A Remarkable Story!

George Clooney's latest film tells dark tale of underwater peril

Vannessa Thorpe The Guardian (London)

Hollywood takes on tale of dangerous dives, risky pipe installation and a decades-long battle for compensation 

A dark Nordic mystery played out beneath the icy waves of the North Sea almost 40 years ago is now to find a dramatic resolution in Hollywood. A brave band of Norwegian divers, who put their lives at risk and unwittingly damaged their health by working up to 400m below the surface, may soon receive justice, as George Clooney takes up their cause.

The battle to win compensation for the pioneering divers, who suffered life-changing side effects to secure Norway's enormous oil and gas wealth, has found a new champion in Clooney.

The Hollywood star's own production company plans to tell their story in a film that the divers hope will crown a recent victory in the lengthy legal battle for compensation. The extraordinary feats of the 24 men are already the subject of a Norwegian thriller, Pioneer, which opens in British cinemas on Friday. Now Smokehouse Pictures, run by Clooney and his producing partner Grant Heslov, is to remake the film.

"The plight of the divers is a very well-known story in this country," said Christian Fredrik Martin, producer of the Norwegian film, "and when we first started work on Pioneer, Smokehouse got in touch. They came back to us last year when the film was released in Norway. Clooney and his fellow producers were attracted by the cinematic possibilities of the underwater world, I think, and also because it is the kind of non-fiction story their company has been interested in turning into films in the past."

This year saw the release of Smokehouse Pictures' The Monuments Men, a film directed by Clooney which told the true World War IIsecond world war story of the art historians who set out to save priceless pictures and sculpture from Nazi looting. Clooney and Heslov also wrote 2011's The Ides of March, about a corrupt presidential campaign, and Good Night, and Good Luck, about the McCarthy era communist witch-hunt of the 1950s.

At the end of last year the European court of human rights, in Strasbourg, judged the Norwegian state guilty of not giving the divers enough information about the level of danger they faced in the work they carried out during an oil and gas boom that has since been described as a "wild west" frenzy.

The verdict came after a long battle through the Norwegian courts. In a 2007 case in Oslo, four former North Sea divers successfully sued the state, but the Norwegian government appealed and in 2009 the case came before the supreme court, which ruled that Norway was not liable to pay damages for injuries inflicted by the oil industry. The case went on to Strasbourg, where the divers eventually won last December. This weekend, however, their union has turned down an individual offer of 1.7m Norwegian krone (£170,825) because it is holding out for a larger sum agreed with the government before the last election.

"The interest of film-makers here and in America has been a great help," Henning Haug, director of the Offshore Divers Union, told the Observer this weekend. "It has been especially good because the Norwegian film is so realistic. But we are not satisfied yet. We want to win our members full compensation for this national scandal." The union will not settle for less than 2.1m krone (£211,019) for each diver, he said. "Anything less than that could not be considered decent."

The divers performed crucial tasks to secure the installation of pipelines on the seabed, carrying out surveys, collecting samples and attaching and removing wellheads. They regularly worked at 400m below the surface, while the safe limit for dives is now set at 150m. A hospital in Haukeland, in Bergen, subsequently found evidence of brain damage in 240 former North Sea divers in 2010. After spending an average of 14 years working in the North Sea, a relatively high proportion of divers also acquired significant psychological and physical health problems, including lung disease, brain damage and post-traumatic stress disorder, while others complain of loss of concentration, and memory and hearing impairment. During the 1970s, 99 Norwegian divers died at work in the North Sea.

The producers of the new Norwegian thriller, which is directed by Insomnia's Erik Skjoldbjærg, believe they have closely mirrored the facts of the case, while adding a fictional character-led plot to the story. Set during the early 1980s, Pioneer follows two brothers who take part in a test to see if it is possible to lay pipelines on the bed of the North Sea. When the test goes wrong, one brother begins to investigate the greed and corruption that lie behind the search for oil and gas.

Martin told the Observer that he and his fellow Norwegian producers interviewed between 40 and 50 of the surviving divers to research the film and faced obstruction from vested interests as they tried to uncover more detail.

"They were not trying to stop the film directly," he said, "but it is certainly true that our requests for information came back very slowly indeed and when we finally got permission to film in some of the original buildings and locations, the price they set was so high that we did our own recreations.

"I had not understood before just how the companies involved were prepared to experiment on these men by putting them in conditions never tried before. It is sad and bizarre that this case has had to go all the way to Strasbourg."

2002 Directs and stars in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, based on the life of game show host Chuck Barris, who claimed to have been a CIA assassin.

2005 Stars in Syriana, taken from the Middle East memoirs of CIA agent Robert Baer, focusing on global oil politics.

2005 Co-writes, directs and stars in Good Night and Good Luck, telling of the conflict between radio and TV journalist Edward R Murrow and senator Joseph McCarthy.

2009 Stars with Ewan McGregor in The Men Who Stare at Goats, based on Jon Ronson's book about US military attempts to develop weapons grade psychic powers

　

　

Charles Keating, Key Figure in the 1980s Savings and Loan Crisis, Dies at 90

By Robert D. McFadden NY TIMES

　

　

Charles H. Keating Jr., who went to prison and came to symbolize the $150 billion savings-and-loan crisis a generation ago after fleecing thousands of depositors with regulatory help from a group of United States senators known as the Keating Five, has died. He was 90.

The death was confirmed by his son-in-law, Gary Hall.

The S. & L. debacle of the 1980s and 90s, when a thousand institutions collapsed in an implosion of reckless investments, may be a distant echo in a nation stricken by economic turmoil. But to millions old enough to have been dragged through the mess, Mr. Keating is remembered, perhaps unjustly, as the pre-eminent villain of an era when depositors, many of them older Americans and naïve investors, lost life savings they had squirreled away in hometown thrifts they thought were safe.

Mr. Keating, who pleaded guilty to fraud charges, had been a young man of promise — a Navy flier during World War II, an All-American swimmer in college, the leader of a national campaign against pornography, a blustery Cincinnati lawyer and businessman whose brother was an Ohio Congressman.

But in 1984, Mr. Keating, then a 61-year-old Phoenix real estate millionaire, bought Lincoln Savings & Loan, of Irvine, Calif., for $51 million, double its net worth. Lincoln, with 26 branches, made small profits on home loans, but under new state and federal rules it could make riskier investments, and Mr. Keating began pouring depositors’ savings into real estate ventures, stocks, junk bonds and other high-yield flings.

In three years, Lincoln’s assets soared from $1 billion to $3.9 billion, and Mr. Keating was using the business as his personal cash machine, taking $34 million for himself and his family and $1.3 million more for political contributions, prosecutors said.

