Huffington (Issue #09)

THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE

AUGUST 12, 2012

Unlocking Secrets of Wine Fraud Briarcliff Manor’s Toxic Problems Ben Cohen: Tread Lightly Olympics Highlights

08.12.12 #09 CONTENTS

Enter POINTERS: Fox News vs. Gabby, new iPhone, Santorum Returns MOVING IMAGE Q&A: Ben Cohen

Voices ALAN SCHROEDER: Political Olympics Preview

IN VINO VERITAS?

BY DAN COLLINS

STEVE BLANK: When I Was Told To Lie On My Resume...

BONNIE SNYDER: High-Grade Litigation QUOTED

JOE SCHMELZER (WINE); FIONA ABOUD (SIKHS); CHRISTOPHER CHURCHILL (BRIARCLIFF)

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TRADITION AMID TRAGEDY

BY FIONA ABOUD

TELEVISION: Why Is Shark Week So Popular?

COMEDY: When It Comes to Comedians, Is There a Line?

THE GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK: Elias Oteroi TFU

SUDDEN DEATH

BY KATHERINE BINDLEY

FROM THE EDITOR: Tainted Fields, Tainted Wines ON THE COVER: Illustration for

Huffington by Gérard Dubois

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

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Tainted Fields, Tainted Wines AST MONTH IN Huffington, Lynne Peeples wrote about our society’s unacceptably slow progress in the half-century since Rachel Carson sounded the alarm about the dangers of exposure to chemicals. This week, Katherine Bindley tells a story that puts flesh and blood on that failure—and the nightmarish consequences of not heeding Carson’s warning.

The town is Briarcliff Manor, an affluent New York suburb, where in 1998 the local school district made a deal allowing a trucking company to dump construction debris on school grounds in return for building athletic fields. At the time, such deals were common. But the Briarcliff fields have come under scrutiny as eight students who gathered

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there over the years—for sports practice, pep rallies, and bonfires— have developed cancer.

One student, Demetri Demeropoulos, died from a spinal cord tumor at 18. Others, like Nicholas Mazzilli, have been successfully treated—though parents worry about long-term effects. Parents are contemplating suing the school, which has responded not by cleaning the field but by hiring consultants to disprove the harmfulness of the soil’s contents.

Environmental experts say a link between the field debris and the cancer diagnoses, while possible, cannot be proved conclusively.

But Max Costa, NYU’s chair of environmental medicine, puts it

Join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

best: “This is not a good thing to do, use a waste dump site to build a ball field for kids to play on… I don’t care how much the levels are or what could have happened: it’s playing with a time bomb and you don’t know. You don’t know what you could be doing to these kids.”

Katherine’s story is part small town mystery, part bureaucratic nightmare and part cautionary tale about the consequences of not taking every possible measure to protect our children.

Elsewhere in this week’s issue, HuffPost’s New York editor-at-large Dan Collins reports on a very different kind of mystery: the glamorous, lucrative and shamelessly corrupt world of wine counterfeiting. It’s a winding tale of intrigue and deception, and in Dan’s telling it takes on the quality of a Hollywood screenplay. There’s Rudy Kurniawan, the brash young wine collector who treats his friends to rare Burgundys and vintage Bordeauxs—and then asks the restaurant to ship the empty bottles to his home. There’s Don Cornwell, “winedom’s No. 1 detective,” who trails the slippery Kurniawan in “an elaborate game of cat and mouse.” There are the wine

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industry professionals who look the other way while Kurniawan and his friends bankroll lavish lifestyles with dubious—and easily disprovable—claims at wine auction sales.

Then there are the connoisseurs, enthusiasts and industry Will the insiders who perpetunefarious ate the deception— to Kurniawan salve their egos, and continue their bank accounts. to swindle As Collins writes, his way into “Rather than blowing high society?” the whistle on a counterfeiter, many duped buyers prefer to recoup their losses by reselling the phony wine to other unsuspecting buyers.” A high-end twist on pay-it-forward.

Will the nefarious Kurniawan continue to dupe and swindle his way into high society? Will Cornwell get his man? Read on to find out. It’s a true crime story that mystifies and delights, best enjoyed over a rare Roumier, a ‘47 Lafleur—or perhaps a $12 California cabernet, just to be on the safe side.

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FOX NEWS GOES AFTER GABBY DOUGLAS

After Gabby Douglas took home the gold in the Women’s All-Around Gymnastics competition, Fox News still found something to be unhappy about in the performance.

Alisyn Camerota, a guest host on America Live, questioned Douglas’ patriotism—because she wore a pink leotard. “You know, Gabby had that great moment, and everyone was so excited, and she’s in hot pink— and that’s her prerogative,” she said. Camerota’s guest, Sirius/ XM radio host David Webb, described that prerogative as a “kind of soft anti-American feeling that Americans can’t show their exceptionalism.”

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U.S. OLYMPIAN DISQUALIFIED FOR DOPING

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An American judo fighter was expelled from the Olympics after testing positive for cannabis metabolites. Nick Delpopolo, 23, claimed the test results were “caused by my inadvertent consumption of food that I did not realize had been baked with marijuana.” He is the fifth athlete to be eliminated from the London Games after testing positive for a banned substance.

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SANTORUM’S BACK

Rick Santorum, who once described Mitt Romney as having “the weakest record we could possibly put up against Barack Obama,” will speak at his former rival’s nominating convention later this month. After he dropped out of the presidential race, Santorum endorsed Romney, telling supporters, “Above all else, we both agree that President Obama must be defeated.”

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) will also speak at the RNC.

LEVI HATES BRISTOL’S PARENTING Levi Johnston says he is so disgusted that Bristol Palin allowed their son Tripp to say the f-word on television that he will seek full custody of the boy. “I love my son more than anything,” he told TMZ. “I will do whatever it takes to make sure he is raised the right way.”

The Palin family has accused Johnston, who is expecting his second child with a girlfriend, of failing to use his visitation rights to see Tripp.

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5 PAT ROBERTSON EXPLAINS WISCONSIN SHOOTING

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Pat Robertson blames atheists for the shooting that left six dead at a Sikh temple near Milwaukee. “Is it some spiritual thing, people who are atheists, they hate God, they hate the expression of God?” he asked on his show.

“And they are angry with the world, angry with themselves, angry with society and they take it out on innocent people who are worshiping God.” The alleged shooter has been identified as Wade Michael Page, who once led a racial supremacy group. His religious affiliation is unknown.

NEW iPHONE RUMORS SWIRL

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES (APPLE)

The iPhone 5 is all but confirmed for a debut next month, according to multiple reports. An anonymous source told publications including The New York Times that Apple will introduce the device at a September 12 event. According to Forbes, the new iPhone will be bigger than the iPhone 4S, with bigger display, a sleeker screen and smaller main menu button.

THAT’S VIRAL GAY CHICK-FIL-A EMPLOYEES SPEAK OUT

A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories.

HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES

McKAYLA MARONEY FALLS DURING VAULT, STILL WALKS AWAY WITH SILVER MEDAL

CONGRESS DEALS A BLOW TO THE WESTBORO BAPTISTS

AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL, AUTHOR, AND PLAYWRIGHT GORE VIDAL PASSES AT AGE 86

NEARLY 100 PERCENT OF COMPETITIVE SWIMMERS PEE IN THE POOL...

INCLUDING OLYMPIANS

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Closing Ceremony

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The London Games end Sunday, but the most memorable athletes and moments will go down in Olympic history. Here’s a look back at some of the triumphs, trials and heartbreaks of the past two weeks.

Yamile Aldama of Great Britain after failing to medal in the Women’s Triple Jump Final

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TOP: RICHARD HEATHCOTE/GETTY IMAGES; BOTTOM: IAN WALTON/GETTY IMAGES

Above: Yong Dae Lee and Jae Sung Chung (right) of Korea after winning their Men’s Doubles Badminton Bronze Medal match.

Below: Pawel Zagrodnik of Poland (left) and Masashi Ebinuma of Japan relax after their match in the Men’s 66kg Judo.

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Illya Kvasha and Oleksiy Prygorov of Ukraine compete in the Men’s Synchronized 3m Springboard Diving.

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TOP: EZRA SHAW/GETTY IMAGES; BOTTOM: RONALD MARTINEZ/GETTY IMAGES

Above: Claudio Capelli of Switzerland competes on the horizontal bar in the Gymnastics Men’s Individual All-Around final. Below: Team USA’s Gabby Douglas on the balance beam in the Gymnastics Women’s Team final.

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The Olympic Cauldron burns as athletes compete in the Men’s 400m Hurdles Heats.

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Above: Jack Green of Great Britain after falling in the Men’s 400m Hurdles Semi Final.

Below: Jessica Ennis of Great Britain celebrates winning gold in the Women’s Heptathlon.

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Sergey Prokopyev of Russia sets the ball during the Men’s Beach Volleyball match with the U.S.

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TOP: REUTERS/DOMINIC EBENBICHLER; BOTTOM: ADAM PRETTY/GETTY IMAGES

Above: Micronesia’s Manuel Minginfel drops weights on the men’s 62kg Group B weightlifting competition.

Below: Athletes clear the water jump during the Men’s 3000m Steeplechase Final.

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Mary Killman and Mariya Koroleva of the U.S. compete in the Women’s Duets Synchronized Swimming Technical Routine.

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TOP: SCOTT HEAVEY/GETTY IMAGES; BOTTOM: MICHAEL STEELE/GETTY IMAGES

Above: Ferhat Pehlivan of Turkey (red) in action with Ramy Elawady of Egypt during the Men’s Light Fly (46-49kg) Boxing.

Below: Oscar Pistorius of South Africa competes in the Men’s 400m Round 1 Heats.

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Goalkeeper Andriea of Brazil tries to stop a shot from Shinobu Ohno of Japan during the Women’s Soccer Quarter Final match.

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TOP: HANNAH JOHNSTON/GETTY IMAGES; BOTTOM: CLIVE ROSE/GETTY IMAGES

Above: Gerek Meinhardt (right) of the U.S. competes against Peter Joppich of Germany in the bronze medal match for the Men’s Foil Team Fencing finals. Below: Michael Phelps competes in the Men’s 100m Butterfly Final.

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BRET GRAFTON/BEN COHEN STANDUP FOUNDATION

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Ben Cohen Strips For Equality

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EN COHEN may be one of the highest-scoring players in British Union rugby history, but to his legions of gay fans, he’s best known for taking off his shirt. The 33-year-old athlete, who is straight and married with twin daughters, most recently stripped down for a new underwear line, proceeds from which benefit the Ben Cohen StandUp Foundation. But Cohen hopes that fans will listen as closely as they’re looking: in 2011, he retired from professional sports to launch the foundation, which is focused on combating homophobia and bullying against LGBT youth. Cohen spoke with Huffington about his foundation’s goals, his gay icon status and, of course, those sinewy underwear ads. — Curtis M. Wong

As an athlete and public figure, you can choose to support any number of worthy causes. Why is combating homophobia and anti-gay bullying so important to you? It’s about being a champion on the field and off the field, and that’s where a lot of sportsmen really let themselves down. We want to be on the right side of history with the efforts for equality and respect for all.

What I’d experienced in my family [after the death of his father, who was beaten trying to break up a bar fight] was really devastating. Our pain and our suffering came from the hands of other people, and a lot of the pain my gay fans were expressing on my Facebook page was similar to what we’d experienced. Bullying was no different.

Enter Have you ever been the victim of bullying? I’ve never been bullied myself, but I’ve always stood up for those who’ve been bullied. As a family, we’re very much about, “If someone’s nice to you, you’d better be nice back.” That’s how I was brought up, that was my family’s core value.

What is it about the Ben Cohen StandUp Foundation that makes it unique? Well, we were the world’s first and always will be. For us, it was important to lead. It’s all about getting efforts coordinated to create a cultural change and affect that next generation. Where homophobia is now is a lot different than it was 20 years ago, and with the power of social media, we think we can drive that [change] a lot quicker.

It’s about education.

