Sam Quinones's Blog, page 2

Fentanyl 4 Sale On Craigslist L.A.

In Los Angeles, Craigslist has emerged in the last few months as a major new marketplace for illicit fentanyl.

The online classified ad service has for several years been a virtual street corner, a place where drugs are sold under lightly veiled pseudonyms: black-tar heroin (“roofing tar”), crystal methamphetamine (“clear sealant”), or generic and most likely counterfeit oxycodone 30 mg pills (“M30”).[image error]

But fentanyl, the deadliest of them all, is a new arrival, apparently within the last year, and for the moment appears to be for sale on Craigslist only on its Los Angeles site.

A search of Los Angeles Craigslist revealed numerous listings for fentanyl code words “China White Doll” or “White China Plates” or “China White Dishes.” A few were even more brazen: China “fenty fent” White read one. The ads usually display no photographs or images other than maps of the areas the vendors purport to serve.

The search did turn up numerous ads of what appeared to be vendors of actual dinnerware; these included photographs of plates, bowls, teacups.

But other ads were like this one, from a West Hollywood vendor, who advertised under the headline, “White China Christmas Edition – $100”:

“Were you left out in the cold? Were you served fake stuff? Are you sick? Let me help you ease your pain. …Tired of the petty games or fake product being sold at a cheaper price, or waiting hours upon hours for the dude.”

Offering “Winter White Fine China,” a Sherman Oaks vendor advertised professionalism, reliability, fast service and “product testing available. No pressure to purchase.”

“Yes honest vendors still exist!” the vendor wrote. “Be cautious, stay alert & don’t get fooled! If you’re not absolutely satisfied we go our separate ways!”

“Mention #painpaingoaway for the sale prices,” read one Wilshire vendor’s ad.[image error]

Another in Gardena offered a “brand name substitute of roofing tar”: “$20/strip if you’re buying one, price breaks if you need more. White china plates also available as well, $100/half set $180/full set. TEXT ONLY PLEASE. When you contact me, please include your name, what you’re looking to purchase and if you’re mobile or if you need delivery (If delivery, include your location as well)”

Many listed the keywords that buyers might be using to find vendors: “Addys, blues, China, perks, xanax, white, coke, fent, Subs, Percocet, oxycodone, Norco, Suboxone, adderall, fentanyl, Dilaudid, tramadol.”

I sent an email to Craigslist media department requesting an interview on how and why this occurred and is allowed, but I’ve received no response.[image error]

“We’ve observed a high frequency of involvement of Craigslist in the dissemination of [illegal] drugs,” said Ben Barron, an assistant U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles who is prosecuting the region’s first Craigslist-related fentanyl death case. The case involves Andrew Madi, an alleged Craigslist heroin and fentanyl dealer who is accused of selling fentanyl that killed a buyer last summer.

Madi, 25, was indicted earlier this month on charges that he sold fentanyl to a buyer, recently out of drug treatment, who responded to his Craigslist Los Angeles ad. Barron said Madi allegedly advertised “roofing tar” (black-tar heroin). Then, via texts, Madi allegedly told the buyer he was out of roofing tar, but had “China White,” offering a money-back guarantee if the buyer was unsatisfied with his product.

When Madi texted him later asking his opinion of what he’d been sold, the buyer replied that “this white does the job for sure.” On July 6, the buyer was found dead in his apartment, with a baggie containing fentanyl nearby. Officials allege that Madi had been advertising fentanyl, heroin and Xanax on Craigslist since March.

“We have very good reason to believe that this was just one small slice of the trafficking [Madi] was doing using many email addresses and burner cellphones” on Craigslist, Barron said.

A cursory check of Craigslists in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis, Charlotte, San Francisco, Palm Springs, and Las Vegas turned up only a small number of similar listings, or none at all. New York’s listing offered a handful of such ads. San Diego and Orange County Craigslists had several, though far fewer, suspect listings than did Los Angeles.[image error]

Barron suggested the reason may be related to Los Angeles’s position as a major drug hub, both from Mexico and from China, where much of the fentanyl powder is made by hundreds of chemical companies.

“Even if we don’t have the same degree of opiate overdose problem as you’d see in the Rust Belt, the drugs are flowing through here,” he said.

One long-time heroin addict, who requested anonymity, suggested the Craigslist fentanyl marketplace was due to the bust of an extensive, well-used San Fernando Valley-based heroin delivery services — known by addicts and police as Manny’s Delivery Service — in December, 2017. Addicts and mid-level dealers from as far away as Anaheim and Bakersfield were said to patronize the service.

