Monday, October 31, 2016

the last book I ever read (Phil Jackson's Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success, excerpt five)

from Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success by Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty:

I’ve always felt that there is a strong connection between music and basketball. The game is inherently rhythmic in nature and requires the same kind of selfless, nonverbal communication you find in the best jazz combos. Once when John Coltrane was playing in Miles Davis’s band, he went off on an interminably long solo that made Miles furious. “What the fuck?” Miles shouted.

“My axe just wouldn’t stop, brother,” Coltrane replied. “It just kept on going.”

“Well, then, put the motherfucker down.”



Sunday, October 30, 2016

the last book I ever read (Phil Jackson's Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success, excerpt four)

from Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success by Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty:

Once I was sitting at my VCR trying to decipher what kind of offense the Milwaukee Bucks were running, and I called Johnny over to look at the tape. He took once glance and said, “Oh, that’s Garland Pinholster’s pinwheel offense.” Then he proceeded to explain that Pinholster was one of the nation’s most innovative coaches in the fifties and sixties. He was a coach at small Oglethorpe College in Georgia and amassed a 180-68 record using the continuous-motion offense he’d invented before losing interest in basketball and going into the grocery business and state politics.



Saturday, October 29, 2016

the last book I ever read (Phil Jackson's Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success, excerpt three)

from Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success by Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty:

“How can anything else ever be as meaningful to me as playing basketball? Where am I going to find new purpose in life?”

It would take several years for me to find the answer.



Friday, October 28, 2016

the last book I ever read (Phil Jackson's Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success, excerpt two)

from Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success by Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty:

Nothing was the same after that. I stepped in as a starter the next year to replace DeBusschere and played pretty well, but only three other members of the core team remained—Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley, and Earl Monroe—and it was difficult to forge the kind of unity we’d had before. Times were changing, and the new players flooding into the NBA were more interested in showing off their flashy skills and living the NBA high life than in doing the hard work of creating a unified team.

Over the next two years, we added some talented players to the roster, including All-NBA star Spencer Haywood and three-time NBA scoring champion Bob McAdoo, but neither of them seemed to be that interested in mastering the Knicks’ traditional combination of intense defense and selfless teamwork.



Thursday, October 27, 2016

the last book I ever read (Phil Jackson's Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success, excerpt one)

from Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success by Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty:

All I could do was laugh. Though mindfulness meditation has its roots in Buddhism, it’s an easily accessible technique for quieting the restless mind and focusing attention on whatever is happening in the present moment. This is extremely useful for basketball players, who often have to make split-second decisions under enormous pressure. I also discovered that when I had the players sit in silence, breathing together in sync, it helped align them on a nonverbal level far more effectively than words. One breath equals one mind.

Another aspect of Buddhist teachings that has influenced me is the emphasis on openness and freedom. The Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki likened the mind to a cow in a pasture. If you enclose the cow in a small yard, it will become nervous and frustrated and start eating the neighbor’s grass. But if you give it a large pasture to roam around in, it will be more content and less likely to break loose. For me, this approach to mental discipline has been enormously refreshing, compared to the restricted way of thinking ingrained in me as a child.



Wednesday, October 26, 2016

the last book I ever read (Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, excerpt fourteen)

from Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson:

Forty years after the uprising of 1971, conditions at Attica were worse than they had ever been. According to the Correctional Association of New York, by 2001 “the Department of Correctional Services had cut over 1200 programs providing services to inmates that were there in 1991.” By April 12, 2011, there were 2, 152 men crammed into this facility, the vast majority of whom were African American and Hispanic, and an overwhelming 21 percent of Attica’s prison population that year had been “diagnosed with some level of mental illness.” According to the Correctional Association of New York, which surveyed Attica’s prisoners, there was still “a noticeably high level of intimidation and fear throughout the facility…[and] we received numerous letters describing threats and retaliation for participating in the CA survey.” Furthermore, the association noted, “Attica inmates had the highest ratings of all CA-visited prisons for frequency of physical assaults, verbal harassment, threats and intimidation, abusive pat frisks, turning off lights and water, and retaliation materialized in the form of some officers not letting inmates leave their cells for meals.”

