Dick Cavett and Alec Baldwin Start the Conversation

By PHILIP GALANES The NY Times

 

The “21” Club was packed when Dick Cavett, the longtime television talk-show host and a regular contributor to the Opinionator blog for The New York Times, and Alec Baldwin, star of TV (“30 Rock”), film (“Blue Jasmine”), theater (“Orphans” on Broadway) and, most recently, his own talk show on MSNBC, “Up Late With Alec Baldwin,” arrived.       

The maître d’ led the men through the dining room, into the kitchen and down a narrow flight of stairs with a perilously low ceiling. (“Wait a minute: How are people going to ask for our autographs down here?” Mr. Cavett asked.) The stairwell was lined with special bottles of wine reserved for special patrons (T. Boone Pickens and Chelsea Clinton, to name two). After one final hurdle, they were seated in the private wine cellar at a long table with bottles of wine from floor to ceiling.

Over lunch — an omelet for Mr. Baldwin and Dover sole for Mr. Cavett — and after some debate about who would sit where (Mr. Baldwin: “I think Cavett should sit at the head of the table.” Mr. Cavett: “I couldn’t possibly, just because I’m your senior by three years”), the men spoke of talk shows, Richard Nixon, being chased by the paparazzi and dealing with depression.

PHILIP GALANES: When I first heard that you were hosting a talk show, Alec, I thought: I must not understand how celebrity works. I thought the whole point of being the host of one was access to people who wouldn’t normally sit down with you. But you’re a star. You could set up nice dinners with any of your guests. Why add the cameras and the pancake makeup? What about a talk show appealed to you?

ALEC BALDWIN: When Dick was in his big run at ABC, I watched his show, and I couldn’t watch other things. I turned off the TV when “Gilligan’s Island” and “F Troop” were cresting, and I never got into the Aaron Spelling shows. But I liked talk shows, and I loved Cavett. How he wasn’t all preproduced and let the conversation breathe. So, when I started doing my podcast — —

PG: Do you know that Alec did a podcast for WNYC [“Here’s the Thing”]?

DICK CAVETT: Oh yes, I was on it.

AB: On the talk show, I want to introduce, or reintroduce, the viewers to people I appreciate. I want Herb Alpert to tell them what it was like to have a successful career as an instrumentalist. Or talk with Leonard Bernstein’s kids about what it was like to grow up in that world. Or introduce you to somebody who’s relatively new like Lena Dunham.

PG: Now you, on the other hand, Mr. Cavett, grew up in the world of talk shows, correct? Your first job was writing material for Jack Paar.

DC: I never missed a Jack Paar show until I made my ludicrously ballsy move and got myself hired by him. I was a copy boy for Time magazine, and someone left The Herald Tribune open on the copy boy desk, and I read Marie Torre’s column about Jack Paar. It said he worried more about his monologue than anything else. So I went home and typed one up, then took it to the bowels of the RCA Building and sneaked up to NBC. Of course, if there was security like there is now, I’d never be here today.

AB: This is back when security was a guy named Pat, and he was 80 years old.

DC: So, here comes Jack Paar, walking out of the men’s room, and I had the wits to put the monologue in a Time magazine envelope, and that caught his eye. I hand it to him. “I wrote a monologue for you, Mr. Paar.” “Oh yeah?” he says. And I think that’s that for my monologue. But that night, he ad-libbed three of my lines on the show.

PG: Had comedy writing been your goal?

DC: I was a starving actor. And I wanted to be a comic, I thought vaguely. But most of all, I wanted to be on a talk show — as a guest — and even if I’d done it only once, I could go back to Nebraska and say: I made it, just like Johnny [Carson], who left Nebraska 12 years before me.

PG: Of course, you went on to write for Johnny Carson, when he took over the “Tonight” show from Jack Paar. Have you read the new tell-all about Carson by Henry Bushkin?

DC: I rather liked it. I thought it must be true. There were sides of Johnny that I didn’t know. But I know he was one of the unhappiest men in the world. But he loved me, so I felt good about him.

AB: Why do you think he was so unhappy?

DC: Oh, God, he had a wretched mother. One time, Johnny wins some great prestigious award, and she says, “I guess they know what they’re doing.”

AB: The mother said that?

DC: Yeah. She never encouraged him. And when I worked for him, there was an awful lot of tension. He was like a wire, a tight wire.

PG: You can see it in the early clips.

DC: You can. And he had a wife on the ledge, and drinking troubles. His happiest hour was when he was out there on the set, and the rest of his life was really horrible.

AB: Once someone told me about the ex-wife of a famous television star. He was the star of a family show, he played the dad, and the ex-wife said that he went to work and he gave everything he had to give to his TV children, and when he came home, there was nothing left for his own child. I thought to myself, That’s absurd. Now I see how that happens all the time. The curtain opens, and they say, “Here’s Johnny!” And that’s the moment you’re free and alive and know exactly what’s going to happen for the next 90 minutes.

DC: You don’t have to make any decisions about what to do next.

AB: Someone said to me, “Why do you like doing theater so much?” Though after my last experience [a troubled and short-lived Broadway production of “Orphans”], I don’t like it as much as I used to. Trust me.

PG: I thought it was quite good — you and Ben Foster.

AB: It was a horrible experience, and it took years off my life. But to answer that question, why do I love theater, it’s because it’s the only place in life where you walk out onstage, and by and large, you know what’s going to happen. What you’re going to say, what the other people are going to say to you, whether the audience is going to laugh or feel deeply moved. You don’t have to figure anything out.

DC: I remember being in a play once, and there were just 30 minutes left, and I thought, I don’t want this ever to end. It’s like being in a protective womb for a couple hours, then the poor actor has to go home.

PG: It’s interesting how in tune you are on performing. It brings me back to your talk shows. Physically and temperamentally, you’re very different. We have Cavett’s Mr. Sly and Twinkly-Eyed and — —

AB: I can’t wait to hear what you’re going to say next.

PG: And Alec’s more full-throated, upfront delivery. But the tone of your talk shows is very similar. I watched Dick’s interview with Marlon Brando — in 1973, maybe the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. But he didn’t want to give anything away. He spoke in monosyllables. But you just waited and waited, and finally, he opened up and gave the best interview I’ve ever seen with him.

AB: There must be some technique.

PG: And I saw the same thing in your interview of Debra Winger, Alec. She launched a few stories, and I thought, She has no idea how to land this plane. But you gave her room and were so kind that she found her way to a beautiful point about processing disappointment that she wouldn’t have if you’d rushed her.

AB: What I find is that when you push or try to take something from them, it doesn’t work. But when you let it breathe, when you let your segments run a little longer, they give it to you. They give it to you if you let it be their choice.

DC: Some people thought it was zany to do 90-minute shows with one person: “You’re doing 90 minutes with George Harrison [shortly after the Beatles had broken up]? I don’t envy you.” I didn’t envy myself for the first couple segments.

AB: But by the time it’s over, they look at you and go, “We’re done?”

PG: He was quite funny.

DC: I remember saying to him, “Yoko Ono sat in that chair.” And he knew to jump out of it, horrified. And by the end of the show, he was as interesting as anyone I had met. If you can convince them that you’re not going to hurt them, that security led people to say: “I’ve never felt this good on a talk show. My God, I don’t know how you got me to talk about my abortion.” And that was a man.

PG: So, have you got a tip for Alec?

DC: Well, I guess it’s obligatory to rehearse the advice Jack Paar gave to me: “Hey kid, don’t do interviews.” I thought, What do I do then: sing, read poetry to the audience? Don’t do interviews, kid: What’s your favorite this or that, like David Frost and his clipboard. He meant make it a conversation. I didn’t get it right away, but I realized that’s what Jack did. And he was the most electric personality I’ve ever known on TV.

PG: Did you have any reluctance about doing your show on MSNBC, Alec? Cable news channels are so tribal now. Are you kissing off half of your audience?

AB: First of all, there’s a certain part of the American public that if I walked out onto the ice and Barbara Bush had just fallen through, and I saved her from drowning and carried her to shore and performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and saved her from hypothermia, people would say, “He rumpled her coat!” My original conversations were with NBC, but they didn’t have a slot for me, and may not have a slot for some time. They’re shuffling their whole late night with Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers. Then Phil Griffin [the president of MSNBC] popped up and said, “I’ll give you a slot now.”

