Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 32

The Best-Laid Plans

The section of the book I'm working on today is basically a brief history of terrible kidnapping plots. They're not all necessarily dumb crimes from the get-go—many of the cases I cover involved months of careful planning by above-average crooks. But they inevitably make one key error that unspools the entire enterprise. And more often than not, that error concerns the way in which the ransom is passed from the victim's family to the criminals.

The case of 9-year-old Michelle Wiebe is an excellent case in point. The kidnappers thought they had everything nailed down, including a great concept for the money transfer. But they didn't account for the natural curiosity of passers-by:

Through a series of telephone calls, [Arnold] Wiebe was instructed to leave the $300,000 in a suitcase on an isolated road Tuesday night between Goshen and Visalia, Chief Forsyth said.

He said someone passing by saw Wiebe leave the money, became curious, picked up the suitcase and took it home. The unidentified man telephoned police after discovering the $300,000.

As you might have guessed, the kidnappers were somewhat easily caught after releasing the girl unharmed. The main lesson here is that kidnapping can only really flourish if ransom payments can be funneled through legitimate means—for example, wire services or respected local officials who function as middlemen. Unfortunately, law enforcement in many parts of the world seems reluctant to clamp down on such intermediaries who allow kidnapping rings to function as low-risk enterprises.

Despots of a Feather

Strange YouTube journey this morning as I sought some quickie material for a reporting day. Inspired by Dr. Swerve-On's latest installment of Fresh Produce, I started off looking for George Benson's version of "California Dreaming." Yet I somehow ended up fixated on the video above, in which Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu pays a visit to Pyongyang in the mid-1970s. Note the eerily robotic way in which the North Korean throngs wave their flags to greet Ceausescu's motorcade.

Mo' Problems

Given that I'm all about narrative arc these days, Barnaby Barford is an artist who's right up my alley. He uses his ceramic skills to tell stories, and his latest project is a doozy—a modern update on A Rake's Progress that recounts an English lottery winner's rise and fall. One moment our protagonist is sitting on his couch, watching Newcastle United on the telly while his missus bugs him about a zillion unpaid bills; the next he's living the high life in a casino, blowing his winnings on pleasures of the flesh. This inevitably leads to a classic downward spiral, as the man—a cross between Andy Capp and a rather noxious sort of chav—lacks the fortitude to control his impulses.

And how does it end? That is yet to be determined; Barford is currently fielding ideas from the public on whether his lucky layabout should find redemption or damnation in the final scene. Keep in mind that poor Tom Rakewell ended up in an asylum, flopping around in his birthday suit. Perhaps the modern-day British equivalent is a turn on a celebrity-oriented reality show.

Sedition Was the Case That They Gave Me

In most corners of the world, graffiti artists operate in fear of being nabbed for vandalism. In totalitarian Fiji, they face far more serious charges, at least if their scrawled messages carry the whiff of the political:

A New Zealand businessman is in custody in Fiji along with four others who have been arrested over anti-military regime graffiti in Suva in August.

The five, including Sri Lankan born New Zealand citizen Jagath Karunaratne, appeared in the Suva Magistrate's Court yesterday charged with sedition for graffiti against military strong man Voreqe Bainimarama.

When the graffiti first appeared in August along the Nausori-Suva road, it was claimed to be been put there by a group calling itself the Viti Revolutionary Forces (VRF).

The hastily painted graffiti said things like "PM out you lier" (sic), "RFMF remove Frank … VRT" and "PM your time is over".

A gallery of the offending graffiti is available here. It is, of course, ridiculous to think that political agitation of this mild, non-violent nature could be punished as severely as the actual execution of a violent coup. But as this interview regarding another pending case makes clear, Fiji's sedition laws are designed with exactly this sort of persecution in mind:

HILL: Daniel Urai, the trade unionist, has been charged under a section of the crimes act which talks about, not just opposition to the government, but also creating some sort of political violence. Is sedition that kind of a crime?

HODGE: Well, there's no requirement for violence. One of the subsections does refer to encouraging violence or lawlessness or disorder, but another one is to procure alterations of matters affecting the Constitution, laws or the government. So it may be that he went to an overseas conference and suggested that there should be support for changing the form of government or changing the form of laws or something like that and technically, I have to agree with the military dictatorship there. Technically, he is probably in violation of seeking a change to aspects of the legal system and or the government to Fiji.