It is both tragic and deeply ironic that new levels of brutality against America’s prisoners have been, at least so far, the most obvious and lasting legacy of the 1971 Attica uprising. Even though the extraordinary violence that took place in 1971 was overwhelmingly perpetrated by members of law enforcement, not the prisoners, American voters ultimately did not respond to this prison uprising by demanding that states rein in police power. Instead they demanded that police be given even more support and even more punitive laws to enforce.



Tuesday, October 25, 2016

the last book I ever read (Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, excerpt thirteen)

from Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson:

That Attica had directly, albeit unwittingly, helped to fuel an anti-civil-rights and anti-rehabilitative ethos in the United States was soon clear to people paying attention to electoral politics across the nation. Any politician who wanted money for his or her district had learned that the way to get it was by expanding the local criminal justice apparatus and by making it far more punitive. The tougher on law and order a district was, the more dollars would come its way. As Republican state senator John Dunne put it bluntly, “As a result of Attica, the public attitude is that we’ve got to get tougher. That means we’ve got to put more people in prison. We have not reached the point where as many people as should be in prison, are there.”

Dunne had no idea how right he was about the public’s expectations. Notably, for all of the Rockefeller administration’s nods to prison reform funding in 1972, the following year Governor Rockefeller added to his reputation of being tough on criminals by passing a set of drug laws that were more draconian than anything that had ever before been on the books. Legislation was enacted that, for example, “created mandatory minimum sentences of 15 years to life for possession of four ounces of narcotics—about the same as a sentence for second-degree murder.” These 1973 drug laws were subsequently duplicated across the country, in ever more punitive iterations, over the next two decades. By 1978, for instance, Michigan had passed a so-called “650-Lifer” law that automatically gave life sentences to anyone caught with 650 grams of cocaine. And seemingly overnight, any crime—not just drug crimes—could net someone extraordinary penalties.



Monday, October 24, 2016

the last book I ever read (Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, excerpt twelve)

from Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson:

One of the ugliest prisoner deaths was that of Kenny Malloy, who had been viciously shot at close range. His skull had been riddled with so many bullets that his eye sockets were shredded by the shards of his own bones. Indeed so gruesome was this shooting that one of the two troopers whom investigators knew to be responsible for shooting at this prisoner later spoke of “having nightmares about seeing brains.” This trooper, according to an internal investigative report, was a man named Aldo Barbolini. He had shot Malloy with his .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson. The Attica investigation was persuaded that Barbolini also had killed Ramon Rivera, shooting “directly into this tunnel where Rivera fearfully lay.”

From the earliest days of the investigation, Simonetti’s office had looked closely at Barbolini but all NYSP brass had been making sure that the investigators were told nothing. Significantly, the highest-ranking officials in the NYSP, including Lieutenant Colonel Infante, knew of Barbolini’s actions that day and, as Bell saw it, they conspired to cover them up. According to an internal NYSP memo, trooper Barbolini had been asked to resign on September 17, 1971, and, according to a New York state senator who later contacted the Attica investigation about the matter, Barbolini had specifically been told by his superiors “that if he resigned he would not be prosecuted.”



Sunday, October 23, 2016

the last book I ever read (Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, excerpt eleven)

from Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson:

Most damningly, Simonetti’s office believed it knew exactly which trooper or CO had killed specific prisoners on the day of the retaking. Internal memos suggest that investigators had evidence that trooper James Mittlestaedt shot prisoner James Robinson through the neck “at a range of two to five feet, breaking his neck and killing him instantly.” Simonetti’s office also indicated that it knew who had killed prisoner Bernard Davis. Davis had died from more than twenty-three gunshot wounds, and one internal memo identified that officer as P. F. Stringham. According to other documents CO Stringham had also likely killed another prisoner—Milton Menyweather. One Attica investigator testified that Paul F. Stringham, armed with his “own personal brownie [sic] twelve-gauge shotgun loaded with five deer slugs,” had “identified a photo of P-5, Milton Menyweather [sic] lying on the catwalk to the right of Times Square, as the one he shot."



