S.O.U.L Empire

Awesome capture!

2009-04-15T10:49:00.000-07:00

How Bay Area phenomenon Flickr has managed to create a feel-good route to photographic fame and fortune (or at least a few hefty checks in the mail) and turn scores of isolated amateurs into a network of admired professionals.

By Dale Eastman, Photograph by Merkley

Flickr members warned Deborah Lattimore to be careful, that what she was heading for was the Internet equivalent of crack. With two grown sons she adores and an oral-history transcription firm she has patiently nurtured for 26 years, Lattimore, 54, seems too responsible to get caught up in an obsession. But when she hits on certain topics—politics, animals, family, and travel—her awestruck tone hints at her susceptibility to a mad passion. So it’s not a total surprise that in 2005, soon after she joined the wildly popular photo-sharing site, which now has 35 million members and more than three billion images, her life began to unspool.

Lattimore had taken photographs from an early age, but she’d never set foot in a photo class and didn’t understand things like shutter speed or aperture. But within weeks of joining Flickr, she was effortlessly wielding the digital camera one of her sons had bought her and regularly heading to the shoreline of Pacifica, where she lived, to shoot the iridescent fish that washed up onto the sand. That led her to the Serramonte farmers’ market in Daly City, where she’d arrive early to take dozens of extreme close-ups of fish eyes. She rarely left her house without her camera, and she always had backup disposables in her car. Eventually, even a casual walk became a potential source for her next photo—after which she’d rush home, upload her images, and wait anxiously to read the comments from other members. “It was an addiction, for sure,” she says now.

During two years of this intense exploration, Lattimore posted some 1,500 pictures (up to 20 per week) to her photostream. Something else was happening, too—something many amateur shooters fantasize about, but that Lattimore never consciously set out to accomplish: She was morphing into a successful photographer. Instead of just sharing pictures with family and friends, she was confidently negotiating user rights and making sales to a dozen or so companies and organizations. The largest was to Pearl Izumi, a Colorado-based sportswear company that paid her $4,000 for an image of a runner that it spotted on Flickr and then displayed on its website and on 50,000 apparel tags.

And almost from the start, Lattimore became a minor celebrity within the Flickr ranks. Whenever she uploaded a new image, she would be inundated with gushing praise from fellow members, some of whom also tried to elicit her secret. “This is genius. How did you get the idea?” asked one of nearly 15,000 viewers who eventually checked out the striking image Lattimore posted in 2005 of a bright green apple she was holding in her purple-gloved hand. Even as Lattimore was typing, “thank you!” others were signing on to ask which camera and lens she’d used to take the shot, which has become something of an icon within the Flickr universe.

Lattimore’s is not the only Cinderella story on Flickr. French member Eric Lafforgue, a 44-year-old manager of a multimedia company, had done only a little amateur photography before he joined the site in 2006. But he got such a huge response to his photos of Papua New Guinea tribesmen that he submitted them to Kubik Éditions, a French publisher that released 150 of the images in a striking coffee-table book. One of his shots even made the cover of National Geographic in Taiwan—“the dream of every photographer,” he says. Icelandic art student Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir first created a frenzy on Flickr with her self-portraits, then later with her long-exposure landscapes and her color-saturated shots of otherworldly horses. Then she won an assignment from Toyota to shoot its Prius print campaign in Iceland. There are so many other tales like these—including those of Bay Area Flickr members like the artist known as Merkley, who has earned tons of assignments and an enormous cult following for his stylized nudes, and Erin Malone, a savvy tech-head whose work was featured on KQED—that it sometimes seems as if anyone who joins Flickr will inevitably land assignments and acclaim.

Last month, the chance for that kind of success shot even higher when Getty Images, the first and largest company to sell professional photographers’ work online for commercial use (known as stock photography), began offering thousands of Flickr images to its customers—advertising agencies, magazines, newspapers, and websites—in a prominently branded section of its home page. The company even pays Flickr photographers at the same rate that it pays pros. Given Flickr members’ mostly amateur status, as well as the snapshot nature of up to 95 percent of their photos, some professionals scratched their heads when Getty announced its partnership with the site last year, which gave the company the right to mine all of Flickr’s public photographs. Several naysayers even suggested that all Getty had landed was a black hole of clichéd images, and that it would surely require millions of dollars and just as many hours to uncover the gems, if any even existed. But Getty had been watching Flickr carefully over the years, so it seems more likely that the $2.4 billion company saw something that casual visitors had missed: Alongside all those shots of cute puppies, colorful flowers, hot cars, and romantically backlit couples is an enormous reserve of fresh, good—and even great—images by a huge new pool of talented photographers.

How did this happen? How did an uncomplicated photo-sharing site become the go-to place for a new generation of commercial images and a new kind of commercial photographer? Somehow, Flickr went from being a place where everyone from soccer moms to frat boys could post shots to being a worldwide force within the photography industry. It now operates as an enormous social network where members share images and personal support—something Lattimore would come to appreciate when she was diagnosed last year with breast cancer—and as a form of art salon–cum–photo school. George Oates, Flickr’s former chief designer, says that over the years, she’s noticed many examples of people who “joined Flickr with a crappy camera phone, just taking bad photos of their mates on the couch.” But as time went on, she says, there was a transition. “Suddenly, they were looking at the light a bit differently, then maybe they bought a better camera, and eventually they turned into proper photographers. And I use those words very deliberately.”

With no small amount of controversy, Flickr has also created a whole new career ladder for aspiring photographers. For generations, the established art world nurtured the idea of the photographer as a lone wolf, and the photograph as a singular, rarefied object produced through laborious work. But Flickr has enabled instant feedback among millions of people, regular group meet-ups, and an almost endless source of images and information about photography equipment and craft. The speed and, in some cases, perceived cheekiness of the process have startled and even offended some observers. Virginia Heffernan, of the New York Times Magazine, wrote in a piece about Flickr that San Francisco photographer Merkley “might have amounted to nothing in analog times, when elaborate deference to institutions, hard-won group shows, and expensive years spent in unnoticed toil were the only way to success.” What Heffernan seems to have missed is that now, even traditionally trained photographers—people who years ago might have raised an eyebrow at the site’s unorthodox methods—are using Flickr to get ahead.

But the site’s biggest impact has been on hobbyists like Lattimore: people who never dreamed they’d one day call themselves full-time photographers—not because they lack desire or talent, but because of all the time, networking, and money that becoming a respected photographer has generally required. Lattimore still runs her oral-history business to pay her bills, but she now considers herself primarily a photographer and loves to tell her tale to the beginners she teaches in 4-H clubs. “It’s great, because they can relate to the idea of being spontaneous, of not having a background in a subject but just forging ahead passionately and having fun. That’s what photography is all about for me, and I think Flickr is the perfect vehicle for that expression.”

It feels strange listening to Lattimore talk about having so much fun with her photography, and to hear her call it “creative expression,” especially given her commercial success. My brother Michael was a commercial photographer in Southern California in the late 1980s, and although I know he enjoyed his work, he was extremely methodical in his approach—and still wasn’t able to make it. He took thousands of images to familiarize himself with his equipment, and he spent hours in art history classes at Cal State Fullerton, and many more in the darkroom. He also interned with an established photographer after graduation. When Michael did strike out on his own, he accepted mostly smaller jobs that his peers with long-standing careers no longer needed. But when the recession of the late ’80s hit and the bigger photographers needed every client they could get, Michael’s sources of income dried up, eventually forcing him into another career.

Surely one reason Flickr photographers are able to make so much more headway than Michael did is the affordability of today’s digital technology. When Michael was working, the price tag for a digital camera was upward of $25,000; now you can buy one for less than $200 and start operating it within minutes. This new equipment has also had the unexpected effect of returning us to a more democratic definition of what a photograph can be. At the turn of the 20th century, renowned art photographer Alfred Stieglitz became so disgusted with the snapshots people were taking with the easy-to-use Kodak, the camera that unleashed photography’s first democratizing wave, that he joined the Pictorialist movement and formed the Photo-Secession group, both of which emphasized the art and the labor-intensive craft behind taking “real” photographs.

But by the time this century rolled around, the snapshot was back in vogue, even in the world of commercial photography, where images began shifting away from traditional stock shots—the slim blonde on her cell, the buff guy driving his sports car—toward authenticity. Witness Dove’s “campaign for real beauty,” which featured zaftig models, or the Liberty Mutual insurance ad that uses a series of shots—a nearly empty refrigerator, an unkempt bed, a wrinkled dress lying on an ironing board—that look like they’ve come out of someone’s personal photo album.

Flickr wasn’t the first site to take advantage of the digital-photo craze among ambitious amateurs: When video-game makers Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield launched Flickr in Canada, in 2004, Shutterfly and Snapfish were already up and running. But Flickr was much more user-friendly, thanks to an extremely efficient photo-sharing program that Fake and Butterfield brought with them from their gaming days. Flickr’s “tagging” function also made it easy for designers and editors to search the site for new work. Every picture that’s posted can be tagged with as many as 75 terms, so someone searching for an image of an “antique, blue car,” for instance, can type in those words and come up with thousands of possible images. By the time Yahoo! bought Flickr for a reported $30 to $40 million, just a year after Flickr launched and months after it moved to its new offices in Santa Clara (the company is now in San Francisco), Shutterfly and Snapfish had to rely more and more on their photo-printing services in an effort to stay competitive.

After the sale, Flickr grew like a hothouse fern, finally outdistancing even onetime archrival Fotolog, which for a period was mired in disruptive technical glitches. Kakul Srivastava, Flickr’s general manager, won’t reveal how much the company is currently worth, but during Microsoft’s Yahoo! takeover attempts last year, one tech blogger calculated Flickr’s value at as much as $4 billion. Srivastava even claims that the company has become profitable—a major achievement for a dot-com site—through a combination of prem ium fees, revenue from ads displayed on the sites to members who opt for a free account, and money from its printing services.

If technical ease is initially what drew people to Flickr, the genial and supportive atmosphere has helped keep them there. “Nobody on Fotolog would talk to me,” says John Curley, the former deputy managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, who threw himself more deeply into photography when he left the paper in 2007. Curley (who has done assignments for this magazine) shoots haunting, late-night street scenes, as well as quirky images of offbeat events like the local version of Santacon, an annual gathering of people dressed like Santa Claus. But despite the accessibility and the stunning technical quality of Curley’s work, no one on Fotolog paid him any mind. “I’d leave a comment on someone’s shot, post a shot of my own, and then wonder, ‘Where are the comments?’ But there was nothing.” With Flickr, he says, “you get people who know how hard it is to take good photos looking at your work. They know what went into it, which is tremendously exciting. So it was all about the feedback—and the immediacy.”

This feedback, which also played a crucial role in Lattimore’s evolution, often takes a laughably simple form: the comment box Flickr provides under each photo that’s uploaded. This is the site’s equivalent of the rubber band or the safety pin—a practical tool that makes it easy for millions of people all over the world to share thoughts about each other’s work. Of course, anyone who reads through the Flickr comments and their litany of positive backslapping might wonder about the actual level of education going on. “Brilliant idea!,” “Great silhouette! This image reminds me of friendship,” and the oft repeated “Awesome capture!” can all be seen under Lattimore’s shots. Lattimore admits to choosing carefully which comments to take to heart, but says the “validation and generosity” they convey gave her great confidence. “I started to realize my work was really different from other people’s—that I have a unique eye.”

The comment boxes are just the beginning, though. Away from the casual observer’s view, there are tens of thousands of specialized groups in which advanced discussions of the art and technique of photography take place. When Lattimore decided to branch out from her digital camera to experiment with a Holga, a cheap plastic device that devotees love for the evocatively lit images it produces, she joined several Holga groups. That’s where she learned how to take advantage of the camera’s light leaks—and where she discovered Light Leaks magazine, which subsequently published one of her Holga photos. At one point, Lattimore belonged to 403 dif ferent groups that focused on everything from how to make use of a Polaroid to the best way to shoot cemeteries.

Much has been made of the lack of civility in online discussions—one Flickr photographer closed her account because she felt people were relentlessly pressing her for professional secrets—but Lattimore says she has never had a problem. Her work flourished from all the input she received, she says, and soon, her now famous fish-eye close-ups caught the attention of Heather Champ, Flickr’s director of community management, who asked Lattimore to show her work at a Flickr event at the Apple store in Union Square. The nervous Lat timore eagerly agreed, although at the exhibit, she wasn’t able to say much more than “I like pictures, and I like dead fish.” Even so, the show was a turning point for her: “It gave me the courage to start pushing myself in a more professional arena. Until then, I’d only shown my work in small galleries in Pacifica.”

Soon she was being approached through Flickr to take part in other shows and began actively reaching out to galleries far and wide (she’s been in at least 30 exhibits to date, from the Artist- Xchange, Calumet San Francisco, and Avenue 25 Gallery in the Bay Area to galleries in D.C., New Jersey, and Paris). Somewhere around this time, she was brought on as a contributing photographer at the Pacifica Tribune, which is where she sold a lot of her surfing shots. Thanks to Flickr’s unofficial ranking system, which puts what the site calls the “most interesting” images at the top of any search, book publishers, photography magazines, and advertising agencies also started to find her work, which she now sells for around $250 per image. People had even begun to pirate Lattimore’s images. (Flickr members can get a range of licenses to protect their work, but as the music and video industries have proven, the Internet makes it easy to circumvent such restrictions.) Eventually, she felt she had to pull her images off the site and have them professionally copyrighted before reloading them to her account.

Lattimore feels that her success was well earned, but she also concedes that much of it came about because of Flickr. “It helped me express myself and brought so many of us together in such a personal way.”

More seasoned photographers also mine Flickr for advice and support. Erin Malone, a clear, direct 45-year-old who seems to reserve her passion for her beautifully lit, painterly photographs of open fields and local wetlands, started taking pictures when she was 15. Extensive classroom work and one-on-one training followed—but Malone, who lives in San Francisco, had to cut back when she started working, although she never stopped talking and thinking about images. She used some of her own shots in her job as a web-design guru at Yahoo!, and she is now a partner in a design-consulting firm.

But in 2004, she was eager to get more creativity into her life, so she joined Flickr (before Yahoo! purchased it) and bought the first in what has become a 20-odd-camera collection. At the time, she says, she was aware of doubts within the professional photography community about whether Flickr was a place that harbored serious artists. But she forged ahead, in part because she just wanted to be able to look at a whole lot of photographs—a key, she says, to an artist’s ability to evolve. Flickr alone has billions of photos, and last year it began displaying thousands of images from photo archives all over the globe, including at the Library of Congress, Australia’s Powerhouse Museum, and the Bibliothèque de Toulouse in France. Flickr members have been slyly adding to this growing archive of world-class art and documentary photography by uploading pictures taken with their cell phones at museums and gallery exhibits.

In part because of the demands of her job, Malone was much less interested in producing work to sell than in the artistic process itself. Perhaps that’s why she turned from her digital to a pinhole camera, which forced her to move at a slower, almost meditative pace that enabled her to create her artful, impressionistic shots. With no pressure to crank out saleable work, Malone also decided to look for more specific feedback from Flickr members, which is what convinced her that the site really does attract serious photographers. She posted as many as a dozen versions of one image—a field of grass, for instance, where she was experimenting with the effects of light and wind—then watched closely to see which ones other members preferred. “If lots of people comment on a particular shot,” she says, “then I know I’m heading in the right direction.” I asked Malone if she risks aiming too much for the wisdom of the crowd at the expense of her own artistic vision, but she insists “that’s life online. Feedback makes you a better photographer.”

Unbeknownst to Malone, one of the people watching her stream closely was Russ Morris, another Flickr member and the first photographer featured on a segment about local photographers on KQED’s Quest program. Morris liked Malone’s work so much that he encouraged her to send it to KQED, which had been soliciting submissions on Flickr for a while. At first, she didn’t think she had enough worthy material, but the support she received on Flickr encouraged her to shoot some new work and to reconsider older work in her portfolio. Within days of submitting, Malone was told that she had been picked to appear on the program in a two-minute piece that aired last summer. “Quest forced me to get my shit together,” she says, “and Flickr gave me the support and exposure I needed to take that step.”

This past February, Malone’s image Jagged Beach was included in the annual Plastic Camera Exhibition at RayKo Photo Center in San Francisco, and her photograph Clouds over Mesas is being used in marketing materials for the Marfa Film Festival, which will take place in Marfa, Texas, at the end of this month. A series of her outdoor images wound up in a new book, Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, and she now puts out a quarterly online magazine devoted to lens-free photography (WithoutLenses.com). “Flickr gets bad hype because it’s mass culture,” Malone told me toward the end of our conversation. “Gallery owners and museum curators seem to feel like they’d be stepping off their pillars of high culture if they actually went and looked at it. But if they did, I think they’d find work they liked.”

Musician and former concert promoter Merkley (who goes by his surname only, plus three question marks in his Flickr handle) wasn’t searching for community or support when he joined Flickr in 2006. “I don’t think somebody else’s ideas are going to make my work better, they are just going to make it less mine,” he says. He wanted to see what all the hype was about—and ended up with an adoring audience. For years, he has been shifting between music, painting, and digital photography, and a few months after he joined Flickr, he was well into shooting a series of 111 women, all nude and posing on different couches. By now, he claims, his photographs have received 16.5 million views, which makes him conceivably one of the most closely watched photographers not just on Flickr, but in the world. (I’m guessing the nud ity helps.) “There’s not a museum or gallery that could offer that,” he told me during one of several bring-down-the-established-art-world manifestos he delivered during our interview.