PG: Do you think MSNBC was hoping for a more combative Alec Baldwin than they’re getting?

AB: No, I told Phil what I wanted to do. They want to explore some different programming.

PG: How about your famous TV combat, Dick — the near fistfight between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal? Did the network say, “More of that, please!”?

DC: The network never said anything good.

AB: Let’s get Liz Ashley and George Peppard on there.

DC: Exactly. All they said was, “Can’t you get more big stars?” And I got every big star there was that I wanted: Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Groucho Marx, Orson Welles, Lucille Ball, Alfred Hitchcock. The only ones I didn’t get were Cary Grant and Mike Nichols. But all they ever said was, “Why do you keep booking authors?”

PG: Let’s talk about your famous opponents. Did you ever find out what you did to make poor Richard Milhous Nixon so angry with you?

DC: Well, apparently the White House was furious about a show I did with John Kerry and John O’Neill, debating the Vietnam War. That started it. Then, your friend and mine John Lennon asked if I’d come down to court and assert that he should not be deported by the Nixon administration. That really did it.

PG: They wanted to deport John Lennon?

DC: Oh yes. You can even go to YouTube after lunch and listen to Nixon asking Haldeman, “What can we do to screw Cavett?” And years later, I learned from several members of my staff that he had used one of his favorite illegal hobbies and had the I.R.S. audit all of them, which was just hurting “the little people,” in the words of Joan Crawford.

AB: What enemies do you suppose I possibly have?

PG: The New York Post’s coverage of you is so operatic. What did you ever do to them?

AB: No. 1, you have to have some rap sheet that they can come at you with. You can’t be crystal clear and pure. And yes, I left an angry voice mail message for my daughter that my wife and her attorneys decided to release on the Internet. So there’s that. And as we all know, the Internet is the death of forgetting. You cannot reinvent yourself because it’s always there. You hit Google, and your cavalcade of misdeeds comes rolling back to the top of the page.

DC: Like the Great Pyramid.

PG: I live around the corner from Alec, and every week, it’s a mosh pit of TV crews and paparazzi. Why do they want wall-to-wall coverage of you?

AB: I don’t have any proof of this, and that’s important to say, but I think they’re there for harassment. I’m not J. D. Salinger. I’m out and about, having my picture taken. So when they come to my house and stake it out for days, they’re there to provoke. Then they ask: “Why are you so angry? You need counseling.”

DC: As a talk-show host recently said to Anthony Weiner, “What’s wrong with you?”

AB: Which I would understand if I was having altercations with FedEx deliverymen or meter maids. My bad luck is I’m having these altercations with people who just happen to have still and video cameras they’re ready to capture on film.

DC: There was an age when they didn’t exist, and it must have been wonderful.

PG: Speaking of this other age that Dick mentioned, I grew up in the ’70s. And there wasn’t a moment I didn’t know who Dick Cavett was. But I can remember as clear as day when I really honed in on you. It was just after my father killed himself, and you spoke out publicly about your own depression. I wonder if you know how much your words helped people, including me?

DC: At one point, I thought: I’m not so sure I want to become the poster boy for depression. But I still get mail about it, even today: “You saved my dad’s life.” “You helped me acknowledge my own depression.” “If Cavett can have this, then I guess it’s all right for me to.”

AB: But don’t you believe that the overwhelming majority of people are depressed at some time in their lives and they’re just not honest about it?

DC: Depression is epidemic because it’s still so undiagnosed. And even my analyst made the mistake of saying to me — after I’d told him I wished he knew for a minute what my depression felt like — he said, “Oh, that’s all right, I was pretty low when my dad died.” I sat up and said, “You think grief is even close to this?” He apologized.

AB: When I wrote a book about my divorce, I can remember writing about depression and wanting to kill myself. I felt like I was walking and walking in the woods, or in this vast open place, like Saskatchewan, and all of a sudden you come to this abyss that goes as far as the eye can see. And looking into it, it’s like death is inevitable.

PG: I’ve led us into a really cheery cul-de-sac, haven’t I?

DC: Sort of an Ingmar Bergman image.

PG: Let’s end on something cheerier: philanthropy. I don’t think I’m cheap. But I have a hard time giving money away. I’m afraid there won’t be enough. But your philanthropy is so large scale, Alec. Has it always been easy for you?

AB: Before “30 Rock,” I had always given a percentage of my income to charity. I’m not blowing my horn about it. Most people give, I think. But when I learned that “30 Rock” was going into syndication, I entered into a very lucrative agreement with Capital One, and I gave nearly every dime to charity. That’s why I did the commercials. I got addicted to giving the money away.

DC: Put down, at this point, Cavett said, “What a guy.”

Kitschy, cool Vagabond Motel coming back to life on Biscayne Boulevard’s MiMo district

BY ANDRES VIGLUCCI
viglucci@MiamiHerald.com

MARICE COHN BAND / MIAMI HERALD STAFF

Workers finish the renovations on the pool at the Vagabond Motel, Wednesday, October 30, 2013. Developer Avra Jain plans to open the Vagabond in time for Art Basel. After years in limbo behind a construction fence, the marvelous Vagabond Motel on Biscayne Boulevard is finally coming back to life as an upscale boutique hotel and dining and lounging spot with all its MiMo features. That's in large part thanks to a new city of Miami program that allows owners of historically designated properties to sell "air rights,'' or the potential development rights they can't take advantage of, to developers in other parts of town. The revenue must then be plowed into the historic property. Developer Avra Jain plans to open the Vagabond Motel in time for Art Basel. After years in limbo behind a construction fence, the marvelous Vagabond Motel on Biscayne Boulevard is finally coming back to life as an upscale boutique hotel and dining and lounging spot with all its MiMo features. That's in large part thanks to a new city of Miami program that allows owners of historically designated properties to sell "air rights,'' or the potential development rights they can't take advantage of, to developers in other parts of town. The revenue must then be plowed into the historic property.

After years in a sad limbo behind a construction fence, the sirens and porpoises at the marvelously waggish Vagabond Motel are looking decidedly chipper under a fresh coat of paint. The re-plumbed fountain will soon come back to life along with the rest of the iconic but long-dormant motel, which has come to symbolize the fortunes of the fledgling Miami Modern historic district on Biscayne Boulevard.

The reopening of the fully restored 1953 MiMo landmark, set for Dec. 5, could mark a significant milestone in the slowly gathering revival of the boulevard along the city’s Upper East Side.

The Vagabond’s newest owner, developer Avra Jain, is buying four more of the dozen or so historic but rundown MiMo motels that define the district. She has ambitious plans to turn them into a collection of boutique hostelries and dining and lounging spots for locals and visitors looking for distinctive, affordable alternatives to South Beach.

“The boulevard is at the tipping point,’’ Jain said as she led a tour of the bustling, still-unfinished Vagabond restoration. “The demand is there. This isn’t contrived. If you change the motels on the boulevard, you change everything.’’

The Vagabond’s multi-million-dollar makeover, overseen by architect Dean Lewis, will restore the kitsch-edged 1950s verve that made the motel the gem of the boulevard in its heyday, before family tourism gave way to hookers and drug pushers.

Its glorious neon signs are being restored. The mermaid mosaic at the bottom of the swimming pool has been faithfully reproduced using tiles brought from France. A new open-air Cabana Bar will stand by the pool. The interiors will be done up in mid-20th Century Modern style by designer Stephane Dupoux.

But Jain says none of this would be happening without a little-known, and previously untried, city program designed to foster renovation of properties designated as historic.

The program allows owners to sell “air rights’’ — meaning development rights they can’t use because of historic designation — to developers looking to build bigger in high-rise districts such as downtown. The revenue, which can amount to millions of dollars, must then be plowed back in full into renovation of the historic property.

Jain and her attorneys at Greenberg Traurig were the first to figure out how to tap into the transfer of development rights (TDR) program, established when the city’s new Miami 21 zoning code went into effect in 2010.