Given that you’re a heterosexual, married father of two, how do you view your status as both a gay icon and sex symbol? I don’t really see it...“icon” is a big word. If men find me attractive, that’s fair enough. I’m very comfortable in my sexuality, and I’m honored and flattered by it—it’s lovely to hear. I wanted to [transfer the energy] of guys finding

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me attractive and following me on Facebook to combating homophobia and bullying, and educating people along the way. It’s good to see we’ve converted that following for a good purpose.

Whether or not I’ve saved someone’s life, I don’t know. But I like to think that I’ve helped.

There’s nothing I do that I wouldn’t show my kids. Everyone needs underwear, so why not attach it to a good cause?”

A cynic might suggest that posing shirtless for a calendar and modeling for an underwear line might cloud your foundation’s aim. How do you feel that incorporating sex appeal furthers the cause? You have to get people’s attention, and also get people to listen, and that’s what we’re doing. It’s important to remember that a lot of my fan base wasn’t here for a specific cause when we started. The pictures are all fun and they’re harmless. There’s nothing that I do that I wouldn’t show my kids. Everyone needs

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underwear, so why not attach it to a good cause?

How would you react if one of your daughters told you she was gay?

As a parent, I couldn’t care less if my child was gay or not, ultimately. If you raise a child who is educated, well-mannered and ultimately happy, then you’ve done a fantastic job.

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If there’s one message that you hope you and your foundation will be most remembered for, what would that be? Just that together we can build a kinder, more loving world. That’s what we all want, after all. We all want to be living in a kinder place, knowing that our children are going to be safe and free from bullying when they go to school. No one should have to tolerate that, no matter what your sexual orientation, the color of your skin, your size or the color of your hair is.

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Cohen’s foundation works to fight LGBT bullying.

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ALAN SCHROEDER

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Political Olympics Preview SCHEDULES AND VENUES have been set, formats have been selected and competitors have begun strategizing for victory in America’s upcoming political Olympics: the 2012 presidential and vice presidential debates, now less than two months away. Let us scrutinize the recent announcement of formats by the Commission on Presidential Debates for early indications about this year’s round of candidate match-ups.

As per recent tradition, the series will unfold during the month

ILLUSTRATION BY EDA AKALTUN

of October, beginning on the 3rd and continuing through the 22nd, two weeks before voters cast their ballots. By international standards, American debates take place unusually early in the process, well before citizens go to the polls. There are historical reasons for this: in 1980 incumbent Jimmy Carter and challenger Ronald Reagan debated only a single time, exactly one week before the elec-

Alan Schroeder is a professor of journalism at Northeastern University.

Voices tion, and Reagan’s strong performance gave Carter insufficient time to regain his footing.

Presidential debaters ever since have allowed themselves a generous window of opportunity in which to overcome an unfavorable showing. It is worth noting that this year’s final debate on October 22 falls later than normal—one week closer to Election Day than the last debate of 2008.

A potential wrinkle on the scheduling front: at least some of the debates appear to conflict with big-ticket sporting events.

The first debate on October 3 happens the same evening as Major League Baseball’s last day of regular season play. The concluding debate on the 22nd coincides with Monday night football—a game in which Obama’s hometown Chicago Bears will take on Romney’s hometown Detroit Lions. How many viewers are apt to choose athletics over politics?

And might this help or hurt a particular candidate?

And will the proposed debate schedule actually go forward as proposed, or can we expect the campaigns to press for changes?

The sponsoring Commission on Presidential Debates sets dates

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and venues months in advance, and so far neither the Obama nor the Romney campaigns have officially signed on. But tampering with the debate schedule carries risks, because it suggests to voters that a candidate is balking, as with George H.W. Bush in 1992 and George W. Bush eight years later. With Obama and Romney evenly matched in the polls, neither side stands to gain from a protracted debateover-debates. After all, these six hours of These television might just six hours of determine who wins television the 2012 presidential might just election. determine In 2008, just days who wins before his first debate the 2012 with Barack Obama, presidential John McCain called election.” for the event to be postponed, dramatically citing the nation’s economic crisis. When Obama responded that he would attend the debate as planned, with or without his opponent, McCain got outfoxed.

Ultimately the Republican candidate showed up as originally scheduled, but his ill-advised maneuver arguably lost the debate for McCain before it even began.

Voices Formats for the 2012 series, as proposed by the debate commission, are similar to the ObamaMcCain matches of 2008. Each debate will run for 90 minutes and begin at 9 p.m. Eastern time.

In the first and last, a single moderator will question the candidates, with one program devoted to domestic issues and the other to international affairs. In the town hall debate citizens will pose questions on topics both international and domestic. The vice presidential candidates will also field questions on all subjects, asked by a moderator.

This year’s vice presidential debate promises to be a more substantive exercise than 2008’s Biden-Palin extravaganza—which, for the record, outdrew all the Obama-McCain debates in the ratings. In that debate handlers for Sarah Palin negotiated unusually short response times: 90 seconds for a candidate’s initial answer, followed by two minutes of “discussion” between debaters—as though any issue of significance could be discussed in two minutes. The strategy paid off: at that superficial level Palin was able to hold her own. Presumably this year’s Republican vice presi-

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dential candidate will be better equipped to survive a debate format that calls for ten minutes of conversation on a specific topic.

Of the different formats to be employed in 2012, the most problematic is likely to be the town hall. Once innovative and unpredictable, town hall presidential debates have become tedious, thanks to heavy-handed restrictions imposed by the political handlers who negotiate format details. In 1992, in the Of the first-ever town hall different presidential debate, formats to be no limitations were employed in placed on the ques2012, the most tioners or on modproblematic erator Carole Simpis likely to be son, resulting in a the town hall.” memorable and enlightening evening of televised political theater. In subsequent town halls, campaign enforcers reduced the spontaneity of the questioning and clamped down on the moderator’s role.

The 2008 town hall debate in Nashville, choreographed to within an inch of its life, was the dullest of the Obama-McCain series and one of the dullest in American history.

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STEVE BLANK

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When I Was Told to Lie on My Resume…

IT’S NOT THE crime that gets you, it’s the coverup.

Getting asked by a reporter about where I went to school made me remember the day I had to choose whether to lie on my resume.

When I got my first job in Silicon Valley, it was through seren-

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dipity (my part) and desperation (on the part of my first employer).

I really didn’t have much of a resume—four years in the Air Force, building a scram system for a nuclear reactor, a startup in Ann Arbor Michigan but not much else.

It was at my second startup in

Steve Blank is the author of The Startup Owner’s Manual.

Voices Silicon Valley that my life and career took an interesting turn.

A recruiter found me and wanted to introduce me to a hot startup making something called a workstation. “This is a technologydriven company and your background sounds great. Why don’t you send me a resume and I’ll pass it on.” A few days later I got a call back from the recruiter. “Steve, you left off your education. Where did you go to school?”

“I never finished college,” I said.

There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. “Steve, the VP of Sales and Marketing previously ran their engineering department. He was a professor of computer science at Harvard and his last job was running the Advanced Systems Division at Xerox PARC. Most of the sales force were previously design engineers.

I can’t present a candidate without a college degree. Why don’t you make something up?”

I still remember the exact instant of the conversation. In that moment I realized I had a choice.

But I had no idea how profound, important and lasting it would be. It would have been really easy to lie, and what the heck, the recruiter was telling me to

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do so. And he was telling me that, “no one checks education anyway.” (This is long before the days of the net.)

I told him I’d think about it.

And I did for a long while. After a few days I sent him my updated resume and he passed it on to Convergent Technologies. Soon after I was called into an interview with the company. I can barely recall the other people I

I can’t present a candidate without a college degree. Why don’t you make something up?” met, but I’ll never forget the interview with Ben Wegbreit, the VP of Sales and Marketing.

Ben held up my resume and said, “You know you’re here interviewing because I’ve never seen a resume like this. You don’t have any college listed and there’s no education section. You put “Mensa” here,”—pointing to the part where education normally goes. “Why?” I looked back at him and said, “I thought Mensa might get your attention.”

Ben just stared at me for an uncomfortable amount of time.

Voices Then he abruptly said, “Tell me what you did in your previous companies.” I thought this was going to be a story-telling interview like the others. But instead the minute I said, “my first startup used a CATV coax to implement a local-area network for process control systems (which 35 years ago pre-Ethernet and TCP/IP was pretty cutting edge).”

Ben said, “why don’t you go to the whiteboard and draw the system diagram for me.” Do what?

Draw it? I dug deep and spent 30 minutes diagramming, trying to remember headend’s, upstream and downstream frequencies, amplifiers, etc. With Ben peppering me with questions I could barely keep up. And there was a bunch of empty spaces where I couldn’t remember some of the detail. When I was done explaining it I headed for the chair, but Ben stopped me.

“As long as you’re a the whiteboard, why don’t we go through the other two companies you were at.” I was already mentally exhausted but we spent another half hour with me drawing diagrams and Ben asking questions. First talking about what I had taught at ESL, then about microprocessors, making me draw the architecture

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and sample system designs.

Finally I got to sit down. Ben looked at me for a long while not saying a word. Then he stood up and opened the door signaling me to leave, shook my hand and said, “Thanks for coming in.” WTF? That’s it?? Did I get the job or not?

That evening I got a call from the recruiter. “Ben loved you. In fact he had to convince the VP of Marketing who didn’t want to

Every time I read about a resume scandal, I remember the moment I had to choose.” hire you. Congratulations.”

Three and a half years later Convergent was now a public company and I was a Vice President of Marketing working for Ben. Ben ended up as my mentor at Convergent, my peer at Ardent and my partner and cofounder at Epiphany. I would never use Mensa again on my resume and my education section would always be empty.

But every time I read about an executive who got caught in a resume scandal I remember the moment I had to choose.

BONNIE SNYDER

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High-Grade Litigation

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RADES HAVE ALWAYS been a relative matter. Students in every school grumble when they feel like they got stuck in the “tough” class, and every teacher in America has probably been approached by a disgruntled student demanding to know, “Why did you give me that grade?” (For the uninitiated, the pat response is: “I didn’t give you your grade. You earned it.”) ¶ Here’s a novel approach for a student unhappy with his report card: sue. That’s right, a high school student in New York state is suing his school district over a C+ in Chemistry. The student contends he deserved an A, and the suit claims that his awarded grade caused him severe physical and emotional suffering, along with decreased college admission chances, scholarship hopes and even future employment opportunities.

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Bonnie Snyder is an author and college/ career consultant.

Voices Wow. One average grade in one class did all that? I don’t want to pick on this kid too much, because no one knows exactly what went on in this classroom, and I understand how overheated the college admissions process has become.

From a teenager’s viewpoint, it sometimes seems like the stakes are life and death itself.

I am also well aware how subjective the scholastic grading process can be. Do teachers sometimes play favorites? You betcha.

Pets often benefit from the “halo effect,” which occurs when a teacher thinks a favorite student can do no wrong and awards consistently high grades even for average performance.

The opposite is the “devil horns effect,” in which a student is perceived as a problem and his grades come to reflect that dim view, no matter what he does. Teachers are supposed to be trained to be aware of their own prejudices, and not to let them influence the grades they award, but they’re human and imperfect. This is nothing new, which is why grades are also interpreted subjectively.

Grades always reflect some bias or another, and students have swapped stories and advice

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on how to “win over” difficult teachers for centuries, if not longer. This inherent subjectivity is one of the main reasons behind the popularity of RateMyProfessors.com, a site that allows students to report on the grading difficulty of various professors. Many college students obsess over these rankings and build schedules based primarily around the reported “easiness” of their professors.

Grades always reflect some bias or another, and students have swapped stories and advice on how to ‘win over’ difficult teachers for centuries, if not longer. ” As educational theorist Alfie Kohn points out, an excessive focus on grades leads to a counterproductive form of extrinsic motivation, in which students are driven more by rewards than by their actual interest in the subject. They don’t care if they learn anything; they just want the grade. This frequently leads to all kinds of conniving short-

Voices cuts to get to the reward with minimal effort, including cheating, shallow learning, and ineffective cramming. The satisfaction of learning for its own sake is completely lost.

Rather than worrying so much about this student’s C+, his litigious parents might want to worry more about their son’s Type A reaction to it. It’s easy to sympathize with his initial distress, but maybe the real lesson to be learned here is about rising above setbacks and taking disappointments in stride, rather than seeking redress. This may be more a test of character than of chemistry proficiency.