The Federal Home Loan Bank Board, fearing wide collapses in a shaky industry, finally imposed a 10 percent limit on risky S. & L. investments. By 1987, its investigators found that Lincoln had $135 million in unreported losses and was more than $600 million over the risky-investment ceiling. Soon, the F.B.I., the Securities and Exchange Commission and other agencies were homing in.

Mr. Keating hired Alan Greenspan, soon to be chairman of the Federal Reserve, who compiled a report saying Lincoln’s depositors faced "no foreseeable risk" and praising a "seasoned and expert" management. And Mr. Keating called on Senators Alan Cranston of California, Donald W. Riegle Jr. of Michigan, John Glenn of Ohio and Dennis DeConcini and John McCain of Arizona, all recipients of his campaign largess, to pressure the bank board to relax its rules and kill its investigation.

All five met with regulators, and Edwin J. Gray, then the board chairman, said four senators — all but Mr. Riegle — "came to me like lawyers arguing for a client." He resisted, but was replaced by a chairman more sympathetic to Mr. Keating, and the board backed off, with disastrous results for depositors and investors.

For two more years, Lincoln survived. On the books, assets ballooned to $5.46 billion, but billions were in speculative investments and hidden losses soared. Meanwhile, Lincoln talked many customers into replacing federally insured deposits with high-yielding bonds from Lincoln’s parent, American Continental, a Keating corporation that was drowning in losses.

Bond buyers were not told the condition of American Continental, or that its bonds were uninsured, prosecutors said. A witness in a lawsuit years later produced a Lincoln memo, telling its bond salesmen to "remember [that] the weak, meek and ignorant are always good targets."

In 1989, American Continental went bankrupt and an insolvent Lincoln was seized by the government. Some 23,000 customers were left holding $250 million in worthless bonds, the life savings of many, and taxpayers paid $3.4 billion to cover Lincoln’s losses. It was the largest of 1,043 S. & L. failures between 1986 and 1995 that, authoritative studies show, cost taxpayers $124 billion and the savings and loan industry $29 billion. The government sued Mr. Keating for $1.1 billion, but he said he was broke.

Convicted of fraud, racketeering and conspiracy in state and federal trials, Mr. Keating went to prison for four and a half years. Both verdicts were overturned on appeals in 1996. California dropped its case, and on the eve of a federal retrial in 1999, Mr. Keating, who always insisted he had done nothing wrong, pleaded guilty to four counts of wire and bankruptcy fraud and was sentenced to time already served.

The Keating Five — all Democrats except Mr. McCain — also insisted they had done nothing improper. The Senate Ethics Committee concluded in 1991 that none had violated laws, but said Senators Cranston, DeConcini and Riegle had interfered with the bank board’s inquiry and rebuked them, Mr. Cranston in the harshest terms. Senators Glenn and McCain were cleared, but criticized for "poor judgment."

Mr. Keating, a 6-foot-5-inch beanpole who walked with a swagger, never minced words about buying political influence. Asked once whether his payments to politicians had worked, he told reporters, "I want to say in the most forceful way I can: I certainly hope so."

Charles Humphrey Keating Jr. was born in Cincinnati on Dec. 4, 1923. He attended Catholic schools and became an accomplished swimmer. He joined the Navy in World War II and became a fighter pilot, but was never deployed to a combat theater. After the war, he enrolled in law school at the University of Cincinnati, won various collegiate swimming championships and was named an All-American. In 1948, he received a law degree and began practice in Cincinnati.

In 1949, he married the former Mary Elaine Fette. They had five daughters and a son. In the 1950s, Mr. Keating organized Catholic men’s groups to fight pornography and founded Citizens for Decent Literature, which under various names grew to 300 chapters and 100,000 members nationally. He became known as a stern moralist, and in 1969 was named by Richard M. Nixon to the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography.

With his brother, William, he founded a law firm in 1952. (William was a congressman from 1971 to 1974 and later chairman of The Cincinnati Enquirer.) By the late 1950s, the law firm’s principal client was Carl H. Lindner Jr., a businessman who formed American Financial Corporation in 1960 as a sprawling conglomerate. Mr. Keating left law practice in 1972 to become American Financial’s executive vice president.

In the 1970s, the S.E.C. accused American Financial of irregularities; Mr. Lindner and Mr. Keating admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to violate no fraud statutes. After a falling out with Mr. Lindner, Mr. Keating moved to Phoenix in 1976 to run American Continental, a real estate spinoff he acquired from American Financial. By the early 1980s, it was a major home builder in Phoenix and Denver.

Mr. Keating thus acquired millions just as the government lifted rules that had long limited the scope of investments S. & L.’s could make with depositors’ money. Lincoln became a cash cow for Mr. Keating’s investments, prosectors said, and its failure a metaphor for an age of excess.

In recent years, he had lived in Phoenix, working occasionally as a real estate consultant. In their book, "Trust Me: Charles Keating and the Missing Billions," (Random House, 1993), Michael Binstein and Charles Bowden said: "He did not simply rob a bank. He broke a bank with his dreams."

EDDIE LAWRENCE

Legandary Recountor, Ad Man, Commedian 95

William Yardley NY TIMES

When Eddie Lawrence first performed his new comedy routine for his agent and a few entertainment executives, they told him that they loved it but that it was too clever for most people to understand. Mr. Lawrence had more faith in his audience.

He began the routine in a nasally whimper, a voice he later described as "sort of a crying Jolson."

"Hiya, folks," he said. "You say you lost your job today? You say it’s 4 a.m. and your kids ain’t come home from school yet? You say your wife went out for a corned beef sandwich last weekend — the corned beef sandwich came back but she didn’t? You say your furniture’s out all over the sidewalk cause you can’t pay the rent and you got chapped lips and paper cuts and your feet’s all swollen up and blistered from pounding the pavement looking for work? Is that’s what’s troubling you, fella?" Then, as banal background music gave way to a marching band, Mr. Lawrence abandoned the whimper for a bellow.

"Lift your head up high!" he thundered. "Take a walk in the sun with that dignity and stick-to-it-iveness, and you’ll show the world, you’ll show them where to get off. You’ll never give up, never give up, never give up — that ship!"

And so was born "the Old Philosopher," a character and routine that became Mr. Lawrence’s bread and butter. Mr. Lawrence, who died on Tuesday in Manhattan at 95, structured the routine like a song, alternating tales of his fictional victims’ strange troubles with his clichéd refrain to carry on.

