From Daily Beast 

Paul Kevin Curtis and J. Everett Dutschke: Epic Feud and Ricin Letters

by Winston Ross Apr 25, 2013 4:45 AM EDT

Could a mind-boggling vendetta be behind the ricin letters sent to Obama and Wicker? Winston Ross travels to Tupelo, Mississippi, to find out about the body parts and Mensa fraud that might have driven the latest suspect.

 

 

As the sun set Wednesday on the birthplace of the king of rock and roll, federal agents in hazmat suits wrapped up their daylong scouring of a tae kwon do studio on the edge of town, a watchful throng of reporters standing vigil, waiting to see what the hell could possibly happen next.

J. Everett Dutschke (left) and Paul Kevin Curtis. (Landov; AP)

It’s been quite a week here in Tupelo, what with the arrest last week of a 45-year-old Elvis impersonator on suspicion of sending letters laced with ricin to President Obama, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), and a local judge, Sadie Holland. Then came the stunning announcement Tuesday that Paul Kevin Curtis was free to head back to Heartbreak Hotel and shake his exonerated pelvis all over Mississippi again. Then news broke that another man—a 41-year-old blues singer, karate master, insurance salesman, Mensa member, accused child molester, and one-time GOP candidate for the Mississippi House of Representatives named J. Everett Dutschke—had become the focus of the investigation. Then stories spread that this Curtis fella and this Dutschke fella had it out for each other and were trading nasty emails about body parts allegedly found at a hospital and fraudulent Mensa memberships and snarky comments left on each other’s YouTube pages about all that. Then rumors swirled Wednesday that Dutschke had skipped town, and the cops had a BOLO (be on the lookout) for his van. Then Dutschke showed up at the studio—in the van!—and the men in the white suits searched that, too, as the karate master, who has not been named a suspect or charged with any terrorism-related crime, shifted his public-relations strategy from talking to any reporter within earshot to pacing beneath the green awning of a tattoo parlor across the street. Then Curtis, the Elvis impersonator, hopped on a plane to New York City with his lawyers in tow, set to celebrate his independence Thursday morning on Good Morning America, among other places.

Good luck sorting that all out, FBI. But here’s what we know so far:

First and most important, Curtis is not just an Elvis impersonator. His longtime friend Nancy Lee Smith Hakes told The Daily Beast that she was shocked not only to hear of his arrest last week on federal charges, but that everyone kept calling him an Elvis impersonator, as if the King was the only person Curtis could impersonate. He also does a mean Conway Twitty, Prince, and Alan Jackson. Oh, and Randy Travis. He does Travis “really well.” Indeed, one of Curtis’s lawyers said his client broke into a spontaneous Travis bit when the lawyer saw him for the first time since being released from federal lockup Tuesday.

Curtis is also a guy with more to him than wacky celebrity impersonations, his ex-wife said. This can be a good and a bad thing.

 

After being freed, Paul Kevin Curtis offered his lawyer a foot rub.

The good part? Man, is he mixed up in a whole lot of different stuff, from karate to Elvis impersonating to fiction writing. The bad part? Man, has he been pissing people off while being mixed up in a whole lot of different stuff, from karate to Elvis impersonating to fiction writing.

The fiction writing is based on a true story, at least according to Curtis, based on the years he spent working at a hospital in north Mississippi—until one day he discovered a bunch of body parts strewn about in the morgue and wrapped in plastic. “Even a severed head,” Curtis later wrote. Curtis blew the whistle on what he quickly determined was some kind of underhanded scheme to sell the body parts, only to find himself summarily fired and kicked out of the hospital for life, not to mention “countless court battles, cops harassing me weekly, death threats, personal & financial losses, several thefts, my home burned down, car exploded, marriage dissolved and bankruptcy.”

More on that later. The moral of the story, says Laura Curtis: “Kevin is outspoken. He makes enemies freely. That’s the reason we divorced. Kevin doesn’t want any friends, and I do.”

The karate part wouldn’t have been a bad thing if not for the toxic, bizarre relationship Curtis eventually found himself in with the owner of the studio he at one point attended: J. Everette Dutschke, who is also mixed up in a whole lot of different stuff.

Dutschke is a Kentucky-born, Texas-reared, Mississippi jack-of-all-trades like no other, as is made clear by a digital trail of crumbs that makes the Cookie Monster look like a finicky eater. By his own description on his MySpace page, Dutschke once wanted to specialize in psychiatric nursing, but wound up in radio and then the insurance business. He is a proud member of Mensa. He’s in a rock band called Dusty and the RoboDrum that, according to itsFacebook page, includes “tons of lasers.” And assuming the various profiles and avatars linked to him are truly him, Dutschke has few qualms about speaking his brilliant Mensa mind on the Internet.

Federal agents wearing hazmat suits and breathing apparatus inspect a trash can outside the Corinth, Mississippi, home of Paul Kevin Curtis on April 19. (Rogelio V. Solis/AP)

Here he is in 2008, insisting an 800 number hawking a “major medical plan” is a “SCAM... all it pays is $100 a day as an inpatient...that won’t even pay for the I.V. and tylenol at a hospital. These people are a rip-off scam artist group of con-men who may not even be licensed insurance agents!” Here he is again in one of a series of YouTube videos he filmed by pointing his phone at himself while driving or at the mirror in his karate studio as he walks through it. One is about illegal aliens. Another, about Mississippi being the unhealthiest state in the nation. Another is about how dogs are good people, and another (parody?) about how “George Bush hates white people.” The best one, objectively, is where he pretends to solve a Rubik’s Cube as an analogy for the problems he’d solve if elected to office.

