Why America Feels Like a Post-Soviet State

Why America Feels Like a Post-Soviet State 

By Masha Gessen

The callous nihilism of contemporary Russian society is everywhere in the Trump Administration’s response to the covid-19 pandemic.

I’ve been plagued by a nauseating sense of recognition lately. Story after story of the pandemic response in the United States reminds me of the country that I spent most of my professional life writing about: the Soviet Union and also the Russian state that was born after its collapse but which couldn’t shake many of its traits. 

One persistent Soviet trait is the ways in which Russian institutions handle information—what we might call “the culture of reporting upstairs.” The best-known example is the Soviet government’s coverup of the extent, nature, and danger of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. This wasn’t only, or even primarily, a matter of suppressing uncomfortable truths. What drove officials to lie was not so much a desire to conceal the facts from ordinary people as it was a need to supply the leadership with upbeat reports. For many officials, before and after Chernobyl, the production of cheerful stories that were entirely divorced from reality was a full-time job. They lied about the number of shoes that the country’s factories had made and about the length and location of roads that its workers had built. (Once, when I was eleven or so, my parents saw a television story about a newly built road and decided to take a trip to it in our recently acquired Zhiguli car. It turned out that there was no road—only a few feet of pavement where the report had been filmed.) Little that was made or said by official Soviet institutions fit, worked as intended, or made any sense, because so much of it existed only for the purpose of reporting upstairs. (An old Soviet joke: “What doesn’t buzz and doesn’t fit in your ass? A Soviet machine for buzzing inside your ass.”) 

I find myself recognizing this culture in the U.S. now, when, for example, I read a report in the Times on how the Trump Administration convinced itself, back in April, that the covid-19 pandemic was on the wane. Or when the Administration shifted the duty of collecting coronavirus data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the Department of Health and Human Services—the C.D.C. had been pliant but not, it seemed, pliant enough for Trump. Could moving data collection to a Cabinet agency explain why the curve of new cases seemed to flatten? I felt a similar sense of recognition when I read the Times’ report on the fifty-two-million-dollar temporary hospital in New York City that ended up treating a total of seventy-nine covid-19 patients, while people died of the virus in other hospitals, sometimes for lack of access to care. The facility, set up at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, in Queens, turned some patients away because they weren’t sick enough and others because they had a fever. Because confusion reigned over whether patients could be transferred there from other hospitals, very few were. The chaos recalled the U.S.N.S. Comfort, which also was supposed to ease the burden on hospitals in New York City. At what was nearly the local peak of the pandemic, only twenty of its thousand beds were occupied. Arcane and absurd rules and procedures kept it from admitting more patients. I thought back to all the times when I would tell a story about Russia to an American friend, and how they couldn’t understand how nonsensical rules could govern and destroy people’s lives. I could never really explain it, and I always had the sense that my friends didn’t quite believe me. For example: a person who had served time in prison in the U.S.S.R. could not obtain a residence registration—a government permit to live at a particular address—if they didn’t have a job, and they couldn’t get a job without a residence registration; not working, in turn, was an offense punishable by incarceration. 

The intentional institutional ineptitude and callous nihilism of contemporary Russian society is the product of a seventy-year Soviet totalitarian experiment—or so I have long believed. No such experiment took place in the United States. So how is it that the pandemic has made the U.S. resemble the post-Soviet Russian state? Part of the explanation lies with Donald Trump himself, in the ways in which he performs power. He acts like a totalitarian leader in the absence of totalitarianism—a Mafia boss without a Mafia—and to an astonishing degree he gets away with this act. He has created a culture of reporting upstairs that is reminiscent of the Central Committee of the Communist Party; as a result, Deborah Birx, once a highly respected public-health leader, is suddenly willing to obscure the impact of covid-19 for him, and the C.D.C. downplays its own safety guidance in urging schools to reopen. Some of the enabling behavior in Trump’s entourage can be explained by the President’s ability to damage almost any Republican politician’s career with a single tweet. But it is harder to understand why people who could leave the government to work in the private sector, without having to appease a deranged boss or debase themselves daily, continue to take part in his show. 

It may be obvious to an individual within a labyrinthine bureaucracy that things ought to be done differently—that a person should not be turned away from a hospital for having a fever—but individual actors have little power as cogs in the machine. In the cases of the Billie Jean King Tennis Center and the U.S.N.S. Comfort, one might have imagined Governor Andrew Cuomo or Mayor Bill de Blasio intervening to cut through red tape—each of them likes a grand gesture, and in their coronavirus responses they worked not in concert with but explicitly in opposition to the President. Still, bureaucratic absurdities dominated much of their conduct, and in the end they enforced irrational and inhumane rules. 

The U.S. and Russia have vastly different cultures, incomparable histories, disparate ideological influences, and divergent economies. One similarity that unites them, however, is radical inequality. In the Soviet Union, members of the Party élite lived in a different universe than the rest of the country. They had their own neighborhoods, schools, roads, resorts, stores, and, of course, their own health-care system. This is still true. A wealthy and well-connected Russian can receive world-class medical care, while ordinary people are reduced, much like in Soviet days, to having to buy their own disposable syringes and pay cash for nursing care in the hospital. Wealthy Americans also live in a different universe, and when they get sick they land in different hospitals than middle- and lower-class Americans—which, as the coronavirus has shown, makes it much more likely that they will survive. 

This radical inequality was a direct cause of the Soviet culture of reporting upstairs. The people who received and passed on the final reports of the number of shoes manufactured and roads built did not wear the shoes and did not travel the roads. It did not matter whether these stories were true, because those other people who used the shoes and roads, the ordinary Russians, might as well have never existed. This same culture permeates Trump’s Washington. Members of his Administration will not die because of a shortage of nursing care; they will not be turned away from any medical facility, and their children will not be attending any of the public schools that the Administration is forcing to reopen. They feel invincible. Trump can refuse to wear a mask, and his officials can stand by his side at his coronavirus briefings, because when they talk about the pandemic they are not talking about themselves. Neither was Cuomo, nor was de Blasio, talking about himself when he held briefings in New York. The disproportionate number of deaths among poor New Yorkers—the plain reality that many died because they had lesser medical care or no medical care—does not detract from New York’s pride in successfully flattening the curve. This fundamental sense of division—of alienation—between the people who run things and the people who die is what makes the rest of the pathetic debacle possible: the runaway bureaucracy, the adverse incentives, the lying. It’s possible because we are not in this together. 

