THE TRUE CRIME ISSUE by VICE Australia

VICE MAGAZINE VOLUME 12 NUMBER 9

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THE TRUE CRIME ISSUE

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TABLE OF CONTENTS | Volume 12 Number 9

Untitled (U.S. Marshals, LAX, #001), from the series U.S. Marshals. Image courtesy of Brian Finke and ClampArt, NYC. The complete monograph U.S. Marshals will be released by powerHouse Books in November.

26 FOUR YEARS ON LINE WITH THE AMITYVILLE HORROR

28 RT TO KILL It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Tweets a Death Threat

30 THE CURIOUS TALE OF LEONARDO DICAPRIO’S EX-BEST FRIEND, THEIR TWO COCKATOOS, AND MILLIONS OF MISSING DOLLARS

32 WHO IS THE WEST MESA BONE COLLECTOR?

48 POSTMORTEM The Life and Deaths of a Medicolegal Death Investigator

58 IT’S A SECRET My Time with Charles Sobhraj, the Bikini Killer

ON THE COVER: Anthropophagous, a painting by Nicolas Claux, who served seven years and four months in a French prison for murder and grave robbery

14 MASTHEAD 16 EMPLOYEES OF THE MONTH 18 FRONT OF THE BOOK Dead Rhinos, Dead Paramedics, Virgin Auctions, Torture Victims, Street Fighters, Jordanian Car Mafias, and an Eerily Familiar Teen Murder in Japan

24 INFOGRAPHIC: THE ART OF RANSOM Any Asshole Can Kidnap Someone; the Real Artistry Lies in Extracting a Hefty Ransom

34 DOs & DON’Ts 40 FASHION: CAGED HEAT Photos by Curtis Buchanan

78 CROOKED MEN: LIVING WITH FEAR 80 SKINEMA Sex Crimes

68 THE GOLDEN ZONE By Andre Dubus III

82 JOHNNY RYAN’S PAGE Kenny G Adventures

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EMPLOYEES OF THE MONTH

See THE GOLDEN ZONE, page 68

DANIEL GENIS See FOUR YEARS ON LINE WITH THE AMITYVILLE HORROR, page 26

JOSEPH SCOTT MORGAN See POSTMORTEM, page 48

We first met Gary Indiana in 2011, when he mistakenly called our offices instead of the hospital where his friend was laid up after lung surgery. Since then we’ve struck up an unlikely friendship, in the sense that we still can’t believe we get to drink vodka with one of our favorite writers. You might be aware of any number of his artistic exploits—he’s a novelist, actor, filmmaker, artist, photographer, playwright, political essayist, and art critic—but it was his bitter, angry nonfiction that piqued our interest years ago. Also, if it weren’t for him, we’d never have read Two Serious Ladies. Gary’s memoir, I Can Give You Anything but Love, will be published by Rizzoli in 2015.

Daniel Genis grew up in New York City and spent much of his youth listening in on vodka-fueled dinners attended by ex-Soviet writers and editors who talked fancy in his parents’ uptown apartment. His publishing career was on track until almost two years of heroin addiction changed everything. Genis became a “Sorry Bandit,” as one of the city’s tabloids memorably dubbed him, when he politely committed a series of robberies to pay off a crazed Ukrainian dealer in the Village. After kicking the habit and being clean for three months, he was spotted by one of his victims and spent ten years in prison. There, he met the Amityville Horror murderer Ronald DeFeo Jr., whom he wrote about for this issue.

Roberto Saviano is the newest VICE columnist, and the first one to be under 24-hour-a-day police protection. In his first book, Gomorrah, the then 26-year-old named names in a far-reaching exposé of the Camorra, the crime syndicate that runs Naples. The Camorra didn’t take kindly to that and threatened his life, leaving him with no choice but to live surrounded by the police. He’s still writing and still investigating criminal societies and economies (his second book, ZeroZeroZero, released last year, examined the worldwide cocaine trade), and in the coming months he’ll be educating us all about the underworld in a regular monthly feature we’re calling Crooked Men.

Joseph Scott Morgan began his career as a forensic investigator with the Jefferson Parish Coroner’s Office in New Orleans, eventually becoming senior investigator with the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office in Atlanta. Over the next 30 years, he participated in more than 7,000 forensic autopsies and made more than 2,000 next-of-kin death notifications before being forced to retire in 2005 due to PTSD. He’s now a distinguished scholar of applied forensics at Jacksonville State University, and an author—in 2012, he published Blood Beneath My Feet: The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator, a memoir of his career that won him the 2013 Georgia Author of the Year award.

Rose Marie Cromwell is one of our favorite photographers right now. That’s not only because she combines images with a mystical poeticism akin to Luigi Ghirri, or because her richly hued photographs reveal a part of the colour spectrum too beautiful to be visible to the naked eye. More than that, Cromwell is invested in the effect globalisation has on intimacy, and it’s because of this interest that she founded and continues to direct Cambio Creativo, an alternative artseducation nonprofit located just footsteps from the largest trade route in the world, the Panama Canal. There aren’t many photographers today actively and magnanimously doing good things for other humans, so this is truly a mark of distinction.

GARY INDIANA See IT’S A SECRET, page 58

ROBERTO SAVIANO See LIVING WITH FEAR, page 78

ROSE MARIE CROMWELL See THE GOLDEN ZONE, page 68

Illustrations by Geffen Refaeli

ANDRE DUBUS III

Andre Dubus III is the author of six books, including the New York Times best sellers House of Sand and Fog and The Garden of Last Days, and a memoir, Townie. His most recent book, Dirty Love, published in the fall of 2013, was a New York Times Notable Books selection, a 2013 Notable Fiction choice from the Washington Post, and a Kirkus Starred Best Book of 2013. Dubus has been a finalist for the National Book Award, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, and two Pushcart Prizes, and is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Fontaine, a modern dancer, and their three children.

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FRONT OF THE BOOK

The Chicago Police Department’s Torture Victims Want Justice

CAR THIEVES ARE TERRORISING JORDAN

is serving a federal sentence for perjury and obstruction of justice, continues to receive $54,000 a year in pension pay. Now, after more than three decades, advocates have managed to get an ordinance in front of the Chicago City Council that would provide $20 million in reparations to compensate, care for, and commemorate the torture survivors. The ordinance would serve as a formal apology to the survivors and provide money to the victims and their families. The measure is supported by a range of victims’ advocates and human-rights groups, including Amnesty International. Despite recent momentum, though, the ordinance remains at a standstill in the council’s finance committee and needs to be called for a hearing in order to survive. Chicago Alderman Edward Burke, the chairman of the finance committee, did not respond to requests for comment on his plans. ALISON FLOWERS

Around 2010, news reports from Amman, Jordan, began noting a rash of stolen cars in the city. At the time, the thefts were dismissed as isolated incidents. But the reality suggested otherwise: Cars in Jordan are being stolen and held for ransom by organised criminal gangs—and in some cases, the thefts appear to be willfully overlooked by police. Even if they haven’t experienced it personally, most people in Amman I spoke with claimed to know someone who has had a car or truck stolen. The way it works, one

China’s Corruption Crackdown

Chinese President Xi Jinping is going to war, but not with the United States or Japan. Instead, he’s taking on corruption inside his own ruling Communist Party, promising to go after “tigers and ﬂies” in what seems like a ﬂagrant attempt to appease the country’s growing middle class. This summer, the purge reached the upper echelons of the party apparatus, claiming Zhou Yongkang, a former domestic-security boss and the kind of luminary considered untouchable under previous regimes. Officially, state news agencies report that Zhou is accused of “serious disciplinary violations.” But according to the Financial Times, senior party officials suspect Zhou of conspiring with Bo Xilai, another disgraced party scion. Still, it’s difficult to say whether this is just a clever PR move or Xi actually wants to reform the political system. Xi also faces internal resistance from party bosses who can’t stomach giving up all the swag. “The two armies of corruption and anticorruption are… in a stalemate,” he reportedly told a private meeting of the Politburo in June. Xi, it seems, is determined to break that stalemate. But whether a few splashy headlines will convince the huge population that their government isn’t full of greedy jerks is another matter entirely. MATT TAYLOR

China photo by Jason Lee/Reuters/Corbis; Chicago photo by Alison Flowers

Starting in 1971, more than 100 people, mostly black men, were forced to confess to serious crimes at police headquarters on Chicago’s South Side, part of a sanctioned torture campaign that continued for almost 20 years under then Police Commander Jon Burge. “They had a ball torturing me,” said Darrell Cannon, a torture victim who spent two decades in prison after falsely confessing to murder charges in 1983. Detectives suffocated Cannon, performed mock executions by stuffing a shotgun in his mouth, hit him with a rubber hose, and shocked his testicles with a cattle prod. “It was something that they liked doing,” he added. The police brutality of the Burge era—and the years of cover-up that followed—fueled a deep mistrust between minorities and law enforcement in Chicago that has persisted for decades. While some victims have received millions in settlements, others, like Cannon, have not. Meanwhile, Burge, who

businessman explained, is that a ring of guys steals a nice vehicle and then demands a ransom. “If they sense any hostility from you, they’ll just torch your car,” said one businessman, who declined to be named. The Jordanian police have denied that car theft is a major problem for the country. In a recent interview, the head of the national police claimed that 98 to 100 percent of stolen cars were being recovered, and that any police caught colluding with car thieves had been fired. ELIZABETH WHITMAN

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Spain Has a Juicing Problem

Spain photo by Darryl Estrine/Getty Images; illustration by Nick Gazin

About a decade ago, Spain was swept by a fitness craze. Since then, young Spaniards have been going to the gym in droves, working out and lifting weights in an effort to make their bodies as enormous as possible. While there is nothing wrong with Spanish youth getting in shape, the trend has also brought with it a host of new body-image and health problems—especially as people realise that getting huge can happen a whole lot faster with the help of magic powders. Anabolic steroids, blood boosters, and human growth hormones, mostly originating from China, have been flowing across Spain’s borders. Once in the country, the drugs are distributed to sports centers, gyms, and private physicians and even advertised on social media. Aside from the obvious health issues, the effects of the cultural emphasis on body size have been detrimental: Experts estimate that between 20,000 and 50,000 Spaniards, mostly young people, suffer from muscle dysmorphia, or “bigorexia,” a kind of reverse anorexia in which a person becomes obsessed with the idea that his muscles are too small, regardless of how jacked he gets. Police in Spain are cracking down on illegal steroids and other doping products. In the past five years, there have been 32 police operations against anabolic-steroid trafficking, half of which occured in Valencia. Earlier this year, authorities dismantled a massive doping-distribution scheme involving students, bouncers, elite cyclists, and a doctor accused of prescribing anabolic steroids 600 times over just a few months. JUANJO VILLALBA

Russian Hackers Have Been Robbing US Banks for a Long Time

In July 1994, Citibank officials notified the FBI of what was then a novel crime: Hundreds of thousands of dollars had simply disappeared from corporate bank accounts. By October of that year, the total had ballooned to $10 million. It was, according to the FBI, the first time that a bank robbery had been committed by a computer. It wasn’t until the end of 1994 that Netscape Navigator, the first web browser to find major commercial success, was released. The finance industry was an early internet adopter, but security was lacking: Citibank officials claimed that the hacking team, led by Russian computer programmer Vladimir Levin, had used valid accounts to access the bank’s unencrypted cash-management system and steal passwords and account data. After being notified of a pair of suspicious transactions totaling nearly $522,000, the FBI tracked the transfers to a pair of Russian nationals, Yevygeny and

Yekaterina Korlokova, in San Francisco. According to statements from FBI agents who were part of a San Francisco white-collar-crime unit (the city did not yet have a cyber crime squad), Ekaterina rushed to her apartment after finding her fraudulent bank accounts had been frozen. As the story goes, she was arrested with suitcases packed and a one-way ticket to Russia in hand. Following their arrest, the Korlokovas told the FBI that Levin was engineering the heists out of St. Petersburg, and they agreed to help track him down. In the spring of 1995, Levin was persuaded to visit London, where he was arrested. In January 1998, after being extradited to the US, he pleaded guilty to federal charges related to bank, wire, and computer fraud. He was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay $240,000 in restitution. By that time, Citibank said it had recovered nearly all of the stolen funds and fixed its security measures to prevent a similar attack. The theft kicked off two decades of the familiar catand-mouse game between increasingly sophisticated hackers and banks. And while $10 million seemed like an immense sum in 1994, the impact of cybercrime has grown by multiple orders of magnitude in the intervening decades. According to a 2014 report by the security firm McAfee, the global economic cost of cybercrime is now roughly $400 billion a year, with much of that cost directly hitting banks and retailers. In August, it was discovered that Russian criminals made off with $1.2 billion in user names and passwords from 420,000 websites, the largest known theft of online credentials in history. DEREK MEAD

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FRONT OF THE BOOK

Martial Arts Gangs Are at War in East Timor Though always a little shocking, death by samurai sword is neither an uncommon nor a surprising occurrence in the far-flung island nation of East Timor. Each year, hundreds of young men here are involved in martial-arts-related violence—stabbings, street brawls, and murder—a trend that has prompted the young country’s government to implement a crackdown on street gangs that are known for practicing stylised combat. Pencak silat, a local fighting technique, has a long history in East Timor, an impoverished country that won independence from Indonesia in 2002. During the Indonesian military’s occupation, students of pencak silat were clandestine resistance fighters who supported guerrilla forces in winning the country’s freedom. In the years following, however, the gangs began turning on one another, spurring the government to pass a law in 2008 dictating how martial arts could be practiced. Then, in 2013, following a rash of attacks and 12 deaths, East Timor’s prime minister, Xanana Gusmão, issued a resolution outlawing the country’s popular pencak silat clubs. Despite the ban, gangs still practice pencak silat, using it to commit a range of crimes. It’s estimated that between 15 and 20 groups are involved in martial arts violence, and most of the East Timorese people I spoke to said they knew of someone involved in the pencak silat groups in some way. Deeply entrenched ideas about gender and masculinity, as well as a 40 percent youth unemployment rate and the fact that nearly half of the country lives below the poverty line, are all contributing factors to the violence. Most of the criminals are young, disenfranchised men. And with nearly half the population under age 18, the INDIA’S WAR ON POACHERS problem shows no sign of abating. YARA MURRAY-ATFIELD

On July 26, a 16-year-old girl in Sasebo, Japan, invited her classmate, Aiwa Matsuo, to the apartment where she lived alone and then bludgeoned, strangled, and beheaded her. When the killer was arrested, she told police, “I wanted to kill someone. I bought tools by myself.” Before confessing to the murder, it appears the girl posted about it on 2channel, an anonymous Japanese image board and the inspiration for 4chan. Posts that lined up with the time of the killing contained messages like, “Oh no, blood keeps pouring out even though I have wiped it away many times.”

Almost exactly ten years earlier, an 11-year-old in the same midsize city fatally slashed the throat and arms of her classmate, Satomi Mitarai, with a box cutter during school. Against the wishes of the police, the killer’s image was posted on 2channel. After the 2004 incident, a program was created in Sasebo to teach school children about “the sanctity of life,” and the Japanese weekly Nikkan Gendai reports that since the second crime, teachers are being subject to scrutiny over the program. Still, it’s hard to imagine an otherwise healthy student turning into a murderer because she wasn’t taught about the sanctity of life properly. The 2004 murder was grisly, but it was later revealed to have been motivated by an argument and probably committed in hot blood. The second Sasebo murder seems to have been committed in cold blood by someone for whom violence was a pastime. In fact, she had been disciplined for ﬁve incidents of poisoning classmates, but the police were never notiﬁed. A guilt-stricken teacher at the school told the Japan Times, “We just sought a closure of the problem without seriously facing the dark side of her mind.” MIKE PEARL

Martial arts photo by Binsar Bakkara/AP; India photo by Anuwar Hazarika/Pacific Press/Sipa USA; Japan photo by the Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images

An Eerily Familiar Murder in Japan

At least 18 greater one-horned rhinoceroses have been killed and de-horned by armed poachers this year in Assam, India, a previously untapped goldmine for the illegal wildlife trade. To ﬁght back, the Indian government has launched a ruthless campaign against the poachers, deploying armed guards, intelligence agents, and security drones to protect the rare rhinos.

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FRONT OF THE BOOK

Canadian First Responders Are Killing Themselves at an Alarming Rate

Tema Conter Memorial Trust, a Canadian nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness about PTSD among emergency responders and military personnel. It’s a cause that’s close to his heart—in 1988, Savoia, then a paramedic, was called to a gruesome murder scene where a 25-year-old woman, who he says eerily resembled his fiancée, had been tied to a bed, gagged, raped, and stabbed 11 times. Like many who have worked in emergency response, Savoia wasn’t trained in how to deal with PTSD—he didn’t even know what it was. He said that the system needs to be more compassionate and streamlined, but that it’s historically failed those who are suffering. “Most levels of government pay lip service to assisting first responders,” he said. “There is very little funding for psychological support.” ALLISON ELKIN

Mexico Celebrates Serial Killers After crowds poured into a temporary exhibit on famous serial killers, Mexico City’s state-run police museum decided to make the show permanent. The result is a testament to the country’s love affair with surrealism, with images of tortured children and dismembered bodies alongside vampire paraphernalia and replicas of famous psychopaths, including Mexico’s infamous “Old Lady Killer.”