The ability to raise money through TDRs, she said, is key to the restoration of the deteriorated boulevard motels, whose small size and big renovation needs would otherwise make the job financially unfeasible.

“There’s a reason this building sat vacant for so long,’’ Jain said, alluding to failed efforts in recent years by previous owners to resuscitate the Vagabond, which she bought for $1.9 million last year. “Economically no one could make it work. We will spend $5 million on renovation. Part of this for me was really passion for the building. But it’s otherwise hard to justify spending this kind of money on a 45-room motel.’’

Jain raised $3 million for the Vagabond restoration by selling 440,000 square feet worth of air rights to developers Related Group and Terra Group for use in three high-rise condo projects in Edgewater, Brickell and Coconut Grove. The appeal for the condo developers: the TDRs have sold for $7 to $8 per square foot, considerably cheaper than the cost of buying additional development capacity through the city’s Miami 21 “bonus’’ program, which also permits builders to purchase the right to add volume to their projects, said Lucia Dougherty, Jain’s attorney at Greenberg.

That Jain was able to do so was in part because of fortuitous timing, Dougherty said. There had been no demand for the TDR program because no one was building after the real estate collapse.

“The good news is, there is a place to sell them because people are building again,’’ Dougherty said.

But the process, which Jain and her attorneys described as laborious, took months because the city had not set up rules and procedures for the TDRs. The city also had to establish safeguards to ensure revenue from sale of TDRs is not diverted to other uses.

Jain next plans to use TDRs again to restore two other MiMo motels she has purchased — the Royal, a block north of the Vagabond, which she will turn into an annex to the iconic motel; and the Stephens, at 6320 Biscayne, where she will bring in a national retailer. Jain also has contracts to buy two more boulevard motels, she said.

The city’s use of TDRs in the MiMo historic district, which runs along both sides of the boulevard from 50th Street to 77th Street, has not been entirely uncontroversial.

At the insistence of some neighbors and City Commissioner Marc Sarnoff, who represents the area, the city imposed a 35-foot height limit on both sides of the boulevard. That raised strenuous objections from preservationists and property owners, who say the restriction has stalled redevelopment of the district by making it nearly impossible to expand smaller, outmoded buildings to make them viable again.

Preservationist Nancy Liebman, co-founder of the MiMo Biscayne Association, argues the city is unwisely allowing the use of TDRs by owners of vacant and non-historic buildings inside the district to, in effect, compensate their owners for the loss of property rights arising from the height restriction. As a consequence, she said, those are being replaced by bland, one- or two-story new commercial buildings that do little to complement the historic buildings in the district.

“They’re using the TDRs to stop people from filing lawsuits because their property rights are being taken away,’’ said Liebman, a pioneering Art Deco District preservationist who favors lifting height limits on the Boulevard to 50 feet, a scale she contends will allow the mix of uses that revived South Beach. “That’s not what TDRs are supposed to be for. It is just creating those one-story buildings that add nothing to the character of the neighborhood. It doesn’t give you the infill that creates a destination.’’

Sarnoff insisted the TDRs are working as designed.

“You’re putting the urban density where it belongs downtown, and you’re keeping a street at the scale at which it was designed years ago,’’ he said. “The proof is in the pudding.’’

Still, Liebman heartily applauds Jain’s use of TDRs to salvage historic buildings.

“She is the Tony Goldman of the boulevard,’’ Liebman said, referring to the late preservationist and developer who helped turn around South Beach and Wynwood. “She got it. She is the best thing that’s happened here so far. We need more [like] her.’’

The historic district was the city’s first in a commercial area when it was established in 2006. The hope was it would spur redevelopment around its set of 1950s motels, which grafted bright neon signs and space-age detailing on simple, Bauhaus-inspired Modernist boxes to lure middle-class visitors traveling to Miami by car with their families.

While numerous shops and restaurants have opened along the district to cater to the gentrifying neighborhoods flanking both sides of the boulevard, only a small handful of motels have been renovated, including the New Yorker and another re-baptized Bianco. But those have proven so successful in drawing economy-minded European tourists that they’re often fully booked.

That prompted Jain, who has redeveloped other urban commercial and residential properties in Manhattan and Miami and is a partner in the Regalia luxury residential tower now nearing completion in Sunny Isles Beach, to take a hard look at the Vagabond.

The motel — designed by Robert Swartburg, architect of the famed Delano in South Beach — had been gutted by a former owner who gamely tried to restore it, saving many of its original details and finishes, including terrazzo floors and Dade County pine ceilings, before losing it to foreclosure in the crash.

She decided to take the chance after her Greenberg team persuaded her they could make the TDRs work. Because banks were not making project loans, Jain said, she raised money up front from friends and family.

Now she’s scrambling to get the Vagabond sufficiently ready for an opening Tiki Party poolside during Art Basel Miami Beach week. Work is more advanced than it seems from the outside, she said. New electrical and plumbing systems have been installed, and windows and wallboards are going in this week.

Eventually, the motel’s former office will be a casual seafood diner, and Jain hopes the Vagabond will become a gathering place for the neighborhood. For her plans to fully bear fruit, however, will require other developers to follow suit by purchasing and renovating historic motels.

That may yet happen. Greenberg’s Dougherty and Iris Escarra say other developers interested in using TDRs have approached them. and other deals are hatching.

TDRs, Sarnoff said, are “selling like hotcakes.’’

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© 2013 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/11/03/v-print/3727161/kitschy-cool-vagabond-motel-coming.html#storylink=cpy

The Government’s Cheap, Dishonest Campaign Against the Chinatown Bus Industry

The Daily Beast

On May 20, 2013, a passenger motor coach run by a Chinatown bus company called Lucky Star departed New York City for Boston’s South Station. Shortly after hitting the road, the driver heard a strange bang come from under the bus. The bus seemed to be functioning normally, so he kept going.

Passengers board a large tour bus in New York, June 26, 2012. After federal officials shut down a slew of small transportation companies in May for safety violations, large tour buses have begun to compete with smaller ones to ferry passengers between Chinatown in Manhattan and Chinatown in Queens. (Robert Stolarik/The New York Times, via Redux)

Upon arriving in Boston, the driver was shocked to find a New York City manhole cover lodged in the vehicle’s luggage compartment. Apparently, the bus struck the loose cover in the streets of Manhattan, sending it darting up into the vehicle’s undercarriage. Lucky Star immediately took the bus out of service and sent it to the garage for repairs.

The following month, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) ordered Lucky Star to cease operating on the grounds that its buses and drivers posed “an imminent hazard to public safety.” One of the primary reasons the FMCSA gave for the shutdown was the manhole cover incident. But the out-of-service order, which is the official document revoking the company’s operating license, incorrectly states that after discovering the damage, Lucky Star’s dispatcher kept the vehicle out of the garage and continued sending it on passenger trips in an act of willful negligence.

The false account of the manhole cover incident is just one of many distortions and inaccuracies that appear in the out-of-service order, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation. (FMCSA spokesperson Duane DeBruyne declined to comment for this article.) The case of Lucky Star, a well-run company with a nearly spotless accident record, is the latest example of how the government’s stepped-up safety regime is destroying small bus companies to the benefit of large, politically-connected corporate carriers, and in the process making American travelers less safe.

The persecution of Lucky Star is an outgrowth of the federal government’s new and troubling approach to regulating the motor coach industry. Washington, D.C. transportation officials and members of Congress began pushing for a regulatory crackdown following a handful of tragic bus accidents that drew widespread media attention but aren’t indicative of a downward trend in bus safety. The 2012 Federal Transportation Reauthorization Act gave the FMCSA new authority to unilaterally revoke a bus company’s operating license. In April, then-U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood created “Operation Quick Strike,” a new division of the agency comprised of small SWAT-like teams of bus inspectors with a special mandate to force unsafe operators off the road. The FMCSA, which issues breathless press releases touting Operation Quick Strike’s swift takedowns of companies that are “an imminent hazard to public safety,” calls this approach a “new paradigm” for the agency.

“In contrast to the large corporate-carriers, the owners and staff of the Chinatown companies lack political connections and often speak English as a second language, making them easy targets for abuse by regulators.”

