Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 273

What it’s like to be gay and in a gang

In this Sept. 5, 2014 photo, a reputed member of the Los Solidos street gang shows his tattoo to police in Hartford, Conn. (Credit: (AP Photo/Dave Collins))

There are many stereotypes of and assumptions about street gangs, just as there are many stereotypes and assumptions about gay men. Pretty much none of those stereotypes overlap.

In movies and television, some of the most recognizable gay characters have been portrayed as effeminate or weak; they’re “fashionistas” or “gay best friends.” Street gang members, on the other hand, are often depicted as hypermasculine, heterosexual and tough.

This obvious contradiction was one of the main reasons I was drawn to the subject of gay gang members.

For my new book “The Gang’s All Queer,” I interviewed and spent time with 48 gay or bisexual male gang members. All were between the ages of 18 and 28; the majority were men of color; and all lived in or near Columbus, Ohio, which has been referred to as a “Midwestern gay mecca.”

The experience, which took place over the course of more than two years, allowed me to explore the tensions they felt between gang life and gay manhood.

Some of the gang members were in gangs made up of primarily gay, lesbian or bisexual people. Others were the only gay man (or one of a few) in an otherwise “straight” gang. Then there were what I call “hybrid” gangs, which featured a mix of straight, gay, lesbian and bisexual members, but with straight people still in the majority. Most of these gangs were primarily male.

Because even the idea of a gay man being in a gang flies in the face of conventional thought, the gang members I spoke with had to constantly resist or subvert a range of stereotypes and expectations.

Getting in by being out

Male spaces can be difficult for women to enter, whether it’s boardrooms, legislative bodies or locker rooms.

How could I — a white, middle-class woman with no prior gang involvement — gain access to these gangs in the first place?

It helped that the initial group of men whom I spoke to knew me from years earlier, when we became friends at a drop-in center for LGBTQ youth. They vouched for me to their friends. I was openly gay — part of the “family,” as some of them put it — and because I was a student conducting research for a book, they were confident that I stood a better chance of accurately representing them than any “straight novelist” or journalist.

But I also suspect that my own masculine presentation allowed them to feel more at ease; I speak directly, have very short hair and usually leave the house in plaid, slacks and Adidas shoes.

While my race and gender did make for some awkward interactions (some folks we encountered assumed I was a police officer or a business owner), with time I gained their trust, started getting introduced to more members and began to learn about how each type of gang presented its own set of challenges.

Pressure to act the part

The gay men in straight gangs I spoke with knew precisely what was expected of them: be willing to fight with rival gangs, demonstrate toughness, date or have sex with women and be financially independent.

Being effeminate was a nonstarter; they were all careful to present a uniformly masculine persona, lest they lose status and respect. Likewise, coming out was a huge risk. Being openly gay could threaten their status as well as their safety. Only a handful of them came out to their traditional gangs, and this sometimes resulted in serious consequences, such as being “bled out” of the gang (forced out through a fight).

Despite the dangers, some wanted to come out. But a number of fears held them back. Would their fellow gang members start to distrust them? What if the other members got preoccupied about being sexually approached? Would the status of the gang be compromised, with other gangs seeing them as “soft” for having openly gay guys in it?

So most stayed in the closet, continuing to project heterosexuality, while discreetly meeting other gay men in underground gay scenes or over the internet.

As one man told me, he was glad cellphones had been invented because he could keep his private sexual life with men just that: private.

One particularly striking story came from a member of a straight gang who made a date for sex over the internet, only to discover that it was two fellow gang members who had arranged the date with him. He hadn’t known the others were gay, and they didn’t know about him, either.

Becoming ‘known’

In “hybrid” gangs (those with a sizable minority of gay, lesbian or bisexual people) or all-gay gangs, the men I interviewed were held to many of the same standards. But they had more flexibility.

In the hybrid gangs, members felt far more comfortable coming out than those in purely straight gangs. In their words, they were able to be “the real me.”

Men in gay gangs were expected to be able to build a public reputation as a gay man — what they called becoming “known.” Being “known” means you’re able to achieve many masculine ideals — making money, being taken seriously, gaining status, looking good — but as an openly gay man.

It was also more acceptable for them to project femininity, whether it was making flamboyant gestures, using effeminate mannerisms, or wearing certain styles of clothing, like skinny jeans.

They were still in a gang. This meant they needed to clash with rival gay crews, so they valued toughness and fighting prowess.

Men in gay gangs especially expressed genuine and heartfelt connections to their fellow gang members. They didn’t just think of them as associates. These were their friends, their chosen families — their pillars of emotional support.

Confronting contradictions

But sometimes these gang members would vacillate about certain expectations.

They questioned if being tough or eager to fight constituted what it should mean to be a man. Although they viewed these norms with a critical eye, across the board they tended to prefer having “masculine” men as sexual partners or friends. Some would also patrol each other’s masculinity, insulting other gay men who were flamboyant or feminine.

Caught between not wanting themselves or others to be pressured to act masculine all the time, but also not wanting to be read as visibly gay or weak (which could invite challenges), resistance to being seen as a “punk” or a pushover was critical.

It all seemed to come from a desire to upend damaging cultural stereotypes of gay men as weak, of black men as “deadbeats” and offenders, and of gang members as violent thugs.

But this created its own tricky terrain. In order to not be financial deadbeats, they resorted to sometimes selling drugs or sex; in order to not be seen as weak, they sometimes fought back, perhaps getting hurt in the process. Their social worlds and definitions of acceptable identity were constantly changing and being challenged.

Fighting back

One of the most compelling findings of my study was what happened when these gay gang members were derisively called “fag” or “faggot” by straight men in bars, on buses, in schools or on the streets. Many responded with their fists.

Some fought back even if they weren’t openly gay. Sure, the slur was explicitly meant to attack their masculinity and sexuality in ways they didn’t appreciate. But it was important to them to be able to construct an identity as a man who wasn’t going to be messed with — a man who also happened to be gay.

Their responses were revealing: “I will fight you like I’m straight”; “I’m gonna show you what this faggot can do.” They were also willing to defend others derided as “fags” in public, even though this could signal that they were gay themselves.

These comebacks challenge many of the assumptions made about gay men — that they lack nerve, that they’re unwilling to physically fight.

It also communicated a belief that was clearly nonnegotiable: a fundamental right to not be bothered simply for being gay.

Vanessa R. Panfil, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice, Old Dominion University

Add dwarf planet Haumea to the list of solar system objects with rings

Artist concept of Haumea with the newly-discovered ring. (Credit: IAA-CSIC/UHU)

When we think of a ringed planet, most of us envision something akin to the intricate grooves of Saturn’s ring system, which have fascinated humans for centuries. Yet a recent astronomical observation seems to suggest that the distant dwarf planet Haumea, which possesses only about one-third the mass of Pluto, may have a ring as well.

Haven’t heard of Haumea before? That’s not too surprising: it was only discovered in 2004, and there are no direct images of it that look like more than a few low-resolution light blips in the sky. (The image used in this article is an “artist’s conception”; if you want to see a grainy telescope image of Haumea and its moon Hi’iaka, click here.) As a dwarf planet, it’s not one of the solar system bodies taught to schoolchildren the way that the eight major planets are. (Other dwarf planets you may have heard of include Eris, Ceres, Quaoar, and, of course, Pluto, which the International Astronomical Union demoted to “dwarf” status to widespread popular objection.)

Haumea’s orbit around the sun is relatively elliptical, and situates it a bit beyond the orbit of Neptune, albeit at a much greater tilt than that planet; this puts it in a class of solar system objects known as “trans-Neptunians” in addition to being classified as a dwarf planet.

A letter published yesterday in Nature by a consortium of scientists led by José Luis Ortiz at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Spain reported on the discovery, based on observational data, that Haumea harbors a thin, rocky ring system around 2300 kilometers from the center of mass of the dwarf planet.

Why are we only just discovering that Haumea has a ring? Well for one, it’s extremely hard to see, by virtue of being quite far away and pretty small, as mentioned. Astronomers had to wait for the dwarf planet to pass by a bright star (relative to Earth) in order to observe how Haumea blocked out the light from the star in the background. This kind of observation — of watching one body pass in front of another, usually brighter body — is known as occultation in the astronomy world, and is a fairly common method of inferring the mass, atmospheric density, and shape of astronomical objects. Indeed, in hunting for extrasolar planets, occultation is one excellent means of observing if nearby stars harbor their own planets.