The service reputedly did not sell fentanyl, but the addict said many people have switched to fentanyl after Manny’s cheap, potent heroin, and the organization’s convenient delivery, were no longer available — though other services have stepped into the vacuum Manny’s left behind.

The Craigslist ads for fentanyl, he noted, began popping up not long after Manny’s was taken down by local and federal authorities. The cases against 16 defendants in the Manny’s indictment are still winding their way through court.

Fentanyl might have arrived anyway, said the user, given its advantages as an underworld drug. “But I can tell you without a doubt what has happened to the L.A. dope scene since they were busted: Fentanyl is everywhere. There’s a lot of people who are choosing to use fentanyl,” he said in a telephone interview.

If you have any stories of buying fentanyl, heroin, or other illegal drugs on Craigslist, or from Manny’s Delivery Service, please feel free to comment below, or contact me at samquinones7@yahoo.com.

Fentanyl is a legitimate medical painkiller – a synthetic opioid – used often in cardiac surgery and to control chronic pain. But it is up to a hundred times more potent than morphine and highly addictive, and thus has become a street drug as America’s epidemic of opiate addiction has spread in recent years. The epidemic began with doctors overprescribing narcotic pain pills. Many patients grew addicted to those pills and some of them switched to heroin, which is mostly from Mexico or Colombia. Recently, though, traffickers have turned to fentanyl as a heroin substitute because it is cheaper to manufacture and, due to its potency, easier to smuggle in small quantities.

Public health and law enforcement officials attribute the record overdose-death rates of the last few years to widespread addiction to opiates across the United States and the arrival of illicit fentanyl – often in powder form – on the streets in response.

Fentanyl has become widely offered for sale on the Dark Web — that part of the Internet that requires a special connection and expertise to connect to. But Los Angeles appears to be the first place where the drug is offered on the open web.

The emergence of the Craigslist fentanyl marketplace is alarming, Barron said, because at least “on the Dark Web, there’s a degree of sophistication involved in that, whereas anybody can use Craigslist.”

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Bruce Wayne and the Rule of Law

You can learn a lot from Lyft drivers.

One thing I tend to encounter is stories of how we become American.

I met a Lyft driver recently named Aldo. He’s from Guatemala and came here 30 years ago, at 14, escaping civil war.

He doesn’t want anything to do with Guatemala, he told me.[image error]

He went back for the first time not long ago, and couldn’t stand it. There’s no rule of law. “Nobody follows the rules,” he said. “You can’t just drive along peacefully like this. You gotta be aware of these other drivers running redlights. Motorcyclists coming up to rob you.”

I’ve heard the greatest stories from Lyft drivers. I met the brother of the champion of Mongolian BMX racing one time. Another was a Vietnamese screenwriter. A third was a Dreamer.

As Aldo and I drove along, he extolled the virtues of the Kia Optima hybrid, how he’d lived peacefully with his family in South Gate for eight years until his landlord married a Colombian woman and she started causing problems.

He told me he’d adopted his wife’s children — she was legally changing her name from Maria de la Luz to Lucy — raised them and they are now grown or growing. That he contracted polio when he was born and walks with crutches.

In Guatemalan, he couldn’t go back to his old neighborhood because he might not be able to leave it. He also couldn’t stand the smells in the outdoor markets.

So he came back from his visit home, and is getting his U.S. citizenship next year. And when he does he’ll change his name to Batman’s alter ego.

“I’m American,” he told me. “Everybody knows him.”

 

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Mexican Mafia Chronicles: Champ Reynoso Dies

Word was recently passed to me that another of the pioneers of the country’s most damaging prison gangs, the Mexican Mafia, has died.[image error]

Adolph “Champ” Reynoso passed at a Colorado hospital near the federal maximum-security lockup where he’d spent his last many years. He was 75.

Reynoso was part of L.A. crime lore. He was a member of Big Hazard, an East LA street gang.

Later, he was made a member of the Mexican Mafia while in prison. He was one of the 22 Eme members indicted in the first federal RICO case against the gang — coming in 1995, and hingeing on the testimony of Ernie “Chuco” Castro, up to that point one of the most influential members of the organization.

The trial pulled back the veil on the mafia in several ways – one of which was to reveal its scheme for using street gang members to tax drug dealers in the barrios of Southern California, the revenue for which was funneled to mafia members and their associates.

The scheme remains in place today and has turned the Mexican Mafia into more than a prison gang –rather, an organization with enormous influence beyond prison walls.

Years later, now 61, Reynoso was identified as a leader of the Eme in the Supermax prison at Florence, Colorado, in testimony about a hit that took place within the gang at the prison.

