Police Say Woman Picked Many Pockets in Chinatown

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR NY TIMES A 67-year-old woman from Florida, the authorities say, found an unusual way to experience the town on her frequent trips to Manhattan: strolling through Chinatown, picking the pockets of unsuspecting pedestrians. The woman, Ha Vasko, a retired restaurateur, is accused of a string of thefts that date from June 5, 2010, when she was arrested and charged with stealing $500 from a woman’s bag at the corner of Canal and Mulberry Streets. That arrest, the authorities said, led to a cycle in which Ms. Vasko would return to New York for court dates in Lower Manhattan and then head to Chinatown to lift cash and wallets. Prosecutors said in court on Tuesday that Ms. Vasko, who was born in Vietnam, told the police that she did not like Chinese people. By the time of her last arrest on March 21, Ms. Vasko, who was living in Melbourne, Fla., had been charged with three felonies and two misdemeanors, including “jostling,” which is legal jargon for trying to pick someone’s pocket or handbag. Prosecutors said all her victims were Chinatown residents. “This defendant is a calculating thief who robbed her unsuspecting victims of not only credit cards and cash, but also their sense of security in their neighborhood,” Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, said in a statement. He said his office’s Crime Strategies Unit identified Ms. Vasko as a “persistent offender,” and therefore “treated this case as a priority.” A lawyer for Ms. Vasko, Richard Wojszwilo, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on Tuesday night. According to prosecutors, after her initial arrest, Ms. Vasko was charged with grand larceny. Then, on a return trip to New York for a court date in December, they said, Ms. Vasko walked to Chinatown and plucked $50 from a woman’s purse at the Bowery and Grand Street, before moving on to Hester Street, where she lifted a wallet containing eight credit cards. A police officer spotted Ms. Vasko and arrested her, at which point she tried to bribe the officer with cash, prosecutors said. According to the authorities, Ms. Vasko struck at least two times after that. In January, she was arrested and charged with jostling three women on East Broadway and trying to dip into their handbags. Then in March, she was arrested at the corner of Forsyth and Division Streets after prosecutors said she reached into the purses or pockets of at least four people and stole $350 from them. Ms. Vasko was ultimately charged with bribery, jostling, and numerous counts of grand larceny and criminal possession of stolen property.

TITAS WUS HERE!

Chris Wright Boston Globe

Cast your mind back to the history books you read in school, the ones that covered classical Greece and Rome, and you’ll probably find yourself thinking about people like Pliny and Plato, Seneca and Socrates, men who seemed to spend the bulk of their days orchestrating epic battles and formulating complicated theories about shadows in caves. It seems less likely that you’ll recall the anonymous Athenian who, some 1,500 years ago, snuck out in the middle of the night to inform the world that a certain Sydromachos had a backside “as big as a cistern.” Likewise, the fact that someone named Titas was “a lewd fellow” will almost certainly have passed you by. As for the pictures in the clomping textbooks of old, these would have consisted of grainy busts and urns, not boomerang-shaped penises or disembodied testicles. But times have changed, and there they are, on page 94 of “Ancient Graffiti in Context”: the free-floating genitalia of Hymettos, carved into the rocks there by someone with time on his hands and a loose grasp of human anatomy.

You at the back there: Quiet.

The essay accompanying these images does not invite prurient interest. These carvings, we learn, have a great deal to tell us about “social connectivity” and “cultic resonances” in the ancient world. The new book in which they appear contains 10 densely argued essays in all, covering everything from sports-related goading in Aphrodisias to shout-outs among friends in Pompeii. As for what people were etching and daubing back then, a good deal of it cannot be reprinted in a family newspaper.

The first thing we learn is this: People in the ancient world were very, very sweary. So maybe Winston Churchill had it wrong. Perhaps history isn’t written by the victors; maybe it is written by the vandals.

Claire Taylor and Jennifer Baird, coeditors of “Ancient Graffiti in Context,” would be irritated by that last remark. Phallic imagery on a public wall in the ancient world was not intended to cause shock and dismay, says Taylor, who teaches Greek history at Trinity College Dublin. Instead, these images were intended to express religious devotion and community. “Context,” she says, “is everything.”

Taylor and Baird don’t quite fit with what we know about classical scholars. They occupy the sharp end of a small but enthusiastic group of academics who argue that the “Great Men” approach to history has left a gaping hole in our understanding of the ancient world. The stuff that ordinary people scratched on their city walls, the argument goes, can be far more illuminating than yet another account of the Battle of Corbione.

According to Baird, an archaeology lecturer at the University of London, the idea for publishing a collection of research on ancient graffiti came up during a conversation in a pub. “We had problems with how graffiti was being treated (or not) by archaeologists and historians,” she says. “It’s not just idle scratches, but something that gives real insights into people’s lives.” This is not to say that graffiti has been entirely overlooked by conventional scholars. Historians have noted and cataloged it, and occasionally used it to look into things like literacy rates and class divisions, but that’s about all.

The fact that graffiti is being treated as a serious, stand-alone body of evidence represents something new, something that goes even further than the folk history that has pervaded certain corners of academia in recent years. We’ve had Outsider Art — now we have Outsider Research. At first glance, anyway, what we see when we look at the clutter of graffiti in Pompeii and Athens doesn’t seem particularly enlightening. There are plenty of puns and insults and expressions of romantic yearning, but very little in the way of depth. As the first-century essayist Plutarch put it: “There is nothing useful or pleasant” about graffiti, “just that X ‘remembers’ Y ‘for good,’ or that someone is ‘the best of friends,’ or much similar nonsense.” If Plutarch sounds a bit grouchy here, he had good reason.

Cities in the Greco-Roman world were absolutely rife with graffiti. No subject was too large or too small for these people to share their thoughts about it in a public space — from imprecations to the gods to notations on the price of cheese. You found graffiti in temples and garrisons, living rooms and latrines. Everyone was at it. This fact represents a central problem facing scholars interested in exploring this subject.

As one of the essayists in Taylor and Baird’s textbook points out, nobody can really decide which set of marks is historically interesting and which is simply an eyesore. The only possible consensus seems to be that the older the graffiti, the more interesting it becomes. An inscription about the sexual preference of Aithonides, citizen of Attica, might be worthy of study; a felt-tip scrawl concerning Steve of San Francisco probably isn’t. But the graffiti scholars soldier on. The anti-Aithonides slur, we learn, is part of a cluster of similar inscriptions, which, taken as a whole, shed light on male rivalry and machismo in the ancient world. “Their authors wanted to humiliate and insult their opponents,” writes Angelos Chaniotis, a classics researcher at All Souls College, Oxford. “We are not dealing with sexuality, but with competition and power, with notions of superiority and domination.” And we are dealing with these things, importantly, in the most mass-market manner available at the time.

These were very much “public performances.” Vulgar chest-thumping played a big role in a lot of ancient graffiti, but there are plenty of gentler examples to be found. “Therefore, make me die, you who force me to live without you,” some tortured soul wrote on the wall of the Basilica in Pompeii. “The reward for the good surely will not be to be put to the rack.” In a house in Roman Campania, children scrawled images of wobbly boats and five-legged birds, which are very cute. Academics aren’t generally interested in cute, however, and the Campania etchings are clinically picked apart to explore everything from the degree to which they reflect modern theories on development psychology (“children draw what they know rather than what they see”) to what they can tell us about the movements of kids in a typical Roman household. “The graffiti are archaeological evidence of children’s presence and activities and are, therefore, worth detailed and separate exploration,” writes Katherine Huntley, a PhD student at the School of Archaeology and Ancient History at Leicester University.

Clusters of chatty graffiti in Pompeii, meanwhile, are said to provide clues about how adults forged and maintained social relationships — and, more pertinently, how eager the citizens of Pompeii were to present their friendly banter in a public setting. These people, as one scholar argues, were effectively tweeting each other. There is something deeply fulfilling about being able to draw parallels between the mundane and the exotic — be it faraway places or the distant past — and the study of ancient graffiti provides plenty of opportunities for that. The sexual boasting, the political griping — if it weren’t for the cryptic-sounding names and the strange syntax, you could be reading this stuff on the benches of the Harvard Square T. And then there’s this, more than 2,000 years old, etched into a wall in the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii: “Rufus est.” This is Rufus.

