The Good News About Mel Gibson

By FRANK RICH NY TIMES
FOR Fourth of July weekend fireworks, even Macy’s couldn’t top the spittle-spangled eruptions of Mel Gibson. The clandestine recordings of his serial audio assaults on his gal pal were instant Web and cable-TV sensations — at once a worthy rival to Hollywood’s official holiday releases and a compelling sequel to his fabled anti- Semitic rant of 2006. A true showman, Gibson offered vitriol for nearly all tastes, aiming his profane fusillade at women, blacks and Latinos alike. The invective was tied together by a domestic violence subplot worthy of “Lethal Weapon.” There was even a surprise comic coda, courtesy of Whoopi Goldberg, who, alone among Gibson’s showbiz peers, used her television platform on “The View” to defend her buddy’s good character.
The Gibson tapes — in plain English and not requiring the subtitles of some of the star’s recent spectacles — are a particularly American form of schadenfreude. There’s little we enjoy more than watching a pampered zillionaire icon (Gibson’s production company is actually named Icon) brought low. The story would end there — just another tidy morality tale in the profuse annals of Hollywood self-destruction from Fatty Arbuckle to Lindsay Lohan — were it not for Gibson’s unique back story.
Six years ago he was not merely an A-list movie star with a penchant for drinking and boorish behavior but also a powerful and canonized figure in the political and cultural pantheon of American conservatism. That he has reached rock bottom tells us nothing new about Gibson. He was the same talented, nasty, bigoted blowhard then that he is today. But his fall says a lot about the changes in our country over the past six years. We shouldn’t take those changes for granted. We should take stock — and celebrate. They are good news.
Does anyone remember 2004? It seems a civilization ago. That less-than-vintage year was in retrospect the nadir of the American war over “values.” The kickoff fracas was Janet Jackson’s breast-baring “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl, which prompted a new crackdown against televised “indecency” by the Federal Communications Commission. By December Fox News and its allies were fomenting hysteria about a supposed war on Christmas, with Newt Gingrich warning of a nefarious secular plot “to abolish the word Christmas” altogether and Jerry Falwell attacking Mayor Michael Bloomberg for using the euphemism “holiday tree” at the annual tree-lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center. In between these discrete culture wars came a presidential election in which the Bush-Rove machine tried to whip up evangelical turnout by sowing panic over gay marriage.
It was into that tinderbox of America 2004 that Gibson tossed his self-financed and self-directed movie about the crucifixion, “The Passion of the Christ.” The epic was timed to detonate in the nation’s multiplexes on Ash Wednesday, after one of the longest and most divisive promotional campaigns in Hollywood history.
Gibson is in such disgrace today that it’s hard to fathom all the fuss he and his biblical epic engendered back then. The commotion began with the revelation that his father, Hutton, was a prominent and vociferous Holocaust denier and that both father and son were proselytizers for a splinter sect of Roman Catholicism that rejected the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, including the lifting of the “Christ-killers” libel from the Jews. Jewish leaders and writers understandably worried that “The Passion” might be as anti-Semitic as the Passion plays of old. Gibson’s response was to hold publicity screenings for the right-wing media and political establishment, including a select Washington soiree attended by notables like Peggy Noonan, Kate O’Beirne and Linda Chavez. (The only nominal Jew admitted was Matt Drudge.) The attendees then used their various pulpits to assure the world that the movie was divine — and certainly nothing that should trouble Jews. “I can report it is free of anti-Semitism,” vouchsafed Robert Novak after his “private viewing.”

Uninvited Jewish writers (like me) who kept raising questions about the unreleased film and its exclusionary rollout were vilified for crucifying poor Mel. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News asked a reporter from Variety “respectfully” if Gibson was being victimized because “the major media in Hollywood and a lot of the secular press is controlled by Jewish people.” Such was the ugly atmosphere of the time that these attempts at intimidation were remarkably successful. Many mainstream media organizations did puff pieces on the star or his film, lest they be labeled “anti-Christian” when an ascendant religious right was increasingly flexing its muscles in the corridors of power in Washington.