Indeed, Merkley has no use for the world of organized commercial photography, which is why he loves Flickr—and why he decided to publish his own coffee-table book of the nude shots he posts on the site. He produced only 1,111 copies of the $111 book (titled 111???); the launch party took place on January 11 last year at popular SoMa gallery 111 Minna. It was so crowded that people were turned away. For all his marketing chops, Merkley is first and foremost a showman and entertainer who is shrewdly aware of his highly crafted persona, which he constantly uses to turn situations to his advantage. This skill is evident not just in his photos, but also in the bold and uppercase type he uses; the long, in-your-face captions (Errol—Posing With 2 Apple Balls & 2 Banana Boners Rocking a Giant F T-Shirt, Hard to See Pants and Hands Almost Indicating Double Butthole, Om or OK Depending On Your Background); the quirky manifestos (“74 Things I Learned About Being Mentioned in the New York Times”); and the playfully belligerent commands to “Buy my book!” (Because of a Flickr restriction against prominent sales language, these messages were recently toned down or moved to his blog.)

In some ways, Merkley is a poster boy for all that is seductive and unsettling about the web. His nudes, for instance, are at once as off-putting as Hustler and as engaging as the work of David LaChapelle, the famous digital fashion photographer who crams so much visual information into each image that it feels like a mini-film. This all makes sense, given that Merkley doesn’t even think of himself as a photographer; rather, he uses photographs to tell “tiny, funny stories” that he hopes will steep viewers “in the creative process, because even figuring something out sometimes makes your own creativity kick in.”

This philosophy helps explain the flying cats, the monkey on the toilet, the endless litany of sandwiches, and the dinosaurs—all of which pop up in his work like uncoded fragments of surreal dreams. None of this seems like an obvious match for Flickr, a site known for its simple and even anachronistic design. Unlike personal blogs or strictly social-networking sites like MySpace, where users have free reign to embellish their small pieces of digital real estate, all Flickr pages look basically the same: mostly white with black and blue lettering. “The distinction is the work itself,” says Oates, an idea that also underlies the spare, monochromatic design of most galleries and museums. When I offer up this observation to Merkley, he scratches the wiry hairs of his Howard Hughes–like beard and announces, “Flickr isn’t anything like an art gallery. It’s like a shopping mall!”

If so, Merkley is one of its smartest entrepreneurs, having figured out how to use Flickr like his own private stock agency, even though he doesn’t need to rely on his photography to make a living. He’s taken images of bands (Bing Ji Ling, Dredg, Von Iva), writers (Michael Chabon), and products (a line of makeup in Australia), and he and his work have been featured in half a dozen European magazines. He’s so fiercely independent that he even turned down Getty’s invitation this past January to license 129 of his photographs on its site. He considered the idea, but when he learned that the contract was exclusive—meaning he wouldn’t be allowed to continue to offer those same images through Flickr—he said no. Other members felt the same way. “That’s a deal breaker for me,” announced one poster on Aphotoeditor.com, when Getty first announced its partnership with Flickr last year.

But for many, the Getty deal is a godsend. Cindy Loughridge, a busy, 44-year-old pharmaceutical analyst in San Jose, had been shooting for years, mostly on evenings and weekends. But when she joined Flickr in 2006, she stepped things up considerably; at one point, she belonged to as many as 700 groups. Her images, taken mostly of what she calls “small moments,” possess much of the comforting familiarity of stock shots, though flawlessly executed: a woman riding down the street on her bike, a couple chatting on a bus, a pensive young man looking off into the distance from his perch on some crumbling stone stairs.

Until recently, Loughridge’s biggest thrill (and largest sale) was selling an image of her 14-year-old daughter to an advertising agency that found her on Flickr while looking for an image for a Wal-Mart campaign. Then, last December, Getty invited her to contribute more than 100 of her images. She was so excited that she accidentally deleted the message from her email and had to ask Getty to resend it. She can hardly believe her good luck. “Without doing anything,” she says, “I’m now in Getty’s stable of photographers. It’s incredible!”

Lattimore hasn’t heard from Getty yet, but says that may be just as well for now. Last September, she discovered that a painful spot on her right breast was actually a cancerous tumor. Within weeks, she had to undergo a double mastectomy. She was devastated by the news—but instead of falling apart, she instinctively turned to Flickr. There, she found several photostreams by women who had documented their own harrowing bouts with the disease in images that were both startlingly graphic and devastatingly poignant. The bravery they embodied worked on Lattimore like a tonic.

“Looking at those photos changed my entire mindset,” she says, and allowed her anger and resistance to her upcoming surgery to fall away. For months afterward, she chronicled every step of her diagnosis, surgery, and follow-up therapy, including the day she had all her hair cut off, the moment when she was wheeled into surgery, and every chemotherapy treatment she received. Perhaps the most shocking images are the full-frontal shots of her scarred chest after the bandages were removed. “If it was going to help people see what cancer and chemotherapy are like, I posted it,” she says.

Her posts prompted hundreds of emails from Flickr members all over the world. Some simply wished her well, but many came from women eager to share their own terrible experiences with cancer, or to thank her for awakening them to the need to get regular mammograms. Lattimore’s visual story gained even more impact when she linked it to her blog—Love, Cancer, etc. (ddlatt.blogspot.com)—a nearly day-by-day chronicle of the medical and emotional ups and downs of her treatment. By recording it all, she says, she was able to transform a bizarre and frightening situation into “something good that could help other people.”

The experience may have also enabled Lattimore to become a better photographer. Not only has she been bled of much of her self-consciousness—the death knell of any good art—but even at the height of her illness, she says, the public airing of her story gave her uncommon energy and drive. “Suddenly confronted with my own mortality, I realized more than ever how important it is to capture every single moment. I don’t want to forget anything, and I want to leave my son a long trail of visual memories.”
Dale Eastman's last feature for San Francisco was "A Collector's Guide to the Exploding Art Market," in the January 2008 issue

Jay-Z's Secrets To Personal Success

2009-03-25T23:33:00.001-07:00

With nearly 40 million albums sold and a business empire that includes clothing, fragrances, the New Jersey Nets, sports bars, liquor, and hotels, Jay-Z has transformed himself into one of the most potent brands in the world

By: Anthony DeCurtis

"With education comes refinement," Jay-Z observes late one Friday afternoon. He's lounging on a couch in a studio at the Chelsea Piers Sports and Entertainment complex on the far west side of Manhattan and speaking between nibbles of a takeout salad in a plastic container and sips from a bottle of water. In his everyday speech, as in his raps, Jay-Z is inclined toward aphorisms, the compressed expression of complicated ideas, delivered with rhetorical flair. It's hard-earned wisdom, graced by a poet's touch.

He is relaxing after a typically jam-packed day that included a photo shoot, an interview, and a meeting about his potential involvement in a forthcoming video game. He celebrated his 39th birthday the night before with the staff of his Rocawear clothing line, so a mild fatigue has set in. Slender and six feet three inches tall, Jay-Z is an imposing figure, even in relative repose. He's wearing distressed jeans that hang loosely from the middle of his hips, black sneakers, and a long-sleeved black T-shirt that has replaced the pristine short-sleeved white one he wore before changing for his photo shoot. The look is studiously casual...until you glance at his left wrist and notice a diamond watch so thick it could pass for a weight band.

The winter sky is growing gray in the bank of windows behind him as the sun sets over the Hudson River. Jay-Z returns to the narrative of what, in the 19th century, would have been called his sentimental education, the education of his emotional life. That journey to refinement began in the rugged Marcy Projects in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant district, and now continues in arenas and boardrooms, in posh homes and VIP hideaways, around the world.

Jay-Z feels comfortable in all of these realms. "I've never looked at myself and said that I need to be a certain way to be around a certain sort of people," he explains. "I've always wanted to stay true to myself, and I've managed to do that. People have to accept that. I collect art, and I drink wine...things that I like that I had never been exposed to. But I never said, 'I'm going to buy art to impress this crowd.' That's just ridiculous to me. I don't live my life like that, because how could you be happy with yourself?"

Staying true to yourself might stand as a succinct summary of Jay-Z's philosophy of success. The notion goes back to Shakespeare's "To thine own self be true," and further back than that to the Greeks. But for Jay-Z, it has an urgently contemporary meaning. Even, or perhaps, especially, in recessionary times, amid the thousands of entertainment and lifestyle choices consumers have available to them, what separates winners from losers is a commitment to a single proposition: You are the product. If people believe in you, they will believe in what you create. Jay-Z understands this and is down with it.

By selling nearly 40 million albums and building a business empire that extends far beyond music into clothing, fragrances, the New Jersey Nets, sports bars, liquor, and hotels (to name just a few of his seemingly innumerable investments), Jay-Z has transformed himself into one of the most potent brands in the world. But that brand retains its power only if people remain convinced that the product they are purchasing somehow genuinely reflects Jay-Z and his tastes. As he famously put it in one of his raps, "I'm not a businessman/I'm a business, man."

"My brands are an extension of me," he says. "They're close to me. It's not like running GM, where there's no emotional attachment." The reference is apt, given the government's ongoing potential bailout of two major automobile companies. Jay-Z notes that resonance with a pause and a chuckle.

"My thing is related to who I am as a person," he says. "The clothes are an extension of me. The music is an extension of me. All my businesses are part of the culture, so I have to stay true to whatever I'm feeling at the time, whatever direction I'm heading in. And hopefully, everyone follows."

In conversation, Jay-Z's speech is slower, calmer, and more deliberate than in the propulsive, deep-voiced, and often incendiary raps that have made him a titan in the world of hip-hop, a man whose sales and staying power have elevated him above all but a handful of potential rivals. He's an engaged and animated speaker, quick to touch you in a friendly way to emphasize a point.

But as laid-back and accessible as he seems, he also exudes a calm air of confidence. He doesn't need to be aggressive or impose his will in a ham-fisted manner. Half a dozen people are floating around the studio, ready to read any sign of need or impatience on his part. He's cooperative and congenial in the way that only someone who knows he can immediately put an end to any experience that moves in an unpleasant direction can be. "Jay-Hova," he has called himself, echoing the name of the mighty, vengeful God of the Hebrew Bible. He has anointed himself the "God MC."

But he has also rapped that he "never prayed to God/I prayed to Gotti." Perhaps there is a distinction to be drawn between Jay-Z, the battle MC who to this day engages in raw exchanges with younger rappers looking to take him down, and Shawn Corey Carter, the far-sighted businessman who cofounded his own label, Roc-A-Fella Records, in 1996; who served as president and CEO of Def Jam Records from 2005 to early 2008 and helped launch the careers of Kanye West, Young Jeezy, and Rihanna; who sold his Rocawear clothing line in 2007 for $204 million, while retaining a major stake in the company; and who, following a path blazed by Madonna and U2, forged a $150 million deal last year with the concert-promotion firm Live Nation.

Last summer, Forbes ranked Jay-Z seventh on its "Celebrity 100" list of the ultrafamous and ultrapowerful. The magazine estimated his annual income at $82 million, and other sources have reported his net worth at $350 million. If that doesn't seem enviable enough, last year Jay-Z married Beyonce Knowles, one of the world's most desirable women. It is part of his attitude of ultimate cool that he never publicly talks about her.

Jay-Z moves in exclusive circles of all types. Musicians, actors, designers, politicians, captains of industry, and athletes all want to get next to him. He has developed an easygoing manner that enables him to cross these cultural boundaries in ways that make him seem accessible but still dignified, always aware of who he is. "I'm a mirror," he says. "If you're cool with me, I'm cool with you, and the exchange starts. What you see is what you reflect. If you don't like what you see, then you've done something. If I'm standoffish, that's because you are."

Occasionally, stereotypes rear their heads and uncomfortable situations arise. "It's hilarious a lot of times," he says. "You have a conversation with someone, and he's like, 'You speak so well!' I'm like, 'What do you mean? Do you understand that's an insult?' "

Growing up, however, Shawn Carter was far from the likeliest candidate for this sort of mind-boggling success. He was always recognized as bright--even today, the first word anyone who meets Jay-Z invariably uses to describe him is smart--and in the sixth grade, he tested at 12th-grade levels. But the Marcy Projects in Brooklyn were overrun by drugs and violence in the '80s. His father left the family when Carter was 11, and his mother had to raise him, his older brother, and his two older sisters. When he was 12, Carter shot his brother for stealing his jewelry. (They have since reconciled.) Carter attended high school with fellow Brooklynites the Notorious B.I.G. and Busta Rhymes, but dropped out to deal drugs in a region that extended from Brooklyn to Maryland and Virginia--as he details in his music--and to dabble in the still-nascent hip-hop game.

Along with the dealers who ran the neighborhood around the Marcy Projects, Jay-Z remembers identifying sports figures as his first models of success. "Growing up where I grew up, we looked to athletes," he recalls. "They were our first heroes. They came from the same places we came from. I mean, you can't watch TV and see someone who is successful that you can really relate to. That person isn't real, he doesn't exist. But athletes traveled the world, had these big houses, and gave their families a better life. We were like, 'Wow, that's really cool.' These guys get paid millions of dollars to play the game they love."

Around the same time that he began to identify with athletes, Carter experienced another revelation: hip-hop. He began writing nonstop in notebooks, keeping his mother and siblings awake at night as he pounded the kitchen table to create beats. He hooked up with local rapper Jaz-O, who brought him to England when he toured there. Carter recorded with Jaz-O and also with Big Daddy Kane. But despite the acknowledgment of his skills (and his growing anxiety that either violence or the law would eventually catch up with him on the streets), Carter was reluctant to give up dealing. He was rolling in a Lexus and making more money, as far as he could tell, than most rappers.

Still, he decided to take the plunge, but no record company was willing to offer him a contract. So with two partners, Carter formed Roc-A-Fella Records, and, in 1996, released his debut album, Reasonable Doubt, which established him as a major figure on the hip-hop scene. It was a heady moment, but Jay-Z barely realized it at the time. "I was naive," he recalls. "I made that album to impress my friends, so they would say, 'Oh, wow, look what you did!' It was my first album on the label that we owned. I was like, 'Okay, what happens now?' "

What happened was that Jay-Z left drug dealing behind and began to build his empire, moving steadily from "grams to Grammys" as he puts it in one song. But the process wasn't easy. The treachery of life on the streets, where he faced bullets at close range, turned out to be nothing compared with what he would encounter in the upper echelons of the music business. "I come from a world that's completely different from the music industry, and it wasn't recognizable to me at all," he says. "I come from a place where you had to keep your word, where people would stick with you no matter what. That's impossible in the music business, where if you're not hot, people are not talking to you. I just tried to be a man of my word."

The choice of Roc-A-Fella as his label's name would prove telling. On one hand, it's standard hip-hop braggadocio to establish a connection between a fledgling rapper and one of the richest and most powerful families in American history. But it also suggested the means through which Jay-Z would eventually establish his own business empire. The Rockefeller family and other 19th-century industrialists established a monopolistic hold on all aspects of the goods they produced. If you owned the mines that produced coal, for example, you also bought the railroads that transported it, the refineries that prepared it for market, and the utilities that provided its end product to the general population.

As Jay-Z's career has progressed in the past dozen years, he has sought to establish a similar hold on the lifestyle market for which his music provides the soundtrack, and in which he stands as the ideal model to emulate. Rather than providing anything as tangible as coal or oil, Jay-Z, through his myriad branded investments, manufactures a way of being that makes it at least theoretically possible to never leave the world of his products. You can enjoy his music while sporting Rocawear clothing (estimated as doing $700 million a year in business), wearing one of his fragrances, and sipping his Ace of Spades champagne. You can attend his concert and end the night at one of his 40/40 nightclubs. His videos, DVDs, and CD booklets provide free exposure for all of his products, all of which, in turn, enhance every other aspect of the Jay-Z brand.

The question then becomes how, with all this marketing and glossy brand extension, does Jay-Z maintain the credibility in the hip-hop world that made him such a marketable star in the first place? "We are excited to partner with an industry giant such as Elizabeth Arden," Jay-Z declared in the press release announcing his fragrance line, which made its debut last year. No matter how deeply you've absorbed the potency of Jay-Z's mainstream reach, that sentence still makes you do a double take. This is the man who took the film American Gangster as the inspiration for his most recent album? Jigga what?

But Jay-Z believes deeply in the aspirational power of hip-hop, the notion that the music's truest fans want to see their heroes succeed and want to emulate them. He draws a sharp distinction between hip-hop and rock 'n' roll, whose stars have often expressed disdain for business and success. "I noticed that difference early on, like if you were successful in rock 'n' roll, that was a really bad thing," Jay-Z says with a laugh. "You almost had to hide it. You had these guys selling 200 million records with dirty T-shirts on. I was like, 'Come on, man. Come on. We know you're successful.'

"Hip-hop is more about attaining wealth," he continues. "People respect success. They respect big. They don't even have to like your music. If you're big enough, people are drawn to you."

Consequently, any discussion of credibility, or keeping it real, elicits a response of disbelief from him. "That's an insecure emotion," he explains. "You make your first album, you make some money, and you feel like you still have to show face, like 'I still go to the projects.' I'm like, why? Your job is to inspire people from your neighborhood to get out. You grew up there. What makes you think it's so cool?"

Of course, Jay-Z has not been immune to those insecurities himself. In 1999, he was arrested for stabbing a record executive in a New York club, and in 2001, he was charged with possession of a loaded handgun. Against his lawyer's advice, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in the stabbing case and was sentenced to three years' probation. The gun charge was dropped.