Multiple ground-based telescopes all across Europe observed how the light from the star was dimmed as Haumea passed in front of it. A telltale dip in light preceding and following the occultation, at the same distance, revealed that Haumea likely had a ring.

This puts Haumea in a class of its own in terms of astronomical bodies with rings. In our solar system, most of the ringed planets are gas giants, not rocky planets. Earth is thought to have briefly had a ring, after a collision with a Mars-sized body, although that ring is believed to have eventually coalesced into the Moon. But a ring around a dwarf planet?

“Until a few years ago we only knew of the existence of rings around the giant planets; then, recently, our team discovered that two small bodies situated between Jupiter and Neptune, belonging to a group called centaurs, have dense rings around them, which came as a big surprise,” said Pablo Santos-Sanz, a member of the research team, in a press release. “Now we have discovered that bodies even farther away than the centaurs, bigger and with very different general characteristics, can also have rings,” he added.

“Different” is an apt description for Haumea: not only is it far away, cold, harbors two moons and has a ring, but it is also egg-shaped. Indeed, the occultation also provided the team with new data about just how elongated Haumea is.

“There are different possible explanations for the formation of the ring; it may have originated in a collision with another object, or in the dispersal of surface material due to the planet’s high rotational speed,” Ortiz said in the same press release.

Rose McGowan roars back to Twitter, immediately drags it, Trump and Jeff Bezos

Rose McGowan (Credit: Getty/Paul Zimmerman)

Twelve hours after being suspended by Twitter, actor Rose McGowan is back with heated, righteous fire. Initially, the social-media publishing platform had blocked her use of her account because, as its @TwitterSafety account says, “one of her Tweets included a private phone number, which violates our Terms of Service.”

Indeed, McGowan had made public a private phone number when she revealed a series of texts that showed others in her professional circle knew about the alleged pattern of sexual abuse perpetrated by Harvey Weinstein and specifically her claims that he had raped her in a Park City, Utah Hotel during the Sundance Film Festival in 1997.

McGowan was 24 at the time and, according to The New York Times, reached a settlement with Weinstein’s legal team to stop her from discussing the alleged assault. “The $100,000 settlement was ‘not to be construed as an admission’ by Mr. Weinstein, but intended to ‘avoid litigation and buy peace,’ according to the legal document,” the Times wrote.

In the intervening years, McGowan made sideways references to the alleged incident, going so far as to note in 2016 that “My ex sold our movie to my rapist for distribution” and “it’s been an open secret in Hollywood/Media & they shamed me while adulating my rapist.” Following the release of two exposés in the Times and one in The New Yorker, McGowan began speaking out about people she viewed as enabling Weinstein and other abusers, adding that she was “allowed to say rapist” given all the accusers and accusations that had come to light.

Now am I allowed to say rapist https://t.co/95Ze9BixCT

— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) October 10, 2017

From there, she continued to drag Ben Affleck and others, eventually drawing the suspension. Under pressure to explain why the company had blocked her access and forced her to delete a post, the @TwitterSafety account wrote:

We have been in touch with Ms. McGowan’s team. We want to explain that her account was temporarily locked because one of her Tweets included a private phone number, which violates our Terms of Service. 1/3

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) October 12, 2017

The Tweet was removed and her account has been unlocked. We will be clearer about these policies and decisions in the future. 2/3

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) October 12, 2017

Which is, one would suppose, fine. Then the account offered this:

Twitter is proud to empower and support the voices on our platform, especially those that speak truth to power. We stand with the brave women and men who use Twitter to share their stories, and will work hard every day to improve our processes to protect those voices. 3/3

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) October 12, 2017

The high-minded rhetoric runs a little flat, given that Twitter is known for not suspending accounts that harass women — particularly those connected to Gamergate — and continues to host dangerous zealots, Richard Spencer and members of the various wings of the American white supremacy movement included.

McGowan, in her first tweet back, was having none of it.

when will nuclear war violate your terms of service? https://t.co/72FiiyoZ59

— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) October 12, 2017

It’s a clear rebuff both to the company and to current president Donald Trump, who has used his own account to not only threaten nuclear war with North Korea, something that most policy experts view as dangerously destabilizing, but also single out private citizens while in office, including ESPN host Jemele Hill, comedian Rosie O’Donnell and football player Colin Kaepernick, just to name a few.

“Get Out” director and comedian Jordan Peele helpfully pointed out that Trump’s behavior may indeed be subject to a Twitter suspension, given the platform’s own stated terms of service:

.Yes. In fact, that’s already supposed to be covered…. pic.twitter.com/jjEOkVmluj

— Jordan Peele (@JordanPeele) October 12, 2017

From there, McGowan opened up on a new target in the long list of people and companies that have caught fire from her and others in the wake of the Weinstein exposés: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

1) @jeffbezos I told the head of your studio that HW raped me. Over & over I said it. He said it hadn’t been proven. I said I was the proof.

— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) October 12, 2017

2) @jeffbezos I had already sold a script I wrote to your studio, it was in development. When I heard a Weinstein bailout was in the works

— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) October 12, 2017

3) @Jeffbezos I forcefully begged studio head to do the right thing. I was ignored. Deal was done. Amazon won a dirty Oscar.

— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) October 12, 2017

4) @jeffbezos I called my attorney & said I want to get my script back, but before I could, #2 @amazonstudios called to say my show was dead

— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) October 12, 2017

4) @jeffbezos I am calling on you to stop funding rapists, alleged pedos and sexual harassers. I love @amazon but there is rot in Hollywood

— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) October 12, 2017

5) @jeffbezos Be the change you want to see in the world. Stand with truth. #ROSEARMY #Amazon

— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) October 12, 2017

Good luck with that, Mr. Bezos. Welcome back, Ms. McGowan.

UPDATE: According to the Hollywood Reporter, McGowan has confirmed to the outlet that the initials “HW” in her tweet to Bezos belong to Weinstein.

Trump talks through solemn military ceremony: “Are they playing that for you or me?”

Donald Trump (Credit: Reuters/Rick Wilking)

President Donald Trump clearly had no clue how to properly respect a longstanding military tradition on Wednesday night during his interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity.

As the president spoke to Hannity at an Air National Guard hangar in Middletown, Pennsylvania, the tune of “Retreat” was heard over the loudspeakers. The song is “part of a firmly rooted tradition that predates the American Revolutionary War; the U.S. military tune signals the start and end of the official duty day,” Task and Purpose reported.

“When the American flag is lowered and raised on US military installations, a bugle blares on loudspeakers as service members and civilians pay their respects to the flag.”

The tune “Retreat” is played at 5 p.m. every day and “is traditionally a time to secure the flag and pay respect to what it stands for,” according to the Defense Logistics Agency.

Trump heard the song on Wednesday, and instead — like everything else — made it about himself.

“What a nice sound that is,” he said, before asking Hannity, “Are they playing that for you or for me?”

But before Hannity could answer, Trump added, “They’re playing that in honor of his ratings. He’s beating everybody.”

Trump has repeatedly bashed and openly called for the firing of professional athletes who engage in a protest of racial injustice and police brutality during the national anthem.

But where was Trump’s respect for the military when he snubbed a longstanding tradition that he evidently had no idea even existed? It’s certainly interesting coming from someone who has claimed to know more than anyone about the military.

“There’s nobody bigger or better at the military than I am,” Trump said in a Fox News interview in 2015. “I know more about ISIS [the Islamic State militant group] than the generals do. Believe me,” he bragged months later.

To be clear, the issue here is not that the public should be outraged because Trump didn’t recognize a tradition for the flag, it’s that this type of behavior is only acceptable if he is the one doing it. It is highly unlikely a single Trump supporter will view the president as less patriotic, or less of an American because of his oblivious actions.

But for black athletes who have taken a knee during the national anthem and risked their careers in order to speak out about injustice, the president shamelessly called for them to be fired, and his cultish base rejoiced that someone had finally told black athletes to keep their mouths shut because fans didn’t want to hear about issues that they have the privilege to be able to tune out of. How nice it must be.