Medellín’s Virginity Auctions

In the slums of Medellín, Colombia, street gangs are recruiting adolescent girls—some as young as ten years old—and auctioning off their virginity to wealthy tourists in the city’s thriving underground sex trade. Girls are approached by gang leaders who attempt to lure them with the promise of designer clothes, fancy meals, and other luxuries, according to investigations conducted by a Colombian advocacy group. Often, gang members also give money to the families, with the expectation that relatives will make sure the girls stay virgins until a sale can be made. Weakened by poverty and fear, the families have little choice but to acquiesce. In a typical auction, clients are offered brochures of as many as 60 women, with prices going as high as $2,600. Customers then receive a secret PIN that lets them access an auction website. When the auction is done, the site is taken offline and the brochures are destroyed. Once sold, most of the girls remain in the sex trade. According to local nonproﬁts, the auctions have become common with the increase of development and tourism in Medellín. It is a perverse side effect of the city’s transformation from Pablo Escobar’s drug-war fortress into an urbane metropolis. According to a report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the recent surge in foreign visitors has been a major boost to Medellín’s underground economy, turning the city into a destination for drug and sex tourism. Sex-trafficking networks have proliferated, supported by foreign sex-tourism operators and controlled by local street gangs that supply the women from the city’s suburban slums. GRACE WYLER

Photo by Francisco Gómez; illustration by Kyle Stewart

In July, Ken Barker, a recently retired Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, took his own life. Barker had been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after responding to a grisly Greyhound bus murder in Manitoba in which passenger Tim McLean was stabbed, mutilated, beheaded, and cannibalised by fellow passenger Vince Li. Since April, 16 first responders in Canada have taken their lives, 13 in a span of just ten weeks leading up to July 17, bringing numbers to an epidemic level. While Canadian stats are hard to come by, a study published by Eastern Michigan University researchers in 2003 cited that up to 31 percent of first responders experience PTSD, a significant increase from previous studies that cited rates of up to 19 percent. North America isn’t the only place dealing with this problem. A 2006 study of 262 Dutch police officers found that 41 percent experienced symptoms of PTSD after being exposed to a traumatic event—armed conflict, a car crash, or a violent death. “These individuals who do come forward can’t be harassed or ridiculed, as they sometimes are,” said Vince Savoia, founder of the

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The kidnapping biz is booming these days. Once the specialty of South American guerrilla armies and drug cartels, abducting and bartering for human beings has become a global industry in the past decade. According to data from the security fi rm Control Risks, kidnappings in Asia and Africa made up more

1532: Atahualpa, King of the Incas Paying his own ransom to conquistador Francisco Pizarro, the last emperor of the Incas surrenders a hall full of gold and silver worth roughly $1.5 billion in modern money—the largest ransom ever paid.

than half of incidents worldwide in 2013, thanks to growing social unrest and the spread of radical groups. While any terrorist cell, street gang, or band of pirates can pull off an abduction, the real artistry lies in extracting a hefty ransom. Here’s a brief list of notable ransoms through the ages:

1973: John Paul Getty III When oil tycoon J. Paul Getty refuses to pay a $17 million dollar ransom for his abducted grandson, kidnappers cut oﬀ the 16-year-old’s ear and send it to an Italian newspaper. Getty eventually agrees to a $3 million ransom but pays only $2.2 million, the largest tax-deductible amount, and loans the other $800,000 to his son, the kid’s father, at a 4 percent interest rate.

1996: Victor Li

1874: The First Ransom Note Kidnappers abduct four-yearold Charley Ross near his home in Pennsylvania and leave what is believed to be the first ransom note in US history, demanding $20,000 for the kid’s return. Ross is never found.

1970s: The Montoneros The left-wing guerrilla group terrorises Argentina, abducting businessmen and extorting enormous sums of money. Their chef d’oeuvre is the 1974 kidnapping of Jorge and Juan Born, wealthy grain magnates. The brothers are returned months later for more than $60 million. That’s equivalent to roughly $293 million in 2014 money, making it the largest ransom in modern history.

1974: Patty Hearst The 19-year-old heiress is kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a left-wing domestic terrorist group that demands the Hearst family distribute $70 million in food to poor people in California. Hearst’s father quickly donates $6 million in food, but the SLA decides to keep its hostage because the food was shitty. Three months later, Hearst announces she is joining the SLA and changing her name to Tania.

The son of Hong Kong’s richest business tycoon, Li Ka-shing, is kidnapped by Chinese gangster Cheung Tze-keung, a.k.a. “Big Spender,” and returned for $133 million. A year later, Big Spender demands a similar ransom for Walter Kwok, another Hong Kong business scion. Kwok is eventually released for $77 million.

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Four Years on Line with the Amityville Horror BY DANIEL GENIS

Ronald DeFeo Jr., center, is escorted by police officers after being arrested on charges of murdering his parents, two brothers, and two sisters. AP photo

hey ran meds before breakfast, so I used to see the back of Ronald DeFeo Jr.’s head every morning before the sun was up. Heroin addiction had taken me from my desk at a literary agency to an alley with a pocketknife to this line for medication at Green Haven Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison for men in Dutchess County, New York. DeFeo was the biggest celebrity we had— Son of Sam was nearby in Fallsburg, and Robert Chambers had been released the year before. An inmate pointed DeFeo out to me on my first day, and because of the alphabetical proximity of our last names, I was to spend my waking hours with him for the next four years. As the only guy in that prison who’d been to DeFeo’s family home in Amityville, a town on Long Island, I had a good opening line. Strangely enough, my grandparents had lived in Amityville for 20 years. By the time they moved there in the early 80s, Ronnie had already murdered his entire family and gone away a decade earlier, but the myth lived on. It started with a book by Jay Anson called The Amityville Horror: A True Story, which was originally published as nonfiction in 1977 and spawned as many as a dozen films between 1979 and 2014. Although the book sits on the shelves of many Amityville residents, it barely mentions Ronnie’s murders, instead chronicling the 28 days when the Lutz family lived at 112 Ocean Avenue about a year afterward. They bought the house cheap, paid $400 to keep the DeFeo furniture, and then claimed that they had to flee because of the haunting. According to the book, the house was beset by a phantasmal marching band and—my favorite—Jodie, an evil, demonic pig who was an imaginary friend to five-year-old Missy Lutz. To a 13-year-old boy, this is exciting stuff—especially if it’s Halloween and he knows a secret way into the house. In 1991, three of us took a rubber dinghy over a fingertip canal to the back of the property in the middle of the night and sneaked into

the empty house to look for the red room beneath the stairs, where the devil allegedly resided. We did not find it. Thirteen years later, Ronnie confirmed to me that there was no evil room beneath the stairs. Every morning Ronnie received a little plastic cup full of OxyContin pills. He would methodically chew through the time-release coatings and get chatty once the drug kicked in. I never understood what was so wrong with him that he needed a large dose of painkillers, which prisons are not usually keen on handing out. Once we had our small talk about the best pizza spot in Amityville and the continued existence of the bar he burst into on the night of November 13, 1974, claiming that someone had killed his family, Ronnie became comfortable with me and shared the details of his odd life. He sent paintings out to his wife, who, he claimed, clandestinely sold them—though he maintained he didn’t really need the money because he was (supposedly) paid for the use of his image in the films. As we got to know each other, the murders came up. During my first year with Ronnie, he spun me a story out of Goodfellas. He claimed his great-uncle Peter DeFeo was a caporegime in the Genovese crime family. Some dispute over mob money caused the mafia to send out hit men, who killed everyone except for Ronnie, who somehow managed to get away. I nodded my head without judgment. The wise guys inside were aware of

Ronnie’s connection to “made men” but did not accept him as one of their own because of the nature of his case. He told me about “button men” and kisses of death and Joe the Barber’s 1957 meeting in Apalachin, New York, at which Peter DeFeo got made. It would be a while before Ronnie decided I was worthy of knowing the real story. Once the OxyContin hit, and a good year had passed during which I had not made fun of him or gossiped about him or asked him for pills or a loan, he admitted that he’d made up the mobster killers. His sister had lost it, DeFeo now claimed; Dawn was always unstable and hated the family and ended up executing them all with a shotgun. Ronnie survived by wrestling the gun away from her and killing her himself. I nodded my head politely. Another year passed, and Donnie’s dose of opiates was upped, and he considered me a fellow Amityvillian. Now it was time for the truth. Slurring his words and staring at me with his arresting gaze, Ronnie told me that his parents had been monsters. They treated his four siblings better than him and made a big deal about his taste for LSD and PCP. In other words, they had it coming. At 6:30 one winter morning, during my last year in Green Haven, Ronnie said that they deserved what they got and if he had the chance he’d pull that trigger six times over again. Oh, and there was no demon pig.

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RT to Kill It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Tweets a Death Threat BY BRIAN MERCHANT

The ruse was supposed to unfold over a series of three tweeted photos. The first presented a blurry gun. The second showed a bloody victim. In the third, a young man lay on the ground next to a police car.

n the night of March 11, a Twitter user with the handle @StillDMC stood at a window in downtown Los Angeles and took a photo of his rifle, the barrel aimed at what appeared to be a couple of pedestrians standing on a street corner in the distance. At 12:09 AM, he tweeted. “100 RT’s and I’ll shoot someone walking,” he wrote alongside the picture, which quickly racked up well over 100 retweets. An hour later, he followed up with “Man down. Mission Completed.” This time the image showed a young man lying on the ground, clutching his torso— along with what looked, in the pixelated dark, like a chest wound. The next day, LAPD detectives arrested 20-year-old Dakkari McAnuff. The police report states that investigating officers had “discovered multiple pictures displaying an unknown type of rifle pointing in the direction of various Los Angles city streets [sic],” determined McAnuff was @StillDMC, and

confirmed his location. At midday, police officers arrived at 22-year-old Zain Abbasi’s high-rise condo building, where McAnuff was a guest. According to Abbasi’s account of the arrest, the building’s property manager summoned him to his office, where detectives placed him and another friend in handcuffs. Helicopters circled the building, snipers took aim from a complex across the street, and multiple police cars blocked the parking lot. The detectives told Abbasi to call McAnuff and to instruct him to come down to join them. As soon as he left the condo, McAnuff was apprehended by ten LAPD officers who were lying in wait, their guns drawn. The officers searched Abbasi’s apartment and found the weapon pictured in the tweet: an unloaded air rifle. The entire group was handcuffed and taken into custody. McAnuff was “jailed on suspicion of making criminal threats,” and his bail was set at $50,000. It was all supposed to be a joke, of course. McAnuff and Abbasi, along with their friends Moe and RJ, are members of a group called the MAD Pranksters. They’re transplants from Houston, Texas—all between 19 and 22 years old—who moved to LA to try to make it in the entertainment business. This was their inaugural stunt: an attempt at what Abbasi calls “a social prank.” The ruse was supposed to unfold over a series of three tweets. The first presented

the blurry gun and a violent entreaty, the second the bloody victim, and the third and last—posted nearly 11 hours after the second—showed McAnuff, his hands behind his back, on the ground next to a police car. An LAPD officer stood in the frame. The text read: “Last Night Before I Got Arrested. SMH. Fuck Whoever Snitched. And Fuck LAPD!” The Pranksters hoped, naturally, that the fabricated saga would go viral. On that stage, “100 RT’s and I’ll shoot” killed. The prank was retweeted a thousand times (Twitter soon suspended McAnuff’s account), and news of the alleged threat made headlines around the world. The media painted McAnuff as either a lurking, latent murderer or a reckless jerk, and most outlets downplayed the fact that his gun was a toy. It’s not hard to see why. The tweet seemed to offer a flickered forecast of a disturbing future, one in which would-be killers are enabled by distant strangers on social media, morbid voyeurism collapses into mass complicity, and modern gladiators conjure their coliseum out of the ether. In other words, the gamification of murder. But the MAD Pranksters contend that their stunt was an obvious hoax—and that the LAPD knew as much, even before McAnuff was arrested. And if the department didn’t, the Pranksters say, it should have: There were clues in the tweets, which

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the LAPD claims to have monitored closely, that revealed the stunt for what it was. “The LAPD completely overreacted, put me and my friend’s lives in danger so they can bully us into not tweeting ‘Fuck LAPD!’” Abbasi wrote in an email. The department “spent countless hours, resources, and taxpayer dollars to carry out this whole operation so they could bully MAD Pranksters to not use their irrevocable right.” I attempted to get LAPD detectives to confirm or deny the details of the Pranksters’ account, but only the PR team was willing to discuss the case. “The tweeted picture was considered a credible threat. That’s why officers were sent to investigate,” an LAPD spokeswoman told me. “We have officers that monitor social media. While they were conducting their routine monitoring, they came across the tweet.” Abbasi and McAnuff’s story raises questions about how police departments should handle investigations into threats made on the internet. What, given the noisy, unreliable, and rapidly evolving social media landscape, do authorities have an obligation to know before drawing their weapons? “We’re not breaking the law,” McAnuff told me. “We’re just pranking.” That, of course, is a matter of intense legal debate. The question of how and when threats made online should be considered criminal—and when they can be considered free speech under the First Amendment—is

currently en route to the US Supreme Court in the case of Pennsylvania resident Anthony Elonis. On Facebook he wrote a series of ultraviolent rap lyrics in which he described, in gruesome detail, murdering his estranged wife and former colleagues. For those posts, Elonis spent almost four years in prison. Meanwhile, social media stunts like the Pranksters’ are becoming increasingly popular, and dubious online threats are still a relatively new frontier for law enforcement. So far, authorities have struggled to strike a balance between allowing for the inevitability of stupid, harmless behavior and prosecuting verifiable danger. “There is a category of free speech called true threats,” Clay Calvert, a professor at the University of Florida who focuses on media and communication issues, told me. “It’s speech that, typically, a reasonable person would perceive to be a threat of danger.” If that sounds a little ambiguous, it is. “The definition of ‘true threat,’ unfortunately, is not very clear,” Calvert said. The MAD Pranksters point out that they had direct contact with an LAPD officer— the one who allowed them to use his car as a prop in the final tweet—and say they told him exactly what they were doing. The gun was obviously fake, and so was the death scene, they argue. In other words, the LAPD ought to have known there was no true threat. Abbasi also claims that before his friend McAnuff was arrested, one of the detectives walked into the office where they were being detained, saw Moe—who played the corpse in the prank—and said, “Oh, look, there’s the dead guy.” The Pranksters’ account holds that more than 16 hours had elapsed between the first tweet and the arrest—enough time, arguably, to contact the officer in the third tweet and to have a firearms expert determine whether the gun pictured was real. According to the LAPD’s statement, the officers discovered the tweet at 9:30 AM— and it was time-stamped from the night before. Even so, the arrest wasn’t made for another three and a half hours, according to Abbasi. So it seems that the department wasn’t treating the case as an emergency. But the LAPD still felt compelled to send enough cops to the scene to take down a small cartel—including, according to Abbasi, helicopters and snipers. Indeed, the most harrowing detail of the entire affair was that the LAPD had the Pranksters in its crosshairs. At the precinct, Abbasi claims, a female police officer told him, “You were

on my scope earlier… If you had walked on that balcony with that toy rifle I would’ve blown your head off.” So a kid could well have been shot dead for tweeting out a picture of an air rifle. The LAPD spokeswoman said she was unable to give me any details about the operation that led to McAnuff’s arrest. Prank or no, the stunt conjures an unsettling vision of how actual murderers may begin to interface with social media networks. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube already offer an omnipresent global audience and an incentive for users to broadcast bizarre, envelope-pushing deeds in a bid to win likes and followers. Given the sizable social media footprints of real-life killers like 22-year-old Elliot Rodger—who earlier this year went on a rampage at the University of California, Santa Barbara—that could feasibly extend to serious crime, too. It has also been well documented that youth are especially susceptible to online social pressure. That’s probably why there is a homemade video on the internet of a girl swallowing her own tampon, and of some kid eating his own feces with ice cream. Given our society’s hard drift toward real-time selfpromotion, we shouldn’t be surprised at the rise of social media shock jocks who don’t sign corporate releases and can’t guarantee that no one will get hurt. McAnuff and his crew were fortunate, given the circumstances. Days after he was released, he received word that the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office was declining to pursue the charges. Plus, nobody got shot by an LAPD sniper. But this is bound to happen again. “There certainly will be more true-threat cases involving social media, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, where people are posting videos of themselves making threats,” Calvert said. “It’s another case where the law has to play catch-up with technology.” As the audience to all this artifice, whether willing or otherwise, we have little choice but to figure out how to separate hoax from threat, and ploy for virality from plea for help. This filtering process is already shaping up to be one of the great, thankless projects of a cultural future that will play out in a bottomless social media sandbox. It takes time to sort out fact from fiction, time that news consumers and family members and police departments don’t always have. @StillDMC’s prank might have been reckless, dumb, and dangerous. But we should expect to see more like it popping up in our feeds.