About that: Dutschke ran for a seat in the Mississippi House of Representatives in 2007, against incumbent Democrat Steve Holland, whom he quickly realized he had no chance of beating, but went after with a vicious and unrelenting attack-ad campaign anyway. At some point there was an embarrassing incident involving Holland’s mother demanding a public apology, Steve Holland told reporters this week. Dutschke lost the race—by a whole mess of a lot of votes. Holland’s mother is the local judge who also got a ricin letter in the mail.

Dutschke’s political tumble would soon be eclipsed by legal woes. In January he was arrested on charges of molesting a 7-year-old girl at his tae kwon do studio. Earlier this month he pleaded not guilty and was released on bond.

He is convinced Curtis is not really a Mensa member, and the two exchanged several heated emails about that, too. “That made Everett so mad, he just came apart,” Laura Curtis says, “threatening to beat him up.”

Somewhere along the way, Dutschke’s and Curtis’s fates intertwined in the most epic and Southern and Faulkneresque kind of way. At first, when breathless reporters started pestering the two for details of the feud that led one to claim the other had framed him, both insisted they didn’t remember. Curtis told several reporters he had no idea why Dutschke might have it in for him, even as his lawyer was holding press conferences pointing the finger squarely at the bluesman. Dutschke claimed the same: “I met the guy on two occasions,” he told the northeast Mississippi Daily Journal. “I wasn’t going to be pulled into his fantasy world.”

But from where Elvis’s ex-wife is sitting, the whole feud is plain as a bluebird day. For one thing, Dutschke is a Republican. Curtis is a Democrat. But the war between the two of them started with the body-parts thing. One of Dutschke’s many endeavors was at one point running a small “newspaper,” one of those hastily published say-whatever-the-hell-you-want-to kind of things, and Curtis tried to convince Dutschke that he ought to write about the hospital’s body-parts scheme, to lay the whole scandal bare. Dutschke refused. Some words were exchanged.

“Everett was worried it would hurt his image,” Laura Curtis says. “It’s the only hospital in Tupelo. They’re powerful.”

Another key battle: Curtis’s Facebook cover photo, which shows a Mensa certificate in his name. Dutschke was infuriated by this, as he is convinced Curtis is not really a Mensa member, and the two exchanged several heated emails about that, too.

“That made Everett so mad, he just came apart,” Laura Curtis says, “threatening to beat him up.”

The two sparred over music, too, Curtis told Talking Points Memo. At one point, he said, Dutschke sent him an email that read: “I’ve created a band called Robodrum and we’re going to throw you off the national circuit.”

The two have gotten along rather foully ever since, with a string of emails back and forth that consisted of “You’re a dumbass,” Curtis’s attorney told The Daily Beast on Wednesday.

By the time Dutschke got arrested in January, the two pretty much hated each other electronically. When Curtis learned the news, he emailed Dutschke, Laura tells The Daily Beast:

“How’s it feel to be on that side?” the email read. On a completely unrelated YouTube video of Dutschke’s, Curtis wrote, “C U in court.”

“Of course Everett went ballistic,” Laura Curtis says.

That’s why, when the FBI came knocking at Laura Curtis’s door last week, she was convinced of two things: her ex-husband’s innocence and that he was framed. Kevin Curtis is nowhere near smart enough to figure out how to make ricin, she tells The Daily Beast.

“Kevin would blow up half of Mississippi trying to make something like that,” she says. Plus, he’s not a violent person. “He’ll send you a thousand emails, but he’s never going to cause you harm.”

(Lest you worry that this comment might offend her ex-husband, he told Piers Morgan on CNN Tuesday night that when the FBI first told him what they thought he’d done, he responded, “I don’t even eat rice!”)

The second thing Laura Curtis is sure of: J. Everett Dutschke was behind all this. He’s a “brilliant” man,” she says. “I told the FBI, I believe this man had something to do with framing Kevin, because they hate each other.” Kevin Curtis’s lawyer said pretty much the same thing, and with a microphone, in front of a bunch of reporters, no less.

Plus, Curtis was ripe for a setup. He had posted about the hospital body-parts conspiracy all over the Internet, and he wrote letters to Wicker and other politicians, signing them, “This is Kevin Curtis & I approve this message.” The signature of the ricin-laced envelope: “I am KC and I approve this message.”

Dutschke did not return several phone calls from The Daily Beast, nor did he answer the door Wednesday at his Tupelo home, which was raided by the FBI on Tuesday. He expressed shock when Talking Points Memo broke the news to him that Curtis had been released. “What did you just say?” he asked the reporter who called. “You’re kidding me.” An hour later the FBI was knocking at his door. But he has professed his innocence several times and in several places over the past couple of days.

“I’m a patriotic American. I don’t have any grudges against anybody. I did not send the letters,” Dutschke told reporters Tuesday. He also lashed out at Curtis and his attorneys for fingering him. “I guess Kevin got desperate. I feel like he’s getting away with the perfect crime.”

Allan Arbus, Psychiatrist With Zingers on ‘M*A*S*H,’ Dies at 95

By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK NY Times

Allan Arbus, who left the successful fashion photography business he and his wife, Diane, built to become an actor, most memorably playing the caustic psychiatrist Maj. Sidney Freedman on the hit television series “M*A*S*H,” died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 95.

Amy Arbus, his daughter, confirmed his death.

Mr. Arbus appeared in films like “Coffy” and “Crossroads” and was a TV regular during the 1970s and ’80s, appearing on “Taxi,” “Starsky & Hutch,” “Matlock” and other shows.

But his best-known role was Major Freedman, the liberal psychiatrist who appeared in a dozen episodes of “M*A*S*H.” He treated wounds of the psyche much as Capt. Hawkeye Pierce treated surgery patients: with a never-ending string of zingers.

Alan Alda, who played Hawkeye, recalled Mr. Arbus as a very believable therapist.