Both George and Laura Bush expressed eagerness to see “The Passion.” There were reports (spread by the film’s producer and never confirmed) that the very frail Pope John Paul II had given a thumbs-up after his own screening at the Vatican. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which would publish several encomiums to “The Passion,” ran a sneak preview likening the film to “a documentary by Caravaggio.” Even The New Yorker ran a deferential profile of Gibson — in which the star said he wanted to kill me and my dog (though, alas, I had no dog) and have my “intestines on a stick.” Far more troubling was the article’s whitewashing of Gibson’s father’s record as a Holocaust denier. In the America of 2004, Mel Gibson, box office king and conservative culture hero, was invincible.
Once “The Passion” could be seen by ticket buyers — who would reward it with a $370 million domestic take (behind only “Shrek 2” and “Spider-Man 2” that year) — the truth could no longer be spun by Gibson’s claque. The movie was nakedly anti-Semitic, to the extreme that the Temple priests were all hook-nosed Shylocks and Fagins with rotten teeth. It was also ludicrously violent — a homoerotic “exercise in lurid sadomasochism,” as Christopher Hitchens described it then, for audiences who “like seeing handsome young men stripped and flayed alive over a long period of time.” Nonetheless, many of the same American pastors who routinely inveighed against show-business indecency granted special dispensation to their young congregants to attend this R-rated fleshfest.
It seems preposterous in retrospect that a film as bigoted and noxious as “The Passion” had so many reverent defenders in high places in 2004. Once Gibson, or at least the subconscious Gibson, baldly advertised his anti-Semitism with his obscene tirade during a 2006 D.U.I. incident in Malibu, his old defenders had no choice but to peel off. Today you never hear conservatives mention their embrace of “The Passion” back then — if they mention Gibson at all. (Fox News has barely covered the new tapes.) But it isn’t just Gibson who has been discredited. Even as he self-immolated, so did many of the moral paragons who had rallied around him as a culture-war martyr.
Take, for instance, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals. During the “Passion” wars, he had tried to blackmail Gibson’s critics by publicly noting that Christians are “a major source of support for Israel” and that Jewish leaders would be “shortsighted” to “risk alienating two billion Christians over a movie.” That evangelical leader was Ted Haggard, the Colorado megachurch pastor since brought down by a male prostitute. Gibson’s only outspoken rabbinical defender in 2004, the far-right Daniel Lapin, would be sullied in the scandals surrounding the subsequently jailed Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff. William Donohue of the Catholic League — who defended Gibson in 2004 by saying, “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular” — has been reduced these days to the marginal role of attacking The Times for reporting on priestly child abuse.
The cultural wave that crested with “The Passion” was far bigger than Gibson. He was simply a symptom and beneficiary of a moment when the old religious right and its political and media shills were riding high. In 2010, the American ayatollahs’ ranks have been depleted by death (Falwell), retirement (James Dobson) and rent boys (too many to name). What remains of that old guard is stigmatized by its identification with poisonous crusades, from the potentially lethal antihomosexuality laws in Uganda to the rehabilitation campaign for the “born-again” serial killer David Berkowitz (“Son of Sam”) in America.
Conservative America’s new signature movement, the Tea Party, has its own extremes, but it shuns culture-war battles. It even remained mum when a federal judge in Massachusetts struck down the anti-same-sex marriage Defense of Marriage Act this month. As the conservative commentator Kyle Smith recently wrote in The New York Post, the “demise of Reagan-era groups like the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority is just as important” as the rise of the Tea Party. “The morality armies have failed to inspire their children to join the crusade,” he concluded, and not unhappily. The right, too, is subject to generational turnover.
As utter coincidence would have it, the revelation of the latest Gibson tapes was followed last week by the news that a federal appeals court, in a 3-0 ruling, had thrown out the indecency rules imposed by the F.C.C. after Janet Jackson’s 2004 “wardrobe malfunction.” The death throes of Mel Gibson’s career feel less like another Hollywood scandal than the last gasps of an American era.

Young twins drown in Lynnfield
By John M. Guilfoil and Sydney Lupkin Boston Globe

LYNNFIELD — Two toddlers, identical twin sisters, fell into the swimming pool behind their family’s home and drowned yesterday morning, leaving their parents in shock and devastating rescuers and neighbors.
Firefighters arrived at 5 Stagecoach Lane minutes after receiving a 911 call at around 10:20 a.m. and administered CPR on Veronica and Angelina Andreottola. The 2 1/2-year-olds were taken to Union Hospital in Lynn, where they were pronounced dead, authorities said yesterday.