Have a little faith in college admissions officers, scholarship committees and employers, too. Even at highly selective schools, they are real people and they don’t require students to be perfect grade-achieving automatons who can walk on water. (I say this from experience, having been admitted to an Ivy League school myself with a C in high school Chemistry—not even a C+.) Admissions reps understand that a C+ in one class can be the equivalent of an A in another, and that any number of variables

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can influence a grade.

Colleges give applicants opportunities to explain any grades that seem inconsistent with the rest of the student’s academic record, and guidance counselors can call to discuss special situations and extenuating circumstances. All is not lost.

There’s an old c’est la vie saying that goes, “You can’t spell Calculus without two ‘Cs’.” If

Maybe the real lesson to be learned here is about rising above setbacks... This may be more a test of character than of chemistry proficiency.” that’s true, then it stands to reason that you also can’t spell Chemistry without one ‘C’. It’s time to lighten up, disgruntled chem student, and rediscover your sense of humor. It’s great to be a high-achieving student, but it’s even greater to develop the ability to roll with the punches rather than resorting to litigation when things don’t happen to go your way.

AP PHOTO/STEPHEN LANCE DENNEE (FISH); STEVE C. MITCHELL/INVISION/AP (ANGELAKOS); SHUTTERSTOCK (BOOKS)

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QUOTED

“ Remember folks....

Do not panic, This is a natural thing the planet is doing, Killing off everything in the hopes that man will go somewhere else.”

—HuffPost commenter IfIOnlyKnew on the Midwest heat wave

First he’s Kenyan, then he’s Muslim, now he’s a racist. Sorry, not buying the ‘ol racist slander of the president from ACTUAL racists.

—HuffPost commenter judesuper

on President Obama being accused of racisim against whites in a new Super PAC web ad

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“ People don’t understand that it’s not just debilitating; it’s all-encompassing.

It’s something that you have to work on your entire life.”

—Michael Angelakos

of Passion Pit to Rolling Stone about his depression and bipolar disorder

“ The great thing about online publishing is that anyone can now publish a book.

The bad thing about online publishing is that anyone can now publish a book.”

—HuffPost commenter damikli2 on Amazon’s sex tourism EBook

Voices

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: AP PHOTO/HARAZ N. GHANBARI; JULIAN FINNEY/GETTY IMAGES; MICHAEL KOVAC/ GETTY IMAGES FOR THE ELTON JOHN AIDS FOUNDATION; SAMIR HUSSEIN/REDFERNS VIA GETTY IMAGES

You think your vote doesn’t matter?

Then why are they trying so hard to take it away from you?

— Heather Smith,

QUOTED

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“ She should be viewed with the same respect granted to our first female and minority athletes.

Once mocked, now revered. She has taken a brave step towards an improved future for the women of her country.”

—HuffPost commenter Axekick

on the first Saudi woman to compete in the Olympics

president of Rock the Vote, to the AP

“ She’s such a nightmare.”

—Elton John in an interview with Australia’s Channel 7 after he said Madonna’s career is over

“ Boy, was that a battle. That was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I really feel proud of what happened here at the Olympics.”

—Venus Williams,

who was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, to the AP about how she had to raise her ranking to qualify for the Olympics

FIONA ABOUD

08.12.12 #09 FEATURES

IN VINO VERITAS? TRADITION AMID TRAGEDY SUDDEN DEATH

w

V E R I TA S ?

 Inside the World of Bogus Wine

BY DA N C O L L I N S P H O T O G R A P H S BY J O E S C H M E L Z E R

750MB

08.12.12

PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

Don Cornwell dilligently inspects a wine bottle at the Los Angeles Fine Wine and Storage Co.

PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

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ON CORNWELL SAYS he got his first real look at wine counterfeiting in 1986 as a young attorney working in Los Angeles when the manager of a local wine store ushered him into the store’s basement.  “It was unbelievable,” Cornwell recalls. “The owner had been routinely turning cases of 1983 Bordeaux into cases of 1982 Bordeaux.”  In Bordeaux, 1983 was a pretty good year. But 1982 was at the top of the heap. Legendary. The owner’s sleight of hand potentially added thousands of dollars to the value of the wine.

“It was done rather crudely,” Cornwell says. “He had sanded off the 1983 vintage date on the wooden crates the wine is shipped in, and burned in 1982.”

A local printer, meanwhile, provided bogus labels for each bottle.

That allowed the store’s owner to turn wines like a 1983 La Mission Haut Brion (a very good wine that now retails for around $250 a bottle) into a 1982 La Mission Haut Brion (a magnificent wine that often sells for $1,000 or more in today’s market.)

The local district attorney eventually launched an investigation of the storeowner, but the probe petered out. And the manager Cornwell tried to help?

The owner fired him.

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Welcome to the underbelly of the fine wine market, a sometimes lawless place where scammers often have free rein to repackage and reconstitute lesser vintages as premier vino, pocketing handsome sums of money along the way. Wine is easy to enjoy, fun to learn about and nearly impossible to totally master. That’s one reason counterfeiters have multiplied like gerbils.

The wine auction market generated about $478 million in revenue last year, up about 17 percent from 2010, according to the Wine Spec-

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tator. Eager collectors have turned New York, London and lately, Hong Kong, into the world’s auction capitals. Many more millions of dollars change hands in private sales.

All of this happens despite the fact that many of the old and rare wines in the market are almost certainly fake, according to vintners and investigators like Cornwell, who has become one of the world’s leading wine sleuths in the years since he walked into the basement of that Los Angeles wine store.

Laurent Ponsot, the owner of one of Burgundy’s most prestigious wines, Domaine Ponsot, estimates that 80 percent of the

Cornwell displays his extensive collection of wine auction guides.

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highly prized old and rare Burgundies offered for sale are bogus.

There’s a reason why the number of fakes keeps growing. One is the inability of many collectors to tell that the rare vintage they’ve just opened for their special guests is just filler.

“There are very few people in the world who actually know what old wines taste like,” says John Tilson, founder of the Underground Wineletter, a small online magazine that has spotlighted wine fraud since the 1980s. “That’s what makes wine fraud so easy to do.”

Then there’s complicity. Rather than blowing the whistle on a counterfeiter, many duped buyers prefer to recoup their losses by reselling the phony wine to other unsuspecting buyers. Cornwell has tracked several cases in which wealthy collectors purchased millions in counterfeit wine. But instead of calling the authorities and surrendering the bogus bottles, the collectors resold them to other unknowing collectors.

And so a simple and depressing logic has come to rule the market for old and rare wines. Counterfeit bottles tend to remain in circulation because they keep being resold. In addition, counterfeiters are pump-

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ing more fake wine into the system.

Meanwhile, the supply of real vintage wine is finite. Over time, the amount of genuine 1947 Chateau Lafleur declines as the wine is consumed. A small amount is also probably lost to accident or fire. Still, lots of people would still like to be able to drink — or at least imagine they’re drinking — the famous ’47. Others, of course, would love to sell it to them. So at some point, the amount of fake ‘47 Lafleur in the market exceeds that of the real stuff and continues to grow.

Things haven’t changed much since 2002, when Don Cornwell met Rudy Kurniawan, a young Indonesian from a Chinese family, at a wine tasting in Los Angeles.

“My bullshit meter went off the scale,” is how Cornwell remembers that first encounter. “If you told him you’d tasted a rare Roumier, (a prized Burgundy) he’d say, ‘Oh yes, I had three rarer Roumiers at a recent tasting.’ He had to dominate the conversation, and he seemed to do this with every person he met.”

Cornwell and Kurniawan, who was one of the biggest wine counterfeiters in the world, eventually engaged in a series of face-offs that came to a climax earlier this year­— showing just how porous and deeply compromised the market for fine wine remains.

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THE SEDUCTIVE CELLAR

RICARDO DEARATANHA / LOS ANGELES TIMES



Don Cornwell grew up in Denver and attended the University of Georgia on a debating scholarship.

While attending law school at the University of Virginia in the late1970s, he found summer work as a clerk in a major Los Angeles law firm. It was there that he was accidentally introduced to the joy, pleasures and frustrations of fine wine.

Cornwell likes telling this story. He and a friend had agreed to

housesit for a partner at the firm who was going on vacation. “Well, behind his bar he had this little room built in, which was his wine cellar, and he brought us over there and he said: ‘Feel free to drink whatever you want.’”

When Cornwell and his friend invited two girls for dinner one night, they purchased a large bottle of jug wine for the occasion, hesitant to indulge in the more expensive bottles stashed in the cellar.

But when that was gone, the night was still young. “My friend Jay said, ‘Let’s go to his cellar and see what he’s got most of. And we’ll drink some of that and then we’ll replace it.’ And I said, ‘Great idea!’”

Kurniawan in his element at a winetasting event in 2005.

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Cornwell soon found 18 bottles of a wine called Chateau Latour from the 1970 vintage. He grabbed three bottles, and he and his friends frolicked in the partner’s pool until the early morning hours while guzzling the blue-chip Bordeaux.

It was a night of two epiphanies.

One — which every wine maven can recount in one way or another — was the shock of discovering that there really was something special about the good stuff. “I had to find out what the hell was going on, because the Latour was in an altogether different league from the kind of stuff that I was accustomed to drinking,” Cornwell says.

The other revelation was that the good stuff wasn’t easy to come by. Seeking to replace the missing bottles, Cornwell discovered that they weren’t simply sitting on the shelves in the local wine store. And when he did find two bottles, he discovered they cost what was then an eye-popping $37 a bottle. (He never did find a third bottle of the Latour, and substituted another Bordeaux with the blessing of the partner.)

Cornwell was a man on a mission when he returned to law school.

“I went back to Charlottesville, where there was a little wine shop. I was constantly going over

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there and buying whatever $7- or $8-bottle of French wine that I could find,” he says.

Over the ensuing years, Cornwell, now 59, built a law practice in L.A. and a wine cellar that now tops 5,000 bottles. He’s an authority on the wines of Burgundy, and is an expert on such insanely geeky subjects as the premature

“ COUNTERFEITERS HAVE MULTIPLIED LIKE GERBILS.”

oxidation of white Burgundies.

He has also become winedom’s No. 1 detective. Although Kurniawan’s exploits have been broadly covered in trade publications, newspapers and magazines — including New York and Vanity Fair — until now Cornwell has remained relatively quiet about his role in exposing the scams.

“I got really mad about the fact that Rudy Kurniawan was getting away with selling large quanti-

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ties of counterfeit wine,” Cornwell notes. “I thought there must be a way to stop him, even though I knew what I was doing had a Don Quixote quality.”

Says the Underground Wineletter’s John Tilson: “Don is an attorney, number one. So he’s used to digging deep for stuff. Secondly, he’s very diligent, and he’s very thorough and he’s very careful.

And he has a passion for wine, and a passion for this kind of digging.”

“Don is incredibly tenacious,” adds Geoff Troy, the New York wine merchant and expert on Burgundy who also eventually played a key role in Kurniawan’s downfall. “He has blown the whistle on a number of auction houses selling questionable wines.”

KEEP THE CHANGE, SHIP THE EMPTIES 

From 2002 to 2008, the slender Kurniawan, a bespectacled wine prodigy, bamboozled many in the world of fine wine. He played the role of free-spending rich kid with a passion for old and rare Bordeaux and Burgundy — the holy of holies in the temple of fine wine.

His background was, by design,

murky. He told some friends that he attended Cal State Northridge on a golf scholarship, but the school’s longtime golf coach has no recollection of a student by that name.

School records show he graduated in 1996 with a degree in accounting.

Kurniawan told the Los Angeles Times that he had his first taste of wine in 2000, at age 24­­— the same year he applied for political asylum in the U.S. When his application was denied, he appealed, but that too failed and he was ordered to leave the country in 2003. He never did. But unlike many undocumented immigrants, he seemed to have no fear of attracting attention to himself. He even cooperated with the Los Angeles Times for a page-one profile in 2006. (“Rudy Kurniawan inhabits a high-rolling club of wine fanatics to whom money’s no object. Young and hip, he’s upped the industry ante.”)