Released in 1956 as a three-minute single, "The Old Philosopher" rose into the Top 40 of the Billboard charts. Decades later, it continued to provide Mr. Lawrence (and some imitators) with a flexible framework for comic sketches, commercials and many television appearances. Many people became familiar with the routine, or variations on it, even if they did not know Mr. Lawrence by name. But it brought him new opportunities. He worked as a lyricist, pitchman, actor, writer and director. In the 1930s, he performed in variety shows at the Roxy Theater. In the Army in World War II, he was a disc jockey. Soon after the war, he did impersonations on radio, including on a show with the actor John Marley, and he began recording albums of comedy routines in the 1950s, many of which included versions of "The Old Philosopher."

He became a regular on "The Steve Allen Show" and appeared on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson." In the 1980s, he adapted "The Old Philosopher" for commercials for the Claridge Hotel Casino in Atlantic City.

Decades earlier, he appeared off Broadway in "The Threepenny Opera" and had a prominent role on Broadway as a bookie in "Bells Are Ringing."

In 1965, Mr. Lawrence wrote the lyrics for what became something of a pop standard, "I’ll Never Go There Anymore." Stephen Sondheim once listed it among songs he wished he had written, but it was also linked to one of Mr. Lawrence’s most frustrating experiences, the 1965 musical "Kelly." Inspired by the story of Steve Brodie, who supposedly survived jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge in 1886, the show became the biggest flop Broadway had ever seen at the time.

Mr. Lawrence wrote the book and the lyrics, and Moose Charlap composed the music. It was a labor of love for both of them, intended as a nuanced, unconventional story that reflected their serious artistic ambitions. But after producers decided to make substantial changes, Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Charlap sued, trying to stop the production from going forward. The cost ballooned from $450,000 to $650,000, considered exorbitant at the time.

The show opened on Broadway on Feb. 6, and closed after that one performance.

The experience was a lifelong sore point for Mr. Lawrence. He was pleased many years later when a concert version of "Kelly," as originally written, was produced by the York Theater Company, with Brian d’Arcy James in the lead role.

Eddie Lawrence was born Lawrence Eisler on March 2, 1919, in New York, the oldest of two brothers. His father, Benjamin, was a banker, and his mother, the former Bess Garbowsky, was a garment worker. He graduated from Boys High School in Brooklyn and he later studied art at Brooklyn College, where he graduated in 1940.

After the war, he used the G.I. Bill to study painting in Paris with Fernand Léger. Mr. Lawrence painted throughout his life. He exhibited in galleries and signed his works Lawrence Eisler.

His survivors include his wife, the former Marilyn White, and his son, Garrett Eisler, who confirmed his father’s death.

Mr. Lawrence sometimes said no when asked to perform his signature routine to pitch products.

When that happened, it was not unusual for him to later hear an imitator on the radio, hawking whatever it was he had decided against pitching. But he often said yes. In 1974, he was surprised to get a call from John Lennon. Mr. Lennon had produced a record by Harry Nilsson and he asked Mr. Lawrence to do a promotional riff for the record. He gave Mr. Lawrence creative control.

"Hiya, pussy cat," Mr. Lawrence said in the 30-second spot. "You say you opened up a bicycle wash and the first six customers drowned, and they picked you up in the wax museum for trying to score with Marie Antoinette? Is that what’s got you down, pussy cat? Well, rise up, get yourself Harry Nilsson’s new album, ‘Pussy Cats,’ produced by John Lennon. Nilsson’s latest — ‘Pussy Cats.’ On RCA records and tapes. Meow, and purr."

　

TV pitchman Kevin Trudeau gets 10-year sentence

By MICHAEL TARM, Associated Press

CHICAGO (AP) — Best-selling author Kevin Trudeau, whose name became synonymous with late-night TV pitches, was sentenced to 10 years in prison Monday for bilking consumers through ubiquitous infomercials for his book, "The Weight Loss Cure 'They' Don't Want You to Know About."

As he imposed the sentence prosecutors had requested, U.S. District Judge Ronald Guzman portrayed the 50-year-old Trudeau as a habitual fraudster going back to his early adulthood. So brazen was Trudeau, the judge said, he once even used his own mother's Social Security number in a scheme.

"Since his 20s, he has steadfastly attempted to cheat others for his own gain," Guzman said, adding that Trudeau is "deceitful to the very core."

Trudeau, whose trademark dyed black hair turned partially gray as he awaited sentencing in jail, showed little emotion as the stiff sentence was handed down at the hearing in Chicago.

Addressing the judge earlier in a 10-minute statement, Trudeau apologized and said he's become a changed man. He said he's meditated, prayed and read self-help books while locked up at Chicago's Metropolitan Correctional Center.

"I have truly had a significant reawakening," said Trudeau, who was dressed in orange jail clothes. "If I ever do an infomercial again ... I promise: No embellishments, no puffery, no lies."

While Trudeau appeared calm throughout the hearing, one of his supporters interrupted the judge at one point and began to speak. After cutting the judge short a second time, the man dropped to the floor and refused to leave. U.S. marshals carried him out of the courtroom.

Jurors convicted Trudeau of criminal contempt in November for defying a 2004 court order barring him from running false ads about the weight-loss book. Despite the order, he aired the infomercials at least 32,000 times, according to prosecutors.

He sold more than 850,000 copies of the weight-loss book, generating $39 million in revenue, prosecutors say. And the judge agreed with prosecutors that the amount of loss stemming from Trudeau's deception was more than $37 million — nearly the amount in revenue.

But in remarks Monday asking for a sentence of less than two years for his client, defense attorney Tom Kirsch said the harm Trudeau caused was minor compared to fraud in which some people are cheated out of their life savings.

"A 10-year sentence might be appropriate for a defendant who destroyed lives," Kirsch said. "(But) Trudeau — if he swindled anyone — swindled them out of $30 (the price of the book)."

Another defense attorney, Carolyn Gurland, added that Trudeau's legal troubles had already cost him his businesses and his home, and nearly all his other worldly possessions.

"He has a suitcase containing his personal artifacts. That's what he has left," she said.

But Guzman showed little sympathy, appearing angry as he said that Trudeau had thumbed his nose at the justice system by violating multiple court orders since the 1990s.

"He has treated federal court orders as if they were mere suggestions ... or impediments to be side-stepped, out-maneuvered or just ignored," the judge said.

Trudeau's weight-loss book describes a grueling, 500-calorie-a-day diet, as well as hormone treatments. The deception, Guzman explained, came in Trudeau's infomercials that misrepresented the contents of the book as laying out "a simple, no hunger ... diet-free method of losing weight," which enticed more people to buy the book.

