The Washington Post National Weekly - April 10, 2016

Politics Excited for Clinton?

They are! 4

Innovations DIY dentist: Doctors not smiling 16

Milestones 100 years of spirited living 17

5 Myths About bicycling 23

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THE MYSTERY OF The STOLEN STRAD How a promising violinist got away with it and took his secret to the grave.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Sanders’s baffling support gap BY

P HILIP B UMP

T

Would you vote for a socialist?

Data from McClatchy/Marist polling, Nov. 2015

wo native Brooklynites with divergent life stories sat down to talk at the request of the Hollywood Reporter last month, and the topic turned to politics.

Since, after all, one of the Brooklynites was Bernie Sanders and the other was Spike Lee. Lee asked the Democratic presidential candidate why he was having so much trouble getting support from older black voters. Sanders replied that the problem was broader than that.

“We’re doing phenomenally well with all of the young people — white, black, Latino, you name it, Asian American,” he said. “And we’re getting killed, frankly, not just with older African Americans but also older whites, older Latinos. It’s the weirdest thing in the world.”

It’s weird, he argued, because of the focus that he’s put on protecting the social safety net for older Americans. But the main focus of his statement needs no further explanation; it’s obvious from the voting so far.

In every single state where exit or entrance polls have been conducted, the oldest Democrats support Sanders less than the youngest.

Even in his home state of Vermont, the only state where Sanders won voters 65 or older, he still did 18 points worse with that group than he did with voters under 30.

This has been hugely problematic for Sanders, because older voters are much more likely to come out to vote than younger ones. (There are a lot of reasons for this, including that older voters have established a habit of voting, are less likely to move and therefore need to re-register, and are less likely to work odd hours.) In a number of states, more than a third of Clinton’s support has come from voters 65 and older, according to exit and entrance polls, including Iowa and Nevada. In no

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state has more than a fifth of Sanders’s support come from that group.

So why the disparity? Why are older voters so much less responsive to Sanders’s candidacy?

One possibility is that younger voters are more in-tune with Sanders’s politics. Last November, McClatchy/Marist released a poll showing that young people (of all political stripes) were much more likely to back a candidate who identified as a socialist.

(Sanders, of course, identifies as a “democratic socialist,” but it’s safe to assume that the distinction is often lost on people.)

It’s not clear if this distinction holds in the Democratic Party, though. The GOP skews older, so it’s likely that the differentiation seen above is a function of partisanship, too.

Analysis from Pew in 2014 suggested that there wasn’t a big ideological difference between young and old Democrats. About 59

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percent of millennial Democrats identified as consistently or mostly liberal, compared with 57 percent of boomers.

Where there is a difference is in party identification. Millennials are substantially more likely to identify as independent than older voters, but to then align with the Democratic Party. In other words, younger voters are a lot more likely to be nominative independents but to participate in Democratic politics — just like the candidate that they support.

Support for Clinton increases about as much for both men and women between younger and older age groups. In Washington Post/ABC News polling in March, men younger than 50 prefer Sanders by 21 points — but men 50 and older prefer Clinton by 19. Women of all ages prefer Clinton, but women 50 and over do so at a 2-to-1 ratio.

There are certainly intangible factors, too.

Last December, CNN considered the question, talking to voters who suggested that they felt a loyalty to the Clintons — a refrain that’s been echoed among black voters as well (who are also heavily supporting Clinton).

At the time, Sanders’s campaign insisted that it was a function of a lack of familiarity with the candidate (which, again, is similar to what it said about black voters). Campaign manager Jeff Weaver suggested that it was in part because younger voters were online more than older ones. It’s true that they are — in 2015, 96 percent of those under 30 went online versus 58 percent of those 65 and older — but that would suggest that he would also do better with wealthier, better-educated voters, who are also online more. He doesn’t.

Sanders’s bafflement at the age gap appears to be legitimate. His campaign has clearly tried to close it, but hasn’t. Making us feel slightly better that we can’t pin it down precisely either. n

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY INNOVATIONS BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Philip Johnson was a promising musical prodigy. Then he stole a teacher’s prized Stradivarius. Illustration by KINGA BRITSCHGI for The Washington Post. Violin based on a photograph

by Getty Images.

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POLITICS

Fueled by pragmatism, not passion S TEPHANIE M C C RUMMEN Phoenix BY

T

hey began arriving a full four hours early, hundreds of people stretching single file outside a Phoenix high school. It was a hot and cloudless day, but the people had come prepared to endure, preparation and endurance being hallmarks of a Hillary Clinton rally.

They slathered on sunscreen.

They popped open umbrellas.

They reached into purses and fanny packs for little baggies of trail mix, ignoring the yelling Donald Trump supporters across the street, and the carload of Bernie Sanders fans that kept whizzing by — “Bernieeeee!” they shouted through the window, their hair flying free. Their own hairlines glistened with sweat.

“She’s a serious candidate, and she doesn’t have to entertain me,” said Chris Haggerty, 58, a pastor in her third hour of waiting, of moving in small increments toward the high school doors.

Elsewhere in America, Sanders was thundering about a “political revolution.” The Republican front-runner Trump was promising to “bomb the sh--” out of the Islamic State. These were the emotionally cathartic rallies that had come to define this unorthodox political season so far — angry, raucous, anti-establishment and, in Trump’s case, occasionally violent.

A Clinton rally was decidedly none of these things.

What was it, then? What happens at a rally for the presidential candidate who has gotten more votes than anyone else so far?

What does it mean to cheer a person often described by pundits as having a “passion gap” compared with her rivals, to go bonkers for a detail-laden stump speech that crescendos on words such as prudent and percent of your income?

I

n the line, Clinton campaign workers handed out bottles of water.

Rose Smith, 55, took one and

PHOTOS BY MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST

At rallies, Clinton supporters are excited by what others deem boring glanced over at the Trump yellers, which included a man with a Smith & Wesson 9mm strapped to his thigh shouting that Clinton should be “taken down a notch.”

She did not yell back.

“Trump’s angry; Bernie’s angry all the time,” said Smith, a retired elementary schoolteacher who said she was not angry other than whatever frustration she felt toward the other candidates and their followers, which she sublimated. “Just realistically, I think it’s not a matter of pumping the team up, it’s a matter of playing the game. You can’t have that kind of demeanor. I can’t imagine these men being in the room when some crisis really happens. Is emotion going to rule them, or are they going to have a level head and

make calm decisions?”

The man next to her was nodding.

“They always say she’s not emotional enough,” said Rick Beitman, 31, a graduate student sipping from a Starbucks cup. “I like Bernie — my heart is where his heart is, but my head is where Hillary’s is. She’s more logical. She has more structure and organization to her ideas.”

“She’s like a steady plateau,” Smith said.

To her and others baking in the sun, this was in fact the paradox of being a Clinton supporter at a Clinton rally, the thing that no one seemed to understand. They were excited by her lack of excitability; thrilled by her boring wonkiness; enthusiastic not about the prospect of some dramatic change but

Hillary Clinton speaks to Arizona voters during a rally in Phoenix last month. Her events have a very different feel from those of Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump — and that’s just how her supporters like it.

about Clinton’s promise of dogged, small-bore pragmatism, a result of decades of government experience they considered a qualification, not a liability.

Theirs was the campaign that voters so often said they wanted — one of substance and detail, of practicality rather than dreamy idealism, of freedom through discipline. The Bernie car sped by again.

“Bernieeee! Wooo!” the young people yelled.

Vincent Medina, 40, who took the day off from his job as director of early-childhood education, rolled his eyes.

“I know with Bernie it’s all revolutionary,” he said. “But there’s excitement here, too.”

Not the thrill of revolt and rage, he explained, but rather the joy of

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POLITICS hearing a candidate speak in excruciating yet accurate detail about Head Start and Early Head Start, the federally funded programs to help low-income children prepare for kindergarten.

“Like when she went to Flint,” Medina continued, referring to the Michigan city where possibly hundreds of children have been poisoned by toxins in the water supply. “She was strongly encouraging the government to put Head Start in place because she knows one of the requirements is annual lead screening.”

Sweat was beading on his forehead.

“She really gets down to specifics,” he said as the line inched forward, and Clinton campaign workers began shouting instructions.

“No homemade signs!” one said, and a few people threw away their hand-drawn placards.

“Oh, I’m very excited!” said Randall Clark, who owns a small delivery business. By “excited,” he explained, he meant that he looked forward to “continued, incremental, small changes” on issues such as global warming, gun control and health care, for this was the worldview inside the Clinton camp. Progress was a thing achieved not in grand, sweeping gestures but rather by relentless, often unrecognized toil.

A carload of Trump supporters sped by — “USA! USA!” they yelled.

“He’s an embarrassment — I can’t wait for her to win,” said Bea Rios, 65, a retired bank teller who came to support Clinton even though her back was hurting.

“The Trump clown car,” muttered Haggerty, the pastor.

“I’m so excited,” said her friend Bonnie Coon, 68, as they finally reached the doors of the gym, where the music was not Flogging Molly’s “Revolution,” which often blares at Sanders’s rallies, or Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” which usually blasts at Trump’s.

It was the Gap Band’s “Outstanding,” circa 1982, which was followed by a Top 40 melange, played at medium volume.

“We are mature and responsible people,” said Balbir Grewal, 65, raising her voice slightly over the music.

I

nside, the mature and the responsible milled around or sat on the bleachers.

A lone woman in a red hat danced without inhibition when Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” came on.

People who knew one another from fundraisers said hello. Grewal sat down.

“I’m not a kid,” continued the retired restaurateur, who became an activist in the local Sikh community when a young Sikh man was murdered after 9/11. “I don’t need to get angry and yell.”

She was here, she said, because she was a serious person. And in Clinton, Grewal saw a larger, more powerful version of her own serious self: a person who could be

doing anything but was working with local law enforcement to prevent another pointless death, teaching young Indian women English, and counseling others about how to stick up for themselves in a sexist and restrictive culture.

“She’s a strong person, and that’s why she’s getting such crap,” Grewal offered, her voice rising.

“She knows she can do it, and she’s not going to take any crap from anybody. I just love her.”

On stage, a local elected official began by introducing Clinton as a “doer!”

The civil rights and labor activ-

Top, Gretchen Baer dares to wear her heart on her sleeves at the rally. Above, Clinton snaps a selfie while mingling with Arizona voters during the event.

KLMNO WEEKLY

ist Dolores Huerta spoke about Clinton’s role in passing the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program.

“The CHIP program,” Huerta said, revving up the crowd, “that was Hillary! That was Hillary!”

Mark Kelly, the husband of former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, compared the Clinton candidacy with a space shuttle mission.

“It takes a lot of hard work, over a long period of time,” the retired astronaut said, and soon, Clinton walked onstage, and the crowd roared and waved their briefcasesize, campaign-approved signs.

“It is so exciting to be here!”

Clinton began.

“We love you!” someone yelled, but very soon Clinton turned serious, introducing a couple whose daughter was killed in the Aurora, Colo., theater shooting and explaining the need for “commonsense gun reform,” at which point the crowd began roaring.

“And I want you to think about this,” Clinton said over the cheers, but the crowd would not settle down.

“We want you!” a man yelled out.

“I want you, to want me!” Clinton yelled back a bit haltingly, and people began chanting: “We want you! We want you!”

But Clinton would not indulge.

She moved on through her talking points, which did not really make for catchy zingers but were cheered nonetheless: Not free college tuition, but debt­free college tuition. Not scrapping the Affordable Care Act, but improving it.

Not just education, but early­ childhood education.

“Yes! Yes!” a teacher yelled from the back row, and Clinton moved on to how sad it was that Arizona did not participate in CHIP. “It’s a three-to-one federal match!” she said in the depths of her stump speech.

People cheered this, and they cheered all the way until the very end, which was not so much an emotional moment as it was a sobering call to action.

“We’ve got to roll up our sleeves and get to work!” Clinton said, deploying the rallying cry that the people now standing and cheering understood.

They had their instructions, and when the rally ended, they did not linger long. There was work to do. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

POLITICS COMMENTARY

THE TAKE

In GOP, a fight for every delegate BY

D AN B ALZ

A

fter Sen. Ted Cruz’s big victory in the Wisconsin primary, Republicans enter a new and critical phase in their volatile nomination battle, with Donald Trump’s rivals and those in the party establishment who are determined to stop him sharing a single objective: to keep the GOP front-runner as far short of a first-ballot convention victory as possible.