“I was so convinced that he was a psychiatrist I used to sit and talk with him between scenes,” Mr. Alda said in an interview with the Archive of American Television. “After a couple months of that I noticed he was giving me these strange looks, like ‘How would I know the answer to that?’ ”

Allan Franklin Arbus was born in New York City on Feb. 15, 1918. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School and entered City College at 15. He left college a year and a half later for a job at Russek’s Department Store, where he met Diane Nemerov, the daughter of the store’s owners.

They married in 1941 and became passionate about photography. They shot fashion photographs for Russek’s before Mr. Arbus left to serve as a photographer in the Army Signal Corps in Burma during World War II. When he was discharged in 1946 the Arbuses established a studio on West 54th Street for fashion photography and soon won a contract from Condé Nast to supply photos for magazines like Glamour and Vogue.

In 1956, Ms. Arbus dissolved their business partnership to work full time on her haunting shots of marginalized people. Mr. Arbus continued to work in fashion photography but also took up acting.

The Arbuses separated in 1959 and divorced in 1969, when Mr. Arbus moved to Los Angeles. Ms. Arbus committed suicide in 1971. In 1976, Mr. Arbus married Mariclare Costello. She survives him, as do his two daughters from his first marriage, Amy and Doon; and a daughter from his second marriage, Arin Arbus.

Mr. Arbus’s last television role was on the HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in 2000.

Hacked A.P. Twitter Feed Sends Erroneous Message About Explosions at White House

 By NICOLE PERLROTH and MICHAEL D. SHEAR NY TIMES

The Twitter account of The Associated Press was hacked on Tuesday and erroneously sent out a tweet saying there had been explosions at the White House, injuring President Obama.

Within a few minutes, Twitter suspended the account, and Julie Pace, the chief White House correspondent for The A.P., announced at a White House briefing that the account had been hacked.

Jay Carney, Mr. Obama’s press secretary, confirmed that the president was unharmed.

Editors at The A.P. soon followed with a statement saying that “The (at)AP twitter account has been hacked. The tweet about an attack at the White House is false. We will advise more as soon as possible.”

The Dow Jones industrial average plummeted more than 150 points when the news broke on Twitter — an indicator of traders’ presence on the social media platform — before immediately recouping the losses after it became clear that there had been no incident at the White House.

The A.P. typically uses Social Flow, a social media tool, to distribute tweets. But in this case, the attackers posted directly from the Web, according to the meta data associated with the tweet.

In the past few days, The A.P. discovered that malware had infected some of its company computers, according to a spokeswoman. Hackers can use malware to gain a foothold inside a company’s computer network and from there, can gain access to a company’s usernames and passwords to e-mail, administrative and social media accounts.

Shortly after the account was suspended, Mike Baker, a reporter for the news organization, posted a message saying that the attack may have originated with a spear-phishing campaign, in which attackers send a cleverly disguised e-mail from a friend, or work contact, that contains a malicious link or attachment.

Through a Twitter account, a group called the Syrian Electronic Army took credit for the attack.

Ops! @AP get owned by Syrian Electronic Army! #SEA #Syria #ByeByeObama http://t.co/HTKoO6gIL6

— SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA6) 23 Apr 13

That Twitter account is linked to the Web site Syrianelectronicarmy.com, a Syrian language Web site that broadcasts what the group says are its latest cyberattacks. Even as the Twitter accounts for @AP and @AP_Mobile were suspended Tuesday afternoon, the account for the Syrian Electronic Army was still live.

This is the third high-profile corporate account to be hacked in recent months. In February, Burger King’s Twitter account was hacked, the company’s logo was replaced by a McDonald’s logo and rogue announcements began to appear. A day later the Twitter account for Jeep was also attacked.

But the attackers used The A.P.’s Twitter account for more nefarious means. Within seconds, the erroneous A.P. headline about explosions at the White House had spread all over Twitter and been retweeted hundreds of times.

The incident, and hacking episodes before it, continue to raise questions about the security of social media passwords and the ease of access to brand-name accounts. Logging on to Twitter is the same process for a company as it is for a consumer, requiring just a user name and one password.

Twitter has tried to take an active role in ridding malicious content from its platform. It has manual and automatic controls in place to identify malicious content and fake accounts, and last year the company sued those responsible for five of the most-used spamming tools on the site.

But preventing hacking and identifying fake accounts continues to be more art than science. Security researchers estimate that as many as 20 million Twitter accounts on the platform are fakes, and real accounts continue to be catnip for hackers.

Boston in Lockdown

Posted by Ian Crouch THE NEW YORKER

 

 

Since Monday, most of the talk about the Boston Marathon bombing has centered on the city itself—narrowing in on the spot on Boylston Street, where a finish line was turned, as one runner said, into “a war zone.” But anyone who knows Boston knows that the city is much bigger than its official dimensions. It is the capital of New England, and its reach includes the places that surround it: Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, Chelsea, Revere. And, as much of the world now knows, Watertown, which is just a few miles west on the Charles River. In the frantic late hours of Thursday and early ones of Friday, Watertown became the site of a car chase, shootout, and manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a nineteen-year-old former student at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, who was born in Kyrgyzstan to a Chechen family and came to the United States nine or ten years ago. His brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was twenty-six, was killed in the night; according to reports, he was run over by his brother during an attempt to escape. News broke that Tamerlan had explosives on his body, which turned the search for his brother into an even more urgent and precarious effort. By late morning, the world was watching Watertown, where soldiers, police SWAT teams, bomb-sniffing dogs, explosives experts, and a barely corralled gaggle of press were all tracking someone assumed to be Dzhokhar. Residents were ordered to stay in their homes, and some tweeted photos of law-enforcement officers lying flat on neighboring houses, with machine guns drawn.