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The Curious Tale of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ex-Best Friend, Their Two Cockatoos, and Millions of Missing Dollars BY ANDY CAPPER AND SCOTT PIERCE, PHOTOS COURTESY OF DANA GIACCHETTO

Leonardo DiCaprio and Dana Giacchetto mug for the camera in a cockpit, presumably during one of their many lavish trips.

n the mid 1990s, Leonardo DiCaprio was the king of the world. The baby-faced movie star was about to play the leading role in Titanic, and he spent some of his time hanging with Dana Giacchetto, a former investment banker and member of the new wave group Breakfast in Bed, at Giacchetto’s penthouse loft on Broadway and Cortlandt in Manhattan. The two friends owned matching cockatoos named Angel and Caesar and hosted lavish parties for the most powerful people in 90s film, fashion, and finance: Michael Stipe, Andrew Cuomo, Kate Moss, Winona Ryder, Harmony Korine, and Alanis Morissette, among other celebrities.

In between doing the things that happen at late-night parties, including spraying vintage champagne everywhere, some guests made million-dollar late-night deals—at least that’s what Giacchetto claims. His high life crashed down on him when he was arrested in 2000 and pleaded guilty to fraud under the Investment Advisers Act. After that, most of his clients left him, and the court sentenced him to a maximum of 57 months in prison for misappropriating approximately $9 million. Thanks to good behavior, time already served in prison, and his willingness to enter rehab, he was released early, but his life has never been the same.

Giacchetto’s downfall began in 1988, when his mother, Alma, loaned him almost $200,000 so he could found the Cassandra Group. Giacchetto already worked as an account executive at Boston Safe Deposit & Trust, and he used his bona fides to persuade friends in new wave and punk bands to put money in an investment group for cool, arty people. Thanks to his business skills and rock cred, Giacchetto started working with Sub Pop Records, the iconic indie label that was simultaneously broke and famous for releasing Nirvana’s first album, Bleach. Soon after, Giacchetto worked as the money manager

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for all of Sub Pop’s acts, as well as for the Smashing Pumpkins, Alanis Morissette, Phish, Victoria Williams, Q-Tip, R.E.M., and many of their agents and managers. Giacchetto went to prison for stealing $9 million from a number of these clients, including Phish, who lost more than $1 million, according to the New York Times. The Securities and Exchange Commission had discovered improprieties in Cassandra’s bookkeeping dating back to September 1997. (Giacchetto had used a version of the classic “asset-kiting scheme,” in which one asset is borrowed to cover the disappearance of another.) Prosecutors alleged that Giacchetto’s scheme involved improperly tapping into the accounts of the Cassandra Group’s clients and ordering checks from financial services firm Brown & Co. He was able to cash them at the US Trust even though some checks were made out to celebrities like Ben Stiller. “I was someone who was extraordinarily successful, beyond his wildest dreams, and I flew too close to the sun and, you know, got really burned,” he told us when we met him in New York this summer.

After telling us he didn’t have too much time to talk because he had to meet with his lawyer and the FBI, he insisted on his innocence and maintained that he had been accused and convicted because Hollywood insiders were trying to keep him out of the elite, high-powered, celebrity life of Hollywood that he saw as a kind of Mount Olympus. “I think that there is some truth in the idea that there is this vapid vacuum still that is Hollywood—sometimes because it’s a business built on artifice, fantasy,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that it’s not legitimate. It just means that, contextually, you have to sort of put it into place, and I think people do get envious of that.” Arranging interviews with Giacchetto was as absurd and overcomplicated as a Hollywood movie set. One day, he refused to let us speak to him at his loft in SoHo because people were “tearing up and replacing the floors.” Another time he stopped us from interviewing him at his home because he claimed the FBI, after reading this article, would learn of his multimillion-dollar artwork—the Basquiats, the Schnabels. When we finally met him in person, he brought

his parents along. He persuaded us to interview his father, Cosmo, and to plug Cosmo’s self-published novel from the 1960s. The next day, he brought along Bruce Pavitt, the founder of Sub Pop Records, and pitched us a “new app that would revolutionise that music industry.” At every meeting, Giacchetto promised us he would bring photos from his years with DiCaprio. We didn’t believe him, but at our last interview, Giacchetto brought a Travelpro expandable luggage bag full of hundreds of photos, like these pictures of DiCaprio partying. As Giacchetto flipped through the pictures, he reminded us of a father showing photos of his children, not because Giacchetto liked bragging about his 90s debauchery but because these celebrities were once his friends. When he went to jail, many of them abandoned him. This hasn’t stopped Giacchetto from doing business with the rich and famous, of course. Along with his phone-app gig with Pavitt, he’s repping a new line of luxury food items that will enable you to eat lobster thermidor straight from the can. Look for our documentary on Dana, coming soon to VICE.com as part of our new series The Real...?

CLOCKWISE: DiCaprio twirls his cockatoo in Giacchetto’s penthouse. Giacchetto partying with DiCaprio, Naomi Campbell, and some other guys DiCaprio and Giacchetto with (allegedly) Q-Tip, mellowing out DiCaprio, pre-dating the Shmoney Dance, at Giacchetto’s apartment

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Who Is the West Mesa Bone Collector? BY GRACE WYLER

Workers excavate a crime scene on the outskirts of Albuquerque, NM, where the remains of 11 bodies have been discovered. Photo by Sergio Salvador / AP

he story of the West Mesa murders begins outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, on a high desert plateau that rises up over the Rio Grande. Sun Belt sprawl and subdivisions with names like Desert Spring Flower and Paradise Hills give way to dry sand, tumbleweeds, and trailer parks. It’s desolate on this part of the West Mesa. There’s a municipal shooting range, a speedway, the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center. There’s also a crime scene where, in 2009, 11 decomposed corpses were found buried in shallow graves. It took the Albuquerque police weeks to uncover all the bodies—which were scattered over a 92-acre swath of land owned by a home developer—and nearly a year to identify the victims. All of them were women between the ages of 15 and 32, and most were Hispanic. The women had gone missing between 2001 and 2005—long before the bodies were uncovered. Ten of the 11 victims were known prostitutes and drug users, a fact that police pointed out early and often. One victim, 22-year-old Michelle Valdez, had been four months pregnant. The 11th woman, 15-year-old Jamie Barela, had disappeared in 2004. She had gone to the park with her cousin, Barela’s mother told reporters, leaving the house with her curling iron still on. Her body was the last to be identified. Her cousin, 27-year-old Evelyn Salazar, had been identified two months prior. A second 15-year-old, Syllania Edwards, a runaway from Lawton, Oklahoma, was the only African American victim and the only one with ties outside New Mexico. It was the most horrific murder case Albuquerque had ever seen. While serial killers are not uncommon in the Western United States, New Mexico’s largest city had never dealt with one before. Police promised the families of the victims that solving the murders was a top priority, and initially that seemed to be the case. Investigators assembled a crack team of

detectives, bringing in FBI profilers and working with law enforcement agencies around the state to try to figure out how the bones of 11 women had wound up in the desert. Now it’s more than five years after the first body was discovered. Police still have no official suspects, and Albuquerque has largely forgotten about what was once known as the city’s “crime of the century.” “There hasn’t been the degree of public fear and alarm that you might expect. There has been very little publicity,” said Dirk Gibson, a professor at the University of New Mexico who has written two books on serial killers. “There’s a sense of physical remoteness—this place was very removed. A combination of remoteness of time and geography made it so that there has been little pressure on the police to investigate.” To be fair, there wasn’t much for the cops to go on. Officially, the cause of death for all 11 women was “homicidal violence,” but the truth was, medical examiners and forensic experts couldn’t determine how the victims had been killed. No witnesses have come forward, and there was

virtually no forensic evidence at the burial site, which meant that there was nothing to tie the victims together except their shared grave and “high-risk lifestyles.” There were leads, of course. First there were the photos, released by the Albuquerque Police Department at the end of 2010, of seven women who cops believed could be linked to the West Mesa murders. Two of the women were later discovered to be alive, and one had apparently died of natural causes. Police have never said where the photos originated, or whether anything has come of the tip. Then there was Ron Erwin, a photographer from Joplin, Missouri, and a frequent visitor of the New Mexico State Fair, which is held near the burial site. But after confiscating hundreds of photos and documents from his home and businesses, police couldn’t tie him to the murders. (Erwin, rather obviously, later told a local newspaper that he was devastated by the serial-killer suspicions.) Later that year, George Walker, a private investigator, started receiving cryptic, taunting phone calls and emails from someone claiming to

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have information about the killer, but the lead still hasn’t panned out. Over the years, other names have popped up in the investigation—mostly local pimps and serial wife beaters, some dead or in jail—but nothing has stuck. “There’s a possibility the killer has come and gone. Serial killers move; that’s why they don’t get caught,” Walker said. “If he didn’t get caught, I’m sure there are more victims somewhere. He could possibly be on the loose in New Mexico or another state.” The investigation revealed the dark side of Albuquerque, a sleepy Southwestern city of half a million people, where the rate of violent crime is more than double the national average and where women of questionable morals can vanish into thin air without anyone giving a shit. In 2007, two years before the crime was uncovered, an Albuquerque reporter discovered that the city’s lone missing-persons detective had compiled names of 16 prostitutes who had disappeared in the city between 2001 and 2006—the first sign of a serial killer. But to the police, it seemed, it was nothing but a list of missing hookers. Eventually, nine of those women were identified at the West Mesa boneyard. The whereabouts of the other seven remain unknown, leaving open the question of whether the killer might have had other burial sites—and whether

he may still be out there, killing. “It’s logical that there may be more than one grave site,” said Gibson. “Albuquerque is filled with tons of these types of sites. If police discovered this one, which clearly had been discontinued, maybe there’s another one. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.” As shocking as the West Mesa serial killings are, they are also not unique. While the number of serial killings in the US has declined in recent decades, those that do occur disproportionately target women. According to FBI data released in 2011, 70 percent of serial-killer victims since 1985 have been women, mostly in their 20s or 30s. “The majority of victims of serial killers are what I call the less dead—as far as the public is concerned, they are less alive because they tend to be the marginalised groups in society—in this case drug addicts and prostitutes,” said Steven Egger, who teaches criminology at the University of Houston–Clear Lake, in Texas, and has consulted for the FBI. “There’s an attitude that permeates the press and the public that reduces pressure on police to solve the crime, at least initially, until you’ve got a number of victims.” Police in Albuquerque say that they are still investigating the West Mesa serial killings, known officially as the 118th Street Homicides. Detectives have given few details about the status of the investigation

in recent years, and a spokeswoman for the police department declined to comment for this story. The Albuquerque cops have also had their own internal problems to deal with: In late July, the city announced that the Department of Justice would monitor the Albuquerque Police Department, after a civil investigation found that a pattern of excessive use of force, including deadly force, by officers resulted in 20 fatalities between 2009 and 2012, and concluded that the majority of these shootings were unconstitutional. Albuquerque and New Mexico law enforcement officials have also been racked by sex scandals in recent years, including accusations that a state police officer and an Albuquerque police officer sexually assaulted prostitutes. In the absence of any official details or updates, though, everyone has his own theory about the West Mesa bone collector, ranging from dirty cops to drug gangs. Regardless of the answer, it seems that both the killer—or killers—and Albuquerque have moved on. “Albuquerqueans don’t relate to the victims; they think they’re just a bunch of hookers and drug addicts,” Gibson said. “Police budgets are stretched thin. There’s so little money, and there are so many crimes. Investigating a ten-yearold crime where the police think that the victims had it coming—there’s just no incentive for that.”

Police file photos of the 11 West Mesa victims Jamie Barela

Monica Candelaria

Victoria Chavez

Virginia Cloven

Syllania Edwards

Cinnamon Elks

Doreen Marquez

Julie Nieto

Veronica Romero

Evelyn Salazar

Michelle Valdez

Family members of Michelle Valdez grieve at a memorial site. Photo by Adolphe Pierre-Louis / Albuquerque Journal / AP

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DOs Every ginger twink has a tall, dark alpha in his past who broke him down and built him back up again and now has the privilege of sob-fucking him in the garage at parties. Sorry Kevin, but I don’t make the rules.

Everyone needs a friend who’s hit hard times and dresses up like an extra from Phantom of the Opera. People may make fun of him for smoking only imported tobacco he rolls in paper he makes himself, but when the shit goes down he’ll be backing you up, holding a gigantic knife no one knew he was carrying this whole time.

Hair by Out of Klonopin, makeup by Lord of the Flies, face by I Binge-Ate All the Food in Your Apartment While You Were Asleep so Now We’re Married.

First rule of Silk Tiger Dress Shirt Club: Tell everybody about Silk Tiger Dress Shirt Club.

The interior lives of the generic dirt bags who killed Charles Bronson’s daughter (or whatever they did) in the Death Wish movies were never sufficiently explored. What if some of them wanted to be artisans but the handmadelongboard market tanked and circumstances forced them into a life of crime?

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DON’Ts Old Polish men more or less know what’s up. You can catch them at your neighbourhood’s best dive 12 hours a day, smoking inside because it’s whatever and telling the same seven stories about their three decades on the force. But taking them up on a vacation offer is a rookie mistake. “Lake house” doesn’t mean what you think it means.

The blogging life isn’t for everyone. Fourteenhour days spent mining for shareable content on Reddit and Tumblr, scalding your callused hands on overheated laptops, typing through the pain of carpal-tunneled fingers, and still you can’t afford the finer things in life, like pajamas or your own bed.

This warehouse? Packed to the ceiling with vests and Speedos. A lot of people like to fill their warehouses with tires or lumber. Not me. This is my warehouse, and it’s filled with vests and Speedos as far as the eye can see.

Ugh, these postmodern white rap nerds. They’re all, “What set do I rep? There is no set. The set is an illusion, but I rep regardless.”

One cool way to show the girl you’re stalking that you love her is to tattoo her name and a cartoon of her first dead pet on your foot.

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DOs I call this facial hairstyle “Shave Everywhere My Boyfriend’s Taint Touches When We Play Chocolate Factory.”

Gender bending ain’t easy. It especially ain’t easy if you live with your stepdad, have never left Dumond, Iowa, and your only clothing-store options are Dressbarn and Champs.

The year after you pack your youngest off to college is a special time in your life as a father. With your children gone, you can finally pursue your interests, like installing a bar in what used to be the nursery, throwing let’s-break-in-thebutterfly-fuck-swing-we-just-bought parties with people you just met on Craigslist, and eating your wife’s brand-new tits 24/7.

The aloof-is-cool angle has been worked to death. If you’re going to seem like you don’t care about stuff these days, the bar is set at having a narcoleptic episode in the vicinity of a naked woman.

I legitimately don’t know whether to give this lady my spare change or sell all my belongings, build a shack in Christiania with her, and smoke resin together until we die.

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DON’Ts

This is what every public protest looks like to everyone who isn’t involved in it.

This is what I imagine the dudes who were on the swim team in high school are up to now. They ran out of sorta homophobic joke-song videos to watch on YouTube, discovered drugs, and invented a nighttime ball sport called Vigilante Wars.

Forget credit hours—you should get your art-school diploma whenever you start to look like you’re always one person smoking the wrong brand of cigarette away from an act of Carrie-style terrorism.

You know those architecture-porno-mag homes that are so beautifully austere you could never picture anyone actually living in them? That’s club culture: so trying-tobe-fuckable that it’s unfuckable.

Dogs are ostensibly great, but then you have to walk them two times a day, dress them in artisanal booties, listen to them talk and talk about how everyone is just a sack of blood with skin, blah, blah, blah, and now your kids won’t return your texts and people cross the street when they see you coming.