The Wisconsin race represents a potentially important turning point in the Republican contest, one that will embolden Trump’s opponents. A contested convention has become more probable.

Whether that comes to pass will be determined by what takes place in the trench warfare that will play out over the next three months.

The Republican race is about to become granular. The coming battles will be waged in targeted congressional districts where Trump shows weakness regardless of his statewide appeal, in hand-to-hand competition at state party conventions where the delegates are being selected, and ultimately in a battle for the hearts and minds of the men and women who will go to Cleveland, bound or unbound on the first ballot but free agents after that.

Until now, the nomination fight has been portrayed, rightly, as a series of state-by-state contests, where victories beget momentum and bragging rights. In this competition, Trump has won more than anyone else — the most votes overall and the most delegates.

From here on, delegate accumulation matters above all. For Trump and Cruz, winning states certainly remains important. But every delegate denied to Trump will be considered a small but important victory by the anti-Trump forces.

At his victory rally in Wisconsin, Cruz said he is “more and more convinced” that he can win the nomination. “Either before Cleveland or at the convention in Cleveland, we will win the majority of delegates,” he said.

Cruz’s clear victory in Wiscon-

PAUL SANCYA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

sin makes it exceedingly difficult for Trump to reach the 1,237delegate threshold by the final day of the primaries and makes the senator from Texas the principal alternative. Ohio Gov. John Kasich hopes to hang in until the convention, but his weak showing in Wisconsin makes his case more difficult.

How close Trump comes to a first-ballot majority will have a huge influence on the behavior of the convention delegates when they gather in July. “For us, it’s how much more can we peel him back from that number,” said Katie Packer, founder of Our Principles, an anti-Trump super PAC. With Wisconsin in the books, about two-thirds of the convention delegates have been allocated. Only about 832 of the 2,472 total delegates are yet to be allocated. Only Trump has even an outside chance of getting to 1,237, but his path became narrower because of Wisconsin.

The immediate calendar appears favorable to Trump. The next contest, on April 19, will be

held in the New York billionaire’s home state. It seems the ideal place for him to rebound after two weeks of self-inflicted wounds — controversial foreign and domestic policy proposals, damaging statements about abortion and a campaign manager charged with misdemeanor battery — and now a serious setback in a key Midwest industrial state.

The most recent polls show him with a sizable lead statewide and support topping 50 percent.

But New York’s rules are less than ideal for Trump at a time when he needs to sweep up as many delegates as possible.

For starters, the state’s 95 delegates will be awarded proportionally, rather than on a winnertake-all basis. Beyond that, 81 of those delegates are distributed on the basis of results in the state’s 27 congressional districts.

Trump could gain 14 delegates if he wins more than 50 percent of the statewide vote. Otherwise, he will share those delegates with any rival who tops 20 percent. In any congressional district where

Sen. Ted Cruz (RTex.) appears with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, left, and his wife, Heidi, during an event in Milwaukee last week. Cruz won the state’s GOP primary, defeating Donald Trump.

he falls short of 50 percent, even if he has the plurality of votes, he will give up one of the three delegates awarded in each of those districts. If he runs second in any district, he would pick up just one delegate.

A week after that, the biggest prize is Pennsylvania, with 71 delegates. But only 17 of those delegates will be bound to vote for the winner of the primary. The other 54 will be elected individually, three for each of the 18 congressional districts. They are not identified by the candidate they support, if they favor someone, and are not bound to vote for the winner. Polls there show Trump, Cruz and Kasich as competitive — but Cruz’s team believes its superior organization and attention to detail will pay dividends on the delegate front.

The biggest prize comes on the final day of the primary season, when California awards 172 delegates. California is a winnertake-all state, but it is both winner-take-all for the 13 at-large delegates awarded on the basis of the

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POLITICS statewide results and the rest awarded to the winner of each of the state’s 53 congressional districts.

“It’s going to be congressional district by congressional district, now into June,” said Russ Schriefer, a Republican strategist.

The other side of the battle could be just as important in determining the state of play heading into Cleveland. This is the delegate selection process, rather than the delegate allocation process, or what Republican strategist and election-law attorney Ben Ginsberg described on MSNBC on Tuesday as “the dirty blocking and tackling” of the nomination process.

As Republicans in state after state pick their delegates, the rival campaigns will do all they can to ensure that those delegates, bound or unbound, are as friendly as possible to their candidate. In this competition, Cruz has a strong head start, having spent months developing organizations in the states and with an attention to detail that has been far superior to that of Trump’s campaign.

Cruz’s campaign has shown its prowess in Louisiana, North Dakota and Tennessee and is confident that it can prevail in other states.

Trump has taken steps to improve his operation, hiring strategists with experience. But they are starting from behind. “This is all a process that takes time and planning and knowledge of not only the rules but also the delegates,” Schriefer said. “There are not a lot of people who are actually good at it.”

Trump retains important advantages because of his performance this year. He can arrive in Cleveland short of a majority with a potentially persuasive argument that he deserves the nomination. A new McClatchy-Marist poll found that 52 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said that if Trump has more delegates, even if not a majority, he should become the nominee.

That is the second step of the process. The first is trying to stop Trump. The anti-Trump forces — and, in particular, Cruz — took an important step in that direction in Wisconsin. The results will change the conversation, but only that.

Keeping Trump away from 1,237 is the ultimate game-changer. n

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THE FIX

Could 2016 be anything like past fiery conventions?

BY

P ETER W . S TEVENSON

F

or the past several decades, the national political conventions held by each party have largely been procedural matters, unremarkable in terms of actual political debate, and essentially week-long PR pitches to the news media and voters.

But things are different this year. Establishment Republicans are open about the fact that they want a contested convention; they simply can’t stomach Donald Trump. And Bernie Sanders’s staff said that the senator hopes he can win the nomination at a contested convention.

The possibility that at least one party goes to a contested convention is real. So what might that look like? Here are some of the most fiery conventions in U.S. history.

l Democratic National Convention, 1860

The 1860 Democratic convention, just before the Civil War, was divided over slavery. Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, considered a moderate on the slavery issue because he preferred to let individual states choose whether to outlaw or allow the practice, was the front-runner.

But delegates from seven Southern states organized an effort against him, and he couldn’t get the requisite number of votes.

After holding a convention in Charleston, S.C., where delegates were unable to come to any kind of consensus after 57 ballots, Democrats took six weeks off before trying again in Baltimore, where Douglas was nominated.

But the splinter group of Southern Democrats didn’t attend; they held their own convention, and nominated Vice President John C. Breckenridge. Thus, two Democrats were nominated, and Republican Abraham Lincoln beat them handily that November.

l Democratic National Convention, 1924

The 1924 Democratic National Convention, held in New York, was the longest-running political convention in U.S. history. The party was divided, again largely on geographic lines, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was rapidly gaining political power.

Pro-Klan delegates from the South and other areas couldn’t see nominating New York Gov. Al Smith, a Catholic. But anti-Klan

tion because they thought he was part of the northeastern political elite — the GOP establishment.

Goldwater, on the other hand, took hard-line positions on limited government and opposing the relatively new communist government in Vietnam. Moderate Republicans openly disliked him, and some viewed him as such an extremist that his hard-line stances were thought to damage his chances in the general election. Goldwater lost to Lyndon B. Johnson. l Democratic National Convention, 1968

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Demonstrations disrupted the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968.

delegates were against nominating William Gibbs McAdoo, who had Klan support despite not being a member. There weren’t enough delegates in either faction to nominate a candidate, so the voting went on and on.

Eventually, after 102 ballots, McAdoo and Smith both withdrew from consideration. A compromise candidate, John W. Davis, got the nomination, but lost in the general election by almost 250 electoral votes. l Republican National Convention, 1964

Republicans were split among geographic and ideological lines.

The moderate wing of the GOP was in favor of Nelson Rockefeller, the Republican governor of New York. Conservative Republicans, preferred Barry Goldwater, a hawk from Arizona.

Conservative Republicans booed Rockefeller at the conven-

This time, it wasn’t about an electorate divided between two candidates — it was about tension that had been building exploding into violent riots.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that spring.

Robert F. Kennedy, one of the leading candidates, was killed even closer to the convention, on June 5. And the Vietnam War was at its peak.

So when an estimated 10,000 antiwar demonstrators descended on the city, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley simply decided not to issue permits. He thought, naively, that without a place to gather, the protests would remain small. But still, he deployed about 23,000 police and National Guard members.

Things went fairly smoothly in the convention hall, and Hubert H. Humphrey won the nomination handily. But outside the hall, Daley’s aggressive response to the protesters turned an already volatile situation into a violent one.

On Aug. 28, 1968, officers moved into the throng of protesters to arrest a man seen lowering an American flag. The officers beat the protester, while other protesters started throwing rocks and chunks of concrete at the police.

The protest quickly turned into a riot and spread through the city.

Humphrey would go on to lose to Richard M. Nixon in the general election. n

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NATION

The rise and fall of a drug epidemic T ODD C . F RANKEL Pompano Beach, Fla. BY

L

t. Ozzy Tianga jumped in his unmarked cruiser and headed out to his favorite place to find flakka addicts.

He hadn’t visited in a while. But as he drove down Dixie Highway one recent weekday, Tianga turned to fishing to explain the spot’s reliability: This was his “honey hole.”

Last summer, Tianga made frequent trips to this flakka hot spot as news media from around the world descended on South Florida to document the synthetic stimulant’s devastating effects. Flakka addicts were everywhere. Running into traffic. Zoned-out on curbs. Sometimes naked. Sometimes in the grips of a drug-fueled psychosis.

Similar scenes unfolded across Broward County, the drug’s ground zero in the United States.

The public was alarmed. Tianga, of the county sheriff’s office, was, too. He had never seen a drug hit so hard, so fast.

But now, as Tianga pulled up, his honey hole was quiet.

“This is incredible. I can’t find even one person,” the lieutenant said, scanning the gas station lot that once served as a den for flakka deals. He kept searching, driving past an alley where users gathered.

He pointed to the electrical boxes that addicts liked to hide behind.

He cruised for several blocks.

“I can’t believe this,” he said.

In just a few months, and with little attention, flakka has disappeared from South Florida.

Experts say drug epidemics almost never burn out like this. Look at the current distress in vast swaths of the country over heroin and its synthetic cousin fentanyl.

What happened in Florida, experts say, was the result of unprecedented coordination among local groups to fight flakka’s demand and — most important — the unusual willingness of the Chinese government to halt flakka’s production. Florida officials early on blamed overseas labs for supplying the drug.

The result was a rare reprieve in the fight against synthetic drugs.

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

Synthetic flakka pushed South Florida to the brink, then — in just a few months — disappeared But even today, few people realize the depth of the flakka crisis in Broward County, a beach-lined locale with 1.8 million residents.

Flakkawasdifferent.Emergency services in Broward were strained by the strange and often violent reactions of flakka users.

“At the height of the flakka craze, you were almost praying for crack cocaine to come back,” recalled Don Maines, a drug counselor with the sheriff’s office.

Jim Hall, an epidemiologist at Nova Southeastern University, had never heard of flakka until police in the county seat of Fort Lauderdale reported seeing a few cases in late 2014. Even as its popularity soared, the drug remained centered on South Florida. It popped up sporadically across the country. But no one had any experience with flakka.

Flakka’s chemical name is alpha-PVP. And it was stronger

than similar headline-grabbing synthetic drugs such as “molly,” K2 or bath salts. The chemical attacheditselftobrainpathwayswith such ferocity that slight changes in purity or dose resulted in bizarre, sometimes deadly reactions.

A series of videos made flakka famous. A security camera captured a man high on flakka trying to kick in the doors of police headquarters, thinking he was being chased by wild dogs. Another impaled his leg on a steel fence as he tried to flee his hallucinations outside a police station.

Getting naked wasadistinguishing feature of flakka. The drug caused a user’s body temperature to soar — 104 and 105 degrees was not uncommon. The resulting hyperthermia contributed to the 63 flakka-related deaths that Broward County reported by the end of 2015.

Many flakka users suffered hallucinations and agitation. Last

Lt. Ozzy Tianga, left, and others from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office are seen with a suspected flakka user last June in Pompano Beach.