It was another in a series of blue-sky spring days. And for the fifth straight morning, much of the greater city was shut down. It started on Monday, when, in a festive mood, the streets of Boston were cordoned off for the marathon. It is an annual inconvenience, a joyous one that many people in Boston gripe about and love. On Tuesday, new barriers went up, blocking off a crime scene in the middle of the city. Those have stayed in place, and on Thursday, a new part of the city was closed down when President Obama travelled to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, in the South End, to lead a rousing interfaith service that was an emotional high point in a week of low ones. The trash got picked up this morning outside my apartment, in the South End, but that was before Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick gave a brief press conference in which he called for a citywide lockdown. The Boston and Cambridge police departments were tweeting out the locations of suspicious packages, which were being called in from all over the metro Boston area. Public transportation had been shut down, trains were stopped coming in and out of Boston, planes were being rerouted away from the city’s airspace, taxi service was suspended, schools were closed, and the city was told, in the words of Patrick, to “shelter in place.” Kenmore Square, one of the city’s beating hearts, was bare this morning. The blue-sky days have kept coming, but the weather has come to seem a kind of ill omen. Maybe we are all waiting for rain.

Robocalls went out across the city, reminding people to stay inside. Locked down, we turned to the television. As the hosts on CNN were reporting that Dzhokhar was considered “armed and extremely dangerous,” and warned that he might be contemplating “going out in a blaze of glory,” they were also pulling together interviews with people who had known him, and were learning incongruous things about him. He was, apparently, a thoroughly “Americanized” young man. He went to parties, was said to smoke marijuana from time to time. His father referred to him as a “true angel,” and an acquaintance suggested that he may have been roped into a bombing scheme by his older brother. On Thursday, at a memorial service at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, President Obama had talked about a city that opens its arms to young people from around the world: “Every fall, you welcome students from all across America and all across the globe, and every spring you graduate them back into the world—a Boston diaspora that excels in every field of human endeavor.” Dzhokhar might have been one of those people welcomed to the city, but he was a suspect in the murder of three young people and the maiming of dozens of others-the most serious terror attack in America since September 11th. How had Dzhokhar become radicalized so seriously and so fast? There were references to videos on what looked like might be one brother or the other’s social-media page, but nothing confirmed. Tamerlan had also been featured in the Boston University student magazine as an aspiring boxer. There he was quoted as saying, “I don’t have a single American friend, I don’t understand them.” The Tsarnaevs’ uncle held a press conference. He called them losers.

Greater Boston had been clamoring for information about the bombers for days, and was growing impatient. Scheduled F.B.I. press conferences on Wednesday had been postponed and then cancelled. Some in the press grew impatient, too, and began to report false information to fill the void. These rushes to judgment left everyone in a kind of uncomfortable limbo. That changed on Thursday evening, when two easels, covered in black, were brought into an F.B.I. press conference. Suddenly, the city had two faces to put to the bombing, which was reassuring but also brought a new, deeply uncomfortable element of humanity to the whole thing—it was easy to picture relatives or friends or even the pictured suspects themselves seeing these images and suddenly experiencing any range of emotion.

On Twitter, Jess Bidgood, of the Times, noted that everyone who had died so far in connected to the marathon attack was less than thirty years old. Boston is a place full of young people; it drains in the spring and fills in the fall. The loss of the young, and the idea that young people could have done this, may be the great madness of this all.

Krystle Campbell, from Medford, was twenty-nine. Lu Lingzu, a graduate student at Boston University, who had come to Boston from China, was twenty-three. Martin Richard, with a smile that no one in Boston will soon forget, was just an eight-year-old kid from Dorchester. Sean Collier, the M.I.T. police officer who was shot on Thursday night, was twenty-six. The first suspect in the shooting and the bombing, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was twenty-six. Meanwhile, the city is looking for Dzhokhar, who is nineteen.

Each day has brought news in a trickle. We’ve learned the names of victims and of the wounded, and have heard stories of the volunteers and bystanders who rushed to the aid of strangers. We’ve come to understand how a city’s hospitals were primed to respond to disaster so well. We’ve pored over bomb-making techniques, studied video, and zoomed in on photographs. Yesterday, we saw faces. And today we have names, and are casting our glances toward recent world history and to places far away from Boston, to Chechnya and Kyrgyzstan. Yet there remains a gaping hole in our understanding. It’s not about missing facts but, rather, a larger question, one that won’t be answered anytime soon. On Tuesday, after we had learned the name of the second victim of the attack, Krystle Campbell, her mother, Patty, spoke briefly to reporters. She was distraught, but her words came through: “This doesn’t make any sense.”

 

Brothers Seen as Good Students and Avid Athletes

By ERICA GOODE NY Times

One was a boxer who liked Russian rap videos and once said, “I don’t have a single American friend.”

The other, an all-star high school wrestler, listed “Islam” as his worldview on a Russian social-media page and was described by a neighbor as a “very photogenic kid” who had “a heart of gold.”

As a picture has begun to emerge of the two brothers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, who are suspected of carrying out the bombings at the Boston Marathon, it was difficult to distinguish them from millions of other young people who come to the United States to forge a future. The authorities are scrambling to determine how they might have evolved into terrorists who would plant powerful bombs in a crowd of innocent people.

The Tsarnaevs are believed to be of Chechen heritage and to have emigrated from Kyrgyzstan or another country in the region with their family to the United States in 2002 after living for some time in Makhachkala, capital of Dagestan in Russia.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger, graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in 2011, where he was listed as a Greater Boston League Winter All-Star wrestler. That year, he won a $2,500 scholarship awarded to 35 to 45 promising students by the City of Cambridge. He may be a student at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. On its Web site, the university said that “a person being sought in connection with the Boston Marathon bombing” had been identified as a student registered there. The university was closed down on Friday.

Mahmoud Abu-Rubieh, 17, a student at the high school, said he had known Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for almost three years as a friend and a wrestling teammate. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, he said, dressed “like any other student at our school,” favoring jeans or khakis, button-ups and T-shirts.