Think the federal cops in Portland are scary?

Think the federal cops in Portland are scary? Police use these tactics all the time

Plainclothes police ‘jump-out boys’ terrorize American cities. Sometimes they become all-out criminal gangs

Brandon Soderberg and Baynard Woods @baynardwoods London Guardian

Chicago residents reported that plainclothes units acted like an ‘occupying army’ and made the neighborhood feel like ‘an open-air prison.’ 

People in Portland, Oregon, have protested against racism and policing for more than 50 consecutive nights, following the police killing of George Floyd on May 25. The violence of the police response has further stoked the anger of protesters, as it has around the country. 

In response, President Trump has empowered federal agents under the Department of Homeland Security to detain and arrest protesters. Many around the world were shocked when Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that federal agents wearing camouflage were driving around in unmarked vehicles, snatching up protesters, and speeding away. 

That description sounded all too familiar. We’ve spent much of the last five years reporting on the Baltimore Police Department. In reporting our new book, I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad, we found that police units in unmarked cars have long used terror and confusion to destabilize communities. 

During the uprising following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015, the national guard snatched up one protester and police attacked another on live television. Away from the cameras, we witnessed other agencies with unmarked uniforms rounding citizens onto school buses, for mass detention, often without ever formally charging them. 

Even before the uprising, Baltimore, like most American cities, has heavily relied on aggressive police squads to maintain order. Plainclothes police squads – “jump-out boys” – ride around in unmarked vehicles looking for citizens to tackle or throw against a wall, then search for guns or drugs. 

Police departments officially call it “proactive policing.” 

Chad Wolf, the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security, recently used similar language on Fox News to describe what is happening in Portland. 

“Because we don’t have … local law enforcement support, we are having to go out and proactively arrest individuals,” Wolf said. “And we need to do that because we need to hold them accountable.” 

Yet the police themselves are rarely held accountable. “Proactive policing” is, at its core, unconstitutional. These practices presume people guilty and ignore constitutional protections. We, in turn, are all too ready to ignore these violations, especially if the victim has a criminal record and the cops actually find drugs or guns during the search. 

The US Department of Justice’s 2017 report on policing in Chicago noted that residents reported that plainclothes units acted like an “occupying army” and made the neighborhood feel like “an open-air prison.” Police in Baltimore, where nearly 80 percent of the officers do not live in the city, have also been described as an “occupying army.” 

Many cities have made a troubling, quasi-fascist trade-off: Use terrorizing tactics to heavily police certain parts of the city, in the name of comforting the parts of the city and the suburbs which rarely see plainclothes police. 

In June, the New York Police Department abolished a plainclothes anti-crime unit and reassigned 600 plainclothes officers because of their involvement in a disproportionate number of shootings and their use of “stop and frisk” tactics widely considered racist and unconstitutional. 

In The New York Daily News, civil rights attorney Joel Berger said he was encouraged by the disbanding of New York’s plainclothes units, which follow an approach “designed as a form of social control to show people in minority neighborhoods who is in charge, just like stop and frisk.” 

Even those who support these tactics do not shy from this philosophy. In her 2016 book The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, the conservative writer Heather MacDonald argued that proactive policing is a form of “urban reclamation.” 

In Baltimore, this kind of policing has been exceptionally egregious. A special plainclothes squad called the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) was the subject of a sweeping 2017 federal indictment charging eight detectives with robbery and racketeering charges. All either pleaded guilty or were convicted and are currently serving sentences for widespread violations of constitutional rights. Before they became federal prisoners, however, these were decorated and celebrated police officers who acted precisely as we see Trump’s federal agents acting in Portland. 

According to the testimony of squadmate Maurice Ward, Wayne Jenkins, a 14-year veteran who ran the GTTF at the time it was taken down, would make as many as 50 unconstitutional stops a night. Jenkins used a technique he called a “door pop.” When he saw a group of Black men standing at, say, a bus stop, he would speed up in his unmarked car and slam the brakes. Another cop would pop open the door and they would chase and tackle anyone who ran. If the person had a gun, they arrested them. If the person had drugs, they stole and sold them. The police considered these people, a federal prosecutor later said, “beneath the law.”

Wiretaps and trial testimony revealed that because Jenkins wasn’t wearing a uniform or displaying any police identification beyond a tactical vest, he often lied to victims and said he worked for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) or the US Department of Justice. In one case in 2016, Jenkins and his squad stopped a man and his wife as they left a home repairs store. They took them to an unofficial interrogation site called “The Barn,” where Jenkins claimed to be a federal prosecutor. 

Then members of the GTTF took the couple to their home, in another jurisdiction, and detained them for hours. They found nothing illegal, so they didn’t arrest the couple for any crimes. They did, however, steal $20,000 from them. 

Because the man had a criminal record, no one believed him when he said police kidnapped and robbed him. The man’s wife later explained that she didn’t know if the people stopping her were even cops. This is common in Baltimore, where police in cargo pants and sneakers prowl around looking for trouble. Sometimes, members of the GTTF even wore masks so residents they ambushed would think they were criminals. In his guilty plea, Jenkins admitted that when he did this to a driver in 2010, the man panicked and crashed into another car killing its driver. Jenkins and a sergeant planted heroin to justify the chase. 

These aren’t isolated examples of “bad apples.” The US Department of Justice report on Chicago cites a case where two plainclothes officers wearing all black approached a couple, who thought they were being robbed and fled. One of the officers shot and killed the man. 

Whenever there is a perceived crime spike, calls for proactive policing are renewed. When the NYPD disbanded its plainclothes unit, police union president Patrick J Lynch said that “shooting and murders are both climbing steadily upward, but city leaders have clearly decided that proactive policing isn’t a priority” and they “will have to reckon with the consequences.” 