At his passing, he was deemed the highest-ranking active Mexican Mafia member.

The last few years have seen the passing of several Eme figures from those years — those who formed or spread the Eme: Peter “Sana” Ojeda, Frank “Frankie B” Buelna, Ruben Rodriguez, “Black Dan” Barela. Joe Morgan and Benjamin “Topo” Peters died years ago. Many others have dropped out of the gang while in prison – an exodus that began with Castro, who went into federal witness protection, and, before him, Ramon “Mundo” Mendoza.

Most of the older Eme members, like Reynoso, were heroin addicts on the street — reflecting the fact that their criminal careers began in the late 1960s, early 1970s — a time when heroin crept into the Mexican-American neighborhoods of Southern California with a vengeance.

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In Praise Of A Great Newspaperman: Mike Fitzgerald, Stockton Record

In 31 years as a reporter, most of them at daily newspapers, I’ve worked with two great columnists.

One was Steve Lopez of the LA Times. The other was Mike Fitzgerald at the Stockton Record.[image error]

Mike retires this week, after decades on the job. Here’s his final column.

Great columnists possess one common trait: They’re all newspapers reporters at heart. They sometimes opine on the day’s news, but they usually leave 24-hour news punditry to others.

Instead, what they most believe in is going to talk to the neighbor, the cop, the pastor, or the taco truck owner. Reporting, true and straight. Nothing like it for burning away crud and getting to a joyous kernel of veracity.

That’s what Mike has done as a columnist. He combined that instinct with a deep knowledge of his native town.

Today, awash in the sewage of 24-hour news, we too often confuse columnists with pundits. They are not the same – at least the best columnists aren’t.

The best columnists help you understand where you live, often by pointing out the tiniest corners of the town that you realize only later that you were dying to know about. Mike did that.

It’s not that they don’t have opinions. Columnists’ job, in part, is to have opinions. But these opinions should be based on the relentless collection of facts, not on ideology. Mike did that.

Sadly, we Americans prize pundits, who are cheap, as everyone has an opinion; we don’t want to pay for columnists and thus we are poorer for it. We have too many of the former and one less of the latter today.

Mike and I met when I began my stint as the Record’s crime reporter. He took me around to meet the cops and others that would make up my daily rounds for the next four years (1988-92). That first night we drove to south Stockton where a car had plunged through a house and landed on a woman sleeping in her bed. I’d never known that to happen, but in Stockton I covered another dozen of those.[image error]

In a year or two, they made Mike a columnist. We sat across from each other for a couple years, as he churned out terrific snapshots of the corners of the town, of its politics, its neighborhoods filled with Cambodians, Sikhs, Michoacanos, blacks, and the whites of north Stockton and east Stockton – which were then two separate planets.

We covered the horror of Cleveland School together, where a drifter showed up in January 1989 with an AK-47 and killed five kids and wounded 30 more.

We were part of a staff then that I believe the best I ever worked with – young reporters, eager to cover the world, growing with experience, and set loose on a town that was full of stunning, beautiful, crazy, terrible stories.

Mike and I got along because we recognized in each other a kindred spirit: we were both born to be reporters. We’d have been miserable and failures in any other profession.

It helped Mike, too, to that Stockton is one of the great American cities. Integrated, roiling, common-sensical, a lot of problems and a lot of heart.

As Mike writes: “It’s the drug addict in recovery. The Hmong in adult education class. The millennial who wants to live in a high-density downtown community. Filipinos digging out their history to restore their lost narrative.”[image error]

Mike got out of the office and told their stories and many more. That’s what great columnists do.

Great columnists keep at it. Mike did that, too. (Read some of those columns here. )

My feeling is that Stockton will miss Mike Fitzgerald a whole lot.

As that feeling grows, meanwhile, I just wanted to say, from one newspaperman to another, thanks, Brother Mike. You done great! -30-

 

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The Bent Spoon Guy & Purdue Pharma

This summer, a sculptor built a steel, 11-foot, 800-pound bent heroin spoon. With the help of an gallery owner, he put it on a trailer and drove it to the headquarters of Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin.[image error]

The bent-spoon protest of the country’s opiate epidemic by Massachusetts sculptor Domenic Esposito and Fernando Alvarez, owner of a Connecticut art gallery, stayed in front of the company’s Stamford, CT offices for only two hours before police impounded the sculpture, but it gained worldwide attention.

Alvarez was arrested and eventually convicted of a misdemeanor charge of blocking free passage.

I was in Boston recently and had a chance to meet and talk with Esposito about the episode and what brought it on.