Saturday, October 22, 2016

the last book I ever read (Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, excerpt ten)

from Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson:

Interestingly, other high-level parties also began mobilizing to gather information that might help to make these charges stick. According to a December 20, 1972, memo that the Buffalo office of the FBI received from W. Mark Felt, the acting director of the FBI in D.C. (and later admitted Watergate whistle-blower Deep Throat), had just received a request “for the criminal background of the individuals indicted whose names have been publicly disclosed.” No one was to know that the FBI was involved in any way in these cases; Felt stressed discretion, and “cautioned” the Buffalo office “that this matter must be obtained in a most circumspect manner.” Pressed to reveal who had made this request, Felt disclosed that is was the vice president, Spiro Agnew, who was “interested in what type of individuals, as to criminal history, were involved.”



Friday, October 21, 2016

the last book I ever read (Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, excerpt nine)

from Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson:

Still no one from the state of New York ever contacted the families of the dead prisoners by phone or personal letter to tell them the fate of their loved one. Most had to hear the terrible news over the radio and only then because Howard Coles, a popular African American radio personality from Rochester, had decided to dedicate his popular broadcast to providing his listeners with whatever information the DOCS released about the dead as soon as it was made available. This was how Laverne Barkley finally found out what had happened to her son. For days she had been trying to reach someone at the prison for word of L.D., and when she got nowhere with state officials, she decided to drive across town to the headquarters of FIGHT—the social justice organization run by minister Franklin Florence, one of the observers—to see if she could get him to help her. But before she ever got to the office, while she was still circling the street looking for a parking space, she heard her son’s name being read over the radio. Her young daughter Traycee, who was sitting next to her in the passenger seat, watched in great distress as her mother almost lost control of the car, pulled over, and collapsed in grief. Now that L.D. was dead, Mrs. Barkley berated herself for never having taken his complaints about his treatment at the prison seriously enough. Just before the uprising L.D. had said to her: “You can’t imagine what it is like here…. I know that there is a possibility that I shall never leave here alive.”



Thursday, October 20, 2016

the last book I ever read (Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, excerpt eight)

from Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson:

To the dismay of all parties concerned, however, this news could not be contained. For starters, it was obvious to anyone who had been in the ME’s office and had seen the bodies that they were riddled with bullets and buckshot. And as soon as the hostages’ autopsies were completed and their bodies were released to funeral homes, countless other people would be able to see their wounds. But what really forced their hand was that Edland’s officer supervisor leaked the autopsy findings to Dick Cooper, a reporter at a local paper, the Rochester Times-Union. Cooper ran back to his car and headed for the city room to file the story. “I knew the information I had was important but the weight of my knowledge did not hit me until I was on the road. If the hostages did not die from slashed throats and did in fact die of bullet and buckshot wounds then they must have been shot by the state police who were sent into Cellblock D to save them.” When Dick told his colleagues at the paper, they were stunned. Another Times-Union reporter, Lawrence Beaupre, recalled hearing the news. “I gasped. Everyone knew what that meant, since the prisoners reportedly had no firearms at all.”



Wednesday, October 19, 2016

the last book I ever read (Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, excerpt seven)

from Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson:

Russian roulette was a frequent practice of the night guards and troopers; so was telling thirsty, exhausted men cowering on the floor—like Carlos Roche—to “drink the urine of correction officers.” Officers spent the entire night of the 13th scraping the bars loudly with the butts of their guns, taunting, physically assaulting, and threatening to kill the men they had just rehoused. And during the following several nights as well, groups of COs visited the cell area and threatened inmates with death, pointing guns and clubs into the cells. Some of the former hostages were taken aback by how relentless the attacks on prisoners were. Once hostage Danny Almeter heard about what had been happening at the prison, he said, shaking his head, “I understood the intial beatings but I never understood going back in a cell three days later and dragging a guy out of his cell to beat him.”