He cut a wide swath through the auction market in New York and Los Angeles, where he was spending a reported $1 million a month on old and rare wines. Some said he had single-handedly driven up worldwide prices of such wines.

In 2005, he spent $8 million for a newly constructed mansion in Bel-Air, one of Los Angeles’ toniest neighborhood. He also launched a series of expensive improvements

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that included a pool, a spa and — of course­— a wine cellar. (The work was never completed and, seven years later, the mansion has never been occupied.)

Kurniawan also amassed an art collection that included works by Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst.

He drove flashy cars and wore expensive clothing and jewelry. He told the Robb Report — the luxury lifestyle magazine — that he had moved away from “edgy” watches to a more “classic” timepiece by purchasing a Patek Philippe 5960 Annual Calendar Chronograph (retail price $92,000). “It looks elegant and sophisticated with a suit, yet you can wear it every day without being too flashy,” the wine collector advised.

Kurniawan ran up more than $16 million in charges on his American Express card from 2006 to 2011. He wrote personal checks for millions more during the same five years, according to the criminal complaint that was later filed against him.

Along the way, Kurniawan acquired a bicoastal reputation for having a formidable palate and a keen eye for counterfeit wine. He was also widely viewed as extremely generous. Kurniawan shelled out tens of thousands of dollars on

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drinking binges at the restaurant Cru, a gathering spot in New York for wine lovers that later closed.

“Rudy would just waltz in, buy wine off the list, and treat everybody to some very expensive bottles,” says Paul Wasserman, a wine

“ WINES THAT HAD DISAPPEARED FROM THE MARKET 30 YEARS AGO WERE REAPPEARING, OFTEN IN LARGE-FORMAT BOTTLES,” CORNWELL SAYS.

professional and friend of Kurnaniawan’s who attended several of the gatherings at Cru. “He was very cocky and arrogant about wine, but he was also very generous. He was definitely the center of attention.”

At the end of the meals, he asked the restaurant staff to ship him all of the empty bottles of wine his party had consumed. He gave various explanations for this peculiar request, including a “photo shoot.”

In all, 13 packages containing empty bottles were shipped by FedEx to Kurniawan’s home in Los Angeles in 2005 and 2006. He complained

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AP PHOTO/KIN CHEUNG

angrily to the puzzled restaurant staff when one of the shipments arrived with some broken bottles.

KURNIAWAN ALSO hosted lavish tasting dinners in Los Angeles, where old and rare bottlings of astronomically expensive wines like Chateau Petrus and Domaine de la Romanee-Conti were served. In the wine world, these dinners were taken to be an example of his wellpublicized generosity. Less well known was that he charged dinner guests $5,000 each, according

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to two people who were invited to these dinners. If many of the wines were counterfeit, as now seems likely, the magnanimous Kurniawan walked away with a profit.

When Kurniawan felt the need to explain where he got his money, he often said he received an allowance from his brother in China to care for their mother. As with much else in his life, it was a mixture of fact and fiction. Kurniawan did indeed live with his mother in Los Angeles, and occasionally took the family matriarch to wine tastings.

The government said Kurniawan’s brother gave him $1.5 million during one 18-month period, but that

Bottles of 2000 Chataeu Petrus on display at a wine auction.

A case could cost up to $61,900.

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barely covered his lavish lifestyle.

In reality, Kurniawan financed his spending sprees by selling tens of millions of dollars in rare wines at public auction and millions more in private sales, according to government documents and civil lawsuits.

‘SHIT HAPPENS’ 

The boom in the sale and price of rare wines several years ago mirrored the U.S. housing bubble. Instead of mortgage brokers willing to look the other way while people with sketchy income signed on to six-figure mortgages, the wine boom was fueled by an industry willing to look the other way when seemingly unavailable vintages popped up for auction.

“Wines that had disappeared from the market 30 years ago were reappearing, often in large-format bottles,” Cornwell says. Large-format bottles may contain the equivalent of anywhere from two bottles (a magnum) to 40 bottles (a Melchizedek). Collectors prize them.

Kurniawan seemed to have more than his share of this new supply of previously unavailable wines.

His most celebrated achievement

was selling $35 million in wine in 2006 at two auctions in New York City dubbed “The Cellar” and “The Cellar II” by the auction house, Acker, Merrall and Condit.

(Kurniawan was not identified by name as the seller in promotional material for the auctions.)

Speaking of “The Cellar,” the fine-living magazine Robb Report said “the young owner of this fabled trove regards it less as a collection than as an opportunity to share with others his passion for wine.”

This was a fable any wine lover wanted to believe. The seller was putting up these almost-impossible-to-come-by bottles because he wanted to share his good fortune with others.

Acker CEO and auctioneer John Kapon, a Kurniawan drinking buddy, readily confirmed his friend’s indifference to money. “He’s kind enough to open $50,000 bottles for people. He can’t help himself,” Kapon explained.

Despite the incredible success of “The Cellar” auction, the Robb Report told its readers, the sales failed to put much of a dent in Kurniawan’s extensive collection. Therefore, another auction, dubbed the “The Cellar II,” would be necessary. Money would again be a secondary consideration for the seller.

“In the beginning, you just want

MIKE CLARKE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

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the rarest stuff in the world,” Kurniawan told the luxury magazine.

“But to have a $100 million or $200 million cellar when I’m 50 years old doesn’t make sense. It’s more about sharing and drinking.

And I’m really a drinker.”

Cellar II shattered auction records. Sitting on top of the auction world in 2006 was a young man who didn’t hold a job, and who was theoretically in the business just to make people happy.

Kurniawan overreached at another Acker auction in New York City in 2008 by trying to sell 87 counterfeit bottles of Domaine Ponsot, a blue-chip Burgundy. The winemaker, Laurent Ponsot, denounced the wines as fake and demanded that they be withdrawn from the auction. Everyone involved in the sale professed astonishment. Kurniawan himself seemed to shrug.

“We try our best to get it right, but it’s Burgundy, and sometimes shit happens,” Kurniawan told Wine Spectator.

Actually, nothing happened for nearly four years. Besides the inability of wine buyers to really tell a vintage classic from a normal nice bottle of wine, and the complicity of some in the rare wine business in the trafficking of

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frauds, the counterfeiters had another advantage: law enforcement was in no rush to help buyers of five- and six-figure bottles of Burgundy and Bordeaux. The FBI was focused on terrorism. There were also traditional priorities: organized crime and bank robbers.

Then, in a bad break for Kurniawan, Jason Hernandez, a federal prosecutor with a passion for wine, was assigned to the investigation.

Meanwhile, Kurniawan was becoming increasingly strapped for cash.

His luxurious lifestyle had pushed him deeply into debt, ac-

John Kapon, president of Acker, Merrall and Condit, presents a bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild.

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cording to government documents.

He battled the problem by stepping up his alleged counterfeiting activities and obtaining large loans that he failed to repay in most cases. “can u send a mil?” Kurniawan e-mailed a wealthy collector. He got the money. He borrowed about $11.5 million in 2007 alone. In apparent desperation, he used his art collection as collateral on one loan, then used the same art as collateral on a second loan.

In addition to the demands of his lavish lifestyle, Kurniawan faced another serious financial problem. Angry collectors who came to realize they’d purchased fake wine from him were demanding their money back. This included collectors who purchased his wine at Acker auctions. They claimed he owed them millions.

A TOTAL BULLDOG 

To many in the wine world, Kurniawan seemed to disappear after the Domaine Ponsot disaster. In fact, he had only moved his operation underground, where he was being tracked by a small group of wine lovers, including Cornwell,

New York wine retailer Geoff Troy and New York lawyer and Burgundy-lover Doug Barzelay.

Cornwell discovered that Kurniawan had used at least two aliases to sell bogus wine to unsuspecting collectors. A civil lawsuit filed against Kurniawan by one, billionaire collector William Koch, said Kurniawan’s real name was Zhen Wang Huang. The real Rudy Kurniawan, it turned out, was an Indonesian badminton great in the 1960s and 1970s.

(Another Huang alias, Darmawan Saputra, is the name of another Indonesian badminton star.)

Cornwell’s friends and contacts in the wine industry began to provide him with the identities of people who had dealings with Kurniawan. He found several collectors who had been ripped off. He also learned that Kurniawan was using a front man to pose as the owner of rare wine he wanted sold at auction. Frequently, auction houses release very little information about a wine’s history — its provenance — or the identities of sellers. It’s a perfect recipe for fraud.

Cornwell says he twice warned Christie’s about consignments of wines that originated from Kurniawan, as did Geoff Troy. But the auction house ignored them and sold the suspect wines anyway.

Christie’s declined to comment,

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except to say, like the other auction houses that have put Kurniawan’s wines up for sale, that it would never knowingly sell counterfeit wines.

In January of this year, Cornwell discovered that Spectrum, another U.S. auction house, was preparing to sell a large consignment of Kurniawan wines in London, including many scarce bottlings of the Burgundy most prized by collectors, Domaine de la Romanee Conti. (Kurniawan’s nickname was “Dr. Conti.”)

Cornwell’s warnings to the auction house were again ignored

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(Spectrum also declined to comment, a spokeswoman said). This time, Cornwell decided to act. He published a warning about the auction on Wine Berserkers, the most popular online wine board and a gathering place for Burgundy lovers.

“Don is a total bulldog. He took this story and ran with it, which took a lot of cojones,” says Doug Barzelay, the New York lawyer and Burgundy collector who also played an important role in Kurniawan’s downfall. “You have to remember that the auction took place in England, where libel laws favor the plaintiff. You could find yourself in trouble over there for printing something that’s the ab-

Cornwell posted the results of his sleuthing online; the list of Kurniawan’s missteps quickly went viral.

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solute truth.” (It was Barzelay who first alerted the owner of Domaine Ponsot that Kurniawan was selling suspicious bottlings of Ponsot at the Acker auction in 2008.)

Cornwell’s detective work had produced a laundry list of counterfeiting errors committed by Kurniawan. He published these as well: There were missing accents and misspellings on some of the labels and bottle numbers with too many digits or too few.

The capsules — the wrapping that covers the cork and the top of the bottle — might look old, while the labels looked fresh and clean. Some wines had the wrong capsules. Others had the wrong kind of glass. In some cases, there just too many bottles of stupendously rare vintages. Only seven bottles of the 1966 DRC Montrachet had reached the auction market since 1996, but Kurniawan claimed to have 14 available for sale from his own personal cellar.

“Surely this requires, at a minimum, a detailed description of the provenance of these bottles,” Cornwell wrote.

Cornwell’s posts went viral.

Spectrum resisted at first, but finally removed Kurniawan’s bottles from the sale, saying it

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planned to sue Kurniawan if the wines were proven to be bogus.

FBI agents arrested Kurniawan in Los Angeles last March, less than a month after Cornwell posted his notes on the Internet, and charged him with four counts of mail and wire fraud. He has pleaded not guilty and is jailed without bail in the federal detention center in Brooklyn. His lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.

“The revelation that Rudy was continuing, with seeming impunity, to manufacture and sell millions of dollars of counterfeit wine in the marketplace, may have played a significant role in the government’s decision to arrest him,” Doug Barzelay, the Burgundy-loving New York lawyer, wrote in essay published on the Internet.

At the Los Angeles home Kurniawan shared with his mother, authorities found a counterfeiting factory. The feds seized hundreds of wine labels, corks and stamps.

Kurniawan, the government says, used California cabernet in an effort to mimic the taste of bluechip Bordeaux wines, and California pinot noir to do the same thing for Burgundy bottlings.

The jury is still out on the impact of Kurniawan’s downfall.

John Tilson of the Underground Wineletter said the level of worldwide wine fraud remains “outra-

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geous” and pointed to the fact that the auction houses — and the counterfeiters — have shifted to China, where fine wine is very hot.

(It has been lamented that there is now more 1982 Lafite Rothschild in China that was ever produced by the legendary French chateau.)

Barzelay has a more optimistic outlook.

“One good thing is that the market has come back to Earth,” he says. “There is now a reasonable skepticism out there. Kurniawan’s arrest has made people realize that there really is a problem here.”

Don Cornwell isn’t so sure.

“All I can say for certain at this point is, it’s a start,” he observes.