Members of the so-called “Chinatown bus industry,” like Lucky Star, have been particularly vulnerable to abuses under this new paradigm. These companies, many of which were started in New York City by immigrants from the Fujian Province, China in the late 1990s, have revolutionized the passenger bus industry over the past decade. By charging extremely low prices and picking up passengers off the sidewalk instead of at a traditional bus station, they demonstrated that it was possible to lure hordes of new customers to travel by bus. Faced with declining market share, Greyhound, Peter Pan, and Coach USA started subsidiaries that imitate the Chinatown business model, and today “curbside” busing is the fastest growing mode of intercity travel in the U.S. But in contrast to the large corporate-carriers, the owners and staff of the Chinatown companies lack political connections and often speak English as a second language, making them easy targets for abuse by regulators.

It was an Operation Quick Strike team that took down Lucky Star, and what happened to the company demonstrates how the unit’s smoke-out-the-perpetrators mandate creates an incentive to distort facts. In the out-of-service order, Quick Strike inspectors alleged that Lucky Star continued operating a bus after it was found to have a broken emergency exit during a routine October 13, 2012 inspection. In fact, as the written report from that inspection indicates, the emergency exit was snapped into place on the spot to the satisfaction of the attending officer and the issue was closed.

Quick Strike inspectors claimed that Lucky Star also failed to comply with drug and alcohol testing requirements. In fact, according to sources familiar with the investigation, the company conducted regular drug and alcohol tests on its drivers. What it didn’t do is mandate that Steve Desmarias, a mechanic who runs his own a garage and works on contract for Lucky Star, also undergo drug and alcohol testing. The regulations don’t require that mechanics be tested, so why did the inspectors cite Lucky Star for non-compliance? Desmarias occasionally drives empty Lucky Star buses to a garage for repairs. This, according to Quick Strike officers, makes him an official driver. 

Desmarias, a well-regarded figure in the Massachusetts’ bus industry, spent 20 years as a supervisor and head mechanic at Tremblay’s Bus Company in New Bedford before opening his own garage. Lucky Star is his primary client. Desmarias says that the two FMCSA officers who conducted field inspections at his shop, David Graham and Terence McSweeney, appeared ignorant of basic inspection guidelines, made threatening remarks to him and his staff, and seemed to be digging for reasons to write up violations.

“I’ve been in this business for over 40 years,” says Desmarias, “and I’ve never seen inspectors behave like these guys.”

Desmarias says that when Graham first walked into his garage, one of his mechanics greeted him by asking, “Can I help you?” “Can I help you?,” replied Graham, and then he flashed his badge. At one point, Desmarias says, Graham threatened to have him “locked up.

Desmarias also says that during a field inspection on May 10th, Graham and McSweeney cited three buses for allegedly having defective safety hatches, which was the sole reason for taking two of the vehicles out of service. According to Desmaris, the hatches of all three buses were fully operational, but because the buses were parked in his garage with their hatches unlatched for ventilation, Graham and McSweeney marked them as broken. (My request to interview Graham and McSweeney was ignored by FMCSA’s press office.)

One of the more absurd passages in the out-of-service order alleges that Lucky Star conspired to hide GPS data from regulators, which could theoretically be used to fact-check company logs. Federal regulations don’t require that bus companies maintain GPS systems on their buses, but the company optionally contracted with an outside firm to install a system on some of its buses. The GPS system never worked properly, generating laughably inaccurate data, so Lucky Star cancelled its contract months prior to the FMCSA’s investigation. Nevertheless, Quick Strike inspectors demanded access to the faulty information and then used it to conclude that Lucky Star drivers were habitual speeders.

As described in the out-of-service order, FMCSA inspectors found it damning that Lucky Star’s buses broke down 80 times over the course of a year. But the report cites no baseline numbers. Lucky Star buses were logging 3.1 million highway miles a year, according to federal data, which works out to one bus breakdown for every 38,750 miles on the road. In other words, Lucky Star’s buses had about one breakdown for every 180 one-way trips between Boston and New York City. Taking into account that a breakdown can be caused by something as unavoidable as a flat tire, the company’s maintenance record was impeccable. 

Although the out-of-service order was riddled with inaccuracies, Lucky Star’s owners, Maria Wong and brothers Edward and Albert Leung, were forced to accept the charges out of expedience. Appealing the order could have ensnared the company in an interminable appeals process, keeping its buses off the road for years. (Wong and the Leungs declined to be interviewed for this article out of fear that they would anger FMCSA staff and jeopardize their chances of getting back on the road.)

The FMCSA’s handling of the Lucky Star investigation isn’t an isolated case. Fung Wah is the best-known Chinatown bus company—a cultural icon for those of a certain age and demographic. It was shut down by the FMCSA in March. Like Lucky Star, Fung Wah was a well-run outfit with an impeccable safety record—contrary to the conclusions drawn by many horrendous press reports on the company—and its forced closure was a clear abuse of power. In the case of Fung Wah, state bus inspectors in Massachusetts were also partially to blame for what happened to the company. (Fung Wah’s owner and founder, Pei Lin Liang, declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Fung Wah’s troubles began in February, when Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities bus inspectors Steve Boleyn and Dyann Prouty discovered frame cracks in multiple Fung Wah buses. Most of these cracks had been repaired, but not to the satisfaction of Boleyn and Prouty. “Not trivial stuff,” Ann Berwick, chair of the DPU, told the Boston Globe.

In fact, these cracks were trivial stuff. “Most frame cracks have no safety impact,” says bus engineer Christopher Ferrone. “People that do a very good job of running their buses are getting wrongly impounded for frame cracks,” he says. (Ferrone has no direct knowledge of Fung Wah’s fleet.) Because tour bus bodies have a monocoque construction, meaning they’re fabricated in one piece, frame cracks don’t threaten their structural integrity. Other inspectors had recently cleared the same vehicles that led to Fung Wah’s shutdown.

One month after Fung Wah was forced off the road, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, which determines official out of service criteria for buses, began rewriting its guidelines for field inspectors with the goal of “alleviating some of the misdiagnosed violations” stemming from frame cracks, according to Lieutenant Donald Bridge, Jr., who is head of the CVSA’s Passenger Carrier Committee. This behind-the-scenes reassessment, however, didn’t lead to a mea culpa on the part of regulators.

The government’s mistreatment of both companies has caused financial and emotional harm to their owners, employees, and their families—but it’s also been detrimental to the riding public. The Boston Globe reports that Lucky Star is planning on raising its prices when it reopens, which will help cover some of its costs stemming from the shutdown. The company will likely get away with its price increase because the new regulatory regime has made it harder than ever for new bus companies to get into the business and undercut existing operators.

Not so long ago, the Chinatown bus industry was subject to fierce price wars. Fung Wah was the first company to introduce a $10 fare between Boston and New York, at a time when Greyhound was charging about five times as much. This lured many travelers out of their cars, which in turn made the riding public significantly safer, because even a poorly maintained bus is orders of magnitude safer than a passenger car. To put the recent hysteria over bus safety into perspective, from 2001 to 2011, there were an average of 34 fatal intercity/cross-country bus accidents each year. During the same period, there were an average of 23,000 fatal passenger car accidents annually. While it is difficult to translate these figures into risk-probability rates, they convey a sense of how much safer it is to take the bus.

Today, Lucky Star is close to reaching a final deal with regulators to reopen. Since the June shutdown, the owners have lost out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in operating revenues. they’ve spent upwards of a million dollars in their efforts to get the company back on the road. Among other things, they’ve purchased expensive new devices for their vehicles in order to please FMCSA regulators that do nothing to enhance passenger safety. Immediately after being shutdown, Lucky Star hired a team of well-compensated Washington, D.C. government relations experts to negotiate a reopening plan with the FMCSA, including Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board, and Annette Sandberg, a former head of the FMCSA.

Fung Wah is also fighting to gets its operating authority back with no set timetable. To help with its case, the company has hired its own team of government relations experts, including Jeffrey Mullan, the former secretary of transportation in Massachusetts, and Joe Mokrisky, an independent consultant who specializes in instructing bus carriers on how to comply with FMCSA rules.