Tuesday, October 18, 2016

the last book I ever read (Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, excerpt six)

from Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson:

The governor was thrilled. Given the “castration of the guard,” Rockefeller stressed, they did indeed need to go in with force. When Rockefeller went on to report that, actually, the prisoners had killed some guards prior to the retaking, Nixon reacted more cautiously. “You can prove that can’tcha?” he said warily, to which Rockefeller gave his assurances. Of course, the governor conceded, it was likely to be “a Catholic hospital” that would be dealing with the hostage deaths, and therefore, “It’s outside of our jurisdiction” (implying that he might have had some sway over media reports had the hospital been a publicly run and funded institution), but he was confident that his information would nevertheless be corroborated. The bottom line, Rockefeller confirmed for Nixon, was that the entire rebellion had been masterminded by African Americans. “The whole thing was led by the blacks,” he said, and he assured the president that he had sent in the troopers “only when they were in the process of murdering the guards.” Rockefeller did warn the president that he was probably going to get some flak from New York City’s mayor, John Lindsay (whom Nixon referred to dismissively as “the New Democrat…the convert” since Lindsay had recently changed political parties), and that the mayor would “probably say that I should have gone up and all these deaths would have been saved,” but Nixon seemed unconcerned. To the idea that Rockefeller should have gone to Attica he said, “No Sir, no Sir.” After Nixon reiterated how much everyone in Washington supported his moves at the prison that morning, Rockefeller thanked him profusely, and signed off by saying, “We’ll do the mopping up now.”



Monday, October 17, 2016

the last book I ever read (Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, excerpt five)

from Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson:

John Hill, known in the yard as Dacajewiah, was one of the prisoners holding a hostage on the catwalk of B Block when the gunfire erupted. In that second he realized how completely the men in D Yard had failed to grasp the state’s intentions. “We felt somewhat protected by the presence of Dunne, and even the media…. We felt, I think, that there just couldn’t have been a massacre with media watching. As he came up from under a barricade the prisoners had built on B catwalk where he had been crouching for cover, he was shot. He was then hit with the butt of another trooper’s weapon, which hurled him over the catwalk railing onto the cement handball court below.



Sunday, October 16, 2016

the last book I ever read (Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, excerpt four)

from Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson:

A bloody outcome was virtually guaranteed by the NYSP’s choice of weaponry. Two six-man teams of troopers would position themselves on the rooftops of A and C Blocks with rifles at the ready to provide cover for the men launching the assault below. The men leading the assault on D Yard would themselves be armed with .270 caliber rifles, which utilized unjacketed bullets, a kind of ammunition that causes such enormous damage to human flesh that it was banned by the Geneva Conventions. Many of the other troopers and COs preparing to go in were also carrying other weapons that would have a particularly brutal effect, such as shotguns filled with deadly buckshot pellets that sprayed out in a wide arc. As all state officials knew, although there were some gas guns in the yard that could fire tear gas, no prisoner in the yard was carrying a firearm.

Although the men in D Yard preparing for bed late Sunday night had no idea that the NYSP had been given the green light to storm the prison the next morning, they were by no means optimistic that a peaceful end to this standoff was imminent. It was clear to them that Oswald had no intention of removing Vincent Mancusi from his position at Attica, nor was Rockefeller budging on offering full amnesty in exchange for their surrender. And yet, it still wasn’t easy to imagine surrendering. Earlier that day, Herb Blyden had gotten up before the men in D Yard and had made the implications of this crystal clear. Even after being transferred to Attica, he reminded everyone, he still faced “seventy-seven counts” for having rebelled at the Tombs the year before. “All of this came about,” he made clear, “after the Mayor and staff promised us, promised us no reprisals on the T.V. screen.” Before he sat down Blyden said sadly to those looking up at him, “Man, I am not trying to scare you,” but no matter what they say and promise here at Attica, “you’re still gonna die.”



Saturday, October 15, 2016

the last book I ever read (Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, excerpt three)

from Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson:

The prisoners knew that the hostages were all that stood between them and what they believed would be a bloody assault on the prison. Despite the bravado they had displayed in their discussions with prison officials throughout the day, the men in D Yard were also terrified. They were not at all sure they could trust Schwartz to get them an injunction against reprisals and they worried mightily about the sharpshooters that the NYSP had been placing on the cell block roofs above them. For this reason, as one prisoner explained, “most of us slept right out there in the yard.” At least out in the open they’d know if an attack was starting.