Susan Farrell, who oversees the website www.graffiti.org, says that the underlying motive for all graffiti writers is “the urge to make a permanent mark during an ephemeral life.” This fact is as true of the wall-scratcher Rufus as it is of the kids in Sao Paulo who climb railroad bridges to spray paint their elaborate tags. “I think of it as the need for meaningfulness,” says Farrell, “which I believe is a basic human urge.”

One of the chapters in “Ancient Graffiti in Context” explores the rock faces at El Kanais, a remote outpost in the Egyptian desert, which are cluttered with names and dates left by generations of travelers who simply wanted to state that they were there: “Demetrios wrote this” and “Zenon came up here too.” Some of the more intrepid graffitists had clambered up onto ridges high above the desert floor — just like those crazy kids on the bridges of Sao Paulo. A few weeks ago, Theodora Richards — daughter of Rolling Stoner Keith — was arrested for defacing a nunnery with a red paint pen. Her message to the world: “T [HEART] A.” Centuries earlier, a citizen of Aphrodisias etched a similar sentiment on the column of a portico there: “I love Epikrates.” Such inscriptions, as one essayist puts it, reveal that these ancient cities, so far removed from the world we live in now, “were inhabited by people, who lived and loved, quarreled, hated.” Not so very different, after all, from you and me.

Baird insists that we should be careful about using graffiti to draw parallels between the ancient world and our own. “It is incredibly tempting to do this,” she says. “And while there’s certainly something universal in the need to make one’s mark on the world, it’s important we recognize the ways in which things are different.” Context is everything. Maybe so, but the more I learn about graffiti in the ancient world, the more I am reminded of a line, crudely spray-painted onto a wall not far from my house: “You are not alone.” Chris Wright is a writer living in Spain.

A Clock Moves in Grand Central, and Memories Stir
By JAMES BARRON NY TIMES
James Barron/The New York Times The old clock in its new space at Grand Central Terminal.
It was never the famous “meet-me-under-the-clock” clock at the old Biltmore Hotel. Nor is it the gilded four-faced centerpiece in the concourse of Grand Central Terminal. It was just a plain workaday clock that spent most of its life in a lower-profile nook at Grand Central answering one of two questions: Can I make the train, for people sprinting to catch one, or how late was it, for people sprinting off a train that had finally arrived.

Now it has a new home. It has been moved downstairs, to the dining concourse on the lower level. It is on the ceiling near the gates to Tracks 108 and 109.

Metro-North Railroad officials hope more people will see it there. Its old home was on the upper level, inside the gate at Track 19 — “above the block,” in railroad lingo. The block is where the tracks end.

Metro-North is sprucing up the area inside the gates on the upper level, with new terrazzo floors and energy-efficient lighting, said Marjorie Anders, a Metro-North spokeswoman. It was the new lighting that drove out the clock: The new fixtures blocked the clock’s round face.

The clock, in a square oak case, is a relic from the pre-digital days when Grand Central rolled out a red carpet — literally — for the 20th Century Limited. The clock’s face carries a name that railroaders remember, that of the Self Winding Clock Company of New York.

Once there were more than 50,000 Self Winding clocks across the country, all maintained by Western Union, according to Nancy Dyer, the librarian and archivist of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors.

“The time was picked up from the Naval Observatory in Washington and transmitted by Western Union to Self Winding clocks, which were in the train stations everywhere,” she said. “This was part of the standardizing of time before time zones and all that. Every railroad operated on their own time — if you were riding on the B&O, the lines ran on Baltimore time. if you were riding on the Pennsy” — the nickname for the Pennsylvania Railroad — “it was the time in Philadelphia. On the Central” — as the New York Central was often called — “it was the time in New York City.”

“It was important that everything was coordinated,” she said, “because if you had a single track, the trains could run into each other.”

Self Winding was the brainchild of two Brooklynites, Charles Pratt, the tycoon who founded Pratt Institute, and Henry Chester Pond, who already held a patent for an “electro-mechanical clock” when they started the company. Self Winding was looking to cash in on the railroad boom, not by laying tracks or engines, but by marketing the most precious commodity of all: time, or at least timepieces — big ones. In the 1880s they set up a factory on Willoughby Street that hummed and clattered till the late 1950s, when the company moved to Lower Manhattan. It went out of business several years later.

In Self Winding’s heyday, its clocks kept time on New York skyscrapers and inside the United States Capitol. It also made Grand Central’s four-faced clock. And — though Metro-North no longer knows exactly when — it delivered the one that has been moved to the dining concourse.

“That clock was too big and too beautiful to put it in a museum,” Ms. Anders said. “And it still works fine.”

Conservative Pie; Republicans Introduce Legislation Redefining Pi as Exactly 3
IAN Squires Huffington Post
Congresswoman Martha Roby (R-Ala.) is sponsoring HR 205, The Geometric Simplification Act, declaring the Euclidean mathematical constant of pi to be precisely 3. The bill comes in response to data and rankings from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, rating the United States' 15 year-olds 25th in the world in mathematics.

OECD is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2011, and the Paris-based NGO released its international educational rankings, placing the US in a three-way tie for math, equaling Portugal and Ireland, just beneath No. 24 Luxembourg.

"That long-held empirical value of pi, I am not saying it should be necessarily viewed as wrong, but 3 is a lot better," said Roby, the 34-year old legislator representing Alabama's second congressional district, ushered into office in the historic 2010 Republican mid-term bonanza.

Pi has long been defined as the ratio of a circle's area to the square of its radius, a mathematical constant represented by the Greek letter "π," with a value of approximately 3.14159. HR 205 does not change the root definition, per se. The bill simply, and legally, declares pi to be exactly 3.

Roby, raised in Montgomery, Ala., is on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education.

"It's no panacea, but this legislation will point us in the right direction. Looking at hard data, we know our children are struggling with a heck of a lot of the math, including the geometry incorporating pi," Roby said. "I guarantee you American scores will go up once pi is 3. It will be so much easier."

Democrats first responded to the measure with a mixture of incredulity and amusement.

"Really?" asked George Miller (D-Calif.), the ranking member on the Education and Labor Committee. "Isn't that an awful lot like assuming only even numbers can be negative? You can't legislate math; that's like making it illegal to rain on the Fourth of July," the San Francisco Bay area representative chuckled.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) ridiculed objections from the left as further examples of classic elitist liberalism.

"Democrats don't want our children to succeed, they would actually feel better if France one day bests our kids on that test," Boehner said, unaware that, by tying Slovakia for 16th, France already does outrank the US in math. "Time after time, Democrats refuse to acknowledge American exceptionalism, and they're doing it again by trying to deny our children another tool for success."

Rep. Roby took a slightly more pragmatic stance.

"For decades, we've all been learning that pi is this crazy 'irrational' number. And any number with no end is, not, well, it makes it really hard," Roby said. "We talked about making pi 3-and-a-third, but that wouldn't really help, because you're still then stuck with endless threes."

HR 205 is expected to pass the House of Representatives but even if it also passes in the Senate -- unlikely with Democrats maintaining a slim majority -- President Obama has pledged to veto.

"I badly want to refuse to dignify HR 205 with acknowledgment, but... my Republican friends are serious," Obama said. "And I don't care how strongly Geometric Simplification has been polling, I just can't be responsible for that." The president added, "Unless there's something on the table. Barack Obama does love a good compromise. Maybe if Republicans will agree to let Planned Parenthood perform AIDS testing. Or just convince the Tea Party Caucus to at least publicly agree it is the Earth that revolves around the sun, and not the other way around."

New York City Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) responded to Roby's legislation with a massive brain aneurysm. Democrats are hopeful to retain his New York City seat in an April special election.