The circumstances surrounding the drownings are under investigation by Lynnfield police and the Essex district attorney’s office, but at a news conference yesterday afternoon, Police Chief Joseph Dunn said the drownings appear to be accidental. Dunn said the girls “tragically, somehow, some way,’’ got themselves where they shouldn’t have been.
Dunn said a retractable cover was on the pool but not all the way, leaving some of the water exposed.
In a phone interview, police Sergeant Sean Donovan said that an early review indicated that the toddlers may have pushed a button to open the electric pool cover, but that remained under investigation.
“A tragic accident occurred here where two little babies are now deceased,’’ he said.
Getting details on how the drownings occurred was difficult for police because family members were in shock, police said.
“As you can certainly imagine, we didn’t get very far,’’ Donovan said.
The twins’ father told police that “his world was ending,’’ and their mother appeared dazed, he said. The girls’ mother, Crystal Andreottola, was home at the time, but their father, Anthony, was not, according to a police statement.
The family lives in a mansion in a secluded part of town, set back from Route 1. The brick house is at the front of the lot, with a large yard to the side and rear. In the yard is a large jungle gym, with three slides and a basketball hoop. An inflatable ball sat on the grass near a tall metal fence surrounding the property.
A stream of people came and went from the home throughout the day yesterday, but two men turned away a Globe reporter and said the family would not be issuing a statement.
Neighbors said the family also has a young son.
“I can’t believe this. What a terrible tragedy,’’ said one neighbor, who lives a few houses down but did not want to give his name.
Other neighbors on the small street declined to comment or asked not to have their names published.
Lynnfield Fire Chief Thomas P. Bogart said yesterday that firefighters arrived within six minutes and had the toddlers in the ambulance, ready for transport, within three minutes of their arrival.
“This is painful. How do you prepare for 2 1/2-year-old girls?’’ Bogart said outside a firehouse near the home yesterday. “You can’t prepare for this.’’
The dozen or so firefighters, paramedics, and police officers who responded to the home were immediately taken off duty yesterday as stress and grief counselors from the Metro Boston Critical Incident Stress Management Team arrived in Lynnfield.
Bogart said the rescuers were heartbroken.
“Some are doing better than others,’’ Bogart said. “But you can’t always go by that. Some people seem OK, and they may be OK today and tomorrow, but maybe not at some point in the future.’’

John M. Guilfoil can be reached at jguilfoil@globe.com.

The Gospel of Mel Gibson

By DAVID BROOKS NY TIMES
Let us enter, you and I, into the moral universe of the modern narcissist.
The narcissistic person is marked by a grandiose self-image, a constant need for admiration, and a general lack of empathy for others. He is the keeper of a sacred flame, which is the flame he holds to celebrate himself.
There used to be theories that deep down narcissists feel unworthy, but recent research doesn’t support this. Instead, it seems, the narcissist’s self-directed passion is deep and sincere.
His self-love is his most precious possession. It is the holy center of all that is sacred and right. He is hypersensitive about anybody who might splatter or disregard his greatness. If someone treats him slightingly, he perceives that as a deliberate and heinous attack. If someone threatens his reputation, he regards this as an act of blasphemy. He feels justified in punishing the attacker for this moral outrage.
And because he plays by different rules, and because so much is at stake, he can be uninhibited in response. Everyone gets angry when they feel their self-worth is threatened, but for the narcissist, revenge is a holy cause and a moral obligation, demanding overwhelming force.
Mel Gibson seems to fit the narcissist model to an eerie degree. The recordings that purport to show him unloading on his ex-lover, Oksana Grigorieva, make for painful listening, and are only worthy of attention because these days it pays to be a student of excessive self-esteem, if only to understand the world around.
The story line seems to be pretty simple. Gibson was the great Hollywood celebrity who left his wife to link with the beautiful young acolyte. Her beauty would not only reflect well on his virility, but he would also work to mold her, Pygmalion-like, into a pop star.
After a time, she apparently grew tired of being a supporting actor in the drama of his self-magnification and tried to go her own way. This act of separation was perceived as an assault on his status and thus a venal betrayal of the true faith.
It is fruitless to analyze her end of the phone conversations because she knows she is taping them. But the voice on the other end is primal and searing.
That man is like a boxer unleashing one verbal barrage after another. His breathing is heavy. His vocal muscles are clenched. His guttural sounds burst out like hammer blows.