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00h:32m:29s Into the story This portrait captures a response to an on-screen moment created by NIDA graduates. Wolf Creek (2005)

NIDA Studios 6–12 month courses – Discover the power of performance

Apply now www.nida.edu.au/studios

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PHOTOS BY CURTIS BUCHANAN STYLING: MIYAKO BELLIZZI Creative Director: Annette Lamothe-Ramos Makeup: William Lemon Hair: Darine Sengseevong Photo Assistants: Robert Crozier, Viktor Saldana Stylistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Assistant: Synmia Nicholas Shoot Assistant: Bobby Viteri Models: Alex P., Brittany P., Fabianne T., Javeonna G., and Silke L. at Wilhelmina, Anjelina A., Page R., and Talea L. at Next

PREVIOUS SPREAD: Red Kap coveralls, Timberland boots THIS PAGE: Dickies top and pants, Uniqlo undershirt, Hue socks, Nike sneakers OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP: Bijules ring, Lady Grey ring, Maria Black ring BOTTOM: HUF sweatshirt, Champion sports bra, Dickies pants, vintage earrings, Bing Bang necklace; Lonely Hearts top, Champion pants, HUF socks, Maria Black necklace; Carhartt WIP top and pants, Calvin Klein shirt, vintage earrings; Mango sweater, Calvin Klein shirt and boxers, Stance socks, Adidas sneakers

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THIS PAGE, TOP: HUF top, Ruhi undershirt, Dickies pants, Vans sneakers, Lucy Folk earrings; Cheap Monday top, 6397 sweater, Dickies pants, Nike sneakers, Bing Bang earrings and necklace; Dickies top and pants, American Apparel undershirt, Reebok sneakers BOTTOM: Dickies top and pants, vintage earrings, Maria Black necklace; Base Range jacket, Dickies pants, Nike sneakers; Calvin Klein T-shirt, Dickies pants, Reebok sneakers; Dickies top and pants, Calvin Klein undershirt, Bing Bang earrings; Dickies top and pants, Rebecca Vallance undershirt; Dickies top and pants, HUF socks, Nike sneakers, Maria Black ring; Dickies top and pants, American Apparel undershirt, HUF hat, Pamela Love necklace OPPOSITE PAGE: Calvin Klein top, HUF pants, vintage earrings, Bing Bang necklace; Calvin Klein top, Lightning Bolt pants, Bing Bang earrings and necklace; Calvin Klein top, Goodlife pants, vintage earrings, Maria Black necklace; Dickies top and pants, American Apparel undershirt, Adidas sneakers, HUF hat; Dickies top and bottom, American Apparel undershirt, Nike sneakers, vintage earrings

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THIS PAGE: Uniqlo top, Dickies pants, Bing Bang earrings; Clu top, Maria Black necklace, Aoko Su earrings; Carhartt WIP jacket, Alternative Apparel sweatshirt; Dickies top, Goodlife pants, Adidas sneakers OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP: Dickies top BOTTOM: Dickies top and pants, American Apparel undershirt, Reebok sneakers; Dickies top and pants, Leviâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s undershirt, Nike sneakers, Lady Grey necklace, Aoko Su bracelet, Maria Black ring

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POSTMORTEM The Life and Deaths of a Medicolegal Death Investigator BY JOSEPH SCOTT MORGAN

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Blood, water, and wineâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;suicide on a balcony. All photos by the author

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still remember the ﬁrst time I smelled brain. It was my grandfather, cracking open the skulls of squirrels he’d killed. They’d scamper down the sides of pecans and live oaks among the Louisiana timbers where I grew up, enter his sights—then, oblivion. I was very small then, so it never seemed odd when those brains found their way into the scrambled eggs my grandmother would cook up for Papaw. When I was there I’d have some too. The matter of tree rats adds a certain sweetness generally absent from an otherwise bland backwoods diet.

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hen I was older, and working in the morgue, the scent would hang in my nostrils for days. Maybe it was the acrid combination of blood and cerebral spinal fluid. The smell of souls. I vividly remember the last time I smelled brain. It was July 2004, and I was peering up at the underside of a Camry. I lay on my back considering the strata of accumulated road filth, spots of tar, and oil coating the wheel wells, tires, and front axle. Wedged among the dark-speckled tapestry were brilliant arrays of pink and grey. They had accumulated in little globs that organically glistened among the machinery. Some hung like stalactites, their tips pointing at my nose. Others were smeared here and there—evidence of something brutal and violent. These particular bits of brain belonged to a 23-month-old child. Earlier that day, his mother had dropped him off at his grandmother’s house. As she pulled out of the driveway, the child ran back, perhaps to say goodbye to his momma one last time. She would later recount the slight bump she felt as she turned the wheel and drove away. Obviously she had no idea that bump was her son’s skull being crushed between a tire and the outstretched roots of a pine tree. She continued on, unknowingly spraying her son’s brains across the underside of her car. When I arrived on the scene, the paramedics had already shot her up with Ativan. She had been whirling about, slamming her head into the pavement, screaming and tearing at her blouse. In the context of morbidity, one could say that she finally had a true purpose. Bile burned in her throat. Maybe for the first time in a while she felt aware of her flesh, tingling with fear, the nausea causing vomit to rise from her gut. I can tell you from more than 30 years of experience that this is the sort of awakening that death investigators witness daily. It is part of our job to watch humans as they awake from the illusion of happiness, ripped from their mundane existence by the ferocity of death. When this inevitable reality finally punches them in the face, it plunges many of these people into madness. On my second date with my wife, she quipped, “I never thought about death till I met you.” In my view, death is the fart of an old person that’s politely ignored. One that most folks don’t turn into their profession. For my colleagues and me, death is a siren song. One with crescendos of blood, maggots, trauma, and screams that, for whatever reason, lure us in.

’ve spent most of my life employed as a medicolegal death investigator. My career began at a coroner’s office in New Orleans, and it concluded more than three decades later following my tenure as a senior investigator with the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office in Atlanta. During that time, I participated in 7,000 forensic autopsies and completed more than 2,000 next-of-kin death notifications. Eventually, the stress was just too much, and in 2005 I was forced to retire after suffering from crippling anxiety and PTSD. I have investigated all manners of deaths: homicides, suicides, and accidents—both natural and inexplicable. My job was to understand the various mechanisms that end people. I had no interest in convictions or those who were arrested or who got away with murder. That was the cops’ problem. I was just the nosy geek who dug around crime scenes. The answers that I sought were, while many times salacious, much more complex than an investigation into the drive-by shooting of a crack dealer.

I had three main tools to arrive at my answers: autopsy, toxicology, and microscopic tissue examination. When these assets are combined with an investigator who understands forensic applications, the right questions to ask, and how to integrate the information collected in the field with physical findings in the lab, they become highly effective methods of solving complex questions. On first hearing what I did for a living, most people’s reaction was to open up about their deepest fears of death: “I don’t want you to see me naked in the morgue!” I assure you that after the last breath leaves your nostrils, your lack of toned abs, penis length, or cup size is the last thing you should be concerned about. Your death is a “golden ticket” for various types of voyeurs and sociopaths carrying a badge. We have backstage passes for things you never wanted anyone to know and can no longer defend. We stand over your remains, shaking our heads over pathetic suicide notes, snickering at your taste in porn or the medication you failed to take before you became the dead. We judge you because you happened to die on our watch. It’s our job, and I bet you make fun of and bitch about a lot of people at your workplace too.

OPPOSITE PAGE: The author teaches his students that we all become furniture after we die, subject to the same environmental changes an old bed or chair is. THIS PAGE: An atypical suicide: The victim used a power cord.

Many death investigators hold the dead in contempt. The stories the dead tell are always slightly different, but they all end the same, and the investigators are often the only ones who bother to read them. I learned early on that it was fruitless for me to care about the dead, for they are unaware. They are meat that used to have a pulse. I couldn’t care less about the families whose lives I destroyed with bad news about their expired love ones, because I had no more room in my head for screams and hysteria. But somehow I did not become unhinged. What kept me nailed to the floor was the science behind it all. The “How” never accused you of failing the dead; it never

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writhed in pain from the reality of the finality of absence. It was simply a mechanism. Most folks, by way of their own vanity, never realise that who they are, what happens to them, or where they are will never really matter to a seasoned death investigator. If we focused on that, we wouldn’t last a year on the job. Focusing on the particulars in a cold and calculating way provides the intellectual stimulation that allows us to slog on. Ironically, a death investigator comes to terms with the fact that, for most of us, the “How” is the coping mechanism we use to survive. Anything more macro will have you deepthroating a pistol in no time. THIS PAGE: The painted toenails of a decomposing body

nvestigating death, of course, raises existential questions of morality and mortality. And there is one question that is more prevalent than the rest: Of the seven deadly sins, which best sums up the ills and follies of mankind? If researchers were to gather a group of crime-scene investigators, medical-examiner investigators, homicide detectives, and other forensic practitioners into a room and pose this simple question, I believe the vote would tally squarely on gluttony. Not in the sense of Falstaff drowning in a tankard of ale, or of engorgement on lamb hocks, but rather the gluttony of daily life. Most of us live like starving hounds, sitting

OPPOSITE PAGE: The victim was lured into a car and stabbed more than 20 times.

them into my mouth with hands still dusted with talcum powder from the exam gloves. The soothing wash of food, alcohol, and self-love would last until the next call, or until the next vision of destroyed humans entered my mind’s eye. When I started my career, working for the coroner’s office in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, death investigators were required to assist in autopsies. “Assist” kind of cleans it up a bit. The process demands little to no formal training, just simple application of the “cold steel” wherever the forensic pathologist tells you. After a time, doing autopsies feels like making biscuits: Turn the lights on, take the dough out of the refrigerator, roll it out, cut it up. In fact, it’s more like butchery. You use only the sharpest instruments to cut up corpses—“tongue to nuts,” as we called it. I was good at it. My fastest time was less than four minutes. It’s a curious thing to slice through somebody’s chest, using limb shears to remove the ribs and sternum. At first all bodies looked the same, but the more I gutted, the better I became at interpreting what I was seeing: bullets tracking through the bowels, rebar entering the eye and settling in the brain, hearts the size of Christmas hams, women with fake tits accentuated by bellies full of pills. Death scenes are no different. Everyone thinks he’s mommy’s little angel, but in death you’re nothing. Bodies lie lifeless before the investigator like crushed roaches or deer struck by cars. As an investigator, you look for evidence. You slouch through the motions. Sometimes you take the work seriously; at other times you barely meet the baseline. The general population views death investigators as heroes who seek justice, caring for the dead as if they were relatives. Wake up. It’s like church and Hollywood—a false front. Every now and then something stirs in you, but most of the time it’s mental masturbation with no happy ending. There are always more bodies calling for your attention. t was hot and humid when I arrived at the Texas Inn on Airline Highway in New Orleans. This strip was once infamous as a haunt for mob figures, but it’s always been a home for pimps and sore-laden whores, scratching themselves, unable to focus on my questions. During my tenure in New Orleans, any number of homicides, overdoses, and suicides happened in the “no-tell motels” along Airline. The rooms were always dirty, with an unknown black substance caked into the carpet like Silly Putty shit out by a monkey with dysentery. These spots clutched at your feet like a vile form of quicksand. As I entered the motel room, a man in his late 50s with saltand-pepper hair lay naked on the floor, purple from the nipple line to the top of his head. His tongue protruded, clenched between his teeth, and his eyes seemed like they were about to pop out of his skull. A rubber rested loosely over his now flaccid penis, which was surrounded by crusty pubic hair, and his body lay in a puddle of liquid feces. Witnesses and the desk clerk told me that a local lady who regularly sold her body to pay for crack was seen running from the room in only a denim miniskirt, her breasts exposed, screaming. This kind of scene is not uncommon. Prostitutes often have disagreements with their johns. When we spoke to her and examined the body, nothing pointed to signs of trauma. The room was as ordered as any other room in that hellhole could be. I interviewed the prostitute in the manager’s office as she trembled and chain-smoked Virginia Slims. Her shoulders were draped by a sheet that hung over her stained denim skirt and black flip-flops, which used to be pink. She told us that

and slobbering at the backdoor of life, waiting for slop to be delivered by our master. I am chief among sinners. In my years as a death investigator, death owned me. It’s all I thought about. I lived in fear that I would die at any moment and numbed myself through chronic masturbation and food. It wasn’t uncommon for me to leave a scene stinking of decomposing bodies and race to the Burger King drive-through to order two Triple Whoppers with cheese, rushing home to slather on more mayonnaise before forcing

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Your death is a â&#x20AC;&#x153;golden ticketâ&#x20AC;? for various types of voyeurs and sociopaths carrying a badge. We have backstage passes for things you never wanted anyone to know and can no longer defend. We stand over your remains, shaking our heads over pathetic suicide notes, snickering at your taste in porn or the medication you failed to take before you became the dead.

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By the time I get to you, you’ll have died at one of three places: at the scene, on the way to the ER, or in the hospital. The chances that the last words you hear will be “I love you” are inﬁnitesimally low. Most people die with the hollow dinging of hospital equipment ringing in their ears, if not the screaming of sirens, blasts of gunﬁre, crunching of metal, or crackle of radios.

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the bald man had picked her up at least twice a week for the past month, and one time he’d paid for an entire day, a point she seemed particularly proud of. Still, she begged me not to take her back to jail. “Look,” I told her, “if you did nothing wrong, nobody is going to jail.” On this particular day, the bald man had picked her up on the street behind the Texas Inn, telling her he didn’t have much time. She paid for the room, and when they got the key and entered the room, he started rubbing her all over. I sat there, like so many other times before, listening to what many would find prurient. By this time in my career I was far from being interested in the goings-on at any of these motels—it all seemed to be on a loop, and I struggled to concentrate on the details. She told me how she’d put the condom in place with her special technique, which, according to her, involved her nose and teeth. When she got on top of him, his face was red and he was sweating. He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her down, coughing loudly and spitting into her face. Then his tongue stuck out and he started straining and farting, and she ran out of the room. The man, as it turned out, had suffered a heart attack. The autopsy later revealed that two major arteries were blocked. It’s not uncommon for men to go into cardiac arrest during the throes of intercourse, or even while rubbing one out—no surprises here. But as usual, it fell upon me to track down the next of kin to deliver the news of his death, so my partner and I drove to the address listed on his license. The home was located in a neat little neighbourhood in suburban New Orleans. Like many of the homes in this distinctly Catholic city, religious iconography lined the yard—a shrine to the Blessed Virgin on the left and a shrine to the Sacred Heart on the right. My colleague, who was usually hungover or still drunk, climbed the steps behind me. As I knocked on the door and pulled out my coroner’s badge, I heard the footsteps coming toward us. The bald man’s wife stood there, maybe five feet tall, with dyed black hair and pink terry cloth slippers. I introduced myself. My partner said nothing. I felt my stomach seizing up on me, as it always did. Next-of-kin notifications are usually filled with horror for the family and are always potentially dangerous. I hated doing them. She let us in without saying a word, and just as I was about to impale her with the news of her husband’s death, she looked at me and said, “He’s dead, ain’t he?” Pope John Paul II stared at me from his position on the wall. I stood there for a moment, stunned, not knowing what to make of her. Many people said the same thing when they saw my badge, but her tone put me on my heels. “Ma’am,” I said, “I need you to sit down.” She didn’t sit. “He was with a whore, wasn’t he?” My jaw dropped. “Ma’am,” I tried again, “please sit down.” She sat on her plastic-wrapped couch, her knees slightly spread, hands fisted at her side, leaning forward on her toes. “Your husband is dead.” She vaulted into the air, shouting, “You mean to tell me I’m off my cross in this life? He’s burning in hell! Hallelujah! God has heard my prayers and delivered me! Do you know how many years I’ve waited for this? Praise God! I couldn’t divorce him, but God heard my prayers and delivered me!” She asked me again if he’d been with a whore when he died, and I told her he was with a lady at a motel down on Airline. “A whore! I knew it!” She danced around the living room,

offering praise to the Heavenly Father. Before I left, I told her where the body would be, and that she’d need to make arrangements with the local funeral home. I handed her my card and walked out of the house toward my car. She stood in the doorway, smiling and waving. That kind of marked me as an investigator. It was the only time I had brought someone pure joy. Joy, not closure, a word I despise. It was surreal. Four weeks later my secretary handed me a gold-embossed envelope addressed to me in beautiful calligraphy. It’s not uncommon for death investigators to receive thank-you cards, but this one was different. It was an invitation to a party, called “A Celebration of Death.” The wife was past her mourning stage and wanted the world to know she was off her cross. I didn’t attend, but I can’t help myself from smiling when I think back on it. y the time I get to you, you’ll have died at one of three places: at the scene, on the way to the ER, or in the hospital. The chances that the last words you hear will be “I love you” are infinitesimally low. Most people die with the hollow dinging of hospital equipment ringing in their ears, if not the screaming of sirens, blasts of gunfire, crunching of metal, or crackle of radios.

OPPOSITE PAGE: This is what happens when you and three of your friends are left in a van for two months after being executed. Death investigators call it “skin slippage.” THIS PAGE: The author takes a reflection selfie while investigating a rape, torture, and homicide.

If you die on the scene, or in the ambulance, your spirit will pass from you on some county or federal roadway, floating over the roofs of Cracker Barrels and Jiffy Lubes. If you survive the trip to the hospital, your last thoughts will be of sliding through sci-fi double doors—no control, strapped to a gurney with strange hands touching you and pushing those who care for you away. After the machines are turned off, the IVs will be removed, your pockets will be emptied, and you’ll be stuffed into a black

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Solving mysteries wears thin after a while, at least it did for me. Nothing that I ever did as an investigator ever stopped people from killing one another or themselves. Humans rarely, if ever, learn from the choices of others. All that is left is the memory of bloated forgotten men and women, tortured children, and screams.

