracted followers, mostly naive Westerners with lots of money, where he twisted standard Eastern practices like yoga and meditation to his own ends. Sexual orgies and other darker things were a large part of what went on. After having trouble with the Indian government over tax fraud, Rajneesh moved to America where his cult took over the isolated farming town of Antelope, Oregon and began building their own city called Rajneeshpuram. Needless to say, the people of Antelope didn’t take too well to the orange-clad so-called sanyasins, especially since they outnumbered the locals and eventually took over the city council and school board. The passages on the politics of Rajneesh are somewhat muddled and incomplete so if this part of the story is truly interesting to you, you might want to look to a better source for information. 

     Rajneesh himself mostly disappears from the articles after his arrival in America. He decides to take a vow of silence and appoints the sociopath Ma Anand Sheela to run the Rajneeshpuram cult. Narcissistic, machiavellian, and cruel, she runs the commune’s affairs like a true tyrant and eventually gets arrested for attempting to poison a city called The Dalles by putting salmonella in restaurant salad bars and the water reservoirs. 

     The best parts of this book detail the lifestyle and practices of the cult. Characteristics that mark Rajneeshpuram out as a typical cult include sleep deprivation, information control, unpaid and intensive physical labor, use of trances and altered states of consciousness, control over sexual behavior and diet, and, most importantly, infallible leadership. Encounter therapy groups involving physical violence, verbal abuse, sexual assault, and psychological trauma were used to break down members’ egos thereby dismantling their sense of individuality and the ability to think for themselves. Ecstatic trances involving yoga and dancing were used to facilitate an emotional bond with the larger group. Rampantly promiscuous sex was used to prevent individuals from forming intimate friendships or romantic relationships. Long work hours, sleep deprivation, and poor diet were used to make people too weak to think clearly or rebel. The questioning of leadership led to harsh punishments. They even built their own private crematorium to dispose of dead bodies due to the number of people dying from exhaustion or other causes that have never been revealed. Meanwhile, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Ma Anand Sheela lived high on the hog with expensive jewelry, luxurious houses, a massive fleet of Rolls Royces, and frequent steak dinners at expensive restaurants in places nearby. It was an open secret that Bhagwan’s taste in girls was similar to that of Jeffrey Epstein’s. 

     The last section of the book backtracks to 1980 when the Rajneeshees first arrived on the shores of California where they infiltrated and took over a new age church. Considering the millions of dollars Rajneesh had brought over from India, you might wonder why they felt a desire to do such a thing. They had enough money to buy their own land and build their own church without having to dispossess anybody of their own space. But the beach-front chuch had luxurious grounds and beautiful architecture as well as a senile minister who had fallen in with Rajneesh while traveling in India. More importantly, the sanyasins used this as a test run for later taking over the town of Antelope. While this is an important part of the Rajneesh story, the internal affairs of a new age church’s board of directors is not exciting to read about. It is made worse because the author writes as if he can’t wait to finish writing so he can go home and do something more exciting like mowing the lawn or watching TV. 

     In fact, most of the writing in this book is dull. The story of this dangerous cult that fell apart before its leaders got chased out of America is interesting enough on its own to keep a reader engaged. But the writing is dry and lifeless. A fascinating story gets turned into a work of journalistic mediocrity. It’s like listening to somebody making a speech in an unemotional, dead monotone. Aside from that problem, it would have been nice to learn more about the biographies of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Ma Anand Sheela since almost nothing about their lives previous to the cult is mentioned. 

     The Rajneesh Chronciles is one of those books where the story is good enough to stand on its own  while the delivery is subpar enough to make reading it a chore. Anyhow, most reasonable people would consider Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Ma Anand Sheela to be grifters, but maybe they really did understand the Truth with a capital T. That Truth has nothing to do with spiritual enlightenment and everything to do with an understanding of human nature and the world we live in. The Truth is that a vast number of people are suckers and sheep and are easily led around by people who take advantage of them out of pure selfishness. Gurus like Rajneesh are enlightened enough to know that these people will gladly give away their money and their freedom of mind if it means access to unlimited sex and religious experience. When the infallible teacher arrives with a taste of what it is they want, they get trapped and the ones doing the trapping don’t have their best interests in mind. Freedom means being neither predator nor prey. Maybe that is the ultimate form of enlightenment. 

