Author Archives: chrislombardi

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About chrislombardi

Journalist, novelist, educator.

valuable lesson for investigative reporters

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As many know, I’ve kept poking around at the high school story I wrote about last month. And I’ve complained more than is probably seemly about the angst of it all – about how tiring it is to meet with numerous scared sources, dig through raw data, the tricky task of presenting the results in a balanced picture.

Now I’m embarrassed – because all my angst was about internal consequences. But no sooner had this story arrived in newsboxes on Friday than the real-world consequences feared by those sources began. One of my main sources, quoted in an earlier story, was escorted out of the school building and told he was being “reassigned” from the building where he’d taught for 11 years. Another was told by the principal, who’s leaving the school two years short of being eligible for retirement, that he had “something in store” for her on Tuesday. a

I now can’t mention honorably the way learning that made me feel. Their bravery astounds me. Thank god they have a union, and a contract that doesn’t proscribe talking to the press.

And my only consolation is that the piece may help the kids in that school, who deserve better than they’d been getting, and who didn’t get to talk to me at all.

The real indictment may be of schools chancellor Joel Klein, who honorably wanted to change the rules that had failed to serve low-income students for year – but by demanding instant results, and discouraging the value of experienced educators, may have damaged some kids’ prospects beyond repair. It’s too early to know that for sure; we’ll only know in 20 years if the events I’m noticing are core to the process or just the collateral damage of a more useful process.

Updated: When Wall Street uses Google for evil

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Well, now that the investor-landlord meme I wrote about last week has finally caught on, the Village Voice and the Times note a brilliantly evil use of “the Google ” by these new owners, They find someone with a similar name somewhere else, and claim that the rent-stabilized apartment is not a tenant’s primary residence.

The Oliveiras ultimately got their lease. But McCreanor, the housing attorney, has filed a lawsuit that is filled with similar instances of apparently over-eager accusations. One plaintiff is Nelis Fuentes, 75, who has lived in the 88th Street building for 21 years. Vantage has told her that it knows her real residence is in Miami, where another man with her ex-husband’s name—Jose Fuentes—lives.

“How many Jose Fuentes are there in the country?” asked [attorney] McCreanor. His lawsuit claims that such deceptive practices have become a Vantage trademark and should be barred under consumer-protection statutes.

All the media attention appears to have gotten the City Council’s attention, at least. Queens’ Eric Gioia has done the math, and concluded the obvious:

Gioia has pledged to hold hearings on the impact of the new investment firms on the affordable-housing stock.”When I look at their business plan and I see it is predicated on a 20 percent turnover, the only way you can do that is to have an orchestrated plan to force people out,” said Gioia. “There’s no other way to figure it.”

From my little corner of reporting, I’d advise he look not just into Vantage but Townhouse Management, GFI, and Cardinal Investments. Then Gioia can be the one asking the question I asked last time, about banks that lend money expecting evictions.

Update, 5/26: It’s not just investors that do it, but owners who court them the hardest. The Times just learned that Tishman-Speyer has been playing this game too:

In 2007, Tishman Speyer accused Dolores J. Shapiro, 62, an anthropologist and retired professor of nursing, of actually living in Naperville, Ill. Ms. Shapiro says she has never been to Naperville. She hired a lawyer, James B. Fishman, who discovered in an Internet search that a woman with the same name but a different middle initial — Dolores M. Shapiro — appeared to reside at the Naperville address.

The relevant sentence to my core question: “A financing document for Tishman Speyer’s purchase states that the company expects to have converted about 57 percent — 6,397 — of the two complexes’ units to market-rate rents by January 2011.” Part of that estimate, they admitted, was betting that elderly tenants would die, but I guess they figured a little Googling never hurt. Again, how can the credit offered under such “financing statements” be anything but dirty money?

Meanwhile, the folks at Google still get to contemplate what “Don’t be evil” really means.