Triangle Fire: Liberating Clothing Made in Confinement
By RUTH LA FERLA NY TIMES
Remembering the fire that killed 146 workers at a garment factory in Manhattan and its lasting impact.
The American shirtwaist was a trend that, quite literally, had legs. This brash but sensible pairing of tailored shirt and skirt offered a glimpse of the ankles, which was as rare in its day as it was freeing.

Designed for utility, the style was embraced at the turn of the 20th century by legions of young women who preferred its hiked hemline and unfettered curves to the confining, street-sweeping dresses that had hobbled their mothers and aunts.

Few looks have been as versatile — or as egalitarian — adapting through the decades to all sorts of shifting conditions and sociopolitical landscapes.

And few have so nimbly walked the line between function and frivolity.


By 1911 the Triangle factory, a half-block east of Washington Square Park, was the largest maker of waists in New York City. Pressed elbow to elbow at the factory, in Greenwich Village, hundreds of women, working 12 to 16 hours six days a week, earned $5 a week or less to help dress Americans in the white, gauzy blouses — also called shirtwaists — that when worn with a skirt completed the look.

In the last minutes of the work week, on Saturday, March 25, 1911, a match or a cigarette tossed into a waste basket ignited a fire that fed on the scraps of cloth and paper patterns hanging overhead. The blaze swept through the factory — the 8th, 9th and 10th floors of the 10-story building — within a half-hour, leaving 146 dead, all but 23 of them young women. About 50 jumped to their deaths to escape the relentless flames.

As hundreds of events this week mark the 100th anniversary of the fire on Friday, the shirtwaist style has proved its remarkable staying power.

Democratic from its inception, the shirtwaist was “one of America’s first truly class-shattering fashions,” wrote David Von Drehle, who briefly outlined its history in “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003).

The practical uniform of factory hands, clerks, shopkeepers and librarians, it “both symbolized and enabled a wave of women’s liberation,” Mr. Von Drehle argued, the “perfect repudiation of corsets and bustles and hoops — all the ludicrous contraptions that literally imprisoned women in their own clothes.”

The earliest shirtwaists — originally shirts and separate skirts — were engineered for mobility, their popularity coinciding with a huge urbanization that saw women rushing about the streets, demanding the vote and, ultimately, flooding the workforce.

By 1910, when the entire American population was only 90 million, more than 5 million women held jobs outside the home. At that time, as Mr. Von Drehle noted, nearly a third of all factory workers in New York State were women, the majority dressed in a shirtwaist and skirt.

Shirtwaists flourished in the early 1900s as a badge of confidence and athletic femininity, the sporty attire of the Gibson Girl. They attained a touch of worldliness in the late 1940s when Christian Dior introduced a version, propped up by petticoats, as an essential component of his fabled New Look.

By midcentury, calf-length interpretations of the Dior shirtwaist represented domesticity to a generation of homemakers taking their style cues from Donna Reed. More recently, this sturdy fashion archetype was resurrected on “Mad Men,” the popular television series set in the 1950s and ’60s, inspiring a wave of nostalgic revivals on American fashion runways.

The look traveled well, as popular on the playing field as it was in more formal settings. As the fashion historian Caroline Rennolds Milbank observed in “New York Fashion: The Evolution of American Style” (Abrams, 1989), the dress “was suitable for working women and college students, for street wear and lunching in a restaurant, and also for golf, tennis, boating and other summer sports.”

In the early 1900s, “waists,” as these comfort-driven shirts were known, were turned out by the thousands in steamy tenement rooms and factories like that of the Triangle Waist Company in Greenwich Village. In later versions combining top and skirt, they thrived as the practical uniform of women working on assembly lines, as bookkeepers and clerks, as seamstresses and even as factory foremen.

Buttoned-up as it was, the shirtwaist could flirt. There is nothing more coquettish in the summer than “a crisp-looking shirtwaist of taffeta,” proclaimed The Chicago Daily Tribune in 1903. Society scribes liked its standardized look. “If a man can wear the same general-type shirt all day why can’t a woman do the same?” Amos Parrish pointedly inquired in The Schenectady Gazette in the spring of 1934.

By the 1950s, the trend had extended its reach to every level of the marketplace, from Saks Fifth Avenue to Sears.

Style setters lent it an unassailable chic. Grace Kelly wore a version in beige silk — subsequently christened the “To Catch a Prince” — when she and Prince Rainier of Monaco announced their engagement a few months before their marriage in 1956.

The following year the shirtwaist became, without willing it, an emblem of stoic resistance. “Of all the images of the civil rights movement, one of the most chilling is a photo of a black teenager in a shirtwaist dress and sunglasses,” Andrea Stone wrote in a 2007 USA Today article commemorating the desegregation crisis at Little Rock Central High School.

In the early 1970s, the shirtwaist was given a shot in the arm by Halston, whose streamlined, one-style-suits-all adaptation was issued in machine-washable Ultrasuede.
The bread and butter of his line, it achieved best-seller status, engendering a raft of knockoffs for the better part of the decade and continuing even now to inspire designers who have tweaked it for a modern eye.

The fashion equivalent of comfort food, recent incarnations derive their appeal from an economic climate that favors reliable standards over the showy and the new.

Yet designers have played fast and loose with a formula built on cinched waists, roomy skirts and mannishly tailored placket fronts. In their spring shows, some riffed on the shirtwaist, offering versions in leather. Others toyed with skewed waistlines and fluttery kimono sleeves, placing their own quirky stamp on this trusted American classic.

Bus Crash in the Bronx Ends a Man’s Fight for His Family

By KIRK SEMPLE and JEFFREY E. SINGER
The authorities were at Wang Jianhua’s door in Fujian Province, China, intent on taking his wife away. Her crime: She already had a child and she was pregnant again, in violation of the country’s one-child policy.

As Mr. Wang would later recount to his friends, he stepped between the officials and his wife. A scuffle ensued, Mr. Wang’s wife escaped, and the officials hauled Mr. Wang, the son of poor rice farmers, to a jail where he was held for several days and severely beaten, his friends said.

The confrontation was apparently a turning point in Mr. Wang’s life, which had already been marked by poverty and hardship. Within months, his wife still pregnant, he would set off alone for the United States with the aid of smugglers, taking a chance that a better life awaited him — and eventually his family.

But on March 12, three years after his arrival in New York City, his aspirations were dashed in a sudden crash of steel and asphalt on Interstate 95 in the Bronx. Mr. Wang, who had been working as a restaurant deliveryman, was one of the 15 passengers who died when their bus overturned and was sliced open by a sign post as they were returning to New York’s Chinatown from a casino in Connecticut.

There were a few threads that tied these victims together. Many were first-generation, working-class immigrants, many were Chinese, and many were seeking some kind of solace and hope, however illusory, in the parallel universe of the Mohegan Sun casino. This is a portrait of one of those victims.

From interviews with Mr. Wang’s friends, relatives and co-workers, both in the city and in China, a profile emerged of a man who was guided by a deep devotion to his family and who lived a life of continual struggle, embodying many of the hallmarks of the immigrant experience among the latest Chinese newcomers to New York.

Mr. Wang grew up in Gui’an, a rural village in a mountainous region of Fujian Province; he dropped out of school when he was about 13 to join his relatives in the rice paddies.

“He told jokes, even on the hardest days,” his older sister, Wang Wenzhen, recalled in a telephone interview from the family’s home in Gui’an. “But he was also an introverted, reserved person; didn’t share his true feelings.”

As a young man, Mr. Wang never talked about career plans, his sister said. “We are in a very backward village,” she explained. “All they can think about is making more money. What else can we dare to wish for?”

She added: “I am sure he had his own dream, but he never talked about it. He knew that’s impossible.”

His father died of a stomach ailment when Mr. Wang was 19, tipping the family deeper into poverty. Mr. Wang left home in search of better work to help support the family and, through his 20s and 30s, chased opportunities for work in Fujian Province, mostly manual labor. For several years he drove a taxi, often taking the night shift so he could help with household chores during the day and take his mother, who was chronically ill, to the hospital, Ms. Wang said.