“I never heard him talk about politics,” Mr. Abu-Rubieh said. “He didn’t really bring up anything like that.” He said the last time he saw Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was about three months ago, when he stopped by wrestling practice.

“We exchanged a greeting,” Mr. Abu-Rubieh said. “He said it was nice to see that I continued to wrestle. If I wanted to convey any message it would be that he was a kind student, that many people respected him, he had many friends and was active in our school.”

Ashraful Rahman, 17, a senior at Cambridge Rindge and Latin, said that he and two other friends recognized Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s photo on television on Thursday night and one of them called the F.B.I.'s tip line.

But he said he could not believe that Dzhokhar, whom he met two years ago, could have been involved in the bombing.

“He would never come across as someone who would do anything like this, Mr. Rahman said.

He and Dzhokhar have much in common, he said. Both were wrestlers, both enjoyed boxing and were both Muslim. They would occasionally meet at the mosque in Cambridge, a few blocks away from their school, he said.

Dzhokhar’s closest friends were a group known among their classmates as “stoners,” according to Mr. Rahman. He described Dzhokhar as “laid back” and said that he had assumed he was born in the United States because he did not speak with an accent.

Mr. Rahman said he last saw Dzhokhar last August, near the end of Ramadan, during prayers at the mosque.

“Regardless of whether you knew him as well as I did, as someone who wrestled with him, hung out and chilled with him or whether you were people who saw him the hallway, he was always the same — a generally nice guy,” Mr. Rahman said, adding that he was a hard-working student and an even harder working wrestler.

When he was not wrestling, Mr. Rahman said, Dzhokhar “was not some testosterone ridden jock or anything like that, just a cool guy.”

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died after a shootout with law enforcement officers early Friday morning, was apparently studying engineering at Bunker Hill Community College when a photographer, Johannes Hirn, chose a young boxer as the subject of an essay for a photojournalism class at Boston University four or five years ago.

In the essay, the subject, believed to be Tamerlan Tsarnaev, is quoted as saying he had become devoutly religious, having abandoned smoking and drinking. He sounded alienated from Russia, saying that he would not want to box on the Russian team unless Chechnya achieved independence. The essay was later published in a university magazine, The Comment, according to Peter Southwick, director of the photojournalism program, who taught the class.

“There are no values anymore,” Mr. Hirn quotes him as saying. “People can’t control themselves.”

Tamerlan confessed a love for the movie “Borat” in the essay, and showed off his pointed shoes — “I"m dressed European style,” Mr. Hirn quotes him as saying.

In the caption of one photo, showing his muscled upper body, he says that he does not usually take his shirt off in front of women. “I’m very religious,” he says.

Larry Aaronson, a retired social studies teacher at the high school, lived a few houses from the Tsarnaev family on Norfolk Street, on the border between Cambridge and Somerville.

He became friendly, with Dzhokhar, who he said he saw often around the neighborhood but had not seen recently. He believed that Dzhokhar might have gone off to college, Mr. Aaronson said.

“He was gracious,” he said of the younger Tsarnaev brother. “He told me he was from Chechnya, and I asked him what that was like, and he never expressed any bitterness toward Russia or his situation.”

He added, “This comes as a total shock.”

Both young men had a substantial presence on social media. On Vkontakte, Russia’s most popular social media platform, the younger of them, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, describes his worldview as “Islam” and, asked to identify “the main thing in life,” answers “career and money.” He lists a series of affinity groups relating to Chechnya, where two wars of independence against Russia were fought after the Soviet Union collapsed, and lists a verse from the Koran, “Do good, because Allah loves those who do good.”

Ruslan Tsarni, the brothers’ uncle, said at a news conference at his home outside Washington on Friday that his nephews had difficulty adjusting to the United States and that he thought their actions came from “not being able to settle themselves and hating everyone who did.”

But he said he had not seen his nephews since December 2005, and he implied that some rift had occurred between the two families.

“My family has nothing to do with that family, he said. “I just want my family to be away from them.”

Mr. Tsarni said that the two brothers may have been radicalized but if so, it was not their father who was responsible. The father, he said, had recently moved back to Russia but had been working “fixing cars” in the United States.

“I never ever imagine that children of my brother would be associated with that,” he said.

He added: “I say, Dzhokhar, if you are alive, turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness.”

The family is part of a Chechen diaspora that dates back to 1943, when Stalin deported most of the population of Chechnya from its homeland and over concerns the Chechens were collaborating with the Nazy German invading army. Most returned to Chechnya in the 1950s, after the death of Stalin and lifting of the deportation order, but some stayed. Kyrgyzstan’s Chechen diaspora is concentrated in a steppe region on the Kazakh border, near the town of Talas.

The deportation was a searing, and in some cases, radicalizing experience. Among the former diaspora in Kyrgyzstan was the first rebel president of Chechnya in the post-Soviet period, Dzhokhar Dudayev, who hailed from the Kyrgyz diaspora villages, said Edil Baisalov, a former presidential chief of staff in Kyrgyzstan.

Irina V. Bandurina, secretary to the director of School No. 1 in Makhachkala, Russia, said the Tsarnaev family left Dagestan for the United States in 2002 after living there for about a year. She said the family — parents, two boys and two girls — had lived in Kyrgyzstan previously.

She said Dzhokhar, the younger boy, attended School No. 1 in the first grade, and Tamerlan attended school in Makhachkala through the eighth grade. She said she did not know them personally.

Although the Tsarnaev family is believed to have come to the United States in 2002, they were in Turkey on July 9, 2003, according to Muammer Güler, the Turkish Interior Minister, and left the country 10 days later from the capital, Ankara. There was no information on the family’s next destination after Turkey, the minister said.