Part two, notes from Winter Soldier on the Hill

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“You’re telling us that what we’re doing there is bloodying our hands,” Representative Maxine Waters told members of Iraq Veterans Against the War halfway through Thursday’s hearing, also known as Winter Soldier on the Hill.

Waters added that much of the information she was hearing was new, and that it felt truer than all the administration’s happy-talk about Iraq, all the hopeful phrases meant to encapsulate this or that stage of the war. After ” shock and awe, last throes, clear and hold, the surge,” she said, “We have had enough.”

As I reported in part one, by then the handful of House members at the informal session had heard first-hand accounts of kicking in doors, shoot-first policies, abuse of detainees and other hazards of occupation. All had been laced with searing self-criticism on the soldiers’ part, as when Geoffrey Millard described soldiers’ racism and others said that many “did not have any intent of helping the Iraqis.” They had also heard Millard voice IVAW’s three demands: immediate withdrawal of troops, full health care for all troops upon return, and reparations to the Iraqi people for the spoliation of their country.

The veterans were also frank about their internal wounds. Many, like Kristofer Goldsmith, had attempted suicide; many, perhaps most, others had “self-medicated” with alcohol or drugs. Yet those same effects could make one ineligible for VA healthcare or the GI Bill, they noted, depending on branch of service or the language of your discharge. Kristofer Goldsmith, once a boy scout dreaming of becoming a soldier, said that his general discharge blocks him from education benefits; Millard, despite nine years of service, was ineligible because all of his service was with the National Guard. “We’ll fix that,” said Rep. Waters. “We have to.”

Perhaps appropriately for International Conscientious Objector Day, many spoke frankly of what they called the “dehumanization” inherent in current military training. Goldsmith described the perhaps immortal basic-training moment when the drill sergeant screams, “What makes the grass grow?” and expects to hear, “Blood, sergeant! Blood makes the grass grow!” As the link indicates. that phrase is already the title of a film about resisters from the first Gulf War. When I interviewed one star of that film, Aimee Allison, she described that chant as a turning point for her in 1991, which began her realization that she was a CO.

Another soldier on the panel  described watching a commander belittle someone undergoing that realization, using irrelevant hypothetical questions such as: What would you do if Al Qaeda went in and raped your wife, murdered your children, etc? The soldier looked up and asked why the commander would ask such a question: “Do we do that to them?”

After taking a break to vote on the war funding bill (with a surprising result, as it turned out, the committee began to ask the vets many questions— some personal, many policy-oriented.

Asked about the effects of the Abu Ghraib scandal on their work, the veterans were sober. “I was manning a checkpoint the day it broke,” said Adam Kokesh, and he wondered what it made him seem to the Iraqis meeting his eyes. James Gilligan said that detainee treatment overall has damaged any relationship possible with ordinary Iraqis: “ When you meet an Iraqi teenager on the street,” he said, “they know what their cousins, their uncles have been through” at the hands of the U.S. military. “That makes it hard.”

I confess I didn’t keep adequate notes on many of the policy discussions, especially when Woolsey and the others asked the vets to administration talking points, such as The surge is working, or We’re fighting Al Qaeda, or If we pull out now there will be chaos. To the last, Adam Kokesh said simply: ““Every specter we raise increases the longer we’re there,” meaning that each day of occupation increases terrorism and the prospect of a bloodbath.

Captain Luis Carlos Montalvan – whose testimony was the most blatant in blaming  specific generals, including the media rock star General David Petraeus, for much of the current chaos — was equally damning about “a misconception that staying in Iraq is vital to our national security interests…an assumption made time and time again by people at the highest echelons” that the occupation should continue “with no end state in sight.”

In any event, Montalvan said, while it may not be pretty, “my belief is that will force the hand of the sectarian forces to work things out on their own.”

Immediately after the hearing, active-duty Sergeant Mathis Chiroux publicly declared his refusal to deploy to Iraq, which event became the lede in most news stories about the day (including this terrific piece by my friend Karin at Agence-France Press). But to me, the real news came toward the end of the hearing itself, when Rep. Watson pledged to bring the veterans back to more formal House committees, such as Foreign Affairs and Homeland Security. There, she said, they would have an opportunity to testify under oath, something neither the 1971 Winter Soldiers or those testifying in March had done. “Are you willing to return,” she asked each in turn, and to bring documentation to support their testimonies?