     

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Almighty Black P Stone Nation by Natalie Y. Moore & Lance Williams

The Almighty Black P Stone Nation:

The Rise, Fall, and Resurgence Of an American Gang

      By the 1990s, hip hop had grown to be one of the most prominent musical genres, if not the MOST prominent genre in America. Possibly it became the most prominent musical style in the world. I’ve never been to a country where you didn’t hear it playing in stores, on the radio, in restaurants, or blasting out of car windows. This is true even in Luxembourg which I would consider to be the least hip hop-like place I’ve ever been. A lot of journalistic writing has been dedicated to uncovering the roots of hip hop in the likes of James Brown, The Last Poets, and various other obscure funk, jazz, and soul bands from the 1960s and 1970s. I’ve encountered less journalism or historical studies that have examined the social origins and influences that fed into later hip hop culture. There is one group of African-Americans who may not have directly influenced the genre in the beginning, but they certainly embodied a lot of the themes that had become prominent in the music by the 1990s. Natalie Y. Moore and Lance Williams’ The Almighty Black P Stone Nation does not examine this cultural connection, but it does lay a groundwork for a cultural historian to see how the hip hop movement and some of what it stands for did not emerge out of a void.

This history begins in the south side of Chicago with its heavy concentration of African-American people, many of which were there because they or their ancestors migrated from the South to escape the racism and poverty, to the booming city of Chicago where the steel industry and others needed manual, unskilled laborers. That is where two young teenagers, Jeff Fort and Eugene “Bull” Hairston dropped out of school at a young age and formed a gang called the Blackstone Rangers. Part of their motivation was strength in numbers when facing off against their rivals, the Disciples, who preyed on kids from other neighborhoods who had to pass through their turf to get to school. The Blackstone Rangers soon got involved in all the crime that gang membership entailed including drug dealing, prostitution, gambling, extortion, protection rackets, and street violence. But the Rangers took a slightly different turn from the Disciples and other gangs.

Fort and Hairston established a strange alliance when the ministers at a Presbyterian church took them under their wing and allowed the teenagers to use their property as headquarters. It was a symbiotic relationship since the church received federal aid money for a job creation program because they worked directly with troubled teenagers who had some social capital in their neighborhood. The Blackstone Rangers also benefited because they had a legitimate looking place to go, keeping themselves off the streets and out of the eyes of the police. They also participated in the job creation program, directing unemployed youth towards occupations that benefited them and their families. But the Rangers also stole money from the church and some critics even say the ministers allowed this to happen in order to stay on the good side of the gang. Whatever the case may be, the Blackstone Rangers grew in stature and reputation all over Chicago. They chartered other gangs from all over the city, renamed the organization the Almighty Black P Stone Nation, and Fort and Hairston set up a ruling council of twenty one leaders to oversee the whole corporation. They got even bigger when they began doing business with La Cosa Nostra. When Bull Hairston got sent up the river for a very long paid vacation in the penitentiary, Fort took over the leadership position and ruled the Nation until he died. Even when he himself got sent to prison, he commanded the gang from behind bars.

But something else happened to Jeff Fort while he did his time. Like so many African-American people who end up in jail, he found religion and like so many of those others, the religion he found was Islam. Fort had joined up with Noble Drew Ali’s cult the Moorish Science Temple and when released, he announced that he was changing the Black P Stone Nation into an unorthodox Muslim sect he called El Rukn based on Noble Drew Ali’s teachings. This temple was run out of a building called The Fort. But El Rukn was not entirely pure and holy; while there was an element of sincerity in Fort’s newly designed religion, it was also used as a cover for the same old gangbanging that the Black P Stone Nation had been involved in all along. El Rukn also began embracing militant Black Nationalism and started stockpiling heavy artillery including machine guns and explosives. One member even got busted in a sting operation when buying a rocket launcher from undercover FBI agents. The feds also wiretapped El Rukn when they sent a delegation to Libya to meet with Moammar Gaddafi.