After Freddie Gray’s death, a rise in crime in Baltimore quickly turned the narrative from police reform to tough-on-crime solutions that further empower police. Every time members of the GTFF stole drugs or money, it created a ripple effect of violence. Those who were robbed had to answer to people they owed money or drugs. In one case, GTTF officers stole $10,000 from a man who was later murdered over a debt as he returned home from an appearance in court for the gun they charged him with. Of course, his murder, like those of the more than 300 other Baltimoreans killed that year, further justified increasing police powers – and expanding the police budget. 

In Portland, we are seeing the federal version of “proactive policing” sow confusion and chaos – and Trump is betting on the turmoil. Unaccountable police, whether in plainclothes or uniforms, create chaos, which allows authoritarian leaders to argue that we need more police power, the very thing that people in Portland – and across the country – are protesting against. 

Trump’s federal police simply expand the definition of who is “beneath the law” so that it encompasses white, middle-class protesters as well as Black and brown people. Now, he’s threatening to send the same shock troops to more cities. But our cities do not need more jump-out boys. They’re teeming with them already, and they’ve already contributed enough chaos and violence. 

Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg are the coauthors of I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad

Inside the Violent and Misogynistic World of Roy Den Hollander

Inside the Violent and Misogynistic World of Roy Den Hollander 

He was known for his hatred of women and frivolous lawsuits. Then he killed the son of a New Jersey federal judge before taking his own life, officials said. 

By Nicole Hong, Mihir Zaveri and William K. Rashbaum NY TIMES

Roy Den Hollander sounded bitter and angry when he bumped into a former rugby teammate in December at a library in Manhattan. He said he was so sick from a rare cancer that he could die at any moment, wondering aloud if he should sue his doctor for malpractice. 

Things kept getting worse for Mr. Den Hollander, a self-described “anti-feminist” lawyer who was known for his misogynistic tirades and the dozens of lawsuits he filed, many frivolous. A Manhattan judge dismissed one of them in May, and a few weeks later, a federal judge in New Jersey named Esther Salas canceled a scheduled hearing in a different suit. 

The delay followed years of resentment that he had harbored against Judge Salas over his unfounded claim that she was moving the case too slowly. That, in turn, built upon a lifetime of seething hatred toward women: He accused his mother of preventing him from having a girlfriend, and his ex-wife of marrying him only to obtain a green card. 

Mr. Den Hollander’s rage turned to violence this month when he showed up at Judge Salas’s home in New Jersey posing as a FedEx deliveryman and opened fire, killing her 20-year-old son and wounding her husband, investigators said. She was not harmed. 

Days before, Mr. Den Hollander, 72, had traveled by train to San Bernardino County, Calif., where he shot and killed a rival men’s rights lawyer at his home, the authorities said. 

Hours after the shooting in New Jersey, the police found Mr. Den Hollander’s body off a road in upstate New York with a single gunshot to the head. 

Mr. Den Hollander was captured on a surveillance camera in Union Station in Los Angeles. He killed a lawyer nearby, officials say. Credit...San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, via Associated Press 

In his nearby rental car, investigators found a list naming more than a dozen possible targets, according to people briefed on the investigation. Aside from Judge Salas and the rival lawyer, the list included the names of three other female judges and two oncologists, at least one of whom had treated Mr. Den Hollander. 

An examination of Mr. Den Hollander’s life shows how he represented the most violent elements of a male supremacist movement whose discourse online has become increasingly threatening toward women. 

He made his views clear in thousands of pages of writing. In his final months, he uploaded the last version of his autobiography, a 1,698-page manifesto that ended with an ominous epilogue about his determination to fight “feminazis” until his last breath. 

His beliefs swirled between the worlds of self-proclaimed anti-feminists and men’s rights activists. He ranted about what he perceived to be gender discrimination against men in family courts and other institutions, a focus of men’s rights activists, but also wrote blog posts calling for women to be killed. 

After a contentious divorce in 2001, Mr. Den Hollander began using the court system to address his grievances, suing nightclubs for advertising ladies’ nights discounts and Columbia University for having a women’s studies program. When he lost in court, as he almost always did, he would sometimes respond with lawsuits targeting the opposing lawyers personally — and even once sued a judge who had ruled against him. 

But by the end of his life, he was a man alone, facing terminal cancer, financial instability and a growing ostracization from the legal community and advocates for men’s rights, according to his writings and interviews with a dozen people who spoke with him in the past four decades. 

“It really appeared to be a classical story of someone who felt scorned, but then took it to a delusional, psychotic level in his response to it,” said Nicholas J. Mundy, the divorce lawyer who represented Mr. Den Hollander’s ex-wife. 

When Mr. Den Hollander felt aggrieved, Mr. Mundy said: “He stopped at nothing to harass you and make your life miserable. He was like The Terminator.” 

Mr. Den Hollander’s turn to violence appeared to be years in the making. In his autobiography, he mused about killing his mother and about sexual violence against a female judge in his divorce case. 

During his divorce proceedings in 2001, his wife accused him of threatening her with a gun. 

Mr. Den Hollander had long harbored a grudge against Marc Angelucci, the rival lawyer who served as the vice president of the National Coalition for Men, a men’s rights group. Last year, Mr. Angelucci won a major victory in a lawsuit he brought challenging the male-only military draft, an issue that Mr. Den Hollander believed belonged only to him. 

After Mr. Angelucci filed the lawsuit in 2013, Mr. Den Hollander called the coalition’s president and threatened violence. Mr. Den Hollander was then kicked out of the group. 

Mr. Den Hollander shot and killed Mr. Angelucci, 52, on July 11 at his home in San Bernardino County, the authorities said. 

Mr. Den Hollander had brought a lawsuit in New Jersey similar to Mr. Angelucci’s that was pending before Judge Salas. In his autobiography, he complained about delays in the case and appeared to be jealous of Mr. Angelucci’s victory. Last month, Judge Salas had canceled a hearing in the suit that had been set for June 25. 

In both the New Jersey and California shootings, the gunman wore a uniform resembling a FedEx driver, according to people briefed on the investigation. A spokesman for FedEx has said the company is cooperating with the inquiry. 

In his autobiography, Mr. Den Hollander wrote about impersonating a FedEx delivery man on the phone when he was stalking his ex-wife after their divorce to figure out when she would be home. 