Recently, there have been fewer calls to police about the drug.

summer, county hospitals were admitting, on average, 12 new cases of flakka-related excited delirium every day. Other drugs rarely cause psychosis, experts said. But with flakka, it approached routine.

“We were in an emergency scenario,” said Hall, the epidemiologist.

Police had to change tactics.

Two deputies usually responded to a “signal 57” — a drug call. But flakka users could exhibit adrenaline-fueled superhuman strength.

In Broward County, the sheriff’s office started sending at least four deputies to every flakka call. They treated it like a bank robbery, Tianga said. All hands on deck.

Tasers didn’t always work on flakka users. And talking them down never did. Deputies had to wrestle users to the ground, punching them to gain control, Tianga said. The official protocol was to attack and attack hard. It looked brutal. And in a postFerguson, Mo., world, where police use of force is scrutinized, Tianga knew the scenes could be interpreted as his deputies going too far.

“We were always one incident away from making national news.”

He started visiting churches on Sundays to explain to people why deputies needed to be so rough.

They weren’t taking people to jail, he told them. They were taking them to the hospital. And no one went willingly, even though they were often near death. Tianga started calling the incidents “awful but lawful.”

In March 2015, as flakka use soared, the United Way organized the Flakka Action Team. It was the first time the social services agency had formed a group for a particular drug. The task force contained members of local law enforcement, substance abuse counselors and other professionals.

The group developed a plan to educate the community, to teach police how to respond and to figure out how to stop production.

“I never knew you could collaborate your efforts with the United Way,” Tianga said.

Heather Davidson, a United Way prevention specialist, said task force members plastered the

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NATION county with anti-flakka posters with the slogan “Lose your mind.

Lose your life.” They held community forums. They educated officials at schools, jails and shelters.

Traditional drug treatment didn’t work with flakka. Chronic users struggled with concentration, one of several side effects.

Then the task force began pressuring Chinese authorities. It was an open secret that you could place an online order for flakka from a Chinese manufacturer and have it delivered to your door. A kilogram of flakka sold for $1,500 online. That was worth $50,000 on the street. And flakka was just one of hundreds of new substances that governments did not have time to identify and ban.

Hall, at Nova Southeastern University, made sure to bring up the China connection in media interviews last summer. He hammered away at the issue.

Their cause won support from the U.S. Treasury Department when, in mid-October, the agency imposed Kingpin Act sanctions on one alleged synthetic drug producer in China named Bo Peng.

Then, in November, Florida law enforcement officials, including Tianga and local DEA agents, visited China to directly plead their case. When they returned, China announced that back on Oct. 1, it had banned 116 different synthetic drugs, including flakka.

The combined efforts turned the tide. Hospitals in Broward County went from seeing 306 flakka cases in October to 187 cases in November. The next month, it was just 54.

“There’s a drought on,” Davidson of the United Way said.

“There’s no more flakka.”

In February, the Flakka Action Team even dropped “flakka” from its name. The task force now focuses on a range of drug problems.

In Tianga’s office, the sheriff’s lieutenant keeps framed newspaper pages from last summer detailing flakka’s power. One of the “Lose your mind. Lose your life.” posters covers one office wall.

They look like artifacts from a different time.

For Tianga, they are reminders of just how bad it got and how they still beat it.

“I’d like to think we’ve developed a new model for dealing with epidemics,” he said.

And the veteran officer knew the next one was coming. n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Many people over 50 see an unexpected diagnosis: HIV BY

L ENNY B ERNSTEIN

T

housands of people 50 and older are diagnosed with HIV each year in the United States, a development that has significant consequences for the health care and social support they need and the doctors, counselors and others who provide it.

Older people tend to be sicker when the infection is finally discovered. They usually have other health conditions that accompany aging and often are too embarrassed to reveal their illness to family and friends.

Many never dreamed they were at risk of contracting the virus, and some have outmoded ideas of a disease that long ago became manageable through advances in medication.

“I said, ‘Well, I guess that’s a death sentence,’ ” a Maryland man recalled of his diagnosis at the age of 73. “And the fellow who told me said: ‘No, it’s not. It’s not like that anymore. Once you get on medication, you’ll probably die of whatever old-age thing you’re going to die of anyway.’”

Yet health-care providers still don’t routinely consider HIV when treating older patients, despite guidelines that call on them to screen through age 64, researchers and physicians say. They may be reluctant to ask about an older person’s sex life and sometimes attribute HIV symptoms to age-related issues such as heart disease.

Amy C. Justice, a researcher at Yale University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS, recalled a married man in his 60s who was seen by specialists at Yale-New Haven Hospital. It took more than 18 months before anyone thought to test him for HIV, despite symptoms consistent with the disease.

In 2014, nearly 17 percent of the country’s new HIV diagnoses — 7,391 of 44,071 — were among people 50 and older, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Diagnoses of HIV infections by age group 2014 Diagnoses of HIV in infections bythousands) age group in 2014 (In thousands) (in 0 Age:

0 to 19

2

4

6

8

2.0

20 to 24

7.9

25 to 29

7.9 6.0

30 to 34

4.7

35 to 39 40 to 44

4.2

45 to 49

4.0 3.2

50 to 54 55 to 59 60 to 64 65 and older

People 50 and

2.2 older accounted for 16.7 percent 1.1 0.9

of diagnoses

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention LAZARO GAMIO/THE WASHINGTON POST

The phenomenon has various medical and social roots. Erectile dysfunction drugs such as Viagra, for example, have extended men’s sex lives. And older heterosexuals, particularly women beyond childbearing years, may not be in the habit of using condoms for safe sex.

The advocacy organization ACRIA is trying to educate them about protected sex through a campaign called “Age Is Not a Condom.”

While the older newly diagnosed group includes more heterosexuals and more women, it generally reflects the overall HIV universe: mostly gay men, some straight men and women, intravenous drug users. It is mostly minority, as well.

A big difference for older people, however, is the shock of receiving an HIV diagnosis later in life. That is especially true for heterosexuals, mostly women, who thought they were in monogamous relationships and must confront the idea that a partner likely has been having sex with someone else.

“They’re just completely caught off guard,” said Ellen A.B. Morrison, a researcher at Columbia Uni-

versity’s Mailman School of Public Health, in describing the women with whom she has worked.

“These are not people who ever thought themselves at risk. They do not understand their partner’s behavior. They know nothing about HIV. They don’t know anyone who has it. They don’t know who to turn to for questions. And they are terribly embarrassed.”

Older people who feel stigmatized worry that family, friends, neighbors or caregivers will shun them at a time when they often have a heightened need for social support, especially if a spouse or partner hasdied,some expertssaid.

The diagnosis and social isolation can lead to depression, studies show. That can cause people to stop taking their medication, said Stephen Karpiak, director of research and evaluation at ACRIA, which is based in New York City.

But a 2015 study of HIV-positive women older than 50 found that many eventually transition from shock, disbelief and a sense of doom to growing acceptance.

Because HIV is an inflammatory condition, it increases the likelihood of heart attacks and strokes.

Older people already are more likely to be managing high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes, so their doctors must be careful about which antiretroviral drugs to prescribe.

Alfred Newton of San Francisco said he practiced unprotected gay sex and took illicit drugs all his life — until shortly before his HIV diagnosis last year at 72.

By then, he already had many infirmities of age, including high cholesterol and mild chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He had had hip replacement surgery, plus two other operations on that joint, as well as prostate surgery.

When he got over the shock of hearing he had HIV, he began to view it as another condition of his advancing years. He has no symptoms and a very low viral load, he said.

“It’s just another add-on to everything else,” Newton said. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 10, 2016

10

KLMNO WEEKLY

WORLD

Gangs unite in effort to halt violence

BY J OSHUA P ARTLOW AND S ARAH E STHER M ASLIN

San Salvador

O

ne of the gangsters, a black bandanna over his mouth, tapped his clawlike fingernail on the table.

Next to him was a sworn enemy, a man with a black fisherman’s hat and rainbow-tinted sunglasses.

The two rivals, and their tens of thousands of followers in El Salvador’s dominant gangs, have called a halt, for the moment, to their street war with each other and the government. On March 25, Mara Salvatrucha and two factions of the 18th Street gang announced a cease-fire, a respite from the fighting that has made El Salvador one of the world’s deadliest countries.

Many, though, expect the ceasefire will be temporary, a lull in an ever more chaotic battle, a moment that simply shows the enormous gap that separates these gangs from the government.

El Salvador’s ferocious pace of violence, with more than 2,000 murders in the past three months, has exhausted all sides. Dozens of police and their relatives have been hunted down and killed by gangsters, provoking defections from the ranks. The gangsters complain about police running death squads, their friends being driven off in pickup trucks and disappearing.

But despite the enormous toll on both sides, the administration of President Salvador Sánchez Cerén has remained defiant, vowing to tighten security at prisons and relentlessly pursue gang members.

“The government has said there’s no chance of dialogue with the gangs,” said Mauricio Ramírez Landaverde, minister of security.

The Salvadoran gangs are descendants of gangs formed in Los Angeles in the 1980s by immigrants who fled this country’s civil war. Many of their leaders were eventually deported back to El Salvador. The country is now a patchwork of gang-controlled neighborhoods. Their members extort residents, kill, kidnap, rape and serve as sentries against rival cliques.

The gangs and experts who study them estimate their active ranks at

FRED RAMOS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Leaders say they can bring down El Salvador’s death toll, but many doubt a cease-fire will hold 70,000 people, not including the tens of thousands behind bars.

Sánchez Cerén, a former leftist guerrilla leader during El Salvador’s 12-year civil war, has vowed to intensify the crackdown on the gangs. After months of police raids, his government plans to transfer hundreds of jailed gang leaders to solitary confinement and has proposed what it calls “extraordinary measures” to disrupt communications. “With these cruel criminals, it is not possible to have an attitude of tolerance,” Sánchez Cerén said.

Ramírez Landaverde dismissed the possibility that the current pause could stretch into a more durable peace, saying the gang landscape is fragmented with hundreds of small cells and cliques.

“Often it turns out they [gang leaders] don’t have the backing of all the groups, or all of the members,” he said. “Many of them don’t participate, and you can see proof in the streets. They’re killing like nothing happened.”

The streets, however, do seem to have calmed. Over the first six days of the gang cease-fire, initially set for 72 hours but now with no official endpoint, an average of 10 people were slain each day, less than half the rate of killing in the first two months this year.

Past attempts at ending the gang war have failed. A 2012 truce, negotiated by former guerrillas and religious leaders, with the support of former president Mauricio Funes, lasted for two years and then fell apart after the government imposed tighter conditions on jailed gang members.

Critics say that the gangs used the time to rearm and grow stronger.

The current one-sided truce could quickly be followed by more violence, as the gangs seem determined to fight back if the police do not ease up.

“This is kicking the hornet’s nest,” Raul Mijango, a politician and former guerrilla who helped negotiate the previous gang truce, said of the government’s current

Three hundred gang members were transferred last month to the Quezaltepeque prison in La Libertad, El Salvador. Experts estimate the active ranks of the nation’s gangs at 70,000 people, not including the tens of thousands behind bars.

approach. “These iron-fisted actions — today it’s total war declared against the gangs — have not been effective against these types of problems. On the contrary, what they’ve always done is increase them.”

Some of the gang members’ statements had a political flavor: They described the government as corrupt and exploitative and labeled members of the administration as hypocrites, former guerrillas who betrayed the poor people of El Salvador once they got into power. The gang members cast themselves as benefactors, offering survival in a poor job market.

“If there isn’t work, how are you going to survive? You can’t eat air,” a Mara Salvatrucha spokesman said.

They also said they were frustrated that the government has not invested more in programs to reintegrate gang members into society or provide jobs for them.

They seemed particularly outraged about the conditions inside prisons, where they said gang members receive insufficient medical care. In their neighborhoods, they complained, there were indiscriminate arrests and killings. “The police arrive in a community and grab everyone in sight,” the Mara Salvatrucha spokesman said.

In response to the rising gang violence, authorities have cut off family visits to inmates and deployed soldiers to guard prisons.

The legislature approved Sánchez Cerén’s request for more power to transfer inmates to highersecurity facilities, where they would have less access to phones, visitors and weapons.