He pummels her honor, her intelligence, her womanhood, her maternal skills and everything else. Imagine every crude and derogatory word you’ve ever heard. They come out in waves. He’s not really arguing with her, just trying to pulverize her into nothingness, like some corruption that has intertwined itself into his being and now must be expunged.
It is striking how morally righteous he is, without ever bothering to explain what exactly she has done wrong. It is striking how quickly he reverts to the vocabulary of purity and disgust. It is striking how much he believes he deserves. It is striking how much he seems to derive satisfaction from his own righteous indignation. Rage was the original subject of Western literature. It was the opening theme of Homer’s “Iliad.” Back then, anger was perceived as a source of pleasure. “Sweeter wrath is by far than the honeycomb dripping with sweetener,” Homer declared. And the man on the other end of Grigorieva’s phone seems to derive some vengeful satisfaction from asserting his power and from purging his frustration — from the sheer act of domination.
And the sad fact is that Gibson is not alone. There can’t be many people at once who live in a celebrity environment so perfectly designed to inflate self-love. Even so, a surprising number of people share the trait. A study conducted at the National Institutes of Health suggested that 6.2 percent of Americans had suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, along with 9.4 percent of people in their 20s.
In their book, “The Narcissism Epidemic,” Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell cite data to suggest that at least since the 1970s, we have suffered from national self-esteem inflation. They cite my favorite piece of sociological data: In 1950, thousands of teenagers were asked if they considered themselves an “important person.” Twelve percent said yes. In the late 1980s, another few thousand were asked. This time, 80 percent of girls and 77 percent of boys said yes.
That doesn’t make them narcissists in the Gibson mold, but it does suggest that we’ve entered an era where self-branding is on the ascent and the culture of self-effacement is on the decline.
Every week brings a new assignment in our study of self-love. And at the top of the heap, the Valentino of all self-lovers, there is the former Braveheart. If he really were that great, he’d have figured out that the lady probably owns a tape recorder.

CNN Nears Deal to Fill King’s Slot

By BRIAN STELTER and BILL CARTER
Piers Morgan, the bad-cop judge on the hit NBC show “America’s Got Talent,” is poised to take over Larry King’s coveted time slot on CNN, a move smoothed by an imminent deal between the two media giants that own the channels, NBC Universal and Turner Broadcasting.
This week, NBC signaled that it was willing to share Mr. Morgan with CNN. That decision frees Mr. Morgan to negotiate directly with CNN, and according to three people involved in the delicate maneuvering between the companies, a contract could be signed within a few days.
If completed, the deal would vault Mr. Morgan, a native of Britain, into the top tier of television interviewers, alongside people like Oprah Winfrey, Barbara Walters and Katie Couric. It will also demonstrate that CNN thinks there is still room in prime time for long-form interviews with public servants and starlets, a stark contrast to the partisan pundits on its higher-rated rivals, Fox News and MSNBC.
Mr. King announced two weeks ago that he was ending “Larry King Live” this fall, creating a huge vacancy for CNN. Mr. Morgan had been rumored as a replacement even before then, a prospect that baffled many people inside CNN.
But what many people in the United States might not know is that Mr. Morgan, 45, is an A-list interviewer, and he has essentially been rehearsing for CNN for the past year by hosting “Piers Morgan Life Stories,” a series of well-received and high-rated interviews with figures like Gordon Brown and Simon Cowell, on the British network ITV.
A former creature of Fleet Street who edited The Daily Mirror for a decade, Mr. Morgan has all manner of critics, including the NBC viewers who dislike his mean-Brit persona and the television critics who despise his chilling self-confidence. But Mr. Cowell, his close friend, has demonstrated on “American Idol” that being disliked can be a shortcut to fame and fortune.
“Almost every other U.K. TV import has been hugely successful,” said Tammy Haddad, a former executive producer of “Larry King Live” who now runs a media consulting company.
For CNN, Mr. Morgan’s role on the talent show could be a promotional platform to attract desperately needed younger viewers — or it could be a source of awkwardness for a channel that calls itself “the most trusted name in news.” CNN has been trying to rebuild its low-rated prime-time lineup. Last month, it hired Eliot Spitzer, the former New York governor, and Kathleen Parker, a newspaper columnist, to host an 8 p.m. discussion show.
Now it needs to rebuild the 9 p.m. slot Mr. King is vacating.