“Rudy left behind a veritable ocean of fake highly collectible wines and a lot of people are reselling them.”

“It’s the end,” he continues, “of one battle, in what really has to be a war fought against wine counterfeiting.” And perhaps, it would lead to arrests of some who enabled Kurniawan.

But for anything to really change, Cornwell believes laws need to be overhauled.

“The auction houses in particular have very little incentive under existing state laws to actively

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screen out counterfeits or to disclose real provenance information to prospective bidders,” he says. “If Rudy’s arrest ultimately leads to changes in the laws or serious changes in how the auction houses conduct their business, I’ll feel my efforts really accomplished something.”

“ RUDY LEFT BEHIND A VERITABLE OCEAN OF FAKE, HIGHLY COLLECTIBLE WINES AND A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE RESELLING THEM. THOSE WINES WILL BE CIRCULATING FOR YEARS TO COME.”

Putting future Rudy Kurniawans out of business will require reforms that would include — at a minimum — giving buyers detailed information about the provenance of old and rare wines put on the auction bloc or sold privately.

Many wine lovers don’t think that will happen anytime soon.

In the interim, Don Cornwell remains vigilant. And if you’re interested in buying a rare bottle or two of blue-chip Bordeaux, I know a guy in China who’s got a case of 1982 Lafite — cheap.

TRADITION AMID TRAGEDY

AMERICAN SIKHS: VIOLENCE VISITS A MISUNDERSTOOD IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY Photographs by Fiona Aboud

The only well-known Sikh actor in the U.S., Waris Ahluwalia, immigrated to Brooklyn from Amritsar, Punjab, when he was five years old. He appears in the Spike Lee movie Inside Man.

LAST SUNDAY, in yet the latest random act of gun violence in the country, six people were killed and three critically injured in a shooting at a Sikh temple in suburban Wisconsin. Fiona Aboud, a photographer, is currently working on a project about American Sikhs, an immigrant community with cultural traditions that make them easy targets for the intolerant. “There

are approximately 600,000 Sikhs in America,” Aboud notes. “Their story is a microcosm of the classic American immigrant tension between assimilation and tradition. Yet their path is fraught with a deeper challenge as their tradition of wearing turbans subjects them to continual abuse in the shadow of 9/11.” We’re pleased to share some of Aboud’s portraits with you here.

Above: Honored guests make up the front lines of the 2009 New York City Sikh Day Parade, an annual meditation march which takes place in April to celebrate a festival called Vaisakhi.

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Above: Sikhs in Princeton, N.J., celebrate Vaisakhi with a volleyball game in 2010. Below: Though women of the Sikh religion do not traditionally wear turbans, Baljit Kaur decided to start wearing one to further symbolize the equality between men and women in her religion.

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Lukhbir Gill outside his home in Santa Rosa, Calif.

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Above: The Sikh version of the Vaisakhi festival is typically celebrated with much food and drink, and at this event in Princeton, N.J., face paint and balloons as well. Below: Avtar Singh of Phoenix, Ariz., was shot twice in his truck in 2003 by people who were yelling “go back to where you came from!”

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Noor Kaur Chima is pictured here in her family’s orchard in Yuba City, Calif.

TRADITION AMID TRAGEDY

Above: Jasmine Kaur Dhillon, a nine-year-old from Yuba City, CA, presents her self-portrait.

Below: Bhupinder Singh’s family came to the U.S. due to the 1984 riots in India that killed 3,000 Sikhs after the assasination of Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards.

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TRADITION AMID TRAGEDY

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Harjinder Kaur, the widow of Balbir Singh Sodhi, stands over the monument honoring her husband outside his Mesa, Ariz., gas station where he was shot.

Sodhi was the first post-9/11 victim of a hate crime, gunned down on September 15, 2001.

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Above: An ice cream truck in Yuba City, Calif. Below: SatKirin Kaur Khalsa, left, was inspirted to convert to Sikhism by the famous Yogi Bhajan. Her son, Gurumustuk Singh Khalsa, pictured, is the founder of Sikhnet.com and mrsikhnet.com, a blog that follows his life living as a white Sikh in New Mexico.

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Guru Singh and Guruperkarma Kaur are from L.A., but they teach yoga worldwide.

Guru was one of the first students of Yogi Bhajan and the first Westerner to don the turban. He has had many celebrity students, including Steven Tyler and Britney Spears.

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Above: When Rose Kaur, whose given name is Bhupinder, was going through airport security in 2005, her name turned up on the terrorist watch list. She was nine years old at the time. Below: Lakhmi and Siri Chand are the first African-American born Sikhs in the U.S. Their parents converted to Sikhism in the 1960s.

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Even though most Sikhs do not drink alcohol, Harminder Jit Singh, standing in front of his liquor store in Atlanta, GA, said it was a good business to own because it is closed on Sundays—the day Sikhs go to Gurdwara (Temple).

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TRADITION AMID TRAGEDY

Deciding to cut his hair to join the U.S. Army was a difficult decision for Cadet Simratpal Singh. In the Sikh religion, hair should remain uncut for both men and women. He hopes to eventually pave the way for army-bound Sikhs to keep their hair, which is allowed for the forces of Britain, Canada and India.

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TRADITION AMID TRAGEDY

Harsimrat Kaur Dhillon stands for the Pledge of Allegiance with her classmates in her high school photography class.

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DEATH WHAT’S IN THE GROUND IN BRIARCLIFF MANOR? MANOR

by Katherine Bindley

photographs by Christopher Churchill

RIARCLIFF MANOR, a village of 8,000 people less than thirty miles north of New York City, looks a lot like what one might picture a place called Briarcliff Manor to look like.

Situated on just under six square miles of land in Westchester County, between Ossining and Mount Pleasant, Briarcliff is home to the Sleepy Hollow Country Club and a Trump National golf course. The median home value is around $750,000. And the time it takes to walk from one end of Pleasantville Road to the other—that’s the main drag with the bank, the hardware store and the café where the owner handed an entire jar of Nutella and a spoon to a young customer one day this summer—is just over three minutes.

“Briarcliff is like, kind of a little picture of perfection,” says Jenny Rosen, 21, a senior at Bucknell University who grew up across the street from the Briarcliff Manor schools. With only 150 students per class, the high school is small enough to share its property with the middle school.

Briarcliff Manor Union Free

School District, offering one of the nation’s top high schools, is an important reason people choose to settle here. Many residents pay $20,000 a year or more in property taxes, a large chunk of which funds the public school system.

And 20 years ago if you told some of those parents—who patted their kids on their heads and kissed them goodbye before sending them off on the bus—that one day they’d consider suing their

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school for exposing their children to suspected carcinogens without their knowledge, they probably wouldn’t have believed you.

But that’s what’s happening in Briarcliff right now. For years, the school let students play sports, have recess, attend summer camp and celebrate fall pep rallies with bonfires on a pair of athletic fields that were built on top of contaminated construction debris. At least eight of those students, residents say, have had cancer.

“Three close to me,” Rosen says, counting her friends who’ve had cancer. “Demetri, Alex and Nick.” She continues counting, adding three more to the list.

“It’s a really small town, so you know the names.”

Whether the suspected carcinogens in the soil of the Briarcliff fields contributed to the startling number of cancer diagnoses among young people in the area in recent years can’t be known definitively. When it comes to environmental factors and cancer, cause and effect is difficult to establish.

Even so, several parents in Briarcliff say they still want answers about the athletic fields, why they weren’t made more aware of possible problems in the first place,

and why someone other than them got to choose whether their children were exposed to toxins.

“I’m one of those really upset parents,” says Mark Santiago, 62.

In order to get his children into one of the local nursery schools in Briarcliff when they were little, Santiago recalls literally having to work for them.

“You can’t buy them in,” he says. “You agree to work there.”

That’s how for a time, Santiago, who works as a consultant, became the school’s unofficial painter. It’s been 29 years since he moved to Briarcliff and he remembers that the real estate agent who sold him his house said that Briarcliff High School was the same as a private school.

Santiago sent his two children to the high school, and by virtue of having a pool and a large basement, his house became the hang-out spot for his daughter Olivia’s friends. One of those friends was Demetri Demeropoulos, a varsity lacrosse player for the school who died in May of 2010 from a spinal cord tumor at the age of 18.

“In a town as small as ours, when an 18-year-old dies, everyone knows, but it was a couple degrees

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Briarcliff High School and Middle School peeks out from beyond the contaminated practice football field.

more than just we knew him,” Santiago says, commenting on how remarkable and poised Demeropoulos was for a boy his age. “His death was personal to us.”

Knowing what he does now about the fields, Santiago sends his son and daughter, ages 26 and 21, for check-ups with a physician twice a year. He says his children’s school district always kept in close contact with families about the smallest of matters, like the time the air conditioning shut down at the elementary school.

“The kindergarten was sent home,” he recalls. “That, they

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tell me about that. They don’t tell me that apparently someone was dumping toxic materials into a field.”

The Briarcliff fields Santiago refers to are the result of a deal the school district made with a Yonkers-based company called Whitney Trucking in 1998. In exchange for allowing Whitney to dispose of construction debris on the school grounds, the company built a practice field and a softball field for the school.

In the years that followed, “fill for fields” deals became popular in Westchester County and at least three nearby districts participated in agreements similar to Briarcliff’s arrangement. School documents show that in exchange for

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IN A TOWN AS SMALL AS OURS, WHEN AN 18-YEAR-OLD DIES, EVERYONE KNOWS. being allowed to dump its debris in Briarcliff, Whitney promised the fill would contain materials acceptable for dumping, such as concrete, rocks and soil, and wouldn’t require approval from New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation.

Whitney gave the school a certificate of origin for 110,000 cubic yards of fill that they unloaded in Briarcliff. It was enough to fill 36 Olympic swimming pools.

Dirty Fill

One summer day in 1999, Fred Pierce, a facilities manager for the Briarcliff school, came upon two investigators from the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation on the school’s property.

Pierce later told his bosses that the investigators told him that someone had filed a complaint

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about Whitney, and that they didn’t think the fill was clean.

“I told them that we had documentation stating that it was good fill, and they basically told me that the paper I had was no good,” Pierce later wrote in a letter to the assistant superintendent.

DEC cited the Briarcliff school district for improperly accepting and disposing of construction and demolition debris in 2001. The district’s current lawyer, Michael Bogin, of Sive, Paget & Riesel, says negotiations began with the DEC to fix the violation that same year. The district hired the consulting firm Leggette, Brashears & Graham to dig test pits and install ground water monitoring wells on the practice field.

Bogin says the school wanted to complete its investigation of the fill as soon as possible, but hammering out an agreement with the DEC can take months, so the firm began testing with an informal goahead from the agency. Bogin says the practice field had been seeded

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Jenny Rosen points out her friend Demetri Demeropoulos in his class picture. He passed away in 2010 due to a spinal cord tumor.

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by that point, but that students weren’t using it yet.

Several surface soil tests showed levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (or PAHs) that exceeded state public health and environmental guidelines.

There are over 100 chemicals classified as PAHs and the Environmental Protection Agency considers several of them to be probable human carcinogens.

They can be found in things like cigarette smoke, vehicle exhaust, tar and even meat that’s been cooked on a grill. PAHs make their way into the body in three ways: people breathe them, ingest them, or make contact with them through their skin.

In November of 2001, LBG wrote to the DEC on behalf of the school district to say that it had determined the fill didn’t present a public health or environmental threat. But the letter also noted that more testing was needed to confirm that conclusion.

During the course of its work, LBG also found that some tarlike petroleum had made its way into the soil near the school’s tennis courts, which was another area where the district had permitted Whitney to dump debris.

Bogin says the district paid to have that material carted away, which prompted them to sue Whitney for breach of contract in 2003. Although the Briarcliff district later won a judgment for $298,000 against Whitney, they were unable to collect because by that time, the company had gone out of business.

It was also in 2003 that the school board signed a consent order with the DEC, agreeing to pursue additional ground water and soil testing of the field in conjunction with an ongoing agency investigation. But according to school documents, the district stopped funding work on the project the next year.

Eventually, the district’s former lawyer asked LBG in a letter if there would be any problem with reconstructing the practice field. The project manager advised against it. The district went ahead though, covering up the monitoring wells and dumping clean soil over the contaminated fill.