Despite the sense of foreboding, there were moments of levity and, for some, even a feeling of unexpected joy as men who hadn’t felt the fresh air of night for years reveled in this strange freedom. Out in the dark, music could be heard—“drums, a guitar, vibes, flute, sax, [that] the brothers were playing.” This was the lightest many of the men had felt since being processed into the maximum security facility. That night was in fact a deeply emotional time for all of them. Richard Clark watched in amazement as men embraced each other, and he saw one man break down into tears because it had been so long since he had been “allowed to get close to someone.” Carlos Roche watched as tears of elation ran down the withered face of his friend “Owl,” an old man who had been locked up for decades. “You know,” Owl said in wonderment, “I haven’t seen the stars in twenty-two years.” As Clark later described this first night of the rebellion, while there was much trepidation about what might occur next, the men in D Yard also felt wonderful, because “no matter what happened later on, they couldn’t take this night away from us.”



Friday, October 14, 2016

the last book I ever read (Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, excerpt two)

from Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson:

Rockefeller’s men were not the only ones interested in monitoring the response of grassroots and civil rights organizations to the Attica uprising. So was the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In fact, it was remarkable that federal agencies were so involved in what was happening in this one state prison in the middle of rural New York. Immediately, the FBI stepped up its already extensive surveillance of groups suspected to be sympathetic to prisoners and leaned on its informants in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco to gather information on the Attica rebels. Even more astoundingly, whatever intelligence the FBI gathered, credible or not, was then relayed to authorities at the highest levels of the United States government, including President Richard Nixon, Vice President Spiro Agnew, and U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell, as well as the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of the Army, the Department of the Air Force, the Naval Investigative Service, the Secret Service, and the National Security Agency. The Albany office of the FBI alerted other bureau directors that Rockefeller’s right-hand man, Robert Douglass, also wanted to be kept apprised of any “information bearing on the Attica situation” that they gleaned from their “extremist informants.”

Troublingly, the various reports disseminated by the FBI were often misleading if not outright inaccurate. In one teletype sent to the director of the Domestic Intelligence Division of the FBI, as well as to the White House and the U.S. attorney general, at 11:58 p.m. on September 9, the Buffalo office reported that during the riot “the white were reportedly forced into the yard area by the blacks” and Black Power militants there were rounding up not just employee hostages but also all white prisoners, which was misleading in that it suggested a race riot was unfolding. More inflammatory still, the FBI’s Buffalo office stated that the prisoners “have threatened to kill one guard for every shot fired [at them]”; that they “have threatened to kill all hostages unless demands are met”; and that all of the hostages “are being made to stand at attention” out in D Yard. None of this proved to be the case.



Thursday, October 13, 2016

the last book I ever read (Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, excerpt one)

from Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson:

To the relief of the 1,281 prisoners who found themselves suddenly in charge of their own facility, and to the horror of prison officials and the police who had been watching their actions from the outside, by the afternoon of September 9 Attica’s D Yard had become the scene of a highly organized and remarkably calm protest. Whereas the early morning hours had been filled with the sounds of men screaming and windows being smashed, a few hours later the incarcerated at Attica were bringing some remarkable order to what had been utter chaos.

Prisoner Carlos Roche very much liked the freedom of movement that the morning’s upheaval had netted him, but he also found the lack of structure worrisome. Roche was part of 48 Company in D Block and like the thirty-nine other men in his company, including his friend Frank “Big Black” Smith, he was assigned to work in the laundry. The morning of September 9, he was at his job when he realized that the metal shop just above the laundry was on fire. The phone was ringing behind him—Superintendent Mancusi’s wife was, at this very moment, calling down to the laundry to order clean sheets for the warden’s mansion—but all Roche could focus on was the smell of smoke, the sound of men yelling, and then, once he’d stepped out into the corridor, the utter chaos. When a forklift being driven by a prisoner came barreling down the corridor, he finally understood: a riot was in progress.