It's generally thought that those brushes with potential incarceration cured Jay-Z of the need to prove that he could still live the thug life. He has rapped about both of those arrests ("Put that knife in ya/Take a little bit of life from ya/Am I frightenin' ya?"), but has shown no further inclination to transform his words into deeds that would put an end to the extraordinary life he has created for himself. In fact, quite the opposite. He has been baited relentlessly by other rappers--Nas, to cite just one example, taunted "Gay-Z" for his "dick-suckin' lips"--and has responded in kind, but only in song. In real life, he has taken steps to ease those rivalries and ensure that tragedies such as the killings of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. never happen again.

That's because too much is at stake now, far more than money or bling. At 39, Jay-Z is old enough to think about the cultural impact that hip-hop has already had, and the critical role he has played in it. "Hip-hop has done so much for racial relations, and I don't think it's given the proper credit," he says. "It has changed America immensely. I'm going to make a very bold statement: Hip-hop has done more than any leader, politician, or anyone to improve race relations.

"I'll explain why I say that," he continues. "Racism is taught in the home. We agree on that? Well, it's very hard to teach racism to a teenager who's listening to rap music and who idolizes, say, Snoop Dogg. It's hard to say, 'That guy is less than you.' The kid is like, 'I like that guy, he's cool. How is he less than me?' That's why this generation is the least racist generation ever. You see it all the time. Go to any club. People are intermingling, hanging out, having fun, enjoying the same music. Hip-hop is not just in the Bronx anymore. It's worldwide. Everywhere you go, people are listening to hip-hop and partying together. Hip-hop has done that." He pauses, as if marveling at the idea, and then repeats it for emphasis: "Hip-hop has done that."

Something else that hip-hop has done, in Jay-Z's view, is help to elect Barack Obama. "Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk, and Martin walked so Obama could run," Jay-Z told a concert audience in the crucial swing state of Ohio shortly before the November election. "Obama is running so we all can fly, so let's fly." He recorded a get-out-the-vote message for robo calls to African-American voters during the primaries. Perhaps even more extraordinarily, after a particularly heated primary debate, Obama brushed off Hillary Clinton's attacks with a gesture of wiping lint off the shoulders of his suit, and hip observers recognized an unmistakable reference to Jay-Z's song, "Dirt Off Your Shoulder."

Jay-Z's eyes widen as he recalls that moment. "I felt like, man, what time are we living in, where a presidential nominee is making reference to a rapper?" he says. "What a beautiful place we've come to. Growing up, politics never trickled down to the areas we come from. But people from Obama's camp, and Obama himself, reached out to me and asked for my help on the campaign. We've sat and had dinner, and we've spoken on the phone. He's a very sharp guy. Very charming. Very cool.

"It's surreal," continues Jay-Z. "I couldn't imagine anything like that could happen. I didn't vote until I was an older adult. I didn't think I would ever vote, because it didn't matter who was in office. The situation never changed where we lived. Our voices weren't heard."

Jay-Z walks idly around the studio as crew members break down the set for his photo shoot. He's rapping along with a hip-hop track that's blasting in the room. When the sound system abruptly shuts off, Jay-Z continues rapping and moving to the music, like Wile E. Coyote in the moment before he looks down and realizes that he has run off the cliff. Jay-Z catches himself, looks around the room in mock surprise, and laughs. It's the sort of self-deprecating gesture he's good at, acknowledging that all eyes are on him, but humorously taking the edge off whatever intimidation factor his presence might have.

That's a quality he brings into the boardroom as well. He's far from just a figurehead or a media front man. He takes his businesses as seriously as his artistry, and he goes at both with the same level of determination. He's clear about his own views, willing to listen to others, eager to keep everybody loose and motivated, and far more interested in long-term strategy than short-term gain. Even in the current economic environment, which is challenging to say the least, he's insistent on executing his game plan rather than making changes that might not ultimately be right for his brands.

"He's smart as hell," says Neil Cole, chairman and CEO of the Iconix Brand Group, the company that bought Rocawear two years ago for more than $200 million. "He understands himself as a brand, and it's incredibly well thought out. We meet every week, and there's nothing impulsive about him. He's very consistent, and he won't settle. If something's not right, he's not going to do it for more money. He'll wait to get it right. He has a wonderful taste level about where he wants to take the brand. . .and himself."

Michael Rapino, the president and CEO of Live Nation, echoes Cole's assessment of Jay-Z. "In meeting with superstars about potential deals, there are some who spit out 'How much can I get?' and the meeting is over, because you know you're starting out on the wrong basis," he says. "When we sat down with Jay-Z, 'How much money are you going to pay me?' came up in maybe the seventh conversation. The first conversation was, 'Can we change the business together?'

"Right there, we knew we had a common agenda," continues Rapino. "It was like, 'I'm hungry. The business is changing. I'm a change agent, and I have a lot of years left.' Then the creativity flows. You don't become the best in the world at what you do, and then flip the off switch. Jay-Z wants to win. And for him it's also about the integrity of the win. He's a true partner, always looking for the win-win. He's asking, 'How do we win together?' "

Indeed, part of the refinement Jay-Z has attained entails that big-picture vision of success. It's a vision that extends beyond business and beyond music. It's about what makes your life meaningful, and it goes beyond lifestyle to a way of life. "I'm hungry for knowledge," says Jay-Z. "The whole thing is to learn every day, to get brighter and brighter. That's what this world is about. You look at someone like Gandhi, and he glowed. Martin Luther King glowed. Muhammad Ali glows. I think that's from being bright all the time, and trying to be brighter.

"That's what you should be doing your whole time on the planet," he concludes. "Then you feel like, 'My life is worth everything. And yours is too.' "

Soaps, Sex and Sociology

2009-03-14T14:48:00.001-07:00

From The Economist print edition

Do women who watch telenovelas have fewer babies (but more men)?

THE glamorised world portrayed on the nightly telenovelas (soap operas) on Brazilian television is, superficially at least, about as representative of the country as a whole as Marie Antoinette and her shepherdesses were of 1780s’ France. But they are all about aspiration. About 40m people watch the mid-evening novela from Globo, the leading network. The action often takes place in Rio de Janeiro, where Globo is based, among families which are smaller, whiter and richer than average. New research suggests that by selling this version of the country to itself, Globo has boosted two important social trends.

The soaps blossomed under Brazil’s military regime of 1964-85. The generals subsidised sales of television sets to build a sense of nationhood in a large and then largely illiterate country. National news was meant to do the job, but the soaps got the audience. Their scriptwriters and directors, many of whom were on the left, saw them as a tool with which to reach the masses. Their plots often tilt in a progressive direction: AIDS is discussed, condoms are promoted and social mobility exemplified.

How much impact do the soaps have on real life? As recounted in papers from the Inter-American Development Bank, researchers tracked Globo’s expansion across the country and compared this to data on fertility and divorce.*

The results are most striking for the total fertility rate, which dropped from 6.3 children per woman in 1960 to 2.3 in 2000, despite contraception being officially discouraged for some of that time. This was because women moved to cities and opted to have fewer babies. The papers argue that the small, happy families portrayed on television contributed to this trend. Controlling for other factors, the arrival of Globo was associated with a decline of 0.6 percentage points in the probability of a woman giving birth in a given year. That is equivalent to the drop in the birth rate associated with a woman having two extra years of schooling

The effect on divorce was smaller, but noticeable. The researchers found that between 1975, when divorce was first mooted, and 1984 about one in five of the main characters in Globo soaps were divorced or separated, a higher percentage than in the real Brazil. These break-ups were not just a result of machismo: from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s about 30% of female lead characters in novelas were unfaithful to their partners. The researchers find that the arrival of Globo in an area was associated with a rise of 0.1-0.2 percentage points in the share of women aged 15-49 who were divorced or separated. The authors reckon that watching “empowered” women having fun in Rio made other women (a few of them anyway) more independent.

Other research shows that divorce and lower fertility are linked to less domestic violence. So the influence of soaps may be far more positive than critics of their vapidity claim. If Globo could now come up with a seductive novela about tax reform its transformation of Brazil would be complete.

* “Television and Divorce: Evidence from Brazilian Novelas,” by Alberto Chong and Eliana La Ferrara (January 2009) and “Soap Operas and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil,” by Eliana La Ferrara, Alberto Chong and Suzanne Duryea (October 2008).

Ecko's startup story: Rhinos and maxed credit

2009-03-13T14:09:00.000-07:00

By Jessica Harris

To launch his streetwise fashion line, Ecko burned up his credit cards and learned to dampen checks to slow down the bank's cashing them.

NEW YORK (FORTUNE Small Business) -- Fortune Small Business recently sat down with fashion designer Marc Ecko, founder and CEO of Marc Ecko Enterprises, at his Batcave-like headquarters in lower Manhattan. Ecko, 36, told us how he got his burgeoning streetwear empire off the ground. Below are edited highlights from Ecko's conversation with FSB contributor Jessica Harris; for more, see our video of the interview.

FSB: How did you become exposed to hip hop and graffiti - elements that have influenced your fashion?

Ecko: I grew up in the 1980s, in this really eclectic New Jersey town called Lakewood that had a large population of blacks and Latinos. Hip hop was something you had to go out and find back then - it wasn't something that found you.

FSB: You went to college planning to become a pharmacist like your father. What changed your mind?

Ecko: I wasn't happy with the idea of being a pharmacist. I was more passionate about art. And every time I tried to make a business out of art, whether it was airbrushing T-shirts or making custom denim jackets for friends, I felt valid among my peers because they made a big deal out of it.

FSB: What set you apart from your competitors in the fashion world?

Ecko: I had a rich education around graphic design and illustration, even though it was kind of a street education. Today, I consider myself less a traditional designer in the 'Mr. Armani, Mr. Klein' sense of the word and more of a curator. I have good chops at embellishing an item. I know how to apply art and illustration and give a context to core fashion foundation pieces that gives them a different energy.

FSB: What was the hardest part of getting off the ground?

Ecko: Probably learning to fully understand the word "independent." When [you launch a company] you start signing your name to things that commit you fiscally and legally.

FSB: You were capital-constrained in the early days. How did you pay the bills?

Ecko: Credit cards, credit cards, credit cards. [Plus], I learned that the barcodes at the bottom of a check are actually magnetic, so if you wet them down you could slow the bank's ability to cash the check. You could buy 15, sometimes 20 additional terms that way.

FSB: A few years after you started your company, you almost went bankrupt. How did you turn yourself around?

Ecko: It helped that the streetwear space started to get validation. We also put more emphasis on merchandising. I was good at [stuff like] graphic T-shirts and fleece. We started to study the sales reports: "Hey, you did that well, the consumer liked it and they reordered." Or you might have loved that piece there, you might have been emotional about it and thought it was the greatest piece of design [ever], but guess what, they hated it.

FSB: Tell me about Marc Ecko Cut and Sew, your new line.

Ecko: It's an extension of my brand. If you grew up on Ecko Unlimited then you can relate to Cut and Sew. Ecko Unlimited appeals to a slightly younger demographic. Cut and Sew is an older demographic, slightly more dressed up but still casual and still richly embellished.

FSB: Your company mascot is a rhinoceros. How did you come up with that?

Ecko: My dad had a collection of wooden rhino sculptures that I used to play with as a kid. Later on I had a line of 25 T-shirts in the range and one of them carried our rhino logo. I remember buyers saying, "What are you trying to say? Is this some kind of wannabee Timberland (TBL) thing?" But the consumer responded and validated the rhino so i started using it more and more. I wanted a logo mark, not just a word mark. I knew that if I could take all the lifestyle stuff that I embody and sublimate it onto this creature, it would be a recipe for success

Cybercrime-as-a-service takes off

2009-03-13T11:32:00.000-07:00

By Ry Crozier

Malware writers that sell toolkits online for as little as $400 will now configure and host the attacks as a service for another $50, a security expert has said.

Speaking at the Vasco Banking Summit in Sydney yesterday, the company's technical account manager, Vlado Vajdic, told delegates that cyber crime was becoming so business-like that online offerings of malicious code often included support and maintenance services.

Additionally, he said, cybercrime outsourcing would become a key trend in 2009.

"It was inevitable that services would be sold to people who bought the malware toolkits but didn‘t know how to configure them," Vajdic said.

"Not only can you buy configuration as a service now, you can have the malware operated for you, too. We saw evidence of that this year."

"Investors get malware developers to write code for them and then get the writers to host and distribute it, too."

Vajdic showed delegates an email purported to be from a malware 'provider' offering hosted services for an extra $50 for three months.

Vasco's regional director for Pacific, India and Japan, Dan Dica, said company researchers buy the kits online and disassemble them to try to learn the secrets of their programming.

"The kits come with maintenance, support and a user guide," Dica said.

"For $400 you can become a hacker."

Vajdic said that toolkit creators increasingly appeared to apply commercial development techniques in their creation.

"There's evidence of solid software engineering practices being built into them," he said.

"Today's bad guy is a business person that attracts investment, has malware writers working under them and probably even employs a project manager. These people are high-flyers."

Vajdic also said that the malware writers often viewed themselves as being involved in a legitimate business.

"They say it is spyware or that it's for research purposes only and they can't control what you do with it," Vajdic said.

How America Lost the War on Drugs.

2009-03-02T14:15:00.001-08:00

After Thirty-Five Years and $500 Billion, Drugs Are as Cheap and Plentiful as Ever: An Anatomy of a Failure.

Ben Wallace-Wells

1. AFTER PABLO
On the day of his death, December 2nd, 1993, the Colombian billionaire drug kingpin Pablo Escobar was on the run and living in a small, tiled-roof house in a middle-class neighborhood of Medellín, close to the soccer stadium. He died, theatrically, *ridiculously, gunned down by a Colombian police manhunt squad while he tried to flee across the barrio's rooftops, a fat, bearded man who had kicked off his flip-flops to try to outrun the bullets. The first thing the American drug agents who arrived on the scene wanted to do was to make sure that the corpse was actually Escobar's. The second thing was to check his house.

The last time Escobar had hastily fled one of his residences - la Catedral, the luxurious private prison he built for himself to avoid extradition to the United States - he had left behind bizarre, enchanting *detritus, the raw stuff of what would *become his own myth: the photos of *himself dressed up as a Capone-era gangster with a Tommy gun, the odd collection of novels ranging from Graham Greene to the Austrian modernist Stefan Zweig. Agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, arriving after the kingpin had fled, found neat shelves lined with loose-leaf binders, carefully organized by content. They were, says John Coleman, then the DEA's assistant administrator for operations, "filled with DEA reports" - internal documents that laid out, in extraordinary detail, the agency's repeated attempts to capture Escobar.

"He had shelves and shelves and shelves of these things," Coleman tells me. "It was stunning. A lot of the informants we had, he'd figured out who they were. All the agents we had chasing him - who we trusted in the Colombian police - it was right there. He knew so much more about what we were doing than we knew about what he was doing."

Coleman and other agents began to work deductively, backward. "We had always wondered why his guys, when we caught them, would always go to trial and risk lots of jail time, even when they would have saved themselves a lot of time if they'd just plead guilty," he says. "What we realized when we saw those binders was that they were doing a job. Their job was to stay on trial and have their lawyers use discovery to get all the information on DEA operations they could. Then they'd send copies back to Medellín, and Escobar would put it all together and figure out who we had tracking him."

The loose-leaf binders crammed in Escobar's office on the ground floor gave Coleman and his agents a sense of triumph: The whole mysterious drug trade had an organization, a structure and a brain, and they'd just removed it. In the thrill of the moment, clinking champagne glasses with officials from the Colombian police and taking congratulatory calls from Washington, the agents in Medellín believed the War on Drugs could finally be won. "We had an endgame," Coleman says. "We were literally making the greatest plans."

At the headquarters of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in Washington, staffers tacked up a poster with photographs of sixteen of its most wanted men, cartel leaders from across the Andes. Solemnly, ceremoniously, a staffer took a red magic marker and drew an X over Escobar's portrait. "We felt like it was one down, fifteen to go," recalls John Carnevale, the longtime budget director of the drug-control *office. "There was this feeling that if we got all sixteen, it's not like the whole thing would be over, but that was a big part of how we would go about winning the War on Drugs."

Man by man, sixteen red X's eventually went up over the faces of the cartel leaders: KILLED. EXTRADITED. KILLED. José Santacruz Londoño, a leading drug trafficker, was gunned down by Colombian police in a shootout. The Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, the heads of the Cali cartel, were extradited after they got greedy and tried to keep running their organization from prison. Some U.S. drug warriors believed that the busts were largely public-relations events, a showy way for the Colombian government to look tough on the drug trade, but most were less cynical. The crack epidemic was over. Drug-related murders were in decline. Winning the War on Drugs didn't seem such a quixotic and open-ended mission, like the War on Poverty, but rather something tangible, a fat guy with a big organization and binders full of internal DEA reports, sixteen faces on a poster, a piñata you could reach out and smack. Richard Cañas, a veteran DEA official who headed counternarcotics efforts on the National Security Council under both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, can still recall the euphoria of those days. "We were moving," he says, "from success to success."

This is the story of how that momentary success turned into one of the most sustained and costly defeats the United States has ever suffered. It is the story of how the most powerful country on Earth, sensing a piñata, swung to hit it and missed.