Some doubt that the government’s defiance is as strong as it seems. Some experts suspect a covert deal is already in the works between the gangs and the government. Religious leaders are among the only people openly working toward that outcome now.

“The whole world is opposed to dialogue,” said Rafael Menjivar Saavedra, a Lutheran pastor who has met with the gang members.

“My response to them is, ‘So what’s your alternative?’ ” n

SUNDAY, APRIL 10, 2016

11

WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Quiet tip unleashed Panama Papers BY

P AUL F ARHI

I

t began with a message — anonymous, of course: “Hello.

This is John Doe. Interested in data?”

The recipient, German newspaper reporter Bastian Obermayer, promptly responded that he was.

What followed was almost unimaginable: “Doe” began forwarding files that ultimately contained 11.5 million documents, four decades’ worth of digitized records from a Panamanian law firm that specializes in setting up offshore companies for wealthy clients.

The Doe data dump to Obermayer and his colleague Frederik Obermaier in 2014 eventually triggered a unique cooperative project among journalists around the world. The effort culminated last Sunday when, in a coordinated release, dozens of news organizations began publishing stories about the Panama Papers. The vast cache outlines how world leaders, celebrities and individuals have used offshore companies to shield their wealth from public disclosure, and in some cases possibly to avoid taxes or mask illegal activity.

The first wave of stories — the disclosures could go on for years — has already led Iceland’s prime minister to tender his resignation over revelations of his offshore holdings. Among the thousands of people named in the documents are Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s family members, close associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin, British Prime Minister David Cameron’s late father, Ian, and soccer superstar Lionel Messi.

The news reports prompted President Obama, among others, to call for international tax reform.

More than a year after Doe first contacted them at their Munichbased newspaper, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Obermayer, 38, and Obermaier, 32, still have no idea who their source is or why he or she (or possibly they) came to them.

To protect Doe’s identity and safety, however, they remain purposely guarded about what they

SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES

SCHMIDT/HASE/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

do know. “We can’t disclose any numbers or times [of contact], of course, or if we are still in contact,” Obermayer said in an exchange of emails Wednesday. “But we have communicated a lot, through different ways, all encrypted. On some days, I chatted more with the source than with my wife. We had a lot to talk about.”

The little background they gleaned involves the source’s motivation, which Obermayer quotes this way: “ ‘I want you to report on the material and to make these crimes public.’ ” The source never asked for financial compensation, they said.

The extent of the material from the law firm, Mossack Fonseca & Co., proved so daunting — it would take more than 38,000 averagesized books to contain 11.5 million pages — that the German report-

Hundreds of protesters gather for a third day on April 6 in Reykjavik, Iceland. Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson stepped down after the Panama Papers revealed he had hidden his assets offshore.

German journalists Bastian Obermayer, left, and Frederik Obermaier received the leaked documents in 2014 and worked with dozens of news organizations to parse through them.

ers turned to the Washingtonbased International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) for help.

ICIJ, an 11-person unit of the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity, had worked with the German newspaper and other news organizations on cross-border investigations before. The organization coordinated reporters in 45 countries last year to investigate leaked files from a Swiss private-banking firm that hid hundreds of millions of dollars from tax authorities. The “Swiss Leaks” project followed one a few months earlier involving the revelation of secret tax deals between hundreds of global companies and officials in Luxembourg.

But the sheer sprawl of the Panama Papers, covering thousands of names and entities around the world, presented a much larger

Source of the massive data dump is still unknown, even to reporters

challenge.

Working gradually, region by region, ICIJ assembled a team of 370 journalists from about 100 media organizations spread over 70 countries, according to Michael Hudson and Marina Walker, the ICIJ’s senior editor and project manager, respectively. (The organization’s American media partners were McClatchy Newspapers and Fusion, the website and cable network; The Washington Post and ICIJ were partners on a 2013 investigation of tax havens.)

The goal was to find local journalists who knew the territory.

“Instead of us parachuting in to do reporting, we let the folks on ground do it,” Hudson said. “So many of the most important stories today are so complex and so global that the old-style lone- wolf reporter or Woodward and Bernstein just can’t do it.”

The effort, known internally as Project Prometheus, required an unusual degree of cooperation among typically competitive news organizations. The “partners” had to agree to share newsworthy nuggets with the entire group and not to publish anything ahead of the mass release last Sunday.

All of the particulars were spelled out in a series of meetings held in Washington, Munich and Johannesburg last year.

The potential for security breaches also required the journalists to remain tight-lipped about the project for months on end. Digital protections are one thing, but “sometimes the weakest link is the human link,” Walker said. “We told people, ‘Don’t leave your computer open. Don’t open [WiFi] in a cafeteria. And if you ever lose your phone, tell us.’ ” The precautions seemed to have worked; the first public inklings of the project came the other week when Russian officials, contacted by reporters for comment, denounced the questions and falsely accused ICIJ of being an arm of the U.S. government.

The upshot may be that there is strength in numbers. Said Obermaier: “We are always better in a huge group of journalists than doing it alone.” n

H

BY GEOFF EDGERS e is dying, Q-tip elbows poking through a baggy shirt.

Friends visit, spooning him ice cream and playing music. His daughters are around as well, stopping in after school, too young to process the grim scene. And there, carefully placed in the closet, out of view in the room his ex-wife has set up, is the Stradivarius.

Philip Johnson’s fingers are no longer strong enough to play any violin, never mind one so unforgiving. So he keeps the Strad in a plastic crate. The instrument is the only thing he has of value. It is also his biggest secret.

When he’s gone, the news will shock them all, from the FBI to his family to the daughters of Roman Totenberg, who stand to inherit the instrument. They will ask how this once-promising, later penniless eccentric stole an 18thcentury violin worth millions — and got away with it. After all, he was the only suspect when it was taken in 1980. As death approaches, Johnson, usually the loudest voice in the room, keeps his mouth shut. It is the fall of 2011. This has been his secret for 31 years.

the long odyssey of a stolen strad Johnson, who was never able to hold a job, a mortgage or a relationship, somehow accomplished something most everyone thought impossible: He played Totenberg’s Stradivarius in plain view until the end.

He did this through chaos and control, by building an impenetrable wall between his past and present. Those who suspected Johnson of the crime lost track of him. Those who knew him during the last two decades of his life had never heard of the Totenberg theft. They just thought Johnson had an old violin.

“Why,” asked Gregory Maldonado, a friend and fellow violinist, “would Phil have a Strad?”

The trail remained ice-cold even after Johnson died of pancreatic cancer two weeks before Thanksgiving 2011. Then, last summer, Thanh Tran, Johnson’s ex-wife, decided to look into selling the violin. She had no idea it was a Strad.

Philip Johnson plays the Stradivarius in 1994, some years after he began playing it in public.

THANH TRAN

COURTESY OF TOTENBERG FAMILY

COURTESY OF TOTENBERG FAMILY

Phillip Johnson was a promising prodigy studying with some of classical music’s stars. Why did he take a teacher’s priceless violin, and how did he get away with it?

COURTESY OF THANH TRAN

At top, Roman Totenberg plays his prized Stradivarius, accompanied by daughters Amy and Jill Totenberg. In the middle is documentation of Totenberg’s Stradivarius. Above, Phil Johnson, center, at Venice Beach in 1992 with fellow members of the Mobius trio, Michael Fitzpatrick, left, and Xak Bjerken.

A friend suggested she contact Phillip Injeian, a dealer in Pittsburgh. It was Injeian who, working off e-mailed photos, saw that it matched a Stradivarius built in 1734 and stolen from the late Totenberg.

Injeian arranged to meet Tran in New York in late June. He also called the FBI. Within hours of her showing him the violin, two agents with the agency’s art theft team swooped in to claim the Strad. They contacted the Totenbergs, including daughter Nina, the longtime National Public Radio legal affairs correspondent.

In August, during a packed news conference in Manhattan, the authorities returned the violin to the family.

Across town, in the locker room of the Metropolitan Opera, two musicians got ready for a rehearsal.

“Did you hear about Totenberg’s Strad?” asked cellist Jerry Grossman.

Abe Appleman paused. A name the violinist hadn’t thought of in years popped into his head.

“Was it Phil Johnson?” he asked.

“That’s exactly the guy,” said Grossman.

The secret The crime defies logic. The young violinist, with so much ahead of him, brazenly acts while the master mingles in the next room. He leaves town under a cloud of suspicion. And even as he squanders his career, he refuses to reveal his secret. This delicate, hand-crafted masterpiece of wood and gut strings is his to possess, to play, to imprison.

There were hints all along. Only now, in the months after the discovery, can those who came into contact with Johnson piece together how this cocky amateur became a professional thief.

His siblings think of his childhood just outside Philadelphia. The parents coddling the baby of the family, sparking a lifetime sense of entitlement. The ex-wife points to his anxieties, the ones that seemed to haunt his mother, and the manic behavior. The symptoms led her to consider the possibility of undiagnosed attention-deficit disorder. Others note Johnson’s relationship with God. He grew up deeply religious but later lost faith, railing at anyone who believed in a higher being.

In the end, Johnson’s sister admits that she will never fully unpack the mystery.

“Can we ever figure out what makes someone else tick?” Carol Anderson asks. “Do we really know ourselves that well? The Bible says, ‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: Who can know it?’ ” One thing Johnson did know. The beauty of a Stradivarius.

The stringed instrument, named for the Italian craftsman Antonio Stradivari, is considered the finest one can play. It is also very rare.

Experts estimate that of the 1,000 or so violins crafted before Stradivari’s death in 1737, about 500 survive today.

“The magic of a Strad is very hard to put in words,” says violin star Joshua Bell. “It’s sort of the difference between listening to Pavarotti sing and listening to a very good tenor. When you play a Strad, a great Strad, there’s something about it. Like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s what a violin should sound like.’ ” In 2001, Bell paid nearly $4 million for a Stradivarius with its own fascinating history: In 1936, a journeyman player named Julian Altman snuck into Carnegie Hall and stole the

violin from Bronisław Huberman, disguised it with thick layers of shoe polish and performed on the Strad in B-rate gigs for decades. The Altman theft was uncovered only when he died in the mid-1980s.

The story, in some ways, mirrors that of Totenberg, who knew Huberman and was also a supremely gifted Jewish violinist from Poland. There is an important exception.

Johnson was never meant to be a journeyman. At one time, he was thought by many, including his college teacher Joseph Silverstein — one of the great orchestral violinists of the 20th century — to be a dynamic player with considerable promise.

“The secret. I think the secret killed him,” says Maldonado, who knew Johnson for decades.

Concert, then a crime It is May 13, 1980, and Totenberg is playing an all-Mozart recital at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Mass. He is not just the star attraction that night. He is also the school’s director.

Johnson, here to attend the concert, isn’t famous, but after four years as a student in the tightly knit Boston music community, he’s a familiar face.

He is 27, a handsome man with Beatlesque brown hair. That night, Johnson brings a violin case to Pickman Hall and takes his seat. This case will be remembered later as authorities try to piece together how somebody could have smuggled a 246-year-old violin out of a crowded building.

That night, about 200 people packed Pickman to hear Totenberg perform.

Afterward, Totenberg scoots across the lobby and leaves the Stradivarius alone, in a dressing room connected to the director’s office. He steps out to mix with the crowd. When he returns, his violin case is gone. The FBI says that it was found nearby, but empty.

Who took it? Immediately, talk centers on one suspect: Phil Johnson.

“He had been seen in the building that day, and it was odd because he wasn’t a fan of Mr. Totenberg,” recalls Irene Quirmbach, a violinist who had studied with Totenberg. “We didn’t really understand why he was there.”

Kenneth Sarch, one of Totenberg’s former assistants, says Johnson was overheard grumbling that night that the aging master didn’t deserve such a fine instrument.

Karen Marie Marmer, then a young violinist visiting from New York, remembers running into Johnson in the lobby of Longy. She thinks it may have even been the night after the concert.

He was agitated.

“I can’t believe they’re accusing me of something like this,” he told her.

Folsom, Pa. The Johnson family’s neighborhood, just a half-hour southwest of Philadelphia, is made up of the neat, modest brick houses that sprang up all across postwar America.