Wednesday, October 12, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson, excerpt ten)

from The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson by Jeffrey Toobin:

Both in the courtroom and in what passed for their private lives, several jurors showed signs of depression. One juror, Tracy Kennedy, tried to kill himself after he was dismissed, and another, Tracy Hampton, was rushed to the hospital with an apparent anxiety attack on the day after she left the jury. The jurors were further shaken when they learned that on July 19, one of the deputies who guarded them in the courtroom, Antranik Geuvjehizian, was murdered while trying to stop a burglary at a neighbor’s house. The isolation from friends and family, the endless waits as Ito listened to the lawyers haggle, and the mind-numbing testimony about arcane scientific matters all gave the jurors more than adequate reason to be miserable. Watching one after another of their colleagues summoned to Ito’s chambers and then dismissed—without being allowed so much as a goodbye to their fellow jurors or an explanation for the dismissal from the judge—added to the strain. Denied access to alcohol by the sheriffs, several jurors took solace in food. Family members, struggling to find some common ground with their increasingly estranged loved ones, began bringing gargantuan feasts to the hotel during visits—mostly cookies, cakes, and desserts of every description. The remaining jurors gained weight at a fantastic pace, which only compounded their despair.



Tuesday, October 11, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson, excerpt nine)

from The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson by Jeffrey Toobin:

The four Brown sisters all looked and sounded alike, and they reflected the values of their moneyed Orange County upbringing. All four had breast implants, but not one had a college degree. The two oldest sisters, Denise and Nicole, the brunette and the blonde, came closest to embodying a certain California ideal: lithe, athletic, out for a good time, each a homecoming princess at Dana Point High School. Denise graduated in 1975 and became, briefly, a New York model. Nicole graduated on May 20, 1977, and met O.J. Simpson three weeks later.



Monday, October 10, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson, excerpt eight)

from The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson by Jeffrey Toobin:

One of the enduring fictions of the Simpson case was the notion of the defendant himself as “involved” in his defense. Press reports persistently portrayed Simpson as virtually a member of his own defense team. O.J., it was said, was “plotting strategy” and “planning his own defense.” Simpson’s attorneys manufactured this idea primarily as a gift to their client and as a way of remaining in his good graces. Moreover, the idea of Simpson as a formidable figure in his own right—an African-American of stature—helped rally black support to him. In addition, the lawyers knew that many journalists would take their line about Simpson’s level of involvement at face value, even as it was transparently false. Treating Simpson as the equal of his lawyers fit nicely with the paternalistic approach many mainstream journalists take in writing about race. According to these informal standards, white reporters can write with candor about the intellectual limitations of their fellow whites, but not blacks. Absurdly, black sensibilities are thought to be too tender for the truth. Indeed, it is thought to be flirting with a charge of racism to draw attention to the intellectual limitations of any African-American, especially a prominent one like Simpson. So accepting the idea of Simpson as the peer of his attorneys relieved the mainstream press of confronting the obvious truth about him—that was an uneducated, semiliterate ex-athlete who could barely understand much about the legal proceedings against him.



Sunday, October 9, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson, excerpt seven)

from The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson by Jeffrey Toobin:

Kardashian’s divorce from Kristen pained him, especially because she left him for Bruce Jenner, the former Olympic decathlon champion. Jenner and Kristen later married, and at the time of the murders they were starring in a frequently played informercial for a thigh-exercising device. According to a close associate of Kardashian’s, “It bothered him that she was on TV all the time with the Thighmaster. This case was his way to step over them. This was better than informercials.”



Saturday, October 8, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson, excerpt six)

from The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson by Jeffrey Toobin:

At 9:30 a.m., Shapiro arrived at Kardashian’s vast white villa, a garish affair resembling a Teheran bordello, all marble and mirrors. Simpson, who had been sedated, was still in the first-floor bedroom he was using during his stay. His girlfriend Paula Barbieri was with him; she had been at his side for much of the week. (After Simpson’s criminal trial, in a deposition in the victims’ civil case against O.J., Barbieri testified that she had left a telephone message breaking off her relationship with Simpson on the morning of the murders, June 12. But her actions the following week seem inconsistent with the notion that she was trying to end their affair.)