Mr. Den Hollander grew up in Midland Park, N.J., a middle-class town about 25 miles northwest of Manhattan, and had a loathing for his mother, clinging to grudges against her. In his autobiography, he claimed that she told him she wished he had never been born and that she would not let him have girlfriend or learn to play a musical instrument. 

Mr. Den Hollander described getting in trouble in the third grade after trying to forcibly kiss two girls in his class, a pattern that would continue throughout his life. He later wrote that he was kicked out of a martial arts academy for “flirting” with women. 

After graduating high school in 1965, he briefly attended the University of Colorado and later took courses at Columbia University, but it was not clear if he ever received a bachelor’s degree. He graduated from the George Washington University Law School in 1985 and received his M.B.A. from Columbia Business School in 1997. 

During this period, he avoided the Vietnam War draft and drifted between jobs, working as a local news reporter and for political campaigns in New York, according to his resume. 

His many degrees and former employers created a veneer of respectability. Later in life, he sometimes brokered introductions with other lawyers by citing the fact that he once worked as an associate at Cravath Swaine & Moore, one of the most prestigious law firms in New York. (A spokeswoman for Cravath did not respond to a request for comment, but two lawyers confirmed working with him there in the late 1980s.) 

He then moved to Moscow, a turning point in his life. In 1999, he was hired to work in the Moscow office at Kroll Associates, a corporate investigations firm. 

Joe Serio, who helped him transition into the job as his replacement, said Mr. Den Hollander, who was in his early 50s at the time, talked openly about “keeping women in their place” and pursuing much younger women. He was obsessed with his own appearance, Mr. Serio said, dyeing his hair to look younger. 

A spokeswoman for Kroll did not respond to a request for comment. 

In 2000, Mr. Den Hollander married a Russian woman, Alina Shipilina, in Moscow and returned to New York with her later that year. 

The marriage quickly fell apart. He filed for divorce in 2001, accusing his wife of being a prostitute and of duping him into marriage to obtain a green card. She accused him of publishing her diary and naked photos online, citing an incident in which he threatened her with a gun, according to a complaint she filed that was posted on Mr. Den Hollander’s personal website. 

At the time of the divorce, she was 25 and he was 53, according to the records posted on the site. She did not respond to requests for comment. 

The divorce consumed him. He failed in his effort to seek an annulment to invalidate the marriage. Standing on the courthouse steps in New York after a divorce hearing, his devastation turned to hatred, he wrote in his autobiography. He said he wanted to bomb a feminist organization. 

“Finally,” he wrote. “I knew my real enemies, the ones who plotted my destruction from birth, the ones who smiled so sweetly through their blood red lips — dames.” 

For years afterward, the subject of his ex-wife came up constantly, according to four people who recall the conversations. 

After his divorce, Mr. Den Hollander’s legal crusade escalated, and he started filing a flurry of federal and state lawsuits. He often identified himself in court filings as an anti-feminist and a men’s rights lawyer, but some cases seemed to have no ideological purpose — like a lawsuit he filed in 2013 accusing the M.T.A. of overcharging for MetroCards. 

In 2007, he sued an upstairs neighbor in his Manhattan building, complaining of excess noise. After a routine court hearing in the case, Mr. Den Hollander chased the neighbor’s lawyer, Paul Steinberg, down a hallway and grabbed him from behind. They ended up scuffling on the floor, Mr. Steinberg said. 

That night, Mr. Steinberg filed a complaint with the court and cited Mr. Den Hollander’s misogynistic blog posts in arguing for extra security, “particularly when there are factors (such as a female judge) which may trigger unpredictable behavior by Mr. Den Hollander,” according to a copy of the complaint provided to The New York Times. 

Another female lawyer who had faced off against Mr. Den Hollander said a male colleague, after reading Mr. Den Hollander’s violent blog posts, once accompanied her to court in order to sit next to Mr. Den Hollander and create a physical shield for her. 

His unorthodox legal battles gained Mr. Den Hollander appearances on The Colbert Report and Fox News, but his notoriety alienated him from mainstream clients. In recent years, he took contract assignments helping big law firms review documents. One job paid $31 an hour. 

He filed for bankruptcy in 2011 and frequently bemoaned his declining income. At a hearing in 2018, he seemed embarrassed by his status, telling the judge, “I get by doing the lowest of lowest of legal work, called document review.” 

A legal services firm, Epiq Systems, fired Mr. Den Hollander in 2016 after he called another office worker an “illegal,” according to a lawsuit he filed against the company. A spokeswoman for Epiq confirmed that Mr. Den Hollander was terminated, without elaborating. 

Later that year, he made calls for the Trump campaign as a volunteer, according to his autobiography. He said he was drawn to Donald Trump’s views on immigration. 

An official with the Trump campaign said, “We don’t know anything about him, but the crimes in this case are horrific.” 

In 2015, in his suit challenging the constitutionality of the male-only military draft, Mr. Den Hollander represented a woman who wanted to enlist. It was a legal cause supported by women’s advocacy groups, but Mr. Den Hollander had a different motivation. He wrote in his autobiography that women should “finally know not just the benefits but also some of the real hell of manhood.” 

When the case was assigned to Judge Salas, he wrote that he was initially attracted to her and wanted to ask her out. Later on, he called her “a lazy and incompetent Latina.” He claimed that she had worked for organizations “trying to convince America that whites, especially white males, were barbarians.” 

The lawsuit is still pending and on Wednesday was assigned to a different federal judge in New Jersey. 

In late 2018, Mr. Den Hollander received a diagnosis of mucosal melanoma, a severe form of cancer, he wrote. 

It seemed that one of Mr. Den Hollander’s few remaining joys was playing rugby, which he said he originally joined to “keep myself in shape for the girls.” 

The rugby teammate who saw him in December, when he sounded bitter, said he also chatted with Mr. Den Hollander in a short phone call during the pandemic. Mr. Den Hollander did not elaborate on his health but said he appreciated the call, recalled the teammate, who spoke on condition of anonymity. 

In one of Mr. Den Hollander’s last court appearances, a federal judge in Manhattan ruled against him at a hearing in February 2018. Mr. Den Hollander became angry, and the judge urged him not to take the ruling personally. 

“It was a pleasure appearing before you, Your Honor,” Mr. Den Hollander told the judge, “but it is always personal.” 