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plastic “morgue pack” so some kid working his way through college can push what’s left of you down a hall. He’ll bump you into walls, wave at the nurse he wants to screw, wonder whether it’s time to eat. He’ll wheel you into the morgue, struggling with the door, since there will be no one there to help him. By now, no one will be interested in you anymore, not even the housekeeper cleaning your blood from the floor of the ER. What’s the point? she’ll think as she wrings your blood into a mop bucket. Them folks are just gonna mess it up again. The young student will grab your feet and swing you onto the cooler’s stainless steel tray. This is the hard part. He has to get your upper body into the tray. Sometimes he forgets to lock the wheels on the gurney, or other times he’s too stoned, so your body may fall off and hit the floor. After brawling with your body long enough to get you on the tray, your weight will pinch his hand between the tray and your shoulder, and the last words that bounce off your eardrums will be a muffled “piece of shit” before you’re slammed into the pod. Despite the cold, your decay begins. If it is deemed necessary, the medical examiner will claim your remains and take a look at you. A pathologist I once knew referred to this process as “making human canoes.” The law sometimes demands it, families request it, and pathologists need it as justification for their jobs. Your body will be measured, weighed, opened, and split. Portions of your organs will be kept in what look like Cool Whip containers, the rest thrown into plastic trash bags and eventually stuffed back into your chest cavity. Your torso will then be sewn up with stitches that look like baseball seams. If your family cares, maybe you’ll be claimed. Eventually, you’ll be moved to an elegantly adorned “home” built on the profits from the dead. Your next of kin will sit on expensively covered sofas and chairs, weeping. Funeral directors, morticians, and undertakers will speak in a tone and cadence that will set the mood for crying. Hushed and still, lacking swiftness in movement, but all with a specific purpose, they’ll press their scripted pitch to those still in shock. The air will be pumped with peaceful music. While the preacher is arranged and payments are made, you’ll be in the back room. Your blood will be drained out and replaced with sickly-sweet-smelling fluids, and your mouth will be wired shut. Our dead are prepared and hauled off to eternity by those who never knew them, and years later families say they are still seeking “closure.” Ultimately, we have institutionalised our very beginnings as well as our ends. All that remains of our start in this life is images from a camera operated by someone who in times past would have been warming a blanket, swabbing a sweaty brow, or cutting a cord. As the dead bid a final fare-thee-well, they are honored with PowerPoint presentations set to music we think they liked. It all seems as cheap and pointless as Mardi Gras beads. he old adage among death investigators is, “We speak for those who can no longer speak for themselves.” Do the dead really wish to be spoken for? That statement neatly ties things up and makes it easier for us as a people to ignore death and the bigger questions we may have about life. Solving mysteries wears thin after a while, at least it did for me. Nothing that I ever did as an investigator stopped people from killing one another or themselves; I just kept answering the same questions. Humans rarely, if ever, learn from the choices of

others. All that is left is the memory of bloated forgotten men and women, tortured children, and screams. A few years back I was in charge of an undergraduate student from Tulane University who had been selected for a summer internship at the Medical Examiner’s Office in Atlanta. She was majoring in physical anthropology and, per our telephone interview, really knew her stuff regarding forensics. My colleagues and I felt that she would be a good fit. Summer is the height of decomp season, and with the heat comes an increased weekly flow of bloated carcasses. If a student is going to make it as a practitioner, this is a great test. These internships are highly competitive, and we had to be selective. The student arrived at the start of the day shift, 6:30 AM. When she walked into the investigative area, the three of us, drinking our coffee, couldn’t but stare. Two or three skull necklaces hung from her neck. Spikes jutted out from bracelets on both wrists. She wore a cut-off Misfits T-shirt, revealing a paper-white stomach and navel adorned with shiny piercings. Around her waist was a grey-and-black plaid miniskirt and some kind of black leather belt with a buckle in the shape of a revolver. Without extending her hand, she introduced herself and wanted to know whether we had any autopsies she could attend that day.

THIS PAGE: Another crimescene selfie, taken by the author at the site of a driveby shooting OPPOSITE PAGE: Happy Dalmatian, unhappy man. He killed himself in the kid’s toy room.

Of course, being the brutally honest investigators that we were, we collectively said, “Not dressed like that.” All we thought about was death, all day, every day. But we avoided connotations of morbidity, fearful that notified family members would view us as the Angels of Death. Our staff giggled as we sent her home to change. I teach college now, and from time to time I see a student walking around campus, nails painted black, hair dyed black, skin as white as ivory, begging to experience death. I smile and think to myself, Glad it’s not me who has to notify the parents.

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My Time with Charles Sobhraj, the Bikini Killer

Collage by Matthew Leifheit

BY GARY INDIANA

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ne night in the winter of 1983, shortly before I left for Bangkok to work on a movie, a friend told me about a serial murderer known as the “Bikini Killer,” a handsome, charismatic occasional gem thief named Charles Sobhraj who had operated out of Thailand in the early 1970s. My friend had known a Formentera couple, smuggling heroin in relays from South Asia, who had been separately lured to their deaths. They were two of many Western tourists Sobhraj had snuffed out on the so-called Hippie Trail. This path stretched from Europe through southern Asia, trekked by Western dropouts as they smoked grass and connected with the locals. Sobhraj would fleece these spiritually thirsty wanderers of any money they had, contemptuous of what he considered their loose morals. Production delays in Bangkok left me to my own devices for several weeks. It was a disorienting, smelly, traffic-crazy, scary city full of begging monks, teenage gangs, motorcycles, temples, murderous pimps, terrifying prostitutes, sleaze bars, strip joints, street vendors, colonies of homeless people, and mind-boggling poverty. After discovering that Captagon, a powerful amphetamine, was sold over the counter, I sat at my rented manual typewriter for 12 or 14 hours at a stretch, churning out poems, journal entries, stories, and letters to friends. The drug helped the writing along. After a speed binge I knocked myself out with Mekhong, a virulent whiskey said to contain 10 percent formaldehyde and rumored to cause brain damage. At dinner parties with British and French expats who’d lived in Thailand since the Tet Offensive, I picked up more rumors about Sobhraj. He spoke seven languages. He’d escaped from prisons in five countries. He had passed himself off as an Israeli scholar, a Lebanese textile merchant, and a thousand other things while trawling southern Asia for tourist victims as a drug-and-rob man. People he befriended over drinks woke up hours later in hotel rooms or moving trains, minus their passports, cash, cameras, and other valuables. In Bangkok, things had taken a grim turn. Sobhraj had made himself an object of passion to a Canadian medical secretary he met in Rhodes, Greece—a woman named Marie-Andrée Leclerc, who was vacationing with her fiancé. Leclerc quit her job, dumped her fiancé, and flew to Bangkok to join Sobhraj. Upon her arrival, he ordered her to pose as his secretary or his wife, as occasion demanded. Sobhraj rarely fucked her, much to her chagrin, and only when her common sense threatened to overpower her florid romantic fantasies. They traveled up and down the countryside, drugging tourists, taking them in a semi-comatose condition to a spare apartment Sobhraj rented. He convinced them that the local doctors were dangerous quacks and that his wife, a registered nurse, would soon have them in the pink of health. Sometimes he kept them sick for weeks, Leclerc administering a “medicinal drink” consisting of laxatives,

O Charles Sobhraj and Marie-Andrée Leclerc in 1986. Photo by REX USA

ipecac, and Quaaludes, rendering them incontinent, nauseated, lethargic, and confused, while Sobhraj doctored their passports and used them to cross borders, spend their cash, and fence their valuables. In 1975, he met an Indian boy named Ajay Chowdhury in a park. Chowdhury moved in with Leclerc and Sobhraj, and the two men commenced murdering certain “guests.” The “Bikini Killings” were especially gruesome, unlike any of Sobhraj’s previous crimes. Victims were drugged, driven to remote areas, then clubbed with boards, doused with gasoline and burned alive, stabbed repeatedly before their throats were slit, or half-strangled and dragged, still breathing, into the sea. Sobhraj had killed people before, with accidental overdoses. But the Bikini Killings were different. They were carefully planned and uncharacteristically inelegant. They occurred over a strangely compressed period between 1975 and 1976, like a fit of rage that lasted several months and then mysteriously stopped. Sobhraj and Chowdhury slaughtered people in Thailand, India, Nepal, and Malaysia. It isn’t known how many: at least eight, including two incineration homicides in Kathmandu and a forcible bathtub drowning in Kolkata. Sobhraj was finally arrested in 1976 in New Delhi, after drugging a group of French engineering students at a banquet in the Hotel Vikram. He tricked them into taking “anti-dysentery capsules,” which many swallowed on the spot, becoming violently sick minutes later. The hotel desk clerk, alarmed by 20 or more people vomiting all over the dining room, called the police. Entirely by chance, the officer who showed up at the Vikram was the only policeman in India who could reliably identify Sobhraj, from the scar of an appendectomy performed years earlier in a prison hospital. Tried in New Delhi for a long menu of crimes, including murder, Sobhraj was convicted only on smaller charges— enough, it was assumed, to ensure his removal from society for many years. In Bangkok, sleepless from speed, I began to suspect that Sobhraj wasn’t really incarcerated in an Indian prison as the papers reported. I was paranoid enough to think that since I was thinking of him, he was likewise thinking of me. I dreamed of him in the rare hours that I slept, picturing his lithe, lethal fi gure in a black body stocking, crawling inside air ducts and ventilation shafts in my building, like Irma Vep. n 1986, after ten years in prison, Sobhraj broke out of New Delhi’s Tihar Jail, helped by fellow inmates and a gang he’d assembled on the outside. He escaped by drugging an entire guardhouse with a festive gift of doped fruit, pastries, and a birthday cake. India, which had no extradition treaty with Thailand when Sobhraj was arrested in 1976, had agreed to honor a special extradition order after he’d served his time in India—a non-renewable order valid for 20 years. Thailand had evidence of six first-degree murders. The Bikini Killings had ruined the tourist industry for several

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seasons, and Sobhraj had made fools of the Bangkok police. It was widely believed that if he were extradited he’d be shot getting off the plane. He fled from Delhi to Goa. He buzzed around Goa on a pink motorcycle, in a series of absurd disguises. Eventually, he was seized in O’Coqueiro restaurant, while using the telephone. The whole purpose of the escape had been to get arrested and be given more prison time for escaping—just enough to exceed the Thai extradition order’s expiration date. After years of sporadic interest in Sobhraj, I wanted to meet him. So in 1996 I proposed an article about him to Spin. I didn’t particularly want to write an article, especially not for a glorified version of Tiger Beat, but they were willing to pay, so I went. I first contacted Richard Neville, who had spent a lot of time with Sobhraj when he was on trial in New Delhi. Neville had written a book, The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj, and now lived in a remote part of Australia. He still had nightmares about Sobhraj. “You should go and satisfy your obscene curiosity,” he told me, “and then get as far away from that person as possible—and never, ever have anything to do with him again.” When I arrived in New Delhi, Sobhraj’s ten-year sentence for the jailbreak was about to expire, along with the extradition order. I moved into a cheap hotel owned by a friend of a friend. I often hung out at the Press Club of India in Connaught Place, a favorite dive of journalists from all over the country. The club resembled the lobby of a Bowery flophouse circa 1960. Plates of Spanish peanuts fried in chilies, the only edible item on the menu, came free with the drinks. Lining the walls were shrinelike portraits of journalists who, after leaving the Press Club dead drunk, had been run over in traffic. My new colleagues were full of lurid Sobhraj anecdotes— tales of his friendships with jailed politicians and industrialists, of fabulous sums he’d been offered for movie rights to his story. A Hindustan Times correspondent assured me I’d never get in to see him. Sobhraj had been quarantined from the press, and the lavish privileges he’d once enjoyed in Tihar Jail had been cut off when the new warden took over. he new warden was Kiran Bedi, a legend of Indian law enforcement. A former tennis champion, she became the first Indian policewoman. She was an outspoken feminist and, paradoxically, an avid supporter of the rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party. Fanatically incorruptible in a richly corrupt police force, she had been given numerous “punishment postings” to discourage her, but she applied such literal-minded zeal to her jobs—ordering state ministers’ illegally parked cars towed away, for example—that she became a national hero her bosses couldn’t get rid of. Before Bedi’s arrival, Tihar had been known as the worst prison in India, which is saying something. Bedi flipped her penalty assignment into another PR triumph, transforming Tihar into a rehabilitative ashram, introducing an inflexible regimen of morning meditation, vocational training, and yoga classes. I sat for hours one morning in the prison administration hall, near a vitrine of confiscated weapons. Listless soldiers passed through, yawning and scratching their balls. An excited

The victims were drugged, driven to remote areas, then clubbed with boards, doused with gasoline and burned alive, stabbed repeatedly before their throats were slit, or dragged into the sea.

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I had speculated that Sobhraj’s Bikini Killings were a twisted, homoerotic death ritual triggered by amphetamine psychosis. I wanted to suggest this to the Bombay police, but I was on speed myself.

group of ladies arrived, some in pantsuits, some in saris, surrounding a short figure in blinding-white plus fours, with a butch haircut and a bunched fist of a face. This was Bedi. On advice from friends at the Press Club, I told her I wanted to write a profile of her for a New York magazine. It took only moments in her presence to sense the immensity of both her ego and her shrewdness. I was welcome to spend time at the prison, she said. But if I planned on speaking to Sobhraj, I could forget about it. She would endanger her job if she let the press talk to him. Whether or not that was true, I felt certain she intended to be the only celebrity on the premises. I asked how Sobhraj was. “Charles has changed!” she declared in the birdlike, pattering accent of Indian English. “Through meditation! He will work with Mother Teresa when he is released! No one can see him now—he is rehabilitated!” In the next breath, she suggested I remain in India for several months. I could live very nicely there, she said, if I agreed to ghostwrite her autobiography. This seemed bizarre. Before I could breathe, I was hustled outside and packed into a bulbous automobile that sped along the inside perimeter wall enclosing the four separate jails of Tihar, an enormous

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complex with many open spaces, resembling a little city. We arrived at a reviewing stand, where I was ushered to the end of a row of dignitaries in formal dress. Below us, 2,000 prisoners sat in the lotus position, many festooned with smeary coloured powder. I had no idea what I was doing there, in torn jeans and a Marc Bolan T-shirt. Bedi’s speech was a celebration of Holi, a Hindu religious festival encouraging love, forgiveness, and laughter. And smeary coloured powder. After the ceremony we returned to the office. Bedi announced she was leaving for a conference in Europe the next day for several weeks. Eager for me, her new biographer, to get the full effect of the Tihar ashram, she scribbled a laissezpasser to all four jails on some scrap paper. I was in. Sort of. very morning for three weeks, I inched toward Tihar Jail in a cab edging through unexcitable crowds and confused traffic, skirting elephants and ashen, starving cows. Everything shimmered in the appalling heat. We passed the Red Fort, the air greasy with yellow smog and the black smoke of gasoline fires. Beggars squatted in the marshes beside the road, candidly shitting as they watched the traffic. My laissez-passer was inspected every morning—with the same doubtful scrutiny—in a cavernous security buffer between two immense iron gates. Each day, the ranking officer assigned me a minder for the day, and I tried to bend things in favor of the youngest guards, who were the most relaxed and permissive, often abandoning me while they ambled off to smoke and chat with friends. They showed me anything in Tihar I cared to see— vegetable gardens; yoga classes; computer classes; shrines to Shiva and Vishnu covered in daffodils and hibiscus; dormitory cells carpeted in prayer mats; loose circles of chattering women bent over looms; a bakery full of barefoot men of all ages, in diaper-like shorts, shoveling dough into industrial ovens. I met Nigerians accused of drug trafficking; Kashmiris accused of terror bombings; Australians accused of manslaughter; accused people who had languished in prison for years, still waiting for a trial date—Indian “undertrials” often serve a full term for the crimes they’re charged with before they’re even tried, and if they’re acquitted they get no compensation for false imprisonment. I saw everything but Sobhraj. Nobody could tell me where he was. But one afternoon, after three weeks of daylong visits, I got lucky: I had a toothache. My minder took me to the prison dentist, in a little wooden house with 30 or so men lined up outside, waiting for typhoid vaccinations. My minder distracted himself talking to a nurse on the veranda while she stabbed the same needle into one arm after another. I asked the men in the queue whether anyone could take a message to Sobhraj, and a Nigerian wearing a glowing beaded necklace took my notebook and sprinted off, returning after my dentist’s appointment. My face was numb with Novocain as he slipped a folded paper into the pocket of my orange kurti. I opened it hours later, as the young warden of Prison 3 brought me back to my hotel on his motorcycle. Sobhraj

had written the name and phone number of his lawyer with instructions to call him that evening. On the phone, I was told to meet the lawyer at exactly nine the next morning, at his office in the Tis Hazari courthouse. The Tis Harazi courthouse was a thing of wonder, sprung from the brow of William S. Burroughs. A Leviathan in maroon stucco, with an ocean of litigants, beggars, water sellers, and various weird forms of humanity surging outside. At one end of the building an overturned bus, charred inside and out, housed a large family of vicious monkeys, excitedly ripping excelsior out of the split seats, shrieking and lunging and hurling feces at passersby. A shallow ravine separated the courthouse grounds from a labyrinthine mesa of squat cement bunkers that served as lawyers’ offices. The lawyer was a boneless-looking man of unguessable age, with dusky skin and Aryan features. He told me to leave my camera behind. We walked over to the court, through the crowds, and up some stairs to a dim, boxy courtroom. I recognised Sobhraj in a queue of plaintiffs, one by one approaching the bench of a bilious Sikh judge in a bright yellow turban who thoughtfully swigged from a bottle of Coca-Cola. The lawyer introduced us.