“The 9 p.m. hour is the linchpin of any success in cable news,” Ms. Haddad said. “As a cable channel, it tells viewers who you are and what you care about.”
CNN executives were clearly impressed by Mr. Morgan’s ITV interviews — and by his reputation for preparing scrupulously for them. For his part, Mr. Morgan has long told friends that Mr. King’s show was his dream job.
But NBC had full control over Mr. Morgan’s immediate future in television because his contract grants the network exclusive rights to all his work on American television. CNN had made its interest in Mr. Morgan clear, both to him and to NBC. In the usual course of contractual niceties in the entertainment industry, Mr. Morgan and his representative could listen to what CNN had to say, but had to steer clear of anything that might constitute a formal negotiation.
The main action has not directly involved CNN. It is taking place quietly between executives from NBC Universal and Turner Broadcasting, a unit of Time Warner. These talks centered on whether Turner had something to offer NBC Universal.
Neither side was prepared on Tuesday to announce what, if anything, Turner might have given in return. But whatever NBC gained, the decision seemed to indicate that NBC’s opinion of Mr. Morgan’s prospects as an interview host did not match CNN’s. If he does take the job, Mr. Morgan would be a chief rival to MSNBC, the news channel owned by NBC.
The companies declined to comment on Tuesday, and it is still possible that CNN could not sign Mr. Morgan.
One protection NBC secured in the apparent deal is that “America’s Got Talent” would be the priority for Mr. Morgan in any potential scheduling conflict with his role on CNN.
For the last two decades, Mr. Morgan has built a journalist-celebrity brand for himself in Britain by carefully cultivating both his relationships with celebrities and his own status as one.
He was fired by The Mirror in 2004, after it published faked photographs that purported to show abuse of Iraqi prisoners by British soldiers, and he set his sights on a full-time television future. He became a full-time host of BBC shows like “Tabloid Tales” and, in a nod to his embarrassing exit from The Mirror, “You Can’t Fire Me, I’m Famous.”
Then he whitened his teeth, tanned his body and came to the United States with the help of Mr. Cowell, who placed him on “America’s Got Talent” four years ago. The show now keeps NBC afloat during the summer months, routinely drawing 10 million to 15 million viewers per episode. Mr. Morgan recently extended his contract with the show through 2013.
Named after the race car driver Piers Courage, Mr. Morgan studied journalism in college and quickly found himself working at The Sun, running a column on entertainment, where he introduced his calling card: photos of himself with celebrities.
Now a celebrity himself, Mr. Morgan juggles “Got Talent” franchises in America and Britain; interview and travel shows on ITV; and a monthly interview column for GQ. Last year he found time to pose for an ad for a gimmicky Burger King body spray, and last week he popped up on the “Today” show interviewing Susan Boyle.
Dylan Jones, the editor of the British GQ, said in an e-mail message that he hired Mr. Morgan in part because he knew that people would be intrigued to meet him.
“Which they were,” he said. “Politicians, actors, singers, everyone. Piers has that amazing ability to tap you on the shoulder, and say, ‘It’s ok, you can tell me.’ Amazingly, people do.”

Barefoot Bandit Caught: Bahamas Police Arrest Colton Harris-Moore
JUAN McCARTNEY AP
NASSAU, Bahamas — For two years he stayed a step ahead of the law – stealing cars, powerboats and even airplanes, police say, while building a reputation as a 21st-century folk hero. On Sunday, Colton Harris-Moore's celebrity became his downfall.
Witnesses on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera recognized the 19-year-old dubbed the "Barefoot Bandit" and called police, who captured him after a high-speed boat chase, Bahamas Police Commissioner Ellison Greenslade said at a celebratory news conference in Nassau, the capital.
Greenslade said shots were fired during the water chase but he did not say who fired them. He also said Harris-Moore was carrying a handgun that he tried to throw away.
Another senior police official, however, said police fired to disable the motor on the suspect's stolen boat, and that Harris-Moore threw his gun in the water. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case, also said that police recovered a laptop and a GPS locator from the suspect.
Police flew Harris-Moore in shackles to Nassau. True to his nickname, the teen with close-shorn hair was shoeless as he walked off the plane wearing short camouflage cargo pants, a white long-sleeved shirt and a bulletproof vest.