The writers of this book are not upfront about how they feel in regards to this gang. They point out some of the positive things they were responsible for like helping teenagers find jobs, working with Martin Luther King when he visited Chicago, embracing Black Power, embracing Islam as a means of community building, running youth groups through El Rukn, and sometimes preventing inter-gang violence rather than promoting it. Yet they also point out how their gangster stance was detrimental to the African-American community. By selling heroin and crack on inner city street corners, by running prostitution rings that pimped out young black girls, and extorting money from Black business owners they were hypocritically harming the community they claimed to be supporting. The strange irony is that Jeff Fort and his followers couldn’t see the schizophrenic nature of what they were doing and in fact appeared to genuinely believe in all its contradictory facets both good and evil. The authors do point out the gang’s strange ideological orientation to society, but they are also strangely dismissive of their later stances regarding revolutionary violence. They write about their potential for terrorist activities as if it is just an eccentricity, downplaying it as a threat. Their unwillingness to thoroughly engage with the potential for destruction that the Black P Stone Nation had in their collection of weaponry is a weakness in the writing.

The other huge flaw in this book is the writing itself. The subject matter is examined from a distance without any insiders’ points of view. It reads like a listing of events as if the gang was never really made up of individual people. It is the type of bird’s eye view prose you get when reading a 20^th century author’s accounts of ancient Roman history. You just can’t see the world through the eyes of the people being written about. The writing is also stiff and stilted, lacking in flow due to there being too many short sentences that make it an uphill battle to read. This book is a good example of how amateurish writing can make a fascinating subject matter look bland and uninspired.

The Almighty Black P Stone Nation is not a great piece of writing, but it does serve as a good introduction to this contradictory and influential African-American social organization. It covers the territories of gang culture, street culture, youth culture, prison, social conditions, political ideology, revolution, outlawry, Black theology and religion, inner city violence, and it even touches on fashion. All these themes show up in rap lyrics and the Black P Stone Nation had an unusual way of bringing all these elements together as if the whole gang where the atom that split and exploded into the subculture we now know as hip hop. All of this happened under the tutelage of the visionary Jeff Fort. But his vision was distorted and he might have been just a little more crazy than not. He certainly could see farther than he could reach. This book is marred by too much reporting and not enough analysis. That analysis will hopefully come later because there is a lot to unpack here. The ability the Black P Stone Nation has for holding together over such a long period of time despite all its contortions and contradictions may say something important about the nature of human societies. Those secret forces may be malignant or they may be benign, but we won’t know what they are until this subject matter gets taken up by a more analytical scholar.

 

Book Review

Where White Men Fear to Tread:

The Autobiography of Russell Means

with Marvin J. Wolf

As a white man, I took the title of this book to be a challenge. Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means is, after all, precisely calculated to draw attention to itself by needling a white person’s conscience. Beyond the title, it doesn’t take long after starting the book to feel as if I passed a simple test. It’s like Russell Means is saying “Here is a line. If you dare to cross it you will be confronted with your own ignorance. If you don’t cross it you are a coward, but if you do and you follow along with me as I tell my story to the end you will benefit immensely even though you will face some tough trials just like I did.” So by the last pages of this autobiography I felt like I had taken a few blows, That is to my benefit. Russell Means, possibly the ultimate American Indian warrior of our time, also leaves himself open to blows. He made a lot of mistakes in his life, but he was man enough to write them into these pages so he and others can evaluate them and learn from his life. Whether you are white or not, that line that Russell Means dares you to cross is well worth the risk.

Like all autobiographies, this one starts at the beginning of Means’ life. His parents grew up in the forced segregation of Indian boarding schools and he was of the first generation to grow up as an urban Indian, attending public schools. That generational shift is an important element in his story. Means was a highly intelligent boy who sometimes excelled academically and sometimes struggled to adjust. He never lost a taste for learning though, even until the end of his life. What he experienced might be typical for a lot of Indian children, meaning broken families, alcoholic parents, trouble fitting in, delinquency, and racism. By his teenage years, he was dealing drugs, drinking a lot, committing petty crimes, and turning into a drifter, moving from city to reservation and back again, mostly in search of work. From a young age, he honed his skills at fighting by getting into barroom brawls and his experiences with the Bureau of Indian Affairs were contentious and disappointing. Again, there is a lot for American Indian people to relate to here.