Sobhraj being led to Tihar Jail in New Delhi in April 1977. Photo by REX USA

obhraj was shorter than I expected. He had a sporty beret tilted on his salt-and-pepper hair. A white shirt with blue pinstripes, dark blue trousers, Nike sneakers. Slight, though whatever weight he put on obviously went straight to his ass. He wore rimless glasses that made his eyes enormous and damp-looking, the eyes of some blubbery undersea mammal. His face suggested a somewhat crumbling boulevard actor formerly noted for his beauty. It passed through a morphology of “friendly” expressions. I avoided his eyes and stared into his mouth. Behind his fleshy lips, he had wildly irregular, jagged bottom teeth, vaguely suggesting the maw of a predatory amphibian. I decided I was reading too much into his mouth and focused on his nose, which was more pleasantly formed. He was waiting to plead his side of some trivial litigation of a type he was always initiating, mainly to get out of jail for a day and make a splash in the local papers. “You need to wait outside” were the first words he said to me. “The lawyer will show you.” He walked me to a spot under a high rectangular window in the courthouse facade. Half an hour later, Sobhraj’s face appeared in the window, framed against an unlighted holding cell. Before I could say anything, he peppered me with questions about myself: who was I, where did I come from, where did I go to university, what sort of books did I write, where did I live, how long would I be in India, a virtual Niagara of ferreting questions about my political attitudes, my religion if any, my favorite music, my sexual practices. I lied about everything. “Where are you staying in New Delhi?” he asked me. I mumbled something about the Oberoi Hotel. “A-ha,” Sobhraj snapped. “The lawyer told me you called him from a hotel in Channa Market.” “That’s true, but I’m moving to the Oberoi. Maybe tonight!” I said emphatically. I was suddenly striken with

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Sobhraj reading about himself in a French newspaper upon his arrival in Paris in April 1997. Photo by REX USA

the thought of one of Sobhraj’s minions, of which there were always many on the outside, paying me a surprise visit and involving me in some innocent-sounding scheme that would land me in jail without any laissez-passer. Out of nowhere: “Maybe you could work with me writing my life story for the movies.” Something that felt the size of a peach pit suddenly clogged my throat as I told him I’d only be in India for a few weeks. “I mean later. After I am out. You can come back.” I felt relieved when an irritating, gawky journalist cantered up to the window and interrupted, even though I was bribing Sobhraj’s guards every 15 minutes for the privilege of talking to him. A bit later, Sobhraj emerged from the lockup, manacled by his wrists and ankles and chained to a soldier lurching behind him. He had some other business at the distant end of the courthouse. I was permitted to walk beside him, or rather, he told me to, without meeting any objection from his guards. We walked inside a ring of army personnel, with submachine guns pointed at both of us. Other prisoners with court business simply walked hand in hand with their unarmed escorts, but Sobhraj was special. He was a serial killer, and a major celebrity. People rushed through the cordon sanitaire to beg for his autograph. “Now,” I asked him as we walked, “before Kiran Bedi took over the prison, people said you were really in charge of the place.” “Did she tell you I’m writing a book?” he snapped. “About her?” “She mentioned something. I don’t remember exactly.” “I am a writer. Like you. In jail there is not much to do. Reading, writing. I like very much Friedrich Nietzsche.” “Oh, yes. The Superman. Zarathustra.” “Yes, exactly. I have the philosophy of the Superman. He is like me, with no use for bourgeois morality.” Sobhraj bent down, clanking his chains, to pull up a pant leg. “This is how I ran the prison. Do you know about those little micro-recorders? I would tape them to myself here, you see. And under my sleeves. I got the guards talking about taking bribes, bringing prostitutes into the jail.” He showed me some papers scrunched in a plasticine wallet he’d been carrying in his shirt pocket. “These are papers for a Mercedes I will turn in here,” he said, pointing at the open door of the office. “It applies against my bail. When I leave Tihar, I have to give them some money.” “By leave, you mean—” “When I leave to work with Mother Teresa.” Yikes. “I need to ask you something, Charles,” I repeated, as firmly as I could. In the course of our conversation (of which this is only the gist) I noted that Sobhraj had made a sort of mental collage of everything I’d told him earlier about myself, and was feeding parts of it back to me, with various plausible modifications, as revelations about himself. It’s a standard technique of sociopaths. “Would you like my autograph as well?” “No, I’d like to know why you murdered all those people in Thailand.”

Far from the shattering effect I had hoped for, Sobhraj smiled at some private joke and began cleaning his glasses with his shirt. “I never murdered anybody.” “What about Stephanie Parry? Vitali Hakim? Those kids in Nepal?” On a Christmas holiday vacation, Sobhraj and Chowdhury, Leclerc in tow, had found time to incinerate two backpackers in Kathmandu. “Now you are speaking about drug addicts.” “You didn’t kill them?” “They may have been…” He searched for the proper word. “Uh, liquidated by a syndicate, for dealing heroin.” “Are you the syndicate?” “I am one person. A syndicate has many people.” “But you already told Richard Neville that you killed those people. I don’t want to offend you, but I want to know why you killed them.” “I just told you.” I felt time slipping away. I didn’t consider it prudent to see this person again, and as soon as he concluded this murky business with the Mercedes they would take him back to Tihar. “Well, I can tell you about one,” he said after a thoughtful silence. He leaned into me confidentially. One of the guards coughed, reminding us of his presence. “The girl from California. She was drunk, and Ajay brought her to Kanit House.” We knew about her, you see. We knew she was involved with heroin. He proceeded to recount how he killed Teresa Knowlton, a young woman who had definitely not been involved with heroin and planned to become a Buddhist nun, more or less exactly the way he’d told the story to Richard Neville a quarter century earlier. Her corpse was the fi rst to be found, in a bikini, floating off Pattaya Beach. Hence the Bikini Killer. When he got to the end of a long, ugly story I said: “I’m not really interested in how you killed her. What I’d like to know is why. Even if you were working for some Hong Kong syndicate there must be some reason why you and not someone else would do this.” A guard indicated that Sobhraj could enter the office. He stood up with a great clanking of chains. He shuffled a few steps and peered over his shoulder. “It’s a secret,” he said, his face suddenly dead serious. Then he disappeared, waving the title for the Mercedes, Iago to the very end. thought Sobhraj and Chowdhury must have taken a lot of speed. I often speculated that the Bikini Killings were a twisted, homoerotic death ritual triggered by amphetamine psychosis. I wanted to suggest this to the Bombay police, but since I was on speed myself, I had the paranoid thought that if I brought it up they might give me a drug test, right there in their office. I went to meet Madhukar Zende, an impressively solid, strangely feline police commissioner, who presented me with bales of handwritten depositions by Sobhraj’s cohorts, scrawled in ballpoint or pencil, confessing to multiple larcenies in Peshawar and Karachi and Kashmir, carried out

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in a frenzy of bewilderingly rapid transit. Zende had arrested Sobhraj twice: once in 1971 on Zende’s 42nd birthday, after a jewel heist at the Ashoka Hotel in New Delhi, and once in 1986, after the Tihar prison break. He spoke about Sobhraj with ironic affection, thumbing his D’Artagnan mustache as he recalled the early 1970s, when Sobhraj kept a flat on Malabar Hill and made himself popular in Bollywood by offering stolen Pontiacs and Alfa Romeos at a thrilling discount. For dicier scams, he recruited stooges in juice bars and fl eapit hostels on Ormiston Road, doing his drug-and-rob thing to wealthy tourists at the Taj or the Oberoi near the India Gate to keep in practice. “He was interested in women and money,” Zende sighed. “He left a trail of broken hearts wherever he went.” In 1971, Sobhraj had been waiting for an international call at the O’Coqueiro restaurant in Goa when Zende, disguised as a tourist, busted him. sat near the spot where Sobhraj had been seized, as tiny, iridescent lizards scrambled up and down the sage-green walls of the O’Coqueiro. It was off-season in Goa. Waiters stood around aimlessly in the dining room like gigolos in an empty dance hall.

He recounted how he killed Teresa Knowlton, a young woman who had planned to become a Buddhist nun. Her corpse was the first to be found, in a bikini, floating off Thailand’s Pattaya Beach. Hence the Bikini Killer.

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The murders composed a very brief chapter in Sobhraj’s stupendously variegated lifetime of crime: a prolonged explosion of “overkill” by a typically unruffable con artist who prided himself on self-control.

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On the shadowy veranda, Gines Viegas, the proprietor, plied me with rum and cokes while he drawled out tales of his years as a travel agent in Africa and South America. He was an irritable tortoise, but now and then he inserted fresh details of the weeks when Sobhraj showed up every night to use the phone at the restaurant. “He was calling his mother in France,” Viegas told me. “He looked different every time, wearing wigs, his face all made up. He made his nose bigger with putty. When Zende was here on his famous stakeout, he wore Bermuda shorts and tourist shirts. I knew he was a cop right away.” adhukar Zende is dead now. So is Gines Viegas. Charles Sobhraj is still alive. The new owners of O’Coqueiro have installed a statue of Sobhraj at the table where he ate dinner the night of his arrest. As for Kiran Bedi, she lost her job—a victim of hubris and, not unpredictably, of Sobhraj. This tough woman softened under a tsunami of the Serpent’s flattery. She so fervently believed in his rehabilitation that she allowed a French film crew into Tihar to document it, giving her superiors an excuse to fire her. Contrary to what Zende said, I didn’t believe Sobhraj was ever interested in women or money. Despite all the bling he displayed to impress his marks, his pleasure in life was putting one over on them. He never got more than a few hundred dollars from the backpackers who turned up at Kanit House and later turned up dead. Whenever he reaped a windfall from his trade, he instantly flew off to Corfu or Hong Kong and blew it all in a casino. The women in his life have always been props for a criminal enterprise, or publicity. If Charles was ever a fabulous stud, nobody’s ever said so. And they would have.

don’t know why the Bikini Killings happened. But in that part of the world, such events used to be called “amok”— a “triggered rampage,” first observed by anthropologists in Malaya in the late 1800s. More often, now, they happen here in the United States. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold ran amok at Columbine. Adam Lanza ran amok in Newtown, Connecticut. The trigger event in Bangkok—I feel fairly certain of this—was Ajay Chowdhury. The murders composed a very brief chapter in Sobhraj’s stupendously variegated lifetime of crime: a prolonged explosion of “overkill” by a svelte, unruffable con artist who prided himself on selfcontrol. The killings started when Chowdhury came into the picture and stopped when he left it. To the dismay of many people who tried to prevent it, Sobhraj was released from prison a year after I met him. As a French national with a criminal record, he was hastily booted out of India. He settled in Paris, where he was allegedly paid $5 million for his life story and began giving interviews for $6,000 a pop, at his favorite café on the Champs-Élysées. But that isn’t quite the end. In 2003, he turned up in Nepal—the only country in the world where he was still a wanted man. (Thailand has a statute of limitations on all

crimes, including murder.) He believed—or so it’s said—that the evidence against him had long crumbled to dust. I’m not so sure he believed that. He roared around Kathmandu on a motorcycle, as he had in Goa, making himself conspicuous. The Nepalese had carefully preserved dated receipts for a rental car and blood evidence found in the trunk and proceeded to arrest him, fittingly enough, in a casino. As I write this, I just watched a YouTube video that shows Sobhraj losing his final appeal on a murder conviction in Kathmandu. So much time separates the Bikini Killings from the present that the way he will finish up no longer illustrates the tendency of certain individuals to flog their pathology to the point of self-immolation. What it illustrates is the ultimate futility of everything in the face of the aging process. Sobhraj has grown old. If he hasn’t grown tired of himself by now, he’s certainly grown stupid. If you look at his story for as long as I have—the endless trail of mischief and mayhem that only led back where it started, a prison cell; the money robbed and instantly gambled away; the pointless perpetual motion across countries and continents—you will see that Sobhraj was always ridiculous. The first impression I had of him face to face was one of aggressive, implacable ridiculousness. His victims had been people then my own age, no doubt wandering the earth in the same mental fog I carried around in my 20s, in exactly the same years. The story called to me long ago, no doubt, because I wondered whether, in their place, I could have been conned to death by Sobhraj too: In photographs from that time, he looked like a person I would’ve slept with in the 70s—like several different people, in fact, whom I did sleep with in the 70s. There was no way to answer the question by meeting him. He no longer looked like anyone I would ever sleep with, and I knew in advance what he’d done. A criminal quite like Sobhraj would be impossible now: Interpol is computerised; a person can’t hop on and off airplanes and cross frontiers with nothing but fast talk, sexy smiles, and crappily forged passports; every jewelry store in the world has surveillance cameras, and soon every street in the world will have them too. But I may have had the whole thing wrong from the start, anyway. For years I imagined Sobhraj enticing credulous, not-very-bright stoners into his web of death through sexual charm and superior cunning. But what if the people he killed didn’t buy his act any more than I did, regardless of how attractive he was at the time, and even without knowing anything about him? What if, instead of an image of perfection, they saw an obviously Asian, hilariously sleazy loser, like a ponce in a business suit shilling in front of a strip joint, absurdly pretending to be French, or Dutch, or vaguely European, “like them.” What if they considered him amusingly pathetic but possibly useful? Most had been “lured” not by his sex appeal, or his oily patter, but by the prospect of getting expensive gemstones on the cheap. It’s just possible that his victims imagined they were conning him and found him as ridiculous as I did. And maybe they believed—patronisingly, with liberal, enlightened indulgence—that a ridiculous person is also a harmless one.

Sobhraj being escorted by Nepalese police after a hearing at a district court in Bhaktapur on June 12, 2014. Photo by AFP/Prakash Mathema/ Getty Images

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THE GOLDEN ZONE BY ANDRE DUBUS III PHOTOS BY ROSE MARIE CROMWELL FROM THE SERIES ‘EVERYTHING ARRIVES’

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e were hunting a man who got paid to kill people. He was bisexual, and his preferred weapon was an Uzi submachine gun that left its victims nearly unidentifiable. He was employed by a powerful organisation with a lot of money to spend and even more to lose—and somehow, at age 23, I found myself in Denver in my beat-up Subaru, doing surveillance on the apartment of the killer’s girlfriend, hoping he’d show up, hoping he wouldn’t. Her apartment was on the first floor of a complex on the edge of the city. Beyond it the plains stretched to the mountains, soft with smog, and every afternoon I’d park my car in the space facing her unit. Up in Boulder, my girlfriend had left me months earlier, and I lived in a motel room in the shadows of the Flatirons where I wrote fiction every morning, an act that was making me less a participant and more a witness, but if I had considered the risk I was now taking I would probably do it anyway. I was a young and reckless recorder of others, traits my boss must have seen immediately as fitting the kind of work he did on the side and sometimes needed help with: Christof and I worked together in a halfway house for convicted adult felons out of the Cañon City penitentiary, and he also owned a bounty-hunting business that specialised in going after people who’d done terrible things. This one had a $250,000 price on his head. The man’s girlfriend was ten years older than I was. She wore Nike sweat suits and kept her dark hair in a braid down her back. From where I parked every afternoon, I had a direct view of her profile as she sat on the couch and watched television. Sometimes she’d be reading something at the same time, a book or magazine in her lap, and every few seconds she’d glance up at the screen I couldn’t see. Because of the time of day, I assumed she watched soap operas. She talked on the phone a lot, too, the cord a long one she pulled from the kitchen behind her. Every hour or so, she’d go back there and return with what looked like yogurt or a plate of crackers or a glass of something to sip. Most of the time she’d be watching TV, talking on the phone, and reading all at once. Sometimes she’d hang up, set the magazine down, and walk to the bathroom. I’d watch her turn on a bright fluorescent light, a red shower curtain hanging there, and then she’d close the door. I’d stare and wait. It was something I was used to now. But it wasn’t me waiting; it was the other me, Christof’s associate with the fake name, that’s what it felt like, as if I were watching myself the way I was now watching characters come and go on the page, a dangerous thing to do, for these were real people with real guns, people who would not tolerate being watched.