Our conversation ended up including his brother’s addiction, drug marketing, Americans’ pain, and #thespoon movement they hope to ignite.

Great story. Take a listen. Share it if you like it:

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The Palomino Rides Again

I don’t go in for nostalgia much. The Rock N Roll Hall of Fame, for example, seems a sad place to end up, because it means you and what you created are antiques, dead.

So last night, when I went to the resurrection of The Palomino nightclub (for one night only) in the San Fernando Valley, I was wary.

The Palomino, until its closing in 1995, was part of the roiling, ethnically based music scenes that spawned in Los Angeles in the decades before the Internet and changes in the music industry and club world made such conglomerations rare.

Music is created in a time and a place by people from both and eventually they all pass, and only the records remain, which I figure is good enough.

The excuse for last night was to hold a benefit for a new pop-art museum – Valley Relics. Really, though, it was a chance to remember.

But instead of wallowing in the past, a dozen or more singers showcased the beauty of the music created at The Palomino. True, there were a few too many speeches about how great things were back when. But what I’ll take with me is a raw and simple sweetness, intensity, and longing in the music that I don’t associate with oldies, nostalgia shows.

Three monster backup bands, including one led by guitarist James Intveld, who got his start at The Palomino, were worth paying to see by themselves; his band included the tremendous Marty Rifkin on pedal steel.[image error]

Last night, I was finally able to see Rosie Flores, who rocks as hard as anyone. Jim Lauderdale was impeccable and has a voice that, if anything, has improved with age. I first heard him on an anthology album called A Town South of Bakersfield that I found sometime in the early 1990s and was my introduction to LA country.

Most unexpectedly, Gunnar Nelson, of the heartthrob band Nelson, and son of TV-teen-idol-turned-country-act Rick Nelson, showed up to play a Dylan song and two by his late father. He told the story behind his dad’s hit, “Garden Party,” which Rick Nelson wrote after playing a Madison Square Garden oldies show, only now he was playing hippie country music and the crowd hated it. He wrote the song and its chorus (“You can’t please everyone so you gotta please yourself.”) in response. Never knew that story. The song took on a power and poignancy I’d never associated with it until his son played it.

(I’ll admit to not knowing until today that Intveld’s brother, Rick, played in Rick Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band and both were killed when the band’s plane crashed in Texas in 1985.)

A slide show on a wall reminded us that the great days of The Palomino were the 1970s and into the 1980s. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. [image error]Those were great years for music scenes in L.A., and thus for the clubs where they found their legs.

In the late 1970s, legions of white punks in Hollywood created their own scene, complete with clubs but also halls rented for DIY shows. That was followed in the mid-1980s by black kids from Compton creating beats in their garages on SP 1200 drum machines, birthing gangsta rap. Not long after that, the narcocorrido scene emerged in the newly forged Mexican-immigrant enclaves of South Gate, Bell, Huntington Park, Lynwood southeast of L.A., growing from the music of Chalino Sanchez, who was murdered in 1992.

All of these had in common a lot of young folks who were initially ignored by the recording industry and mainstream radio, and who thus learned to make their own records and promote them on their own, selling them in swap meets and outside shows.

Meanwhile, out on Lankersheim in the then-largely white San Fernando Valley, The Palomino attracted huge stars of country music – Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, George Jones, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, Tom T. Hall, Marty Robbins, Kris Kristofferson. But the club was also a magnet for young musicians who came to LA from all over to play country music. Some of the best country music in America was created there.

The Palomino offered what all music scenes must have: A venue for young artists and bands to aspire to, a place to hone, to be heard and discovered. Dwight Yoakam was an opening act there. The club was also a hangout for young actors and stuntmen in the film industry.[image error]

So last night was a good night. In the end maybe I was affected by some bit of nostalgia. The night made me yearn for the days when I was going to the Hong Kong Café and watching the Germs, the Plugz and the Go-Gos on the same small stage. (I think I once went to The Palomino – can’t remember any more – but I do know that back then a trip to the 818 was, for me, almost like a trip to another country, so it didn’t happen much.)

Today, from what I can see, the era of the L.A. music scene is largely dead. My take is that the Internet has made music so easy to create that the industry has fragmented into a million little pieces and no sufficiently large critical mass of fans, clubs, and media attention can form around a small group of artists doing daring new stuff. Everything’s so diffuse. Listen to KCRW and you rarely hear the same band – they just cascade by.

I’m sure someone will correct me on this. Maybe I’m not paying as much attention as I used to.