It was not a happy home. Robert, his father, had studied to become an artist before giving it up to become a machinist. Marion, his mother, is paralyzed by anxiety and depression. By the time the children come along — Robert Jr., Carol and finally Philip — Marion won’t so much as leave continues on next page

SUNDAY, APRIL 10, 2016

14

KLMNO WEEKLY

COVER STORY

from previous page

the house for the supermarket.

Bobby plays the violin first. But he lacks discipline. When Phil is 7, he notices the instrument. He asks whether he can try it.

“I could barely think of what to show him,” Robert Johnson Jr. says today. “He said, ‘Okay, I guess I’ll see what I can do with it.’ He just kept at it and kept at it, and by the end of the summer, when it was time to go to school, he could play every hymn in the hymn book. We were absolutely dumbfounded.”

He takes lessons in elementary school, immediately standing out.

“Phil was hands down the best violinist,” says Stephen Nazigian, a classmate. “He used the entire bow when others were scratching back and forth. He really knew what he was doing. He would practice an hour a day when other kids would be hard-pressed to do 15 minutes.”

With the boy outgrowing the school program, the family tracked down Jerome Wigler, Juilliard-trained and a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Today, at 95, Wigler still remembers Johnson. But not so much for his playing.

Wigler remembers his proselytizing. It bothered him, how Phil stood outside Wigler’s house, eager to pitch any emerging student.

“He would try to get them to join the church,” says Wigler. “He had all sorts of propaganda. He would just talk religion.”

After graduating from Ridley High School, Class of 1970, Johnson headed south to Florida Bible College. And that’s where something shifted.

He dropped out of school, began freelancing for orchestras in Florida and by the time he headed north to Massachusetts in the mid-’70s — why, it’s not clear — he was no longer a believer.

In 1976, Johnson, now 23, entered Boston University to study music. The department’s faculty featured some of the most storied players in the field, including Totenberg.

Other teachers were members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Joseph Silverstein, the violinist who would become Johnson’s teacher, remembers one of the many things that set him apart.

Most entering students were known quantities, referred by former teachers.

“Not Phil,” said Silverstein. “He just came out of nowhere. I still don’t know where he’s from.”

A natural nobody forgets In Boston, Johnson immediately made his mark, though not for the right reasons.

His first teacher, Roger Shermont, a longtime BSO violinist, found him too difficult to teach. Silverstein agreed to take Johnson on.

It was a lucky stroke. As the BSO’s concertmaster, Silverstein was one of the most important orchestral players of his era. For a young student, it would be like working in the batting cage with Mickey Mantle while he still roamed center field for the Yankees.

Silverstein died in late 2015 at age 83. But two weeks before his fatal heart attack, he was asked by The Washington Post whether he

remembered Johnson.

The kid was a fast sight reader and had a talent for jazz. He scored a prestigious fellowship to the Tanglewood Music Center, the BSO’s summer home.

“He also had a certain native charm about him,” Silverstein said. “There was something about this wild kid. He was a natural. His playing was undisciplined, but it was attractive.”

Then there was his other side. Johnson did not treat others with respect. Not his peers, not his superiors.

“You would assign him a particular piece of music and he’d come up with something else,” said Silverstein. “He was a rebel, and we were really trying to harness the kid and get him to focus.”

Silverstein remembered Johnson being dismissive of Totenberg, who taught at BU until he left for Longy in 1978.

COURTESY OF THANH TRAN

A young Philip Johnson practices at home in Pennsylvania. He began playing violin at 7 years old and showed a gift for it.

“But listen, Phil was dismissive of almost everybody,” he said. “He was quite an arrogant kid. A vestigial remnant of the ’60s.”

The master and the wild child They are both gone. That makes it impossible to know how closely Totenberg and Johnson interacted. They certainly knew each other.

Twice a year, every music student had to play for a jury made up of department faculty. But did Totenberg and Johnson ever really talk?

One thing’s for sure. Totenberg didn’t need to brag. Born in Poland, Totenberg played in front of Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House at 25, moved to the United States at 27 and, just before his 33rd birthday, purchased his Stradivarius. The instrument cost $15,000 in 1943.

It took years to break in. The hand-crafted instruments are notoriously persnickety and demand nearly perfect technique. But this Strad, with its distinctive wood-grain finish, would become Totenberg’s primary performance tool as well as one of the instruments he used for lessons.

And it was at Boston University, where Totenberg led the string department from 1961 to 1978, that some noticed how careless the aging master

could be when it came to his Strad. He sometimes treated it like an old winter coat.

“He would kind of shove it behind the sofa and leave it with the door unlocked,” says violinist David Dyer, a student during the 1970s.

Totenberg and Johnson left BU at about the same time, though under vastly different circumstances. In 1978, Longy hired Totenberg as its new director. The following spring, Johnson’s academic performance dropped. He withdrew from three courses and received two F’s and an incomplete. BU expelled him.

He would never tell family or friends about this, his academic dismissal not revealed until 2015, when The Post acquired his transcript.

And Silverstein didn’t remember Johnson’s exit. He did remember that, for years, there had been debates over whether to keep him there.

“Everyonewasdownonhim,saying‘Thiskidis so wild, he’s never going to amount to anything,’ ” Silverstein says. “The one person who was sort of his champion? Roman Totenberg.”

Did he play the Strad?

On a chilly Manhattan morning, Bruno Price opens a desk drawer to reveal the reddish chestnut body of a Stradivarius.

The instrument could be worth millions.

Now, it’s in pieces, part of a delicate restoration underway at Rare Violins of New York.

Totenberg’s daughters, Nina, Amy and Jill, hired Price late last summer to ready the Strad for a sale later this year.

Price admits he worried when the sisters called with news of the violin’s recovery.

A Stradivarius needs more than TLC. It needs to be maintained. But a thief can’t bring a hot fiddle into the shop for a checkup. He would immediately be busted.

So Price felt great relief that morning last summer when, surrounded by FBI investigators and the sisters, he first saw the Stradivarius. The instrument hadn’t suffered any irreversible damage.

Price thought he knew why. He contended that Johnson had played it only four or five years after stealing it in 1980.

“I can’t see how somebody even using it sparingly over that amount of time would have not caused more damage,” Price says.

It is an interesting theory. It also is wrong.

Johnson didn’t just play the Stradivarius in recent years. He used it for free performances in churches and in recording sessions. He played it as recently as 2011 during a crowded session only months before his death.

The fact that Johnson could play the instrument publicly is less a show of daring than a symbol of how far he had fallen. The hotshot violinist, once a standout, was so anonymous that he could play a stolen Stradivarius — and no one noticed.

‘Wrong is wrong’ At first, Johnson kept his prize hidden.

On June 6, 1980, three weeks after the theft, Johnson performed Sibelius’s Violin Concerto at Boston’s Jordan Hall. Steven Mercurio, a close friend from BU, conducted. So soon after

SUNDAY, APRIL 10, 2016

15

COVER STORY the crime, Johnson knew better than to use the Strad.

Nina Totenberg, Roman Totenberg’s oldest daughter, remembers her parents pleading with the FBI to search Johnson’s apartment.

They were told that suspicion alone was not enough for a search warrant.

“My mom kept asking people if they would break into his apartment and look for the violin,” Totenberg says. “She would ask Harvard professors this.”

The Strad would be gone soon enough. Johnson, no longer at BU, headed to New York later in 1980 and roomed with Mercurio for a few months.

Sometime in 1980, Johnson rambled back to his home state of Pennsylvania. He moved in with his sister.

The Stradivarius? Her brother did tell her, at some point, he had a good violin worth something like $30,000. But not a Strad.

“I can guarantee you one thing,” Anderson says, “if either my husband or I knew, we would have reported it immediately. Wrong is wrong, family or no family.”

After three months, Johnson told her of a new opportunity, to play for an orchestra in Venezuela. He threw his bags into the car and Steve drove him to the airport. In the front seat, Johnson held only one thing. His violin case.

“He held it like a baby,” Steve recalls.

‘My God, that fiddle sounds incredible’ The Stradivarius began to emerge.

A childhood friend, Keith Van Brunt believes it was in the late 1980s. Johnson, back from Venezuela, moved in with him.

“He played that violin every day, and he did all the maintenance himself because I would watch him take it apart and do things to it,” he says. “His explanation to me is that he bought an old violin. His dad helped him buy it. What do I know?”

Johnson had at least two violins, so he could play concerts without the stolen Strad. But today, friends who have seen pictures of the violin remember him using it in many of the small gigs he played across the country, barely earning enough to get by.

At a recital in California, a friend, Rebecca Rutkowski, approached Johnson after noticing his sound was particularly rich.

“I said, ‘My God, that fiddle sounds incredible,’ ” she says. “He started acting weird. He said, ‘I just borrowed it.’ Then I asked if I could come back and try it. ‘No, don’t come into the dressing room. I keep it closed.’ That was unusual.”

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Johnson continued to freelance in New York, California and Pennsylvania. That work led to an unexpected — and final — crack at musical success.

He met cellist Michael Fitzpatrick and pianist Xak Bjerken.

Fitzpatrick was drawn to the violinist’s blazing version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”

Bjerken found Johnson’s approach inspiring.

“He felt most people were sort of run of the mill, mainstream, conservative. And he had a

point,” says Bjerken, now a professor at Cornell University. “It was very exciting to play with him. He could get a volume of sound that was enormous.”

The three formed Mobius, a trio that performed the works of the great composers but also embraced improvisation. Later, his bandmates would realize the old violin Johnson often played was the Strad.

Approaching 40, Johnson also entered his most stable relationship. In California, he met Thanh Tran, a native of Vietnam. She and a friend had come to a Sunday afternoon concert in Santa Monica.

Tran, eight years younger, had come to the States in her teens, earned a degree in electrical engineering and started working at Hughes Aircraft Co. Johnson, she learned quickly, had no money but was full of energy. Tran, financially secure, felt drawn to him.

COURTESY OF THANH TRAN

Not long before he died of cancer in 2011, Philip Johnson used the Strad to record a concerto with local musicians in California.

“I wanted him to be able to explore his music without having to worry about money. And I wanted to help. I wanted to feed his talent.”

A high-profile gig, a flop Mobius started with promise. In 1993, Johnson played the Strad on “Beyond Beethoven,” an album that earned the group praise from the New York Times and a prime slot as trio-in-residence at the prestigious Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C. That honor came from Mercurio, Johnson’s old BU friend, now the festival’s music director.

The problem came on the June night when Mobius was set to perform. Johnson decided, just before they took the stage, to add echo and other effects to their instruments.

Fitzpatrick plucked his cello and “it sounded like a cannon shot.”

“He had completely overamplified my cello,” he says. “And then my A-string snapped two minutes from the end of the piece. We couldn’t stop, so I just remember playing the whole rest of the cello solo way up on the D-string. It was a catastrophe.”

Robert Jones, reviewing for the Post & Couri-

KLMNO WEEKLY

er, called Mobius “inept” and compared the performance to “painting mustaches on the Mona Lisa.”

Still, Mercurio didn’t abandon his old friend.

Only weeks later, he brought Johnson and MobiustoItalyfortheEuropeanversionofSpoleto.He appointed Johnson the concertmaster of the festival orchestra. Then he watched as Johnson argued with other players and showed up late.

Finally, Mercurio pulled him. Mobius would soon dissolve. Johnson, now 40, had squandered his last, best opportunity.

“It’s painful to think of somebody with that potential who ends up doing all the wrong things, but you can say that about anybody who had talent and becomes a stripper or junkie,” says Mercurio. “This person was brilliant, charming, smart and talented. How did this happen?”

Johnson and Tran separated in 2005 and officially divorced in 2008. He moved into a second home she had purchased, refinanced it and eventually had to sell. He filed for bankruptcy. The new owner would rent him back a room, a space so small he was embarrassed to invite friends over.

In 2011, Johnson learned he had pancreatic cancer. As his condition worsened, he began to get back in touch with his siblings.

He also reminded Anderson about one of his old violins. The one worth, oh, $30,000.

To sing again On that August afternoon in 2015, cameras flashed as the Totenberg daughters smiled and posed with their father’s Stradivarius. They were in their 30s when they last saw it. Now Nina, the oldest, was 71.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara declared the moment “a joyful ending to an amazing story.”

Nina, sitting on the side, offered a different take. She remained angry.