2. THE MAKING OF A TRAGEDY

For Cañas and other drug warriors, the death of Escobar had the feel of a real pivot, the end of one kind of battle against drugs and the beginning of another. The war itself had begun during the Nixon administration, when the White House began to get reports that a generation of soldiers was about to come back from Vietnam stoned, with habits weaned on the cheap marijuana and heroin of Southeast Asia and hothoused in the twitchy-fingered freakout of a jungle guerrilla war. For those in Washington, the problem of drugs was still so strange and new in the early Seventies that Nixon officials grappled with ideas that, by the standards of the later debate among politicians, were unthinkably radical: They appointed a panel that recommended the decriminalization of casual marijuana use and even considered buying up the world's entire supply of opium to prevent it from being converted into heroin. But Nixon was a law-and-order politician, an operator who understood very well the panic many Americans felt about the cities, the hippies and crime. Calling narcotics "public enemy number one in the United States," he used the issue to escalate the culture war that pitted Middle Americans against the radicals and the hippies, strengthening penalties for drug dealers and devoting federal funds to bolster prosecutions. In 1973, Nixon gave the job of policing these get-tough laws to the newly formed Drug Enforcement Administration.

By the mid-1980s, as crack leeched out from New York, Miami and Los Angeles into the American interior, the devastations inflicted by the drug were becoming more vivid and frightening. The Reagan White House seemed to capture the current of the moment: Nancy Reagan's plaintive urging to "just say no," and her husband's decision to hand police and prosecutors even greater powers to lock up street dealers, and to devote more resources to stop cocaine's production at the source, in the Andes. In 1986, trying to cope with crack's corrosive effects, Congress adopted mandatory-minimum laws, which hit inner-city crack users with penalties as severe as those levied on Wall Street brokers possessing 100 times more powder cocaine. Over the next two decades, hundreds of thousands of Americans would be locked up for drug offenses.

The War on Drugs became an actual war during the first Bush administration, when the bombastic conservative intellectual Bill Bennett was appointed drug czar. "Two words sum up my entire approach," Bennett declared, "consequences and confrontation." Bush and Bennett doubled annual spending on the drug war to $12 billion, devoting much of the money to expensive weaponry: fighter jets to take on the Colombian trafficking cartels, Navy submarines to chase cocaine-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. If narcotics were the enemy, America would vanquish its foe with torpedoes and F-16s - and throw an entire generation of drug users in jail.

Though many on the left suspected that things had gone seriously awry, drug policy under Reagan and Bush was largely conducted in a fog of ignorance. The kinds of long-term studies that policy-makers needed - those that would show what measures would actually reduce drug use and dampen its consequences - did not yet exist. When it came to research, there was "absolutely nothing" that examined "how each program was or wasn't working," says Peter Reuter, a drug scholar who founded the Drug Policy Research Center at the RAND Corp.

But after Escobar was killed in 1993 - and after U.S. drug agents began systematically busting up the Colombian cartels - doubt was replaced with hard data. Thanks to new research, U.S. policy-makers knew with increasing certainty what would work and what wouldn't. The tragedy of the War on Drugs is that this knowledge hasn't been heeded. We continue to treat marijuana as a major threat to public health, even though we know it isn't. We continue to lock up generations of teenage drug dealers, even though we know imprisonment does little to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the street. And we continue to spend billions to fight drugs abroad, even though we know that military efforts are an ineffective way to cut the supply of narcotics in America or raise the price.

All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes - a twelvefold increase since 1980 - with no discernible effect on the drug traffic. Virtually the only success the government can claim is the decline in the number of Americans who smoke marijuana - and even on that count, it is not clear that federal prevention programs are responsible. In the course of fighting this war, we have allowed our military to become pawns in a civil war in Colombia and our drug agents to be used by the cartels for their own ends. Those we are paying to wage the drug war have been accused of *human-rights abuses in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. In Mexico, we are now *repeating many of the same mistakes we have made in the Andes.

"What we learned was that in drug work, nothing ever stands still," says Coleman, the former DEA official and current president of Drug Watch International, a law-and-order advocacy group. For every move the drug warriors made, the traffickers adapted. "The other guys were learning just as we were learning," Coleman says. "We had this hubris."
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3. BRAINIACS AND COLD WARRIORS
"At the beginning of the Clinton administration," Cañas tells me, "the War on Drugs was like the War on Terror is now." It was, he means, an orienting fight, the next in a sequence of abstract, generational struggles that the country launched itself into after finding no one willing to actually square up and face it on a battlefield. After the Cold War, in the flush and optimism of victory, it felt to drug warriors and the American public that abstractions could be beaten. "It was really a pivot point," recalls Rand Beers, who served on the National Security Council for four different presidents. "We started to look carefully at our drug policies and ask if everything we were doing really made sense." The man Clinton appointed to manage this new era was Lee Brown.

Brown had been a cop for almost thirty years when Clinton tapped him to be the nation's drug czar in 1993. He had started out working narcotics in San Jose, California, just as the Sixties began to swell, and ended up leading the New York Police Department when the city was the symbolic center of the crack epidemic, with kids being killed by stray bullets that barreled through locked doors. A big, shy man in his fifties, Brown had made his reputation with a simple insight: Cops can't do much without the trust of people in their communities, who are needed to turn in offenders and serve as witnesses at trial. Being a good cop meant understanding the everyday act of police work not as chasing crooks but as meeting people and making allies.

"When I worked as an undercover narcotics officer, I was living the life of an addict so I could make buys and make busts of the dealers," Brown tells me. "When you're in that position, you see very quickly that you can't arrest your way out of this. You see the cycle over and over again of people using drugs, getting into trouble, going to prison, getting out and getting into drugs again. At some point I stepped back and asked myself, 'What impact is all of this having on the drug problem? There has to be a better way.' "

In the aftermath of the Rodney King beating, this philosophy - known as community policing - had made Brown a national phenomenon. The Clinton administration asked him to take the drug-czar post, and though Brown was skeptical, he agreed on the condition that the White House make it a Cabinet-level position. Brown stacked his small office with liberals who had spent the long Democratic exile doing drug-policy work for Congress and swearing they would improve things when they retook power. "There were basic assumptions that Republicans had been making for fifteen years that had never been challenged," says Carol Bergman, a congressional staffer who became Brown's legislative liaison. "The way Lee Brown looked at it, the drug war was focused on locking kids up for increasing amounts of time, and there wasn't enough emphasis on treatment. He really wanted to take a different tactic."

Brown's staff became intrigued by a new study on drug policy from the RAND Corp., the Strangelove-esque think tank that during the Cold War had employed mathematicians to crank out analyses for the Pentagon. Like Lockheed Martin, the jet manufacturer that had turned to managing welfare reform after the Cold War ended, RAND was scouting for other government projects that might need its brains. It found the drug war. The think tank assigned Susan Everingham, a young expert in mathematical modeling, to help run the group's signature project: dividing up the federal government's annual drug budget of $13 billion into its component parts and deciding what worked and what didn't when it came to fighting cocaine.

Everingham and her team sorted the drug war into two categories. There were supply-side programs, like the radar and ships in the Caribbean and the efforts to arrest traffickers in Colombia and Mexico, which were designed to make it more expensive for traffickers to bring their product to market. There were also demand-side programs, like drug treatment, which were designed to reduce the market for drugs in the United States. To evaluate the cost-effectiveness of each approach, the mathematicians set up a series of formulas to calculate precisely how much additional money would have to be spent on supply programs and demand programs to reduce cocaine consumption by one percent nationwide.

"If you had asked me at the outset," Everingham says, "my guess would have been that the best use of taxpayer money was in the source countries in South America" - that it would be possible to stop cocaine before it reached the U.S. But what the study found surprised her. Overseas military efforts were the least effective way to decrease drug use, and imprisoning addicts was prohibitively expensive. The only cost-effective way to put a dent in the market, it turned out, was drug treatment. "It's not a magic bullet," says Reuter, the RAND scholar who helped supervise the study, "but it works." The study ultimately ushered RAND, this vaguely creepy Cold War relic, into a position as the permanent, pragmatic left wing of American drug policy, the most consistent force for innovating and reinventing our national conception of the War on Drugs.

When Everingham's team looked more closely at drug treatment, they found that thirteen percent of hardcore cocaine users who receive help substantially reduced their use or kicked the habit completely. They also found that a larger and larger portion of illegal drugs in the U.S. were being used by a comparatively small group of hardcore addicts. There was, the study concluded, a fundamental imbalance: The crack epidemic was basically a domestic problem, but we had been fighting it more aggressively overseas. "What we began to realize," says Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studied drug policy for RAND, "was that even if you only get a percentage of this small group of heavy drug users to abstain forever, it's still a really great deal."

Thirteen years later, the study remains the gold standard on drug policy. "It's still the consensus recommendation supplied by the scholarship," says Reuter. "Yet as well as it's stood up, it's never really been tried."

To Brown, RAND's conclusions seemed exactly right. "I saw how little we were doing to help addicts, and I thought, 'This is crazy,' " he recalls. " 'This is how we should be breaking the cycle of addiction and crime, and we're just doing nothing.' "

The federal budget that Brown's office submitted in 1994 remains a kind of fetish object for certain liberals in the field, the moment when their own ideas came close to making it into law. The budget sought to cut overseas interdiction, beef up community policing, funnel low-level drug criminals into treatment programs instead of prison, and devote $355 million to treating hardcore addicts, the drug users responsible for much of the illegal-drug market and most of the crime associated with it. White House political handlers, wary of appearing soft on crime, were skeptical of even this limited commitment, but Brown persuaded the president to offer his support, and the plan stayed.

Still, the politics of the issue were difficult. Convincing Congress to dramatically alter the direction of America's drug war required a brilliant sales job. "And Lee Brown," says Bergman, his former legislative liaison, "was not an effective salesman." With a kind of loving earnestness, the drug czar arranged tours of treatment centers for congressmen to show them the kinds of programs whose funding his bill would increase. Few legislators came. Most politicians were skeptical about such a radical departure from the mainstream consensus on crime. Congress rewrote the budget, slashing the $355 million for treatment programs by more than eighty percent. "There were too many of us who had a strong law-and-order focus," says Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican who *opposed the reform bill and serves as co-chair of the Senate's drug-policy caucus.

For some veteran drug warriors, Brown's tenure as drug czar still lingers as the last moment when federal drug policy really made sense. "Lee Brown came the closest of anyone to really getting it," says Carnevale, the longtime budget director of the drug-control office. "But the bottom line was, the drug issue and Lee Brown were largely ignored by the Clinton administration." When Brown tried to repeat his treatment-centered initiative in 1995, it was poorly timed: Newt Gingrich and the Republicans had seized control of the House after portraying Clinton as soft on crime. The authority to oversee the War on Drugs passed from Rep. John Conyers, the Detroit liberal, to a retired wrestling coach from Illinois who was tired of drugs in the schools – a rising Republican star named Dennis Hastert. Reeling from the defeat at the polls, Clinton decided to give up on drug reform and get tough on crime. "The feeling was that the drug czar's office was one of the weak areas when it came to the administration's efforts to confront crime," recalls Leon Panetta, then Clinton's chief of staff.

4. THE YOUNG GUNS

The administration was not doing much better in its efforts to stop the flow of drugs at the source. Before Clinton had even taken office, Cañas - who headed drug policy at the National Security Council - had been summoned to brief the new president's choice for national security adviser, Anthony Lake, on the nation's narcotics policy in Latin America. "I figured, what the hell, I'm going back to DEA anyway, I'll tell him what I really think," Cañas recalls.

The Bush administration, he told Lake, had been sending the military after the wrong target. In the 1970s, drugs were run up to the United States through the Caribbean by a bunch of "swashbuckling entrepreneurs" with small planes - "guys who wouldn't have looked out of place at a Jimmy Buffett concert." In 1989, in the nationwide panic over crack, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney had managed to secure a budget of $450 million to chase these Caribbean smugglers. (Years later, when a longtime drug official asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld why Cheney had pushed the program, Rumsfeld grinned and said, "Cheney thought he was running for president.") The U.S. military loved the new mission, because it gave them a reason to ask for more equipment in the wake of the Cold War. And the Bush White House loved the idea of sending the military after the drug traffickers for its symbolism and swagger and the way it proved that the administration was taking drugs seriously.

The problem, Cañas told Lake, was that the cocaine traffic had professionalized and was now moving its product through Mexico. With Caribbean smugglers out of the game, the military program no longer made sense. The new national security adviser grinned at Cañas, pleased. "That's what we think as well," Lake said. "How would you like to stay on and help make that happen?"

Taking a new approach, the Clinton administration shifted most military assets out of the Caribbean and into the Andes, where the coca leaf was being grown and processed. "Our idea was, Stop messing around in the transit countries and go to the source," Cañas tells me. The administration spent millions of extra dollars to equip police in Bolivia and Colombia to bust the crop's growers and processors. The cops were not polite - Human Rights Watch condemned the murders of Bolivian farmers, blaming "the heavy hand of U.S. drug enforcement" - but they were *effective, and by 1996, coca production in Bolivia had begun a dramatic decline.

After Escobar fell, the American drug agents who had been chasing him did not expect the cocaine industry to dry up overnight - they had girded for the fallout from the drug lord's death. What they had not expected was the ways in which the unintended consequences of his downfall would permanently change the drug traffic. "What ended up happening - and maybe we should have predicted this would happen - was that the whole structure shattered into these smaller groups," says Coleman, the veteran DEA agent. "You suddenly had all these new guys controlling a small aspect of the traffic."

Among them was a hired gun known as Don Berna, who had served as a bodyguard for Escobar. Double-crossed by his boss, Berna broke with the Medellín cartel and struck out on his own. For him, the disruption caused by the new front in America's drug war presented a business opportunity. But with the DEA's shift from the Caribbean into Bolivia and Colombia, Berna and other new traffickers had a production problem. So some of the "microcartels," as they became known, decided to move their operations someplace where they could control it: They opened negotiations with the FARC, a down-at-the-heels rebel army based in the jungles of Colombia. In return for cash, the FARC agreed to put coca production under its protection and keep the Colombian army away from the coca crop.

Berna and the younger kingpins also had a transportation problem: Mexican traffickers, who had been paid a set fee by the cartels to smuggle product across the U.S. border, wanted a larger piece of the business. The Mexican upstarts had a certain economic logic on their side. A kilo of cocaine produced in Colombia is worth about $2,500. In Mexico, a kilo gets $5,000. But smuggle that kilo across the border and the price goes up to $17,500. "What the Mexican groups started saying was, 'Why are we working for these guys? Why don't we just buy it from the Colombians directly and keep the profits ourselves?' " says Tony Ayala, a retired DEA agent and former Mexico country attache.

The remaining leaders of the weakened Cali cartel, DEA agents say, traveled up to Guadalajara for a series of meetings with Mexican traffickers. By 1996, the Colombians had decided to hand over more control of the cocaine trade to the Mexicans. The Cali cartel would now ship cocaine to Guadalajara, sell the drugs to the Mexican groups and then be done with it. "This wasn't just happenstance," says Jerome McArdle, then a DEA assistant agent for special operations. "This was the Colombians saying they were willing to reduce their profits in exchange for reducing their risk and exposure, and handing it over to the Mexicans. The whole nature of the supply chain changed."

Around the same time, DEA agents found themselves picking up Mexican distributors, rather than Colombians, on the streets of New York. Immigration and customs officials on the border were meanwhile overwhelmed by the sheer number of tractor-trailers - many of them loaded with drugs - suddenly pouring across the Mexican border as a consequence of NAFTA, which had been enacted in 1994. "A thousand trucks coming across in a four-hour *period," says Steve Robertson, a DEA special agent assigned to southern *Texas at the time. "There's no way we're going to catch everything."

Power followed the money, and Mexican traffickers soon had a style, and reach, that had previously belonged only to the Colombians. In the border town of Ciudad Juárez, the cocaine trafficker Amado Carrillo Fuentes developed a new kind of smuggling operation. "He brought in middle-class people for the first time - lawyers, accountants - and he developed a transportation division, an acquisitions division, even a human-resources operation, just like a modern corporation," says Tony Payan, a political scientist at the University of Texas-El Paso who has studied the drug trade on the border. Before long, Carrillo Fuentes had a fleet of Boeing 727s, which he used to fly cocaine, up to fifteen tons at a time, up from Colombia to Mexico. The newspapers called him El Señor de los Cielos, the Lord of the Skies.

The Mexican cartels were also getting more imaginative. "Think of it like a business, which is how these guys thought of it," says Guy Hargreaves, a top DEA agent during the 1990s. "Why pay for the widgets when you can make the widgets yourselves?" Since the climate and geography of Mexico aren't right for making cocaine, the cartels did the logical thing: They introduced a new product. As Hargreaves recalls, the Mexicans slipped the new drug into their cocaine shipments in Southern California and told coke dealers, "Here, try some of this stuff - it's a similar effect."

The product the Mexican cartels came up with, the new widget they could make themselves, was methamphetamine. The man who mastered the market was a midlevel cocaine trafficker, then in his late twenties, named Jesús Amezcua. In 1994, when U.S. Customs officials at the Dallas airport seized an airplane filled with barrels of ephedrine, a chemical precursor for meth, and traced it back to Amezcua, the startling new shift in the drug traffic became clear to a handful of insiders. "Cartels were no longer production organizations, whose business is wrapped up in a single drug," says Tony Ayala, the senior DEA agent in Mexico at the time. "They became trafficking organizations - and they will smuggle whatever they can make the most profit from."
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5. THE LOBBYISTS & THE MAD PROFESSOR
It is only in retrospect that these moments - the barrels of ephedrine seized in Dallas, the quiet suggestion that meth had worked its way into the cocaine supply chain - take on a looming character, the historic weight of a change made manifest. Up until methamphetamine, the War on Drugs had targeted three enemies. First there were the hippie drugs - marijuana, LSD - that posed little threat to the general public. Then there was heroin, a horrible drug but one that was largely concentrated in New York City. And, finally, there was crack. What meth proved was that even if the DEA could wipe out every last millionaire cocaine goon in Colombia, burn every coca field in Bolivia and Peru, and build an impenetrable wall along the entire length of the Mexican border - even then, we wouldn't have won the War on Drugs, because there would still be methamphetamine, and after that, something else.