He was a perfectionist. “Whatever he did,” Ms. Wang said, “he wanted to make sure every detail was fine.”

Work and Love Struggles

During those years, he saw many friends and neighbors leave for the United States, often with the help of smugglers. Over the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of young people from villages in Fujian have made the trip; many headed for New York City. But according to Ms. Wang and several of his friends, Mr. Wang never talked about taking the journey himself.

Mr. Wang struggled not only with work but also with love. As his friends successfully found mates, married and started families, Mr. Wang, a thin man with close-set eyes and a crop of thick black hair, met failure. His sister blamed the family’s economic straits.

“Nobody wanted to pick him,” she said. “Which girl would want to marry into poverty?”

When he was about 30 — old to be a bachelor by the standards of his village — he married Lin Yaofang and they had a baby, a girl. When Ms. Lin became pregnant again, in violation of the country’s one-child policy, the authorities made her get an abortion, relatives and friends said.

When word of her third pregnancy reached the government, he later told friends, officials went to their house to take Ms. Lin away, leading to Mr. Wang’s detention and beating. The account could not be verified with the Chinese authorities.

His decision to try his luck in New York came quietly and suddenly. He did not share his deliberations with many relatives or friends. Only when he had made up his mind did he turn to the rest of the family: he needed their help raising $75,000 to pay smugglers for his passage.

The task was a group undertaking, with all his closest relatives appealing for loans from everyone they knew. Ms. Wang said she herself raised more than half the amount he needed. It took her more than a month. “You borrow $1,500 from one person, another $3,000 from another person,” she said. “One by one.”

Until the mid-1990s, many Chinese were smuggled into the United States in large ships, hundreds at a time. But in the face of crackdowns, smugglers began developing other methods and routes, and in recent years, officials say, most Chinese have been smuggled into the country in small groups or individually, often by way of Latin America or the Caribbean, many across the Mexican border.

Mr. Wang set off in late January 2008, leaving behind his daughter and pregnant wife. There was no going-away party, no ceremony, his sister said. He just said goodbye and was gone. His friends and family said they did not know what route he took — he had never told them, and they had never asked.

That March, following a path carved by so many Chinese before him, he surfaced in New York’s Chinatown and contacted Fujianese acquaintances who were already here. He had an immediate network to plug into. Many Fujianese have settled outside the historic core of Chinatown, west of the Bowery, clustering instead around East Broadway and north of Canal Street on the Lower East Side.

Mr. Wang moved into a tiny apartment on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side with five other men, including a friend from Fujian. They slept in bunk beds and the place was loud with the constant rumble of traffic from the nearby off-ramp of the Williamsburg Bridge.

Mr. Wang bought a bicycle and found a job as a deliveryman at Iron Sushi, a restaurant in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan. He worked six days a week, his friends said, often in 12-hour shifts. Mr. Wang quickly fell into a grueling routine, his life pared down to its simplest components: work, eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep.

He ate instant oatmeal for breakfast and maybe a slice of pizza for dinner. He splurged on occasion by going to McDonald’s. He made about $500 a week, and after paying basic expenses like rent, he sent home most of whatever was left to pay his creditors and support his family, which had grown by one: his wife had given birth to a son. But he also managed to set aside enough to buy an inexpensive laptop to call his family in China at low rates on Internet telephone networks by piggybacking on a neighbor’s wireless signal.

The calls were apparently the highlight of his life. He called every day, usually before he went to sleep. When his family managed to get a computer, they were able to make video calls. His mother would hold up her grandson to a webcam and Mr. Wang would light up with pride, a roommate recalled. “Say, ‘Daddy,’ ” Mr. Wang would implore his son. “Say, ‘Daddy.’ ”

In his spare time, Mr. Wang washed his clothes or lay in bed streaming films online — he preferred historic war movies, the roommate recalled. Their Saturday workday started an hour later than usual, so on Fridays, he and his roommates often played cards in their apartment — they preferred a Fujianese card game resembling poker — and drank red rice wine fermented locally by Fujianese store owners.

Riding to the Casinos

Then Mr. Wang discovered the inexpensive buses that traveled from Chinatown to the region’s casinos, and he started taking them on Friday nights.

Mr. Wang’s friends insisted that he did not wager, but sold the free food and gambling vouchers that were included with the bus ticket and pocketed his profit, usually about $30.

When asked if he had any other recreational outlets or hobbies, several of his friends laughed as if the question were preposterous. “When can we play?” said Mr. Liu, one of his roommates, who asked that his full name not be used because of his illegal immigration status. “We can work. That’s all we do.”

Mr. Wang’s friends and co-workers in New York said he was quiet and polite. When he talked, they said, his conversation never wandered far afield from the matters of work and money. It was his single-minded obsession, all in the service of his family and his debts, they said. “At night he talked about money worries,” Mr. Liu said, “but that’s what we all talk about.”

At the same time, Mr. Wang was apparently banking much of his hope on an asylum application he had filed in November 2008. Lee Ratner, an immigration lawyer who represented him, said the petition was based on “problems with the family planning policy in China,” but offered no further information, citing attorney-client privilege. The policy is commonly used as justification for asylum petitions by Chinese immigrants.

Mr. Wang told his friends that his asylum claim, which was still pending when he died, stemmed from his run-ins with the government over his wife’s pregnancies. Dennis Lau, the manager at Iron Sushi, said Mr. Wang had told him that if he was granted asylum, he would invite Mr. Lau to celebrate at a karaoke bar — “because he knew I liked karaoke.”

But another friend, Lin Feng, said that Mr. Wang’s stoical resolve had started to crack and that he had begun to express regret about emigrating from China. “The pressure was so much,” Mr. Lin said.

Late last year, Mr. Wang had a severe setback when he fell off his bicycle during a delivery and shattered his arm. The injury kept him out of work for four months, and he lived on worker’s compensation payments of about $200 a month, his friends said.

During this time, he was so broke that he started to borrow the money to send to his family and help cover his debts in China, friends said.

More Frequent Trips

Until his bicycle accident, his visits to the casino had been once a week or less, his friends said. But unable to work a conventional job, he started to ride the bus several times a week, sometimes even taking two round trips a day, selling his free vouchers to other passengers, his friends said.

But this new routine was apparently a source of embarrassment: he never mentioned the casinos to his family, his sister said, and he rarely talked about them to his roommates.

Several months ago, Mr. Wang moved into a cramped two-bedroom apartment in a dingy tenement building on Chrystie Street on the Bowery. He shared one of the rooms with three other men; his share of the rent was $200 a month. Two women rented the second room.

The apartment was cluttered, every corner stuffed with the roommates’ belongings: clothing, cooking equipment, suitcases, a spare mattress for short-term residents. Roaches climbed the walls and pigeons were roosting in a makeshift exhaust vent that snaked along the wall. The only decorative touches were colorful Chinese-language characters hanging on the front door and in the kitchen; the characters appealed for good fortune and riches.

Last week, Mr. Wang’s belongings were piled on his bunk, mostly clothes and travel bags. Sitting on a makeshift bedside table was his laptop, a bottle of Chinese herbal medicine — for a toothache, Mr. Liu said — and an old plastic takeout container in which Mr. Wang kept some of his valuables: loose change, his employee identification card from Iron Sushi and a small address book full of telephone numbers. The container also held a players’ club card from Mohegan Sun and several $1 chips from Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, items that suggested he had gambled at least a bit.

After the bus crash, Mr. Lin called Mr. Wang’s family to break the news.

“The family just collapsed overnight,” Ms. Wang said. “My head may explode at any minute.” She said her mother fainted several times a day from crying so much. The family has not yet begun to think about how they will assume the burden of Mr. Wang’s debt.

“Creditors don’t know what happened yet,” she said. “They won’t treat us nicely.”

Contacted by telephone, Ms. Lin, Mr. Wang’s widow, could barely formulate sentences amid her sobs. “What can I do?” she pleaded. “Everything is a mess. And he just died.”