Adnan Z. Dzarbrailov, the head of a Chechen diaspora group in Kyrgyzstan, said in a telephone interview that the Tsarnaev family lived near a sugar factory in the small town of Tokmok, about 70 kilometer, or 40 miles, from the Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. The last member of the family left years ago, he said. He described them as “intelligentsia” and said an aunt of the accused bombers was a lawyer.

Sultan Tsarnaev, a grandfather of the brothers, died in an accident in Tokmok in the 1980, when a propane tank he was carrying exploded, according to Mr. Dzarbrailov and Uzbek Aliyev, a Chechen living in Tokmok. Their uncle, Anwar Tsarnaev, studied at a university in Bishkek with Mr. Aliyev.

“They were good students, they were good people,” he said of the uncle and aunt of the accused bombers. Both brothers eventually emigrated from Kyrgyzstan, he said.

      

Reporting was contributed by Ellen Barry from Moscow; Andrew Kramer in Yekaterinburg, Russia; Serge F. Kovaleski and Katharine Q. Seelye from Boston; John Eligon, Adam B. Ellick, Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Dina Kraft from Cambridge, Mass.; Julia Preston from New Have, Conn.; and Emily S. Rueb and from New York.

 

---

April 16, 2013

In Grisly Image, a Father Sees His Son

By TIM ROHAN NY TIMES

 

BOSTON — When Jeff Bauman woke up in a hospital bed on Tuesday, an air tube was down his throat, both of his legs had been amputated at the knee, and his father was by his side. He tried to talk, but he could not.       

He looked angry, as he motioned his arms up and out like shock waves and mouthed: “Boom! Boom!”

Jeff Bauman is the man in the photograph that has become an icon of the Boston Marathon attack, the one showing a bloodied, distraught young man, holding his left thigh, being wheeled away by a man in a cowboy hat. If the world could not identify him immediately, Mr. Bauman’s father — also named Jeff Bauman — certainly could.

That was his son with his legs destroyed, wearing a favorite shirt. That was his son.

When the explosions went off at the Boston Marathon, Jeff Bauman, 52, called his son’s cellphone again and again — no answer. He knew his son was there, to cheer for his girlfriend, Erin Hurley, who was running her first Boston Marathon. For an hour, he kept calling, calling. No answer.

Then his stepdaughter, Erika, called him. “Did you see the picture?” she asked. “Jeffrey’s on the news. He got hurt.”

“Are you sure? Are you sure?” He was shouting now.

“Yes! Yes! I’m sure!” she shouted back.

Mr. Bauman found the picture on Facebook. It was not the whole picture, the one that showed Jeff’s left leg blown off at the calf. He started calling Boston-area hospitals and found his son registered at Boston Medical Center. He and his wife, Csilla, drove from their home in Concord, N.H., and reached Jeff’s side just before 8 p.m.

The surgery was already done. Both Jeff’s legs had been amputated at the knee. He had lost an excessive amount of blood. During surgery, the doctors had to keep resuscitating him, giving him blood and fluids, because he had lost so much.

Jeff, 27, is a good kid, never got in trouble, his father said. He likes playing guitar. He works behind the deli counter at Costco. He plans to pay off his student loans and go back to school at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

During the marathon, he was standing at the finish line waiting for Ms. Hurley, alongside her two roommates. Ms. Hurley was still about a mile away when the blasts went off, far enough away that she did not know what had happened. Why had everyone stopped?

Jeff was the first casualty brought to Boston Medical, his family was told. He went through the first operation and then a second, about 1 a.m., to drain internal fluids caused by the blunt trauma.

That night, Jeff’s half-brother, Alan, called from his boot camp at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Tex. His father told him Jeff had been hurt but did not say how badly. He planned to tell Alan the whole truth later.

The Baumans knew how lucky Jeff had been. “The man in the cowboy hat — he saved Jeff’s life,” Ms. Bauman said. Mr. Bauman’s eyes widened. He said: “There’s a video where he goes right to Jeff, picks him right up and puts him on the wheelchair and starts putting the tourniquet on him and pushing him out. I got to talk to this guy!”

The man in the cowboy hat, Carlos Arredondo, 52, had been handing out American flags to runners when the first explosion went off. His son Alexander was a Marine killed in Iraq in 2004, and in the years since he has handed out the flags as a tribute.

With the first blast, Mr. Arredondo jumped over the fence and ran toward the people lying on the ground. What happened next, he later recounted to a reporter: He found a young man, a spectator, whose shirt was on fire. He beat out the flames with his hands. The young man, who turned out to be Jeff Bauman, had lost the lower portion of both legs. He took off a shirt and tied it around the stump of one leg. He stayed with Mr. Bauman, comforting him, until emergency workers came to help carry him to an ambulance.

He helped only one man, Mr. Bauman.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Baumans wondered what had become of the man in the cowboy hat. They wanted to tell him that their son was alive, that he was moving his arms and legs.

But he might be in the hospital for two more weeks. What would he do when he was not so sedated? They plan to bring him his guitar. What would they say to him when he came to?

The elder Mr. Bauman covered his mouth with his hand. “I just don’t know,” he said, and he started to cry.

Binyamin Appelbaum contributed reporting from Boston, and Kitty Bennett contributed research from New York.

 

 

A Tale of Three Women

By MAUREEN DOWD NY TIMES

 

 

WASHINGTON

One got famous wearing mouse ears. One got famous wearing brightly colored shifts. And one got famous wearing down the opposition while carrying a handbag.

The trio of famous deaths this week seems incongruous. Yet these spirited women — two quintessential Americans known by their first names and one quintessential Brit known by her nickname — were all vivid emblems of their time.

Three very different worlds are conjured up when you think about Annette Funicello, Lilly Pulitzer and Margaret Thatcher.