Trudeau became rich selling millions of books with titles such as "Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You to Know About" and "Debt Cures 'They' Don't Want You to Know About," touting them in commercials with a news-interview formats.

As legal scrutiny intensified over the years, Trudeau claimed the U.S. government was out to get him, and he accused agencies and other vested interests of conspiring to suppress low-cost, common remedies to diseases, including cancer.

His weight-loss book, which once topped best-seller lists, was the focus of the criminal conviction for which he was sentenced. It also was the subject of related civil case brought by the Federal Trade Commission, in which Trudeau was ordered to pay a $37 million judgment.

In that civil case, Trudeau said he couldn't pay the judgment because he's broke. But FTC lawyers balked at that claim, accusing him of hiding money in shell companies. Trudeau, they noted, has spent lavishly in recent years, including $359 on two haircuts.

___

The Case of the Accidental Superstar

By SARAH LYALL  NY TIMES

In the peculiar-looking, former cross-dressing Shakespearean actor Benedict Cumberbatch, Hollywood has found an unlikely leading man.

Benedict Cumberbatch was in mid-monologue, holding forth on the dangers of the surveillance society, when it suddenly occurred to him that he was meant to be promoting his latest movie, whatever that was (he has been in a lot of them lately). He talks superfast, so that when he paused, the effect was of a train driver slamming on the emergency brakes. “Why does anyone want to know my opinions?” he asked. “I’m not interested in reading my opinions.”

He has no idea. There are people out there these days who so love to hear Cumberbatch talk — who so love to watch Cumberbatch exist — that they do not care what he does, as long as they get to observe him doing it. Somehow, along a career consisting of highly interest-ing but generally non-megastar-making roles (most recently, the lead in the BBC series “Sherlock”; Khan, the wrathful villain in the movie “Star Trek Into Darkness“; the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, in “The Fifth Estate” and the voice of Smaug, the very bad-tempered dragon in the latest “Hobbit” movie), Cumberbatch has progressed from being everyone’s favorite secret crush to one of the most talked-about actors in Hollywood.

His celebrity manifests itself in unexpected ways. When Cumberbatch, who is 37, appeared on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” Fallon noted that more people were waiting in the standby line than for any other guest that year. He was reportedly tweeted about 700,000 times in 2013. Last fall, he appeared on the cover of Time’s international edition. Although he has not been a romantic lead in any big films, and although he says he looks like “Sid from ‘Ice Age’ ” and although he once declared that “I always seem to be cast as slightly wan, ethereal, troubled intellectuals or physically ambivalent bad lovers,” there are numerous websites devoted to the subject of his romantic prowess, e.g., “Benedict Cumberbatch — Fantastic Lover,” a compendium of clips set to Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” that has been viewed more than 490,000 times on YouTube. (These are mostly posted by his army of female fans, who call themselves “Cumberbitches” and who use the hashtag “Cumberwatch” when they tweet about his activities.)

His appeal is manifest, yet hard to pin down. His name is odd, Hogwartsian, suggesting both an Elizabethan actor and a baker whose products are made with rustic ingredients no one has heard of. Tall and lean, he has an other-century look about him, with his long, narrow face, his mop of crazy hair (he keeps it shorter off-duty) and bright, far-apart, almond-shaped blue eyes that on-screen can play intelligent, ardent, manic or insane, depending on the job. In “Sherlock,” he looks like the sort of person who has a stratospheric I.Q. and an abysmal E.Q. but is dead sexy with it; at the same time, if you were to remark on his resemblance to an otter, you would not be the only one.

When he sat down with a cup of coffee in a Camden pub last November and began to discuss electronic surveillance, the government, his favorite movies, his career, the rabidity of “Sherlock” fans and how coffee affects him (it makes him talk even faster), Cumberbatch had just come off an extraordinary run of work. “The Fifth Estate,” in which he perfectly captures the slippery nature of Julian Assange — free-speech hero, treacherous colleague, possible megalomaniac — had just come out. Over the next two months, three more of his films would be released: “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” in which he gets to intone things like “I am death” in a creepy dragon voice; “12 Years a Slave,” in which he plays a sympathetic slave-owner; and “August: Osage County,” in which he has a small role in an ensemble of superstars like Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep.

The Time cover had just hit the newsstands, and Cumberbatch was slightly freaked out. “It’s one of the more bizarre levels of success,” he said. At first he thought it was fake. “Someone sent me a photograph of it and I thought, ‘Some fan has got hold of a photo and done one of those neat apps where they impose your head on something,’ ” he said. Also, he had had an exciting experience on a British talk show, when Harrison Ford, a fellow guest, emerged from his taciturnity to announce that he loved him as Holmes. This has been happening to Cumberbatch a lot lately, fellow actors declaring themselves fans, such as when Ted Danson saw him through a crowd of stars at a pre-awards party recently and began shouting “Sherlock!” A few days earlier, he had wrapped his most recent movie, a biopic of the British cryptographer Alan Turing. Cumberbatch talked for a long time about the tragedy of Turing’s life and about what has been a series of very intense roles, heavy on iconic fictional characters and real people. “I am so ready to play a really dumb character,” he said.

He was born in London, to parents who were in the business — the actors Wanda Ventham and Timothy Carlton — and had his first substantial part in high school at Harrow, the famous boys’ boarding school that is the Yale to Eton’s Harvard. “I played the queen of the fairies,” he said. (That would be Titania in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”) Later, when he performed in “As You Like It,” an old alumnus watching the play apparently pronounced him “the best Rosalind since Vanessa Redgrave.” He went to the University of Manchester and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and then slid pretty easily into work; so far he has appeared in more than 30 films and dozens of television, radio and theater productions. But it was his title performance in “Sherlock,” which debuted in 2010, that propelled him to a new league. Part of it has to do with the witty, knowing script, with its clever allusions to the old stories; and part of it has to do with Cumberbatch’s sublime portrayal of the odd, brilliant, infuriating, charismatic detective. Sherlock-the-character has a fanatic following, with fans who debate every Cumberbatchian movement and every plot twist with the fervor of grassy-knoll conspiracy buffs. Cumberbatch takes care to remind them that though they might well love Sherlock, Sherlock would never love them back. “I always make it clear that people who become obsessed with him or the idea of him — he’d destroy you,” Cumberbatch said cheerfully. “He is an absolute bastard.”