Katherine Rosman and Alan Feuer contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research. 

Nicole Hong covers law enforcement and courts in New York. She previously worked at The Wall Street Journal, where she was part of a team that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for stories about secret payoffs made on Donald Trump's behalf to two women. 

Mihir Zaveri is a general assignment reporter in New York. He previously worked at The Houston Chronicle. 

William K. Rashbaum is a senior writer on the Metro desk, where he covers political and municipal corruption, courts, terrorism and broader law enforcement topics. He was a part of the team awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news.

Juan Marsé Spanish resistance writer

Juan Marsé, Who Wrote of Spain’s Dark Years, Is Dead at 87

His novels chronicled the difficult days after the Spanish Civil War. He was, his biographer, said, “the reference writer of the anti-Franco movement.” 

By Raphael Minder NY Times

  

MADRID — Juan Marsé, a Spanish writer whose novels mostly chronicled the dark years that followed the civil war in his home city, Barcelona, died there on Saturday. He was 87.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by the Carmen Balcells literary agency. His biographer, Josep Maria Cuenca, said the cause was heart failure.

Mr. Marsé wrote more than a dozen novels, several of them based on his experiences in La Salut and Guinardó, working-class neighborhoods of Barcelona. Those neighborhoods were home to many families who had fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, which was defeated by Gen. Francisco Franco.

The characters in some of his books are petty criminals or anarchists operating in the most oppressive years of the Franco regime, when Spain was being purged of his political enemies and struggling to recover economically from the war.

Mr. Marsé also loosely based some of his writing on events in Barcelona’s history, like the 1949 assassination of Carmen Broto, a prostitute. There was speculation at the time that the official version of her murder, for which a man was sentenced, had in fact helped shield some of her powerful clients from scandal. Mr. Marsé turned the story of her murder into the novel “Si Te Dicen Que Caí” (“If They Tell You I Fell”), published in 1973 in Mexico to circumvent the Franco censorship that targeted many of his works.

“I believe Marsé can be considered the reference writer of the anti-Franco movement, who also inspired a lot of writers who came from the working class,” said Mr. Cuenca, whose authorized biography of Mr. Marsé was published in 2015. Mr. Marsé, he added, “overhauled the literature of social realism in Spain.”

Juan Marsé Carbó was born Juan Faneca Roca in Barcelona on Jan. 8, 1933, and adopted as a baby. When he was growing up, his adoptive parents, Pep Marsé and Berta Carbó, told him that they had lost a child at birth but were then unexpectedly offered the chance to adopt him by the taxi driver who was driving the grieving couple home from the hospital. The driver’s wife, they said, had died just after giving birth.

But when Mr. Marsé was in his 70s, Mr. Cuenca told him that he had found flaws in that story while researching his biography. As it turned out, his adoptive mother had not lost a child at birth, and the taxi story was also invented. His adoption was actually agreed upon between his birth father and his adoptive father, who knew each other because they were both Catalan nationalist militants.

Upon hearing the truth, Mr. Marsé said that he still preferred his mother’s fabricated story, and that he understood she had made it up so that he could feel more protected, “the same way as good literature does with us.”

Mr. Marsé’s biological father, a chauffeur, and his biological mother, a domestic helper, worked together for a wealthy Barcelona household. His adoptive father held odd jobs, and his adoptive mother was an auxiliary worker in nursing homes and hospitals.

As a teenager, Mr. Marsé became an apprentice in a jewelry workshop, a job that he kept until the start of the 1960s. At the same time, he began writing for a cinema publication because he loved Hollywood. He later began writing short stories, which were published in various magazines starting in the late 1950s. While completing his obligatory military service in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in North Africa, he worked on his first novel, “Encerrados con un Solo Juguete” (“Locked Up With a Single Toy”), which was published in 1960.

In 1959 he won his first Spanish literary award, the Sesame prize, for a short story. He then left Barcelona for Paris, where he worked as a translator, a Spanish-language teacher and a clerk at the Pasteur Institute, France’s prestigious medical research center.

In 1966, after returning to Barcelona, Mr. Marsé published “Últimas Tardes con Teresa” (“Last Afternoons With Teresa”), a novel about class divisions, which propelled him to fame and is considered his masterpiece. It chronicles the struggles of Manolo, a working-class petty criminal nicknamed El Pijoaparte, who tries to seduce Teresa, a girl from Barcelona’s bourgeois society. (The word “Pijoaparte” does not officially exist in the Spanish language. But, Mr. Cuenca said, it “will have to get added into the dictionary sooner or later,” because it is now commonly used in Spain to describe an ambitious and unscrupulous person who comes from a humble social background.)

In 2009 Mr. Marsé was given the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s most important literary honor, at the University of Alcalá in Alcalá de Henares, Spain.Credit...Pool Photo by Susana Vera

Among the awards Mr. Marsé won was the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s most important literary honor, which he was given in 2009.

In a 1979 New York Times review of an English translation of “The Fallen,” another of Mr. Marsé’s works that had been banned by Franco’s regime, Ronald Fraser described Mr. Marsé as “one of the finest Spanish novelists of the postwar generation” and called the novel “a vivid recreation of corruption, brutality and repression” in the years that followed the civil war.

Mr. Marsé’s “Últimas Tardes con Teresa” (“Last Afternoons With Teresa”), published in 1966, is considered his masterpiece.

In his youth, Mr. Marsé was briefly a member of the Spanish Communist Party, but he soon fell out with the party leadership. Although he grew up speaking Catalan, he wrote only in Castilian Spanish; this disappointed a Catalan nationalist movement that was hoping to gain support from Barcelona’s most famous writers, but that found in Mr. Marsé an ardent critic of Catalonia’s separatist politics.

In addition to writing novels, Mr. Marsé collaborated on some movie scripts, while several of his novels were turned into movies. But he was never happy with those adaptations, and he publicly clashed with some of the directors responsible for them.

“All the movies have been very faithful to the literary text, too faithful,” he once said. “I think they should have been turned upside down like a sock. There are other ways to say the same as in the book.”

Mr. Marsé is survived by his wife, Joaquina Hoyas, whom he married in 1966, and their children, Alejandro and Berta.