Gene Haislip, who served for years as one of the DEA's top-ranking administrators, believes there was a moment when meth could have been shut down, long before it spiraled into a nationwide epidemic. Haislip, who spent nearly two decades leading a small group at the agency dedicated to chemical control, is his own kind of legend; he is still known around the DEA as the man who beat quaaludes, perhaps the only drug that the U.S. has ever been able to declare total victory over. He did it with gumshoe methodicalness: by identifying every country in the world that produced the drug's active ingredient, a prescription medication called methaqualone, and convincing them to tighten regulations. Haislip believes he was present the moment when the United States lost the war on methamphetamine, way back in 1986, when meth was still a crude biker drug confined to a few valleys in Northern California - a decade before the Mexican drug lords turned it into the most problematic drug in America. "The thing is, methamphetamine should never have gotten to that point," Haislip says. And it never would have, he believes, if it hadn't been for the lobbyists.

Haislip was known around the DEA as precise-minded and verbal. His impulse, in combatting meth, was the same one that had pushed the drug warriors after Escobar: the quixotic faith that if you could just stop the stuff at the source, you could get rid of all the social problems at once. Assembling a coalition of legislators, Haislip convinced them that the small, growing population of speed freaks in Northern California was enough of a concern that Congress should pass a law to regulate the drug's precursor chemicals, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, legal drugs that were used in cold medicine and produced in fewer than a dozen factories in the world. "We were starting to get reports of hijacking of ephedrine, armed robbery of ephedrine, things that had never happened before," Haislip tells me. "You could see we were on the verge of something if we didn't get a handle on it."

All that was left was to convince the Reagan administration. One day in late 1986, Haislip went to meet with top officials in the Indian Treaty Room, a vast, imposing space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building: arches, tiled floors, the kind of room designed to house history being made. Haislip noticed several men in suits sitting quietly in the back of the room. They were lobbyists from the pharmaceutical industry, but Haislip didn't pay them much attention. "I wasn't concerned with them," he recalls.

When Haislip launched into his presentation, an official from the Commerce Department cut him off. "Look, you're way ahead of us," the official said. "We don't have anything to suggest or add." Haislip left the meeting thinking he had won: The bill he proposed was submitted to Congress, requiring companies to keep records on the import and sale of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.

But what Haislip didn't know was that the men in suits had already gone to work to rig the bill in their favor. "Quite frankly," Allan Rexinger, one of the lobbyists present at the meeting later told reporters, "we appealed to a higher authority." The pharmaceutical industry needed pseudoephedrine to make profitable cold medications. The result, to Haislip's dismay, was a new law that monitored sales of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine in bulk powder but created an exemption for selling the chemicals in tablet form - a loophole that protected the pharmaceutical industry's profits.

The law, drug agents say, sparked two changes in the market for illegal meth. First, the supply of ephedrine simply moved overseas: The Mexican cartels, quick to recognize an emerging market, evaded the restrictions by importing powder from China, India and Europe and then smuggling it across the border to the biker groups that had traditionally distributed the drug. "We actually had meetings where we planned for a turf war between the Mexicans and the Hells Angels over methamphetamine," says retired DEA agent Mike Heald, who headed the San Francisco meth task force, "but it turned out they realized they'd make more money by working together." Second, responding to a dramatic uptick in demand from the illegal market, chemical-supply companies began moving huge amounts of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine out to the West Coast in the form of pills, which were then converted into meth. Rather than stemming the tide of meth before it started, the Reagan administration had unwittingly helped accelerate a new epidemic: Between 1992 and 1994, the number of meth addicts entering rehab facilities doubled, and the drug's purity on the street rose by twenty-seven percent.

Haislip resolved to have another go at Congress, but the issue ended up in a dispiriting cycle. The resistance, he says bitterly, "was always coming from the same lobbying group." In 1993, when he persuaded lawmakers to regulate the sale of ephedrine in tablet form, the pharmaceutical industry won an exception for pseudoephedrine. Drug agents began to intercept shipments of pseudoephedrine pills in barrels. Three years later, when lawmakers finally regulated tablets of pseudoephedrine, they created an exception for pills sold in blister packs. "Congress thought there was no way that meth freaks would buy this stuff and pop the pills out of blister packs, one by one," says Heald. "But we're not dealing with normal people - we're dealing with meth freaks. They'll stay up all night picking their toes."

By the time Haislip retired, in 1997, the methamphetamine problem was really two problems. There were the mom-and-pop cooks, who were punching pills out of blister packs and making small batches of drugs for themselves. Then there were the industrial-scale Mexican cartels, which were responsible for eighty percent of the meth in the United States. It took until 2005 for Congress to finally regulate over-the-counter blister packs, which caused the number of labs to plummet. But once again, the Mexican groups were a step ahead of the law. In October 2006, police in Guadalajara arrested an American chemist named Frederick Wells, who had moved to Mexico after losing his job at Idaho State University. An academic troublemaker who drove around campus with signs on the back of his pickup truck raging at the college administration, Wells had allegedly used his university lab to investigate new ways that Mexican traffickers could use completely legal reagents to engineer meth precursors from scratch. "Very complicated numerical modeling," says his academic colleague Jeff Rosentreter. By the time Wells was arrested, the State Department had only just succeeded at pressuring Mexico to restrict the flow of pseudoephedrine, even though Wells had apparently been hard at work for years creating alternatives to that chemical. The lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry, Haislip says, "cost us eight or nine years."

For some in the drug war, it was a lesson that even the most promising efforts to restrict the supply of drugs at the source - those that rely on legal methods to regulate legally produced drugs - remained nearly impossible, outflanked by both drug traffickers and industry lobbyists. The tragedy of the fight against methamphetamine is that it repeated the ways in which the government tried to fight the cocaine problem, and failed - racing from source to source, trying to eliminate a coca field or an ephedrine manufacturer and then racing to the next one. "We used to call it the Pillsbury Doughboy - stick your finger in one part of the problem, and the Doughboy's stomach just pops out somewhere else," says Rand Beers. "The lesson of U.S. drug policy is that this world runs on unintended consequences. No matter how noble your intentions, there's a good chance that in solving one problem, you'll screw something else up."

6. THE GENERAL & THE ADMAN

Within the Clinton White House, the reform effort spearheaded by Lee Brown had created a political dilemma. Republicans, having taken control of Congress in 1994, were attacking the administration for being soft on drugs, and the White House decided that it was time to look tougher. "A lot of people didn't think Brown was a strong leader," Panetta tells me. As senior figures within the administration cast about for a replacement, they started by thinking about who would be the opposite of Brown. "We wanted to get someone who was much stronger, much tougher, and could come across that way symbolically," Panetta says.

During the planning for a possible invasion of Haiti, Panetta and others had discovered a rising star at the Pentagon, a charismatic, bullying four-star general named Barry McCaffrey, who had annoyed many in the Pentagon's establishment. In 1996, halfway into his State of the Union address, Clinton looked up at McCaffrey, a lean, stern-seeming military man in the balcony, and informed the nation that the general would be his next drug czar. "To succeed, he needs a force far larger than he has ever commanded before," Clinton said. "He needs all of us. Every one of us has a role to play on this team." McCaffrey, the bars on his epaulets shimmering, saluted. It was one of the president's biggest applause lines of the night.

For the drug warriors in McCaffrey's office, "the General" was everything the languid, considered, academic Lee Brown had not been. "It was clear from the outset that here was a guy who would take advantage of the bully pulpit and who, unlike Brown, would probably be able to get things done," says Bergman, Brown's former liaison. "One thing that surprised us all was how thoughtful he was - he wasn't a knee-jerk, law-enforcement guy. He understood there needed to be money for treatment. He prided himself on being very sensitive to the racial issues, and he was sensitive to the impact of sentencing laws on African-American men." McCaffrey imported his own staff from the Southern Command - mostly men, all military. They lent the White House's drug operation - previously a slow place - the kinetic energy of a forward operating base. "We went to a twenty-four-hour clock, so we'd schedule meetings for 1500," one longtime staffer recalls. "His people sat down with senior staff and told us what size paper the General wanted his memos on, this kind of report would have green tabs, this would have blue tabs."

The General's genius was for publicity. "He was great at getting visibility," Carnevale says. McCaffrey held grandstanding events everywhere from Mexico to Maine, telling reporters that the decades-long narrative of impending doom around the drug war was out of date - and that if Congress would really dedicate itself to the mission, the country had a winnable fight on its hands. Drug-use numbers were edging downward; even cocaine seemed to be declining in popularity. "We are in an optimistic situation," McCaffrey declared.

For the first time ever, McCaffrey had the drug czar's office develop a strategy for an endgame to the drug war, a plan for finishing the whole thing. The federal government needed to reduce the amount of money it was spending on law enforcement and interdiction. But McCaffrey believed this was only possible once it could guarantee that drug use would continue to decline. "The data suggested very strongly that those who never tried any drugs before they were eighteen were very likely to remain abstinent for their whole lives, but that those who even smoked marijuana when they were teenagers had much worse outcomes," says McCaffrey's deputy Don Vereen. So the General decided to focus the government's attention on keeping kids from trying pot.

The "gateway theory," as it became known, had a natural appeal. Because most people who used hard drugs had also smoked marijuana, and because kids often tried marijuana several years before they started trying harder drugs, it seemed that keeping them off pot might prevent them from ever getting to cocaine and heroin. The only trouble is, the theory is wrong. When McCaffrey's office commissioned the Institute of Medicine to study the idea, researchers concluded that marijuana "does not appear to be a gateway drug." RAND, after examining a decade of data, also found that the gateway theory is "not the best explanation" of the link between marijuana use and hard drugs. But McCaffrey continued to devote more and more of the government's resources to going after kids. "We have already clearly committed ourselves," he declared, "to a number-one focus on youth."

"That decision," Bergman says, "was where you could see McCaffrey begin to lose credibility."

In 1996, less than a year into his term, the new drug czar met Jim Burke, a smooth-talking, silver-haired executive who chaired the Partnership for a Drug-Free America - the advertising organization best known for the slogan "This is your brain on drugs." "Burke personally was very hard to resist," one of his former colleagues tells me. "I've seen him sell many conservative members of Congress and also liberals like Mario Cuomo."

Burke told McCaffrey a simple story. In the late 1980s, he said, the major television networks had voluntarily given airtime to the Partnership to run anti-drug ads aimed at teenagers. The number of teenagers who used drugs - especially marijuana - declined during that period. But in the early 1990s, Burke said, the rise of cable TV cut into the profits of the networks, which became stingier with the time they dedicated to anti-drug advertising. The result, the adman told the General, was that the number of teenagers who used drugs was climbing sharply - to the outrage of Dennis Hastert and other conservative members of Congress. As a clincher, Burke handed McCaffrey a graph that showed the declining amount of airtime dedicated to anti-drug advertising on one axis and the declining perception among teenagers of the risks associated with drugs on the other. "I'm ninety-nine percent sure," one staffer at the Partnership tells me, "that it was that conversation that sold McCaffrey."

The General mobilized his office, lobbying Congress to allocate enough money to put anti-drug advertising on the air whenever teenagers watched television. His staff was skeptical. For all of McCaffrey's conviction and charisma, he didn't have much in the way of facts. "That was all we had - no data, just this one chart - and we had to go and sell Congress," Carnevale recalls. But Congress proved to be a pushover. Conservatives, who held a majority, were thrilled that soft-on-pot liberals in the Clinton administration finally wanted to do something about the drug problem. "At some point, you have to draw a line and say that some things are right and some things are wrong," says Sen. Grassley, explaining his support of the measure. "And using any drugs is just flat-out wrong." To the Partnership's delight, Congress allocated $1 billion to buy network time for anti-drug spots aimed at teenagers.

The General was also starting to make friends beyond the Clinton administration. The drug czar had found a natural ally in Hastert, who had become the GOP's de facto leader on drug policy. The former wrestling coach struck few as charismatic - his joyless and drudging style, his form like settled gelatin - but his experiences in high schools had left him with the feeling that the drug issue, in the words of his longtime aide Bobby Charles, "had become extremely poignant." Hastert wasn't quite Lee Brown; he believed that the prime focus of the drug war should be to increase funding for military operations in Colombia. But he and his staff had grown frustrated with the exclusively punitive character of drug policy and wanted the Republicans to take a more compassionate stance. His staff had studied the RAND reports and largely agreed with their conclusions. "We felt if you didn't get at the nub of the problem, which was prevention and treatment, you weren't going to do any good," says John Bridgeland, a congressional aide who helped coordinate Republican drug policy. Hastert eventually won $450 million to be used, in part, to expand a faith-based program discovered by Bridgeland: Developed by a former evangelical minister, it brought together preachers, parents and drug counselors to fight the problem of "apathy" through "parent training" and "messages from the pulpit."

But with McCaffrey's emphasis on kids came another, almost fanatical focus: going after citizens who used pot for medical purposes. If he was fighting marijuana, the General was going to fight it everywhere, in all its forms. He threatened to have doctors who prescribed pot brought up on federal charges, and dismissed the science behind medical marijuana as a "Cheech and Chong show." In 1997, voters in Oregon introduced an initiative to legalize medical marijuana in the state. "I'll never forget the senior-staff meeting the morning after the Oregon initiative was announced," Bergman says. "McCaffrey was furious. It was like this personal affront to him. He couldn't believe they'd gotten away with it. He wanted to have this research done on the groups behind it and completely trash them in the press." As the General traveled to the initiative states, stumping against medical marijuana, his aides sneered that the initiatives were "all being mostly bankrolled by one man, George Soros," the billionaire investor who favored decriminalizing drugs.

Even for those who shared McCaffrey's philosophy, the theatrics seemed strange: There he was, on evening newscasts, effectively insisting that grandmothers dying of cancer were corrupting America's youth. His office pushed arguments that, at best, stretched the available research: Marijuana is a gateway drug that leads inexorably to the abuse of harder drugs; marijuana is thirty times more potent now than it was a generation ago. "It didn't track with the conclusions our researchers came to," says Bergman. "It felt like he was trying to manipulate the data."

McCaffrey had taken the drug war in a new direction, one that had little obvious connection with preventing drug abuse. For the first time, the full force of the federal government was being brought to bear on patients dying from terminal diseases. Even the General's allies in Congress were appalled. "I can't tell you how many times I went to the Hill with him and sat in on closed-doors meetings," Bergman recalls. "Members said to him, 'What in the world are you doing? We have real drug problems in the country with meth and cocaine. What the hell are you doing with medical marijuana? We get no calls from our constituents about that. Nobody cares about that.' McCaffrey was just mystified by their response, because he truly believed marijuana was a gateway drug. He truly believed in what he was doing."
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7. THE HARVARD MAN
For the cops on the front lines of the War on Drugs, the federal government's fixation with marijuana was deeply perplexing. As they saw it, the problem wasn't pot but the drug-related violence that accompanied cocaine and other hard drugs. After the crack epidemic in the late 1980s, police commissioners around the country, like Lee Brown in Houston, began adding more officers and developing computer mapping to target neighborhoods where crime was on the rise. The crime rate dropped. But by the mid-1990s, police in some cities were beginning to realize there was a certain level that they couldn't get crime below. Mass jailings weren't doing the trick: Only fifteen percent of those convicted of federal drug crimes were actual traffickers; the rest were nothing but street-level dealers and mules, who could always be replaced.

Police in Boston, concerned about violence between youth drug gangs, turned for assistance to a group of academics. Among them was a Harvard criminologist named David Kennedy. Working together, the academics and members of the department's anti-gang unit came up with what Kennedy calls a "quirky" strategy and convinced senior police commanders to give it a try. The result, which began in 1995, was the Boston Gun Project, a collaborative effort among ministers and community leaders and the police to try to break the link between the drug trade and violent crime. First, the project tracked a particular drug-dealing gang, mapping out its membership and operations in detail. Then, in an effort called Operation Ceasefire, the dealers were called into a meeting with preachers and parents and social-service providers, and offered a deal: Stop the violence, or the police will crack down with a vengeance. "We know the seventeen guys you run with," the gangbangers were told. "If anyone in your group shoots somebody, we'll arrest every last one of you." The project also extended drug treatment and other assistance to anyone who wanted it.

The effort worked: The rates of homicide and violence among young men in Boston dropped by two-thirds. Drug dealing didn't stop - "people continued what they were doing," Kennedy concedes, "but they put their guns down."

As Kennedy reflected on the success of the Boston project, which ran for five years, he wondered if he had discovered a deeper truth about drug-related violence. If the murders weren't a necessary component of the drug trade - if it was possible to separate the two - perhaps cities could find a way to reduce the violence, even if they could do nothing about the drugs.

In 2001, Kennedy got a call from the mayor of San Francisco that gave him a chance to examine his theories in a new setting. The city had experienced a recent spike in its murder rate, much of it caused by an ongoing feud between two drug-dealing gangs - Big Block and West Mob - that had resulted in dozens of murders over the years. Could Kennedy, the mayor asked, help police figure out how to stop the killings?

Kennedy flew out to San Francisco and met with police. But as he researched the history of the violence, it seemed to confirm his findings in Boston. Though both Big Block and West Mob were involved in dealing drugs, the shootings were not really drug-related - the two groups occupied different territories and were not battling over turf. "The feud had started over who would perform next at a neighborhood rap event," says Kennedy, now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "They had been killing each other ever since."