Over a follow-up breakfast at the Algonquin Hotel in New York a few weeks later, I started to see what his public life is like. We walked there after a quick trip to my office, in which we spoke to no one but which precipitated three breathless “Is that who I think it is?” emails from normally phlegmatic colleagues in under five minutes. (He came back a couple of weeks later, and the non-phlegmatic people were gaping in the halls.) In the street we had to move quickly, because crowds form if Cumberbatch stands still for too long. In the hotel, we positioned ourselves behind a pillar, but people spotted him anyway (when they asked for autographs, they invariably asked on behalf of their teenage children).

As good a sport as Cumberbatch is, he sometimes finds it a bit too much. Filming “Sherlock” last year in Cardiff, Wales, he had an awkward interlude when he had to walk from his trailer to his car wearing a costume that, had anyone seen it, might have become a major plot spoiler. When he failed in his efforts to get a particularly persistent paparazzo not to photograph him, Cumberbatch shrouded himself in a hoodie (“I looked like Kenny in ‘South Park’”) and held up a sign he had hastily fashioned that said: “Go photograph Egypt and show the world something important.” The move was lampooned by the British newspapers, particularly when, to the delight of hundreds of fans massed on the street in London for another shoot, Cumberbatch did it again, this time with signs printed with provocative questions about democracy, government intrusion, journalism and the battle between liberty and security in the war on terror. “These are very complex questions and very difficult arguments to be very clear about, so to ask the questions is to stimulate the debate,” he explained. He has not done it since, though, he said, “I felt really strongly about it at the time.”

In New York he was visiting his friend Zachary Quinto, who acted alongside him in “Star Trek,” seeing some movies, going to some museums and trying to keep a low profile. He is currently unattached, and is gearing up for his next batch of work. One question that has excited “Star Trek” fans is whether his character, who all but stole the last film, will appear in the next one. There is certainly that possibility: He ended the film frozen in a pod and stored away in space. (“That was a stupid thing to do,” Cumberbatch said, referring to Starfleet Command. “They should have just blown me up.”) He pulled a cap over his head and prepared again to withstand the public. He says he has a way of negotiating big-city crowds: “If you pick a point far behind them they perceive you as not seeing them, and you’re the obstacle they have to get around.” For a moment, he sounded positively Sherlockian. “There is a way of just shadowing through,” he continued. “The higher the walls, the more dark the windows, the bigger the sunglasses — the more people are going to look. The greatest disguise is learning how to be invisible in plain sight.”

Rough diamond hints at vast quantities of water inside Earth

IAN SAMPlE The Guardian

Battle-scarred diamond provides evidence of 'wet zone' 410km below the surface where water is locked up inside minerals

The diamond is pitted from its violent journey, which ended with the stone shooting up through the Earth's crust at around 70km/h. Photograph: University of Alberta

A small, battered diamond found in the gravel strewn along a shallow riverbed in Brazil has provided evidence of a vast "wet zone" deep inside the Earth that could hold as much water as all the world's oceans put together.

The water is not sloshing around inside the planet, but is held fast within minerals in what is known as the Earth's transition zone, which stretches from 410 to 660km (250-400 miles) beneath the surface.

"It's not a Jules Verne-style ocean you can sail a boat on," said Graham Pearson, a geologist who studied the stone at the University of Alberta. The water-rich zone could transform scientists' understanding of how some of the Earth's geological features arose.

Tests on the diamond revealed that it contained a water-rich mineral formed in the zone. Researchers believe that the gemstone, which is oblong and about 5mm long, was blasted to the surface from a depth of about 500km by a volcanic eruption of molten rock called kimberlite.

The battle-scarred gem has a delicate metallic sheen, but is pitted and etched from its violent journey, which probably took several days and ended with the stone shooting up through the Earth's crust at a speed of about 70km/h (40mph).

"It's a fairly ugly diamond. It looks like it's been to hell and back," said Pearson, adding that the gem was worth about $20 at most. The stone was found in 2008 by artisan miners working the Juína riverbeds in Mato Grosso in western Brazil.

Most diamonds used in jewellery form at much shallower depths, about 150km down. Those that form in the transition zone are called super-deep diamonds and are distinguished by their battered appearance and low nitrogen content.

Pearson and his team were testing the diamond to find minerals they could use to work out its age. But by chance they discovered a speck of mineral called ringwoodite, a type of olivine that forms under extremely high pressures. The mineral inclusion was too small to see with the eye.

Without the diamond – and the water-rich mineral inside it – scientists had no hope of confirming the make-up of material so deep inside the Earth's interior. "No one is ever going to run a geological field trip to the transition zone 500km beneath the Earth's surface, and no one is ever going to drill down to the transition zone," said Pearson. "It was a total piece of luck that we found this."

For decades, scientists have suspected that ringwoodite made up much of the deep Earth, because olivine is so widespread underground. But no one had ever found any ringwoodite from the Earth's interior that proved the idea beyond doubt. In the transition zone where the diamond and its ringwoodite was formed, the pressure reaches 200,000 atmospheres.

Tests on the mineral found that about 1.5% of its weight is water. "That doesn't sound like much, but when you calculate the vast volumes of ringwoodite thought to exist in the deep Earth, the amount of water might be as high as that contained in all the world's oceans," Pearson told the Guardian. That amounts to more than one billion billion tonnes of water.

At the very least, the scientists say, there must be local wet spots or "oases" in the Earth's interior. "The beauty of this diamond is that it gives us a real sample from those depths," Pearson said. The diamond is described in the latest issue of the journal Nature.

A huge water store in the Earth's mantle might help geologists explain some oddities seen on the planet's surface. Water in the transition zone could dissolve in molten magma and reach the undersides of continental plates, where it would weaken the huge slabs of rock. That could create weak spots prone to volcanoes, and even cause "uplift", where the land rises up.

Hans Keppler, at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, said: "Until now, nobody had ever seen ringwoodite from the Earth's mantle, although geophysicists were sure that it must exist. Most people, including me, never expected to see such a sample."

From David A Fairbanks "We raise boys in an alcohol culture and then we are surprised they drink and act stupid?"

 

 

St. Patrick’s Day celebration near University of Massachusetts spins out of control

AP Photo/The Republican, Robert Rizzuto

 

Police detain participants in the pre-St. Patrick's Day "Blarney Blowout" near the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Mass. on Saturday, March 8, 2014. Amherst police said early Sunday that 73 people had been arrested after authorities spent most of the day Saturday attempting to disperse several large gathering around the UMass campus for the party traditionally held the Saturday before spring break. The partying carried through Saturday evening into early Sunday, and Amherst Police Capt. Jennifer Gundersen said in a statement that police were busy with numerous reports of fights, noise and highly intoxicated individuals.