How Chicago gets its guns

(Credit: AP/M. Spencer Green)

John Thomas set up the deal the way he had arranged nearly two dozen others. A friend said he wanted to buy as many guns as he could, so Thomas got in touch with someone he knew who had guns to sell.

The three of them met in the parking lot of an LA Fitness in south suburban Lansing at noon on Aug. 6, 2014. Larry McIntosh, whom Thomas had met in his South Shore neighborhood, took two semi-automatic rifles and a shotgun from his car and put them in the buyer’s car. He handed over a plastic shopping bag with four handguns.

None of the weapons had been acquired legally — two, in fact, had been reported stolen — and none of the men was a licensed firearms dealer.

Thomas’ friend, Yousef, paid McIntosh $7,200 for the seven guns. He always paid well.

Thomas did little but watch the exchange, but he got his usual broker’s fee of $100 per gun, $700 total. It was “the most money I’ve seen or made,” he recalled — his biggest deal yet.

It was also his last.

Amid Chicago’s ongoing epidemic of gun violence — with nearly 500 people killed in shootings and more than 2,800 wounded this year through September — the availability of guns has been blamed as a root cause and become a defining political and public safety issue.

City police have seized nearly 7,000 illegal firearms so far in 2017 and federal authorities have stepped up efforts to take down dealers.

Still, it’s by no means clear that targeting those like John Thomas makes a real difference.

Most of the guns police seize come from Indiana and other states where firearms laws are more lax, police and researchers have found. After they were purchased legally, most were sold or loaned or stolen. Typically, individuals or small groups are involved in the dealing, not organized trafficking rings, experts say.

Unlike the drug trade — often dominated by powerful cartels or gangs — illegal gun markets operate more like the way teenagers get beer, “where every adult is potentially a source,” said Philip Cook, a researcher at the University of Chicago Crime Lab who’s also a Duke University professor.

Under pressure to respond to the violence, law enforcement has focused on making examples of people caught selling, buying or possessing guns. But authorities acknowledge that these cases do little to stem the flow of guns into the city.

“You are a single salmon swimming upstream at Niagara Falls,” said Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Chicago Police Department. “If your policing strategy is to decrease the number of guns in your city, good luck, because there are too many guns out there. It’s better to go after the person with the gun.”

An in-depth examination of Thomas’ case — based on police reports, court records and interviews, including a series of conversations with Thomas — shows how authorities target mostly street-level offenders, sometimes enticing them with outsized payoffs. In this and other cases, critics say their techniques raise questions of whether they are dismantling gun networks or effectively helping to set them up.

“You have this specter of whether it’s creating crime, which is troubling to a lot of people,” said Katharine Tinto, a professor at the University of California Irvine School of Law who has studied the investigative tactics of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “It’s not as if you’re trying to get someone you know is a violent gun offender. You’re going after someone and purposely trying to entice them into doing a felony.”

A Natural Salesman

At 33, John Thomas has a charming smile that sometimes displays his chipped front tooth. His mother’s name, Val, is tattooed on his left forearm — a tribute to her for bringing him into the world, though he said he could never count on her. His daughter’s name, Jataviyona, is tattooed on his right shoulder.

Even as a kid, Thomas was a natural salesman, quick with a hustle.

“That’s my gift, I guess — to sell,” he said.

He grew up in the part of South Shore known as “Terror Town.” A short walk from a popular Lake Michigan beach, it’s long been a mix of middle-class homeowners and lower-income renters, with bungalows, condominiums and multi-unit apartment buildings on tree-lined streets.

By the time Thomas was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, the neighborhood was struggling. Many white homeowners and merchants had fled after African-Americans moved in. Thousands of people in South Shore and surrounding communities lost their jobs when the nearby steel mills closed. When the crack epidemic hit in the early 1990s, gang violence soared.

Thomas’ father wasn’t around, and his mother struggled with addiction, according to Thomas and a younger sister, Sade Thomas-Adams. With five other siblings, Thomas was raised by an aunt and uncle he considered his parents.

Thomas’ uncle was a pastor, and the family spent a lot of time at church, giving him a lifelong faith. During the week, the kids were told to focus on their studies and come home right after school to avoid the dangers of gangs and drugs. Thomas and some of his siblings chafed at those rules, though, escaping from the house to hang out with friends, drink and smoke marijuana.

“They had their foot in both worlds — the church and the street,” said Thomas-Adams.

This video shows an April 2014 gun deal unfold in Chicago. It was secretly filmed by Yousef, a confidential informant. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

Thomas developed his first hustle while in grammar school, he said. He and his friends would offer to help shoppers with their bags and carts outside an Aldi supermarket. He learned he could talk to people and earn tips.

Thomas graduated to other ways of making money. First, he said, he sold baggies of fake marijuana. Eventually, neighborhood dealers set him up with real drugs.

In November 2001, when he was 17, Thomas was arrested for selling $20 worth of crack cocaine to an undercover police officer, and was convicted and given probation. The incident was one in a long string of cases, including a 2005 gun possession conviction.

After that, Thomas began to sell marijuana and developed a successful promotional strategy. When customers bought a nickel bag — a small quantity for $5 — he gave them another for free. “Two for five,” was how he marketed it. His profits, he said, came from volume.

“Everybody wanted it,” he said.

When he was 20, Thomas began to hang around a new neighborhood store so much the family who ran it offered him a job. Once again, he put his people skills to work. The store sold knockoff gym shoes, but some people didn’t want to come there because it would mean crossing gang lines.

“So I’m taking the shoes to them,” Thomas said. “I’m selling them shoes left and right.”

Gang violence was a stubborn problem in the neighborhood, and moved ever closer to Thomas. At 16, he said he witnessed a fatal shooting. At 18, an acquaintance killed one of Thomas’ friends. Then, at 22, his best friend from childhood was gunned down.

Thomas said he tried to steer clear of guns.

“I know what they have done to people,” he said.

A New Friend, and an Opportunity

In late 2013, Thomas was desperate. Then 29, he was a new father and the primary caretaker of his daughter, and trying to leave criminal life behind. For several years, he’d worked low-paying jobs at restaurants, grocery stores and an uncle’s construction business, but he struggled to pay his rent. As a convicted felon, options were limited.

Then, he met Yousef.

Thomas had taken a job at a tobacco shop in the Beverly neighborhood, making $25 a day, he said. There, he hit it off with one of the guys who hung around the store. Yousef was in his 20s and, like Thomas, joked a lot. They started smoking marijuana together. Thomas said Yousef — who, through his lawyer, declined to comment — knew he was broke. Yousef told Thomas he could help — if Thomas helped him.

“He comes in and asks me about guns,” Thomas said. “I said that where I’m from, we don’t sell guns.”

But Thomas said Yousef kept bringing it up. At some point, he said, Yousef told him he knew a businessman named Pops who could give Thomas a real job if he helped them.

What finally persuaded Thomas, he said, was the dollar-store diapers he’d been buying for his daughter: They sometimes gave his daughter hives. He saw the diapers as a sign he was stuck, and his daughter was paying for it.

“It was just hard,” he said. “Too hard.”

Thomas made his first call — to one of his cousins — in January 2014. Steven Thomas, 38, had served time for attempted murder in his early 20s, court records show. Now, he was trying to rebuild his life. After earning an associate’s degree in prison, he was working to support his family and taking classes to become a massage therapist.

Thomas asked if his cousin knew anyone with guns to sell.

“The first thing he asked me was, ‘Is everything OK?’” John Thomas recalled.

He said his cousin wasn’t sure at first but called back the next day: He’d come up with a couple of guns. John Thomas got in touch with Yousef and introduced him to his cousin at the tobacco shop. He said they went to the back of the store, and when his cousin left a few minutes later, Yousef paid John Thomas $200 for arranging the deal.

“Just for a call,” Thomas said. “I didn’t even have to do nothing.”

Thomas, giddy, said he used the money to buy food, baby formula and better diapers.

What Thomas didn’t know was that Yousef had paid Steven Thomas $400 for a Glock 9mm pistol — then immediately resold the gun for $800, court records show. Even after he paid Thomas, Yousef made a quick $200.