But going out to dive clubs where daring music is played doesn’t seem quite the thing it once was. Without the clubs as centers of community where fans can see musicians and musicians can improve – like, in their day, the Hong Kong Café, El Parral, and The Palomino – it’s hard to imagine that kind of musical effervescence repeated.

Which is not to say new stuff won’t come along – it just may not happen in a community the way it once did.

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Topeka and Brown v. Board

I’m here in Topeka, Kansas, where I’m speaking to the Kansas Medical Society, and it’s an overcast day.[image error]

First time here. So I stopped in at the Brown v. Board of Education historic site in the southwest part of town, where the neighborhoods have a lot of nice wooden houses with porches under tall trees.

The site is the old Monroe Elementary School, once segregated, where the black families who brought the suit had their children enrolled.

Oliver Brown and his daughter Linda Brown were the lead plaintiffs in the case. In 1950, they had gone to a white school to enroll Linda. They were turned away. Their case went to the Supreme Court and changed America by, among other things, beginning our country’s agonizing process of living up to our constitution as written.

The court’s 1953 ruling, of course, overturned the idea, enshrined in U.S. law following the Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), that separate and equal public schools were constitutional.

Using the Brown case as a test, the NAACP and its attorney Thurgood Marshall argued that separate but equal violated the 14thAmendment. The amendment was passed during Reconstruction guaranteeing, among other things, equa[image error]l protection under the law. Jim Crow had rendered the amendment a dead letter.

The court agreed unanimously with Marshall — and with that began the resuscitation of that part of the Constitution.

I learned a few things.

One was that Brown was only the lead of five school segregation cases that were argued before the Supreme Court that day. Others were from South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and Washington DC. The Kansas case was chosen as the lead case because the effects of segregation were less bad – the differences between white and black schools weren’t as pronounced — and thus the case had the potential for setting a new high standard for black schools – that of white schools in Kansas. So a ranger explained to me.

Also, Topeka didn’t wait, but began integrating its schools a year before the Supreme Court’s ruling. Other regions of the country, of course, rebelled.

I heard the name of Charles Houston for the first time.

Houston was the dean of the Howard University Law School who[image error] turned the school into a “West Point for civil rights attorneys,” mentoring Thurgood Marshall, as well as many other less-heralded but equally energetic attorneys. Sounds like quite a figure in American history.

I bought a biography of Marshall written by Juan Williams because it appears to have a lot of references to him.

Through all our complicated history, the courts remain the place, as Houston knew, where people, though it would take so much painful time, eventually could find justice.

Here’s a photo of Linda Brown, who was 7 and in the 3rd grade when this case first went forward. She died earlier this year.

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Coming Soon: Money For Three Addiction Research Centers

The National Institute of Health yesterday announced what sounds like a major new push to attack the opiate epidemic[image error] at the community level.

A big part of what it’s calling its HEALing Communities initiative will be to try to integrate prevention and treatment efforts for addicts while strengthening communities.

There’s more than that, though.

Two years ago, I wrote about the potential for economic development to the Ohio River Valley region that I thought could come from the region positioning itself as a center for addiction research. Northern Kentucky University, and their provost, Sue Ott Rowlands, picked up on that idea, I’m honored to say, and the Ohio River Valley Research Consortium was formed.

It now appears that within the NIH push is what is described to me as “a lot” of money (though how much is as yet unknown) to establish three research centers around the country. Here are the guidelines for applying for that money.

Sounds like it might be a good moment for folks in the tri-state Ohio River Valley, so badly hit by the epidemic and deindustrialization, to marshal some forces and look to the future of what such a center can mean for research, dollars, and attracting PhDs to the area — and what all that might mean, in turn, for regional economic development.

They might also consider, as I wrote two years ago, what such a center could mean for all those recovering addicts now studying to be drug counselors and social workers, who might be hired to help in the studies such a center would fund.

After so many years of negative behavior, many I’ve met are now eager to be part of something positive and something bigger than themselves. Harnessing them could mean a massive infusion of new energy to a region that’s lost a lot of it.

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A Poem For 9/11: Shanksville

This being the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on our country of Sept. 11, 2001, I’m publishing a poem written about the day by my father, who is professor emeritus of comparative literature from Claremont McKenna College.

Shanksville

By Ricardo Quinones

Whatever it was,

Needing a companion at 40,000 feet,

The accumulating spotty clouds

Suggesting the beetle bush wildness

That overhung his eyes;

The patches of ground below

That resembled the  splotches

Of his nearing-ninety skin,

Or the flight path itself

Southeast of Pittsburgh,

Some twenty minutes from  D.C.