Friday, October 7, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson, excerpt five)

from The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson by Jeffrey Toobin:

Simpson had indeed caught the first available flight from Chicago to Los Angeles, and he made his way home at about 12:10 p.m. Curiously for a man who had been told only that his ex-wife had been killed, not necessarily murdered, Simpson had telephoned from his hotel room in Chicago to arrange for a criminal defense attorney to meet him upon his return home. That was Howard Weitzman, who represented him so successfully in his abuse case. So Weitzman—as well as Simpson’s longtime secretary, Cathy Randa; his business lawyer, Skip Taft; and an old friend, Robert Kardashian—were waiting for Simpson on the sidewalk when he arrived at his house. Under the watchful eye of several news cameras, Simpson left his bags with Kardashian and hurried up to the front door. At that point, Weitzman, Randa, and Kardashian were not allowed on the property. Simpson was escorted to the front door by Detective Brad Roberts, Mark Fuhrman’s partner, who was assisting in the search of the house.



Thursday, October 6, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson, excerpt four)

from The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson by Jeffrey Toobin:

Almost half a century earlier, the USC football machine had been willed into existence by one man, an obscure, Illinois-born academic named Rufus Bernhard von KleinSmid. After bouncing around several different universities after the turn of the century, Dr. K, as he was known, became president of USC in 1921. There he faced a dilemma familiar to college presidents. “Supported by tuition, possessed of virtually no endowment (hardly more than $1 million by 1926) with which to finance its expansion, U.S.C. needed money,” the historian Kevin Starr has observed. “Football offered a solution.” Dr. K invested in recruiting, bands, and a magnificent new stadium, the Coliseum, which would serve as the centerpiece of the 1932 Olympic games in Los Angeles. Von KleinSmid’s gamble paid off beyond even his own imaginings. Trojan football became one of the few activities to unite the fractured metropolis of Los Angeles. When USC defeated Notre Dame on a last-second field goal in 1931, a crowd of 300,000, one third the population of the city, greeted the returning team at the train station. The passage of time did not dim the school’s (or the city’s) enthusiasm for the sport. By the 1950s, the Trojans’ greatest star was Frank Gifford, about whom a fellow student, the novelist Frederick Exley, would observe, “Frank Gifford was an All-America at USC, and I know of no way of describing this phenomenon short of equating it with being the Pope in the Vatican.”



Wednesday, October 5, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson, excerpt three)

from The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson by Jeffrey Toobin:

After Gates took over, the list of black victims of the LAPD grew ever longer. In 1979 Eulia Love, a thirty-nine-year-old black widow who was late in paying her gas bill, hit a meter reader on the arm with a garden shovel. The utility man summoned police officers, who, rather than defuse the situation, shot Love dead at point-blank range. In 1982, after a number of African-American men died from police choke holds, Gates observed that the deaths might have been caused by the distinctive physiology of the black victims: “We may be finding that in some blacks when [the choke hold] is applied, the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do on normal people.” It mattered little that Los Angeles had had a black mayor, Tom Bradley, since 1973. The LAPD answered to no one.



Tuesday, October 4, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson, excerpt two)

from The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson by Jeffrey Toobin:

Parker and his wife never had children, and the chief remained aloof from most of his colleagues on the force. He did, however, take a special shine to the young officer who was assigned to be his personal chauffer—Daryl Gates. Together the two men refined a theory of “proactive policing,” which featured relentless confrontations between heavily armed officers and the hostile populations they patrolled. Parker and Gates came of age in an era when white cops didn’t have to rein in their feelings about African-Americans. When Watts exploded in 1965—a rebellion set off by a confrontation between a black motorist and a uniformed officer of the California Highway Patrol—Parker compared the black rioters to “monkeys in a zoo.” A year later, a black man named Leonard Deadwyler was rushing his pregnant wife to the hospital when he was stopped by police for speeding. In the ensuing confrontation, the unarmed Deadwyler was shot dead. “Police are not supposed to stand by and watch a car speeding down the street at eighty miles per hour,” Parker explained. “[The officer] did something he thought would successfully conclude a police action. All he is guilty of is trying to do his job.”