As a tot, I spent every afternoon in my Mickey Mouse Club ears and underwear, clutching a red patent purse full of Milky Ways, glued to the television watching Annette and company. For my older brother and other boys on the brink of their teens, the blossoming Annette sparked the first frisson of hormones. The comely daughter of an auto mechanic, she grew up in the San Fernando Valley and came across as the unpretentious Italian girl-next-door who might actually be your friend, or date.

She was so shy she asked Walt Disney if she should see a shrink; he said no, that she might cure herself of the very quality that people loved.

Even later, donning two-piece bathing suits in her goofy beach party movies with Frankie Avalon, she seemed as innocent as Sally Field in her flying nun outfit. Mr. Disney, as she always called the man who discovered her at 12 in “Swan Lake” at the Burbank Starlite Bowl, implored her to cover her navel.

Annette was the avatar for carefree childhood and carefree summer. Maybe that’s why it was such a shock when she revealed in 1992 that she had M.S. The merry Mouseketeer and mother of three handled that merciless illness with grace, becoming the face of M.S., founding a fund to benefit research and serving as an ambassador for the Multiple Sclerosis Society. Years after using a walker to accept her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1993, Funicello lost the ability to walk or speak. But not before she shared how proud she was that M.S. sufferers had told her that because she went public, they were less embarrassed to go out with canes and wheelchairs.

“Like Cinderella, I believe a dream is a wish your heart makes,” she said, sweet-tempered even as the disease ravaged her. “I’ve had a dream life.”

Pulitzer, another ambassador of fun, fashioned her dream life by branding a sweet slice of the American dream. Like her fellow Palm Beach resident Jimmy Buffett, she cleverly patented Paradise Found. She made citrus-bright resort wear that was, as Vanity Fair put it, “shorthand for WASP wealth at play.” The clothes had down-to-earth snob appeal, as the magazine said in 2003, noting that Jackie Kennedy and her maid both wore Lillys.

Just as Annette did not give in to her disease, Lilly, the daughter of a Standard Oil heiress, did not give in to the dictates of her stuffy old-money background. After she married a Pulitzer heir and moved to Palm Beach, she wandered the town barefoot, threw wild parties, had three kids and suffered a nervous breakdown. A doctor told her, “You’re not happy because you’re not doing anything.”

Unconcerned about making a spectacle of herself, she opened a stand on Worth Avenue to sell the fruit from her husband’s orchards; then, she and a partner, wearing cheap, brightly patterned sheaths to hide fruit stains, had a eureka moment. Style is more than fashion, she said, and being happy “never goes out of style.”

While Lilly was known as “the ultimate party girl,” Maggie was “the ultimate conservative pinup.”

Margaret Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter and mother of modern conservatism, had her faults, heaven knows. The New Yorker’s John Cassidy called her a combination of Ronald Reagan, Ayn Rand and Dr. Strangelove. François Mitterrand said she had the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.

The Iron Lady could be harsh, but she was that rarest of creatures: a female leader who stayed womanly yet transcended gender. She “handbagged” opponents and offending underlings. She handled pols in the global boys’ club deftly — as little boys, when they needed it, or as swains, when she needed it. (A national security aide confirmed to me once that Reagan had a “sneaker” for her.)

I was in Aspen in 1990 when she told President Bush not to go “wobbly” on Saddam, blithely drilling down on the most sensitive part of the Bush psyche, the fear of being labeled a wimp.

My favorite Thatcher moment came while covering a Group of 7 meeting in Paris in 1989. President Mitterrand had given her bad placement twice compared with other world leaders: once at the opera and once on the reviewing stand for a parade marking the bicentennial of the French Revolution, held where King Louis XVI was guillotined. Also, Michel Rocard, the Socialist French prime minister, chastised her for “social cruelty.”

So as Maggie left Paris, she offered a pointed message about the excesses of the French Revolution, slyly presenting Mitterrand a book bound in red leather: “A Tale of Two Cities.”

Annette Funicello, 70, Dies; Beloved as a Mouseketeer and a Star of Beach Movies

By DOUGLAS MARTIN NY TIMES

 

Annette Funicello, who won America’s heart as a 12-year-old in Mickey Mouse ears, captivated adolescent baby boomers in slightly spicy beach movies and later championed people with multiple sclerosis, a disease she had for more than 25 years, died on Monday in Bakersfield, Calif. She was 70.       

Her death, from complications of the disease, was announced on the Disney Web site.

As an adult Ms. Funicello described herself as “the queen of teen,” and millions around her age agreed. Young audiences appreciated her sweet, forthright appeal, and parents saw her as the perfect daughter.

She was the last of the 24 original Mouseketeers chosen for “The Mickey Mouse Club,” the immensely popular children’s television show that began in 1955, when fewer than two-thirds of households had television sets. Walt Disney personally discovered her at a ballet performance.

Before long, she was getting more than 6,000 fan letters a week, and was known by just her first name in a manner that later defined celebrities like Cher, Madonna and Prince.

Sometimes called “America’s girl next door,” she nonetheless managed to be at the center of the action during rock ’n’ roll’s exuberant emergence. She was the youngest member of Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars tour, which included LaVern Baker, the Drifters, Bobby Rydell, the Coasters and Paul Anka. Mr. Anka, her boyfriend, wrote “Puppy Love” for her in her parents’ living room.

As a Mouseketeer, she received a steady stream of wristwatches, school rings and even engagement rings from young men, all of which she returned. She wrote in her 1994 autobiography, “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” that irate mothers often wrote back to say “how hard Johnny or Tommy had worked to save the money for the gift and how dare I return it?”

She said that if she had charm (she undeniably had modesty), it was partly a result of her shyness. Mr. Disney begged her to call him Uncle Walt, but she could manage only “Mr. Disney.” (She could handle “Uncle Makeup” and “Aunt Hairdresser.”)