Everyone seemed to come out ahead. So the next day, the three men did it all again. Thomas talked with his cousin, who then sold two guns to Yousef, and Thomas made $100. Yousef then sold the guns to Pops for $1,600, twice what he’d just paid for them.

To Thomas, it was easy money — money he needed.

Warning Signs

Thomas didn’t know, however, that Yousef was being watched by federal agents.

In January 2014, shortly before Yousef approached Thomas, the ATF had launched an initiative in Chicago to “attack violent crime associated with illegal firearms and narcotics.” As part of that effort, the ATF called on a longtime informant.

“Confidential Informant 1,” as he was identified by federal prosecutors, is not named in court records. He had worked for the government for nearly a decade, since being indicted for fraud and agreeing to cooperate. Gray-haired and squat, the informant posed as a businessman who wanted to buy weapons he could sell overseas, according to undercover ATF recordings and court records.

One of the people he approached about getting guns was Yousef. Authorities have not said why they targeted Yousef and why the informant’s cover story involved selling guns overseas.

Through a spokeswoman, the ATF declined comment.

In January and February 2014, Yousef met with the informant, whom he knew as Pops, eight times for deals that involved 13 guns, according to court records. Some of those deals involved guns Thomas helped Yousef buy from Thomas’ cousin, the records show.

Through September, nearly 500 people were killed in shootings and more than 2,800 wounded, which officials blame on the movement and availability of guns in the city. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune via Getty Images)

That March, ATF agents confronted Yousef: With Pops’ help, they had been monitoring his gun deals. Yousef faced the possibility of going to prison for unlicensed gun dealing. Or he could work for the government.

Yousef agreed to cooperate. In court records, he became “CI-3,” and has not been identified by last name in Thomas’ case. From March to July 2014, the government paid Yousef a total of $6,380 for “living and operational expenses” in addition to the money he used to buy the guns, court records show.

Yousef got to work lining up more gun deals, continuing to use Thomas as his primary, but not only, middleman. After his cousin, Thomas brought in an old friend: Anthony Logan, whom everyone called Snake. Thomas told Logan he knew someone who often overpaid for guns.

In the spring and summer of 2014, Thomas, Yousef and Pops did several deals with Logan, who introduced them to other friends. When those sources dried up, Thomas arranged quick exchanges in an alley with people he didn’t know himself. There were handoffs in parking lots and a trip to Gary, Indiana, where the deal nearly unraveled and Thomas, hoping to salvage it, wandered the streets until he found the seller.

After each sale, Yousef met with ATF agents and turned over the guns and recording equipment he had secretly been wearing, according to court records.

As the money kept coming in, Thomas overlooked warning signs. One seller even tried to tell him he might be dealing with informants.

“My people are leery about you all,” Thomas told Yousef after talking with a gun source in the south suburbs, according to an ATF report. “They say you all the feds.”

Yousef vowed that he wouldn’t do any more business with that supplier.

Still, Yousef seemed willing to buy anything. While some of the deals produced semi-automatic rifles and high-powered handguns, he also bought guns that were rusty or missing parts. On one occasion, Thomas even got Yousef to pay $700 for what turned out to be a BB gun — another warning sign Thomas ignored.

‘I Ain’t Been Doing Nothing.’

That summer, as politicians struggled to deal with violence in the city, Mayor Rahm Emanuel appealed to the Obama administration for help getting guns off the street. The ATF responded by announcing it was sending seven additional agents to Chicago.

At the same time, the number of sales Thomas had brokered passed 20, and he had to expand his sources to continue producing guns. He reached out to Larry McIntosh, the friend of a friend from the neighborhood.

McIntosh proved to be a consistent source. He sold Yousef more than two dozen guns in the summer of 2014 and promised even bigger deals through a connection in Indiana.

That August, he offered a package of at least 14 guns. Yousef and Thomas were set to make the buy on Aug. 26, according to ATF records. But Thomas said Yousef called him at home that morning and asked if they could meet for breakfast to talk about a job offer from Pops. Wearing a favorite Blackhawks shirt and nice jeans, Thomas stepped outside.

“It was, like, 5 in the morning,” Thomas recalled. “I see a gray PT Cruiser [with] a white lady, she’s got a computer, and I’m thinking, what is she doing in this neighborhood at this time of the morning? I look on my left, and I see a gray van, and there’s some white guys in it, and I say, ‘Whoa, whoa, this is not right.’”

Moments later, one of his uncles arrived to give Thomas a ride, and they left. They had gone only a few blocks when police lights flashed behind them. Thomas was whisked to an ATF facility, where he was read his rights and questioned by two agents, according to the ATF’s video of the interrogation.

The agents told him he would be charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm.

“Me personally, I ain’t been doing nothing,” Thomas protested.

The agent leading the questioning showed Thomas a picture. “There’s you, holding a gun.”

After a long pause, Thomas said, “I didn’t buy nothing.”

“You didn’t have to buy anything,” the agent said. “We have you on video, holding guns. You set up all the deals.”

Thomas wanted to know if Yousef had been working with agents from the beginning.

One of the agents said no but encouraged Thomas to become an informant. Thomas refused.

‘Like Buying a Pack of Cigarettes’

The next day, the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago announced 14 arrests on federal charges of illegally possessing or selling guns. Thomas was listed as the top defendant, followed by 13 other men involved in the deals with Yousef, including Logan, McIntosh and Steven Thomas.

If officials knew the original sources for the guns, they were not named in the court records.

In 2015, one at a time, the men entered guilty pleas. McIntosh — who two decades earlier was convicted of involuntary manslaughter after he accidentally shot a woman in the head — was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Logan got eight years and four months. The others received between 18 months and eight years.

In every case, prosecutors noted the gun violence battering Chicago and called for sentences long enough to send a message.

A Letter From Prison:Wesley Pickett is serving eight years in prison for helping Yousef buy guns. Pickett recently wrote ProPublica Illinois Reporter Mick Dumke a letter sharing his story, as excerpted below. Read the full letter.

Many of the defendants, through their lawyers, insisted they had never sold guns until Yousef started offering to buy them.

“The government is not seeking to arrest those who are unlawfully selling weapons but effectively making gun dealers out of street level hustlers by paying three and four times the street value of guns,” Ralph Schindler Jr., who represented Logan, said in a court filing.

The ATF’s tactics are, in some ways, similar to how federal authorities battle other issues. With political corruption, they have used cooperating witnesses to offer bribes to elected officials. Fighting terrorism, they have contacted and enticed disaffected young men to discuss possible plots. Whether any of those targets would have acted without prodding is hotly debated following an arrest.

The ATF spokeswoman would not discuss the agency’s broader strategies.

“We try to hit the top people as much as we can,” said a federal law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They’re tough cases to prove. If we can get them on one gun, we can get them off the street.”

Wesley Pickett, who is serving eight years for helping Yousef buy guns, admits he was wrong to get involved. But he argues that putting people like him in prison will not stem the flow of weapons.

“Getting a gun in the city,” he said in a letter from a federal prison in Pennsylvania, “is like buying a pack of cigarettes at a gas station.”

Facing Prison

Yousef, too, pleaded guilty to unlicensed firearms dealing. He has not yet been sentenced.

After three months in jail following his arrest, Thomas made bail and, in spite of his pending case, got a job as a stocker at a Family Dollar store in Englewood. Within the year, he was promoted to manager.

Thomas blames himself for going after the money in the gun deals. But he doesn’t believe he played a role in Chicago’s gun violence. Though he is streetwise from years running his hustles, he said he believed Yousef’s claims that the guns weren’t headed for the streets. In time, Thomas said he stopped thinking about what was happening to the guns.

“Honestly, after a while, once [Yousef] told me that, I didn’t really care no more,” he said. “I just knew that my daughter was straight.”

John Thomas said he was struggling to support his daughter, Jataviyona, when he decided to make some money in 2014 by setting up gun deals. Thomas said he stopped thinking about what became of the guns. “I just knew that my daughter was straight,” he said.(Andrew Gill/WBEZ Chicago)

As it turned out, the guns never got back to the street. The ATF bought or collected all of the guns Yousef purchased through Thomas.

In March, Thomas pleaded guilty to two counts of being a felon in possession of a firearm and one count of unlicensed firearm dealing. Prosecutors said that, over the course of seven months, he brokered 23 transactions involving 77 guns.