Nothing, of course, was said about bringing the group before the Senate. I wonder if that will happen eventually — and whether the dissension among the Senate’s Vietnam veterans, limned so well in this week’s piece about John McCain‘s war, will be eased or intensified when they hear it.

Notes from Winter Soldier on the Hill, part one

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“I joined the military to kill Iraqi people,” Kristofer Goldsmith said softly in a Congressional hearing room on Thursday.

The slim young veteran, his Mohawk pulled back from his head in a half-braid, kept his eyes focused forward as news photographers scurried under the table at which he sat, snapping photographs as he continued: ” I remember on September 12, 2001, looking up at the TV screen as a 16-year-old boy, saying we should use biological weapons and eliminate the threat in the Middle East.”

Goldsmith had already shown slides of himself as a ten-year-old Boy Scout who had always wanted to join the military, but soon he had segued to a succession of images of what he had witnessed in Iraq, from “presence patrols” designed to intimidate to an image of a man with smashed face. His last few images displayed a wall with an Arabic inscription: Welcome America to the second Vietnam War.

Goldsmith was only one of ten veterans testifying before the House Progressive Caucus, designed to give legislators a taste of last March’s Winter Soldier testimony. At the event, billed as Winter Soldier on the Hill (C-SPAN video at the top link here), ten members faced the caucus, which on budget day amounted mostly to a trio of antiwar women Democrats: Lynn Woolsey, Diane Watson, and Sheila Jackson Lee.

It was May 15 — International Conscientious Objector Day, marked by Congress mostly in reverse. A Foreign Affairs Committee briefing on “Empowering the Soldier Through Technology” featured flashy brochures on the newest Stryker vehicle. Walking through the first floor of the Rayburn Office Building, I was almost blinded by the ribbons and medals on the brass showing off the new hardware.

But upstairs, soldiers who had seen combat far more recently were honoring both the day, even if they weren’t themselves CO’s, and their own pledge upon enlistment to protect the Constitution.

I sat behind the testimonial table, where the row of dark suits most had chosen gave the event a somber feel, like kaddish or a memorial. And their testimonies, describing alleged war crimes, felt similarly somber, blaming equally their own participation, command neglect, and Congressional endorsement of the occupation.

Jason Lemieux — a sweet-faced young blond whose slight build belies his strength — described “firefights in which the rules of engagement were routinely ignored.” “Unit loyalty and cameraderie,” he said, combined with “an emphasis on minimizing short term casualties,” to create an atmosphere in which troops were authorized “on numerous occasions, to shoot any Iraqi that seems suspicious,” and were told that “the command will take care of you.” (Such emphasis on taking care of one another, sometimes overriding concern for civilians, perhaps the dark side of the terribly romantic, Achilles-Patroclus soldier-bond described in such detail by Jonathan Shay.)

When Lemieux submitted incident reports showing “use of excessive force,” he said, commands either downplayed them or, in one case, actually altered the numbers.

In Tal Afar, now praised by President Bush as a great Army success, “ more innocent civilians were injured and killed by Americans than by the enemy,” said Army scout Scott Ewing, his face blank. Ewing described arriving at homes in Tal Afar that had just been blasted by Apache helicopters: “One little boy pointed to his chest,” he said. “We tried to bandage their wounds,” he said softly.

Ewing also showed a slide of a trashed home, from a day when “thousands of of soldiers were ordered to search aggressively” for weapons. Following orders, the troops kicked down doors, smashed computers, and ripped bedsheets. (In the back of the room Aaron Glantz, reporting for Democracy Now, remarked: “It looks like there’s been an armed robbery.”) Overall, said Ewing, “trashing people’s homes did not win us friends in Tal Afar.”