A group of Mr. Wang’s friends and relatives in New York have hired a lawyer to explore litigation in the case. The lawyer said he was also trying to secure a temporary visa for Ms. Lin and her two children to travel to the United States and view Mr. Wang’s body one last time before it was buried.


Zhang Jing contributed research from Beijing.

Nearly Half a Million Japanese in Shelters, as Tolls Rise and Foreigners Flee

By PATRICK J. LYONS NY TIMES

With the world’s attention riveted on the unfolding nuclear crisis in northeast Japan, the more immediate toll from the powerful earthquake and tsunami continued to mount on Thursday, as more deaths were confirmed, more foreigners prepared to leave the country and more of the disaster’s wide-reaching effects came into focus.

Japanese officials said confirmed deaths had climbed on Thursday to 5,692, and that the names of 9,506 people missing and unaccounted for had been registered. But many thousands more are believed missing.

Nearly a week after the earthquake struck, the national police agency said that more than 452,000 people were staying in schools and other shelters, where supplies of fuel, medicine and other necessities were running short.

In a tsunami-battered neighborhood in Sendai, the major city nearest the quake’s epicenter, there is still no running water. One resident, Noriko Sawaki, told The Associated Press that just living day to day was exhausting. “It’s frustrating, because we don’t have a goal, something to strive for,” she said. “This just keeps on going.”

In a smaller town, Kesennuma, people stood in long lines after a supermarket, picked bare over the last few days, got a delivery of supplies that included instant rice packets and diapers. The NHK broadcasting network reported that each person was limited to 10 items.

Foreign governments stepped up efforts to move their citizens out of harm’s way or out of Japan entirely.

The United States, which called on Wednesday for Americans to stay at least 50 miles from the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima Prefecture, drafted plans on Thursday for voluntary evacuations of families and dependents of military personnel and embassy employees in Japan, including those at air and naval bases 200 miles or more from the plant. Japan has ordered evacuations within 12 miles of the plant, and told those within 18 miles to remain indoors.

Capt. Eric Gardner, the commanding officer at the Atsugi Naval Air Facility, told Reuters that the military would be able to fly out about 10,000 people a day. Some would be sent to American bases in South Korea, he said in a recorded message to base personnel. In all, the American military has more than 55,000 troops and more than 43,000 dependents based in Japan, as well as thousands of civilian employees and contractors, the news agency said.

In addition, the State Department said late Wednesday that it had authorized the voluntary departure of about 600 family members of diplomatic staff in Tokyo, Nagoya and Yokohama.

Study-abroad programs in Japan have also been affected. Two American schools, the University of Kansas and Temple University, said Thursday that they would bring home their students, The A.P. said.

Commercial airlines around the world dispatched more and larger aircraft to Tokyo to help thousands of people leave the country, even as they altered or suspended service.

After 25 passengers arriving in Taiwan and 3 arriving in Seoul were found to have radiation levels slightly higher than normal, officials around the world said they would screen travelers from Japan. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that both passengers and cargo arriving in the United States from Japan were being checked out of an abundance of caution.

Trace amounts of radiation were later found on luggage, passengers and the air filtration system of a plane arriving from Japan at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, CBS News reported, citing city officials. The amounts found were not said to pose any threat.

Some foreign airlines have relocated operations to southern cities, but are continuing to operate flights with one eye on the radiation gauge.

“We can keep flying even if the situation deteriorates further,” Christoph Franz, chief executive of Lufthansa, told Reuters in Frankfurt. “But never say never; we don’t know what will happen there over the coming days and weeks.

Britain said it was chartering jets to fly between Tokyo and Hong Kong, and that Britons directly affected by the tsunami would not be charged for the flight. The French Embassy has arranged for special Air France flights. Air India stepped up its flight schedule and sent Boeing 747 jumbo jets, rather than the smaller aircraft it usually uses on the route.

The prime minister of Sweden, Fredrik Reinfeldt, told the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet on Thursday that his government was making plans to evacuate all of its citizens from Japan. The Czech military evacuated some of its citizens from Japan on special flights, The A.P. said.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said in a report issued Thursday that there was no evidence that food exports from Japan posed any risk, Bloomberg News reported.

“Food safety concerns are restricted to food from the affected zone around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant,” the organization said. “Given the reported safety measures, it would be unlikely that food production or harvesting is taking place in the evacuated area.”

For their part American meat and seafood producers said they would step up shipments to Japan to replace stocks that were destroyed and production disrupted by the earthquake and tsunami , The A.P. reported. Sendai is an important processing center for Alaskan seafood catches.

Experts offered rising preliminary estimates of how much it would cost Japan to rebuild. The 3M company, an American manufacturer with extensive operations in Japan, said the bill may run to $150 billion, half again as much as the Insurance Information Institute estimated a day earlier. “Economic activity will probably fall initially,” the 3M report said, “but perversely, after a lull, the necessary rebuilding work will actually create faster growth.”

The International Monetary Fund said that Japan had the financial means to recover, and that the country had not requested any help from the fund. “The most important impact on Japan is the humanitarian one,” Caroline Atkinson, a spokeswoman, said at a news conference, according to Bloomberg News. “We believe that the Japanese economy is a strong and wealthy society, and the government has the full financial resources to address those needs.”

Even so, currency traders bid the Japanese yen up to near record highs against the dollar and euro on Thursday, apparently driven in part by Japanese investors and companies retrieving assets from overseas to help at home, though Japanese officials insisted that the surge in the value of the yen this week was mostly due to speculation.

Report Finds Wide Abuses by Police in New Orleans
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON NY TIMES
NEW ORLEANS — Justice Department officials on Thursday released the findings of a 10-month investigation into this city’s Police Department, revealing a force that is profoundly and alarmingly troubled and setting in motion a process for its wholesale reform.

The report describes in chilling detail a department that is severely dysfunctional on every level: one that regularly uses excessive force on civilians, frequently fails to investigate serious crimes and has a deeply inadequate, in many cases nonexistent, system of accountability.

Using the report as a guideline, federal and local officials will now enter into negotiations leading to a consent decree, a blueprint for systemic reform that will be enforced by a federal judge.

“There is nobody in this room that is surprised by the general tenor and the tone of what this report has to say,” said Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, at a news conference attended by city and federal officials.

But, added Mr. Landrieu, who publicly invited federal intervention in the Police Department just days after his inauguration in May, “I look forward to a very spirited partnership and one that actually transforms this Police Department into one of the best in the country.”

The city’s police chief, Ronal Serpas, said he fully embraced the report and would be going over its findings with senior leadership later in the day.

While the report describes an appalling array of abuses and bad practices, it does not address in detail any of the nine or more federal criminal investigations into the department. These inquiries have already led to the convictions of three police officers, one for fatally shooting an unarmed civilian and another for burning the body.

Justice Department officials chose to exclude the information gleaned in the criminal inquiries to keep a wall between those investigations and the larger civil investigation into the practices of the department. But there were more than enough problems left to uncover.

While other departments generally have problems in specific areas, like the use of excessive force, “New Orleans has every issue that has existed in our practice to date, and a few that we hadn’t encountered,” said Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

The report reveals that the department has not found a policy violation in any officer-involved shooting for the last six years, though federal officials who reviewed the records found that violations had clearly occurred. The department’s canine unit was so badly mismanaged — the dogs were so aggressive they frequently attacked their handlers — that federal officials encouraged the department to suspend it last year even though the investigation was still under way.

The report details a record of discriminatory policing, with a ratio of arrests of blacks to whites standing at nearly 16 to 1. Calls for police assistance by non-English speakers often went unanswered.

The report also found that the police “systemically misclassified possible sexual assaults, resulting in a sweeping failure to properly investigate many potential cases of rape, attempted rape and other sex crimes.”

The problems described in the report go beyond policy failings, depicting a culture of dysfunction that reaches all facets of the department. The recruitment program is described as anemic, training as “severely deficient in nearly every respect,” and supervision as poor or in some cases nonexistent.

The department has attracted this level of scrutiny before. As bad as it appears now, the police force was far more troubled in the mid-1990s. Two officers from that era are now on death row, and the number of murders in the city at the time soared above 400.