HILL: So he's guilty?

HODGE: Well, of that statute, yes.

A sobering situation to keep in mind the next time you hear someone in the U.S. complain about how their free-speech rights are being violated simply because other private citizens respond with more speech.

(Image via Fiji Coup 2006)

An Embarrassment of Riches

Spending today sifting through an absolute treasure trove of primary-source documents, which is why you'll have to make do with some Algerian chanteusery instead of the usual polymathic mish-mash. Though I can't yet reveal the exact nature of the documents I'm examining, I can tell you one thing they've taught me so far: Kim Il-sung fooled a lot of people into thinking he actually gave a damn about his people.

Potemkin Would be Proud

There's a terrific old episode of Cops—yes, Cops—in which the Miami police round up a bunch of streetwalkers in advance of Super Bowl XXIX. What's so surprising about the operation is how up front the police are about their objective—namely, to present the game's attendees with a prostitute-free version of the city. In the episode's final shot, a police sergeant stares into a paddy wagon full of handcuffed ladies and says, "Your detention will last until the day after the Super Bowl." Points for honesty, I guess, though certainly not for respect for the rule of law.

Cops in Durban, South Africa, are now up to similar shenanigans in advance of an upcoming climate conference. Their targets are not prostitutes, but rather the homeless denizens of the city's beaches:

Beggars said they had been told to get lost or they would be dumped "in the middle of nowhere" or locked in a crowded cell for the duration of COP17.

"They're coming for us," said beachfront beggar Martin van der Westhuizen. "A few of my friends have already disappeared and I hear a lot of us are being locked up."

He said it was common for authorities to crack down on beggars before big events. The beachfront and area around the International Convention Centre (ICC) were prime targets. "They round us up and take us out of the city to Umlazi or Verulam and drop us in the middle of nowhere. Then we have to walk back," he said.

Another beggar said that event banners going up around Durban's ICC were usually a sign for beggars to get lost. "When visitors are coming, the police clean up the beachfront and other places where the people go. They throw us in the truck and tell us to voetsek. They tell us we're dirty and the tourists don't want to see our ugly faces," said a beggar called Enoch.

The logic of such crackdowns seems facile, to say the least. Is the global elite really unaware that large cities have homeless populations? Are they so sensitive to the solicitations of the unfortunate that they must be shielded from reality? It would be one thing if the cops' targets were posing an actual security threat to the conference. But as far as I can tell, this is simply an attempt to make the attendees' experience in Durban 0.00001 percent more pleasant.

I'm open to persuasion, of course. Can anyone point me toward a study regarding the economic benefits of such crackdowns? Tough for me to envision how Miami's fortunes were changed by presenting a prostitute-free Super Bowl XXIX, but I guess anything is possible.

The Catch

I love this whole approach of picking apart successful yarns to figure out what makes them work. To get myself in the book-writing mindset, I've been doing likewise with a bunch of great stories from my formative years—things that have managed to stick with me all these decades later. It's probably no great shock for me to tell y'all that a bunch of those stories are from the pages of Sports Illutrated.

A few weeks back I revisited the tale of steroid casulaty Tommy Chaikin. This time I'm giving the Microkhan nod to Steve Wulf's 1991 profile of Percy Howard, a man with but one NFL reception to his credit. Fortunately for him, that reception came in the Super Bowl, a fact that has made him far more revered than any other one-catch receiver in football history.

But Howard's wife says this feat may have actually caused her husband more harm than good. Here's the passage that has stuck in my mind all these years, perhaps because I've always had a major soft spot for the book she cites:

Ah, the catch. Most people would consider it a great blessing. Percy certainly does. Pat, on the other hand, considers it a curse. "In a way, it was the worst thing that could have happened," she says. "Percy got the big head after that, and he could never come to grips with reality. Believe me, he was a different person before the catch. It reminds me of Santiago's catch in The Old Man and the Sea. It was a great feat, but by the time he has brought the catch to shore, it has been eaten by other fish, and all he has left are bones."

The couple were recently divorced when the article was published, so perhaps there is too much undue bitterness in her comment. But as with yesterday's post, you can definitely understand how fame can lose its luster once the initial euphoria has worn off.

Where Do We Go Now?