Part of what made this all possible, the vets said, was racism/dehumanization: a previous generation’s “gook” become “hajji,” and thus other and expendable. Geoffrey Millard, of IVAW’s D.C. chapter, showed a slide of a sedan blasted into fragments at a checkpoint; his commander, he said, had brushed it off, saying: “if these fucking hajjis learned to drive that wouldn’t happen.” He has tried, he added, to reason with his peers, for whom “KBR employees who made our food, they became hajjis.. I actually heard a guy say, I’m going over to that hajji shop to get a hajji DVD from these hajjis.” It was hard, he said, to get soldiers to see why that was wrong.

Tomorrow, I’ll post about the soldiers’ awareness of their own trauma, about the committee’s response to all this, and just a few of my own reflections. But right now, I’m haunted by the opening sentence of Millard’s statement, which feels a little like a warning of what could continue indefinitely.

“In Iraq, a year becomes a month, a month becomes a day that repeats over and over and over,” Millard said.

reasons to go get an MBA

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Today, the NY Times’ business section finally noticed something that’s been glaringly obvious for some time, at least if you’d paid any attention to the past few years of landlord-tenant strife. No longer are tenants fighting the traditional landlord, who is penny-pinching to keep his profit-over-expenses margin healthy. Now, they’re facing companies with names like Cardinal/Vantage/Pinnacle/GFI Investment Corporation, who bought their buildings with loans that cannot te repaid if their current, rent-stabilized tenants remain in their homes. As Gretchen Morgensen’s piece explains:

As regulatory filings and promotional materials show, the companies expect to generate higher returns quickly by increasing rents after existing tenants vacate their units. Their success depends upon far higher vacancy rates than are typical in rent-regulated apartments in New York.

I’ve also looked at those “promotional materials,” though I’m glad someone more numerically adept than I is looking at the financial data. No, short of me going off for a third masters’ degree, I have one question– for Morgensen, James Surowiecki, and perhaps the Court of Appeals:

Do our current banking/lending laws not proscribe giving a loan that can ONLY be repaid if the creditor breaks the law?

I asked that of Al Amateau, a smart and sage writer whose desk is next to mine. He shrugged. Is that really our final answer?

“the intervention that makes change possible is love”

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About two weeks ago, I offered a few thoughts on the latest work by Jeanette Winterson, offering one sideline smart passage while mostly urging you to seek out the book itself. Whether you did or not, I advise you to check out this review + interview in Gay City News. (One of the perks of my current job is that I sit next to GCN’s brilliant, singleminded editor, Paul Schindler.)  Michael Ehhardt’s smart review articulates the themes and more of the story than I did; I do feel gratified that one of the passages he chose to quote is the same one I did, which he calls typical of Winterson’s  “fierce Voltarian satire of future society.”

Interestingly, though, the author herself sounds less like Voltaire (who was, after all, one of the literary world’s first human rights campaigners) than like a cross between Barack Obama and Harvey Milk:

Everywhere I look, kids want to feel, want to care, want things to matter, but strength of feeling is frightening. One of the things that art can do is find a channel for strength of feeling at the same time as prompting thought – so the old split of head and heart is relieved.

This is something I have always followed in my work, and in the repeating worlds and circular mistakes of “The Stone Gods,” the intervention that makes change possible is love. Love of all kinds is crucial, not least because it resolves the head/heart tension too, and when I listen to music or read a poem or go to the theater, I am opening myself up to difference and to change — the possibilities of love. I think the artist is someone who is always falling in love — with life itself, and with the creative playful spirit of human endeavour.

Which means we get our hearts broken  every five minutes. Thank god the heart is muscle, and can lift far more than seems possible.

what’s in a name? A lot, if that name is The Chelsea Hotel.

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I always miss my former editor Larry Lerner, who left in February — but never more than when the subject of the Hotel Chelsea comes up. Long before I arrived, Larry had made the famous artist’s denizen a second home; with the help of his camera, his terrific prose and the hotel’s own Ed Hamilton, he charted its ways and the diverse group of artists and writers still within its walls. And when the big story arrived — the sudden expulsion of beloved owner-manager Stanley Bard by fellow shareholders– Larry knew its soul and got it right.