Harris-Moore is blamed for several thefts in the Bahamas in the week since allegedly crash-landing a stolen plane there, and Bahamian authorities said he will be prosecuted for those crimes before the start of any U.S. extradition proceedings.
The 6-foot-5-inch Harris-Moore had been on the run since escaping from a Washington state halfway house in 2008. He is accused of breaking into dozens of homes and committing burglaries across Washington, as well as in British Columbia and Idaho.
He is also suspected of stealing at least five planes – including the aircraft he allegedly lifted in Indiana and flew more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) to the Bahamas, despite a lack of formal flight training.
Some of his alleged actions appeared intended to taunt police: In February, someone who broke into a grocery store in Washington's San Juan Islands drew cartoonish, chalk-outline feet all over the floor.
Through it all, his ranks of supporters grew. Some of his more than 60,000 Facebook fans posted disappointed messages Sunday, while others promoted T-shirts and tote bags with the words "Free Colton!" and "Let Colton Fly!"
Even someone in the Bahamas had mixed feelings about his arrest.
"I feel like it would have been good if he got away because he never hurt anybody, but then he was running from the law," said Ruthie Key, who owns a market on Great Abaco Island and let Harris-Moore use her wireless Internet connection July 5.
"He seemed very innocent when I spoke with him at the store. I don't think he'd hurt anybody," Key said.
Island police had been searching for the teen since he allegedly crash-landed the plane on Abaco, where he was blamed for at least seven burglaries. The search expanded to Eleuthera after police there recovered a 44-foot (13-meter) powerboat reported stolen from Abaco.
Police said several people reported seeing the teenager Wednesday night in the waters between Eleuthera and Harbour Island, a nearby tourist destination known for its art galleries, but did not know about the Barefoot Bandit until after discovering a series of break-ins the next day. Harris-Moore's mistake was to return to the same area.
James Major, who rents cars on Eleuthera opposite Harbour Island, said a witness on his side of the channel reported a sighting of Harris-Moore to police early Sunday. He said locals had been on the lookout since the fugitive was blamed for trying to steal four boats and breaking into two buildings at the ferry landing.
"He might have been dangerous to the public," Major said. "Everybody is glad he was caught."
Greenslade said the high-speed chase began around 2 a.m. Sunday after police received tips from members of the public that the suspect was on Harbour Island.
The chase ended in the waters off the Romora Bay Resort & Marina on Harbour Island, where security director Kenneth Strachan reported seeing a young man running through the bush barefoot with a handgun, according to Anne Ward, who manages the property.
"When Kenny spotted him, he had a knapsack over his shoulder and a gun and he was yelling, 'They're going to kill me. They're going to kill me.' He was running up the dock," Ward said.
Ward said the fugitive ran back to the water and stole another boat but ran aground in the shallows, where police shot out his engine.
"At one point, the boy threw his computer in the water and put a gun to his head. He was going to kill himself. Police talked him out of it," Ward said.
Police declined to comment on whether Ward's account was accurate.
Harris-Moore is a skilled outdoorsman who honed his abilities growing up in the woods of Camano Island in Puget Sound about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Seattle.
Harris-Moore's mother, Pam Kohler, has said that he had a troubled childhood. His first conviction, for possession of stolen property, came at age 12. Within a few months of turning 13, he had three more.
Kohler has defended her son, saying the allegations against him are exaggerated. She previously told the AP that she hoped he would flee to a country that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the United States.
Reached early Sunday at her Camano home, Kohler said she'd heard the news about the arrest but had no comment.
Victims of the crimes Harris-Moore is accused of were happy to see him in custody.
"These people that support him, they've never been violated by having him break into their homes or businesses," said Joni Fowler, manager of a cafe on Orcas Island north of Seattle where Harris-Moore is accused of taking as much as $1,500. "Just knowing he has a huge network of supporters makes me really worry about the state of this country."
Fowler said she hopes Harris-Moore's arrest and upcoming court appearances will pop his mystique and fame – "once everybody figures out he's no God."
Emily Langlie, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Seattle, said that once Harris-Moore faces charges in the Bahamas, her office would seek to extradite him to Washington state and coordinate with local jurisdictions about how his case would proceed.
"There are obviously many jurisdictions that would like to prosecute him," she said.
Shauna Snyder, a private investigator on Whidbey Island near Camano, said she set up a legal defense fund for Harris-Moore at the request of his mother. She said that although she didn't know how much had been raised so far, the fund has been getting donations.