He faced 25 years in prison.

In August, Thomas went before U.S. District Court Judge Andrea Wood to be sentenced. Wearing a tan suit, tan shirt and blue tie, Thomas was accompanied by his daughter, the aunt who raised him, other family members and his pastor. At one point in the sentencing, he wept.

Nicole Kim, the federal prosecutor, gave him credit for working and caring for his daughter, then 4, but argued that a message should be sent that “if you need extra money, if you need a job, this is not OK.”

“He’s not proud of what he did,” said Heather Winslow, Thomas’ attorney. “But absent the influence of the government’s buy money, this crime would not have happened.”

Given the chance to speak, Thomas became emotional.

“People make mistakes, and I did,” he said. “I’m not a gun salesman.”

The judge noted that the government played a role in every deal for which Thomas was being sentenced. But, in spite of the government’s involvement, she told him he should have said no.

“It is difficult in some ways to reconcile the responsible worker and father I’ve seen in my courtroom with the person who would be willing to move 77 firearms,” Wood said.

The sentence: seven years in prison. She allowed Thomas to spend several weeks with his daughter before beginning his sentence.

On Oct. 9, he reported to a medium-security federal prison in central Illinois.

Will North Korea sell its nuclear technology?

(Credit: AP Photo/Wong Maye-E, File)

Earlier this month CIA Director Mike Pompeo suggested “the North Koreans have a long history of being proliferators and sharing their knowledge, their technology, their capacities around the world.”

My research has shown that North Korea is more than willing to breach sanctions to earn cash.

A checkered history

Over the years North Korea has earned millions of dollars from the export of arms and missiles, and its involvement in other illicit activities such as smuggling drugs, endangered wildlife products and counterfeit goods.

Still, there are only a handful of cases that suggest these illicit networks have been turned to export nuclear technology or materials to other states.

North Korean technicians allegedly assisted the Pakistanis in production of Krytrons, likely sometime in the 1990s. Krytrons are devices used to trigger the detonation of a nuclear device.

Later in the 1990s, North Korea allegedly transferred cylinders of low-enriched uranium hexafluoride (UF6) to Pakistan, where notorious proliferator A.Q. Khan shipped them onward to Libya. UF6 is a gaseous uranium compound that’s needed to create the “highly enriched uranium” used in weapons.

The most significant case was revealed in 2007 when Israeli Air Force jets bombed a facility in Syria. The U.S. government alleges this was an “undeclared nuclear reactor,” capable of producing plutonium, that had been under construction with North Korean assistance since the late 1990s. A U.S. intelligence briefing shortly after the strike highlighted the close resemblance between the Syrian reactor and the North Korean Yongbyon reactor. It also noted evidence of unspecified “cargo” being transported from North Korea to the site in 2006.

More recently, a 2017 U.N. report alleged that North Korea had been seeking to sell Lithium-6 (Li-6), an isotope used in the production of thermonuclear weapons. The online ad that caught the attention of researchers suggested North Korea could supply 22 pounds of the substance each month from Dandong, a Chinese city on the North Korean border.

There are striking similarities between this latest case and other recent efforts by North Korea to market arms using companies “hidden in plain sight.”

The Li-6 advertisement was allegedly linked to an alias of a North Korean state arms exporter known as “Green Pine Associated Corporation.” Green Pine and associated individuals were hit with a U.N. asset freeze and travel ban in 2012. The individual named on the ad was a North Korean based in Beijing formerly listed as having diplomatic status. As was noted when the Li-6 story broke, the contact details provided with the ad were made up: The street address did not exist and the phone number didn’t work. However, prospective buyers could contact the seller through the online platform.

This case – our most recent data point – raises significant questions. Was this North Korea testing the water for future sales? Does it suggest that North Korea may be willing to sell materials and goods it can produce in surplus? Was the case an anomaly rather than representative of a trend?

A supplier in search of markets?

In the few public statements North Korea has made on the issue, it has generally denied that it will seek to export nuclear technology.

In 2006, for example, a Foreign Ministry official suggested that the country would “strictly prohibit any threat of … nuclear transfer.” The U.N. sanctions regime would also prohibit the export of nuclear technologies – although North Korea has been happy to defy the U.N. regime since its inception that same year.

Additionally, there have been significant developments in states which were customers, or have been rumored to have an interest, in North Korean nuclear technology in the past.

Syria has spent the past six years in a chaotic civil war. Since the 2007 bombing of the reactor, the country has shown no public signs of interest in nuclear weapons.
After giving up its nuclear ambitions in a 2003 deal Libya has seen significant political changes and unrest following the collapse of the Qaddafi regime in 2011.
The 2015 nuclear deal with Iran saw the country agree to limit its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief, and procure nuclear technology through a dedicated channel. If it continues to adhere to the deal, it has no need for illicit nuclear purchases. While some analysts have speculated about nuclear transfers from North Korea to Iran, no public evidence supports this. It’s unclear to what extent the Iran deal will survive the whims of the Trump administration, and what the longer-term implications are for Iran’s program and other states who may seek to acquire nuclear technology as a “hedge” against Iran in the region.
Myanmar, another country with unfounded allegations of past North Korean nuclear collaboration, has undergone significant political change and has made efforts to wean itself off imports of North Korean arms.

In other words, it’s unclear who – if anyone – would buy North Korean nuclear technology. However, the nightmare scenario of North Korea selling it to the highest bidder merits consideration.

It would not be the first time that an illicit procurement network turned to sales. Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan shifted his attention from procurement for Pakistan’s program in the 1970s and 1980s to sales to Iran, Libya and North Korea in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. The efforts of his network saw centrifuge enrichment technology, and even a weapons design, transferred in some of the most damaging transactions ever for the nonproliferation regime.

Following the discovery of the Khan network, the U.N. and others developed better export controls, and capabilities to detect, inspect and interdict shipments. The international community is better prepared; however, many challenges remain in preventing illicit nuclear-related trade.

Daniel Salisbury, Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Belfer Center, Harvard University

Bannon is trying to take over the GOP within one election. Can he pull it off?

(Credit: AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

The Republican Party’s white nationalist, anti-Washington wing led by Steve Bannon is hoping to turn 2018’s Senate elections into a GOP civil war in which right-wingers oust Republican incumbents deemed insufficiently loyal and unseat Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader.

That’s the takeaway from a series of reports over the past weekend, including a lengthy report at Breitbart News, which Bannon oversees, telegraphing this new intra-party civil war plan and targeting McConnell. The reports imply Bannon has access to the millions needed to wage the 2018 primary campaigns. In all likelihood, funds would come from his longtime patron, hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his family. The reports also suggest the Tea Party, long underwritten by the billionaire Koch brothers, would contribute.

Next year’s congressional midterms were supposed to be the Democrats’ nightmare, with 23 incumbents and two Independents who vote with them defending their seats, while only eight GOP incumbents face re-election. Now, however, it appears that the Republicans’ extreme right wing is poised to oust anyone resembling a centrist in low-turnout primaries before turning to November’s race against Democrats.

Breitbart boasted on its website:

“‘We’re planning on building a broad anti-establishment coalition to replace the Republican Party of old with fresh new blood and fresh new ideas,’ Andy Surabian, a senior adviser to the Great America Alliance [a pro-Trump super PAC that raised $30 million last year] and ex-White House aide, told Breitbart News. Their [Republican Senate] repeated failures to govern have only crystallized their lack of vision or backbone. The group of candidates we are looking to support in 2018 are all bound together in their agreement that the new Republican Party must be bold in their thinking and aggressive in their tactics.”

Breitbart was the most influential Republican website before last November’s vote, as measured by reader traffic and shared content. Its latest account, however propagandistic, also quoted other far-right extremists like Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots and Tony Perkins, the Family Research Council’s president, who both said Washington Republicans were failing the voters who elected Trump president.

“They are angry at the lack of Republican leadership on Capitol Hill, and many think it’s time to ditch Mitch as the leader of the Senate,” Martin said. “What I am beginning to remind people and let people know is I’m meeting incredible candidates around the country who are willing to take on the Republican status quo.”