 

　

AMHERST, Mass. >> A pre-St. Patrick’s Day celebration near the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts spiraled out of control, pitting police in riot gear against thousands of drunken and unruly revelers at the annual "Blarney Blowout." More than 70 people were arrested and four officers were injured in the clashes.

Authorities spent most of Saturday trying to disperse several large gatherings around the UMass campus for the party traditionally held the Saturday before spring break, Amherst police said. The partying carried into early Sunday, and Amherst police Capt. Jennifer Gundersen said police were busy with numerous reports of fights, noise and highly intoxicated individuals and had made 73 arrests.

Gundersen called the daylong partying "extremely disturbing and unsafe."

"Perhaps one of the worst scenes we have ever had with drunkenness and unruliness," Gundersen told The Republican in Springfield. "It is extremely upsetting. It is very dangerous."

UMass denounced the "unruly behavior" Saturday, and spokesman Ed Blaguszewski said students who were arrested will be reviewed under the school’s code of conduct and sanctions could include suspension or expulsion.

The size and scope of the gatherings have led to violence and fights, injuries, severe alcohol intoxication, sexual assaults, excessive noise, property damage and violence toward police and community members, police said.

Most of the arrests came at an off-campus apartment complex, where large crowds began gathering Saturday morning for the event, which was established by bars to allow the students to celebrate the holiday before their spring break begins this week.

Police from the city and university and state troopers in riot gear converged on a crowd of about 4,000 people at an apartment complex shortly after noon. Authorities said people on the property were destroying things, and as officers began to disperse the crowd, they were pelted with glass bottles, beer cans and snowballs.

After quieting the disturbance at the apartment complex, several thousand people assembled near a frat house. That gathering became dangerous and out of control, officials said, and when officers tried to clear the crowd, they again were attacked with bottles, rocks, cans and snowballs.

Pepper spray was used to disperse the crowd because of the size and "assaultive behavior," police said.

Three officers were hurt when they were hit by bottles, and one was injured while attempting to make an arrest, Gundersen said. None of the officers were seriously injured.

Police say charges included inciting to riot, failing to disperse, disorderly conduct, liquor law violations and assault and battery on officers. Some of those arrested had been released on bail by early Sunday, police said, while others were held, depending on charges.

The university had warned students last week that police would have an increased presence around town Saturday, especially after several people were arrested at last year’s Blarney Blowout. Letters were also sent directly to students disciplined in the last year for alcohol-related misconduct.

Amherst Capt. Christopher Pronovost described the day as "mayhem."

"This can’t be in any way, shape or form be characterized as a party," he told the Daily Hampshire Gazette. "This is destruction of property (and) assaultive behavior."

Amherst resident Raul Colon was collecting bottles and cans around the scene of the mayhem Saturday night and told the Gazette that the day’s events looked like "a revolution, like in the countries that have revolutions between the students and the government."

Gundersen said numerous participants in the revelry were also injured.

Other colleges across the country have gone on high alert around St. Patrick’s Day to deal with alcohol-fueled students. At Penn State, the school paid licensed liquor establishments to stay closed this month during the unofficial drinking holiday known as State Patty’s Day for the second year in a row.

State College, Pa., police Chief Tom King said the strategy, along with a fraternity ban on parties, helped lead to a 75 percent decrease in arrests and citations this year compared to 2011 — the fake holiday’s heyday.

The Great War Has Begun

 

NATO and the world must come to terms with a new and frightening reality. Russia is ready to act and has little fear of the west. This is not the cold war nor does it need to become a hot war. President Putin believes the west meddled in Ukraine and set up the revolution. He is determined to protect Russia's interest and bases in Ukraine.

What can the US and Europe do about it? The final outcome may well come from angry Ukrainians facing high unemployment, no internet and a feeling that they cannot control their fate.

 

Here is my video examination of what I believe is the Great War of the 21st Century.



 

 

 

 

 

A Call for Help

What the Kitty Genovese story really means.

by Nicholas Lemann THE NEW YORKER

                   

A. M. Rosenthal (far right) believed that apathetic bystanders, not just Winston Moseley, were to blame for Genovese’s death.

 

Plucking a few events out of the vastness of the world and declaring them to be the news of the day is a mysterious and complicated project. Sometimes what’s news is inarguable—the outbreak of war, a head-of-state transition, natural calamity—but very often it falls into the category of the resonant incident. It isn’t a turn in the course of history, but it strikes editors as illustrative of something important. Take crime. If crimes don’t involve anyone powerful or well known, they generally aren’t considered news. But a few such crimes do become news, big news, and hold the public’s imagination in a tight, enduring grip.

An excellent example is the murder of Kitty Genovese, a twenty-eight-year-old bar manager, by Winston Moseley, a twenty-nine-year-old computer punch-card operator, just after three in the morning on Friday, March 13, 1964, in Kew Gardens, Queens. The fact that this crime, one of six hundred and thirty-six murders in New York City that year, became an American obsession—condemned by mayors and Presidents, puzzled over by academics and theologians, studied in freshman psychology courses, re-created in dozens of research experiments, even used four decades later to justify the Iraq war—can be attributed to the influence of one man, A. M. Rosenthal, of the New York Times.
In 1964, Rosenthal was forty-one years old and relatively new on the job as the newspaper’s metropolitan editor, an important step in his ascent to a seventeen-year reign over the Times’ newsroom. Ten days after Genovese was killed, he went downtown to have lunch with New York City’s police commissioner, Michael Murphy. Murphy spent most of the lunch talking about how worried he was that the civil-rights movement, which was at its peak, would set off racial violence in New York, but toward the end Rosenthal asked him about a curious case, then being covered in the tabloids, in which two men had confessed to the same murder. He learned that one of the competing confessors, Winston Moseley, had definitely murdered a woman in Kew Gardens, Kitty Genovese. That killing had been reported at the time, including in a four-paragraph squib buried deep within the Times, but Murphy said that what had struck him about it was not the crime itself but the behavior of thirty-eight eyewitnesses. Over a grisly half hour of stabbing and screaming, Murphy said, none of them had called the police. Rosenthal assigned a reporter named Martin Gansberg to pursue the story from that angle. On March 27th, the Times ran a front-page story under a four-column headline:

37 WHO SAW MURDER DIDN’T CALL THE POLICE
Apathy at Stabbing of Queens Woman Shocks Inspector


The following day, the Times ran a reaction story in which a procession of experts offered explanations of what had happened, or said that it was inexplicable. From then on, the story—as they wouldn’t have said in 1964—went viral.