Placing us directly over Shanksville,

The last great chapter of American democracy.

All conspired to bring  to mind

The presence that they required.

And so I said to the  presiding form

The poetic father of us all

“Kitty Hawk, Kitty Hawk,”

And he, pleased by the recollection,

Replied, “Shanksville, a name quite different,

Like many along these rural roads,

But what’s in a name?

What matters  are the revelations they contain.”

Out of the depths of the American past,

He established the tableau of vision

That would govern our conversation.

*

The Wright brothers had it all,

The turn-of-the-century

Tinkerer’s genius of invention

Coupled with the thirst for competition.

The French were dogging their tails.

But they were masters of locomotion

And at Kitty Hawk

Were the first to lift a powered device

Weighing more than air

Twenty feet off the ground for twenty seconds

A distance of 120 feet.

To the derision and abuse

Their claims elicited

Galileo’s defense was ready for use,

“Eppure si muove,” nevertheless it flew.

The French with justice in their hearts

Were brought to admit and apologize

For discrediting this first adventure into space

That in more than a half -century’s time

Would send a human to stroll on the moon.

*

With obvious delight

He foresaw the dimensions of flight

And  invention’s need for competition,

Like discovery, a singular goal for many minds,

Hence the rival claimants in contention

But with creation, his favorite theme,

The third expression of human genius,

The matters change:

There are as many prizes as skills to attain.

*

“We don’t get much recent news

There where I am, so tell me about 9/11,

Some American character unfolded there.”

Little did we realize, I began,

Those pigeons of flight

Would grow to be missiles of war.

Or that our planes would be turned against us.

We had an enemy who did not fear scorn

Who bound their young men to suicide treks

Shouting “Allah is great,” while killing innocents.

And so we lost over 3000 by their blatant attacks.

*

With as much meaning as heroes can bear

Firemen of New York trudged the heavy stairs

Burdened with boots and bent with weighty wear.

So dense was the jet-fuel smoke

That they paused at every few landings

To recover their shortened breath

And to calm and reassure the gathered folk

Hurrying them down to safety

While they ignored such orders themselves

Engine and ladder companies

Our soldiers, our knights

They mounted ever higher through the gloom

Marching unknowing to their doom.

When the buildings collapsed,

Bringing everything down

Filling the air with pulverized stone

And organic matter

My friend saw straight as was his habit:

“They did not fall, they are still climbing

But now it’s Jacob’s ladder

And God’s soldiers are they.”

*

I could not help but weep

As he uttered that prayer

For those brave men

Who were by selflessness inspired,

By their desire to help

To do more than the job required,

And brought to the plunging darkness a new light

That raised them to their original height.

*

On this carefree September day

The gods themselves must have turned away,

Why not a storm, even a trickle

Just enough to stagger delays

Put a stick in the spoke?

But they allowed this day

To run its habitual way

Maybe it was to lift ordinariness

To some unaccustomed sway.

The Wright brothers were skilled in locomotion

The FDNY were an elite corps

Who knew when they came running

That their country was at war;

But those on United 93

Were a mixed assortment of common folk

With no greater purpose in mind.

How did they rise up to blunt the design

Of the fourth plane  smashing into  D.C.

With a payload of nasty combustion

And obliterate Congress then in session?

*

The fuel-loaded non-stop to San Francisco

Began a wide-sweeping turn before Cleveland

A veer that brought them southeast of Pittsburgh

Only then did the captives overcome

The last hope that restrains action.

While pestered by daily anxieties

There is in humans a reluctance to admit

The presence of the apocalypse

That they might be  sitting in its midst;

No one imagines being injured in a taxi-cab;

At the first rumblings of Vesuvius

Pompeians should have run for their lives;

And in Krakow they should have reached for their knives.

But we will linger, we will stay

Until the knock on the door

Wakens the terror  unacknowledged before.

Is it simply a fidelity to choice,

A failure to read the signals,

An ease of being in the quotidian rounds,

Which is usually shown to be right?

But it only takes one event, one mischance

Such  comfortings to disperse

Facing  us with horrors  we could not rehearse

That we are where we are and not elsewhere.

So how did this assorted group

Figure the odds were against them,

Piecing together bits of information

And meeting together conclude

That after the WTC, the Pentagon

They too were on a mission  that had one end,

A one-way flight to a bitter finale,

A red ball of fire

A dragon of wrath

Devouring every thing in its path?

They thought and accepted where their thought led.

Common people, some a bit more than ordinary

Came together and made their choice

One not of their choosing

But chose the death that others might live.

There is no courage commensurate with this.