One of those “incredible candidates” is Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, whose corporation providing mercenaries to the Pentagon was involved in the mass murder of Iraqi civilians. The New York Times reported that Prince, who once lived in Wyoming, traveled there to explore establishing legal residency to run as a senatorial candidate.

“Mr. Prince appears increasingly likely to challenge John Barrasso, a senior member of the Senate Republican leadership, according to people who have spoken to him in recent days,” the Times reported. “Republicans have privately said that a primary challenge against a lawmaker like Mr. Barrasso is the kind they fear most: an out-of-the-blue run by a renegade from the right against a senator whose sin is not a lack of conservative credentials, but an association with Mr. McConnell and other party leaders.”

Other outlets such as Bloomberg.com, reported that Bannon is the ringleader of a plan to “back primary challengers to almost every Republican senator who runs for re-election next year in an effort to depose Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and streamline Senate voting procedures.”

“Bannon has held a series of meetings to plan his moves for 2018 since late September, when he backed Roy Moore, the Alabama judge who’s been accused of bigotry, in a successful runoff election against Senator Luther Strange, who had support from Trump and McConnell,” Bloomberg reported. “Bannon plans to support as many as 15 Republican Senate candidates in 2018, including several challengers to incumbents, the people said. He’ll support only candidates who agree to two conditions: They will vote against McConnell as majority leader, and they will vote to end senators’ ability to block legislation by filibustering.”

The news accounts describe Bannon targeting Republican incumbents who are close to the GOP leadership, such as Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker. “Mr. Bannon is also hoping to persuade Ann LePage, the wife of Maine’s outspoken governor, Paul LePage, to run for the Republican nomination to challenge Senator Angus King, an independent who is up for re-election in 2018,” the Times said.

The report on this would-be right-wing senatorial coup, from Bannon’s mouthpiece, Breitbart, also listed which candidates they will be promoting. In Tennessee, where Republican incumbent Sen. Bob Corker is not seeking re-election, Breitbart is cheering on Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn.

“It’s not just Tennessee and Wyoming where McConnell and establishment Republicans are down on their luck,” Breitbart writes. “Weak incumbent Republicans face tough primaries in both Arizona and Nevada, where the vehemently anti-Trump Sens. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Dean Heller (R-NV) face conservative pro-Trump challengers next year. Danny Tarkanian, a businessman and son of the legendary UNLV basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian, is running against Heller while former state senator Dr. Kelli Ward is running hard against Flake in Arizona. Both Tarkanian and Ward are polling ahead of the incumbent senators nearly a year from the election, something causing great alarm for the GOP establishment in Washington.”

There was other breathless prose in Breitbart supporting Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley for its GOP primary, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (he faces term limits as governor), Republican Rep. Evan Jenkins in West Virginia, Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel, “Wisconsin conservative outsider Kevin Nicholson,” and Virginia’s “anti-establishment Corey Stewart.” The only Republican incumbent not targeted in a primary by Bannon was Texas’ Sen. Ted Cruz, whom the Mercers supported for president before losing to Trump.

Breitbart said this is “all part of an effort to wrest control of the Republican Party away from failed leaders and hand it to fresh blood.” And it suggested that House Speaker Paul Ryan and incumbents not aligned with the House Freedom Caucus are also being targeted.

“That doesn’t even mention House or gubernatorial races,” Breitbart boasted. “On the House side of things, conservatives have their eyes on taking down many failed incumbent establishment Republicans and are also even looking at many open races. That picture, movement leaders say, is expected to come together more clearly in the days and weeks ahead.”

Despite their propagandistic posturing, the threat posed by Bannon and his allies and funders is very serious. Primary elections in non-presidential years are historically low-turnout contests. That means smaller, more ideological groups can have outsized impacts, as the Tea Party did in 2010. It does not matter that nationally, poll after poll has found support for Trump’s policies hovers in the mid-30s, percentage-wise, or that the Democrats, nationally, won 2.9 million more presidential votes in 2016.

If Bannon is successful, Republicans like Ted Cruz may find themselves as part of a new extremist firmament seeking to bend Congress to its whims.

Living with Trump’s new normal is driving me crazy

(Credit: Getty/Mandel Ngan)

Can we take a moment from trying to follow last week’s Trump White House follies and our incessant worrying that Trump is about to start World War III to engage in a little time-travel back to a more innocent time, when we had no idea what was in store for us, before the exhaustion of the New Normal had set in? I’m speaking here of March 4 of this year, a lazy spring Saturday morning when we were happily going about our business, maybe going out for a hike, or getting ready for our kids’ spring break, or maybe we were going to find a spring training exhibition game on cable, or watch the qualifying for the NASCAR race in Atlanta. When Trump woke up that Saturday morning at Mar a Lago, he picked up his phone and started thrumb-thwacking a bizarre theory that President Obama had been wiretapping him during the run-up to the 2016 election.

“Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” Trump tweeted at 8:02 a.m. A few minutes later, he fired off this gem: “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”

It’s really hard to remember those innocent days, isn’t it? I mean, I’ve been sitting here like you have, literally drowning in the tsunami of last week. First Trump sends out a tweet that undercuts Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s attempts to make some kind of deal with China to reign in North Korea, saying “Sorry, only one thing will work!” Which fires up speculation that he’s threatening a nuclear war. Then he flies to Puerto Rico to have a look at the devastation on the island which has 3.4 million without water or electricity, nobody is able to get anywhere because of washed out roads and bridges, no cell phone reception, people are literally starving from lack of food, and he stands in some fucking airport hanger and throws paper towels into a crowd and then gets on his jet and flies back to the White House and gives a couple of interviews congratulating himself for such a great trip.

Then it’s revealed that Tillerson had called the president “a fucking moron” at a meeting of national security officials at the Pentagon last summer. A day later, Trump poses for a photo before a dinner with military leaders, and tells the press what they are seeing is “the calm before the storm,” and when asked what he meant by that ominous phrase, answers “you’ll find out.” Then Senator Bob Corker gets into it with Trump, saying he was running the presidency like “a reality show, calling the White House an “adult day care center,” and going further to say that Trump’s saber rattling at North Korea could put us “on the path to World War III.” Trump fires back by calling Corker (who stands about 5-7) “Liddle’ Bob Corker,” and saying that the “failing New York Times” had set him up, “and that’s what I’m dealing with!” leaving aside that what he’s “dealing with” are the effects of three savage hurricanes, a congress that hasn’t passed a single item on his agenda, and the encroaching threat of the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, among other heavy issues. And all the while, he declared that every single report on the events of last week was “fake news.” His disastrous trip to Puerto Rico? Fake News. Tillerson’s “moron” comment? Fake news. He’s threatening North Korea? Fake news.

The answer to his prayers, “fake news,” as far back as March 4, only 43 days into his presidency. By then, he was already struggling against allegations of collusion between his campaign and the Russians in 2016. The White House had begun with flat-out denials, of course. But on February 13, less than a month into his presidency, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was fired because he had lied about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the campaign and afterwards during the transition. Three days later, on February 16, Trump held his first solo press conference, and tried to put the whole Russia thing behind him by declaring that anything having to do with Trump and Russia was “fake news,” and Flynn was a pretty good guy who had been “badly treated” by the media, and that his travel ban, which had generated chaos at airports and had already been put on hold by a federal court, had enjoyed “a very smooth roll out.”

It didn’t work. The press conference was widely derided as unhinged, both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees announced that they would be investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, and the questions about Flynn’s firing and the Trump campaign and Russia just refused to go away, so Trump went down to Mar a Lago and decided to change the subject by, yes, screaming that Obama did it! Then he made the fatal mistake of telling the congress that they should investigate Obama’s possibly criminal wiretapping of Trump’s campaign.

So they announced they would look into it, and on March 20, the House Intelligence Committee called FBI Director Comey to Capitol Hill, where he proceeded to tell the committee that the FBI didn’t have any evidence of Obama tapping Trump’s phones, but come to think of it, the FBI had had a criminal and counterintelligence investigation going since July of 2016 “that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”

It was a bombshell. Well, correct that: it was the first of many, many bombshells. That was Monday, March 20. On Wednesday morning, March 22, the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee — the committee which had just held the hearing during which the Comey bombshell went off — appeared on the driveway of the White House and announced that he had evidence that the “intelligence community” had listened in on communications involving members of the Trump transition team (of which Nunes was one) during foreign intelligence “intercepts.”