When Lucky Star and Fung Wah get back on the road—which will hopefully happen very soon—they’ll have a new expertise essential to surviving in today’s passenger bus industry. They’ll know how to better navigate FMCSA’s often arbitrary rules and they’ll know which politically-savvy consultants to call when troubles arise—two things that have nothing to do with providing a safe and pleasant ride to their customers. The golden age of the $10 fare is giving way to a new era, in which the biggest challenge of operating a successful bus company is keeping government bullies at bay.

Aqueducts’ Defenders Volunteer to Fill Breach in Upkeep of Park

From the New York Times

ROME — In their day, Rome’s aqueducts — 11 elevated pipelines that carried more than 3,400 gallons of water per second to the ancient capital — stood as the height of public administration, providing the “best water service in the ancient world and perhaps of any era,” in the words of one archaeologist, Filippo Coarelli.

Today, what remains of the aqueducts has come to stand for something else: the challenges Italy faces in preserving its past while extensive cutbacks in public funding are eroding the maintenance of Italy’s cultural heritage and parks.

The effect is visible in the Park of the Aqueducts, a site near the Cinecittà film studios in Rome that includes some of the city’s most monumental, if little-known, ruins: the remains of six aqueducts dating to antiquity, and one to the Renaissance.

For years, the public institutions in charge of the park — a jumble of municipal, regional and national entities — were unable to adequately maintain the 590-acre area, which is mostly privately owned. Then, five years ago, a handful of older residents, calling themselves the Volunteers of the Park of the Aqueducts, adopted the park as their retirement hobby.

They spend hours pruning and weeding and clearing garbage to liberate clogged and long-forgotten streams. They plant fruit trees and have created miles of dirt paths for bicycles and joggers.

“We wanted to improve an area that had been left to itself,” said Luciano Di Vico, 67, a former manager with a natural gas company who serves as the group’s leader.

“This is where we found two cars, a boat trailer, a marble Roman sink, several supermarket carts, even a slot machine,” Mr. Di Vico said on a recent fall morning, pointing to a small hollow the group had cleared.

Volunteer groups “are the soul of the park,” said Mario Tozzi, the commissioner of the Regional Park for the Appian Way, an area of around 8,400 acres that extends from the center of Rome to outside the city limits.

“If it weren’t for them, for their fierce defense, the green areas that now comprise the park wouldn’t even exist,” Mr. Tozzi said. The regional park includes the Park of the Aqueducts, as well as estates and areas where other volunteer groups operate.

The regional park was created in 1988 to protect a monument-rich area from the deregulated urban development that spurred Rome’s postwar sprawl. Because of volunteer groups, Mr. Tozzi said, “this slice of ancient Rome managed to escape from modern Rome, which hasn’t behaved all that well, gobbling up what it could.”

Even so, the remains of the aqueducts have gotten little respect. The Volunteers of the Park of the Aqueducts has tried to change that.

Given the few volunteers and the vast size of the park, it is a Sisyphean feat. No sooner do they take their hoes and rakes to one overgrown patch, then another area they had already cleared needs tending.

Their main challenges are the modern marauders who regularly pillage and destroy the results of their labor. Culprits have made off with fruit from trees “when they’re still not ripe, they’re not even tasty,” Mr. Di Vico said.

Vandals have dismantled wooden bicycle racks to use as tinder for barbecues. They have repeatedly broken into the information booth to steal wheelbarrows and have destroyed a vegetable garden created by schoolchildren. They have even dumped garbage from the bins to make off with the garbage bags. “They stole the bag,” Mr. Di Vico said. “How can that even cross one’s mind?”

“It’s a cultural problem to get people to understand what they have,” he said. “They treat the park as something that can be abandoned.”

He and his crew monitor the vandalism through the small army of older parkgoers who take daily walks. “I have my informers,” Mr. Di Vico said, though he admitted that older people “are the worst predators when it comes to flowers.”

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Other volunteer groups have been similarly active. The Associazione Tor Fiscale, named for a 13th-century tower built near two of the aqueducts, began cleaning a different abandoned tract of the Regional Park for the Appian Way in 2000. The association is now managing a restaurant inside the park to subsidize its activities.

“Something abandoned has become precious,” said Gloria Mazzamati, leader of the association. “The city didn’t even know that this possibility existed. Now people are coming from all over the world to see the aqueducts. They are a spectacle to foreign eyes.”

Orchestrating parkwide management is a challenge because the park is mostly private property, largely owned by the heirs of Rome’s noble families — which farm much of the land — and a church foundation, along with a few public institutions, like the region and the city.

Although they are generally well liked, the aqueduct volunteers have at times run afoul of the rules.

Two years ago, they began clearing some of the arches of the Aqua Claudia of the trees and bushes that hid them from view. “People would pass by and thank us,” said Bruno De Giusti, a volunteer, who grumbled that archaeology officials had not been taking better care of the monuments.

But park guards soon stopped them. “You can’t delegate such a delicate task as cleaning to volunteers,” said Rita Paris, who is responsible for the regional park on behalf of the Culture Ministry. “It has to be done under the control of experts.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Ms. Paris said. “Thank goodness these volunteers exist, but the care and maintenance of these sites must be left to public institutions. The committees are active, and they bring forward battles, but they’re not a real solution.”

In a compromise, the volunteers have been permitted to get rid of some types of weedy plants — nettles and reeds, for example — but must get authorization for other, more ambitious projects. The bureaucracy has not deterred Mr. Di Vico and his group, and they have posted handwritten notices to recruit more volunteers.

But, he said, they would not mind a little money to cover their expenses. They have bought dozens of plants, hammers and hoes and a seemingly endless number of wheelbarrows. “The park supports us morally, and with love, but that’s it.”

Asked about money, Mr. Tozzi, the park commissioner, was succinct. “There just isn’t any money,” he said. “Our budget is zero.”

COMMENT

BUSINESS AS USUAL

by George Packer from the New YorkerOCTOBER 28, 201

Jenny Brown started working for the Internal Revenue Service right out of high school, in 1985, typing numbers from tax returns into a computer. Her home town, of Ogden, Utah, has not only a large I.R.S. facility but an Air Force base, Hill Field, where Brown’s father worked as a civilian. Her stepfather and her late sister used to work at the base; a brother, a son, and a nephew work there now. Her other son is with the Army in Afghanistan, and two other nephews are in the Air Force. “We’re really just a government family,” Brown said last week, on the second-to-last day of the shutdown. And Ogden is a government town, with twenty-four thousand federal employees. Brown grew up with the belief that a government job was secure, well-paying, and honorable, but, when she told her new doctor recently that she works for the I.R.S., he replied, in all seriousness, “Do you need a prescription for Xanax, or some kind of stress reducer?”

In fact, a lot of Brown’s colleagues, in Ogden and around the country, are taking pills for stress. They haven’t had a raise in three years. Every I.R.S. employee lost three days of pay last summer, owing to furloughs brought on by the blind budget cutting known as sequestration, and during the shutdown ninety per cent of the agency’s employees were sent home without pay. Many of them now live paycheck to paycheck, and some had to turn to food banks during the sixteen days of the shutdown, while the charity at the Ogden local of the National Treasury Employees Union (Brown is the president of Chapter 67) ran low on supplies. Nationally, the agency’s workforce has been cut by almost twenty-five per cent in the past two decades, while the number of individual tax returns filed has grown by an even larger figure.

With the extra workload, face-to-face audits have dropped by half since 1992, as have the odds of being convicted for a tax crime. Frank Clemente, the director of Americans for Tax Fairness, says, “When the I.R.S. doesn’t have the money to do its job, it’s easier for wealthy people and big corporations to cheat the system, especially by hiding profits offshore.” For every dollar added to the I.R.S. budget, the agency is able to collect at least seven dollars in revenue, but in times of austerity that money doesn’t come in—which means that, in recent years, the Treasury has lost billions in taxes, starving government services and increasing the deficit. Another result, Jenny Brown pointed out, is that wait times at the Ogden call center have risen from ten or fifteen minutes a few years ago to an hour or more today. “By the time they get the I.R.S. on the phone, they’re frustrated, and they vent awhile, which takes up more time,” she said.