Russell Means’ political awakening came when he attended an Occupy Alcatraz Island demonstration in the 1960s. A band of native activists gathered on the prison island to declare it a sovereign state for indigenous people. Of course it amounted to no more than a little media publicity, but it sparked a fire, fueled by a high octane grade of testosterone, in Means’ heart that began to rage. Means later found himself in the company of the American Indian Movement (AIM), founding the Cleveland chapter of that activist organization where he took over the job of the BIA by doing the work they were set up to do but weren’t doing.

As AIM turned from being a community services oriented organizations to being a more militant revolutionary one, fighting for the sovereignty and independence of Indian people in America, Means entered the most turbulent period of his life. He organized a cross-country tour called the Trail of Broken Treaties, started the militant occupation of the Wounded Knee battlefield on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, participated in a courtroom riot, helped to destroy the Bureau of Indian Affairs office building in Washington, D.C., and got into a lot of trouble along the way. After several trials, he got exonerated from most of his charges with the help of a team of activist lawyers, though he did end up doing a three year stint in prison. You can criticize Means for embracing violence as his primary tactic and you could possibly say he did more good for his people when AIM was simply providing practical assistance to struggling Indians, but then again, all the violence did draw a lot of attention to the plight of American Indian people and all but started a renaissance in Indian cultural awareness during the 1970s. Besides, the violence goes a long way in illustrating all the pent-up fury that accumulated after so much genocide, broken treaties, stolen land, racial discrimination, and cultural destruction suffered at the hands of the white establishment. The violence is unfortunate, but when looked at in the wider historical context, it isn’t surprising. Part of what makes this book so great is the way Means always tells his story in reference to both history and the contemporary society in which he lived.

After the violent phase of his life, Means became a bit more creative in his approach to activism. He set up a commune to teach people how to live according to traditional Indian ways. He didn’t limit the community to Indians only and in fact allowed people of any race to participate as long as they were there in good faith and willing to contribute something of value to the community. Russel Means had no tolerance for white people who larp as Indians to trick themselves into thinking they are spiritual. He had no tolerance for anthropologists, sociologists, or gawking tourists either. This book makes the point that Indians have a living culture that is neither a museum piece nor entertainment for seekers of novelty.

Also of note is Means’ break with the American progressive Left. While being one of the prominent leaders of the fight for Indian civil rights, he had a contentious relationship with the activists of the post-1960s New Leftt who didn’t approve of his use of violence for political purposes. The big break up came in the 1980s when he visited the Miskito Indians on the est coast of Nicaragua, only to find that the socialist Sandinista party in power were committing genocide against them. After Sandinista militias tried to assassinate Means while conducting bombing campaign against Miskito villages, he returned to America and got shunned by Leftists who refused to believe the Sandinistas would do anything so terrible.

Russell Means turned to the radical American right from then on, making questionable alliances with Larry Flynt, the Unification Church, and the ever-so-flakey Libertarian party who asked him to run in the presidential primary against Ron Paul in 1984. Most Libertarians at that time actually hated Ron Paul and Means lost by only three votes. While Means could sound quite wise and philosophical when discussing the politics of racism and history, he comes off as naive and overly-simplistic when he explains his take on libertarianism. He isn’t any different from other libertarians in that way, but at least in his case it makes sense in the context of an Indian activist who wants freedom from the U.S. government for his people who are sitting on broken treaties that guaranteed them just that.

Unfortunately for everybody, it becomes clear that other Indians were incapable and not motivated enough to keep up with Mean’s never-ending energy and commitment to his cause. He was just one of those people with too much power, moving too fast through life for other people to keep up with.

By the end of the book, Russell Means is living in a treatment facility for people with anger management problems, a place he went to voluntarily. While acknowledging that his anger motivated him to do a lot to uplift his people, he was also courageous enough to admit that his rage also destroyed a lot of relationships in his personal life and led him to commit unnecessary acts of violence that did no one any good. After all he accomplished, he ends his story where he began: with an insatiable desire to learn and improve.

Means didn’t just live the life of a warrior; he also lived the life of an intellectual with a complex mind and a willingness to look at ideas from multiple perspectives. After reading this, it becomes clear that this autobiography is not just about Means telling his story to the world, but it is also a chance to reflect on his own life, searching for what he did right and what he did wrong with the intention of correcting the mistakes he made in the twilight years of his life. Means spent his life attacking American society while trying to rebuild the culture of Indian people and finished by looking in the mirror and confronting the most horrible things he did. Taking that kind of responsibility requires strength of character, a kind of strength that a lot of leaders in America and the world don’t have. I’m certain that Means would say this strength came from his people’s traditions and his connecation to nature.