This would soon lead us down the rabbit hole of the great Susan Rice “unmasking” controversy, during which Nunes, among others, would essentially accuse Obama’s National Security Advisor and alleged master of the Benghazi cover-up of secretly “tapping the wires” of Trump’s people at Trump Tower. Within a few days, it was revealed that on the night of March 21 — the day after the Comey bombshell on Capitol Hill — Dim Bulb Nunes was in an Uber with members of his staff going somewhere when he received a mysterious phone call, ordered the Uber to pull over, got out, got himself another Uber, and disappeared into the night. Where did he disappear one night after Comey told the world that the Trump campaign had been under investigation for nine months? Well, it turns out the call he got was from two youthful White House staffers who told Nunes to get himself over to the White House, where they led Nunes on a midnight snipe hunt through the deep weeds of the National Security Council “SCIF” searching for “evidence” that Obama put a “tapp” on Trump’s “wires.”

One of the snipe-hunters was Ezra Cohen-Watnick, 30, “Senior Director for Intelligence” on the National Security Council. Watnick had been hired by Michael Flynn back in January. McMaster tried to fire him when he took over the NSC from disgraced Flynn in February, only to have his order overturned by Trump’s Power Twins, Bannon and Kushner, for whom Watnick was apparently spying on the NSC staff. The other snipe-hunter was Michael Ellis, 32, a lawyer in the White House counsel’s office who was “working on national security issues.” And who did Ellis work for before he got his job at the White House? Dim Bulb Nunes, natch. He was “counsel” to Nunes on the…you guessed it…House Intelligence Committee.

Are you with me, so far? Okay then. Follow this: facing revelations about the White House Midnight Merry Go Round, Nunes, who had been stopping before every press gaggle he could find to accuse the Obama White House of tapping Trump’s “wires” was suddenly dodging reporters and refusing to answer questions and denying that he his credibility had been totally and completely destroyed by revelations that he had pulled his John Le Carre moves whispering into cell phones and changing Ubers and rushing over to the White House to meet Watnick and Ellis, because, you know, he could never reveal sources and methods, which is why he couldn’t discuss the “intercepts” that he had delivered to the White House that the White House already had because of course he had found the “intercepts” during his midnight snipe hunt with Watnick and Ellis.

A day or so later, he canceled an open hearing he had scheduled to hear testimony from former CIA Directors Brennan and Woolsey and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates (who had revealed Flynn’s ties to Russian Ambassador Kislyak and had been quickly fired,) and then he scheduled a closed hearing to hear again from FBI Director Comey and NSA Director Admiral Michael Rogers, and then he cancelled that closed hearing too. And a few days after all of that, on April 6, Nunes recused himself from the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation while the Office of Congressional Ethics began an investigation into whether he “made unauthorized disclosures of classified information, in violation of House Rules, law, regulations, or other standards of conduct” when he stepped before the mics on the White House driveway and babbled on and on about “intercepts” and “unmasking” and stuff.

Got that? It’s really something, going back through all that shit, isn’t it? Well, reach back down into your memory hole and recollect this: only a month later, on May 9, Trump fired Comey and walked smiling ear-to-ear straight into a meeting with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak (remember him? Flynn’s buddy?) and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and told them he had just fired Comey, calling him “crazy, a real nut job,” and bragging that “I had faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” And then came the lies about Comey being fired because the FBI was in “turmoil,” and then his admission to Lester Holt that he had fired him because “I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said ‘you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.”

And we were off to the races with the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and daily allegations that pretty much all news that didn’t come straight from either Spicer or Huckabee-Sanders was “fake news,” and about eleventy-seven dimwits got fired from the White House and replaced with new dimwits, and lots of saber rattling at North Korea and calling Kim Jong-un “Rocket Man” and Rocket Man actually firing off rocket after rocket, and learning about even more meetings with Russians including the infamous Trump Tower meeting held by Donald Junior along with Manafort and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and, well, don’t you need to take a breath? I sure as hell do.

This stuff is making my head hurt. I live in constant fear. Right now, I’m afraid to turn on the TV and see what the monciferous me-man in the White House has done since I sat down to write this. And I’m a cynical bastard, for crying out loud! I covered Richard Nixon and Watergate! I’ve been writing about this shit for 50 years — the assholes who get us into wars and run us into bankruptcy and pollute our water and air and deny health care to sick people and refuse to raise the minimum wage while they let billionaires steal us blind — and Trump’s New Normal is wearing me out. I’m going to take two ibuprofen and lie down.

“This isn’t Denver,” my lawyer said: Not all of Colorado loves legal weed

(Credit: Getty/LukaTDB)

All that was on my mind was, I don’t want to die tonight. It was a frigid evening in December 2016. I’d been evicted from my home in Denver and spent three weeks living with a friend in Sydney, Nebraska. After searching for permanent living and finding none, I’d decided to head back to the Denver area to find help at a homeless shelter or a church. Unfortunately, I lacked cell service, money and a GPS and couldn’t contact anyone for help. My best bet was to drive into Denver and look for places to sleep. It was 12 below and I knew I’d freeze to death if I tried to sleep in my car.

I didn’t know the way to Denver without a GPS, so I stopped at a rest area in Colorado to look at a map. After I ran back to my car, I wrapped myself in a blanket and tentatively picked through the paltry remains of some cannabis I’d bought a few weeks ago. I’d been using cannabis to help treat pain associated with a rare nerve disorder, and I had very little left. But that night I was desperate. I was cold, scared and alone. I just wanted something to ease my pain, to keep me company, to help me feel like I’d make it out of this alive. One bowl in my car, I thought, one bowl, wait an hour, then drive to Denver. I smoked, waited an hour to sober up, and drove on. But I never made it to Denver.

I was driving through Sterling, Colorado when the city sheriff pulled me over. I’d forgotten to turn on my headlights. I thought he was going to issue a warning and let me pass, but then he said, “Have you been smoking marijuana this evening? I can smell it in your car.” I should’ve denied it. I should’ve lied. But I was in Colorado and, besides, I wasn’t breaking the law. “I smoked about an hour ago,” I said. “But I waited until I felt okay to drive.”

He asked me to step out of the car for a sobriety test. The bitter, icy wind bit at my skin and my body shivered. Still, I passed . . . or so I thought. But before I knew it, I was slammed against a police car and handcuffed as another police officer recited my Miranda rights. I was mute with shock. Hadn’t I passed the test? All I did was shiver! I was dragged to the jail and was read a list of consequences that made no sense and left me more confused than before. The sheriff said he needed my blood, and if I didn’t comply I’d be prosecuted automatically. Terrified, and now on the brink of tears, I complied. They took my clothes and my belongings and left me in a jail cell for the next five days.

Until that point, my view of Colorado was one that was shaped entirely by living in Denver just for the past several months. In Denver, marijuana is everywhere. A 7-leafed emblem decorates signs on every street corner in every part of town. People smoke in public, openly, even though it’s technically illegal. One head shop owner I spoke to said the police never cared. “Unless you’re toking it up next to a bunch of little kids,” he chuckled, “they’re not going to do anything about it.” I’d witnessed this firsthand at an EDM concert in downtown Denver. A group of people I was with asked the policewoman outside if they could smoke. She shrugged as if to say, “Sure, as long as you’re not obnoxious about it.”

I’d thought most Coloradans shared this same laissez-faire attitude towards weed. So when I was told my blood exceeded the legal limit of THC and was charged with a DUI, I was certain I still had a chance in trial. After all, I’d read about Melanie Brinegar, a medical marijuana patient who, despite being four times the limit of THC, proved to the court she wasn’t impaired and was cleared of a DUI charge. And her case isn’t unique. Science has continually made the case that the current legal limit for marijuana (5 ng/mL) is utterly arbitrary and inaccurate, especially for regular users, and courts have been known to take that into consideration.