Federal agents conducted a similar investigation of the department, but there was less cooperation by local officials and, crucially, there was no consent decree.

While the department improved for a time, the structural problems remained and festered, as Thursday’s report makes clear.

This time, there will be federal court oversight, and there is already widespread consensus that systemic police reform is needed. Confidence in the department is so low that prosecutors have trouble finding juries, as so many prospective jurors declare that they would not put any trust in the testimony of a New Orleans police officer.

The robust citizen engagement that has been a significant factor in the city’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina has also changed the dynamic, officials said. While the New Orleans police force may be troubled to a rare degree, federal officials also described the city’s appetite for systemic reform as unprecedented.

Federal officials said the team of agents assigned to investigate the department worked with police leadership as well as rank-and-file officers. Investigators also reached out to community leaders to a degree that they had not previously done.

Still, officials acknowledge that changing the department’s entrenched culture will be hard and will take years. Though Mr. Serpas, who was an officer during the reform efforts in the 1990s, has already begun addressing many of the concerns, news reports of police abuses during the Mardi Gras season have come out in the past few weeks, and the number of homicides is still stubbornly high.

“I’m not naïve about the hard work that lies ahead,” Mr. Perez said, adding that he was still optimistic. “I’m certain that we’re in a qualitatively different position than we were 10 years ago.”

Community advocates viewed the day’s announcement with a mix of hope and skepticism. Some groups had been trying to draw attention to police abuse in the city for years before their complaints were noticed by law enforcement.

“Nobody believed anything we said,” said Norris Henderson, a founder of a group for former prisoners called Voice of the Ex-Offender. He said he was encouraged that community groups were so involved in the federal inquiry, but was concerned about the level of involvement going forward.

“Will we be a part of the conversation?” he asked. “Just going to the quote-unquote criminal justice folks, well, y’all the folks responsible for this damn problem.”

Ex-Revere library chief indicted on embezzling charges
By Katheleen Conti Boston Globe
After a two-year investigation, the former director of the Revere Public Library has been indicted on charges that he embezzled at least $200,000 in city funds by purchasing items for himself or to sell online for his profit over four years.
Robert E. Rice Jr., 45, of Rowley, was indicted by a grand jury Tuesday on 21 felony counts, including three counts of larceny over $250, three counts of embezzlement by a city officer, and 15 counts of procurement fraud, according to Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley’s office.

Each count of larceny and procurement fraud carries a penalty, on conviction, of up to five years in prison, while each embezzlement count carries up to 10 years, according to Jake Wark, spokesman for the Conley’s office. Rice is scheduled to be arraigned April 1 in Suffolk Superior Court.

Rice, who has been the director of the Pelham, N.H., Public Library since October 2009, did not return a call for comment. He had resigned as Revere’s library director, a post he held for 12 of the 27 years he was employed there, immediately after the allegations surfaced in January 2009 through a routine city audit of his department.

Mayor Thomas G. Ambrosino of Revere said that while he felt there was evidence of criminal activity, the number of counts against Rice was unexpected.

“It seems like a lot of counts, but the city believes there was a lot of evidence of criminal activity and evidence of fraud,’’ Ambrosino said. “It was certainly surprising at the time. He had never given any indication that he was doing anything improper until our auditors looked at his procurement records. In many respects, we continue to implement the controls that allowed us to uncover this fraud.’’

Ambrosino said the extent of the alleged embezzlement was not known to city officials the day they first questioned Rice. The mayor said he hopes that if Rice is convicted, the city recoups some of its losses with monies Rice still has invested in the city’s pension fund.

Rice is accused of billing the city for the purchase of books, software, DVDs, and collectible curios that he kept for himself or sold on eBay, according to Conley’s office. In some cases, Rice allegedly kept money refunded to the city for items that were ordered but not shipped.

George M. Anzuoni, the city’s finance director, said Rice allegedly altered purchase orders and requisitions “to read as other items.’’

Revere Police Captain Michael Murphy called the investigation tedious but “quite historic’’ in scope, and said he has never seen the likes of it in his 25 years in the department. The investigation looked into alleged offenses dating to 2005 and was led by Revere police with the help of outside auditors and the New England State Police Information Network.

“He’s alleged to have purchased many things . . .’’ Murphy said, “some of which had been library related and then misappropriated, and others that did not seem on their face to have much to do with the library.’’

The charges still baffle some Revere officials.

“I knew him, and he seemed like a straight shooter, and I was shocked when I heard of the allegations,’’ said Councilor Anthony T. Zambuto. “But if they’re indicting at this point, where there’s smoke, there’s probably fire.’’

Councilor George Rotondo called the charges troubling, saying that the city needs to move forward.

“A wise thing to do at this point is double check the way we conduct business in the city and implement strict auditing procedures and move on from there,’’ Rotondo said.

Francis Garboski, chair of the Pelham Public Library Board of Trustees, said in a statement that the board is surprised by the indictments, and that members were aware of “issues regarding his prior position’’ when Rice was hired.

“Nevertheless, we were satisfied with his explanation, and his references were excellent,’’ Garboski said. “Bob’s service to the Pelham Public Library has been nothing short of exemplary. . . . We have complete confidence in our director to effectively run the library and have no evidence to question his ability to perform his job. This board will continue to support him and look forward to putting this unpleasant situation behind us.’’

Katheleen Conti can be reached at kconti@globe.com.

A Look at the Mechanics of a Partial Meltdown
By HENRY FOUNTAIN NY TIMES

The difference between a partial meltdown and a full meltdown at a nuclear plant is enormous, both in the degree of damage and in the potential release of radiation, experts in nuclear power said.

A partial meltdown, like those suspected at two reactors in northeastern Japan over the weekend, may not necessarily mean that any of the uranium fuel in the core has melted, experts said. The fuel rods may be only damaged, a portion of them having been left uncovered by cooling water long enough to crack, allowing the release of some radioactive elements in the fuel.

But in a full meltdown — which could occur within hours if all cooling water was lost and the rods became completely uncovered — melting is all but guaranteed, as thousands of fuel pellets fall to the bottom of the reactor and heat themselves into a molten pool at several thousand degrees Fahrenheit.

While it is considered highly unlikely that a full meltdown would result in a nuclear chain reaction, experts said, such lava-like fuel might breach the reactor’s pressure vessel and then its containment, leading to widespread release of radioactivity.

To avoid such a catastrophe, workers at the two reactors have tried to pump enough seawater into them to keep the cores completely covered. But unless normal cooling systems can be restored, they will have to keep pumping seawater for weeks.

“You’re looking at several thousands of gallons a day potentially out as long as a year,” said Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear engineer who worked on reactors of the same design as those in Japan.

The Japanese reactors, made by General Electric and built in the 1970s, have thousands of thin, 12-foot-long fuel rods stacked like straws inside a pressure vessel made of steel up to 6 inches thick. The rods, tubes made of a zirconium alloy, contain ceramic pellets of uranium oxide that are about the size of a fingertip.

Ordinarily, this fuel core is kept submerged in water that circulates to remove the heat of nuclear fission, making steam that is used to turn turbines to generate electricity.

With loss of power and pumps after the earthquake, the fission reactions at the plants were successfully halted. But there is much residual heat in the reactors, both because they operated at about 550 degrees Fahrenheit and because the radioactive elements in the fuel continue to produce heat as they decay. Without pumps to circulate the water, it will boil off quickly.

That apparently is what happened at least one of the reactors, leaving the upper part of the cores uncovered until technicians, in what has been described as a desperate measure, rigged up a way to pump seawater in. The sea water is laced with boric acid, which would quench a fission reaction if one began.

Once part of the core is exposed, the zirconium starts to oxidize, or rust, extremely rapidly, becoming brittle and cracking. The rusting also results in the production of explosive hydrogen; the cracking allows the most volatile radioactive elements in the fuel, like iodine and cesium, to escape. To prevent pressure buildup, the gases are allowed to vent into the containment, and in this case must have leaked or were vented through the containment into outside air.