Totenberg talked of how her father eventually cashed out a $101,850 insurance policy and used it toward the $300,000 purchase of a Guarneri built in 1736. Totenberg wished Johnson would have spoken up. While the thief was dying, her father was still very much alive. He died in May 2012 at 101.

“He would have loved to have known it was not lost to humanity and that it would sing again,” she said.

The Strad never made it to Totenberg’s bedside. It almost slipped away forever. After Johnson died, Tran considered donating it to her youngest daughter’s school. Anderson, though, remembered the old violin that her brother had reminded her of as the end neared.

“You might want to check it out,” she told Tran. “The way Philip talked about it, it might be worth quite a bit.”

Now, both men are gone. The Stradivarius is being restored with a purpose. The Totenberg sisters are not searching for the highest bidder, a collector eager to place a mystical trophy on his mantel. The violin is being restored for a very specific buyer. A player. So that one day, the Stradivarius, a secret for decades, can be free to sing again. n

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INNOVATIONS

$60 and a 3-D printer fixed his smile Digital design student’s success with his own teeth prompts questions about dentalcare costs

BY

M ATT M C F ARLAND

A

college student has received a wealth of interest in his dental work after publishing an account of straightening his own teeth for $60.

Amos Dudley, who studies digital design at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, had no dentistry experience when he decided to create plastic aligners to improve his smile. After publishing before-and-after pictures of his teeth last month, Dudley has received hundreds of requests from strangers, asking him to straighten their teeth.

Dudley’s project has raised the question of whether the cost of professional dental care is unnecessarily high. Although some orthodontists say Dudley’s work may eventually lead to lower costs, they warn that the amateur’s methods were risky and could backfire, ultimately leading to a need for more expensive professional help.

“It’s very dangerous,” said Hera Kim-Berman, director of graduate orthodontics at the University of Michigan. “He’s done a tremendous disservice to many people who look at this and think they can possibly do it.”

Kim-Berman and other orthodontists warn of the dangers of leaving a certified health-care professional out of the process.

Among Kim-Berman’s many concerns was that the plastic aligners Dudley made for his teeth did not include his back molars, which Kim-Berman said could potentially create significant problems such as a disrupted bite.

“He could’ve done his own Lasik surgery,” said Brent E. Larson, a director of orthodontics at the University of Minnesota’s dental school. “But he probably wouldn’t have embarked on that road because that’s a more obvious risk to the health of your eye.

But in fact, this is the same sort of risk.”

Larsen stressed the importance of creating not just a beautiful smile, but a healthy smile.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF AMOS DUDLEY

College student Amos Dudley made a mold of his top teeth, which he scanned into a computer. Then he used software, top, to shift his teeth to where he wanted them to be and 3-D printed a set of plastic aligners, middle. After 16 weeks, at bottom is what his teeth look like now. Some orthodontists warn that the amateur’s methods were risky.

Orthodontists take into consideration the health of gum tissue and the location of bones that support teeth. Larsen said Dudley overlooked these considerations.

The $60 price tag Dudley paid for the work also doesn’t tell the complete story of the costs. Given his university studies, Dudley had access to a 3-D printer and laser scanner on campus, which cost in excess of $30,000 to purchase.

And his technical expertise far

exceeds that of the average person.

If he’d focused solely on the project, Dudley said, he could have completed it in a week or two. He began researching the project last summer and checked out dental books from the library.

Dudley then bought materials online to make a mold of his teeth.

He used a laser scanner to upload the mold into a computer program, where he could digitally

shift his teeth to a desired location. To ease his teeth into the transition, Dudley printed 12 different retainers, which gradually shifted his teeth to their final destination. He would shift from one retainer to the next after he could feel the current retainer no longer putting pressure on his teeth. After 16 weeks of wearing the retainers on his top teeth, Dudley had the smile he wanted.

(He did not seek to straighten his bottom teeth.)

Although not advocating that the average person try such an approach, some orthodontists said Dudley’s case might lead to more affordable dental care down the road.

“It’s a promising thing that this is happening,” said Kjeld Aamodt, a dental professor at the University of California at San Francisco.

“I think people are eager to have their teeth straightened and I think frustrated with the current orthodontic marketplace being not only inconvenient for them but too costly.”

Aamodt doesn’t expect anything near $60 to be realistic. But he said he could foresee a system in which advances in technology lead to patients not having to visit orthodontists every month, and paying a lower cost because of changes in the infrastructure of health care.

“There is a potential for maybe some cost savings, but not in the same way there is for consumer electronic goods that can be manufactured more efficiently, effectively using robots,” Larson said.

The cost of dental work comes largely not from the equipment, but from the expertise of the orthodontist, who finishes their schooling with hundreds of thousands of dollars of loans.

Dudley acknowledges his work required only a small fraction of the knowledge that orthodontists have. And he isn’t accepting any requests to make plastic aligners for the people who contact him.

Instead Dudley, who is set to graduate this spring, has interviewed with 3-D printing companies that were intrigued by his project. n

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MILESTONES

It’s still Cleary’s world

Some of Beverly Cleary’s most famous characters are Ramona Quimby, left; Ralph from “The Mouse and the Motorcycle”; and Henry Huggins, the protagonist of her first book.

BY

N ORA K RUG

B

everly Cleary doesn’t really want to talk about turning 100. “Go ahead and fuss,” she says of the big day, April 12. “Everyone else is.”

Across the country, people are delving into Cleary nostalgia, with celebrationsandneweditionsofher books with introductions by the likes of Amy Poehler and Judy Blume. Kids and adults are being asked to “Drop Everything and Read” to commemorate Cleary’s contributiontochildren’sliterature.

But the beloved children’s author has something far more lowkey in mind for herself: a celebratory slice of carrot cake, she says, “because I like it.”

Cleary is as feisty and direct as her famously spirited character Ramona Quimby — an observation that she hears often and doesn’t care for. “I thought like Ramona,” she says in a phone interview, “but I was a very wellbehaved little girl.”

Today, Cleary lives a quiet, wellbehaved life in a retirement home in Northern California. She gets up at 7:30 a.m. and spends the day reading the newspaper and books (on her night stand when we talked in mid-March: Alexandra Fuller’s “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs

Tonight”) and doing crossword puzzles. She watches “Doc Martin” and CNN and enjoys visits with her family. She doesn’t have a computer, and though she enjoys writing letters, she notes dryly that “when you get to be 99, there aren’t many people to write letters to.”

Cleary is both set in her ways — “I don’t think I joined this century” — and keenly aware of how times have changed. “I think children today have a tough time, because they don’t have the freedom to run around as I did — and they have so many scheduled activities.”

In her youth, she points out, “mothers did not work outside the home; they worked on the inside.

And because all the mothers were home — 99 percent of them, anyway — all mothers kept their eyes on all the children.” This is part of the reason, she says, that the children in her books were so often out tromping through the neighborhood without adult chaperones.

Cleary’s last book was “Ramona’s World,” published in 1999. Her plucky heroine remains frozen at age 9; her sister, Beezus, is 14 and just entering high school. Who knows what Ramona might have been like when she hit puberty.

Cleary, for one, is happy to leave her before that nightmare. “I think writers need to know when to re-

ILLUSTRATIONS COURTESY OF HARPERCOLLINS

tire,” she says.

Yet Cleary’s books live on. In January, HarperCollins published new editions of three of her most popular works: “Henry Huggins,” “Ramona Quimby, Age 8” and “The Mouse and the Motorcycle,” with introductions by Blume, Poehler and Kate DiCamillo, respectively. There are more than 40 Cleary titles in print, and you can even watch Selena Gomez and Joey King play her two most famous characters in the 2010 movie “Beezus and Ramona.”

Cleary has won a National Book Award, a Newbery Medal and a National Medal of Art from the National Endowment of the Arts, among other accolades. In 2000, the Library of Congress gave her a Living Legend Award. Yet she wears her literary stardom lightly.

“I’m just lucky,” she says. Throwing zingers — “People tell me I don’t look a day over 80”; “Don’t expect me to analyze my books!” — she’s both modest and outspoken.

Perhaps these qualities are a product of her upbringing. Born Beverly Bunn in rural Oregon, she spent much of her early life doing farm work. When her family moved to Portland, she says, “city life was a shock.”

Although her mother read to her regularly, she wasn’t always

CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/ SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE VIA CORBIS

A muchloved children’s author nears 100 with the feisty spirit she gave to Ramona Quimby

KLMNO WEEKLY

eager to read on her own. “I liked to have her read to me,” she says.

“So I thought, what’s the point in my having to do it myself?”

She nearly failed first grade, she says, and didn’t read on her own until third grade. Even then, it happened organically: “I was looking through ‘The Dutch Twins’ by Lucy Fitch Perkins,” she recalls, “and I discovered I was reading — and enjoyed it.”

Cleary long yearned to be a writer — a passion she explains eloquently in her memoirs “A Girl from Yamhill” (1988) and “My Own Two Feet” (1995) — but she met resistance from her mother, who told her, “You must have some other way of earning a living,” Cleary recalls. “So I became a children’s librarian — the next best thing.”

In 1940, she eloped, marrying her longtime sweetheart Clarence Cleary, who died in 2004.

Cleary’s first book, “Henry Huggins,” was published in 1950.

Based loosely on a story she had overheard while working at a military hospital library, the book (originally titled “Spareribs and Henry”) came slowly. And it was, at first, rejected by her publisher.

As Cleary reworked it, she added Beezus and Ramona — the latter a name she heard being called out by a neighbor — to the mix.

Her own children — twins Marianne and Malcolm — born five years later, inspired the book “Mitch and Amy” and even helped shape that story.

“My son pointed out that you cannot ride a bike with a banana in your hip pocket,” she says. “So I did take that out. I didn’t want my character to have a squashed banana in his pocket.”

As she approaches 100, Cleary still talks about her characters as if they are friends. Even if she doesn’t want to be compared to Ramona, she confesses that the spitfire is her favorite. The charming and better-behaved Ellen Tebbits is a close second.

Ramona, she says, has to some degree been misunderstood. It’s not that she’s naughty, Cleary says, it’s that “things just didn’t work out the way she thought they should.” But for her creator, things pretty much have.

“I live in a very pleasant place with a very nice room that looks out on trees and rabbits and birds,” she says. She has her books, her newspaper, her family and her memories. Bring on the carrot cake. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

ERIC HUDIBURG

TOM CHUDLEIGH

NIGEL RIGDEN

Clockwise from top left: Artist Stephen Turner anchored this egg-shaped structure in a river in Exbury, England, to use as a temporary workspace, home and laboratory. The Sphere House is part of a private hotel on Vancouver Island, B.C. A portable home made by students at Green Mountain College in Vermont can be pulled by a four-cylinder car. Steve Messam’s footbridge in Cumbria, England, was made from 22,000 sheets of red paper and no fasteners.

STEVE MESSAM

Structures so small, they’re unreal N ON-FICTION

T NANOTECTURE Tiny Built Things

By Rebecca Roke Phaidon. 335 pp. $24.95

l

REVIEWED BY

P HILIP K ENNICOTT

he tiny-house movement hits so many progressive architecture buttons that it can begin to feel ideologically claustrophobic.

It wouldn’t exist except in reaction to the super-sizing of everything today, especially in America, and so it comes with a broader agenda, against consumerism and in favor of sustainability. Spend time on the many websites devoted to it, or with Rebecca Roke’s “Nanotecture: Tiny Built Things,” and you see how the small-isbeautiful ethos is also about spiritual improvement, mindfulness and a better relationship to the social and natural world. It addresses almost every pathology — alienation, isolation and anomie — that modernity has cooked up.

Roke’s book surveys 300 contemporary examples of “nanotecture,” which is a broader category than the tiny house, encompass-

ing garden follies, small libraries, teahouses, sculptural forms, conceptual projects and shelters for pets. The book’s index also breaks down the projects by their materials, which include corncobs, flax, cardboard and packing tape. Unfortunately, the author’s approach favors breadth over depth, so only one picture is included for each project, and descriptions are cursory.

But the variety of structures helps Roke prove several claims made in her short introduction.

Nanotecture encourages architects to experiment, and it keeps them honest when it comes to cost and materials: “The restricted palette of tiny buildings also requires a maximized logic: the ability to take fewer materials and work efficiently with them.” And so Swiss architects have created a small, translucent pavilion out of reused plastic bottles, architec-

ture students in Portugal constructed a pop-up bar made from Ikea storage tubs, and designers in San Francisco fashioned a temporary table and chairs out of reused cardboard printer rolls.