Emily DeSantis, a spokesperson with the DEC, said in an email that the scope of LBG’s work, and any plans to remediate the field, were never formally approved. She also said that the district didn’t tell the

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At least eight Briarcliff students have had cancer. Here, Jenny shows off her tattooed “D.” in rememberance of Demetri.

DEC that there was still a softball field right behind the school that was also built on Whitney fill.

By 2007, Briarcliff parents were starting to complain about the fields. The athletes at Briarcliff were coming across strange things on the field during practice; a six or eight-inch nail here, a shard of glass there. One time, they found some wire.

“We would just pull that stuff off and throw it over the fence,” says Andrew Paulmeno, 21, who played several seasons of football at Briar-

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cliff and now attends the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD. While debris was a mere annoyance, dust made the field almost unbearable. Grass was dying on the field and as the season wore on, Paulmeno says it was like playing on dirt.

“You’d come back from practice, you’d pick your nose and you’d be pulling out solid black,” he recalls.

“There was a permanent dust in the air. You couldn’t breathe without getting it in every part of your face or head. It was caked into your skin when you were done. It was everywhere.”

Some of the athletes said they had trouble breathing, and ac-

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IT WAS CAKED INTO YOUR SKIN WHEN YOU WERE DONE. IT WAS EVERYWHERE. cording to an email from a parent to the school superintendent, Frances Wills, one student said the dust tasted like chemicals. Wills assured the football moms that it was just the dry weather, but that they’d relocate temporarily. She also said she would have the soil checked out.

The school ordered another round of testing by another consulting firm, but the sample was small—nine taken from a 1.7-acre piece of land. That firm, too, determined that the fill wasn’t a threat to the students’ health, so the athletes began practicing again.

Wills, who has since retired from the Briarcliff school system, says she arranged a meeting for the parents of the athletes and that they were invited to review the test results. If the DEC investigation wasn’t mentioned, Wills says, that’s because she was un-

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der the impression it had been long ago resolved.

“I thought that we had been following this process,” she says.

“Clearly, we had not, so this is where I once said that I thought we dropped the ball there. But I don’t think this is a situation where people did something deliberately.”

Lisa Tane, a former school board member, says the DEC issues were not made known during this second round of soil testing.

“When parents were raising concerns, we would have of course acted on it,” she says. “I would have asked more questions.”

Stacy Agona, who served on the board starting in 2007, says the same: she knew of the testing but doesn’t remember being told the full history.

“There was nothing about an open consent order,” says Agona.

“The focus in 2007 was the dryness. It was a particularly dry summer, so that was the focus of the conversation.”

It wasn’t until 2010 that the

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SUDDEN HUFFINGTON The school has DEATH 08.12.12 abandoned the fields once used for recess and baseball in an attempt to isolate the contamination.

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school district closed the fields.

(They are still closed today, and will remain so until all of the soil under the fields is remediated). It also was in 2010 that many Briarcliff Manor residents learned for the first time, they say, about the nature of the materials that had been sitting underneath the school fields for twelve years.

By that point, many former Briarcliff students were already sick.

Chip, Chip, Chip

The curved drive that leads to the Briarcliff Manor middle and high school campus is flanked with state championship signs in the schools’ colors, blue and orange. Out front, adjacent to the parking lot, is what remains of one of the practice fields.

Today, it’s waist-high brush with a rope strung around its perimeter.

Back when the field was operational, it was the place that kids played while they waited for their parents to pick them up after school.

“The practice field looked like a state fair parking lot,” says Paul Mazzilli, a former analyst for an investment bank and a father of two, who lives in Briarcliff.

Mazzilli’s wife, Sharon Pickett, remembers trying to track down

her son Nicholas, now 20, after school. Sometimes he was tossing around a football with friends, other times, he was chipping golf balls on the field.

“Chip, chip, chip,” Pickett says, raising her arms to depict the dust that would fly up with each swing.

“He would come home and literally, he’d be picking stuff out of his teeth, picking stuff out of his ears, and God knows even where else.”

Mazzilli and Pickett have lived in Briarcliff since 1980 when they fell in love with a two-acre piece of land behind Sleepy Hollow Country Club. They raised their two children in a beautiful home on a winding private drive. From one of their living room windows, you can catch a glimpse of the Hudson River.

Pickett wouldn’t call herself a Ra-Ra-Go-Briarcliff type of mom, but she took on the role of class parent, led field trips to the Bronx Zoo and attended all her son’s sporting events.

“We never missed one,” Pickett says, seated barefoot in her living room, her hair tied back and not a trace of make-up on her face. Despite her involvement with the school, Pickett too says she knew nothing about the contaminated fill, until 2010.

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A thin rope delineates the contaminated and overgrown fields from the school parking lot.

“Might have been Demetri,” Pickett says. “He was supposed to be our son’s roommate in college.”

It was around the time that Demetri Demeropoulos was getting very sick, in 2010, that talk around Briarcliff about the fields started to circulate. A year later, in June of 2011, the Mazzillis’ own son was diagnosed with thyroid cancer after a doctor felt a growth in his throat during a routine appointment for a physical.

“The doctor said to Nicholas, ‘It’s very treatable. There was an-

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other young man from the community that we just treated successfully,’” Mazzilli recalls.

Nicholas asked the doctor if that young man’s name was Alex Demeropoulos, Demetri’s younger brother. The doctor said it was.

“The doctor put his head in his hands,” Pickett remembers, and began crying. Pickett says he then asked her son: “Where’d you go to high school?”

A top surgeon removed Nicholas’s thyroid two weeks after that doctor’s appointment and then he went through sequences of radioactive iodine treatments. The Mazzillis are among three families that have notified the school district

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that they may sue. They say they’ve heard that there may be as many as 10 young people from Briarcliff diagnosed with cancer.

“The thing anybody with a soul might have done is just say, ‘We’re going to shut this down,’” Mazzilli says. He wonders aloud why no one at the Briarcliff schools just admitted, “we made a mistake.”

Maybe it had something to do with trying to protect the area’s image and its property values, he says. Whether the fields contributed to Nicholas’s cancer or not, it doesn’t change his parents’ feelings about what has happened.

“The fact that they were just so negligent and so just, self-serving.

I think it just makes us sad and makes us, not even angry. I’d love to be angry,” Pickett says. “That’s what Paul says. ‘Why don’t you like get up and scream and yell?’

And I’m just more sad than angry.”

After Nicholas asked his parents what people not as financially well-off as them do about cancer, the Mazzilli’s started a fund for early cancer detection at Hudson River HealthCare, a non-profit that provides low cost or free primary health care for at-risk populations. It’s the only bright side the family sees to

Nicholas’s situation.

Mazzilli emailed the new Briarcliff school superintendent, Neal Miller, who came aboard a little over a year ago, after Nicholas was diagnosed. He asked Miller to let him know what he planned to do with the information about his son’s illness.

Miller wrote back to say that he was sorry to hear the news, that he would bring it up at the next board meeting, and that he would make a note of it in Nicholas’s pupil file.

“It felt like shit,” Mazzilli says, describing his reaction to Miller’s email.

A Right To Know

When Blaise Benza, 21, and his father, Brett, talk about his 8-month battle with leukemia that began when he was 14, it’s clear that his years of being in remission bring a sense of not only relief, but of pride.

Blaise went to Briarcliff for sixth, seventh and eighth grades, playing baseball and going out for recess on the softball field behind the school. A bad sore throat prompted a doctor’s visit five weeks into his freshman year at Fordham Prep, a private high

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Jenny grew up across the street from the Briarcliff Manor schools. Three of her close friends who were students there, Alex, Nick and Demetri, have been afflicted with cancer.

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THE THING ANYBODY WITH A SOUL MIGHT HAVE DONE IS JUST SAY, ‘WE’RE GOING TO SHUT THIS DOWN.’ school. After his pediatrician took a blood test, she called to say that Blaise should get to a hospital immediately. He was diagnosed with Burkitt’s leukemia.

He’d spend most of the next eight months in and out of hospitals getting aggressive chemotherapy, made worse by an initial misdiagnosis. Burkitt’s leukemia is so rare that the doctors Blaise initially went to in Westchester treated him for another type of leukemia.

“I don’t remember the first four days,” Blaise says, looking towards his dad to fill in the details. Benza added that the treatment the hospital provided nearly destroyed his son’s kidneys and left him on dialysis temporarily.

Before long, Blaise moved to another hospital and the repeti-

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tion of treatments—getting blood taken by the same nurse, for example—felt normal.

“You have your own routine that you get used to, so it’s not really scary anymore,” he says.

Blaise couldn’t go outside for the month of November that year.

Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve were spent in the hospital, and so was Christmas, when his family ordered Chinese food.

“When I did go outside, that first time, I had to wear a mask and wasn’t allowed to take the mask off,” he recalls. “Going outside wasn’t going outside.”

Blaise’s last day of chemo was in May of 2006. It’s been six years, and Blaise has had no signs of cancer. Six feet tall now, he once weighed only 82 pounds.

“We’re sitting here and Blaise looks great, and he is great,” Benza says, seated in an apartment in a Chelsea high-rise where he lives. Blaise is a senior at Vil-

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Blaise Benza, 21, a former Briarcliff student, battled for eight months with leukemia.

lanova. His persistence, or stubbornness, allowed him to move ahead with his peers to the 10th grade, even though he spent the majority of 9th grade at Columbia University Medical Center.

It also cost $1.5 million to pay for his treatment and months of aggressive chemotherapy to get him to where he is now.

“We’re not sure if he can have children because of the timeliness of this whole thing. We

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don’t know the long term effects that this illness had on his heart, his system in total,” Benza says.

“So while we are very thankful that he is here and we’re thrilled, we don’t know what the long term effect is. To kind of say that he’s healed, and that’s all we want, well, that’s not really all we want.”

The Benzas have not filed a lawsuit against Briarcliff but they haven’t dismissed the idea either.

“If I had found out two years ago, before they closed the whole thing down that these kids were sick and I didn’t know about it, I

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would have been on a war path,” says Benza. “At a minimum, parents had a right to know.”

One In A Million Risk

The secrecy that seems to have surrounded the Briarcliff fields ended in 2010. Newly elected Briarcliff board members uncovered the DEC investigation and the school district has erred on the side of being very public about disclosures since then.

In January of 2010, there was a special school community fields presentation, by a board member, Eric Bashford.

“The only way we found out about this is a community member happened to mention to a board member a few weeks ago that they had heard about a rumor of contaminated fields,” Bashford said in his presentation, which was videotaped and posted to the school’s website.

The school hired another consulting firm, HDR, to do testing on the fields and the DEC was alerted to the existence of the landfill beneath the softball field.

HDR’s investigative plan was approved by the DEC and it con-

firmed much of what the previous firms had: PAHs are in school soil.

They also concluded that there are few risks to students’ health.

“There’s this window that’s used, a one in a million risk up to one in 10,000,” says Mike Musso, a project manager from HDR. “The data here, we’re close to the bottom end of this decision. We’re closer to a one in a million risk than to a one in 10,000.”

The school will be sending their remediation plans for the fields to the DEC to review soon.

According to Musso, they involved extensive use of soil caps to safeguard the fields.

DeSantis, the DEC spokesperson, noted in an email that the school’s plan had not been reviewed yet, but that such caps have worked well elsewhere. What’s unclear is why it took Briarcliff ten years to make real headway on any of this. The DEC would not comment as to what they consider to be “timely” completion of their orders.

The school’s lawyer, Bogin, says the investigations have been thorough. “I was confident that they had done a reasonably complete investigation even when we first came on board,” Bogin said.

Both Agona and Tane, the for-

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Briarcliff Manor community pool.

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mer board members, say they believe the testing conducted over the years has been sufficient, and neither of them has any problem with their children having played on the fields.

But other parents still question why they were not made more aware of the existence of the DEC investigation in the first place. Several former board members could not be reached for comment, but Wills, the former superintendent, says nothing about the fields was ever intentionally hidden; rather it was discussed at school board meetings in the years before email was the norm.

“It was a different time,” she says. “You had board meetings and, you know, people who came and people who didn’t.”