As the rods crack apart, the pellets inside them can start to fall out, which engineers call a washout.

“There’s nothing holding them there,” said Margaret Harding, a consultant who worked on reactor designs for General Electric for 27 years. But since lower parts of the core are undamaged, the pellets may end up in various places around the reactor, not necessarily in a clump on the floor. “It’s not guaranteed you’re going to have melting,” she said.

At the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979, in which the core was partly uncovered, robotic cameras later determined that melting had occurred. In the Chernobyl accident in 1986, considered the world’s worst, a power surge led to explosions and a reactor fire, sending an enormous plume of radioactive material into the air.

If a full meltdown were to occur at one of the Japanese reactors — meaning operators were unable to keep pumping water and the core became completely uncovered — molten fuel would soon pool on the floor of the pressure vessel. “The worst case is that the molten mass leaves the vessel and creates a steam explosion,” Mr. Gunderson said. “That would destroy the containment.”

A Changed Starbucks. A Changed C.E.O.
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER NY TIMES
RAISE your hand if you remember when Starbucks seemed cool.
Anyone?
Think back. To before the planet groaned with 17,000 Starbucks shops. Before the pumpkin spice lattes and the Ciao Amore CDs. Before the Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino ice cream, the Starbucks cream liqueur, the Pinkberry-inspired Sorbetto.

In short, to before Howard D. Schultz and his trenta-size ambition turned a few coffeehouses here into the vast corporate Empire of the Bean.

The world has often seemed three espressos behind Mr. Schultz — which is why the low-key guy sitting in his office here doesn’t quite seem like Howard Schultz.

Did he just say “but”? As in, “We have won in many ways, but ...”? Was that a “we” instead of an “I”? A note of humility?

Yes, this is Howard Schultz: the man who willed Starbucks onto so many street corners — and then, for a moment, looked as if he might lose it all.

Not even Mr. Schultz could have predicted how Starbucks would change our culture when its first shop opened here, in Pike Place Market, on March 30, 1971. Like it or not, Starbucks became, for many of us, what we talk about when we talk about coffee. It changed how we drink it (on a sofa, with Wi-Fi, or on the subway), how we order it (“for here, grande, two-pump vanilla, skinny extra hot latte”) and what we are willing to pay for it ($4.30 for the aforementioned in Manhattan).

But during the depths of the recession, Starbucks nearly drowned in its caramel macchiato. After decades of breakneck expansion under Mr. Schultz, tight-fisted consumers abandoned it. The company’s sales and share price sank so low that insiders worried Starbucks might become a takeover target.

So, after an eight-year hiatus, an alarmed Mr. Schultz returned as chief executive in January 2008. He shut 900 shops, mostly in the United States, drastically cut costs and put the company back on course.

Friends and colleagues say this hellish experience left Mr. Schultz a changed man. Starbucks, these people say, is no longer “The Howard Schultz Show.” The adjective that many use to characterize his new self is “humble” — a word that few would have applied to him before.

“Everything Starbucks did in the past, more or less, had worked,” Mr. Schultz said in an interview in January at the company’s headquarters, with a view of Puget Sound south of downtown Seattle. “Every store we opened was successful, every city, every country.”

He continued: “Growth had a life of its own — and that’s O.K., when you’re hitting the cover off the ball every time, but at some point, nothing lasts forever.”

One thing hasn’t changed: the man dreams big. In that same interview, Mr. Schultz spoke of expanding into still more products and in markets like China. He is pushing, of all things, a brand of instant coffee. The words “Starbucks Coffee” were just removed from the company’s green mermaid logo because he wants to waltz his brand up and down the grocery aisles. On Thursday, he announced that the company had struck a deal with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters to distribute Starbucks coffee and teas for Keurig single-serving systems. Shares of Starbucks jumped nearly 10 percent on the news, reaching their highest level since 2006. The stock closed at $36.56 on Friday.

Mr. Schultz and his colleagues say Starbucks will keep its feet on the ground this time, but some outsiders have doubts. Detractors say Starbucks long ago ceded its role as a gourmet tastemaker to become a “billions-and-billions served” chain like McDonald’s. Starbucks — “Charbucks,” to those who complain that its heavily roasted coffee tastes burned — will never rekindle the old romance, these people say.

“Has anybody said they came back because people love the coffee again?” asks Bryant Simon, a history professor at Temple University and author of “Everything but the Coffee: Learning About America From Starbucks.”

“They came back because they’re remaking themselves as a brand that competes on value, largely — a brand that’s everywhere, easily accessible, predictable,” Mr. Simon says.

HOWARD SCHULTZ, now 57, is a tall, sinewy man with a toothy grin and a silky sales pitch. He rarely sticks to script, preferring to speak off the cuff, whatever his audience. In conversations, he leans in, locks eyes and gives the impression that, right now, there is no one else in the world he would rather be talking to. When he speaks of “soul” and “authenticity” and “love,” you could almost forget that he runs a multibillion-dollar business that has become an uneasy symbol of globalization. Or that the British actor Rupert Everett once likened Starbucks to a metastasizing cancer.

The story of Mr. Schultz’s life and career has been told many times, not least by Mr. Schultz. (His second book, “Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul,” is to be published on March 29.) But some highlights bear repeating:

He grew up poor in the Bay View housing projects in Canarsie, Brooklyn, received a football scholarship to Northern Michigan University and, after a variety of jobs, joined the fledging Starbucks in 1982, as head of marketing. Inspired by Italy’s coffee culture, he left Starbucks and opened his own coffee shop. Then, in 1987, he bought Starbucks, which at the time had all of six shops. By 1995, Starbucks had 677 shops. By 2000, it had 3,501, and that year Mr. Schultz stepped aside as C.E.O.

And so it went for Starbucks, one success after another, until the recession hit and exposed the company’s overreach to the world.

In December 2007, Mr. Schultz was worried that the Starbucks brand was losing its luster, and he and the board decided that in the new year, they would push aside Jim Donald and announce that Mr. Schultz would return as C.E.O. That month, Mr. Schultz, his wife, Sheri, and their two children flew to Hawaii for their annual getaway.

But on the beach in Kona, he just couldn’t relax. He kept checking the company’s daily sales figures and was horrified to see that they were falling by double digits.

Also in Hawaii then was his friend Michael Dell, who had recently returned to run Dell Inc. On a long bicycle ride along the coast, Mr. Dell told Mr. Schultz that when he returned to Dell, he wrote what he called a “transformational agenda.” Mr. Schultz then created his own plan for Starbucks.

His goals were to fix troubled stores, to rekindle an emotional attachment with customers and to make longer-term changes like reorganizing executives and revamping the supply chain.

He returned to Seattle, handed copies of his plan to the company’s senior executives and posed the big question: Are you in, or are you out? Eight of those top 10 executives have since departed.

“What the company needed then was what he used to be to us — the innovation, the refusal to not be a champion,” says Troy Alstead, the chief financial officer. “A lot of people were questioning, in that span before he came back, ‘Were we done?’ And Howard came back, and it wasn’t even a question anymore.”

MR. SCHULTZ usually rises at 4 a.m., without an alarm, downs a Starbucks Sumatran coffee at home, followed by a short double latte or espresso macchiato from one of two Starbucks stores he visits on his way to work. He arrives in his office by 6:30.

Friends and colleagues agree that he is as fanatical as ever about Starbucks. Millard Drexler, the chief executive of J. Crew, recently e-mailed Mr. Schultz to complain that the coffee lids at a Starbucks on Astor Place in Manhattan kept spilling coffee on his shirt. Mr. Schultz’s reply: “On it.”

Mr. Drexler, who has a habit of e-mailing C.E.O.’s with complaints, says: “I can give you many more examples when they say, ‘I’ll send this to a research department or a gatekeeper.’ ” But, he says of Starbucks, “to have that kind of quality control they have around the world is pretty extraordinary.”

It was on such a morning in early 2008 that Mr. Schultz was convinced he had a product that would re-energize the company’s tired sales. It was called Sorbetto after the Italian for “sorbet,” and the drink was a twist on Pinkberry, the frozen yogurt chain in which Mr. Schultz is an investor.