But for every project that elicits intellectual admiration, the real emotion appealed to is envy. The most enticing projects are the perfectly rationalized, immaculately constructed, live-and-work spaces that appeal to the minimalist aesthetic. Ideally, they are set in a heartbreakingly beautiful landscape, and they come with the implicit promise that you will be inspired to do there all the things you are too distracted to do in the real world. A small, dark, woodclad tower on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, rises above a rocky seascape, and though we can’t see inside its black, forbidding, abstract form, you sense that this is a perfect machine for communing

with nature. Inside, we are assured, is a kitchenette, bathroom, woodburning stove, studio and access to a roof deck.

But there’s a caveat: The Fogo Island tower, built in 2011, is part of a residency program for artists.

And so, like many of the tree houses, forest studios, one-room glass villas and other enticing spaces, it is disconnected from the usual grid of domestic obligations. It comes with a support structure. And it’s that larger support structure — whether a place to do your laundry, or fix your car, or store your gardening tools — that is often left out of the picture when we salivate over living small. As any architect will tell you, the clean, simple, strippeddown, minimalist look is often purchased at a very high price. n Kennicott is an art and architecture critic for The Washington Post.

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BOOK

KLMNO WEEKLY

A tired thriller from a literary lion

A wide view of the Godfather of Soul

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

L

l

REVIEWED BY

M ICHAEL M EWSHAW

ate in his career, Louis Begley, the “About Schmidt” author and a former president of the PEN American Center, has morphed into a mystery writer. It began with last year’s “Killer, Come Hither” — and now we have its sequel, “Kill and Be Killed.” Thus Begley joins a constellation of literary stars who risked their reputations producing genre fiction.

Having produced a trilogy of Schmidt books, Begley has had practice handling a continuing character and recursive plots. So it comes as a shock, not to mention a disappointment, that Begley makes a mess of the basic recipe for a thriller series.

“Kill and Be Killed” commences with a synopsis of its prequel. The narrator, Jack Dana, languishes in Venice, recovering from physical and psychic wounds, and completing his new novel. Still in his early 30s, Dana possesses credentials that put James Bond to shame. He mixes a perfect martini, is a connoisseur of fine food and wine, charms women of all sexual persuasions and keeps his body toned with six-mile runs and martial arts training. After Yale and Balliol College, he served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Like previous generations of his family, who “never failed to raise our glasses to our country or spill our blood for her, right or wrong,” Jack wears his heroism lightly and shrugs off getting stabbed as a shaving accident.

After a sniper ended his military career with a shot to the pelvis, Jack drew on his battlefield exploits for his successful first novel.

Finishing the book on a remote estancia in the Mato Grosso of Brazil, he returned to civilization to discover that his only living relative had been murdered. In “Killer, Come Hither” he solved that crime, dispatched the killer in hand-tohand combat and inherited Uncle Harry’s Fifth Avenue penthouse, his place in Sag Harbor, and his beautiful legal protégé, Kerry.

Now in “Kill and Be Killed,” it’s

revealed that Kerry has broken with Jack because of his violent nature. He has hopes of reclaiming her, but then learns she’s died of an overdose in a shabby Chelsea hotel, in an incident that also involved sex.

Immediately Jack suspects Kerry’s death is linked to his uncle’s murder and that both killings came at the behest of a Texas billionaire, Abner Brown, whose criminal empire includes illegal arms sales and a fraudulent FedEx operation. Indifferent to Brown’s earlier threats, Jack flies back from Venice determined to track and execute Kerry’s murderer, and to punish Brown. This entails running a gantlet of Brown’s henchmen, all of them Serbs who talk like the Two Wild and Crazy Guys in the old “Saturday Night Live” sketches. “Tonight I beat. Maybe next time I kill.”

Against these stock (and strangely ineffective) villains, Jack is no respecter of Marquess of Queensbury rules. He stabs one, shoots one and shoves another down a flight of subway stairs.

As a novelist, Jack — and Begley, by extension — could have benefited from a blue-penciling editor.

Even by the flexible standards of genre fiction, many lines are simply too flabby and tired.

The least one expects from a thriller is that it be thrilling. Here again “Kill and Be Killed” falls short. Begley portrays Jack Dana as so utterly without fear, so impervious to pain and introspection, that a reader feels little tension or sense of jeopardy. And it’s difficult to identify with a hero who eviscerates an assailant and wisecracks, “The guy wasn’t ready for prime time,” then returns to his hotel famished for breakfast. After “Killed and Be Killed,” a reader is left famished for the socially insightful and evocatively crafted fiction Louis Begley used to write. n Mewshaw is the author of, most recently, “Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal.”

J

KILL AND BE KILLED

By Louis Begley Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday.

269 pp. $25.95

KILL ’EM AND LEAVE Searching for James Brown and the American Soul

By James McBride Spiegel & Grau. 256 pp. $28

l

REVIEWED BY

G ERALD E ARLY

azz great Count Basie once told soul singer James Brown to “become an institution,” as Basie himself had.

A book like “Kill ’Em and Leave” suggests that Brown is exceeding that status, becoming both an institution and a myth.

Let us suppose that James Brown was Orson Welles’s Charles Kane. If he were, James McBride’s new book could have been called “Citizen Brown,” as it mostly consists of chapters giving perspectives about the singer from various people who knew him: from his first wife, Velma, whom he married in 1953, to his undertaker, Charles Reid; from his trusted friend and manager Charles Bobbit to the Rev. Al Sharpton, a protege of the volatile performer.

And if this is “Citizen Brown,” then the mysterious house in Queens that Brown owned during his New York years in the 1960s and that McBride introduces to us in the first chapter as the one that mesmerized him and his sisters, might be considered Xanadu. (Actually, Brown had several Xanadus.) And Brown’s will, which left at least $100 million in a trust fund called the I Feel Good Trust “to help educate poor children — white and black — in South Carolina and Georgia,” might be considered his “Rosebud.”

In the nine years since Brown’s death at age 73, the will has never been probated, and his estate is being bled to death in a tangle of lawsuits from which only the lawyers are getting rich. The mystery about this will is not that Brown wished to bequeath his money in this way. It is easy to understand why a black kid from the South who grew up without a mother, never finished school, was sent to a juvenile prison for theft and didn’t get a “pair of underwear out of a store” till he was 9 would want to help poor children. But knowing that his estate was “gonna be a big mess” when he died, why did he not simply establish a foundation for the education of poor chil-

dren while he was still alive, when he could have done what he wished with his money? Why did he make helping poor children contingent on his death?

McBride writes well, and the fact that he is also a musician allows him to open up dimensions of Brown’s creativity that a nonmusician critic could not. His comparison of jazz soloing to funk soloing, for instance, is illuminating.

But the informants here are not particularly forthcoming; indeed, most avoid saying anything especially critical about Brown. There are the usual stories about Brown the impossible, petty taskmaster; Brown the determined, intensely competitive young man who worked hard and was willing to do just about anything onstage to get an audience’s attention; Brown the aloof artist, who immediately left a venue once his performance was over (“kill ’em and leave”); Brown the race man, who made the pathbreaking hit “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” in 1968 and who coached Sharpton; Brown the generous benefactor, who gave away cars, paid college tuition and provided loans for many; Brown the skinflint, who underpaid his band and many of his employees and hated charity with a Scrooge-like passion; and Brown the believer, who celebrated the American Dream.

There is the drug-addled Brown, the race victim sentenced to six years in prison in 1988. (He served two years.) Brown the woman beater is mentioned here and there, but the grisly specifics of some of his more horrific episodes (involving singer Tammi Terrell, for example) are absent.

McBride acknowledges that knowing the South is the key to understanding Brown, but otherwise McBride’s Brown proves as inexplicable as Welles’s Kane. n Early teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and is editor of the Common Reader.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Aaron Burr: America’s real progressive hero NANCY ISENBERG is the T. Harry Williams professor of history at Louisiana State University, and author of “Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr.”

Alexander Hamilton clearly is having a moment. The hero of the hottest show on Broadway is being newly celebrated as a hero of the progressive left. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik described the musical as a metaphor for the Obama era: “At the simplest presentational level, it shows previously marginalized people taking on the responsibility and burden of American history.”

The irresistible appeal among progressives of Broadway’s version of Hamilton seems coupled with equal disdain for the play’s villain, Aaron Burr.

Burr is reviled in “Hamilton” and in popular consciousness as a cowardly, unprincipled man who was unwilling to believe in or fight for anything. But in fact, Burr was in most ways more forward-thinking, by our standards, than his nemesis Hamilton, and the romantic recasting of Hamilton’s life story comes at the expense of a true progressive champion.

Burr’s villainy is actually the result of a smear campaign invented by his political enemies centuries ago, and then disseminated in newspapers, pamphlets and personal letters during and after his lifetime. Pop culture portraits of Burr have blindly repeated these distortions, transforming Burr into the quintessential bad guy of early American history.

In “Hamilton,” Burr is portrayed as a man without a moral compass, driven by envy and a yearning for power, whose only clear goal in life is to topple his heroic rival Hamilton, which leads to their tragic duel and Hamilton’s untimely death. The first advice that Burr dispenses in the play is to never reveal what you really think. At the time of the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton calls on Burr to “take a stand” for the “first time in your life.” Burr replies: “I’ll wait here

and see which the way the wind will blow.” Arriving at the election of 1800, words are put in James Madison’s mouth that Madison would never have said — that Burr has no positions: he “obfuscates, he dances.”

Hamilton tells Burr at the same time: “No one knows what you believe.” None of this could be further from the truth.

The historical Burr was no less passionate about the revolution than Hamilton. In 1775, he was appointed aide-de-camp to Richard Montgomery, a great general. For courage under fire, Burr received a commendation from Congress. He was not just a disciple of the Enlightenment, but also an advocate for criminal justice reform, freedom of the press, women’s rights and the rights of immigrants. He would have made an excellent judge if he had accepted a 1792 offer to sit on New York’s Supreme Court. Burr was a skilled innovator in the interest of democracy, working to make elections, financial services and even the U.S. Senate more fair and transparent.

As a hero, the musical’s Hamilton represents the American dream in the form of an immigrant-made-good, born on the Caribbean Island of Nevis, then raising himself to high society through sheer determination and genius. Yet Hamilton — and the Federalist Party he headed — were hostile to the idea that the United States should ever be led by newcomers.

POOL PHOTO BY OLIVIER DOULIERY/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

Members of the “Hamilton” cast perform musical selections from the broadway show in the East Room of the White House last month.

It was the Federalists who pressed for a constitutional amendment barring naturalized foreigners from elected offices, and it was that supposed villain Burr, in the New York Assembly at the time, defending the liberal promise of the young republic.

“America stood with open arms and presented an asylum to the oppressed of every nation,” he said. “Shall we deprive these persons of an important right derived from so sacred a source as our Constitution?”

Burr was also advanced compared to his peers in terms of women’s equality. He was far ahead of Hamilton, Jefferson and Adams in advancing the ideas of philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, a leading advocate of women’s rights. Burr and his wife, Theodosia, educated their daughter as they might have a son: She could read by age 3, then mastered French, Italian, Latin, Greek, mathematics, history and geography. The idea that women were the intellectual equals of men was radical, and Hamilton attacked Burr for supporting it.

And what of that fateful duel that secured the permanent entwining of Hamilton and Burr’s reputations? “Hamilton” suggests that the duel was fought over the election of 1800, and that Burr knowingly shot Hamilton after seeing him fire a bullet in the air.

But this is wrong on all counts.

Eyewitnesses at the duel agreed that the men had fired within seconds of each other, but they

disagreed on who shot first. The real cause of the duel was that Hamilton openly insulted Burr before a group of prominent men (and refused to apologize) when Burr ran for the New York governorship in 1804. The insults were then published in a local paper; the key phrase that led Burr to issue a challenge was that Hamilton had uttered a “despicable opinion” about Burr’s private character. Though Hamilton had said offensive things before, and Burr had repeatedly accepted his apologies, this time, Burr wrote to a friend, it became impossible for him to retain his self-respect and forbear Hamilton’s rude treatment any longer. (Also omitted from “Hamilton” and most Hamiltonian lore is the fact that Hamilton supplied the pistols, and only Hamilton knew of the secret hair trigger. This gave him an advantage and violated the era’s gentlemanly code of conduct — so much for fairness .)