Monday, October 3, 2016

the last book I ever read (The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson, excerpt one)

from The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson by Jeffrey Toobin:

In January 1994, when Nicole moved into the Bundy condominium, her relationship with O.J. oscillated between reconciliation and a final breach, and the financial tensions between them escalated. The first point of conflict revolved around a man named Kato Kaelin. Although the Simpson affair made the name Kato synonymous with houseguest, his original relationship to Nicole was the more familiar one of tenant to landlord. Kaelin had rented her guest house at Gretna Green for five hundred dollars a month, a figure he could reduce somewhat by baby-sitting for her children. (During this period Sydney and Justin grew so fond of Kato that they named their pet Akita after him.) When Nicole moved to Bundy, she and Kaelin planned to continue the deal, with Kato paying to stay in a small guest suite wedged between the garage and the kitchen. Shortly before the move, however, O.J. told Kaelin that although he had had no objections to his living in a separate guest house at Gretna Green, he didn’t want him living under the same roof as his ex-wife. Simpson’s solution was to give Kaelin a rent-free guest house at his home on Rockingham. O.J.’s offer thus simultaneously removed a potential rival for Nicole’s affections and took money out of his ex-wife’s pocket. It also led ultimately to Kaelin’s prominent place in the history of freeloading.



Sunday, October 2, 2016

the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt fourteen)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

Back in the winter of 1974, the Reverend Jim Jones showed up at the China Basin warehouse and asked to distribute the food. Spooked by Jones’s air of menace, the proprietors of the People in Need program declined his services. But Jones’s fanatical dedication and that of his followers to a kind of ersatz socialism made them a disciplined and powerful force in San Francisco politics. Jones mobilized the largely African American flock in the Peoples Temple to elect George Moscone mayor of the city in 1975. Then, the following years, Jones was privately courted by Walter Mondale, the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate. Rosalynn Carter met with Jones after she became First Lady. At a testimonial dinner, California’s governor, Jerry Brown, said Jones “became an inspiration for a whole lot of people. He’s done fantastic things.”

Still, there were always hints of darker forces at work in the People Temple. Some members died under mysterious circumstances, and others reported that Temple leaders pressured them into sexual relationships. Former followers contacted journalists, who began describing the Temple as a cult. Under new scrutiny, Jones complained about government conspiracies. Press coverage turned more critical in 1977 as members told reporters of kidnappings, extortion, and abuse by church leaders, including Jones himself. Earlier, Jones had rented thirty-eight hundred acres of land in the small South American nation of Guyana for use as an agricultural outpost. As pressure on the church mounted, Jones began demanding that his followers pick up stakes in San Francisco and move there. Hundreds of his acolytes and their families streamed into Guyana, and they founded a rugged community that they called Jonestown.



Saturday, October 1, 2016

the last book I ever read (American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, excerpt thirteen)

from American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin:

In short order, George Martinez went beyond simple representing Bernie Shaw in his divorce to replacing Bailey and Johnson as Patricia’s lawyer. Martinez recognized that Patricia’s legal options had run out. She could petition Judge Orrick for a reduction in sentence, but that was a long shot. Her only real hope was so audacious that it would not have occurred to most convicted felons—a commutation of her sentence by the president of the United States. But most convicted felons lacked the resources and connections of a Hearst.

Randy and Catherine had formally separated around the time Patricia returned to prison, but they found a common cause in the effort to win their daughter a commutation from Jimmy Carter. They formed an organization called the Committee for the Release of Patricia Hearst, under the nominal leadership of he Reverend Ted Dumke, an Episcopal priest whom Patricia had known back in Berkeley. The family did bipartisan political outreach, with Catherine appealing to Republicans and Randy to Democrats. Catherine made the case to Ronald Reagan, her old sponsor, that Patricia was the victim of the evil counterculture; to Democrats like Lou Ryan, the congressman who represented the Hearsts’ district, Randy argued that her punishment was excessive. Both ultimately endorsed a commutation. Charlie Bates, chief of the local FBI office, who had kept vigil with the Hearsts in Hillsborough, retired from the bureau and became an outspoken advocate for Patricia’s release. Bernie Shaw persuaded dozens of his fellow cops to sign a petition of Patricia’s behalf.