Worst of all is the hostility that Brown senses toward government employees in general, but especially those at the I.R.S. She’s learned not to mention her job to strangers, sparing herself the rude comebacks. “On Facebook, my colleagues don’t put anything where it asks where you work,” Brown said. Instead, they write, “If you know me, you know where I work”—as if they were employed at a pet crematory, or a strip club. “Morale is horrible. People are looking for a way to get out of the government.” After twenty-eight years on the job, she wouldn’t dream of recommending federal employment to anyone.

The government shutdown is over. National default has been averted, for now. According to an estimate by Standard & Poor’s, the Tea Party’s brinkmanship cost the American economy twenty-four billion dollars—more than half a percentage point of quarterly growth. House Republicans have suffered a huge tactical defeat of their own devising, and their approval ratings are at an all-time low. President Obama and the Democrats in Congress appear strong for refusing to give in to blackmail.

But in a larger sense the Republicans are winning, and have been for the past three years, if not the past thirty. They’re just too blinkered by fantasies of total victory to see it. The shutdown caused havoc for federal workers and the citizens they serve across the country. Parks and museums closed, new cancer patients were locked out of clinical trials, loans to small businesses and rural areas froze, time ran down on implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation law, trade talks had to be postponed. All this chaos only brings the government into greater disrepute, and, as Jenny Brown’s colleagues dig their way out of the backlog, they’ll be fielding calls from many more enraged taxpayers. It would be naïve to think that intransigent Republicans don’t regard these consequences of their actions with indifference, if not outright pleasure. Ever since Ronald Reagan, in his first inaugural, pronounced government to be the problem, elected Republicans have been doing everything possible to make it true.

These days, Republicans may be losing politically and resorting to increasingly anti-majoritarian means—gerrymandering, filibuster abuse, voter suppression, activist Supreme Court decisions, legislative terrorism—to nullify election results. But on economic-policy matters they are setting the terms. Senator Ted Cruz can be justly described as a demagogic fool, but lately he’s been on the offensive far more than the White House has. The deficit is in fairly precipitous decline, but job growth is anemic, and millions of Americans remain chronically unemployed. Democrats control the White House and the Senate, and last year they won a larger share of the national vote in the House than Republicans did. And yet the dominant argument in Washington is over spending cuts, not over ways to increase economic growth and address acute problems like inequality, poor schools, and infrastructure decay. “The whole debate over the last couple of weeks is playing against a backdrop of how much to increase austerity, not to invest in the economy,” Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, said last week. “We are living in a time of government withering on the vine.”

While House Republicans go home to sift through the debris of their defeat, the sequester remains in place, with deeper cuts ahead. A hiring freeze at United States Attorneys’ offices will continue and they will have to go on using volunteers. There will be no new agents to fill training classes at the F.B.I. Academy, while the bureau’s concrete headquarters, on Pennsylvania Avenue, crumbles. The loss of government scholarships at the National Health Services Corps will mean fewer doctors in underserved areas. Jenny Brown’s friends and co-workers in Ogden will look for jobs in the private sector. And the talk in Washington will return to deficit reduction. ♦

Radio’s Mark Levin Might Be the Most Powerful Conservative You Never Heard Of

From The Daily Beast

Conservative talk show host Mark Levin might be the most politically influential person you’ve never heard of. David Freedlander makes the introductions.

Last weekend, at a dusty race car track in that part of New Jersey where lacrosse fields slowly give way to farmland before the landscape seems to stop altogether,Sarah Palin rallied a couple of thousand partisans on behalf of Steve Lonegan, a longshot, Tea Party-fueled candidate for the U.S. Senate.

Eva Russo for The Washington Post/Getty

“I just told Todd,” she said to the crowd a moment after they stopped chanting her name. “‘Ooh,’ I said. ‘I can die and go to heaven now: I just shook Mark Levin’s hand.’”

Levin had been out earlier, warming them up. He cuts a figure that is the exact opposite of the Grizzly Mama, with her low cut red shirt and stemwinders about a Revolutionary War fightress “swabbin and loadin, swabbin and loadin” a cannon even as the red coats knocked her bonnet off. Hunched over the podium wearing a blue baseball hat, he is more like the uncle you are reminded not to talk politics with at Thanksgiving.

“Mr. President, open our damn memorials! Mr. President, this country doesn’t belong to you—it belongs to us! Mr. President, this government doesn’t belong to you—it belongs to us!”

The crowd, almost entirely white, in ill-fitting jeans and sweatshirts, and in some cases wearing literal hard hats, as if to culled from a central casting call for “blue collar,” chant Levin’s name and wave copies of his book like holy rollers at a tent revival.

“You shoved Obamacare down our throats, now we intend to shove it down yours! This election is about the Constitution! This election is about restoring this republic! This is about the rights of individuals!”

From the back of the rally, Levin becomes nearly obscured by the host of yellow “Don’t Tread On Me” flags, which wave their approval, and which outnumber the Stars and Stripes. Off the corner of the stage, someone dressed as Thomas Jefferson holds a sign that says, “Where’s The Hope N’ Change? More Like Rope N’ Chains.”

“You are the Paul and Paulette Reveres of this country!” Levin continues, his voice rising, his finger jabbing the audience in the chest. “You are the people who are going to save this country and restore the republic! You are the people who are going to breathe life back into the Constitution!”

It is entirely possible that unless you listen to conservative talk radio or regularly attend Tea Party rallies, that you have never heard of Mark Levin, a conservative talk radio host who reaches 7 million listeners nightly. Not that the genre doesn’t have cross-over stars. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity (both of whom directly proceed Levin on most AM radio stations where his show is carried), Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck—their faces are as famous as their names.

But Levin?

In a long New Yorker story over the summer about the efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform, Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin told the magazine’s Ryan Lizza why Florida Senator Marco Rubio has been invaluable to the effort: “He’s willing to go on the most conservative talk shows, television and radio, Rush Limbaugh and the rest … He brings up the names of some of these conservative people I’ve never heard of who everybody in their caucus knows.”

One of them, Lizza said was Levin.

“I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup,” Durbin told the magazine. “Who is Mark Levin?”

“Dick Durbin won’t even be a footnote to a footnote in history. Dick Durbin doesn’t matter to me. Whether or not he knows me is inconsequential,” Levin said in a phone interview.

It was a conversation that he submitted to only after weeks of effort, and my enlisting associates of his to intervene on my behalf, and his likewise doing due diligence on me.

“I don’t get up in the morning and say, ‘Gee what can I do to get noticed by Dick Durbin?’ Or, ‘I wonder what Chuck Schumer thinks about me.’ I could care less.’”

But if you want to know about what is happening in Washington, why the Republican Party seems willing to swallow itself whole as it shuts down the government and drives the nation nearly to default, then pay attention to the 56-year-old Mark Levin. His 2009 book Liberty and Tyranny spent 12 weeks as a New York Times best seller. His latest, The Liberty Amendments, debuted at number one. YouTube is full of videos of the lines outside his book signings; they seem to wrap around the entire suburban Long Island town where they are held.

“He is very influential with members of Congress,” said Rep. Michelle Bachmann. “He helps us understand the issues form a different perspective.”

When Congress was debating Obamacare back in 2009, it was Levin, she said, who led the GOP charge against it, posting articles detailing the dangers of “socialized medicine” on his website and urging his listeners to contact their representative. In the end, not a single Republican voted for the bill.

“He is not a civil disobedience person. He is not crazy,” Bachmann said. “He is not telling people do something that would be negative, but he is very much the motivator and people trust him … Mark understood that once this Obamacare was implemented, dependency is a crack cocaine addiction. Once people get on a form of dependency, is it possible to get off? Yes, but it is very difficult, and it would change the country forever.”

“He is fighting for his country. He believes we are in a very bad spot,” Hannity told me. “He has not moved. He has not changed. He believes the principles that were applied back when worked then, and if applied now to today’s problems would be just as effective. He has an insatiable appetite for learning. He is constantly recommending to me this book or that book. Deep down inside he is a professor. I consider him one of my best friends in the world.”