Now, it looks like Big Story #2 has arrived, and I’m completely unprepared.

Of course, the Chelsea wouldn’t deserve the name if it weren’t in upheaval, though in the past year rock and roll drama (think Sid and Nancy) has been of late replaced by Chelsea’s surreal real estate dance. shareholders. Last July longtime owner Bard was replaced by BD Hotels, the brainchild of boutique hoteliers Richard Born and Ira Drukier, and a host of changes followed, including ominous eviction threats from the new 28-year-old manager. Numerous tenants have complained about BD’s sluggishness in performing repairs, according to longtime residents Ed Hamilton (of the hotel’s blog Living With Legends) and Linda Troeller, whose exhibit on the hotel’s artistic history opened this week.

And BD’s renovations, said Troeller, did not match the vision of Bard’s daughter Michelle, who “was always so careful when she upgraded the rooms, in choosing which of the artist’s work belonged in the space. BD was more like one of those European spas – kind of cookie-cutter.”

So what’s the new Big Story? I only found it first through Ed’s invaluable blog: the hotel’s board has ousted both Travis and BD. “[Board member] Marlene Krauss has filed a suit against them. We think that her reasons for firing them are that they are losing money and not fixing the place up,” Ed Hamilton writes.

According to Hamilton, BD at first contested its firing in court, claiming in its defense that since last July its management increased net operating income of the hotel by 225%, revenue per available room by more than 35%, occupancy from 73% to 88%, and room nights sold by 41%. But on Monday BD withdrew its petition, leaving the hotel currently without a manager at all.

Rumors that longtime shareholder David Elder would be taking over have met with high scorn from Hamilton. who points out that a long-running lawsuit by author Piri Thomas is seeking to have Elder removed from the hotel’s board entirely. Meanwhile Troeller, when I called her this afternoon, would say only that Elder had been “very kind last December, when we knew nothing” and helped her secure the hotel’s ballroom for this week’s exhibit. “I’m not that privy to the real estate gossip,” Troeller added. “But it’s clear that BD didn’t share the vision of the hotel – for so many years, we has leadership that made this place somewhere that welcomed artists, so much so that when Christo and Jeanne-Claude arrived in the 1980s, they only knew one thing: ‘The Chelsea Hotel’….Now,” she said, “We don’t know what it will be like.” Troeller suggested that the hotel’s new direction might take a page from the Lloyd Hotel and Cultural Embassy, the 75-year-old hostel in Amsterdam now turned boutique hotel, called by Guardian UK “a riot of creativity” that showcases top Dutch designers such s Marcel Wanders and Jurgen Bey. “That owner turned the first floor into a gallery,” Troeller said. “You can do a lot, if you have vision.”

All of which is very diverting, but leaves out a lot – like Ed’s last-minute discovery of asbestos at the hotel, and whether the web of housing-court precedent being set by the losses of last year will mean to artists trying to live in this town. And all of it leaves out the history of the place itself, and what it has meant to generations of New Yorkers.

A big story? No story, because too diffuse? I’ll figure it out in the next few weeks, I guess (Meanwhile, my least favorite story has just done the fizzling into air that many expected..)

Update, May 17; After I wrote the above, things kind of exploded. Here’s the story I wrote about it all….

republicans against privatized health care?

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I can’t believe I’m posting twice in one afternoon. But this is quietly extraordinary: the famously pro-privatization mayor of my city realizing that for-profit health care may not be the best idea.

Bloomberg noted the city had gotten its health insurance from the two companies — Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York and Group Health Incorporated — for more than 60 years, adding: “We don’t need city dollars intended to protect hard-working city employees and retirees used instead to pad the compensation of healthcare executives.”