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half-moon glowed weakly over Olas Altas bay. I was leaning on a concrete seawall peering down into the pale darkness at rats on the beach. They were shadows of movement below, scurrying from the cracked shells of coconuts, an empty Pacífico bottle, a withered palm frond, and the carcasses of roosterfish and dorado that had been thrown off a boat when the sun still shone over Sinaloa and the Sierra Madres and this port of Old Mazatlán. Christof stood beside me in his white linen suit. He was over six feet and 230 pounds and wore a straw cowboy hat tilted back on his head. In the darkness his handlebar moustache looked blacker than it was. He was reciting a Neruda poem in Spanish. The air smelled like dead fish and crumbling concrete and the sea. It would have been easier if we’d found our killer in Denver, but the word from the US Marshals was that he’d been seen in Mazatlán, a place outside of their jurisdiction but not ours. The plan was to find him, then give the location to Christof’s Mexican friends, who would capture him, tie him up, throw him on a boat, and sail up the coast to the waters off San Diego so the US Marshals and DEA could pick him up, that promised six-figure bounty so unreal to me I didn’t even think about it. Now I was leaning on the seawall along Avenida del Mar in the moonlight, listening to Neruda and the scurry of rats and the lapping of the water along the sand. Christof and I had just come from a gay bar called Caballo Loco, a place our killer had been many times before. It was a small one-story building set

in a hillside of mimosa and morning glory trees. Christof told me the Mazatlecos called them trees of the dead. If you drank from the waters near them, you’d go crazy. Maybe I was already crazy. The bar was warm and dim, its window shutters open to the salt air. The floor and walls were tiled with brown porcelain, blue flowers, and vines painted along the edges, and a jukebox in the corner was playing Julio Iglesias, the room crowded with men, some standing at the bar, others sitting in twos at small wooden tables that held a burning lantern and their glasses of beer or jiggers of tequila or snifters of brandy. Some were smoking, others were kissing or holding hands, and I didn’t like how a muscular man at the bar kept looking me up and down, his eyes lingering on my ass as Christof and I found a table and sat down. Christof wore leather sandals, that white linen suit, and an open-collared silk shirt. In the low flickering light of the table, he looked healthy and gay. Which is what I was supposed to be, too—just a gay tourist with my boyfriend in a bar on the water. Again, the boundary was weakening between my imaginary world on the page and my real life, what I was doing in this bar in Sinaloa, simply allowing myself to drift into the skin of another, this time a gay man with a name that wasn’t my own or even the one the federal and state agents knew me by. Just before we flew to Mazatlán, Christof had sent me to Denver to pick up the latest mug shots of our killer. I stood in an office on the 37th floor of a skyscraper overlooking downtown Denver and the plains. The agent was in his 50s and wore a pink shirt

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IN THE ELEVATOR I STUDIED THE KILLER’S FACE. I’D SEEN HIS PICTURE BEFORE, BUT THESE PHOTOS WERE CLEAR CLOSE-UPS, AND IT WAS LIKE SEEING THE FACE OF A COUSIN WHO’D DIED BEFORE YOU WERE BORN.

and grey tie, the handle of his gun an oiled walnut. He was standing behind a counter. He slid the sheet of photos over to me. “Be careful down there. These aren’t nice people.” I thanked him and left. In the elevator I studied the killer’s face. I’d seen his picture before, but these were clear closeups, and it was like seeing the face of a cousin who’d died before you were born, the awakening sense of being connected somehow, sharing something you barely knew you had. He was 29 years old, half Italian, half Irish, a kid of the streets who had turned his rage into a job, and he was handsome in the way the mill-town brawlers I’d grown up with were handsome, something cut or chipped or broken off his face, this breaking worn as defiantly as a family name. A shirtless teenage boy came to our table. He held an empty tray at his side, and Christof ordered a brandy for himself and a soda water for me. For this trip I wasn’t drinking. It was a decision that had seemed to rise out of the Mexican earth soon after we’d landed. It hadn’t been a long flight, but how could we have arrived so soon at a world so far from our own? We sat in the back of a white shuttle van, and I stared out at the glare of sun on scrub and mesquite among the low rolling hills. Off in the distance was a brown ridge, at its base a grove of thorn trees, Christof told me. Then he pointed out a tall strangler fig, and in its shadow a jackrabbit raised its nose and disappeared. Then came the homes of the poor. Tiny shacks made from discarded or stolen street signs, sections of billboard advertising Carta Blanca or Coca-Cola, corrugated tin for the walls or half a roof, the other half open or covered by a ripped tarp or construction plastic or canvas. Beside one was a rusted-out Datsun pickup truck, two boys squatting in its shade in the dirt. They were barefoot and shirtless, their black hair dusty, and they were playing some kind of game at their feet with rocks or rusted bolts. Then we were in the narrow streets of Mazatlán, the stone and plaster walls of shops and houses, many with enclosed courtyards in the shade of coconut palms, flowers snaking along the tops of walls and spilling over: cardinal sage and spider lilly, pink trumpet and mala ratón. Again, words Christof gave me, and I was learning this about words: Once you knew the names of things, you saw them clearly for the first time. The driver’s window was down now. I could smell car exhaust and frying tortillas from the marketplace, El Mercado in the Centro Histórico. Even these words from a language I did not speak, they too had the power to make me more here in Mazatlán, and so when Christof asked whether I wanted a cold cerveza I heard myself saying, “No, I want to stay awake.”

Now the moon was low, and Christof and I were walking away from the rats on the beach back to the hotel. We’d stayed at the Caballo Loco for that one drink, long enough to see our killer was not there. Two tables over sat the only other white man in the place. He was small with grey hair he’d combed to the side, his lavender button-down shirt pressed, his hand in the hand of a Mazatleco my age. He had long black hair cut unevenly, and he wore a dirty T-shirt, ripped jeans, and sandals. On the way out, Christof stopped and said hello to the American, who was drunk and began to talk openly about himself, as if our very presence demanded that he confess he was a retired professor from Minnesota here on vacation. The Mazatleco beside him wasn’t smiling. He looked up at us as if we were interrupting him in his work. Outside, we waited for our pulmonía, one of the opentopped taxis that ran day and night from Old Mazatlán to the Golden Zone. Christof said, “That young man with the professor.” “Yeah?” “He probably has a wife and kids.” “And he’s gay?” “No, he’s poor. He does what he has to do.”

e stepped out of the pulmonía and into the Hotel Belmar, its plaster facade pink and white, its arched entrance open to the sea air. During a Carnival ball in 1944, the governor of Sinaloa was shot to death in the lobby. His murderer had used a .45-caliber pistol, its bullets still sunk in the tiled column after having passed through the governor’s torso. Now, as I walked by that column, I stopped and looked again at those nickel-size holes. I pushed my fingertips into them, felt cool mortar and wood, a tiny fragment of lead; there was so much to know and to have known, so much to do and have done, and one life was just not enough to live it all. The next morning I sat in the shade of a fan palm in the Mercado Pino Suárez. I was sipping hot coffee and watching Christof pass out gifts to Los Sordomudos, the deaf-mutes of Mazatlán. They were boys who lived in the street, the oldest maybe 18, the youngest nine or ten, and because Christof had been coming here for years and was fluent in sign language as well as Spanish, he’d befriended them, would bring them new Converse and Nike sneakers, T-shirts and shorts and socks. They were crowded around him in the morning sun, a dozen or more thin brown boys laughing and speaking with their hands and faces, two or three of them peering over

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THE MOON WAS LOW, AND CHRISTOF AND I WERE WALKING AWAY FROM THE RATS ON THE BEACH BACK TO THE HOTEL. WE’D STAYED AT THE CABALLO LOCO FOR THAT ONE DRINK, LONG ENOUGH TO SEE OUR KILLER WAS NOT THERE.

Christof’s shoulder to see what else he’d pull from his plastic trash bag. Christof was clearly happy doing this. He was sitting on a bench, his face shadowed beneath his straw cowboy hat, laughing, speaking slowly in Spanish for the lip readers, handing out box after box to boys whose feet may not even fit into shoes they were already pulling on without socks. There was a breeze from the water. I could smell frying tortillas and coffee, dead fish and cigar smoke and sweet mala ratón. The marketplace was filled with men and women and kids, most of them working their vendor carts, one heavy with raw cuts of beef and pork on ice, others stacked with papayas, mangos, and bananas. From where I sat I watched a tall tourist buy a coconut from a Mazatleco, who then cut it in half and squeezed lime juice onto it and sprinkled it with salt and chili powder and handed it to him on a paper plate. There were carts of woven sombreros hanging on hooks, folded shawls striped orange and yellow and the dull red of sunset. There were beaded necklaces and crucifixes and carved figurines of Jesus next to a rack of black T-shirts with hot-pink lettering: Mazatlán. In the shade behind me, old men sat on a short stone wall talking and smoking cigars and spitting down at their feet. At their backs was a stand of banyan trees, their grey roots clawing up their own trunks like the ghosts of ancestors refusing to leave, and high in the branches was a parrot, its squawk lost in the voices below, the honking pulmonías in the street, a guitar strumming Spanish chords, and was that really an iguana walking languidly under the sun not far from my feet? Was Christof really showing the mutes photos of our killer? Yes, he was, for nobody paid attention to these homeless deaf boys, he told me. People said and did anything in front of them because they didn’t see them as full human beings. But if you gave Los Sordomudos a day and a night and our man were still here, they’d know where.

welve hours later, we were in the back of a covered taxi driving down a rutted country road. The driver took it slowly, his car bouncing in and out of dips in the packed dirt, and Christof was drunk and singing a love song in Spanish. The driver ignored him. In the months I’d known Christof, I’d never seen him drunk. It seemed a strange thing to be, under the circumstances. We had just eaten marlin tacos at an open-air restaurant in the Plaza Machado, and while Christof was drinking margaritas, I’d kept to soda water. My abstinence was beginning to feel like a pose of some kind, but there was an easy clarity that came with it, a constant alertness, and now that I knew we would be hunting our killer out in the country,

I’d gotten nervous and wanted to stay as ready as I could. I told Christof I’d feel better if we had guns. “Why?” “Because he does, doesn’t he?” Christof narrowed his eyes at me, pursed his lips beneath his mustache. At another restaurant across the plaza, a mariachi band was moving from table to table, their black sombreros tilted way back on their heads as they played. “Gun energy invites gun energy,” he said. “What?” “I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve never needed a gun.” “What if we see him at this place in the country?” “We call my friend.” “Does he have guns?” “Oh yes, many.” At the next table, an American woman laughed and leaned in closely to her date. She kept one finger on the rim of her wineglass, and she was speaking softly to him, smiling, and I heard myself say to Christof, “I’m curious what it’s like.” “Qué?” “To pay for it. To drive someplace and pay a stranger for it.”

fter dinner Christof hired a taxi. On the way out of Mazatlán, as we moved farther from the water and deeper into the side streets, there were the homes of the working poor, one-story, two-room shanties of bleached timber and cracked plaster, of scrap and stone behind fences of rusted wire or battered planks, fan palms leaning over them like sullen teenage boys. Some didn’t have electricity or running water, and dogs lay in cool dirt near the stoops, and it was like being on my hometown streets again, everything pervaded by a gut-sick giddiness that only trouble could be found here. And then eight or nine young men were piling into the bed of a pickup truck, each of them carrying a rifle or shotgun or pistol. One had a red bandanna tied loosely around his throat. We could see them in the shine of the taxi’s lights as they sped off, two or three glancing back at us like we were a half-forgotten memory, the wind blowing the hair around their young faces. “The fuck is that about?” Christof took in my question. He was in his white linen jacket again, and he turned and asked the driver something in Spanish. The answer was only two or three words. “Sí, sí.” Christof looked back at me. “Drugs. One gang going off to fight another.” Then we were driving through low, dry hills in the moonlight, moving in and out of ruts in the road. Christof was

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singing “Cucurrucucú Paloma.” Somewhere behind us to the west, away from the tourist hotels of the Golden Zone, those boys could already be shooting at other boys, and if I’d been raised here with nothing, what could have kept me from doing the same thing? Was aiming your shotgun at another’s chest and pulling the trigger that much different from punching and kicking him in the head? Yes, I thought, and no, but they were on the same continuum you fall into after breaking through that part of yourself that once broken stays broken. What I’d known, though, felt small compared with how these boys were living and dying, and when the driver stopped in front of a half-abandoned motel in the darkness, I felt young and vulnerable and now too reckless for my own good, especially when the driver turned the taxi around and drove away, his headlights jerking up and down through our dust, which hadn’t even settled yet. We stood in front of a cinder-block compound. At the far corner, bugs flew at an exterior light shining onto weeds and a steel barrel cut in two. Beyond that lay the sign for this place, its letters too rusted to read. A soft blue light glowed on the other side of the open doorway. Freddy Fender was singing on the jukebox, and Christof and I stepped inside. The blue light came from a neon sign for a tequila I hadn’t heard of. It hung over the bar to our right, the bartender nodding at us as we came in, the stools empty. Scattered throughout the room were small folding tables and mismatched chairs, and it was so dark that at first I didn’t see the women sitting along the wall, 12 or 13 of them. Some were

smoking and talking under Freddy Fender’s song, and when it ended I could hear their voices, the everyday sound of women chatting in a hair salon, and now more music began to play, something with more brass, the singer’s Spanish tiredly festive. Christof and I sat down at a table in the center of the empty room. A woman walked over in a loose T-shirt and jeans, and in the bar’s blue light I could see she was older, in her 50s or 60s, her lipstick black in that blue. She was explaining something to us in Spanish. “Sí, sí,” Christof said to her. He nodded his head and said something else, and the woman turned and went to the bar. I asked him what she’d told him. “The house rules.” I looked back at the women. Some were sitting, others standing. Most were in short skirts or tight dresses, and even in that blue shadow I could see the dark smear of their lipstick and eyeliner. Every one of them was staring back at us. “What are the house rules?” “We have to pick which one we want. It cuts down on infighting among the señoras and señoritas.” The older woman set a brandy in front of Christof and an iced drink in front of me. I told her gracias and sipped soda water and lime juice, and now I wasn’t as curious as I’d been back in Mazatlán. Choosing one would be like picking a cut of meat from a vendor in El Mercado. Choosing one would not be choosing another. And how could I even be doing this? This would only help to enrich the son of a bitch they worked for; this could only help run the machine

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that exploited them. I wasn’t even aroused at the thought of being with one of them; there was only my desire to know what it felt like to be doing this, to stand and walk through the blue darkness to a line of women against the wall, to move quickly for the one with short hair and a pretty face who smiled at me and dropped her cigarette onto the floor, stubbing it out with her high heel as she stood and took my hand and led me back to our table. I’d done it before my adrenaline could back up on me, before I could think much more about it. There was another woman beside Christof. She was plump, her shoulders bare, her cleavage pushing up out of her dress. She was speaking Spanish loudly over the music, her hand on his, and I hadn’t seen him choose her. Later I would learn he’d told the older woman that only I was here for the girls, and so she’d sent another one to drink with him, to run up his tab with booze. The woman I’d chosen was sitting close to me. She smelled like nicotine and lipstick, and she was speaking Spanish into my ear. She rested her hand on my thigh and sipped from a drink she’d ordered as soon as she sat down. The woman next to Christof was speaking more softly, smiling, Christof shaking his head and smiling back. He looked close to nodding off, and I remembered his girlfriend in Denver, a woman who owned a clothing shop that catered to the rich. Was he staying at this table because of her? Or was he hoping our killer would stumble in? Or was he morally opposed to what I was doing? Or was he just too drunk?

“Fuck and suck?” The woman squeezed my leg. I looked at her directly for the first time, saw that her front tooth was chipped and she was much older than I was—35 or 40. “Fuck and suck, sí?” “Sí.” We stood, and I followed her through the cigarette smoke of the other women I didn’t look at. We stepped outside through an open doorway, ahead of us a long row of motel rooms, a red or white bulb glowing over half the doors. The tiles under my feet were loose, and off to the right was a rectangular hole in the ground, weeds sprouting up out of it like hair. At the end of the diving board someone had set a cane chair upside down, its four legs poking up at the stars, and on the other side were more rooms, their windows dark. A few of them were cracked or shattered. She stopped and unlocked a door, and I followed her inside.

hristof had switched to Coke and wasn’t as drunk now. On the cab ride back he was talking about our killer, how he may have been there earlier or would be there later or maybe Los Sordomudos had the wrong place. I nodded. The driver’s face was lit from beneath by a battery-powered lamp on the seat beside him. There was a day of whisker growth along his chin and throat, a white stubble, and on the radio was a top40 song from the States that made me think of polyester shirts and barrooms and waking up hungover beside a naked woman I did not know.

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THE WOMAN I’D CHOSEN WAS SITTING CLOSE TO ME. SHE SMELLED LIKE NICOTINE AND LIPSTICK. “FUCK AND SUCK?” SHE SQUEEZED MY LEG. I LOOKED AT HER DIRECTLY, SAW THAT HER FRONT TOOTH WAS CHIPPED AND SHE WAS MUCH OLDER THAN I WAS—35 OR 40.

I’d learned nothing from doing what I’d just done. It felt no different from any other loveless act. There was the momentary sweetness of release, then a hollow emptiness, the body taking the soul to a place where there were only echoes. Everything that happened there I could have imagined. Not to have done so instead had diminished me somehow. This driver was taking it faster than the first one, and we were bouncing in and out of the ruts in the road, the light of his headlamps jerking ahead of us. Off to my right lay a field of brush and mesquite under the moonlight, my shoulder pressing hard against the door. Soon we were once again passing the homes of the poor. A new song was on the radio now, Christof quiet and pensive. I thought again of the young men my age in the bed of that pickup, and I pictured two or three of them lying dead under the moon, their blood leaking into the dust. Over the one-story shacks and through the strangler fig branches came the white and yellow lights of the Golden Zone. Then we were in it, a wash of neon and palms, and off to our right was the moonlit expanse of Puerto Viejo bay. I began to feel afraid—the woman I’d just been with, the killer we were looking for, the deaf-mutes we’d publicly bribed with kindness to get information, Christof getting recklessly drunk—all of this began to feel like some cosmic debt I was going to have to pay, and soon. I rolled down my window to the smells of dead fish and wet sand. Lined along the beaches were wooden fishing boats, many of them on plank frames with an axle and two bicycle wheels so the fishermen could pull them into the water without help. Soon we were in the darker streets of Centro Histórico, the driver pulling up to the pink and white entrance of our hotel. Christof gave him what looked like many pesos, and the driver thanked him three times. Then Christof and I were passing through the lobby, among its massive potted palms and tiled columns. This time I ignored the one with the commemorative bullet holes, and I followed Christof down the long tiled corridor to our room. But something was different, a square of light where there shouldn’t be, and it was coming from the left, the door to our room wide open, a sliver of wood from the casing lying across the threshold. Christof stopped and stood still and held up his hand. Now was the time for a gun. Now was the time for a knife or a baseball bat or a tire iron. My tongue was thick in my mouth, and then I was stepping into the room behind him.