It was Hannity who helped give Levin his start in radio. Levin had to come to Washington from Philadelphia, where he graduated from Temple University at 19, and Temple Law School a few years later. His parents ran a day camp and a nursery school outside of Philadelphia, in the town of Cheltenham Township, a diverse middle class enclave that serves as the first outpost for families looking to escape Philadelphia. They were conservative, Levin says, if not political. But he caught the bug early, working the precincts in local races, ultimately winning a seat on the Cheltenham school board while still in law school. He started a group called the Committee for Tax Limitation, which, like an early version of the Club for Growth, would bestow its endorsement on candidates who pledged to keep rates low. “It was more conservative than the Republican Party,” he says. “The tax issue really came at birth for me.”

He was involved in Reagan’s ill-fated 1976 effort against Gerald Ford, and signed on again in 1980. When Reagan won, Levin went to the White House, working first for a now defunct agency called ACTION that oversaw VISTA, the Peace Corps, and the like, and later worked for the Department of Education, the Interior Department, the Office of Presidential Personnel, and eventually ended up at the Justice Department as Chief of Staff to Edwin Meese.

“Unlike the other talkers, he had an actual Washington career,” said one top Republican operative. “The others, they don’t have the faintest idea how things get done in Washington.”

After Reagan left office, Levin went on to head the Landmark Legal Foundation, a conservative legal advocacy group that once nominated Rush Limbaugh for the Nobel Prize and that has targeted the National Education Association, the Democratic National Committee, and other left-wing outfits and that is mostly known for supporting Paula Jones’ lawsuit against Bill Clinton in the 90’s. He was a regular talk radio listener, and would write in to Limbaugh when legal matters would come up on the show. “Eventually he appointed me to the fictitious position of ‘legal adviser,’” Levin said.

Limbaugh would invite Levin on occasionally, and as the Lewinsky saga heated up, he would often be called into the then relatively new medium of cable chatter to talk about the legal issues surrounding the case (a debate with Alan Dershowitz is still talked about reverently in conservative circles for the way Levin dismantled his fellow constitutional law professor.) Hannity discovered him then, too, and stuck him with the nickname “The Great One,” which is now used by Palin and nearly everyone who talks about him. He filled in on occasion when Hannity was away, until Phil Boyce, Hannity’s producer, offered him a chance to have his own show on WABC in New York  on Sundays. There was only one catch: there was no money in the budget to pay him.

“I figured he would slam the phone down,” Boyce says. He wanted, he added a “fire-breather” to go against Michael Savage. Levin worked for free for 14 months, routinely beating Savage, when Boyce figured, “it was time for him to go national.”

It was Boyce who came up with the idea for the intro to the Mark Levin Show. It begins with a voice that sounds like something out of a monster truck rally: “He’s here. He’s here. Now broadcasting from the underground command post deep in the bowels of a hidden bunker somewhere under the brick and steel of a nondescript building we have once again made contact with our leader—Maaarkkk Luuuhhhhhvvvvinnn!”

“He does the show in suburban Washington, and so we wanted to create this sense of intrigue. ‘Somewhere under the brick and steel of a nondescript building,’” Boyce says, doing his best radio announcer voice. “It’s a sense of intrigue—like he is the underground leader speaking to his followers and you can only pick him up on a short wave radio.”

On the radio, Levin is less the uncle you want to avoid talking politics with after the second bottle of wine and more like John Belushi on the old “Weekend Update” on “Saturday Night Live,” working himself up to such a lather that his blood vessels practically splatter across the radio dial.

On a typical show, he will begin quietly in his flat, Philadelphia Jewish twang (he is, he says, “a person of deep faith,” but stopped going to temple because “I got tired of the lectures. ‘I am here, Rabbi, to talk about what is in the Torah and so forth, and that is your area of expertise, not politics.’”)

“It’s amazing how sick the media are in this country,” Levin said at the top of a recent show, his voice as dulcet as a pediatrician’s.

It was the start of the government shutdown, and news of kids kept out of cancer trials was dominating the headlines, and for the day at least, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was public enemy number one.

“Two hundred kids who are scheduled for trials at the NIH, when his party won’t fund the NIH, and his president could have made certain that those kids could have participated in those trials and ladies and gentlemen, there are many more trials than trials for cancers out there,” he says, his voice slowly growing louder. “There are trials for heart disease, for diabetes, for all sorts of life threatening diseases going on there.”

By this point, Levin is shouting. As a listener, you are either hooked, and ready to storm the barricade too, or you feel like you are about to watch a fight in a mall parking lot. You know you should intervene, or at the very least look away, but you cannot.

“Obama has no problem evading the Constitution! He has no problem rewriting statues. He no problem issuing waivers, executive fiats, when it helps him politically with illegal aliens, with union bosses, with the environmental movement! But when it comes to 200 kids with cancer, where is Obama?!”

The dials in the control booth push past red.

“WHERE IS HE? HE IS NOWHERE! AND HIS PARTY SEEKS TO EXPLOIT IT WHEN IT IS HIS PARTY THAT WON’T FUND IT. THIS WHY WE CANNOT ALLOW THE FEDERAL LEVIATHAN TO GET BIGGER AND BIGGER AND CONTROL MORE AND MORE OF OUR LIVES. WE RESIST IT, IT SEEKS TO PUNISH US! IT SEEKS TO HURT US! IT SEEKS TO TORMENT US!”

He breaks for a bit, hawks his own books, a project from the right-wing media watchdog group Media Resource Center—a website, called StopTellingMeLies.Com—and adds a plug for an online course on the Constitution he teaches at the Christian school Hillsdale College when he picks up the show again, in high dudgeon mode, this time about the demonstration in front of the World War II memorial planned for the next day.

“I want to say this loud and clear to the people on Capitol Hill who are listening to this, to the administration: You lay one damn hand on one of those World War II vets at that memorial, and I will bring half a million people to that damn memorial. You got that! I am sitting here stewing just thinking about this! Playing these damn games! You will ignite a movement like none you have seen before! We will come out of every town and city in this nation! You have been warned! You! Have! Been! Warned!”

Democrats in Levin’s telling are “Statists.”  “Mark really made popular that term,” David Limbaugh, brother of Rush, said. “Now everybody uses it.” GOP congressmen who don’t toe the Tea Party line are “French Republicans.”

Interviewees get it no easier.

Senator Ron Johnson, a Tea Party lawmaker from Wisconsin, recently went on Levin’s show earlier this month to defend his notion that the Defund Obamacare movement was ill-fated. You can hear the panic in his voice as he is accused by Levin of voting for Walter Mondale. “We are all pretty big fans, Mark,” he says after defending himself from accusations that he is part of the “surrender caucus.” “I certainly wasn’t coming on here expecting an inquisition.”

“Levin says out loud exactly what people yell at the TV,” says Erick Erickson, the blogger behind Red State, and who says that he records Levin’s show every night and listens to it on the ride home from his own radio show, which is broadcast at the same time. “He takes complex subjects and makes them simple and engaging for people to understand, and that is a rare gift.”

“He has a marvelous ability to keep up my level of moral indignation against the left,” agrees Morton Blackwell, the president of the Leadership Institute and a longtime conservative luminary.

Asked to explain his worldview in a nutshell, Levin described a fallen world, one that had gotten worse and worse since 1776 until it was not practically beyond repair.

“I think that what is threatening society is the lack of appreciation for man’s nature. I don’t why when individuals get elected to office or become part of the civil service they become superior to understanding how the world works and go about remaking it. I am not into all of this social engineering. I think it is very problematic, and where do we draw the line? If we are unmoored from the Constitution, then what are we onto? What is the blueprint of the left? I want to read it, see if I like it. It doesn’t exist. Otherwise, we are just like the hamster on the wheel.”

Asked how something like Obamacare would make him more dependent on government, or threaten his own freedom, Levin said, “Do you know how much time I spend with my income taxes? Do you know how much work it takes to straighten that out? This is not productive. Where do you draw the line? Where do you slow this down? This is why we have liberty.

“Not only is the nation established for no other purpose than to promote the individual and free will and self interest and, yes, community, but through the civil society. We have seen societies, we have seen them in Europe and other places where it does not necessarily lead to better lives or the creation of more wealth for more people but to its opposite … The question for me now is, are we on the brink or aren’t we, and I think we are pretty close.”