[image error]

With roughly six months to go 'til my first book is due, you can expect plenty more research extras in the coming weeks. A lot of those posts will be designed to help me think through some of the slippery issues I'm encountering as I shape the central narrative—I'm still struggling to understand the mindsets and motivations of my two principal characters. There are few non-fiction challenges tougher than getting inside the head of someone whose logic doesn't make sense at first blush.

One tangential story I've been contemplating quite a bit is that of Dwight Johnson, a Detroit native who won a Medal of Honor for his bravery at Dakto, Vietnam. Less than three years after receiving the hallowed award, he was killed while trying to rob a grocery store. Johnson's motive for the crime will forever remain a mystery: He was either trying to get $25 to pay for a minor medical procedure for his wife, or so psychologically broken by his post-war experiences that he couldn't help but lash out. What is known, however, is that he felt that the Medal of Honor was as much a curse as a blessing—it forever pegged him as someone special, when deep down he couldn't understand why he had survived Dakto when so many comrades had perished. This heartbreaking New York Times account (PDF) of Johnson's last months includes excerpts from his Army psychiatric evaluations that reveal his inner turmoil:

The subject remembered coming face to face with a Vietnamese with a gun. He can remember the soldier squeezing the trigger. The gun jammed. The subject has since engaged in some magical thinking about this episode. He also suffers guilt over surviving it, and later winning a high honor for the one time in his life when he lost complete control of himself. He asked: "What would happen if I lost control of myself in Detroit and behaved like I did in Vietnam?" The prospect of such an event apparently was deeply disturbing to him.

Reading the whole sad story of Johnson's downward spiral, which has some eerily close parallels to the tale I'm cobbling together, I kept on thinking about the burden of heroism. All Johnson wanted was for life to return to "normal," the way it was before he went to Vietnam, despite the fact that his version of "normal" was quite economically deprived. He never wanted to carry the war back home, but the bestowal of the Medal of Honor made it inescapable—he could scarcely walk five feet in Detroit without someone asking about Dakto. A nation's earnest effort to hail his exceptional bravery was what caused him to come undone. Call it a textbook case of best intentions gone terribly awry.

(Photo of Dwight Johnson, at right, via Ray Smith)

"I'm Smart…and I'm Your Friend"

In honor of Halloween—and in deference to the fact that I gotta split early today for trick-or-treating—I'm once again paying homage to the cinematic evildoer who caused me countless childhood nightmares: undead utopian cult leader Reverend Henry Kane. I dare you to come up with a more terrifying horror-flick villain—the man oozes menace out of every scaly pore. Kind of awesome to know that the actor behind the character, Julian Beck, was a New York theater nerd who was pals with Allen Ginsberg.

Road Hazards

[image error]

So easy to forget what a high degree of transportation safety we've reached here in the United States. I'm not talking purely in terms of vehicle safety—we also are fortunate to have law and order in areas surrounding roads. The lack of that sort of security is what enables folks to blockade entire Indian states, and make assaults on minibuses in Papua New Guinea a seemingly routine occurrence. A 19-year resident of the nation describes one such incident in this richly detailed account of a PMV ride to Madang:

It was dark and all I felt was shattering pellots of window glass all over my face and front, as my fellow passengers barked. It took a few second but I realised this explosion had been a rock and it barely missed my nose in a trajectory right across the sea and out through the opposite window. Such propulsion, it was impressive, and then very scary a I realised I was not hurt, had no blook anywhere, but had almost, by a hair's breath, been beammed, maybe killed. The bus drove on a bit before stopping and everyone realized the windows were shattered, the owner's father crying already about how this was a brand new bus (!), why did they do this, and people scrambling out, stompung the dark road, as we rawled ahead to where another PMV had stopped after passing us.

It looks bad, and my drunken co-riders are shouting, searching the seats for their bushknives and the roadside for heavy stones. I get out shaking my head and clothes, pleading for us to go on please and not to start a fight, to go to the police and send them back and all that. But no one listens. The engine is cut and all the riders are cross the culvert to the trees and behind, where I can hear screams rom the village, people yelping and barking and obviously arming themselves for a good fight.

There's a reason that "suppression of banditry" has often ranked high on the agenda of central government. Unless people can move about their nation free of fear, what chance is there for peace and prosperity?

(Image via Drew Douglas)