“Hamilton” may be a delight to watch, but let’s not convince ourselves that it honors the discipline of history, or that it aptly represents genuine sources of progressive thought in America’s founding. If audiences that have fallen for the play’s energy and spirit want a genuine icon to look to, they should spend a little time getting to know its villain, whose reputation deserves to be recovered from the tabloid pages of history. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 10, 2016

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

How we got $15 minimum wages KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL editor and publisher of the Nation magazine, writes a weekly online column for The Post.

What once was considered pie in the sky is becoming law. In New York, legislators just agreed to raise the state minimum wage to $15 an hour, with the full effect beginning in New York City by December 2018. California passed a compromise raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2022. New Jersey and the District are considering similar laws.

How did this reform go from being scorned as “extreme” to being enacted? Consensus politicians don’t champion it. Pundits tend to ignore it. Many liberal economists deride it as radical. The idea moved because workers and allies organized and demanded change.

Three years ago, fast-food workers walked off the job in what began the “fight for $15 and a union.” With the federal government as the largest lowwage employer, federal contract workers demonstrated outside the Pentagon, Congress and the White House. Progressive politicians added their voices. In Seattle, Kshama Sawant made a $15 minimum wage a centerpiece of her 2013 City Council campaign and pushed it in office. The Service Employees International Union, business leaders and political leaders such as Seattle Mayor Ed Murray helped build the coalition needed to get it done. Now wages in Seattle are headed to $15. In SeaTac, the airport district, the wage is already in effect.

In New York, the minimum

wage was central to insurgent mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio’s campaign. He and the Working Families Party joined with striking low-wage workers, labor and community groups, and City Council members. Zephyr Teachout’s surprisingly strong challenge to Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) put pressure on him to act. To Cuomo’s credit, he took up the issue and got a GOP Senate to approve it.

At the national level, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairs Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) joined with demonstrating contract workers.

The CPC lobbied President Obama to use his executive power to raise wages for federal contract workers. The president

responded with three historic executive orders, lifting the minimum wage for contract workers to $10.10, cracking down on wage theft and other workplace violations, and extending paid leave to contract employees.

Obstacles remain. Today, 42 percent of American workers earn less than $15 an hour. And the right to a union has been trampled by relentless and at times lawless corporate resistance. The Republican leadership in Congress refuses even to allow a vote on raising a national minimum wage that, at $7.25 an hour, means full-time workers can’t raise their families out of poverty.

But now Christine Owens of the National Employment Law Project says that “the Fight for $15 launched by underpaid workers has changed the nation’s economic trajectory, beginning to reverse decades of wage inequality.”

Contrary to the views of the business lobby, an analysis by economists at the University of California at Berkeley shows that New York state’s increases won’t lead to job losses. The higher wages will generate billions in new consumer spending; increased sales will offset the costs to businesses. In Seattle,

unemployment reached an eightyear low after the initial increases in the minimum wage last year.

This movement continues to build. The Fight for $15 and Good Jobs Nation initiatives will ratchet up their walkouts and demonstrations this month. On Monday, a coalition of religious leaders issued a call for “moral action on the economy.” They will press presidential candidates to pledge to “issue an executive order to make sure taxpayer dollars reward ‘model employers’ that pay a living wage of at least $15 an hour, provide decent benefits and allow workers to organize without retaliation.”

Sanders has made $15 and a union a centerpiece of his campaign. Hillary Clinton supports raising the minimum wage to $12.50, while allowing cities to go higher. The Republican candidates oppose minimum wage increases.

With extreme inequality, childhood poverty the worst in the industrial world and more Americans struggling to stay afloat, this country desperately needs bold reform. What the activists and low-wage workers have shown with their fight for $15 is that the changes we need will come if people organize and force them. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 10, 2016

22

OPINIONS

BY ROGERS FOR THE PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE

Why businesses fight for gay rights JENA MCGREGOR writes a daily column analyzing leadership in the news for the Washington Post’s On Leadership section.

The news releases rolled in the other week, one after another, the numbers swelling. More than 80 companies were demanding that North Carolina repeal a law that limits bathroom options for transgender people and blocks local anti-discrimination rules. A day later, it was more than 90. Then more than 100. Then more than 120.

It’s an extraordinary shift from eight years ago, when California’s Proposition 8 came up for a vote and the number of companies that lined up to publicly support same-sex marriage rights was fewer than five.

Back in 2012, when Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein signed up to be a spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, he was called an “unlikely advocate.”

Now, when CEOs weigh in — such as when PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi called the North Carolina law “contrary to our values as a company” and one that “impedes our progress toward equality” — they’re described simply as joining the criticism. And that criticism at times includes threats to reconsider doing business in the state. (In fact, PayPal canceled plans to expand in North Carolina after the law passed.)

Corporate America’s evolution

on gay rights appears to have reached a tipping point, one where so many companies have taken a stand on the issue that the risk of speaking out has been superseded by the risk of not doing so.

How did it happen? Public sentiment surely is playing a role. A recent survey by Public Religion Research Institute found that 71 percent of Americans support laws that would protect lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public accommodations. Data from the Pew Research Center recently found that 55 percent of Americans, and 70 percent of millennials, support same-sex marriage.

But Deena Fidas, the director of the workplace equality program at Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group for gay rights, describes the now-commonplace public support from companies as the result of more than a decade of

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY WASSERMAN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

outreach between the LGBT and corporate communities. “It’s perfectly understandable for the casual observer to look at North Carolina and think it’s trendy now to be pro-LGBT,” she said. “But there’s a very strong structure behind this outreach.”

One factor has been the growth of the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index, which scores companies on their friendliness to LGBT issues and publishes it. When it was launched in 2002, just 13 companies received a perfect score. Fourteen years later, 407 have one. The index examines discrimination policies, employee benefits, presence of LGBT employee groups and a company’s external work with the LGBT community.

As companies began paying closer attention to these metrics, Fidas says, more corporate leaders started identifying with it, and more internal policies and benefits started shifting to accommodate gay workers. Because companies had been doing more to allow for greater equality for their LGBT employees, supporting these issues meant supporting employees, not just airing their voices about public or social policy.

Another major factor, Fidas says, were the state-level fights over same-sex marriage. A watershed moment happened in

2011, when New York became the largest state to legalize same-sex marriage. In the years that followed, says Fidas, “the business voice grew from just ‘it’s the right thing to do’ to ‘it’s good for our business.’ ” If there was a final straw for a willingness to speak out publicly on the issue, it was last year’s Supreme Court ruling, which upheld a right to same-sex marriage. As one author told the New York Times: “The Supreme Court gave corporate America the political cover to speak out.”

Those who still remain unconvinced might want to consider a recent working paper from professors at Duke University and the Harvard Business School. The research surveyed people about Indiana’s religious liberty law, including a statement in some of the surveys that was attributed to Apple CEO Tim Cook or other leaders about how the law would allow discrimination.

People who were told about Cook’s discrimination concerns said in the surveys that they were more likely to buy Apple products. In other words, the business case for speaking out about social issues such as gay rights may go well beyond protecting the rights and interests of their employees. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 10, 2016

23

KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Bicycling BY

L YDIA D E P ILLIS

Each year, 100 million Americans jump on a bicycle at least once, es­ pecially when the weather gets warm. Some of these pedalers are rec­ reational riders; others rely on their bikes for transportation to and from work. In the past few years, scores of bike lanes and bike­share programs have popped up. But there are still a lot of misconceptions about getting around on two wheels.

1

Mandating helmet use is the best way to keep riders safe.

There’s no doubt about it: Helmets save lives. Studies show they reduce the risk of cyclist head injury by 85 percent.

Recently, bike advocates have argued that riding without a helmet should be illegal.

In truth, there are better ways to keep cyclists safe. And legislating helmet use can distract from the many policy interventions that would actually help more. Helmets don’t prevent crashes, and people can be badly hurt in a collision with a moving vehicle, whether or not their heads are protected.

Building dedicated infrastructure to keep bikes away from cars is a more effective way to save lives.

Here’s proof: Most European cities don’t require riders to wear helmets. Yet in those cities, there are fewer cyclist deaths and injuries per capita than in the United States. Experts say that’s because of their infrastructure.

And studies show that when drivers see cyclists in helmets, they behave more recklessly, driving closer to pedalers and increasing the possibility of accidents.

Mandating helmet use also tends to reduce overall ridership, since some people would rather skip bicycling altogether than risk punishment for not wearing a helmet. When that happens, bike density decreases and the presence of cyclists is less apparent, which leaves those who remain more vulnerable.

2

Cyclists break more traffic laws than drivers do.

Most cyclists do say they’ve rolled through a red light once in a while, if the street was clear of oncoming cars, or have hopped on a sidewalk to avoid a crowded road. These acts are illegal in many cities. And occasionally, bikers act unpredictably and irresponsibly, putting themselves and drivers in danger.

But let’s put those bad acts in perspective: According to Wesley Marshall, a University of Colorado engineering professor who surveyed more than 17,000 cyclists and drivers, drivers copped to breaking the rules at a slightly higher rate than bikers.

It’s the rare driver who never speeds, after all. And sometimes, drivers think cyclists are breaking the law when they’re really not — it’s usually legal to take up a whole lane, for example, rather than staying on the right side of the road.

3

If more people rode bikes, there’d be noticeably less traffic and pollution.

Sure, if everyone gave up their cars tomorrow, the health of our cities and our climate would improve. But this is wishful thinking. Just 1 percent of Americans regularly commute by bicycle. Even if that number doubled, cycling wouldn’t significantly cut smog and congestion. And for many people — families with small children, the millions who live 10 miles or more from their jobs, the elderly and the infirm — biking just isn’t a realistic

LINDA DAVIDSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

possibility.

Even if significantly more people rode bikes, it probably wouldn’t make a serious dent in our traffic problems. Studies have shown that congestion increases in cities where there are more bike riders but no new bike lanes. As city planners have long realized, the only thing powerful enough to lure drivers out of their cars is a combination of robust bike infrastructure and a comprehensive transit system.

4

Bicycling is mostly for the wealthy.

Statistics suggest that bicycling is equally prevalent among people of all income levels or may even be more common in the lowest-earning quartile. One PeopleForBikes study found that 40 percent of American adults who ride have incomes of less than $20,000. That makes sense: For distances slightly too far to walk, biking is often the fastest, cheapest way to get around, especially for people who can’t afford to buy and maintain cars.

Unfortunately, the infrastructure has yet to catch up. People who make less than $20,000 a year say they’re less satisfied than others with the bike paths, lanes and trails in their neighborhoods.

5

Bike-sharing programs make roads less safe.

This fear seems understandable. People rent big, clunky bikes and ride them slowly around town, often without helmets, probably careening into stationary objects and causing pile-ups behind them. Right?

After a few years of collecting data on the systems that have sprouted in cities across the country, researchers have found this not to be true. According to a report released in March by the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University, there have been zero fatalities from bike-sharing programs in the United States since the first systems were established in 2010.

They also have a lower non-fatalinjury rate than bicycling generally, and researchers think that’s precisely because the bikes are so large and visible, and riders can’t pilot them as aggressively as conventional bikes.

In European cities, these systems make the rest of the cycling population safer as well, as they increase driver awareness, slow down traffic and increase pressure for safety-enhancing street infrastructure, such as protected bike lanes, for everyone to use. n

SUNDAY, APRIL 10, 2016

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RECOGNIZING THE BEST & BRIGHTEST Do you know someone who shows dedication and innovation on the job, displays leadership skills or has taken on a leadership role and/or demonstrates remarkable people skills? If they are younger than 35 years old on July 31st, be sure to nominate that person to be a “rising star” of North Central Washington.

Entries will be accepted until May 31st.

Business orld Wenatchee Valley

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To nominate, go to:

wvbusinessworld.com/30under35/ Questions? Contact Editor Cal FitzSimmons at fitzsimmons@wenatcheeworld.com or 509-665-1176.

Interested in sponsoring 30 Under 35?

Contact Advertising Director, Andrea Andrus, at andrus@wenatcheeworld.com or 509-664-7136.