The difference between Republicans and Democrats, he adds, is that “The Democratic Party has become a very radical institution. The Republican Party has become a status quo institution, and so the Democratic Party drives the agenda and the Republican Party is reactionary, if it reacts at all.”

Unlike other right-wing talkers, Levin doesn’t veer too far from politics. His Facebook page features his dining room table covered with books, and when people are asked what they like about his show, they invariably mention the Constitution, and that Levin brings a level of erudition to his work. His books are full of long passages of Locke or Burke or de Tocqueville, and he was introduced on stage at the Value Voters Summit earlier this month as “one of the top Constitutional lawyers in the nation.”

Needless to say, there is some disagreement about this.

Dahlia Lithwick, the legal correspondent for Slate, wrote of his first book, Men in Black  that it “never gets past the a.m.-radio bile to arrive at cogent analysis. Each of the first three chapters ends with the word ‘tyranny.’ Absent any structure or argument, this book could just have been titled Legal Decisions I Really, Really Hate. Levin follows the lead of lazy pundits everywhere who excoriate ‘activist judges’ without precisely defining what constitutes one.”

The book, she determines, “is silly.”

In the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, a constitutional law scholar from Case Western said the book was incoherent. A critic for The Chronicle of Higher Education called his book Ameritopia  
“disastrously bad from beginning to end” and Levin “a benighted, philosophically illiterate ideologue.” A right-leaning critic for The Atlantic meanwhile said that the best-selling Liberty and Tyranny doesn’t “even present a reasoned argument for a specific point of view, other than that of willful ignorance.”

Is what Levin does a schtick? Yes, of course, as all radio is a schtick. But it is one that Levin has parlayed into being the voice of a movement that has confounded those outside of it. How influential is Levin? Consider that just after Congress ended the budget standoff and the entire nation was calling for his head, Ted Cruz muscled through a gaggle of reporters to call in to Levin’s show.

Levin said to Cruz, “I have heard it said that we should not have fought over Obamacare, and spend all this time on this. And I am thinking to myself, most of the people saying this didn’t fight Obamacare. They were fighting you fighting Obamacare! Number two—Obamacare is a hot knife to the heart of this country! If we are not going to fight over this what are we going to fight over?”

“Mark, you are exactly right,” Cruz responded.

“I am not an entertainer,” Levin told me. “An entertainer dances and sings and puts on a rubber nose and does whatever they do. I am extremely concerned about the times we live in. I consider them very perilous, and I don’t hold much back.”

Cruz, he said, was getting crucified, because “he was not part of the Republican mush machine. Of he course he is not popular among the people he is battling. Neither am I.”

Political operatives in Texas says it is difficult to imagine Cruz now being in the U.S. Senate without Levin’s early and loud support, having him on the air back when Cruz seemed like a longshot against an establishment pick, and urging his listeners to give money.

“Levin is willing to put his reputation on the line for conservative candidates he believes in,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Texas-based political consultant. “He is really a rarity in ‘the vast right wing conspiracy.’ He has enough knowledge to know how government works, enough courage to say what he thinks and not care what anybody says, and he has a microphone that is powerful enough that it can make an enormous difference in leading conservatives in a direction he wants to lead them.”

In an email, Cruz agreed, calling Levin “a friend and true patriot” who “speaks fearlessly for the people. I’ll always be grateful for his early support for my campaign, which was immeasurably helpful for building support with conservative voters and grassroots activists.”

When Bachmann was running for re-election for her congressional seat, Levin came to believe that the Republican National Committee was insufficiently supportive. Soon, phone lines at RNC headquarters in Washington lit up with complaints.

“He has a direct line into the base,” said a top aide to one Tea Party aligned lawmaker. “It’s as if every Republican office on Capitol Hill has to have a copy of his book.”

None of this endears him much to the Republican leadership, of whom Levin holds a special kind of contempt. He has regularly called for the ouster of House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and thinks that anyone who doesn’t agree has been corrupted.

“It’s the grassroots establishment” laments one GOP operative close to the leadership. “There is in our party a growing group of people who frame themselves as outsiders but are rally just leaders of their own movement, and among them, Levin carrried a lot of weight. When he goes on a rant everybody hears about it.”

What makes Levin remarkable is that his audience is a fraction of that of his better-known colleagues like Hannity and Limbaugh. He speaks, one former Bush administration official said, “To the door-knockers and the envelope stuffers.” In other words, if you wonder how come little known fringe right-wingers are able to knock off establishment Republicans again and again, it has a lot to do with the fact that Levin sends them there. To this crowd, Hannity touts the GOP line too religiously, and Limbaugh is too much of a global celebrity whose radio show is as likely to veer into pop culture and news of the weird as it is to talk about the political situation. Levin is single-minded and relentless.

Asked about the famous 11th commandment as articulated by his old boss and current hero, Ronald Reagan, that “Thou shall not criticize a fellow Republican,” Levin counters, “I believe in the Ten Commandments. They were good enough for God, they are good enough for me.”

“The Democrats aren’t surrendering. They have victory after victory and the Republicans—well, have you ever heard of a party attacking its base. I have never of such a thing. Does the Democratic Party attack its base? They don’t always agree, but they try to accommodate them. We have a Republican Party whose consultants and donors despise the grassroots, and they are not going to win elections if they keep this up. Of course, they don’t win elections any way. We were told McCain was the only one who could win and he lost. We were told Romney was the only one who could win and he lost. George Bush did not win the popular vote. So the guy that ran that campaign is all over television telling us how to win elections. Meanwhile the candidate who won two massive electoral college victories is essentially disregarded, and we are told that the era of Reagan is over.”

“He has the pulse of grassroots, conservative activists,” Erickson says. “He expresses their anger and enthusiasm in way few people out there do. He uses their language. He calls out Republican leaders by name. He is one of the who is really driven by the cause.”

“There are very few institutions of the federal government less responsive to its members than the Republican Party,” Levin says. “I personally have had it with the leadership of the Republican Party, and I have made it abundantly clear. They lack knowledge, confidence, the ability to articulate a principle, and for the life of me I don’t know why they are there. I can’t tell you what the Republican Party today stands for. I know what they say, but what do they do?”

He is also, friends say, incredibly shy, and doesn’t like to travel much. Levin said that he stopped doing much TV after his first burst on the air in the 90s, and that he doesn’t like it all that much.

“When you are on TV more than radio there is a price.You give up privacy.You go to a restaurant and there are five people staring at you. I don’t think he wanted to give that up,” said Hannity, dropping into a raspy Levin impression: “How! Do! You! Put! Up? With! That!?!”

When asked why he wasn’t as well known as his counterparts, Levin cackled. “How do I know? I could care less. Did you see the [Lonegan] rally. Did you see the book signing? Those are the people I want to be with. I can’t control or influence Dick …” He cut himself off. “Well, hell, I do want to actually. But the Dick Durbins of the world and the Chuck Schumers of the world, whether they know me or not doesn’t matter to me. I want my ideas to get out there. I want more and more people to wake up to the fact that where we are headed in this country. And to say that my views are gloomy and bleak is to ignore reality.”

At the race car track, after the rally, most of the crowd stuck around by the stage. Many were there for Palin, but a lot were there for Levin, too, clutching multiple copies of his book.

“He’s honest. He says it the way it is. And he knows a lot about American history. That is what we need to get back to. We need to get back to the Constitution,” said one man, who said he was working two jobs since his wife was laid off, and was in the military reserves, and he tuned into Levin every day when he knocked off work.

“He has informed me about constitutional issues, things like that. He is a roots-based guy. He understand why our country was founded, and where our strength comes from,” said Jim Bukowiec, a graphic designer who drove an hour and a half with his grandson for the rally.

Levin, he said, “is a little deeper. Hannity is like the cherry on top of the ice cream, and Rush is all over the place.”

Palin stayed for nearly an hour afterwards, signing books, taking pictures with Todd and fans. Afterwards, she went to a private reception behind the bus. Levin’s fans never left though. They stayed behind the rope line, waiting for him to come out, but he stayed on the bus, and never did.