In September, Mr. Marsé’s publishing house, Lumen, plans to release one more of his books: “Viaje al Sur” (“Travel South”), a travelogue he wrote while visiting Spain’s Andalusia region in 1962. The manuscript of that book had long been missing and was only recently found.

How Jair Bolsonaro and the Coronavirus Put Brazil’s Systemic Racism on Display

How Jair Bolsonaro and the Coronavirus Put Brazil’s Systemic Racism on Display

By Anakwa Dwamenaore 

President Jair Bolsonaro tested positive for covid-19, the pandemic was ravaging the country’s poor neighborhoods and prisons.two per cent

Several months before the coronavirus first arrived in Brazil, this spring, a series of man-made tragedies befell Maria Marques Martins dos Santos. On November 12, 2019, dos Santos, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of three, whose five-foot frame is crowned by curly brown hair, was at her home, in Favela do Amor, in São Paulo. Just after midnight, her fourteen-year-old son, Lucas, went out to buy soda and cookies and never returned. Three days later, his drowned body was found in a nearby lake, after what witnesses said was an encounter with military police. Four days later, when dos Santos went to the police station to try to identify which officers had attacked her son, the police detained her, telling her that there was an outstanding warrant for her arrest. Eleven days later, on November 30th, in handcuffs and jail clothes, she looked on in pain as her son’s decayed body was buried in a sealed coffin.

Over the next four months, with dos Santos in jail, the coronavirus arrived in Brazil, first afflicting the wealthy and then spreading to poorer neighborhoods and prisons. São Paulo’s penitentiaries, which hold about forty per cent of Brazil’s total incarcerated population, are notorious for their lack of health care. Dos Santos’s family feared that she had effectively been given a death sentence. All over the world, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed and exacerbated class and racial inequalities. In Brazil, where the six richest men hold the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the population, the crisis’s disproportionate burden on poor Black and brown people has challenged the country’s popular, deep-seated illusion of being an equal, raceless society. Largely by incarcerating Black and brown people, Brazil has, in the past decade, become home to the world’s third-largest prison and jail population, overtaking Russia. In that time, the country’s prison population has doubled. Brazil’s prisons are breeding grounds for sicknesses: water is rationed; a lack of on-site medical care means that sick people are constantly shuttled back and forth between public hospitals and prisons; and overcrowding is endemic—on average, prisons in Brazil exceed their capacity by sixty-six per cent. For dos Santos and Brazil’s seven hundred thousand other inmates, social

Social Isolation is impossible.

Amazingly, a full thirty per cent of the people incarcerated in Brazil have not been convicted of a crime. About a third of the country’s prisoners are behind bars on drug charges, and the majority of them are Black mothers like dos Santos. Recognizing the threat of the pandemic, the National Justice Council, a government judicial-oversight board, recommended in March that judges release prisoners who have not committed violent crimes and who are members of at-risk groups: pregnant women, nursing mothers, and mothers or legal guardians of children up to twelve years old. “In São Paulo alone, there are 11,284 people with no history of criminality that have a right to reduced sentences under this guidance,” Marcelo Novaes, dos Santos’s lawyer, told me. But judges, who are the only officials who can lower sentences, have been reluctant to do so: under the guidelines issued by the National Justice Council, thirty-five thousand prisoners are eligible for release, and of the twenty-five thousand who have applied for it judges have released only seven hundred thus far. As the coronavirus has spread in Brazil, the country has experienced the second-highest number of infections and deaths of any nation in the world, behind only the United States. In its jails and prisons, some inmates are preëmptively writing goodbye letters to their families.

“What we are trying to avoid is a massacre,” Luciana Zaffalon, a Brazilian criminal-justice-reform advocate, told me. Zaffalon leads the Brazilian Platform for Drug Policy, one of several groups pressing judges to release vulnerable prisoners. In 2006, a law passed that allowed leniency toward users and instituted harsher measures on dealers. In response, prosecutors and judges shifted to charging people with small amounts of cocaine or crack as dealers, which carry sentences of between five and fifteen years. Advocates for criminal-justice reform say that judges also began charging poor, often Black women as dealers, because few of them can afford costly private defense lawyers and are therefore easier to convict than wealthy defendants. As a result, between 2000 and 2016, the population of women in prison rose nearly seven hundred per cent, to roughly forty-four thousand inmates. Zaffalon, who is the former ombudsman general of São Paulo state’s public defender’s office, blamed the government’s resistance to releasing people on a tough-on-crime mentality among judges which has disproportionately affected poor Black and brown people. “Almost all criminal cases are from Black and poor people who don’t have money to hire a private lawyer to appeal their cases,” she said.

Corruption has long plagued Brazil’s court system. Most of the judiciary budget goes to the salaries of judges, many of whom are older, white men who graduated from the country’s élite universities. The Justa Project, an organization fighting for increased judicial transparency, found that a hundred per cent of those who become judges end up in the top 0.08-per-cent wealthiest segment of the population, which the group contends is a clear sign of systemic racism and corruption. 

Since March, a visitation ban at prisons has prevented families from bringing food to the incarcerated—a common practice in a country where many inmates, owing to the gross underfunding of the prison system, are underfed. Andrelina Amélia Ferreira, who leads the movement Mães do Cárcere (Mothers of the Incarcerated), told me that she has heard stories of inmates eating toothpaste out of desperation and hunger. “Even if they get sick,” Ferreira said, “it is their right to die with their family and not alone in prison.” For the past eighteen years, Ferreira has used her home as her headquarters, and counselled twenty to thirty women a day there. She told me she fears for the lives of prisoners in a way that she never has before. “I am a woman who grew up in a simple community, inside the periphery, and I can say that I have never been so afraid as I am right now,” she told me. “We do not know who will stay alive, who won’t.”

On Tuesday, after mocking the risk of coronavirus infection for months, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro announced that he had tested positive for the virus. Since the arrival of the pandemic in Brazil, Bolsonaro has single-handedly created chaos: he has belittled its severity, despite overwhelming evidence of its danger; publicly defied social-isolation measures by walking among crowds and shaking hands, and encouraging others to do so; fought with and fired a health minister, and undermined the efforts of the rest of the country’s leaders. Asked about the rising number of cases in São Paulo, in an interview on March 27th, Bolsonaro replied, “I’m sorry—some people will die. They will die. That’s life. You can’t stop a car factory because of traffic deaths.”