Wills points to the strong reputations of the consulting firms that were hired as one of the reasons the district acted as it did. At no time, she says, did anyone suggest that the fields posed any dangers to the kids.

When they put the clean soil over the contaminated fill, she says she thought they were following the DEC’s recommendations. She says she knows some

parents in Briarcliff believe that the school played a role in the sicknesses, and deaths, of children under her watch.

“I am personally devastated.

But that’s nothing compared to what parents feel when they even think that something in the school, which is a safe environment, could affect their child.”

Pressed about why she and the school didn’t publicly disclose more about the investigations to parents, Wills repeatedly says that it occurred in a “different time” and that she wasn’t sure what was made known to parents beyond disclosures at board meetings.

Whether or not the school district faces liabilities remains to be seen. A New York State Education Department spokesperson declined to comment on what responsibility the district had to make the situation with the fields more known to the public.

Robert Graham, a partner with Jenner & Block who practices environmental law and has no involvement in the Briarcliff case, suggests that timing could prove crucial in court.

“The fact that there was this seven year delay here would be a material fact in this case,” says Graham.

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IT’S A REALLY NASTY, COMPLICATED MIXTURE OF CHEMICALS THAT ARE PRETTY WELL RECOGNIZED TO BE HAZARDOUS. Had the school been following the consent order, Graham adds, they would have been filing progress reports to the DEC, which might have raised parents’ awareness as well. In effect, he says, the school made it harder for the community to know about the order by virtue of not following through on it.

Max Costa, chair of environmental medicine at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, says tying cancers to environmental factors is notoriously difficult.

“There’s all these things that have to be met to prove causation,” Costa explains, “It has to be the exposure was high enough, the agent can cause the disease, the time element has to be right.”

PAHs have typically been associated with cancers of the lungs, skin and bladder, but existing

research has yet to show ties to several of those found in Briarcliff. The time it takes for chemical exposures to cause cancerous growths in the body is estimated to be 20 to 30 years, though Costa says leukemia can take less time to develop.

The Briarcliff cases don’t conform with these timeframes because the children’s diagnoses surfaced relatively early after their use of the fields. However, Costa notes that children are developmentally different from adults and says that most of the studies on cancer and chemical exposure focus on the occupational hazards adult men face.

“This is not a good thing to do, use a waste dump site to build a ball field for kids to play on,” Costa says. “Whoever did this is an idiot. I don’t care how much the levels are or what could have happened: it’s playing with a time bomb and you don’t know.”

But Logan Spector, a pediat-

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ric cancer epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota’s Masonic Cancer Center, says the distribution of the cancer cases in Briarcliff fit the pattern you’d see in almost any group of young people—so it’s hard to link those cases to PAHs in the sports fields.

However, just how PAHs interact with one another and with metals like lead, which was also found in the fields, hasn’t been fully studied yet.

“Construction debris by nature is not clean,” says John Wargo, a professor of risk analysis and environmental policy at Yale. “It’s a really nasty, complicated mixture of chemicals that are pretty well recognized to be hazardous.”

Wargo argues that because of the varied nature of this debris, which could range from pieces of an incinerator to furnaces, more samples should have been taken over the years, with much tighter grids than were mapped out. He also says that he would have counseled Briarcliff differently and told the district to dig up and dispose of all the debris.

He considers the soil caps Briarcliff has used in the fields a temporary solution that just leaves the problem looming for the next

generation to solve.

“There are a whole bunch of reasons why I would say that this was seriously insufficient, and that’s not making any claim about causation between the exposures and the cancers,” says Wargo. “But it’s no way to manage the environment of children.”

Cancer-causing or not, Wargo argues that the Briarcliff situation raises questions about whether anyone has the right to expose people to known hazardous substances without their knowledge or without their consent.

His answer is no.

And that seems to be what the families in Briarcliff are getting at in their questions about what has occurred in their town. They know they aren’t going to find definitive proof linking their children’s cancers to the fields today, but they’re still worried that some illness might emerge years from now and prove otherwise.

Nicholas Mazzilli’s doctor’s appointment last month showed no signs of thyroid cancer, but he’ll keep having to go to get checked.

“We have relief right now,” says Pickett, his mother. “But you know, you’re going to hold your breath for years.”

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PHOTOS AND VIDEOS COURTESY OF DISCOVERY CHANNEL

Exit

TV

Why Is Shark Week So Popular?

BY JAIMIE ETKIN

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Discovery turned to the ever-fascinating subject of shark attacks for their 20th anniversary, and highest rated program ever, “Ocean of Fear.” The special centered on the worst shark attack of all time, in which a group of sailors were continuously bitten by sharks after being sunk by a Japanese submarine in 1945. This underwater shot pictures a reenactment of Caribbean Reef sharks circling and biting the legs of sailors.

Exit ICHARD MARX’S “HOLD On to the Nights” topped the Billboard charts, Cindy Crawford covered Playboy, “Coming to America” held the No. 1 spot at the box office, Michael Dukakis was the Democratic presidential candidate and the first episode of Shark Week ran on national TV. Today, only the latter enjoys the same cultural relevance it did back in 1988.

Twenty-five years and 143 programs later, the Discovery Channel series is kicking off its silver anniversary on Sunday, Aug. 12, and celebrating its reign as cable’s longest-running programming.

But what is it that turned an educational show into such a huge phenomenon? The question remains as elusive as ever, with many a confused viewer wandering into online forums to ask, “Am I the only one who doesn’t get it?!”

For some, the answer is obvious — sharks. Our morbid fascination with the big fish is fully indulged during the weeklong marathon, with dramatic footage of closeups on shark attacks and flying sharks never before seen on TV. Pop culture has also lent a hand.

Drinking games were born. Words like “jawsome,” created. Most fa-

R

TV

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mously, Tracy advised Kenneth on 30 Rock to “live every week like it’s Shark Week.” All of which makes it harder to discern whether the mania is in earnest or jest.

“There is no exact formula for why some franchises grab the public consciousness and never let go, but with Shark Week it starts with great storytelling, cutting edge production values, and a

It’s a sadistic fascination with the horrific misfortunes of cute surfer boys.” fascinating character: the shark!”

David Zaslav, CEO of Discovery Communications, told The Daily Beast enthusiastically in 2010.

Newsweek’s Isia Jasiewicz mused more cynically, “It’s a sadistic fascination with the horrific misfortunes of cute surfer boys, friendly marine biologists, and... innocent dolphins.”

Whatever the case, Discovery has reason to bring the event ­— which is nearly as old as the network — back yearly. The network’s founder, John Hendricks, premiered it during the summer as a testing ground for their programs. It worked. When

Exit Shark Week first aired on July 17, 1988, it nearly doubled Discovery’s primetime average ratings. On top of that, it was a risk. Shark Week may seem normal today, but as The Daily Beast points out, back then even HBO and Bravo hadn’t started their own original programming yet.

The network has, quite literally, stuck to their winning formula year after year. Much of Shark Week’s 9 a.m. to 3 a.m. daily run is repeated material from years past.

Each year sees the premiere of six or seven new programs, while this year boasts a record 10. Like any reality show, watching comes with the expectation that you’ll reach that dramatic, “worth-it” moment in the episode. With Shark Week, there’s the added benefit that you might learn something, too.

While in its early years, the show drummed up shock tactics to pull in viewers (“It rose to prominence using this formula of sensationalism about sharks and danger,” marine biologist Sal Jorgensen told the Los Angeles Times), it’s become more measured through the years, going on to not only inform audiences, but come to the aid of sharks. Sen. John Kerry teamed up with Discovery to sponsor a Shark Week bill to help end illegal shark fishing and

TV

HUFFINGTON 08.12.12

increase protection for the animal.

In 1994, Discovery added an element that’s become a key part of its self-deprecating identity — the Shark Week Host. In recent years, they’ve embraced their ironic shtick with hosts such as Andy Samberg.

This year, the series picked someone with a lower profile — 26-yearold web sensation Philip DeFranco, who rose to fame on YouTube and boasts more than 300,000 Twitter

There is no exact formula for why some franchises grab the public consciousness and never let go.” followers. It’s a shrewd choice for a series that’s already conquered the TV ratings field and, according to Discovery’s director of communication, Amy Hagovsky, saw the biggest spike in its viewership run parallel to the rise in social media. Just browse through the Shark Week tweets promoting it already — Megan Fox wrote, “Women are deep beautiful blue oceans, and once a month it’s shark week,” while Adam Levine got the timing more accurate: “#sharkweek.

Best week of the year.”

Exit

HUFFINGTON 08.12.12

TV

25 YEARS OF SHARK WEEK A collection of highlights from TV’s most popular educational program. Venture on for shark attacks, flying sharks and more.

’0 3 ANATOMY OF A SHARK BITE While we’re reminded every so often that shark attacks are rare and unrepresentative of the fish’s habits, the shark bite remains an exploited form of drama, from films to those unusual real-life occurrences. In this scene from 2003’s “Anatomy of a Shark Bite” — the second highest rated Shark Week program — we see one of life’s more troubling ironies play out: Shark expert Dr. Erich Ritter — who used to study and swim with sharks — faces underwater footage of himself being attacked by a shark.

’9 6 BABY SHARK

Are baby sharks cuter and cuddlier than grown-up sharks? Decide for yourself in this clip from 1996’s “Tales of the Tiger Shark,” which still holds the title of the third mostwatched Shark Week program ever.

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’0 7

TV

HUFFINGTON 08.12.12

WORST SHARK ATTACK EVER 2

A scene from 2007’s shark attack reenactment shows Harlan Twible (played

by Ryan McClusky) — an ensign on the USS Indianapolis — and other sailors staying afloat on a raft.

ANATOMY OF A SHARK BITE

’0 3

A close-up shot of Ritter’s leg, post-shark bite.

’0 9 THE UNDERBELLY

In this deepwater shot from 2009’s “Shark After Dark,” viewers got a rare look at the deepwater sixgill shark, found in the Puget Sound.

Here, shark videographer Mark Rackley places his hand against its underbelly.

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HUFFINGTON 08.12.12

TV

’10 GIANT TEETH

Shark Week had its first host in 1994, but their choices have become more high profile in recent years. 2010’s program featured TV host/comedian Craig Ferguson who, in this scene from “Shark Bites,” takes us through the varying sizes shark teeth come in, from the pointy and tiny to the rounder, face-sized ones.

’10 ULTIMATE AIR JAWS

2010’s Shark Week featured a first for TV audiences — the flying shark phenomenon. The great white sharks that inhabit Mossel Bay in South Africa (pictured here) use unusual hunting techniques, lunging their bodies fully out of the water to snatch their prey.

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HUFFINGTON 08.12.12

TV

’11 WHALE FOR DINNER

A close-up shot shows the topside of a great white shark named Curly as his more than 200, two-inch, razor-sharp teeth sink into his meal — a meaty humpback whale.

’11 WHALE FOR DINNER

This footage from 2011’s program, “Jaws Comes Home,” features Curly, the Atlantic great white — a deceptively cute name for one of the largest sharks ever seen.

’11 CHIEF SHARK OFFICER

Andy Samberg became Shark Week’s first Chief Shark Officer in 2011. Here, he’s seen taking his job seriously in Ship Channel Bay, Exumas, Bahamas.

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COMEDY

HUFFINGTON 08.12.12

When it Comes to Comedians, Is There a Line?

BY CAROL HARTSELL

N JULY 20, a man walked into a crowded theater in Aurora, Colorado, and shot 59 people, killing 12. On July 26, not quite a week later, a man walked into a crowded comedy club and told a joke about it.

Given the number of comedians who work out new material every night all over the country,

O

ILLUSTRATION BY IAN KELTIE

it probably wasn’t the first joke based on the Aurora shooting tragedy. But it was told by Dane Cook, and it was caught on tape by an audience member.

In the joke, Cook posits that The Dark Knight Rises is such a bad movie, “ ... if none of that would have happened, I’m pretty sure that somebody in that theater, about 25 minutes in, realiz-

PREVIOUS PAGE: GARY MILLER/FILMMAGIC (ROSS); JASON MERRITT/FILMMAGIC (TOSH); CASSIEWRIGHT/WIREIMAGE (SCHUMER); JAY WEST/WIREIMAGE (COOK); MICHAEL TULLBERG/GETTY IMAGES (GRIFFIN); WIREIMAGE(O’NEAL); PHOTO BY CHRIS POLK/FILMMAGIC (MORGAN)

Exit ing it was a piece of crap, was probably like, ‘Ugh, fucking shoot me.’” He later apologized.