The AAA Foundation concluded in 2016, after a study including nearly 5,000 people, that “the evidence was very clear that 5 ng/mL was not a good discriminator of impairment,” adding that THC blood concentration “is not a useful surrogate for the effect experienced by the subject” at all. The study found that people who regularly smoked cannabis could have blood levels many times the current limit and still show no signs of impairment. THC, the study also notes, isn’t water-soluble and leaves the body much more slowly than alcohol, so a person could effectively have 10 times the legal limit of THC in their blood and not have smoked in months. The AAA study asserts that this “undermines the effectiveness and fairness of a per se standard for THC” because the cannabis user “can’t make an informed and responsible decision about whether to drive based on their concentration.”

While the hunt is still on for effective means to road test marijuana impairment, the power is up to the courts to decide if a person with THC in their blood was impaired or not. I was a medical marijuana patient, so I knew I had a high blood content. But I wasn’t obviously impaired and I didn’t cause anyone harm, so I thought I still had a case I could win. My lawyer thought otherwise.

“This isn’t Denver,” she told me, after I presented my points. “You were arrested in Sterling, and the people here hate marijuana. A jury trial will be pointless. No matter the evidence, they will choose to prosecute you. You’re safer taking the plea bargain.”

I had no choice. I took the plea bargain: a DWAI charge, which is less severe than a DUI but is in essence the same. It remains on your record permanently and could still affect future employment.

“It sucks,” my lawyer said, “because I know that if this happened closer to Denver you’d never have been arrested. You weren’t hurting anyone. You didn’t appear to be impaired. But Sterling cops aren’t like Denver cops. They will do anything they can to punish marijuana users.”

When I moved from Nebraska to Colorado, I’d bought into the trope that portrayed Colorado as a holy Mecca for cannabis users. I thought I’d finally be somewhere I could consume my medicine in peace without prosecution from the government or law enforcement. But even now there are places in Colorado that remain precarious for people who use, made possible by loopholes in the law that don’t protect regular and medical users (who will always have more than 5 ng/mL of THC in their blood, even when they’re no longer high).

While Colorado has since made it illegal to search someone based on how they smell, the police in certain towns can still find ways to arrest and detain potential users of cannabis so they can prosecute them based on their blood content. Since there’s presently no fair way to objectively test marijuana impairment, police in prejudiced areas can rely on technicalities to arrest and prosecute unimpaired drivers. This essentially makes marijuana use illegal in those towns, as there would be no way for a regular user to drive a vehicle there without breaking the law. It’s evident that despite the stereotypes of Colorado being “the stoner state,” the state remains deeply divided about marijuana. This divide could potentially cause marijuana users harm while the power to prosecute drivers remains in the people’s hands. It’s extremely important that anyone thinking of moving to Colorado for marijuana treatment chooses an area that has accepted it culturally, or they may be facing a rude awakening. 

“Dynasty” returns shiny and new, but could use some old tricks

Elizabeth Gillies and Nathalie Kelley in "Dynasty" (Credit: CW)

Good shows open with neat packages. An early scene in the original “Dynasty,” for instance, features Krystle Jennings (Linda Evans) enjoying a bridal shower with her old 9-to-5 gal pals at the office. Tucked into sheet cake and drinking out of paper cups, Krystle and the girls are opening gifts, including a telltale tiny box from her fiancé Blake Carrington (John Forsythe). Blake didn’t want to be bothered to deliver the gift himself, sending it via a servant.

And inside the box? A pair of enormous pear-shaped diamond studs. The ladies coo enviously (despite the fact that they look like a prize a child could win Chuck E. Cheese.)

But the scene’s overall message told viewers all we really needed to know about the series that would become a giant among primetime soaps. Krystle Jennings embodied the conventional, presumed dream of the girl in the secretarial pool: plucked obscurity by the multimillionaire boss and set down, gently, in a world of extreme wealth.

“I won’t change,” she whispers to her friends. “I swear it.” The world Krystle was stepping into forced her to break that pledge; Blake Carrington’s new wife hadn’t met his ex Alexis Carrington Colby (Joan Collins). Soon enough, Krystle was catfighting with the best of high society’s grand dames, slapping her challengers into lily ponds and down staircases.

“Dynasty” screamed too much in every regard. Collins played too much to the groundlings watching at home. The shoulder pads were the size of zeppelins, and the jewels seemed to howl with fakery. It was all part of the magic.

In 1981, its version of the average-girl-makes-good story found purchase with an audience witnessing the rise of unfettered excess and materialism on Wall Street. The original “Dynasty” sold the fantasy that outsize wealth could be just one fortunate marriage away while making the average person relieved they didn’t have to deal with the bitches that came with the package.

No such sparkle glistens on The CW’s “Dynasty” reboot, stepping out for the first time Wednesday at 9 p.m. On the contrary, its downfall is a consistent failure to go far enough with drama and camp. The cast isn’t taking the story too seriously, that much is obvious. But it’s also plain to see that they want us to know that they’re deadly serious about doing justice to the original. They shouldn’t be.

This is where the new “Dynasty” gets stuck. Like a person wearing a sequined gown while shopping at a grocery store — at 11 in the morning, on a Tuesday — it’s begging for attention while engaging in the banal in a setting that makes very easy for people to ignore it. We’ll just take another aisle, thanks much.

The primetime soap has evolved appreciably since the days of the Carrington-Colby feud in no small part because of the work of the executive producers of the new “Dynasty.” Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage gave the world “The O.C.” and “Gossip Girl,” while Sallie Patrick gifted us with “Revenge” which, when it was good, was very, very good.

All of these series contained a strain of honest feeling that the first “Dynasty” sidestepped in favor for deliciously old-fashioned melodrama. And among The CW’s young female target audience, most of whom presumably haven’t seen the original, the similarity between this new “Dynasty” and some of its recent kin should serve as a plus.

The minus is that there’s nobody to root for. Besides, we already have a “Dynasty” for the 2010s. It’s called “Empire,” and as homages to the original go, the Fox series gets it right.

However Schwartz, Savage and Patrick admirably update Esther and Richard Shapiro’s original creation to reflect the world today’s viewers know. Cristal (Nathalie Kelley) and Sammy Jo (Rafael de la Fuente) are played by Hispanic actors, and Sammy Jo is male. Today’s Cristal is less subordinate to Blake (Grant Show) than yesteryear’s Krystle was; she’s an executive in his company with a seat at the boardroom table.

Representing the Colby side of the equation is Jeff Colby, played by Sam Adegoke, a black actor. Other aspects aren’t that far off. Steven Carrington (James Mackay) is gay and more sensitive to the needs of everyday folks than his sister Fallon (Elizabeth Gillies), the clan’s Ivanka.

To underline that comparison, the pilot opens with a montage of publicity footage featuring the Kardashians, the Murdochs and the Trumps. Only one of those clans could possibly be referred to as dynastic. The others are merely skilled at playing super rich and entitled on television.

I suppose it’s all in how you define the term, right? Anyway the heart of the matter is in Fallon’s narration layered over that visual: “Like it or not, we live in an age of dynasties. Who else can you trust to run the family business, except family?”

The answer comes later as Blake shocks Fallon and Steven by leaping into a wedding with Cristal in the backyard, which happens after we see a number of subplots with all the juice of jerky: Fallon’s banging the chauffeur (Robert Christopher Riley)! Steven’s got his own tryst that comes back to haunt him! And the family butler Anders (Alan Dale) is convinced that Cristal is a hussy – which would be predictable, interesting and lend the whole story some pizzazz.

We’ve see all of these set-ups before in “The O.C.” and “Revenge,” Aaron Spelling’s shows and a number of series that graced the line-up of ABC Family.

While there’s something adorably kitschy about watching Kelley theatrically flounce down the bridal path to David Bowie’s “Modern Love” as Cristal rubs Fallon’s face in the fact that she’s her stepmom — and they’re both in their 20s — this is one moment in an hour impoverished in entertainment value or originality. And it’s not enough to merit our attention, not with the likes of Cookie Lyon firing up “Empire” every week.

It would be fine for “Dynasty” to be derivative if it weren’t so darn bloodless. The opening montage tells the tale: we’re already up to our necks in watching rich families masquerade as dynasty powers while the world holds its breath in fear of oblivion. They’re already giving us quite the show, filled with black comedy, characters detached from reality and unpredictable twists. If a “Dynasty” reboot can’t outdo reality by lampooning the artifice of it all, what’s the point?