And so they charged together

A wild roar from Hell’s gate

And fell only minutes, maybe seconds short

Of  wrenching the plane from its downward course

That tore its way

Through the lush countryside

Of south central Pennsylvania

By rural route 219

On that ordinary Fall morning

When all the elements were fresh and clean.

*

All perished knowingly

But their actions shall live

As models to unfold

Of the American character;

Circumstances will differ

But the basics remain

Calculation and bravery

Precision and moral courage

How can that abate?

Citizens of a republic,

Not subjects of a State.

Robert Frost mulled the account

Absorbed it to its full

Then smacked his thigh and stood up

Radiating pride at the way

His people responded

In the waging of peace and war

Thinking it through with mind and valor.

He departed at an opening in the cumulus

Still striding like Achilleus hearing Odysseus

Tell the exploits of his son Neoptolemus.

*

Dispute will always attend heroic actions

As the Wright brothers themselves can confirm,

Particularly in times when imaginative fervor

Lags, and understanding has a distorted lens.

We cannot place in physical form

The living images  that such actions adorn,

The consequences of a techno linear age.

Monuments are foundering apace

As well they should.

How dare they employ angels—by innocence graced—

To idealize what this story has to embrace?

Our people–the multitudes of the wise—

Benefited from centuries of schooling

In the arts of  life’s hidden measures

And thus were able to provide

What the unrepeatable moment required

Heroic rightness of thought

And valor in act, those living virtues

That not even martyrdom denied.

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Orchard Supply Hardware And The Mediocrity of Millionaires

Today I learned that the Orchard Supply Hardware store near me is closing.

Some 4300 people are losing their jobs. A chain of growing and seemingly profitable hardware stores, serving well their communities, is being liquidated.

(Correction: I originally noted the number of OSH employees as 5400. A Lowe’s spokeswoman informs me that the correct number is 4300 and I’ve made that correction throughout.)

OSH, as it’s known, has 99 stores in California, Oregon and Florida. If you don’t live in those states, you may wonder why this matters to you. But it does.

For this is not about globalization, or low-skilled immigrants stealing 4300 jobs. Instead it’s Wall Street; it’s about a few rich guys who need to make their numbers.

When I talk about Dreamland, I often say that our opiate epidemic grew from our destruction of community, in many ways, all acros[image error]s America. The demise of Orchard Supply Hardware, announced last week, is the kind of thing I’m talking about.

OSH was a place where the community came, where people bought things with which they built their homes and yards.

The store had a rare combination in hardware these days: great customer service and smaller stores. That meant you could actually find the things you needed. This earned it $600 million in sales last year. OSH, which is owned by Lowe’s, was expanding.

OSH is a chain but people I know feel like it’s their local hardware store. I didn’t buy hardware anywhere else. With all the crappy chain stores and chain restaurants we Americans have to tolerate stomping all over our country, here was one that people actually wanted to shop in, and felt close to.

It seemed that behind OSH was a creative idea: position it as an alternative in a world where customers are moving away from big box stores they have to drive for miles to get to. Smaller stores, easier to get to, alert and knowledgeable staff.

Sadly, Lowe’s backed off this inventive positioning of OSH in July when it hired Marvin Ellison as CEO.

Ellison was the CEO of JCPenney. There, he ran the company into its worst quarter ever. In his last quarter, the company lost $69 million and its stock hit an historic low. In his three years there, JCP shares dropped by more than half. For that record, he was compensated with $10.8 million in cash and stock in 2017, then hired this year to revitalize Lowe’s.

You may wonder: What about that record makes this guy worth hiring anywhere?

You may wonder: What company looking to rebound in this retail environment would hire anyone from JCPenney?

Another question that may occur to you is, why does Lowe’s feel in such a hurry to boost its stock price? Well one reason, apparently, is that a big chunk of Lowe’s stock has been purchased by Bill Ackman, an activist hedge-fund investor, who is hankering for change and wanted Ellison.

Why anyone would listen to Ackman’s advice on business is an interesting question. His hedge fund has lost half its value in the bull market of the last three years.

Ackman is the guy pushing things to go fast at Lowe’s. And he’s the reason the former CEO, a guy with some long-term vision, was booted.

Here’s why: Ackman’s hedge fund once had $20 billion, but as investors have pulled out amid its poor performance, the fund now has only $8 billion. Of that, he’s betting $1 billion on Lowe’s stock to rise, and quickly, to staunch the investor exodus. (For more, watch this CNBC interview.)