It’s evidence of a kind of editorial genius that Rosenthal, by playing the story in the way that he did, was able to get such a reaction. The tabloids had treated it simply as a sensational tale of urban violence. The Times made sure that its apathetic-witness angle would land by prominently displaying the story on its front page. The murder now stood for a profoundly disturbing sociological trend. The key line in Gansberg’s story came from one of the witnesses (none of whom were named), who said, “I didn’t want to get involved.”

Some of the fascination that racialized, sexualized violence attracts surely rubbed off on the story—it became clear from photographs and from other outlets that Genovese was white and attractive and that Moseley, a repeat rapist, was black—but the gist of the piece lent itself perfectly to Sunday sermons about a malaise encompassing all of us. It was a way of processing anxieties about the anonymity of urban life, about the breakdown of the restrictive but reassuring social conventions of the fifties, and, less directly, about racial unrest, the Kennedy assassination, and even the Holocaust, which was only beginning to be widely discussed, and which seemed to represent on a grand scale the phenomenon that one expert on the Genovese case calls Bad Samaritanism.
The Times’ version of the Genovese story represents a version of reality that was molded to conform to a theory. The March 27th story began “For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens. . . . Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.” Later that year, Rosenthal published a very short instant book, the only book he ever wrote on his own, called “Thirty-eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case,” which used portentous, outraged language to enshrine the apathy narrative. (He urged readers “to recognize that the bell tolls even on each man’s individual island, to recognize that every man must fear the witness in himself who whispers to close the window.”) By the eighties, a widely used college psychology textbook drew this scenario from the Times account: “What is interesting about this event is that no fewer than 38 of her neighbors came to their windows at 3:00 AM in response to her screams of terror—and remained at their windows in fascination for the 30 minutes it took her assailant to complete his grisly deed, during which time he returned for three separate attacks.”
It’s now clear that this version of events is wrong, thanks to a number of Genovese revisionists who have emerged over the years. They include Jim Rasenberger, a journalist who has written a couple of influential articles about the case, notably one in the Times, in 2004; and Rachel Manning, Mark Levine, and Alan Collins, the authors of a 2007 article in American Psychologist (which quotes from, and debunks, the textbook rendering). The essential facts are these. Winston Moseley had been out in his car, looking for a victim, when he came across Genovese driving home from work. He followed her. She parked at the Kew Gardens train station, adjacent to her apartment. Moseley parked, too, and attacked her with a hunting knife. She screamed, and a man named Robert Mozer opened his window and shouted, “Leave that girl alone!” Moseley ran away. Genovese, wounded but not mortally, staggered to the back of her apartment building and went inside a vestibule. Moseley returned, found her, and attacked again, stabbing her and assaulting her sexually. He fled again before she died.
The Times story was inaccurate in a number of significant ways. There were two attacks, not three. Only a handful of people saw the first clearly and only one saw the second, because it took place indoors, within the vestibule. The reason there were two attacks was that Robert Mozer, far from being a “silent witness,” yelled at Moseley when he heard Genovese’s screams and drove him away. Two people called the police. When the ambulance arrived at the scene—precisely because neighbors had called for help—Genovese, still alive, lay in the arms of a neighbor named Sophia Farrar, who had courageously left her apartment to go to the crime scene, even though she had no way of knowing that the murderer had fled.
The one indisputable villain in the Genovese case, other than Moseley, was Joseph Fink, who worked in the apartment building across the street from where Genovese lived. He saw the first attack, did nothing, and, after Moseley had fled, took a nap in the basement, rather than going outside to help Genovese. A more ambiguous figure was Karl Ross, a friend and neighbor of Genovese’s, who was drunk that night. He heard the first attack and did nothing. The second attack occurred in the vestibule outside his apartment door. He opened the door a crack, saw Moseley plunging a knife into Genovese, and closed the door, terrified. He made a couple of phone calls, the first to a friend on Long Island, who advised him to do nothing, the second to a neighbor in the building, who told him to come over. Ross crawled out of his window, across the roof, and into a neighbor’s apartment, and eventually called the police. It may or may not be relevant that Ross was thought to be gay, at a time when gay New Yorkers had a lot to fear, both from attackers on the street and from the police. Three months before the murder, Rosenthal had assigned a five-thousand-word story that ran on the Times’ front page under the headline “GROWTH OF OVERT HOMOSEXUALITY IN CITY PROVOKES WIDE CONCERN.” The fact that Kitty Genovese herself was gay evidently escaped his notice.
Winston Moseley certainly led a highly compartmentalized life. He was steadily employed, a married man with two children, and he owned a single-family house in South Ozone Park, Queens. He also routinely broke into people’s houses and stole television sets, which is what led to his apprehension for Genovese’s murder, five days later. Somebody who saw him leaving a house with a TV called the police, and in the course of being questioned Moseley confessed to a number of gruesomely sexualized murders of young women, including Genovese’s; another murder he had committed; and one that he hadn’t committed. (The last created the double-confession story that Rosenthal had asked the police commissioner about.) At Moseley’s trial, a few months later, because of the pervasiveness of the apathy narrative, the prosecution decided not to call Joseph Fink or Karl Ross as witnesses, even though they could have offered the most direct accounts of the murder. Still, Moseley had confessed to the murder; the trial was about whether he should be found not guilty by reason of insanity. The jury convicted him. Today, at seventy-nine, Moseley is the longest-serving inmate in the New York prison system.
Aside from the guilty reflections it inspired, the Genovese case had some tangible consequences. It helped in the push to establish 911 as an easy-to-remember national police emergency number; in 1964, the most reliable way to call the police in New York was to use the specific telephone number of each precinct, and caller response wasn’t always a high priority. Two psychologists, Bibb Latané and John Darley, created a new realm of research into what came to be called the bystander effect, the main finding of which is that your likelihood of intervening in a Genovese-like incident increases if you believe that there are very few other bystanders. The effect has stood up through repeated experiments. In 1977, Winston Moseley, engaged in a periodic attempt to be granted parole, had the chutzpah to argue in a Times Op-Ed piece that his misdeed had wound up making the world a better place: “The crime was tragic, but it did serve society, urging it as it did to come to the aid of its members in distress or danger.”

The fiftieth anniversary of the Genovese murder has generated two full-length books about the case: “Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America,” by Kevin Cook (Norton), and “Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences,” by Catherine Pelonero (Skyhorse). Both authors have interviewed everyone there is to interview and reviewed the public records about the case, but so much attention has preceded their efforts that they wind up working from nearly identical sets of facts, and it sometimes feels as if they were straining to stretch their accounts to book length. Both have decided to write in the true-crime style, which entails occasionally telling us what people may have thought or felt, or presenting as quoted dialogue unrecorded private scenes from long ago—an unfortunate decision, given how much the story turns on the trustworthiness of journalism.