Such evidence suggested that drug enforcement needed to focus more narrowly on those responsible for the violence. "Seventy percent of the violence in these hot neighborhoods comes back to drugs," Kennedy says. "But one of the profound myths is that these homicides are about the drug trade. The violence is driven by these crews - but they're not killing each other over business." The real spark igniting the murders, he realized, was peer pressure, a kind of primordial male goad that drove young gang members to kill each other even in instances when they weren't sure they wanted to.

Given that police departments had already locked up every drug dealer in sight and were still having problems with violence, Kennedy thought a new approach was worth a try. "There's a difference between saying, 'I'm watching this, and you should stop,' and putting someone in federal lockup," he says. "The violence is not about the drug business - but that's a very hard thing for people to understand."

But in the early days of the Bush administration, police departments were in no hurry to experiment with an approach that focused on drug-related murders and mostly ignored users who weren't committing violence. Kennedy's efforts proved to be yet another missed opportunity in the War on Drugs - an experience that made clear how difficult it is for science to influence the nation's drug policy.

"If ten years ago the medical community had figured out a way to reduce the deaths from breast cancer by two-thirds, every cancer clinic in the country would have been using those techniques a year later," Kennedy says. "But when it comes to drugs and violence, there's been nothing like that."

8. HELICOPTERS AND COCA

Instead of pursuing the Boston Gun Project and other innovative approaches to fighting drug violence, the federal government decided to escalate its military response in Colombia. For the past decade and a half, cooperation from officials in Bogotá had been halfhearted, sporadic and deeply corrupt. But by 1999, the country, it seemed, was on the verge of collapsing into civil war. The drug money that had flowed into Colombia had found its way into the hands of the rebel militia - the FARC - which had been laying siege to the Colombian government. The Clinton foreign-policy team, having spent the previous few years dealing with the consequences of failed states in Somalia and the Balkans, was deeply concerned about the possibility of a failed narco*state in America's own back yard.

One afternoon in June 1999, a dozen senior Clinton officials filed into the National Security Council's situation room, summoned by Sandy Berger, the president's national security adviser. Even though Bogotá had ceded control of vast swaths of the country to the left-wing rebels, they were told, recent peace talks had collapsed. "The FARC had basically always been jungle campesinos - they were a pretty austere bunch," says Brian Sheridan, who was in charge of the Pentagon's counternarcotics effort at the time and attended the meeting. "All of a sudden, they were leveling these attacks that had gotten more and more audacious." When FARC rebels had emerged from the jungle for a round of peace talks the previous fall, they had brandished brand-new AK-47s and Dragunovs, as if on military parade. One U.S. official observed at the time that the weaponry was "far beyond" what the Colombian army had - in a pitched battle, the Clinton administration worried, the *Colombian government could plausibly collapse.

The White House advisers weren't the only officials in Washington concerned about Colombia. Earlier that day, two men who attended the briefing - Rand Beers of the State Department and Charlie Wilhelm of the Defense Department - had gotten a call from the Republican caucus on the Hill. Dennis Hastert, who had been elevated to Speaker of the House six months earlier, wanted to see them right away. "It was kind of unusual," Beers recalls - but when Hastert called, you came.

When Beers and Wilhelm arrived, Rep. Porter Goss, then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, handed them a piece of paper. It was a copy of a supplemental spending authorization that the Republicans planned to offer immediately. Crafted by Bobby Charles, Hastert's longtime aide, the bill would have more than doubled military aid to Colombia to take on the rebels and narcotraffickers -to a staggering $1.2 billion a year. But it was the politics of the situation that worried Beers as much as the money. "It occurred to me that if the administration was going to do anything on Colombia, it better do it soon," he says now, "or the Republicans would once again outflank what they perceived as the I-never-inhaled Clinton administration." Beers told the Republicans he would take a look, and then hurried to Berger's meeting.

Throughout much of the Clinton administration, the hope had been that the United States would be able to reduce its military aid to the Andes as the cocaine epidemic waned. Now, as Berger's group heard from intelligence agents, that hope seemed to be fading. Narcotraffickers were paying off the FARC so they could grow coca in the jungles of Colombia. The FARC were then turning around and using the money to buy weapons to stage attacks on the Colombian government.

Berger decided to act. Rather than oppose the Republican plan, he agreed to negotiate on an assistance package to bail out the Colombian government. The result was Plan Colombia - nearly $1.6 billion to escalate the War on Drugs in the Andes. The new program would arm the military and police in their fight against the FARC, launch an ambitious effort to spray herbicide on coca crops from the air and provide economic assistance to poor farmers in rural villages. The initial aid, officials decided, would be heavily concentrated in Putumayo, a rebel-run province in the jungle.

No one is sure what convinced President Clinton to approve such an ambitious escalation in the War on Drugs. But some observers at the time speculated that the critical factor was a conversation with Sen. Christopher Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat, whose state is home to the helicopter manufacturer Sikorsky Aircraft. In early 2000, Clinton unveiled Plan Colombia - and Sikorksy promptly received an order for eighteen of its Blackhawk helicopters at a cost of $15 million each. "Much has been made of the notion that this was Dodd looking to sell Blackhawks to Colombia," Beers tells me. He pauses before adding, "I am not in a position to tell you it didn't happen."

Plan Colombia would be the Clinton administration's primary and most *costly contribution to the War on Drugs, the major counternarcotics program it bequeathed to the Bush administration. But as with so many other aspects of American drug policy, the plan had an unintended consequence: As it evolved, the emphasis on supplying arms to the Colombian government ended up having less to do with drugs and more to do with helping Bogotá fight its enemies. Colombia used the military aid to target the left-wing FARC - even though many believed that right-wing paramilitaries, who were allies of the government, were more directly involved in narcotrafficking. "It wasn't really first and foremost a counternarcotics program at all," says a senior Pentagon official involved in the creation of Plan Colombia. "It was mostly a political stabilization program."
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9. THE TEMPLE OF HOPE
In July of 1999, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas traveled to Cincinnati to visit Hope Temple, a former crack house that had been turned into a church. It was an almost unbearably hot day. Bush was on a tour through the Midwest during which he was testing out his philosophy of compassionate conservatism, trying to see if its rhetoric and principles could sustain a winning presidential run. "The American dream is vivid," Bush told audiences, "but too many feel, 'This dream is not meant for me.' " John Bridgeland, the congres*sional aide who had helped steer federal funding to Hope Temple, says Bush was "overwhelmed" by his visit to the church that day, and stayed the whole afternoon. That evening, Bush spoke about the fervent *religiosity of the place and the rough joys of the addict's redemptions. "These," he said, "are the armies of compassion."

This was a strange moment in the politics of the drug war: Just as the Clinton administration was toughening its rhetoric, influential Republicans were going all soft and gentle. John DiIulio, a political scientist from the University of Pennsylvania who would become a key Bush adviser, was disgusted by the "perverse consequences" of harsh sentencing laws that had put millions of young Americans in prison, disbelieved the "sweeping scientific claims" made about the dangers of medical marijuana and wanted to expand "meaningful drug-treatment opportunities in urban areas." DiIulio and his contemporaries were troubled, too, by the racial imbalances of the War on Drugs: Blacks, who comprised only fourteen percent of drug users, made up seventy-four percent of those in prison for drug possession. It was not as if the Republican Party had suddenly taken up a position on the far left of the drug war. But it did seem, for a moment during the 2000 campaign, as if some moderation were possible.

Three months later, when the Bush campaign released its drug policy, even the most experienced drug warriors were impressed. The platform balanced spending between demand- and *supply-side programs, stressed treatment and doubled the number of community anti-drug coalitions. When Bush won the White House and DiIulio became the director of the Office of Faith-Based Programs, they raided the team of compassionate conservatives surrounding Hastert: Bridgeland became director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, and Charles became assistant secretary of state for narcotics control. The new administration, DiIulio believed, would take the lead in "reforming drug-related sentencing policies that *research had shown were having perverse consequences."

"If you look back at that campaign document, it really is pretty impressive," says Carnevale, who ended up heading the drug office's transition team for the Bush administration. "Which is kind of remarkable, given what happened next. They've appointed a drug czar who ran like hell from a very sensible policy."

It took Bush nearly a year to pick his drug czar, and almost no one felt encouraged by his choice: John Walters, a laconic Midwesterner who had served as Bill Bennett's chief of staff during the administration of George H.W. Bush. "We all knew who Walters was," one longtime drug warrior tells me, "but he wasn't what you would call an inspiring figure, even to conservatives." When Walters submitted his first National Drug Control Strategy to Bush in February 2002, it became clear that the administration's focus had narrowed: Walters was devoted to Plan Colombia and to a prevention campaign that would keep kids from trying drugs for the first time, aimed particularly at marijuana - even though the number of first-time pot smokers had been flat for half a decade. Longtime drug warriors like Carnevale were stunned. "We were going back to an Eighties-style drug policy," he says - one that emphasized the kind of military and law-and-order programs that had been proven not to work, while ignoring programs, particularly treatment, that did.

Walters also had a complaint with the ads that the Partnership for a Drug-Free America had created for the drug czar's office under McCaffrey. They were, he said, too soft. He had a point. The ads, which ran under the slogan "The Anti-Drug," had been designed by a committee of academics who apparently believed that kids needed to be shown that not doing drugs could be fun too. In one characteristic spot, a pen draws an animated landscape, with a cartoon boy avoiding the advances of cartoon dealers before driving off into the distance with a cartoon dragon on a cartoon motorcycle. "My name is Brandon, and drawing is my anti-drug," the narrator says sweetly. The commercials made abstinence seem so lame they could have been designed by the cartels. "A lot of the ads that were produced were really boring," admits Philip Palmgreen, a University of Kentucky communications professor who served on the ad committee. Walters not only wanted harder-hitting messages - he also wanted the focus "to narrow around marijuana," according to one staffer at the Partnership who asked not to be identified. "Very candidly, the Partnership pushed back against that because the problems associated with marijuana are not very dire." But Walters disagreed, the staffer adds, "and we lost."

Walters refused to be interviewed for this story, but his office did make available one of his top advisers, David Murray. I asked him why his boss had narrowed the focus to marijuana, even though studies had disproved the causal link between marijuana and hard drugs. "If you're going to have a national office of drug-control policy, you look at the most prevalent drug in the society that's readily available - you don't go after meth first thing," he says. "You think about it like an epidemiologist, and you go for the vector that's most likely to spread, and that's teen marijuana users."

The new ads took a counterintuitive approach. "We wanted to make sure we were getting through to the thrill-seekers - those teenagers who are much more likely to use drugs - and convince them that it was more exciting not to do drugs," says Palmgreen. In a heralded spot called "Pete's Couch," the teenage narrator says, "I smoked weed and nobody died. I didn't get into a car accident. I didn't OD on heroin the next day. Nothing happened. We sat on Pete's couch for eleven hours." Then the camera shifts to show other teenagers, presumably those who haven't smoked weed, doing fun things - biking, playing basketball, flirting with girls. "You have a better shot at dying out in the real world," the narrator says, "but I'll take my chances out there." The advertising community was impressed with the spot: "Finally, an admission that smoking pot isn't calamitous," cheered Slate's advertising columnist, Seth Stevenson. Said Palmgreen: "Really good spots. The focus groups of thrill-seekers gave them great grades."

But the reality is that such ads - no matter how persuasive - do little if anything to prevent teens from trying pot. In 2005, a government-commissioned study designed to evaluate the prevention campaign over five years delivered its conclusions: Kids who had been *exposed to the campaign ended up with rates of drug use that were roughly the same as those of the control group, who had not seen the ads. Murray loudly challenged the study's methodology, but when Congress asked federal analysts at the Government Accountability Office to assess the findings, the GAO upheld the report. The anti-drug campaign had not worked at all.

There was another problem with the Walters approach: Just as the federal government asserted the dangers of smoking pot, the states - first California, then three others - were permitting doctors to legally prescribe marijuana to relieve the chronic pain that came with cancer, polio and other debilitating long-term diseases. Attorney General John Ashcroft dispatched federal agents to begin raiding the suppliers and purchasers of medical marijuana in California - people who were operating completely within state law. The raids were even more surreal in their theatrics than the ones that had been launched by McCaffrey: In one particularly ludicrous incident, a forty-four-year-old post-polio sufferer named Suzanne Pfeil, who smoked prescription marijuana to relieve her pain, was hauled off to jail by DEA agents who pointed automatic rifles at her head and handcuffed her to her wheelchair. The rhetoric reached the level of crusade: Walters called citizens who plant and tend marijuana gardens "terrorists who wouldn't hesitate to help other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties."

What was striking to many veteran drug warriors was how fully the drug czar's office had bet on the youth marijuana initiative. For all Ashcroft's bluff talk about wanting to "escalate the War on Drugs," only a very small portion of it was being escalated. Funding for drug courts, which channel nonviolent drug offenders through treatment programs rather than prison, was zeroed out, and funding for local police was gutted. Carnevale, who quit his job after overseeing the transition in 2000, began to feel he was in a time warp. "This White House is walking away from prevention funding and treatment," he says now. "They haven't supported the community anti-drug coalitions, which actually work pretty well, and domestic law enforcement is flat or declining. To have a successful drug policy, you need all these elements, and what this administration has done is go crazy on exactly the element that doesn't work."

By the summer of 2005, the drug czar's failures were beginning to spill out into the open. For four years, while he focused obsessively on pot, Walters had done virtually nothing about meth, which was rapidly devastating the red states that had elected his boss. Walters struck a strangely discordant note on the growing epidemic, insisting that even as methamphetamine spread from the West Coast to the East, it remained a regional problem, not a national one, and therefore did not place high on his list of priorities. That September, the House's meth caucus asked Walters to come in for a meeting, to see if they could restore some element of dialogue and begin to rebalance the budget. The drug czar, once again downplaying the issue, sent Murray in his place. The congressmen, who had excluded the press to prevent grandstanding, went through the budget in detail and told the drug deputy what they wanted restored to fight meth. But, according to one staffer, Murray just sat there: "He didn't even bother to ask a question."

Incensed, Rep. Mark Souder, a Republican who chairs the House Subcommittee on Drug Policy, walked out of the room and held an angry press conference. Murray's testimony, he said, had been "pathetic" and "an embarrassment," and Walters was not doing his job: "If he does not lead, we need a change of the drug czar." Sen. Grassley, the Iowa Republican, echoed Souder a few days later. "What I've never understood," he said, "is why they took marijuana so much more seriously than methamphetamine, when methamphetamine is a much more serious drug."

By virtually every objective measure, the White House had lost the War on Drugs. Last year, Walters boasted that drug use among teenagers has fallen since 2002 - ignoring the fact that overall drug use remains unchanged. The deeper problem is that the drug czar has stopped measuring anything other than drug use. During the 1990s, at the direction of Gen. McCaffrey, Carnevale had created a comprehensive system to measure whether we were winning the drug war. The system took into account drug price and availability in the United States, how difficult it was for drug smugglers to get their product into the country and the consequences of drug use on public health and crime. But Walters simply tossed out that system of evaluation - as well as the unflattering facts it highlighted. "Had we kept it," Carnevale tells me, "we would see that the Bush administration has not made a positive impact on any of the measures."

Most unexpectedly of all, crime - a problem that seemed to have been licked a decade ago - is beginning to creep back up. In October 2006, the Police Executive Research Forum released a report declaring that violent crime in the country was "accelerating at an alarming pace." Murders were up twenty-seven percent in Boston over the previous year, sixty percent in San Antonio and more than 300 percent in Orlando. Even in the cloistered world of policing, complaints began to build about the numbers and about the cuts in federal funding. "The reality is a lot of police officers are politically conservative folks," says Ron Brooks, the president of the National Narcotics Officers' Association. "But there's been a lack of leadership in this administration on this issue."

10. THE RETURN OF DON BERNA

While the drug czar was cracking down on medical marijuana, the Bush administration was also overseeing a dramatic escalation in its overseas front of the War on Drugs. From the start, the White House had trumpeted Plan Colombia as an essential weapon in its anti-drug arsenal, eliminating inconvenient rules that had gotten in the way of a full military commitment to the project. For "those in the drug business," Walters declared in January 2002, "now is the time to get out." But despite the billions the administration spent on the program, and the new impunity given to the Colombian military, nobody really knew whether it was working. In July 2006, Adam Isacson decided to see for himself.

Isacson, a scholar who runs the Colombia program at the Center for International Policy, flew down to the Andes to construct his own assessment of Plan Colombia. He decided to make two stops - in Medellín, to determine how much the country's security situation had improved, and in Putumayo, to determine the success of the plan to eradicate the drug traffic. Regular assessments compiled by the White House drug office suggested that the crop-eradication program had reduced the acreage under coca cultivation in Colombia, but Isacson was skeptical: The price of cocaine on the American street had not risen, and separate estimates by the United Nations undercut the Bush administration's findings.

The modern Medellín he found looked more like Miami than a front in the drug war. The government and its paramilitary allies had secured the city, and U.S. officials went out of their way to praise the cooperation they were getting from Colombian police and military units - which had been cleansed, they said, of corruption. When Isacson pressed people about why the violence had decreased so dramatically, he was told repeatedly that "the paramilitaries won" - that government-supported forces had simply driven off the left-wing guerrillas and ended civil war in the city.