Thus, Forbes wrote, “The Lowe’s clock is ticking. And with Ackman as the timekeeper, Marvin Ellison is a man in a hurry.”

First idea: liquidate a growing and seemingly profitable chain of stores and its 5400 employees. Double down on big-box retailing just as consumers are rejecting it.

Mind you, this has nothing to do with improving the long-term viability of Lowe’s as a business.

But I guess if I’d lost as much money as Ackman has, I’d be in a hurry to earn it back, too.

Still, you know, Ackman and Ellison might take a moment. Common folks are paying the price: the employees, the contractors and communities that rely on those stores.

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In corporate America — as we’ve swooned over it, exalted it, praised its wealthy leaders for making themselves lots of money — the clear hunch I have is that, really, a lot of the fellows at the top are not that good. It’s mediocrity on parade a lot of the time, insulated from results, from any whiff of merit pay, and from the consequences of their failures, particularly as they are felt in towns across America.

I spoke to a guy at my OSH store who said he had worked for the company for 20 years. Here’s how he was told the news: On the afternoon of Tuesday last, company officials suddenly shut the store, escorted the remaining customers out, assembled the staff, and let them know their jobs were ending; the store was closing Oct. 20.

“Today you’re Orchard Supply Hardware. Tomorrow you belong to liquidators,” he said they were told.

Within a couple days, “Everything Must Go” signs were all over the store.

You may wonder: How is that okay?

Here’s Ellison: Lowe’s is “developing plans to aggressively rationalize store inventory, reducing lower-performing inventory while investing in increased depth of high-velocity items. Exiting Orchard Supply Hardware and rationalizing inventory are the driving force behind the changes to Lowe’s Business Outlook.”

So they’re going to stock stuff that sells well. Brilliant idea.

But why does that mean OSH must close? Why not sell it to someone who actually gives a damn about Americans and their communities, and who has the creativity and energy to run such a company?

(NOTE: A Lowe’s spokeswoman emailed me this morning (8/29) with this response to the columns, saying that OSH was not profitable:

We are working hard to make this transition as smooth as possible for our associates and our customers.  We will be retaining our associates through the store closure process and are encouraging them to apply for open roles at Lowe’s stores, where they will receive priority status. Associates will receive job placement assistance, and we will be providing eligibility for severance. 86 percent of Orchard locations are located within 10 miles of a Lowe’s store.

The decision to exit Orchard was based on the need to focus growing our core home improvement business and deploy our capital to more profitable projects. Orchard’s 2017 earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) was a -$65 million on sales of approximately $605 million.*)

Instead, Marvin Ellison, escaping JCPenney, decided within less than two months to close 99 stores and lay off 4300 people.

All because? Well apparently Bill Ackman has lost a lot of money in bad investments.

As I’ve traveled the country, I’ve learned that the cost of losing Main Street has been incalculable – yet we bow to the free market as if we have no choice. That’s what’s happening here.

The good news? Lowe’s stock price has gone up a few bucks – so I guess we can all breathe easier.

This move will harm Lowe’s in the long run. I know sales are going online, but hardware will always be different. Customers need that contact with sales staff who know their stuff. Even contractors say that. (See a video about contractors’ opinions on OSH closing.)[image error]

OSH formed in 1931. Many years later it was bought by Sears, whose glory days were well behind it, looking to spruce up its home-improvement position. Owned finally by a hedge fund, Sears apparently did what Sears is now known for as a hedge-fund property – it muddled through. (Read an LA Times story here.)

Finally, it spun the company off, but not before saddling it with enormous debt. Naturally, that debt crushed OSH into bankruptcy within two years. This is how Business Insider described it:

“In 2005, Sears Holdings – by then run by hedge-fund guy Eddie Lampert – announced that it would extract a special dividend of $450 million out of OSH, and that OSH would borrow the money to pay this dividend.

“In January 2012, in typical private-equity manner, the now heavily indebted OSH was spun off to the public; 18 months later, in June 2013, OSH, buckling under this debt that Sears Holdings had put on it, filed for bankruptcy.”

In bankruptcy, OSH was bought in 2013 by Lowe’s, which, under then-CEO Robert Niblock, did some great things. Above all, it remodeled OSH stores. Funny what happens when you invest as if for the long run. The staff now seemed motivated. The store came to life; so apparently did the chain. In Pasadena, it became one of the city’s biggest sales-tax generators. [image error]

Until that day in July when OSH’s parent company hired a guy from JCPenney at the behest of a hedge-fund owner losing money in a bull market.

You may wonder at it all.

If so, here’s a petition to make yourselves felt. Please share it, and this article, if you like it.

 

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