Cook is the more adept storyteller of the two. His peppy, knowing style calls to mind pop-culture products from the time of the murder, like the magazine Argosy or the television crime drama “Naked City.” And he is firmly, and persuasively, in the revisionist camp. He says that Moseley’s prosecutors concluded that there were only five or six witnesses who could plausibly testify at the trial. Pelonero is an anti-revisionist, who presents herself as a defender of the sullied reputation of Martin Gansberg, the Times reporter on the story, and as someone who insists that the unpleasant truth about Genovese’s neighbors’ behavior not be dodged. Her count of true witnesses, gleaned from police records, is thirty-three. (According to Cook, the prosecutors who interviewed potential witnesses found that most didn’t grasp what had been going on.) “Historical revisionism of the Kitty Genovese story was underway, and the beautiful twilight of falsehood did indeed enhance it into something far less blinding than the burning glare of the truth,” Pelonero writes, with more passion than clear meaning.
The Kitty Genovese who emerges from these books was an appealingly independent woman who had grown up in a large middle-class Italian-American Catholic family in Brooklyn but decided not to follow when everyone else left the city for New Canaan, Connecticut. A brief marriage in her teens was annulled; she was once arrested for being a minor participant in a bookmaking operation (the most familiar photograph of her is a mug shot); and, for a year before her murder, she had been in a happy relationship with a woman named Mary Ann Zielonko, who shared her apartment in Kew Gardens and who also worked in a bar in Queens.
Winston Moseley is a truly chilling character, because of his ability to be utterly calm and functional most of the time, even when describing to officials the horrifically violent acts he had performed on female strangers. In 1968, he jammed a tin can into his rectum so tightly that he had to be sent to a hospital. He escaped and, rather than melting into the landscape, quickly committed two more rapes. After he was caught and returned to Attica, he became a model prisoner again.
The third main character in the drama is Abe Rosenthal. He appears only intermittently in the two books about the case, but no matter; he told his own story. In 1999, he wrote a new introduction for a paperback edition of his “Thirty-eight Witnesses,” timed to the thirty-fifth anniversary of the murder; and in 2008 Melville House republished the package, with an introduction by Samuel Freedman, as part of a series called Classic Journalism.

Back in 1927, in “The Rise of American Civilization,” Charles and Mary Beard wrote about how the New York World, in its heyday under Joseph Pulitzer, became America’s first mass-circulation newspaper: “It exploited to the utmost limit the tragedy and comedy of contemporary life, in all its component elements of sex, society, crime, perversion, love, romance, and emotion generally.” Although the Times was always far more respectable than the World, that passage comports with Rosenthal’s description of how he approached the Genovese story: “News is not philosophy or theology but what certain human beings, reporters and editors, know will have meaning and interest to other human beings, readers.” He describes processing the police commissioner’s remark about the thirty-eight silent witnesses as “vicarious shock . . . the realization that what you are seeing or hearing will startle a reader.”

It was obviously disingenuous for Rosenthal to suggest that he had no personal reaction to the Genovese murder—that he was merely making a clinical professional judgment about what would engage readers. His book, like most of his writing, is wildly emotional. The idea of the silent witnesses touched him in some deep, primal way: “there is in the tale of Catherine Genovese a revelation about the human condition so appalling to contemplate that only good can come from forcing oneself to confront the truth.” What’s more, “there must be some connection between the story of the witnesses silent in the face of greater crimes—the degradation of a race, children hungering.” Rosenthal’s convictions about the crime were so powerful that he was impervious to the details of what actually happened. His summary of the case appropriated the high drama of the Times piece, asserting “the choking fact that thirty-eight of her neighbors had seen her stabbed or heard her cries, and that not one of them, during that hideous half-hour, had lifted the telephone in the safety of his own apartment to call the police and try to save her life.” By 1999, it had become clear that the original story might have been overstated, but in his new introduction Rosenthal was even less restrained: “Neighbors heard her scream her last half hour away and did nothing, nothing at all, to give her succor or even cry alarm.”
In 2004, at a fortieth-anniversary conference about the case that was held at Fordham, Rosenthal made an appearance, and announced from the lectern that his sister Bess had died many years earlier after an incident that, to his mind, had been Genovese-like. (Rosenthal, who grew up in the Bronx, had a spectacularly horrible childhood; his father and four of his five older sisters died young, and he was usually on crutches, because of a bone disease.) Bess had been walking home when a flasher exposed himself to her; terrified, she ran all the way home. Then she caught a bad cold, and never recovered. To Rosenthal, the incident and the fatal illness were one. “A sexual pervert jumped out of the bushes and exposed himself to her,” Rosenthal said. “I still miss our darling Bess, and feel Bess was murdered by this criminal who took her life away, no less than the monster who killed Kitty Genovese.”
That seemed to explain a lot about Rosenthal’s handling of the Genovese story, though his own writing makes it clear that he was profoundly disturbed by just about every way in which New York was changing in the sixties. Kevin Cook treats Rosenthal’s 2004 disclosure at Fordham as a Rosebud moment in his narrative, to be saved almost until the end for maximum effect. Pelonero, the defender of the original Times story, chooses not to mention it.
When it comes to assessing the media, it’s hard to get riled about press-generated hysteria over insubstantial matters like Justin Bieber’s legal troubles or Mayor de Blasio’s car running stop signs (unless, perhaps, you’re directly on the receiving end of it). Stories like that of the silent witnesses to Kitty Genovese’s murder represent the real danger zone in journalism, because they blend the power of instinct—which is about whether something feels true, not about whether it is true—with the respectable sheen of social science. In his book, Rosenthal groused, “I did not feel, nor do I now, that the sociologists and psychiatrists who commented contributed anything substantial to anybody’s understanding of what happened that night on Austin Street.” But, if he hadn’t assigned a second-day story consisting of quotes from such people, his version of the Genovese murder would not have taken the shape that it did. The experts transformed a crime into a crisis.
The manufacturing of the thirty-eight-witnesses myth had generally benign social effects. Yet there are many examples in which tendentious public renderings of violence have set off more, and worse, violence. (Many of the lynchings in the South during the Jim Crow era were undertaken to avenge a crime that the mob, confirmed in its rage by the local press, felt certain had taken place.) The real Kitty Genovese syndrome has to do with our susceptibility to narratives that echo our preconceptions and anxieties. So the lesson of the story isn’t that journalists should trust their gut, the way Abe Rosenthal did. Better to use your head. ♦