The paradox for Americans was that paramilitary commanders, such as Don Berna, had also taken control of the cocaine trade and retained enough political clout, according to a study by a Colombian think tank, to alter the composition of the Colombian Senate. When Don Berna was arrested two years ago, the entire bus transportation system of Medellín shut down for a day. "The command came down from the prison phone," says Aldo Civico, a professor of international relations at Columbia University who has done *extensive research on drug smugglers and the paramilitaries. Don Berna is now in a jail cell south of Medellín, from which he continues to control his trafficking organization. "It is a signal to everyone that Don Berna is the one who is in power in Medellín," Civico says.

In Putumayo, Isacson found tent cities buried in the thick jungle, migrants living underneath sheets of plastic. Though tens of millions of American dollars had been spent on trying to improve the local economy, the main road that farmers were supposed to use to ferry their legitimate products to market was still unpaved, and a factory American money had built in 2003 was already shut down. Putumayo had been the first target of Plan Colombia's spray-eradication efforts and the site of its initial success: Coca cultivation had been cut by ninety-three percent from 2000 to 2004. But the place Isacson saw only two years later was "depressed." With no real financial incentive to switch to legitimate crops, farmers in the region had once again begun planting coca: Cultivation doubled in 2005. "We didn't see anything to suggest the improvement was sustainable," Isacson tells me.

The problem was that coca had simply moved next door, to the rural province of Nariño, along the country's Pacific Coast. Traffickers were planting strains of coca that could grow from seed to harvest in just six months. "The spray planes eradicated Putumayo," Isacson says, "and then all of a sudden coca cultivation starts in Nariño, and you see the same pattern - coca money means all these nightclubs and stores go up in these nothing towns, the police start reporting a sharp increase in murders, and eventually the provincial government is overwhelmed." The traffickers hopscotched across the country - Putumayo to Nariño, Nariño to Antioquia - always one step ahead of the drug agents and soldiers.

"As a drug-control policy," Isacson says, "it's hard to come to any conclusion other than that Plan Colombia has failed." In June of this year, the CIA released an assessment that confirmed Isacson's conclusion. Admitting that it had previously been undercounting the coca crop, the agency issued revised numbers showing that six years of Plan Colombia, at nearly $1 billion a year, had not cut coca cultivation at all. The effort to stop cocaine at its source had not made a dent.

"We've been working in Colombia for thirty years, and we don't have a hell of a lot to show for it," says Myles Frechette, the American ambassador to Colombia during the Clinton administration. "This is like a cancer. Every year the lesion, if you took a snapshot, would be bigger."

11. THE WATER BALLOON

At night, the population of el Paso, Texas, is 700,000, and that of Ciudad Juárez, just across the border, is 1.4 million. During the day, those numbers shift, as Mexicans stream across the cobblestone bridge over the Rio Grande for legal work in the United States. Every twelve hours, the two cities pass 100,000 people back and forth, squeezing them from end to end like the contents of a water balloon. "Among them," says Tony Payan, the political scientist at the University of Texas-El Paso and an expert in the dynamics of the local drug trade, "you see the spotters, the lingerers, mostly young men who are just standing there, watching out for when the coast is clear or when an American border agent who's been paid off by the cartel comes on duty. Then they tell the people that need to know, so they can make their drug runs across the border into Texas." With the failure of Plan Colombia, a handful of bridges along the Mexican border have become the main front in the War on Drugs.

Cocaine trafficking in Mexico has its own prehistory. For generations, family networks of smugglers had moved marijuana and cheap, black-tar *heroin across the border -veteran DEA agents were accustomed to arresting the grandsons of men they had arrested years earlier - and the whole drug traffic in Mexico was small enough, by the mid-1980s, that it was effectively controlled by one man, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, who ran a violent trafficking organization out of Tijuana. As Colombian groups, chased from the Caribbean by American interdiction efforts, began to look to the southwest border in the early 1990s, Felix Gallardo discovered he could no longer control the traffic himself from prison. "He had a meeting with his lieutenants and divided the Mexican border crossings up among them, creating the modern cartels," Payan says. "His nephews kept Tijuana, and one group got the Sinaloa-Arizona crossing, another got Laredo-Nuevo Laredo, and Amado Carrillo Fuentes got El Paso-Juárez."

Mexican officials along the border, whose PRI party had kept a lock on national power for seventy years, allowed traffickers to move their product in exchange for reduced violence. "In order to coexist, the government looked the other way as long as the cartels didn't wreak havoc in the country," says Armand Peschard-Sverdrup, director of the Mexico Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "It became somewhat of a safety valve in terms of dealing with organized crime, as a way of mitigating the political instability." Though the U.S. government pushed Mexican officials to crack down on corruption, its pleas and threats went largely unheeded. By 1997, Carrillo Fuentes - the Lord of the Skies - was moving tons of cocaine across the border every year and had amassed a fortune worth $25 billion. But that same year, Carrillo Fuentes died on an operating table in Mexico City, where he had been undergoing plastic surgery to change his appearance and avoid detection: In the ghoulish post-mortem photographs, his face is speckled like a snake's skin, two shades of brown and one of pink. Juárez fell into a testy, three-way competition for control of the drug trade, and the murders took on a symbolic vocabulary of their own: Tortured victims piled in oil barrels filled with concrete and buried alive, members of opposing cartels murdered and left to rot in car trunks in their own neighborhoods, snitches killed and left on the side of the road. The violence between cartels is so pervasive, Payan says, "if you move into a home in Juárez, you will never know whether there's a body underneath the floor in your dining room."

At the beginning of the Bush administration, it looked like Mexico might actually begin to bust corrupt cops who did business with drug smugglers. In 2000, when Vicente Fox, the reforming, conservative rancher and friend of George W. Bush, took power, he began prosecuting dirty police officers, throwing tens of thousands of them off the force. "There were unintended consequences," says Peter Andreas, a Brown University professor who has studied drug trafficking along the border. "Many of the corrupt cops went to work in the drug trade" - a shift in power that had the effect of professionalizing the violence. In addition, an estimated 90,000 Mexican soldiers deserted during the Fox administration, many of them signing up with the cartels.

In Juárez, the effect was devastating. Free to operate as they pleased, the cartels began to split, with capos challenging one another openly for control of the drug corridors. Local and state police killed each other over the right to protect the traffic. A new gang called the Zetas, made up of Mexican soldiers who had quit their day jobs to take over the drug trade, waged war in Juárez and killed 100 people in the corridor around Nuevo Laredo in the summer of 2005. The gaudy theatrics of the murders have only intensified as drug gangs seek to guarantee that their killings send a message by getting media attention: Last year, gunslingers wearing military uniforms walked into a popular nightclub in Uruapan and dumped the severed heads of five rivals on the dance floor, like soccer balls. Over the past year, drug-related murders in Mexico's border states have doubled, driven primarily by the booming trade. "What we're seeing is the Colombianization of Mexico," says Andreas.

For those who have studied American drug policy, the catastrophe along the border looks like a final reckoning for overseas interdiction. "It's like a balloon effect - we've never succeeded in cutting off the traffic, we've just pushed it around," says Payan. "We cut off supply in the Caribbean, and it came here. We cracked down on the Colombian traffickers, and it just meant the Mexicans traffickers got wealthier, and the violence came here." Like many DEA agents and border experts, Payan was consumed last summer by the story of Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese pharmaceutical executive whose house Mexican police raided, suspecting him of diverting meth components from China for illegal use. Inside they found $206 million in cash -final evidence of just how far the meth epidemic has spiraled out of control since pharmaceutical lobbyists prevented Gene Haislip from forestalling it with a simple federal regulation. Payan believes, as do many in the DEA, that Ye Gon is a harbinger of the next frontier in the War on Drugs.

"Even if somehow we could manage to get the drug trade away from the Mexican border, it will come through Asia next," he says. "Instead of fighting a border war, we'll be fighting it in containers. But unless we can reduce demand, it's a zero-sum game."
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12. THE PRIVATEERS
Even by conservative estimates, the War on Drugs now costs the United States $50 billion each year and has overcrowded prisons to the breaking point - all with little discernible impact on the drug trade. A report by the Government Accountability Office released at the end of September estimated that ninety percent of the cocaine moving into the United States now arrives through Mexico, up from sixty-six percent in 2000. Even Walters acknowledges that for all of the efforts the Bush administration has devoted to overseas drug enforcement, the price of cocaine has dropped while its purity has risen. More than forty percent of Americans support legalizing marijuana, yet the government continues to target pot smokers. In October, the administration announced it was planning a new military offensive, dubbed Plan Mexico, with a price tag of $1.4 billion. Things look so bleak that Walters was recently moved to describe a momentary upward blip in drug prices as "historic progress."

There are a handful of battles in the War on Drugs that have actually been won, times when fresh thinking prevailed over politics - but they are not the kind of victories that the Bush administration is eager to trumpet. In the summer of 2003, the police department in High Point, North Carolina, held its annual command-staff retreat in a small conference center themed to look like the log cabins of the pioneers who settled the region. One topic dominated the conversation: an increase in violent crime that was concentrated in three drug-dealing neighborhoods in the city. "The place we were at was that all the traditional enforcement was making no difference," says the department's deputy chief, Marty Sumner. "We agreed we weren't going to be able to eliminate drug use. We weren't even going to try to go after drug use. We wanted to change the marketing of the drug."

Sumner's department called in the Harvard criminologist David Kennedy. The High Point police had worked with Kennedy before, adopting the Boston Gun Project's policy of trying to break the link between drugs and crime. Now the criminologist told them that he had a new kind of project to propose, one that went beyond the Boston experiment. Kennedy's pitch was simple: The trick, he said, wasn't to focus on eliminating drugs but rather to shut down the most "overt" drug markets, the ones operating so openly that they attracted prostitution and violent crime. "Instead of looking at it as a drug problem, we decided to think of it as a drug-market problem," Sumner says. "What the public really couldn't stand was the violence associated with public drug markets." Dealers operating in the open are targets for stickup men and other would-be robbers, and the public swagger and turf consciousness of street slingers can cradle violent, simmering beefs.

High Point police began in the West End neighborhood, one of the city's three overt drug markets. A team of officers staked out the site, videotaping hundreds of hand-to-hand sales and mapping out a complete anthropology of the West End drug market. They found it was strikingly small: Sumner had expected as many as fifty dealers working there, but it turned out there were only sixteen. Before long, the *officers had enough evidence to put away each of the sixteen dealers for good. But they didn't. Instead, Sumner and Kennedy called them in for a meeting. They showed each of them the portfolio of evidence against them and said that unless they stopped dealing drugs, the whole file would be handed over to the prosecutors and they'd be in jail for years. Family members were brought in to urge the dealers to stop, and social-service providers pledged assistance with food, housing and job training.

"We didn't think it would work," Sumner tells me, "but the drug markets have disappeared."

For five years before the program went into effect, the number of drug-related murders in High Point had stayed steady, around fifteen a year. In 2007, in the program's fourth year, it has plummeted to two. Violent crime in the West End has declined by thirty-five percent. "The use of drugs isn't something we could affect," says Kennedy. "But the violence was." His logic has an appealing clarity for overworked police departments: There are now more than sixty cities in the United States that use some version of Kennedy's program, edging away from thirty-five years of punitive measures that have turned the United States into the world's leading jailer to a social-work model that encourages communities and cops to engage the problem on a more human level. The real radicals of the War on Drugs are not the legalization advocates, earnestly preaching from the fringes, but the bureaucrats -the cops and judges and federal agents who are forced into a growing acceptance that rendering a popular commodity illegal, and punishing those who sell it and use it, has simply overwhelmed the capacity of government.

In 2000, voters in California, whose prisons now hold nearly twice as many inmates as they were designed to incarcerate, passed a referendum called Proposition 36, which has since sent more than 150,000 nonviolent drug *offenders to treatment instead of prison. The program is not perfect: Though the outcomes for those who make it through treatment are surprisingly strong, many convicts simply skip the sessions, and there are few enforcement mechanisms to compel them to attend. But the program, according to a study conducted by researchers at UCLA, still saves tax*payers $2.50 for every dollar put in. And a pilot program in Honolulu which requires near-constant drug tests of those on probation and provides incremental punishments for each extra failed test - suggests an effective model for treating hardcore addicts, says Angela Hawken of UCLA and Pepperdine University. "It offers the promise that we might *really be able to solve this problem."

In recent years, there have been flickers of political progress that suggest America's drug policy is ready for a historic shift. Democrats in both the House and Senate have voted to cut proposed funding for Plan Colombia and have pushed for hearings on sentencing reform. As the politics of crime and drugs have lost their power to move votes, some conservatives, including Republican senators Jeff Sessions and Sam Brownback, have begun to question the logic of mandatory-minimum sentences. "There is a more promising environment for drug-policy reform than at any time since the Carter administration," says Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance and one of the country's foremost critics of the drug war.

But despite their evident success, the most forward-looking programs remain buried at the fringes of drug policy, featured not in the president's budgets but in academic journals and water-cooler talk in cities like High Point. Experimentation at the community level is more imaginative than programs that are federally sanctioned. "We haven't had the kind of national leadership that blesses this and encourages it," says Caulkins, the RAND researcher from Carnegie *Mellon. "So this kind of innovation stays below the radar." Thirty-five years after Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs, the most promising *programs continue to be shunted aside by Washington's unswerving emphasis on law and order.

The drug war, in the end, has been undone in no small part by the sweeping and inflexible nature of its own metaphor. At the beginning, in the days of Escobar, the campaign was a war as seen from the situation room, a complicated assault that spanned multiple fronts, but one which had identifiable enemies and a goal. Today, the government's anti-drug effort resembles a war as seen from the trenches, an eternal slog, where victory seems not only unattainable but somehow beside the point. For the drug agents and veterans who busted Escobar, the last decade and a half have been a slow, agonizing history of defeat after defeat, the enemy shifting but never retreating. "You get frustrated," Joe Toft, a former DEA country attache in Colombia, tells me. "We've never had a true effort where the U.S. as a whole says, 'We're never going to crack this problem without a real demand-reduction program.' That's something that's just never happened."

Toft, now a private security consultant, thinks back to the heady days after the fall of Escobar, the days when winning the War on Drugs seemed only a matter of dispatching more American helicopters to the Andes. "The first couple years, I had this very naive idea that I was really going to make a huge impact," he says. "But after a while, you start realizing that without a concerted effort to reduce demand, it's not going to happen. Over the years, I came to see my job as basically keeping the lid on the garbage can trying to sit on that lid and prevent that garbage can from overflowing. If you talk to a hundred agents, that's what almost all of them would say. We're just being realistic."

KYMATICA

2009-02-27T00:23:00.000-08:00

Business Strategy: Execution Is the Key

2009-02-26T22:06:00.000-08:00

By Lawrence G. Hrebiniak.

Summary
Execution is a key to strategic success. Most managers, however, know a lot more about strategy formulation than execution. They know much more about "planning" than "doing," which causes major problems with making strategy work.

Strategy execution is difficult but worthy of management's attention across all levels of an organization. All managers bear responsibility for successful execution. It is not just a lower-level task.

Part of the difficulty of execution is due to the obstacles or impediments to it. These include the longer time frames needed for execution; the need for involvement of many people in the execution process; poor or vague strategy; conflicts with the organizational power structure; poor or inadequate sharing of information; a lack of understanding of organizational structure, including information sharing and coordination methods; unclear responsibility and accountability in the execution process; and an inability to manage change, including cultural change.

Knowing execution hazards (opportunities) is necessary but not sufficient. For successful execution to occur, managers need a model or a set of guidelines outlining the entire process and relationships among key decisions or actions. A "roadmap" is needed to help with the order of execution decisions as managers confront obstacles and take advantage of opportunities.

This overview of execution is vital to success and is developed in the next chapter. Subsequent chapters can borrow from this model and focus more specifically on aspects of it to achieve positive execution results.

Business Strategy: Execution Is the Key Part 5

2009-02-26T22:03:00.001-08:00

By Lawrence G. Hrebiniak.

The Execution Challenge

There are eight areas of obstacles or challenges to strategy execution. Or, to put it positively, there are eight areas of opportunity: Handling them well will guarantee execution success. The areas relating to the success of execution are as follows:

Developing a model to guide execution decisions or actions

Understanding how the creation of strategy affects the execution of strategy

Managing change effectively, including culture change

Understanding power or influence and using it for execution success

Developing organizational structures that foster information sharing, coordination, and clear accountability

Developing effective controls and feedback mechanisms

Knowing how to create an execution-supportive culture

Exercising execution-biased leadership

Having a Model or Guidelines for Execution
Managers need a logical model to guide execution actions.

Without guidelines, execution becomes a helter-skelter affair. Without guidance, individuals do the things they think are important, often resulting in uncoordinated, divergent, even conflicting decisions and actions. Without the benefit of a logical approach, execution suffers or fails because managers don't know what steps to take and when to take them. Having a model or roadmap positively affects execution success.

Strategy is the Primary Driver

It all begins with strategy. Execution cannot occur until one has something to execute. Bad strategy begets poor execution and poor outcomes, so it's important to focus first on a sound strategy.

Good people are important for execution. It is vital to get the "right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus," so to speak. But it's also important to know where the bus is going and why. Strategy is critical. It drives the development of capabilities and which people with what skills sit in what seats on the bus. If one substitutes "jet airplane" for "bus" above—given today's high-flying, competitive markets—the importance of strategy, direction, and the requisite critical skills and capabilities necessary for success are emphasized even more.

Strategy defines the arena (customers, markets, technologies, products, logistics) in which the execution game is played. Execution is an empty effort without the guidance of strategy and short-term objectives related to strategy. What aspects of strategy and planning impact execution outcomes the most is a critical question that needs answering. Another critical question deals with the relationship between corporate- and business-level strategies and how their interaction affects execution outcomes.