Mr. Schultz had flown to Italy to taste the ingredients of his new product and thought he had the next Frappuccino. By that summer, 300 Starbucks locations in California were bathed in pink to promote the new drink. Starbucks had shipped in ingredients from Italy, and Mr. Schultz had primed investors.

But customers didn’t like the sugary concoction. And neither did Starbucks baristas, who had to spend an hour and a half cleaning the Sorbetto machines at the end of their shifts. A few months later, Mr. Schultz abandoned Sorbetto.

“Sorbetto, we did too quickly, and that was my fault,” Mr. Schultz says.

The headlong introduction was a mistake, but it was also classic Schultz.

“He likes things moving quickly, he likes people to be decisive, he’s got this energy level, this need for driving and for winning, and I think at times it’s hard for some people to keep up,” says Michelle Gass, the president of Seattle’s Best Coffee, which Starbucks owns. After his missteps, Ms. Gass says, Mr. Schultz has become more disciplined and a better listener.

Mr. Schultz concedes that he can no longer run Starbucks through the Cult of Howard. And he readily acknowledges that he badly misread the economy and underestimated the extent to which his customers would pull back during the recession.

At the time, he says, he had a hard time accepting that Starbucks would become a poster child for excess.

After his return, he halted new store openings and, with a P.R. flourish, closed every Starbucks in the nation for three hours to retrain baristas. The chain ran its biggest ad campaign ever, emphasizing the quality and freshness of its coffee. It ordered baristas to dump brewed coffee after 30 minutes.

But growth in same-store sales dipped below zero for the first time ever, and the company’s share price kept falling. It was a new feeling for Mr. Schultz, like the A student who breezes into college and then gets C’s.

Executives concluded that Starbucks had to close 200 American shops. The board suggested 600. Executives said that if sales and the economy got worse, they would also cut $400 million in costs. The board said no, let’s start cutting costs immediately, while closing locations. Starbucks ultimately closed 900 locations worldwide and cut $580 million in costs. As the decline in same-store sales neared 10 percent, board members asked executives to model what would happen if the sales slide hit 20 percent — which once would have been unthinkable.

“Nobody knew where the bottom was,” recalls James G. Shennan Jr., a venture capitalist who has been on the company’s board since 1990. “The general agreement around the table was we better have the doomsday plan.”

In December 2008, almost a year after he returned as C.E.O., Mr. Schultz flew to New York on the company jet. He and his team were scheduled to meet with analysts from Wall Street, where Mr. Schultz, once a darling, was now being doubted as never before.

On the plane, he reviewed the grim quarterly numbers: Profits were underwhelming, and holiday sales looked dreadful. Just before the meeting, the company’s chief financial officer, Pete Bocian, resigned.

Mr. Schultz reread the script for the presentation — and didn’t like what he saw. He worried that the stock price might drop so low that someone would swoop in and buy the company.

He summoned his executives to his Fifth Avenue apartment. Late into the night, around the dining room table, they revised the presentation.

The next day, as the executives rehearsed, Mr. Schultz kept interrupting. Vivek Varma, who had recently joined Starbucks as head of public affairs, told him that he should leave.

No one could remember anyone talking like that to Mr. Schultz. But he left. The next day, he and the other executives painted a somber picture for analysts and laid out the recovery plans. Rather than plunge, the company’s share price rose 20 cents that day.

Over the next year, Starbucks made much deeper and more difficult changes than Mr. Schultz had originally envisioned. By April 2009, same-store sales, though still down from a year earlier, were finally rising. By the holidays, they had turned positive.

INSTANT coffee: the very words leave a bad taste in many people’s mouths. But Starbucks has been developing instant coffee in earnest since 2006. Mr. Schultz says his industry considers instant a “death category.” It is, however, a $20 billion one.

Before he returned, Mr. Schultz complained that if Apple could develop the iPod in less than a year, Starbucks could surely develop an instant coffee in that time. Finally, in January 2009, the new product, Via, was scheduled for a full-scale introduction.

But there was a problem: market research was showing that skeptical customers needed a lesson about instant coffee. Some executives worried that a big rollout might flop. Ms. Gass and a few others told Mr. Schultz that Starbucks should delay Via and introduce it in two cities before going national.

“That was hard for him,” Ms. Gass says. But rather than overrule his executives, as he might have in the past, Mr. Schultz agreed. It turned out to be the right decision. After testing Via in Seattle and Chicago, Starbucks rewrote the plan for a nationwide introduction. For instance, instead of just giving away free samples, which customers forgot in the bottom of their briefcases, purses and backpacks, it prepared Via in the stores and gave customers a blind taste test.

In 2010, sales of Via were over $200 million. The instant coffee is now also sold in grocery stores and in Britain, Canada, Japan and the Philippines.

The methodical introduction of Via offered a sharp contrast to the old Howard Schultz whose gut told him — wrongly — that Sorbetto would be a winner. But he has also gone so far as to embrace big-company ideas like focus groups, which he used to shun. Delegating, and accepting other people’s conclusions, is now easier for him. “There’s been more arguing, challenging and debate in the last two to three years than there’s ever been,” says Mr. Alstead, the chief financial officer.

Mr. Schultz’s take: “What leadership means is the courage it takes to talk about things that, in the past, perhaps we wouldn’t have, because I’m not right all the time.”

Born entrepreneurs are not necessarily born managers. You need creativity and drive to start a company, discipline and delegation to run one. In the last year, people who work closely with Mr. Schultz say, he has shown he can make the leap.

Perhaps the bigger question is whether Mr. Schultz can, as he likes to say, preserve Starbucks’s soul, or whatever soul it has left. In a switch, the company is designing new stores with local woods, furniture and art, to make them feel more like a neighborhood shop. It is also buying specialty beans in limited supply, as artisanal shops do.

Whether Starbucks can recapture a neighborhood feel, as Mr. Schultz insists, is anyone’s guess. For many people, especially in areas where carefully made, lighter-roast coffee from the likes of Stumptown and Intelligentsia is trendy, Starbucks has become a place to go for free Wi-Fi, or to use the restroom, or to buy a coffee on the go.

There is a market for a convenient coffee chain, as the recent Starbucks sales rebound shows. But some customers and analysts say that the mass-market approach conflicts with Mr. Schultz’s vision of a global giant that somehow feels local everywhere.

Mr. Simon of Temple University says: “When you’re selling stuff people don’t need, you’ve got to be selling something else, and that’s what Starbucks lost. There’s a kind of dissonance between the messaging and the actual practice.”

Mr. Schultz no longer plans to blanket the United States with new Starbucks stores, sometimes with multiple locations on one block — a practice that inspired a contest on Flickr to see how many Starbucks shops people could fit into a single photograph. Instead, like so many other executives, he has his sights on China. Starbucks already has roughly 430 stores in mainland China and plans to have 1,500 there by 2015. India beckons as well. The company also plans to sell a wider variety of drinks and foods in grocery stores and its own shops, like Kind fruit and nut bars, which Starbucks put on the map.

IT may be difficult to believe, but there was a time when McDonald’s was a novelty. But, like Ray Kroc, who took over a small hamburger business and built it into the most successful fast food operation in the world, Mr. Schultz has learned that growth can be seductive, and that it can exact a price.

Starbucks and its leader are more measured than during his last stint in the corner office. “I think we are very conscious of the things that we have done wrong over the years, particularly when we just got caught up in the growth phase,” says Mr. Shennan, the Starbucks director. “We are not going to do that again under Howard’s management, I tell you, or the current board’s.”

In January, three years after his return, Mr. Schultz stood before 1,100 employees at the headquarters here. Three thousand more from around the world were patched in via Webcast. The company had finished its strongest holiday season ever, and Mr. Schultz had just unveiled its new, “coffee”-less logo. Yet his words were laced with caution.

“We have won in many ways,” he said, “but I feel it’s so important to remind us all of how fleeting success and winning can be.”