As a book, there isn’t much here to criticize. Most of it is exciting with non-stop action, running along at a fast and smooth pace. Russell Means is such a polarizing figure though that there may be times when some readers will feel alienated from the story. His machismo might turn some weaklings off; he always did hate pacifists anyways. Otherwise, he says and does a lot of things that will be objectionable to just about anybody. But whether you agree with all of it, some of it, or none of it, he presents his ideas and life story in such a way that it never gets dull and never ceases to make you think.

And yet another great thing about this book is that it gives such a clear picture of what life for Indians, be they urban Indians or reservation Indians, are living through in our times. This is a perspective that will rarely be found in other books. It’s not about the “noble savages” you see depicted in Santa Fe tourist trap art, Walt Disney cartoons, or the junk new age shaman fantasies of Carlos Castaneda. It shows you realistically how real Indians live in the real world in the very real times we are in. This is where many people in our day will fear to tread, be they hippy Indian wannabes or conservatives and businessmen who turn a blind eye to the damage America and other countries have done to indigenous people.

So should white people fear to tread into the pages of this book? I should hope not as long as you are the kind of white person who cares about humanity and can take some constructive criticism without having an existential crisis. Russell Means can be intimidating; he is at times nasty, cruel, violent, impulsive, egotistical, condescending, and a bit of a publicity seeker, but he also has a caring side, a sly sense of humor, an ironic intellect, and an abundant love for his own people, the planet Earth, and, believe it or not, for humanity as a whole. Despite all his rage, he ends up where Malcolm X did after his pilgrimage to Mecca. No, white people and people of any other enthnicity or race, should overcome any fears they have and dive deeply into these pages. That’s what Russell Mean wants. Taking into consideration the things he says will only make you stronger, even if they do hurt. That is the approach of the warrior, even if it means merely being a literary warrior. Go ahead and read this book. I dare you. You’re a coward if you don’t.

 

Book Review

Love Canal:

A Toxic History from Colonial Times To the Present

by Richard S. Newman

In the late 1970s, there were two places in America that evoked a sense of dread anytime they were mentioned. One was Three Mile Island, the nuclear power plant outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania that leaked radiation into the atmosphere and could potentially have caused a meltdown. The other was Love Canal, a toxic waste dump in Niagara Falls, New York where an entire neighborhood had been built. Richard S. Newman’s Love Canal tells the story of the latter, covering the business practices of the man who gave the site its name, the chemical company that dumped their waste there, and the grassroots protest movement that grew around the discovery of the deadly deposits under the soil.

Newman begins his account with the American Indians’ reverence for the famous Niagara Falls and the coming of colonialists who saw the potential for using Lake Ontario and the Niagara River for the transport of commercial goods. Later, when the Industrial Revolution kicked in and the falls became important for generating electricity, Niagara Falls became a boom town for manufacturers. Out of this economically expanding community came a man named William T. Love. He had a vision of building a canal running off the Niagara River that could be used for generating power in order to expand the growth of the small city southwards where more factories could be built. Love’s enthusiasm was infectious enough to raise investments and his employees went to work building the canal which they named after him, dubbing it the Love Canal. But William Love was more of a dreamer than a doer; he ran out of funds and he abandoned the canal project after its being only partially built.

Years later, Elon Hooker founded the Hooker Chemical company. It was a successful company, especially in the World War II era when they began manufacturing chemicals to be used in various ways for military equipment. Hooker Chemical also took off because they produced important chemicals used in making plastic. Like any other industrial companies, they produced tons of waste. The city of Niagara Falls allocated the Love Canal as a dumping ground, so Hooker Chemical poured all their toxic sludge into flimsy metal barrels and dropped them into the ground, covering them with a topping made of clay.