As infection rates have risen in Brazil, a clearer picture has emerged of which lives the President apparently deems disposable. In the beginning of the outbreak, the largest number of cases were in wealthy neighborhoods—the only places with access to tests. Over time, workers at the Vila Formosa necropolis, the largest cemetery in Latin America, noticed an acceleration in deaths among people on the peripheries of the city. Now the rate in favelas and peripheries is officially ten times higher than the average in the rest of the country. More than half of Brazil’s cases are in its southeastern region, where roughly ten million people live in homes not connected to sewerage networks, and about seven million have no access to running water. The inequality in Brazil’s health system is extreme, as well. Sixty per cent of the I.C.U. beds in the state of São Paulo are in three of its wealthiest regions, and only twenty-five per cent of the population nationally has private health insurance or can afford it. The resulting disparity by race in coronavirus-related death rates is glaring: Blacks in São Paulo are sixty-two per cent more likely to die from covid-19 than whites.

A Sidewalk Execution; Elijah McClain

A Sidewalk Execution

Elijah McClain was injected with ketamine while handcuffed. Some medical experts worry about its use during police calls. 

Ketamine, a powerful sedative, might be given by paramedics to calm people who appear agitated. But some medical and legal experts question its use during police calls. 

By Erik Ortiz NBC NEWS

As state and federal inquiries widen into the case of Elijah McClain, a young Black man who died last summer after Colorado police placed him in a chokehold, the decision by paramedics to inject him with a powerful sedative while he was handcuffed has raised questions about its use during police calls and whether such medical treatment violates a person's rights. 

Fire and emergency medical services officials in the Denver suburb of Aurora have said a preliminary review found that medics' actions on the night police detained McClain, 23, were "consistent and aligned with our established protocols." But some medical and legal experts worry that ketamine — or any form of an anesthetic — raises too many unknowns and that it should not be used to subdue someone in a police action. 

"Why anyone would be giving ketamine in that circumstance is beyond me," said neuroscientist Carl Hart, chair of Columbia University's psychology department. "The major problem here is we should never be ordering any medication, and no one should be taking or given it against their will." 

McClain's death has drawn new attention amid high-profile fatal encounters involving law enforcement against Black Americans, leading to protests. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has appointed a special prosecutor to re-evaluate the case. 

Just after 10:30 p.m. on Aug. 24, McClain, a massage therapist, was buying iced tea from a corner store, his family said. They said he wore ski masks because he had a blood condition that made him feel cold. 

Three Aurora police officers were called to the area on a report of a suspicious person wearing a mask and waving his arms. 

JUNE 30, 202005:06 

Bodycam video showed officers ordering McClain to stop. He responded that he was an introvert and to "please respect the boundaries that I am speaking." 

After questioning him, the officers grabbed McClain. Then one of them said he believed McClain had reached for one of their holstered guns, and McClain was brought to the ground. Police said in a statement that he "resisted contact, a struggle ensued, and he was taken into custody." 

The officers took McClain to the ground using a carotid control hold, a type of chokehold meant to restrict blood to the brain to render a person unconscious. Aurora police banned carotid control holds last month, and chokeholds have been prohibited by police departments across the country in the wake of the death in May of George Floyd, a Black man pinned by his neck while in Minneapolis police custody. 

McClain "briefly went unconscious," according to a report the local district attorney, Dave Young, completed last fall. McClain could also be heard in the police video telling the officers, "I can't breathe, please," and he vomited while he was on the ground. 

A medic told officers that "when the ambulance gets here, we're going to go ahead and give him some ketamine." 

The officers responded, "Sounds good," and they told the medic that McClain appeared to be "on" something and that he had "incredible strength." 

An Aurora Fire Rescue medic injected McClain with 500 milligrams of ketamine, according to the district attorney's report. 

The coroner found that McClain's death was due to "undetermined causes," and according to Young's report, the "evidence does not support the prosecution of a homicide." McClain had marijuana in his system along with the ketamine, which the coroner suggested was a "therapeutic level." 

But the coroner did not rule out that the chokehold, in addition to the ketamine, might have contributed to his death. 

"Although there is no evidence to support ketamine overdose," according to Young's report, the coroner "could not exclude the possibility that Mr. McClain suffered from an unexpected reaction to the drug." 

The medic at the scene estimated that McClain weighed 220 pounds, Young's report said. But the coroner said he was 5 feet, 6 inches tall and weighed 140 pounds. 

According to documents shared by Aurora Fire Rescue, the standard dose of ketamine is 5 milligrams per each kilogram of a person's weight. That would mean that instead of 500 milligrams of ketamine, McClain should have received about 320 milligrams. 

The ketamine was given via syringe into his right shoulder, according to Young's report. 

"After approximately two to three minutes, Mr. McClain calmed down," the report said. "He was placed on a gurney, his handcuffs were removed, and he was placed into soft restraints ... and loaded into the ambulance." 

About seven minutes after he received the ketamine, McClain had no pulse in the ambulance and went into cardiac arrest, the report said. Medics were able to revive him, but he was later declared brain dead, and he was taken off life support less than a week later. 

Young declined to press charges. 

"Under the circumstances of this investigation, it is improbable for the prosecution to prove cause of death beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury," Young wrote in a letter to Aurora's police chief. 

Mari Newman, an attorney for McClain's family, said that the ketamine was unnecessary and that she wants a thorough investigation. 

"The Aurora medics had no right to inject Elijah with ketamine at all," she said. "He was handcuffed, crushed against the ground by officers much larger then he was, and he was not fighting. He was begging for his life, vomiting and trying to breathe. And they certainly had no right to involuntary inject him with a dose intended for someone over twice his size." 

City officials in Aurora on Thursday announced an independent review of the McClain case, and it is expected to include "a team of experts who will thoroughly examine the actions of Aurora police, firefighters and paramedics in the case." 

According to a news release, Mayor Mike Coffman said "it is imperative that the city moves forward quickly and urgently with this investigation to provide answers to the community." 

What does ketamine do?

Ketamine, if administered properly, can be safe, said Jason Varin, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy. 