Cook is just one of several comedians to take a drubbing recently for controversial material performed during the course of his act. From Tracy Morgan’s gay son rant to Daniel Tosh’s rape ad lib, comedians are no longer operating in the semiprivacy of a dark, smoke-filled club. But if you ask them, they’re not the ones with the problem.

“It used to be that when you were in a comedy club, it almost felt private,” Susie Essman told The Huffington Post back in June. “It used to feel like we’re all in this dark club, and we’re all smoking and drinking and we’re having this experience and we’re all in this together.”

Thanks to camera phones, blogs and social networking, a controversial joke can leapfrog from a scribble in a notebook to a national news headline in minutes. There’s very little that’s not caught on tape, which is a particular problem if you’re a comedian who has a new “chunk” you’re hoping to work out at your local club.

Stand-up comedy is a unique art in that it can’t exist without an audience. Rehearsing and honing jokes has to happen in front of people, as their reaction is the only gauge of how a joke should proceed, change or be scrapped. Not so with other creative fields. No one heckled Paul McCartney when he sang “Scrambled Eggs” instead of “Yesterday.” Comedians have no such luxury.

While McCartney’s non sequitur is an order of magnitude less potentially offensive than Cook’s “Dark Knight” punch line, the fact remains that comedians depend on being able to perform untried material without it being offered up to the scrutiny of anyone outside the room where they’re telling it.

Chris Rock explained the problem to The New

COMEDY

HUFFINGTON 08.12.12

COMEDIC MISFIRES

Dane Cook/ Jeffrey Ross

Less than a week after the Aurora shooting, Dane Cook performed a joke at Los Angeles’ Laugh Factory that played off the tragedy.

“If none of that would have happened, I’m pretty sure that somebody in that theater, about 25 minutes in, realizing it was a piece of crap, probably was like, ‘Ugh, fucking shoot me,’” Cook said. Last weekend, Jeffrey Ross also joked about the shooting during the taping of Comedy Central’s “Roast of Roseanne.”

“Congratulations,” Ross said to fellow roaster Seth Green.

“This is actually a

PREVIOUS PAGE: ETHAN MILLER/GETTY IMAGES FOR COMEDY CENTRAL (COOK); BOBBY BANK/JASON MERRITT/FILMMAGIC (ROSS); THIS PAGE: JASON MERRITT/FILMMAGIC

Exit York Times last week: “When you’re workshopping [material], a lot of stuff is bumpy and awkward. Especially when you’re working on the edge, you’re going to offend… Just look at some of my material... ‘Niggas vs.

Black People,’ probably took me six months to get that I think thing right. You know how rac- it’s our job ist that thing was a week in?” to go too far.

Comedians like Rock take a That way we sensitive subject and hammer know as a on it until it changes shape, society what becomes funny. If you can find too far is.” humor in racism, you make — Jeffrey Ross it manageable. Take the adage about getting over public speaking by imagining the audience naked; imagine a group of klansmen naked and what do you have?

Whatever it is, it’s not particularly threatening.

Jim Norton, whose standup special, “Please Be Offended,” came out on June 30, put it this way: “We take these knots in society — like, you know how you get a knot in your neck — and our job as comedians is to take our knuckles and kind of work it out.” Jeffrey Ross, who made headlines just this week at Comedy Central’s “Roast of Roseanne” for telling an Aurora-related joke, suggests that allowing that process to happen serves a greater good. “I think it’s our job to go too far.

That way we know as a society what too far is.”

Then there’s Daniel Tosh and the rape joke heard round the world. At the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles — the same club where Cook was recorded — Tosh responded to a female heckler by saying it’d be funny if she got raped by five guys at that moment.

One outraged blog post later and Tosh became the poster boy for a national debate about sexism, rape culture and whether rape jokes can ever be funny.

great night for you.

You haven’t gotten this much attention since you shot all those people in Aurora.”

He continued: “I’m kidding! You’re not like James Holmes.

At least he’s doing something in a movie theater that people remember.” The roast, which airs this Sunday, cut the joke from the TV broadcast. Cook later apologized on Twitter for his joke, while Ross said he’d crossed a line, but defended the material.

Daniel Tosh

A Tumblr post titled “A Girl Walks Into A Comedy Club” described an incident in which Daniel Tosh allegedly made a female audience member the subject of a rape joke, saying, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now?” Tosh later apologized on Twitter for the joke.

TOP TO BOTTOM: CASSIE WRIGHT/WIREIMAGE; TBS/WIREIMAGE

Exit As offensive or unfunny as Tosh’s joke may have seemed, some comedians defended him for the simple reason that he is a comedian who was on a stage telling a joke. Good or bad, sexist or not, hate-filled or naive, it was a joke, told in a place for jokes.

Patton Oswalt, who admitted in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that he found what Tosh said “despicable,” argued, “It’s very It used dangerous to create an atmoto feel like sphere where people can’t fuck we’re all up onstage, and it costs them in this dark their life or career.” club, and Tosh, like Cook and Morwe’re all in gan, apologized. this together.”

While the debates these con— Susie Essman troversies have generated could be seen as positive, some feel they undermine the creative process that gave us voices like George Carlin and Richard Pryor.

“The sad thing, with all this taping and stuff, no one’s going to do stand-up,” says Rock.

Comedian and director of The Aristocrats, Paul Provenza explains what’s at stake for comics and audiences alike. “The tragedy here is that artists (and yes, I consider comedians artists — some more gifted than others) are being confronted for doing precisely what their function in society is, and has always been: challenge authority, question prevailing attitudes and mores, and tap specifically into perspectives that are not necessarily ‘acceptable’ to voice.”

Cook’s joke may have been “too soon,” and for the majority of people it may never work. But it wasn’t meant for the majority of people; it was meant for a small group of people in a dark room who were all “in it together.”

Which is probably why they laughed.

Amy Schumer

During the 2011 “Roast of Charlie Sheen,” Amy Schumer joked about Steve-O’s recently deceased friend Ryan Dunn: “I know you must have been thinking, ‘It could have been me,’ and I know we were all thinking, ‘Why wasn’t it?’” Schumer did not apologize for the joke.

Tracy Morgan

Tracy Morgan caused an internet firestorm last summer when he launched into a rant during a stand-up show, saying he would stab his son if he told him he were gay and didn’t come to him “like a man” about it.

Morgan apologized for his comments.

Exit

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I wanted them to have a little piece of home when they left.”

Exit

GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK

Elias Otero

Cutting the Line to Employment

BY AJ BARBOSA & STEVE SADIN

ELIAS OTERO MAY be the only barber in town to cut hair for free, but his offer comes with a catch — he’s going to need to see your resume first.

The 49-year-old’s selective generosity began when he watched the attacks on Sept. 11.

He decided to give free haircuts to any veteran or active duty soldier who stepped foot in Otero’s PHOTOGRAPHS BY JIM LUNING

HUFFINGTON 08.12.12

Exit Barber Shop in Deerfield, Ill. Last winter, he extended the offer to any customer who’s currently unemployed as well.

He collects each resume not to parse, but to send to Scott Kane at Gray Hair Management, a company that provides training and networking to some 7,000 unemployed residents in the Deerfield area. The idea is not only to give unemployed customers a clean look before a big interview — it’s to hopefully land them a few more.

“You’ll never know who you can meet using this method, but you need only one person to see your resume and to help you get that next great opportunity,” Kane says.

Otero also keeps copies of each resume in a binder that’s readily available to any of his customers who may be looking to hire new workers. Though he estimates he’s only given around 40 free haircuts to unemployed customers, he says he still maintains the binder. Not everyone walks away with a job, but Otero tries to network as much as possible for each customer.

“This is a little piece but every little bit helps,” Otero said. “I overheard two guys [waiting for haircuts] talking about each need-

GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK

He’s doing his part for Main Street.”

ing to hire 100 employees, and I wanted them to see my resumes.”

Resumes in Otero’s binder come from engineers, lawyers, accountants, financiers and senior managers. They are not only from Deerfield but neighboring areas such as Lake Forest, Buffalo Grove, Northbrook and Barrington.

With unemployment hovering around 9 percent in the United States for more than a year — ­ the real rate nearly double that, according to Rep. Robert Dold (RKenilworth) — the decision to offer free haircuts was made jointly

by Otero and Kane.

Kane has been Otero’s customer for more than 10 years.

HUFFINGTON 08.12.12

Exit He knew Otero was already giving free haircuts to veterans, so the two of them got together and came up with the idea.

Sometimes, it works.

Otero says he received an anonymous letter from one of his customers thanking him for helping unemployed members of the community. Recently, one of Otero’s customers who owns a business sent him one of these letters, and though he wasn’t looking to hire at the time, he was willing to pass Otero’s recommendations on to other managers in his industry.

“I got this card and he was thanking me and saying all these nice things about me,” Otero says.

“He didn’t sign the card and I was trying to figure out who he was, but somebody got a job, and knowing that is always a good feeling.”

Otero stays relatively humble about what he does, but on occasion it’s even impossible for him to ignore the real effect his help has on patrons. Though he prefers not to mention them by name, he recalls one “regular” whose luck changed after stepping foot in Otero’s shop.

“He had been out of work for a long time and was struggling to get a job,” Otero says. “His whole

GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK

HUFFINGTON 08.12.12

life was falling apart ­— his wife wanted a divorce and his finances were all gone.”

Otero continued to give the man haircuts and kept in touch as things started to turn around.

“A couple of months later, he came in and told me that he found a job,” Otero says. “He couldn’t get his marriage back, but now he could start making payments towards his kids’ college tuition.”

I got this card and he was thanking me and saying all these nice things about me. He didn’t sign the card, but somebody got a job, and knowing that is a good feeling.”

Otero became friends with the man and even convinced him to color his hair so he’d look younger. Otero said the man “looks real good and feels good about himself now, too.”

Otero has lived in the Chicago area his whole life and has been cutting hair for more than half of it. His brothers served in the Armed Forces while one of his two sons, Elias Otero, Jr., has been stationed in Afghanistan for

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HUFFINGTON 08.12.12

GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK

You need only one person to see your resume.”

the past three months.

Otero’s motivation for giving the haircuts to service members was a simple act of caring. It was his way to make a difference.

“I wanted them to have a little piece of home when they left,” he said.

Kane expanded Otero’s goodwill for veterans into helping people find jobs. “He’s doing his part for Main Street,” Kane said.

Whether he’s cutting and styling the hair of soldiers, veterans or the unemployed, Otero doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon.

He says that his son has expressed interest in the shop once he finishes his tour in Afghanistan, which would allow Otero to ease his workload and work “for fun.”

“I figure I can probably stick around for another 20 years or so,” Otero says. “Once I know [my son] can manage the shop the way I do, I can start to sit back and work a few days a week.”

01

TFU

BILL CLARK/CQ ROLL CALL (KELLY); NCGA (PITTMAN); AP PHOTO/CARLOS OSORIO (HOMIER); SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES (PLANT); SHUTTERSTOCK (AMBULANCE)

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Mike Kelly Compares Birth Control Mandate To 9/11, Pearl Harbor

2

GOP Lawmaker: Planned Parenthood Is ‘Murder For Hire’

3

4

NEARLY HALF OF AMERICANS DIE PENNILESS

Half Of Nation’s Counties Now Considered Disaster Areas

05

Man Receives Huge Medical Bill After Saving Child From Drowning

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TFU

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THE NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE ©2012. (X-RAY); SHUTTERSTOCK (FENCE, TEACHER, NACHOS); ADEK BERRY/AFP/GETTYIMAGES (PLANE)

Laughing Woman Swallows Knife

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‘Overwhelmingly’ White Town Tried To Keep Minorities Out

08

Teacher Says He Killed A Girl To Skip Out On Work

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Passenger Jumps From Moving Plane

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TACO BELL EMPLOYEE PEES ON NACHOS

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