A couple decades later, the city government allowed housing developers to build a low-income subdivision with a school and a housing project tower block for African-American renters all on top of the Love Canal toxic waste dump. The houses were cheap and a lot of blue collar workers thought they had bought into the American Dream. But then things started to go wrong. Rates of cancer and other diseases became disproportionately prevalent in the area, the rate of miscarriages skyrocketed, birth defects were common, and everybody in the neighborhood smelled a sickening stench in the air. Strange things were happening too like when children threw rocks they found, the rocks would explode and dogs that played in the grass would lose their hair. As it turned out, the barrels underground that were meant to contain the industrial waste had corroded and toxic chemicals were leaking into the soil and air, depositing in people’s basements, and getting into their drinking water. The locals got together and started a protest movement that got national attention. They added more fuel to the fire of the exploding environmentalist movement of the time. The author goes into all the fine details of what they did, how successful they were, the government’s reaction, and the long range impact of the political movement.

Throughout the telling of the Love Canal story, the author writes in a subtext, giving details about the ecological and environmental attitudes in America going back to the founding of the nation. Really that part of the history is taken up with the Transcendentalism of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. After that there were various movements in favor of conservation and the preservation of nature. It wasn’t until the 1960s though that environmentalism intensified and a Return to Nature and Save the Planet ethic took over. People began seeing the natural world as not just a place to escape to for recreation or relaxation, but something we need to be part of in order to survive. All of this eventually merged with the activism of the Love Canal community and furthered the cause of environmental protection.

There is a lot to admire in this book. The chapters on the industrial and commercial history of Niagara Falls are fascinating, especially for those inclined towards an interest in modern history. The story of the Love Canal neighborhood and the activist movement that grew out of it are well-presented and sufficiently detailed too. The author also rightly make a point of explaining how toxic waste is a problem that can be effectively managed with technology when giving the proper funding and attention. The darker side of the story is the reminder that the Republican party and big corporations are working together to roll back all the progress that environmentalists have made, making future ecological disasters a probability. Sadly, people have short memories and living in a country where history is rarely ever taught, the future doesn’t look too bright.

Love Canal is a good book and especially the kind of thing the younger generations should be reading. Until recently, the environmental movement was growing and people of my generation were expecting to pass that torch onto the next generation. Unfortunately, when they picked uo the cell phone they dropped the torch and now pollution levels are rising exponentially, our water is filled with microplastics that kill wildlife and find their way into our food supply, more fossil fuels are burned then ever before, and global warming is accelerating rather than slowing down. Caring for the planet has become less important than staring at a screen all day watching reels of dogs on skateboards, people eating themselves to death in mukbang videos, and the latest, dumbest dance trends. People became so hypnotized by the internet that they forgot about everything that matters. Pay attention, kids...the next Love Canal disaster could be happening under your feet right now. If your phone is more important than the survival of the planet we depend on for life, then maybe we don’t even deserve to survive.

 

Book Review

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

by Peter Matthiessen

     I’ve always thought Peter Matthiessen was a terrible writer. I’ll be up front about that right from the start. The fact that he was a CIA agent doesn’t do much to lend him credibility either. But the story of Leonard Peltier and the American Indian Movement (AIM) is important enough for me to overlook the shortcomings of the author and take In the Spirit of Crazy Horse into serious consideration.

This copiously researched and overwrought work on recent Native American Indian history begins with an account of Crazy Horse, Geronimo, General Custer, and the massacre at Wounded Knee in South Darkota. After some commentary on stolen land and treaties that were never upheld by the U.S. government, the story is brought into more recent times by briefly telling the story of AIM and how leaders like Russel Means, Dennis Banks, John Trudell and other lesser known men formed the militant activist group at the end of the 1960s. The group was loosely organized and made up of urban Indians, mostly from the West coast. They came into prominence in the early ‘70s when they occupied the Oglala reservation of Pine Ridge, South Dakota. This led to a brief standoff with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the FBI that brought AIM into the spotlight of national politics and won them support among Native peoples all across the country. Matthiessen follows this section up with an account of the trials that came after.

Up to this point, the story is straight forward and easy to follow since it goes along an ordinary linear path. Matthiessen’s style is not known for being direct, precise, or clear, but in these opening chapters he manages to keep a tight rein on his language so the audience doesn’t get lost so soon. The opening chapter on Wounded Knee feels arbitrary and unnecessary, especially for anybody who knows about American history. It could have been left out or shortened, but it doesn’t do any real damage to the book. The problems come later. At least these sections do a good job of setting the tone and context for what comes next.