What little we’d brought to Mexico with us was scattered across the floor—shirts, shorts, underwear, a novel I’d been reading. Both mattresses had been upended, and one lay sideways across its frame, the sheet torn off. Christof moved quickly toward the bathroom, pushed open the door, and stepped in. “We’re alone.” I was staring at the pesos I’d left beside my notebook on the small desk. Christof had told me not to carry too much cash with me at one time, so I’d left it behind. I could hear him step out of the bathroom behind me. I pointed to my money. “Why didn’t they take that?” Christof’s linen suit was wrinkled, and his eyes had a dark cast to them I’d never quite seen before. He lifted up what he was holding at his side. It was our killer’s mug shot, the one I’d gotten from the US Marshals in Denver. “This was on the toilet seat.” He didn’t have to tell me what that meant. A warning was a warning. My legs became cold water, and I pulled the cane chair from under the desk and sat down. But I was looking at our open door, its casing splintered, and what would keep him from stepping inside with his weapon of choice and spraying us dead? I swung the door shut and wedged the chair snug beneath the porcelain knob. Christof was gathering up clothes with cool efficiency. “Someone’s told him about us. We’ll have to leave in the morning.” Who? I wondered, but of course, why wouldn’t a professional killer, someone always looking over his shoulder, have people he paid to look too? I stood there feeling young and stupid. I squatted and began to pick up my scattered clothes and stuffed them into my backpack. I set the novel on the table beside my bed. There was little sleep that night. We closed and bolted the shutters against the sea air, and now the air in the room had grown thick and close. Christof snored on his mattress a few feet away, and I could smell the tequila he’d drunk earlier, our sweat, the thin cotton of our sheets. Why wouldn’t our killer decide just to get rid of us? We were in Mexico, beyond the protection of the law enforcers who’d sent us. My heart had become an electronic thumping behind my eyes, and while I had never done anything like this before, the black dread opening up in my chest and gut was nothing new. I was the son of a single mother who, when we were kids, moved us from one rented house or apartment to another, one year three times, always for cheaper rent. I was the constant new

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LYING HALF NAKED IN THE BOXED HEAT OF THAT ROOM AT THE HOTEL BELMAR, WAITING FOR OUR KILLER AND HIS SUBMACHINE GUN, MY ONLY WEAPON MY FISTS, I KEPT ASKING MYSELF WHY I’D COME TO MEXICO. I KNEW IT WASN’T FOR THE MONEY.

boy who got beaten up in the schoolyard or the street simply because I was new. Then, at 14, I snapped and began to fight back with my fists and feet till that was all I ever seemed to do anymore. Then I was a grown man, writing daily, trying to become other people with words, an act of sustained empathy that had made it difficult for me to view people as good or bad. I could see only the grey, that dark tangle of human desire and motivation and hurt and action and apathy that make a life. And now I pictured that prostitute, who was probably the age of my own mother, the dim yellow bulb hanging over her head, how she’d said something to me in Spanish and pointed to a wooden bench against the wall, a place for me to leave my clothes, but underneath it was a pair of white baby’s shoes. And after, she looked at me like she would never think of me even for one moment ever again.

ying half naked in the boxed heat of that room at the Hotel Belmar, waiting for our killer and his submachine gun, my only weapon my fists, I kept asking myself why I’d come to Mexico. I knew it wasn’t for the money—it was for this: to be tossed into the dark heart of danger and then to emerge stronger, bigger, and more fully myself. But I already knew what it was to walk onto an asphalt lot crowded with running, shouting boys, many of whom would turn on me because I was new and did not belong there with them. I knew the violence that would follow, and while it was only insults and a slap or a punch and some kicks to the ribs and back, I knew the quiet afterward, the fear of more of the same. Years later, after knocking out the front teeth of a local thug, I knew the carload of young men who would cruise slowly by the gas station where I worked, the promise of revenge in their stubbled faces. And now this, the possibility of being not beaten up but shot to death. Strange how similar it all felt, how greater danger did not bring greater learning with it. Deep in the night, sleep came against my better judgment and against my will. Then Christof was rousing me awake. He was already dressed, then so was I, and it was a long walk down that sunlit corridor, the hotel’s windows open to the sea, the naked sense we were easy targets now. On the shuttle ride out of the city, Christof and I were the only passengers. The windows were open and the driver was smoking a cigarette, its smoke blowing back into our faces, the scent of the flowers snaking along the stucco walls we passed, the dust rising up alongside us. Christof was back in

his linen suit, and he sat quiet and hungover beside me, his eyes seemingly on the meeting with the federal agents, who would not be pleased. But I didn’t care about that. There was the drafty, lightskinned feeling that we were narrowly escaping something catastrophic. We drove deeper into the country, and I stared out at the shacks made from half-built concrete-block walls and billboards and sheets of tin. There was the rusted-out Datsun, the morning sun glinting off its cracked side mirror, and as we passed I turned in my seat to look for the two young boys who just yesterday had been squatting and playing in the dirt. There was only the Datsun and the shack, the frayed corner of a tarp hanging over the Coca-Cola sign that served as a wall. I turned back around in my seat. Christof asked me what I’d been looking at. “Nothing.” But I thought of the boys in five or ten years armed in the back of a speeding pickup, their hair blowing back from their faces as they drove into lethal danger, not as an adventure or an experience but as a way of life that would be nasty, brutish, and short. I had told myself I’d come here for a job, but I began to feel like a thief, like a white bird of prey. Up ahead was the small airport, the narrow control tower, a plane rising off the tarmac into the air. Soon we would be on one just like it, and I vowed I would not be coming back here, not like this, a tourist of other people’s misery, a consumer of it. When the driver pulled the shuttle van to the curb, I leaned forward and handed him all my pesos. He held it as if it might explode, his eyes careful and still. I told Christof to tell him to keep it. “That’s a month’s pay. You may insult him with that.” “Tell him I mean no disrespect. Just, tell him that.” As I stepped out of the van and hauled my backpack onto my shoulder, the concrete sidewalk felt too bright and open and exposed. I hurried inside the terminal to wait for my boss and my translator, the glass door closing behind me, a desire rising within me to get back to the empty page, but this time with more faith that I might be able to find something true there without having lived it myself. I turned and began walking toward a line of men and women, some American, others Mexican or European, but I was looking for the face that had been left on the toilet of our hotel back in Old Mazatlán, a face I hoped never to see again, a face not so different from my own.

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2014-10-01 10:58 AM

CROOKED MEN: LIVING WITH FEAR |

By Roberto Saviano

For almost eight years I’ve lived under police protection because of a book I wrote. I was 26 years old when I published Gomorrah, which recounts the story of the Camorra, the Mafia from Naples, the land where I was born. I wanted to be able to write about its entrepreneurial power. In reality, the Mafia is not a coppola (a flat cap) or a sawed-off shotgun. It’s not Michael Corleone. It’s business, it’s commerce, it’s a social order that opposes the law. I decided to convey all of this. And I decided to describe these things in a narrative, using first and last names. I never imagined all that would happen later, the multitude of problems that would arise from the book. I still remember the day that I returned—free for the last time—by train from a literary festival in Northern Italy to Naples’s central station and was met by the military police. They put me in an armored car. I didn’t talk. I kept my gaze on my feet as if I had been arrested, though they were saving my life. They said to me, “Sir, we’re sorry, but we must put you under protection.” I believed that it would be for a short time—they even assured me, “Sir, just a few weeks, and then everything will be like before.” It’s been almost eight years—nearly a quarter of my life—and the trial against Antonio Iovine and Francesco Bidognetti—the two Camorra bosses accused by an anti-Mafia prosecutor of delivering a death threat against me through a letter read by their lawyers during a trial—will end this fall, maybe. At this point, I can hear the questions: Why should Mafia bosses hate someone who writes? What did I uncover? And above all, now that I’ve uncovered it and published my findings, wouldn’t killing me be nonsensical? In fact, wouldn’t killing me just confirm every terrible thing people already believe about the Mafia? Criminal organisations are terrified not by writers but by readers. That is why the slaughter of journalists by criminal organisations around the world has never stopped. The internet collects everything, so mobsters are not afraid of information about their activities—it’s all going to get out there anyway. There are judges and police to investigate, arrest, and sometimes convict them, and they’ve always taken law enforcement into account. Such things they are willing to accept. What they won’t accept, what makes them fearful, is a public full of readers who begin to understand organised crime, who talk and share information with one another, and who eventually advocate for change. Cultural pressure, political pressure, a demand for transformation—that’s what frightens Mafia bosses. The most dangerous thing that a journalist—a narrator—can do is put together pieces, find new, valid theories, and recount them. Since my book came out, the question that I get the most is, “How do you live when you’re condemned to death? You’re not afraid?” Fear, if it lives with you every day, ceases to be fear. It becomes familiar, then it stops being hostile, and then you try to figure out how to relate to it, hide it, keep it by your side, nurture it. I don’t water the soil where the plant of fear has rooted. I let it dry up. The fear that dries up but doesn’t die is an asset: It doesn’t permit you to lower your guard. I keep it dry, but not dead, next to me. I try to make sure its roots live. I must remind myself about fear in order to be afraid. In the land where I was born, they have killed many people. When I was a kid I would go to see the murdered bodies. They made me feel big, already an adult. I learned to recognise how they were killed. From the cadavers’ wounded hands, I understood that they had covered their face with their hands. It’s an instinct. No one believes that the flesh of your hands can save you from the slug of a 9-millimeter or an AK-47, but instinct comes first. Just as someone driving full speed into a wall lets go of the steering wheel in the last second to cover his face, a person about to get shot in the head does the same thing. Later on, I learned that smells tell you many things: If you smell the odor of rotten fish near a murdered

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body, it means that he ate fish shortly before dying. If you smell the odor of sour garbage, then he ate fruit or meat. You smell the strong food odor when the person was shot in the stomach and many times in the chest. From the piss and shit around a body, you can tell someone died in agony. When they shoot at the legs and the abdomen or at the chest and the bullets don’t immediately hit vital organs, the body has time to be afraid and piss and shit itself. And then you see rigor mortis of the dick. What shocked me as a kid was seeing these ridiculous, obscene postmortem erections that spilled out of the shorts of people killed during the summer. And it is common to die during the summer because the public is paying less attention. They also kill during the summer because people go out more often, and even if you’re shut away, hiding due to fear, the heat forces you out of your den. I hope, if it ends like that for me, I don’t end up dying in the street with a thousand eyes above my face, asking how I am, whom to call, or—worst of all—saying that everything is fine. I always thought, looking at these bodies, that it would be better to put an end to it quickly, in an isolated street, you and your soul. Dying alone just as you lived: alone. ***

Illustration by Jacob Everett

I began writing about the Camorra to take revenge on them. I believe that it is the best way to return all the evil that they have done and continue to do—how they poison the land with waste trafficking, destroy the coast with building violations, and dominate each and every part of people’s public and private lives. I tried to respond, to speak up and tell as many people as I could about it. I was certain that I had done it with my writing, that I had made words into weapons. I had succeeded in forcing them to react. The light that I turned on brought arrests and drew TV cameras from all over the world. But at a certain point I began to wonder: If my work destroyed me, would it be worth it? Was it worth it now, with seven military policemen around me 24 hours a day? Living in a country eager to maul anyone who doesn’t compromise himself is complicated. Italy loves to purge itself of blame by placing it on something else. As a result, the country cannot tolerate whoever finds a way to expose its contradictions, point to the wound. Mafia bosses know that sooner or later they will be killed or sentenced to life in prison. They have no alternative. They take on their responsibility, and this makes them unique in a country where no one ever takes responsibility for anything. It’s paradoxical, but they become authoritative in the eyes of the people from these areas. They pay for their power. You understand that it is time to leave your country the day that you feel that not dying becomes blameworthy. You hear a hushed litany: Weren’t you supposed to be killed by the Mafia? You’re still alive? Having succeeded in surviving a death sentence becomes suspicious. If you are alive, then you don’t really scare them. One time the Nobel Prize Committee invited me along with Salman Rushdie to the Swedish Academy to talk about our experiences. He told me, “They will blame you for not being dead.” I didn’t believe it right away, but that is what happens. So that is my introduction to you. This is who I am. In this space in the coming months you’ll find stories of Mafia and violence, reflections on the power and mechanisms that make criminal organisations the vanguard of contemporary capitalism. These words are proof that I am alive, and I intend to be so for a long time to come. Deep down, I’m privileged. For a writer it is rare that the words you write destroy your life; it’s rarer still that these same words regenerate you. Translated from the Italian by Kim Ziegler

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SKINEMA |

By Chris Nieratko

SEX CRIMES Dir: B. Skow Rating: 9 Vivid.com

When I was 19, I had a casual Mrs. Robinson thing going on with a wonderful woman in her 40s from Easton, Pennsylvania, home of Crayola crayons. Over the course of our relationship I got to know some of her younger friends who skated, and we’d often hit up the now defunct Shimerville skate park or one of the many colleges in the Lehigh Valley. The entire crew of stoners was highly entertaining, each for his own reason, mostly from being high all the time. Every minute of every day a cloud of smoke hovered above their heads like the dirt around Pigpen from Peanuts: They’d wake and bake, smoke on the way to the skate park, at the park, after skating, etc. I was the first of my friends to stop smoking weed after high school, due to extreme paranoia. This allowed me to sit back and really observe the baked bunch with heightened clarity. They were always concocting the most absurd get-rich-quick schemes (most of which revolved around pot: growing it, selling it, stealing it), and I was smart enough to jot down notes on their genius. My favorite member of the group was a fellow I’ll call Bud, for obvious reasons. Bud was the worst criminal I’d ever met and the most burned-out of all the bros. He got popped for everything he did; he couldn’t jaywalk without getting arrested. His rap sheet was a mile long and had every manner of charge, from selling dime bags to holding acid to breaking and entering and waving to the store security cameras as he exited.

The story that most defines Bud’s life of crime was when he got himself a job at UPS so that he could steal expensive merchandise off the truck. He lasted one week and was arrested for attempting to lift six Mac desktop computers. I’m not sure if you recall the size of Macs in 1995, but they were massive and packaged in boxes as big as washing machines. In his diabolical wisdom, Bud decided to reroute the six enormous boxes to a new location in the UPS computer—his house. Not his neighbour’s house. Not an abandoned building. No, he sent the Macs to his own home, and both the computers and the police were waiting for him on his front porch when he arrived. After the computer incident Bud was unable to get a straight job, and he couldn’t do anything against the law, because all the cops in the tiny town were watching him. So he chose to do the only thing a clever fellow in that position could do: transport copious amount of weed from NYC for resale. That was more short-lived than his UPS gig. On the way to the skate park, hauling a trunk full of weed, Bud got into an argument with his buddy Tom over an EPMD tape. Bud was driving his own car and wanted to listen to Strictly Business. Tom, the prick in the passenger seat, did not and kept turning the tape off and ultimately threw it out the car window. The two started arguing, and Tom punched Bud in the face as he was driving and broke his nose. Naturally, Bud drove directly to the police station to have Tom arrested for assault. Seeing the notorious Bud bleeding before their eyes, the cops decided, rather than hear Bud’s side of the story, to get the drug dogs to search Bud’s car. In the trunk they quickly found five pounds of dirt weed, and Bud was arrested on the spot. As Tom recounted the story for us, he joked that as the cops took Bud away one of the officers told him, “You gots to chill.” More stupid can be found at ChrisNieratko.com or @Nieratko on Twitter.

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SEPTEMBER FRI 26 - Mercians + Avivaa + Siren Lines + Mar Haze SAT 27 - Tim Fitz + special guests

+ HANDS UP! Late-night dance party from 11:30pm every Saturday FREE!

OCTOBER THURS 2 - Jantina and the Jaguars + Capitol + Village Echoes FRI 3 - Jezzabell Doran + Dugong Jr + Zuri Akoko + Laprats + FM THURS 9 - THE FOLK INFORMAL FRI 10 - BANDINTEXAS + Kaleidoscope + Latham’s Grip + Propeller WED 15 - THE LAUGH STAND THURS 16 - Sahara Beck + special guests THURS 23 - The Vernons + special guests

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2014-10-01 11:04 AM

JOHNNY RYAN’S PAGE

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2014-10-07 8:42 PM

VICE MAGAZINE VOLUME 12 NUMBER 9

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THE TRUE CRIME ISSUE

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2014-10-07 8:42 PM