Associated Press Writers Gene Johnson in Seattle and Anna Jo Bratton in Phoenix contributed to this report.

Westin Peachtree window replacement a high wire act

By Leon Stafford
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
At 73 floors above downtown Atlanta, you can’t hear much except the wind.
In fact, for the guys who’ve spent the past nine months replacing the glass that sheathes the Westin Peachtree Plaza hotel, there have been times when they couldn’t even see each other -- or the ground -- because of clouds as dense as mashed potatoes.
“It was eerie,” Pete Casciano, 49, said of the pervasive silence that was occasionally interrupted by a bird or a passing helicopter.
Standing 31 floors above International Boulevard on Wednesday on a swing stage -- a steel platform about two feet wide that supports the workers outside the building -- Casciano and Bud Jones were the model of calm in a job that would have most people on edge. They leaned casually over the protective railings to ready the next glass panel, even as the platform wiggled and squeaked in response to the movement.
They are part of a team slowly working its way down the cylindrical landmark, replacing each window panel as they go. Their muscular forearms are telltale signs of men who hoist 280-pound glass panels into place all day, every day. At this time of year they drink water like camels preparing to cross the desert, trying to stay hydrated while working on steel that gets as hot as 104 degrees in the Georgia sunshine.
Crews from Skanska USA Building and subcontractor Harmon Glass started the job last October. Their task is to replace all 6,350 of the hotel’s windows, many of which were damaged in the freak March 2008 twister that tore through downtown. Instead of only replacing damaged panels, hotel management decided to replace all the glass.
As of Wednesday the workers had replaced more than 4,700 panels on the hotel, the world’s tallest when it opened in 1976 but now merely the tallest hotel in the southeast.
The crews have worked through cold snaps, rain, heat and dense fog. The project is expected to be finished in early October.
“We’ll do something big to celebrate,” Westin general manager Ed Walls said.
There are 75 workers on the project, 55 of whom are replacing the glass, officials said. They hail from all over the nation, but most are Georgia-based. Officials said the poor economy worked in the project’s favor because the workers’ specialized skills normally keeps them in high demand.
“These are pretty unique individuals,” said Graeme Kelly, Skanska USA vice president of operations and project executive on the Westin job. “And there are not many of them. These are guys who have to be able to work at great heights comfortably and safely.”
Standing on the platform above International on Wednesday, Jones, a California native, was relaxed. The heat had not quite hit him by Noon, but he was drinking plenty of water anyway.
He shrugged when asked if the height gives him pause. After more than 10 years dangling from the outside of buildings, being hundreds of feet in the air is second nature.
“You have to respect the height,” he said. “You have to make sure you are have taken all the safety precautions. After that, you just get out there and do your job.”
The installers work in groups of six. Jones and Casciano work from the outside, while their four partners work from inside. Window panels are lifted into place with large suction cups.
Jones, 48, began installing glass after losing a trucking job for Coca-Cola. Prior to working on the Westin, the tallest building he had worked on was 25 floors.
“It’s all the same if you fall from it,” he said with a smile.
There are challenging moments, he said. The biggest on this project has been setting up the pulleys and ropes on the hotel roof that hold the swing stage in place. To do that, he had to climb over a wall on the roof and dangle from the other side to add hooks to hold equipment and workers.
Fortunately, the wind was calm that day, so he wasn’t swinging in the harness that was the difference between him and an 800-foot drop.
“A lot of guys don’t want to do what we do,” he said. “They are smarter than us.”
“My mom doesn’t want to hear about it,” he laughed.
Casciano, a native of New Jersey who has been living in Atlanta since 1991, began working in the industry in the early 1980s after leaving the Marines.
“Ironically, when I first got into this, I was scared to death of heights,” he said.
What changed?
“Repetition,” he said, leaning nonchalantly against the railing high above downtown. “At first, I worked white-knuckled.”
The more he worked on the platforms, the more comfortable he became. And that was in the days when the platforms had only one railing at the back. Today, mutiple steel rails crisscross the platform to ensure safety. Crews also wear harnesses and are connected by ropes.
There have been no accidents on the Westin Peachtree job, officials said.
“The biggest problem we have now is being complacent,” Casciano said. “When we were at the top, we could barely see anyone. Now that we are 31 floors up, it feels like we’re on the ground.”
The project is expected to be completed in early October.