What does come next is the whole heart of the story. In June of 1975, two FBI agents drove onto the Pine Ridge reservation with a huge entourage of FBI and BIA agents, SWAT teams, a gang of thugs, and a right wing militia group, while a spotter airplane flew overhead. A group of AIM members were camping on the reservation with a cache of weapons. Nobody knows how it started, but a firefight began. The two FBI agents were shot point blank and one AIM activist named Leonard Peltier was later charges and convicted of murder.

This whole chapter is confusing. I have to say, that is not Peter Matthiessen’s fault. He tells the story several times from the points of view provided by several different witnesses. Since most of them were either firing guns or hiding to avoid being shot, you can’t expect any of them to provide a clear explanation of what happened. As muddled and difficult as this part of the book can be, Matthiessen still holds your attention enough to keep you reading and guessing what will happen.

The inevitable next section of the story is the arrest of Peltier and some others and their two trials for murder. The prosecution does a terrible job in both trials, resulting in a finding of not guilty in the first and guilty in the second, the one in which Leonard Peltier got sentenced to life imprisonment. Matthiessen demonstrates how insufficient the prosecution’s case was in both and how they broke the law in their conduct by intimidating witnesses, tampering with evidence, and withholding necessary documents from the defense. If Matthiessen’s account of these trials is accurate, then there is more than sufficient reason for Peltier to be allowed a retrial. If Matthiessen’s account isn’t accurate, then it is because he is guilty of massively cherry picking his information. Given what I know about Leonard Peltier, I think the former is more believable than the latter and I would prefer to just go along with the author. But what comes later in the book, or more accurately what doesn’t come later, gives me reason to pause and question how trustworthy the author is.

From a simple standpoint of excitement, the beginning of the last section is the most interesting. The imprisoned Leonard Peltier learns of a supposed plot to assassinate him, so he escapes from the penitentiary, only to be caught soon after. If you want any more action to keep the narrative going, you will find it here. This incident leads the author to assert that there is some sort of conspiracy by the FBI to bring down the American Indian Movement. Matthiessen’s theory is that they are working with some corporations to access uranium mines in the Black Hills on the Pine Ride Reservation. Is it a real conspiracy or just a conspiracy theory? We know that the FBI tried to take out other Civil Rights organizations along with other activist groups of the New Left in the 1960s, so it isn’t a far fetched idea. As to why they chose to go after Peltier even though they probably knew he wasn’t guilty, is a bit more complex. It appears they needed to pin the murders on someone, even if it wasn’t the actual murderer and they found it easier to build a case against Peltier than anyone else. As for the assassination plot, I just don’t know. The FBI had Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers assassinated so it can’t be ruled out even if there is testimony from only one man regarding this.

The rest of this last section involves Matthiessen rambling around, talking to various people about various elements related to the case. Except for the two people who claim to have murdered the FBI agents, there isn’t anything here that actually strengthens the author’s argument. It is a disorganized mess of random stuff that is barely, if ever, interesting. It seems that Matthiessen felt he had to include all the information he had gathered even if it didn’t contribute anything of value to the book overall.

The biggest problem with this last section is not its bad writing, but the way in which it makes its one-sidedness so obvious. I have to say that I mostly agree with the author’s stance on the issues addressed, but the absence of opposing points of view make it look suspicious. There is one passage where the author has a phone conversation with FBI agent David Price, but Price does little more than talk in circles without ever saying much of anything. He obfuscates the FBI’s case rather than clarifies it. It doesn’t stand firmly as an attempt at providing a counter-argument. Matthiessen should have cut down on all the testimony from AIM members and sympathizers, who sound like nothing more than yes-men and yes-women, and included more from the government’s point of view. It would have made the story more complete and I don’t think it would have hurt his thesis. It probably would have strengthened it.

Is In the Spirit of Crazy Horse worth reading? For now, I have to say yes. The history is interesting enough on its own to survive the bad writing. And as far as I know, this is the most well-researched and comprehensive account of the Leonard Peltier affair that is available. Still the question remains, did Leonard Peltier kill those two FBI agents? I really don’t think so, but I also don’t think Peter Matthiessen did a good job of proving his innocence. What he does succeed in is showing how the trial was a sham, a persecution motivated by extreme prejudice and not by a desire for justice.