In lower doses, it can be used to treat acute pain, Varin said, while at higher doses, it becomes a dissociative anesthetic, which means that not only does it help physically, but that a person's reality — feelings, thoughts and understanding of what is occurring — is also "disconnected" and he or she may have limited memory of what is happening. 

Ketamine is known as the street drug "Special K" because of how it induces a trancelike state, which is often referred to as a "K-hole." Variations of ketamine have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat depression. 

Such drugs, are quite mysterious as to how it works in some cases," Varin said. 

Ketamine may be dangerous to people who suffer liver failure, he added, and it can affect blood pressure, cause rapid heart rate or an irregular heartbeat, prompt seizures or muscle twitching, and induce extreme anxiety or hallucinations as a person comes out of it. 

MARCH 6, 201905:58 

Ketamine is most commonly used by veterinarians on animals and as an anesthetic in some surgical procedures on people. During police-related calls, however, medics may not have the full scope of a person's medical history to anticipate how they will react to it. 

"Since it is highly unlikely they can tell the state of health of the individual or if they have non-prescribed drugs, alcohol or prescription medications ... these combination of risks could cause any number of problems, including respiratory depression and cardiac arrest," Varin said. 

The department began using the medication in January 2019, KDVR-TV of Denver reported in October. 

Sherri Jo Stowell, a spokeswoman for Aurora Fire Rescue, told NBC News on Friday that ketamine had been used 18 times in 2019 and at least twice in 2020. She said the use of any medication is reviewed by trained professionals. 

"Aurora Fire Rescue is sympathetic to the pain that members of Aurora's community, especially Elijah's loved ones, are experiencing," the department said in a statement last month. "For the sake of progress and healing, our department welcomes the attention the incident is receiving including the forthcoming independent investigation." 

In Colorado, EMS providers are permitted to use ketamine for pain management and to treat a syndrome known as "excited delirium," but they must first obtain a waiver from the state health department. 

It is not uncommon for medics to use ketamine outside hospital settings to treat patients who appear agitated and may harm themselves or others, according to the state. 

Statewide, 427 people were given ketamine for agitation from August 2017 to July 2018, and about 20 percent of patients had to be intubated at a hospital, The Denver Post reported. 

In the same month McClain was provided ketamine, a 25-year-old man in another Denver suburb was given a 750-milligram, two-dose injection of the drug during a police encounter, KDVR reported. The state health department said last week that it is investigating the case. 

Aurora police spokeswoman Faith Goodrich said officers are not involved in ordering or administering ketamine, which is left to the discretion of a medic. 

Hart, the neuroscientist, said that given the amount of ketamine McClain is known to have received, "I am certain that he thought he was losing his mind." 

Ketamine use for excited delirium

McClain's "sudden collapse after an intense struggle" with police is referred to in the coroner's report as an example of excited delirium. 

The medic who authorized the use of ketamine had told investigators that he could not gather information from McClain about his medical history because he was acting combative and "appeared to be" exhibiting signs of the syndrome, which may be triggered by drug use or stimulants and is broadly considered to be a state of agitation or aggression. 

State health department guidelines note that the use of ketamine for excited delirium "is an emerging treatment" and that "across the country, many physicians question the existence of an excited delirium syndrome." 

While it can be controversial to diagnose someone with excited delirium, because many medical professional associations do not recognize it, Dr. Deborah Mash, a professor of neurology at the University of Miami, told NPR that the phenomenon is "definitely real." 

"And while we don't know precisely what causes this, we do know it is the result of a neural chemical imbalance in the brain," she said. 

Excited delirium has been mentioned in connection with dozens of cases of excessive force and police-involved deaths, including cases in which police eventually used stun guns to shock people into submission, according to Amnesty International. 

One of the four Minneapolis officers charged in the death of Floyd had said, "I am worried about excited delirium or whatever," according to the charging document. 

JUNE 26, 202002:10 

Ketamine has also been linked to other excited delirium cases. In 2018, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported that Minneapolis police officers asked medical responders to use ketamine on people — at times over the objection of those being drugged and, in some cases, when no crime appeared to have occurred — more than 60 times in 2017, up from three in 2012. 

Hospital officials had argued that ketamine helped manage people with excited delirium. The uptick, however, led Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo to prohibit officers from recommending medical treatment to EMTs. 

Kenneth Udoibok, a Minneapolis lawyer who specializes in civil rights and police misconduct cases, filed a federal lawsuit in 2017 on behalf of a man who said police mistook him for a suicidal man in the parking lot of a hospital. The man was handcuffed and then eventually injected with ketamine by a paramedic against his will, according to the lawsuit. Officials described the man as exhibiting "erratic" behavior, but he said he was agitated because police detained him on the ground in the rain for an hour. 

The lawsuit's case against the police was dismissed before trial, and the case against the hospital was resolved out of court. 

Udoibok said sedation lawsuits are hard to win, because without video recording, it is difficult to prove that an officer coerced a paramedic to sedate a person. 

"It's a complete violation of an individual's rights," Udoibok said. "And it's the perfect crime. You can never prosecute it." 

Carl Takei, a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union who focuses on police practices, said ascribing a person's actions to excited delirium can create a shield for officers who use excessive force. 

Then to "stick a needle into somebody" who is considered physically threatening only makes an already fraught situation involving police that much more dangerous, Takei said. 

"Any time that an EMT is administering a medication against a person's will, that raises medical ethics issues, as well, that are not resolved simply because a police officer wanted them to do it," he said. "That goes into the underlying question: Was this invasion of a person's body justified?"

From David A Fairbanks:

White police officers accosted this man, terrorized him, and he naturally resisted because he feared for his life. They executed him so he could never tell the truth. Police described him as a "out of control 220 pound 6 foot male very likely on meth or crack or something else." He was 5 feet 6 inches at 140 pounds was not on any narcotic. Police said he grabbed at their weapon, this is a standard police tactic to say on video to mislead investigators.  

From the start the police knew he was harmless. The executed him because they could. The did not see him as human, but as a animal to be taken down. These police officers were finally fired after a video showing them acting out the execution and laughing.

Aurora Police will never admit to anything, they do not acknowledge Blacks as credible human beings. This is one of many racist assaults by this police department.