At the height of her stardom, she said her ambition was to quit show business and have nine children.

With minor exceptions, like her commercials for Skippy peanut butter, Ms. Funicello did become a homemaker after marrying at 22. One reason, she said, was her reluctance to take parts at odds with her squeaky-clean image. She had three children.

Her cheerfulness was legendary. Her response to learning she had multiple sclerosis, a chronic disease of the central nervous system, was to start a charity to find a cure.

There was no irony, only warm good feeling, in her oft-repeated remark about the world’s pre-eminent rodent: “Mickey is more than a mouse to me. I am honored to call him a friend.”

Annette Joanne Funicello was born on Oct. 22, 1942, in Utica, N.Y., and as the first grandchild on either side of the family was indulged to the point of being, in her own words, a “spoiled brat.” At age 2, she learned the words to every song on the hit parade, her favorite being “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive.”

In 1946, her parents decided to move to Southern California in the hope of doing better economically. They lived in a trailer park until her father, a mechanic, found work. They settled in Studio City and later moved to Encino.

Annette took dancing lessons, learned to play drums and, at 9, was named Miss Willow Lake at a poolside beauty contest. She did some modeling. Mr. Disney, who wanted amateurs and not professional child actors, discovered her when she danced in “Swan Lake” at a local recital.

“The Mickey Mouse Club” was instantly popular, generating orders for 24,000 mouse-eared beanies a day. Annette quickly became the most popular Mouseketeer, and Disney marketed everything from Annette lunchboxes and dolls to mystery novels about her fictionalized adventures.

But she did not receive special treatment. When she lost a pair of felt mouse ears, she was charged $55. It was deducted from her $185 weekly paycheck.

She once decided she wanted to change her last name to something more typically American. She chose Turner. But Mr. Disney, whom she considered a second father, convinced her that her own name would be more memorable once people learned it.

In 1958, as “The Mickey Mouse Club” was ending its run, Mr. Disney summoned Ms. Funicello to his office. She feared she was going to be fired for growing too tall, but instead he offered her a studio contract — the only one given to a Mouseketeer.

Her first movie role was in “The Shaggy Dog,” Disney’s first live-action comedy. Then came the television series “Zorro.” Next she was “loaned out,” in industry talk, to CBS to appear on the Danny Thomas sitcom “Make Room for Daddy.” She also pursued a recording career, and had two Top 10 singles: “Tall Paul” in 1959 and “O Dio Mio” in 1960.

She and her family continued living as they had, with her father working five days a week at a gas station and everyone pitching in to do housework. She was not allowed to date until she was 16. When her mother was asked how she was able to keep life so normal, she answered succinctly, “Nothing impressed us.”

Ms. Funicello had crushes on her fellow singers Fabian Forte and Frankie Avalon but fell hard for Mr. Anka. “As Paul wrote in his hit song about us,” she wrote, “just because we were 17 didn’t mean that, for us, our love wasn’t real.”

But their careers were increasingly busy, and time together was scant. When Ms. Funicello finally told Mr. Anka that she really cared for him, he replied, “What script did you get that from?”

Her records continued, including the albums “Hawaiiannette,” “Italiannette” and “Dance Annette.” Movie parts included “Babes in Toyland,” in which she sang “I Can’t Do the Sum.” (She actually could, as proved by her straight-A high school record.)

When Mr. Disney told her he had been approached by American International Pictures about her making a beach movie, he said he thought it sounded like “good clean fun,” but asked her not to expose her navel. She readily agreed.

She and Mr. Avalon ultimately starred in a series of beach movies together, beginning with “Beach Party” in 1963. She harbored no illusions that she and Mr. Avalon were the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of their generation. “Ma and Pa Kettle of the surf set,” she suggested instead.

On Jan. 9, 1965, Ms. Funicello married her agent, Jack Gilardi. Charles M. Schulz, in his “Peanuts” comic strip, showed Linus reading a paper, clutching his security blanket and wailing: “I can’t stand it! This is terrible! How depressing. ... ANNETTE FUNICELLO HAS GROWN UP!”

She made a few films in the middle and late 1960s, including “Fireball” and “Thunder Alley,” but her attention was focused on her children, Gina, Jack Jr. and Jason Michael. During the 1970s and early 1980s, she appeared occasionally on TV but was known principally for commercials, including her memorable issuing of the Skippy peanut butter challenge: Which has more protein? (Bologna and fish were not the correct answers.)

In 1987, she and Mr. Avalon reunited to do a self-mocking beach party movie. She wore polka dots with matching hair bows, and he portrayed a work-obsessed car salesman who hates the beach. Their fictional son wore punk clothes and carried a switchblade.

But Ms. Funicello’s main concern was being a good mom, her daughter, Gina, said. In a 1994 interview, she told In Style magazine that her mother “was always there for car pools, Hot Dog Day and the PTA.”

In 1981 Ms. Funicello divorced Mr. Gilardi. In 1986 she married Glen Holt, a horse breeder. Mr. Holt, who cared for Ms. Funicello in her later years, survives her, along with her 3 children, 4 stepchildren, 12 grandchildren and 4 great-grandchildren.

Ms. Funicello learned she had M.S. in 1987 but kept her condition secret for five years. She announced the illness after becoming concerned that the unsteadiness the disease caused would be misinterpreted as drunkenness.

She set up the Annette Funicello Research Fund for Neurological Diseases and underwent brain surgery in 1999 in an attempt to control tremors caused by her disease.

But for many, Annette Funicello remained forever young, whether in mouse ears or a modest bathing suit. Some may even recognize a ditty from the long-ago television shows:

Ask the birds and ask the bees

And ask the stars above

Who’s their favorite sweet brunette;

You know, each one confesses:

Annette! Annette! Annette!