The state stands to reap nearly $1.8 billion over several years from the conversion as it would be the biggest shareholder in the new combination, but Bloomberg fears the city won’t be able to afford the higher insurance premiums for public employees and retirees that he said will result.

Maybe the city employees live in the few remaining Mitchell-Lama apartments can next persuade Bloomberg that development deals cannot be the solution to he city’s 50-year-old housing crisis.

the courage not to bomb

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Amid primaries, protests, and my quixotic effort to make progress on my book, I’ve kept headlines like this and this tucked away at the side of my brain, where my belief in the strong possibility of an October surprise lives and worries.

But now, I hear Tim Russert has taken time off from Hillary-bashing to let the cat out of the bag.  Dday notes that

… yesterday, Tim Russert kind of came out of nowhere by basically announcing to Barack Obama that we’re about to drop multiple bombs on Iran. I’m guessing that Russert, who talks to all sorts of foreign policy elite members and figures inside the Bush Administration and presumes those conversations to be off the record unless specified, knows a lot more about this than he’s letting on. And over the last week, we’ve paradoxically seen Administration rhetoric over Iran grow more heated, with the head of the CIA claiming that Iranian policy is “to help kill Americans in Iraq,” while the US has joined major powers in offering a package of incentives to Iran to get them to curtail the nuclear program that the latest NIE says they’ve already stopped.

We already know what song John McCain will be singing. Will the Dem nominee have the guts not to sing along? Or will they do as Tim O’Brien says grunts in Vietnam did – kill for fear of being called cowards?

a villanelle for betrayal

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I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to note this piece by the incredible Col. Ann Wright. Its title skittered over military history listservs, but in question form — Is There an Army Cover-Up of Rape and Murder of Women Soldiers? — that made it appear academic, and not the rigorous prosecutorial brief that it is.

When you talk to military rape survivors, and their families, they are usually more anxious to describe not what their attacker did but what their command did or did not do. With the military mission top priority, commands often stint prosecutions (which require scarce investigative resources and the risk of losing soldiers esteemed by their peers). This was true in peacetime, when I wanted to write a book called “Twice Betrayed,” about the way victim/survivors felt about that fact. To them, the second betrayal cut longer than the first.

More brilliant journalists than I have kept on that case throughout this war; Wright’s piece is a careful reminder not to look away. To me, to whom so much is painfully familiar, it reads like a villanelle: a poem whose themes resound more and more with each echo.

I’ve reproduced below some of the villanelle-bits of Wright’s brief that highlight the double betrayal (go to the piece for the supporting facts)

The Army attempted several explanations, but each was debunked by Mrs. Priest and by the 800 pages of materials provided by the Army itself. The Army now says Tina used her toe to pull the trigger of the weapon that killed her. The Army never investigated Tina’s death as a homicide, but only as a suicide.

Rape charges against the soldier whose sperm was found on her sleeping bag were dropped a few weeks after her death. He was convicted of failure to obey an order and sentenced to forfeiture of $714 for two months, 30 days restriction to the base and 45 days of extra duty.

—

The person identified in the diary as the rapist was charged by the Army with rape after her death. Many who knew her did not believe she shot herself, but there is no evidence of a homicide investigation by the Army.

—-

The sergeant pleaded guilty to drinking in a war zone, drunken driving and consensual sodomy with an underage, incapacitated junior soldier to whom he had supplied alcohol. A military judge ruled McKinney’s death was an accident and the sergeant was sentenced to 13 months imprisonment, demotion to private, but he would not be discharged from the Army.

—

Peterson reportedly objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners and refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Members of her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Peterson objected to. The military says all records of those techniques have now been destroyed. … She was also sent to suicide-prevention training. On the night of September 15, 2003, Army investigators concluded she shot and killed herself with her service rifle. Family members challenge the Army’s conclusion.

—–

Col. Wright is a heroine in my book (literally), who gave up a lifetime career when the Iraq war made contined honorable service untenable. Her editorials should be being published by the Times (or at least the Huffington Post), not relegated to the essential but marginalized Truthout.