Managing Change

Execution or strategy implementation often involves change. Not handling change well will spell disaster for execution efforts.

Managing change means much more than keeping people happy and reducing resistance to new ideas and methods. It also means knowing the tactics or steps needed to manage the execution process over time. Do managers implement change sequentially, bit by bit, or do they do everything at once, biting the bullet and implementing change in one fell swoop? The wrong answer can seriously hamper or kill execution efforts. Knowing how to manage the execution process and related changes over time is important for execution success.

The Power Structure

Execution programs that contradict the power or influence structure of an organization are doomed to failure. But what affects power or influence? Power is more than individual personality or position. Power reflects strategy, structure, and critical dependencies on capabilities and scarce resources. Knowing what power is and how to create and use influence can spell the difference between execution success and failure.

Coordination and Information Sharing

These are vital to effective execution. Knowing how to achieve coordination and information sharing in complex, geographically dispersed organizations is important to execution success. Yet managers are often motivated not to share information or work with their colleagues to coordinate activities and achieve strategic and short-term goals. Why? The answer to this question is vital to the successful execution of strategy.

Clear Responsibility and Accountability

This is one of the most important prerequisites for successful execution, as basic as it sounds. Managers must know who's doing what, when, and why, as well as who's accountable for key steps in the execution process. Without clear responsibility and accountability, execution programs will go nowhere. Knowing how to achieve this clarity is central to execution success.

The Right Culture

Organizations must develop execution-supportive cultures. Execution demands a culture of achievement, discipline, and ownership. But developing or changing culture is no easy task. Rock climbing, white-water rafting, paint-gun battles, and other activities with the management team are fun. They rarely, however, produce lasting cultural change. Knowing what does affect cultural change is central to execution success.

Leadership

Leadership must be execution biased. It must drive the organization to execution success. It must motivate ownership of and commitment to the execution process.

Leadership affects how organizations respond to all of the preceding execution challenges. It is always at least implied when discussing what actions or decisions are necessary to make strategy work. A complete analysis of execution steps and decisions usually defines what good leadership is and how it affects execution success, directly or indirectly.

Controls, Feedback, and Adaptation

Strategy execution processes support organizational change and adaptation. Making strategy work requires feedback about organizational performance and then using that information to fine-tune strategy, objectives, and the execution process itself. There is an emergent aspect of strategy and execution, as organizations learn and adapt to environmental changes over time. Adaptation and change depend on effective execution methods.

As important as controls and feedback are, they often don't work. Control processes fail. They don't identify and confront the brutal facts underlying poor performance. Adaptation is haphazard or incomplete. Understanding how to manage feedback, strategy reviews, and change is vital to the success of strategy execution.

These are the issues that impact the success or failure of strategy-execution efforts. Coupled with the issues previously mentioned (longer time frames, involvement of many people, and so on), these are the areas that present formidable obstacles to successful execution if they are not handled properly. They also present opportunities for competitive advantage if they are understood and managed well.

The last words, "managed well," hold the key to success. Knowing the obstacles or potential opportunities is necessary but not sufficient. The real issue is how to deal with them to generate positive execution results. The major significant point or thrust of this chapter is that execution is not managed well in most organizations. The remainder of this book is dedicated to correcting this woeful situation.

The Next Step: Developing a Logical Approach to Execution Decisions and Actions
So where and how does one begin to confront the issues just noted? Which execution problems or opportunities should managers consider first? What decisions or actions come later? Why? Can an approach to strategy execution be developed to guide managers through the maze of obstacles and problematical issues just identified?

The next chapter begins to tackle these questions. It presents an overview, a conceptual framework to guide execution decisions and actions. Managers need such a model because they routinely face a bewildering set of decisions about a host of strategic and operating problems, including those dealing with execution. They need guidelines, a "roadmap" to steer them logically to execution success.

Priorities are also needed. Tackling too many execution decisions or actions at once will surely create problems. "When everything is important, then nothing is important," is a clear but simple way of expressing the issue. Priorities must be set and a logical order to execution actions adequately defined if execution is to succeed.

Having a model, finally, also facilitates a "simultaneous" view of planning and doing. All execution actions cannot be taken at once; some must precede others logically. A good overview or model, however, provides a "big picture" that enables managers to see and anticipate execution problems. Execution is not something that others should worry about later. Planning requires anticipating early on what must be done to make strategy work.

Development of a logical overview is a step that has been ignored by practitioners, academics, and management consultants alike. Execution problems or issues typically have been handled separately or in an ad-hoc fashion, supported by a few anecdotes or case studies. This is not sufficient. Execution is too complex to be approached without guidelines or a roadmap.

Managers cannot act in a helter-skelter fashion when executing strategy. They can't focus one day on organizational structure, the next on culture, and then on to "good people," only to find out that strategy is vague or severely flawed. They need guidelines, a way to see and approach execution and the logical order of the key variables involved. A roadmap is needed to guide them through the minefields of bad execution decisions and actions. Managers require a "big picture" as well as an understanding of the "nitty-gritty," the key elements that comprise the big picture.

The next chapter tackles the essential task of providing this overview by showing the order and logic of key execution decisions. It begins to confront the obstacles identified in this chapter as it lays out this sequence of decisions or actions. These decisions and actions simultaneously define the areas needing additional attention in later chapters of this book. Having a model of execution is vital to making strategy work, so let's take this important and necessary step.

Business Strategy: Execution Is the Key Part 3 & Part 4

2009-02-26T21:58:00.001-08:00

The Third part is based upon data that is too complex to post here so here is the link

Part 3

Part 4

Making Sense of the Data and Going Forward
Given the responses from managers just noted, what does all this mean? What really affects execution? What should we focus on in subsequent chapters of this book?

The first thing I did to answer these questions was to include all items that were ranked fifth or higher in either or both samples of managers. If either or both groups felt that strongly about an execution obstacle, I felt that the item deserved consideration. The far right-hand column in Table 1.1 shows checkmarks by these items.

Second, I looked to the open-ended responses, panel discussions, and my own notes taken during the Wharton programs and panel discussions to flesh out the items in Table 1.1. This proved to be enlightening. I determined easily that "managing change" included managing cultural change to many of the respondents, a point emphasized earlier. The impact of culture itself on execution and company performance was often emphasized, even though culture was not one of the 12 survey items. Managers basically said that culture was an underlying explanatory element in responses dealing with incentives, power, and change, items that were included in the survey. Some argued strongly for the importance of culture as a separate factor affecting execution success.

From these discussions and open-ended responses, I learned why there were many strong comments for certain items, such as the need for an execution model or plan. If a plan existed to guide execution efforts in their company, managers did not rank it as a significant problem. If such a plan didn't exist, it was considered to be a major shortcoming that gave rise to yet additional problems in the execution process.

I read and heard the lamentations of many about execution problems that arise from poor strategy or inadequate planning. Vague strategies cannot easily be translated into the measurable objectives or metrics so vital to execution. Unclear corporate and business plans inhibit integration of objectives, activities, and strategies between corporate and business levels. Poor strategies result in poor execution plans. Points such as these derived from the panel discussions and open-ended responses provided helpful insights into the meaning of the survey items and the factors affecting execution.

Finally, managers told me about the importance of controls or feedback in the execution process. What they were emphasizing is the importance of strategy reviews that provide feedback about performance and allow for changes in execution methods. These points are consistent with the importance of managing change and organizational adaptation, issues already discussed, but the managers' additional emphasis on the importance of controls, feedback, and change were duly noted.

After carefully examining all the data, I then tried to "cluster" the items logically to see which obstacles to successful execution seemed to "stick together." Here is my take on what the data seem to be saying.

Business Strategy: Execution Is the Key Part 2

2009-02-26T21:56:00.000-08:00

By Lawrence G. Hrebiniak.

Additional Challenges and Obstacles to Successful Execution
The issues previously noted are serious, potentially impeding execution. Yet there are still other challenges and obstacles to the successful implementation of strategy. These need to be identified and confronted if execution is to succeed.

To find out what problems managers routinely encounter in the execution of strategy, I developed two research projects to provide some answers. My goal was to learn about execution from those most qualified to give me the scoop—managers actually dealing with strategy execution. I could have relied solely on my own consulting experiences. I felt, however, that a more widespread approach—surveys directed toward many practicing managers—would yield additional positive results and useful insights into execution issues.

Wharton-Gartner Survey

This was a joint project involving the Gartner Group, Inc., a well-known research organization, and me, a Wharton professor. This is a relatively recent project, with data collection and analysis in 2003.

The purpose of the research, from the Gartner introduction, was as follows:

"To gain a clear understanding of challenges faced by managers as they make decisions and take actions to execute their company's strategy to gain competitive advantage."

The research instrument was a short online survey sent to 1,000 individuals on the Gartner E-Panel database. The targeted sample comprised managers who reported that they were involved in strategy formulation and execution. Complete usable responses were received from a sample of 243 individuals, a return rate that is more than sufficient for this type of research. In addition, the survey collected responses to open-ended questions to provide additional data, including explanations of items covered in the survey instrument.

There were 12 items on the survey dealing with obstacles to the strategy-execution process. They focused on conditions that affect execution and were originally developed in conjunction with a Wharton Executive Development Program on strategy implementation. Let's briefly consider this program and the survey it generated, and then we'll look at the items involved.

Wharton Executive Education Survey

I have been running an executive program on strategy implementation at Wharton a number of times a year for about 20 years. I have met hundreds of managers with responsibility for strategy execution, many of whom confronted major hurdles in their attempts to execute strategy successfully. As part of the formal program, managers brought their real-world problems with them. Time was allocated to air out the problems and focus on their solution in the course of the program.

Based on these presentations and my discussions with managers, I developed a list of execution hurdles or challenges to the execution process. I discussed this list with managers, asking them to rank the problems or obstacles in order of importance. Over time, items were modified, added to, or deleted from the list until I settled on 12 items that made sense and had "face" validity. These items, managers felt, clearly had a relationship to strategy execution.

Using the 12 items to gather opinions over a large number of executive education programs provided me with responses from a sample of 200 managers. They provided a ranking of the items' impact on strategy execution. Open-ended responses to questions about execution issues, problems, and opportunities were also collected over time, providing additional valuable data. Coupled with the data collected in the Wharton-Gartner Survey using the same 12 items, I had complete responses from more than 400 managers involved in strategy execution who told me about their execution problems and their solutions to them.

Panel Discussions

In subsequent Wharton executive programs after the data collection, I held informal panel discussions to collect additional insights into what the data were actually saying. I asked managers why, in their opinion, people responded the way they did. "What are the surveys telling us about execution problems or issues?" was the predominant question.

These discussions forced managers to read between the lines and interpret the formal data. They also enabled me to probe into what could be done to overcome the obstacles and achieve successful execution outcomes. Insights were collected, then, not only on the sources of execution problems but their solutions as well.

The surveys and follow-up discussions provided data right from "the horse's mouth." These were not idiosyncratic data, the opinions or observations of a few managers or CEOs who, against all odds, "did it their way." The number of managers providing answers, coupled with an emphasis on real problems and solutions, added a strong sense of relevance to the opinions gathered about strategy execution

Business Strategy: Execution Is the Key Pt. 1

2009-02-26T21:52:00.001-08:00

By Lawrence G. Hrebiniak.

Introduction

Two decades ago, I was working with the Organizational Effectiveness Group in AT&T's new Consumer Products division, a business created after the court-mandated breakup and reorganization of the company in 1984. I remember one particular day that made an impression on me that would last for years.

I was talking to Randy Tobias, the head of the division. I had met Randy while doing some work for Illinois Bell, and here we were talking about his division's strategic issues and challenges. Randy later moved into the chairman's office at AT&T and then became a successful CEO of Eli Lilly, but his comments that day years ago were the ones that affected me most.i

Here was a new business thrust headlong into the competitive arena. Competition was new to AT&T at the time. Competitive strategy for the business was nonexistent, and Tobias was laboring to create that elusive original plan. He focused on products, competitors, industry forces, and how to position the new division in the marketplace. He handled expectations and demands from corporate as he forged a plan for the business and helped position it in the AT&T portfolio. He created a strategic plan where previously there had been none, a Herculean task and one well done at the time.

On that day, I recall asking Randy what was the biggest strategic challenge confronting the business. I expected that his answer would deal with the problem of strategy formulation or some competitive threat facing the division. His answer surprised me.

He said that strategy formulation, while extremely challenging and difficult, was not what concerned him the most. It was not the planning that worried him. It was something even bigger and more problematic.

It was the execution of strategy that concerned him above all else. Making the plan work would be an even bigger challenge than creating the plan. Execution was the key to competitive success, but it would take some doing.

I, of course, sought further clarification and elaboration. I can't remember all of his points in response to my many questions, but here are some of the execution challenges he raised that day, referring to his own organization. He mentioned the following:

The culture of the organization and how it was not appropriate for the challenges ahead

Incentives and how people have been rewarded for seniority or "getting older," not for performance or competitive achievement

The need to overcome problems with traditional functional "silos" in the organization's structure

The challenges inherent in managing change as the division adapted to new competitive conditions

This was the first elaboration of execution-related problems I had ever heard, and the message has stayed with me over the years. It became clear to me that day that:

Execution is a key to success

It also struck me in those early days with AT&T that, although execution is a key to success, it is no easy task. Here was a company with an ingrained culture and structure, a set way of doing things. For the company to adapt to its new competitive environment, major changes would be necessary, and those changes would be no simple cakewalk. Obviously, developing a competitive strategy wouldn't be easy, but the massive challenges confronting the company made it clear to me early on that:

Making strategy work is more difficult than the task of strategy making
Execution is critical to success. Execution represents a disciplined process or a logical set of connected activities that enables an organization to take a strategy and make it work. Without a careful, planned approach to execution, strategic goals cannot be attained. Developing such a logical approach, however, represents a formidable challenge to management.

Even with careful development of an execution plan at the business level, execution success is not guaranteed. Tobias's strategic and execution plans for the Consumer Products division were well thought out. Yet troubles plagued the division's progress. Why? The problem was with the entire AT&T corporation. The company was about to go through a huge metamorphosis that it simply was not equipped to deal with and make work. Execution plans at the business level founder or fail if they don't receive corporate support. AT&T was, at the time, a slow-moving behemoth in which change was vehemently resisted. Well-prepared and logical plans at the Consumer Products business level were hampered by a poor corporate culture. Tobias' insights and potentially effective execution actions were blunted by corporate inertia and incompetence.

Although execution is critical to strategic success, making strategy work presents a formidable challenge. A host of factors, including politics, inertia, and resistance to change, routinely can get in the way of execution success.

Fast forwarding to the present, I just finished a few weeks working with managers from Deutsche Post, Aventis Pharmaceutical, and Microsoft, talking to them about execution problems. I also just participated in a Wharton executive program on strategic management and was debriefing with a few of the participants.

The major point cutting through all the conversations is the importance and difficulty of executing strategy. Two decades after my conversation with Randy Tobias, managers are still emphasizing that execution is a key to success. They are arguing that making strategy work is important and is more difficult than strategy making. Plans still fail or wither on the vine because of poor execution.

The striking aspect of all this is that managers apparently still don't know a great deal about the execution of strategy. It is still seen as a major problem and challenge.

Management literature has focused over the years primarily on parading new ideas on planning and strategy formulation in front of eager readers, but it has sorely neglected execution. Granted, planning is important. Granted, people are waking up to the challenge and are beginning to take execution seriously.

Still, it is obvious that the execution of strategy is not nearly as clear and understood as the formulation of strategy. Much more is known about planning than doing, about strategy making than making strategy work.

Is execution really worth the effort? Is execution or implementation truly a key to strategic success?

Consider one relatively recent comprehensive study of what contributes to company success.ii In this study of 160 companies over a five-year period, success was strongly correlated, among other things, with an ability to execute flawlessly. Factors such as culture, organizational structure, and aspects of operational execution were vital to company success, with success measured by total return to shareholders. Other recent works have added their support to this study's finding that execution is important for strategic success, even if their approach and analysis are less rigorous and complete.iii These works then, in total, support the view I've held for years:

Sound execution is critical—A focus on making strategy work pays major dividends
Despite its importance, execution is often handled poorly by many organizations. There still are countless cases of good plans going awry because of substandard execution efforts. This raises some important questions.

If execution is central to success, why don't more organizations develop a disciplined approach to it? Why don't companies spend time developing and perfecting processes that help them achieve important strategic outcomes? Why can't more companies execute or implement strategies well and reap the benefits of those efforts?

The simple answer, again, is that execution is extremely difficult. There are formidable roadblocks or hurdles that get in the way of the execution process and seriously injure the implementation of strategy. The road to successful execution is full of potholes that must be negotiated for execution success. This was the message two decades ago, and it still is true today.

Let's identify some of the problems or hurdles affecting implementation. Let's then focus on confronting the obstacles and solving the problems in subsequent chapters of this book.

Managers Are Trained to Plan, Not Execute
One basic problem is that managers know more about strategy formulation than implementation. They are trained to plan, not execute plans.

In most MBA programs I've looked at, students learn a great deal about strategy formulation and functional planning. Core courses typically hone in on competitive strategy, marketing strategy, financial strategy, and so on. The number of courses in most core programs that deal exclusively with execution or implementation? Usually none. Execution is most certainly touched on in a couple of the courses, but not in a dedicated, elaborate, purposeful way. Emphasis clearly is on conceptual work, primarily planning, and not on doing. At Wharton, there is at least an elective on strategy implementation, but this is not typical of many other MBA programs. Even if things are beginning to change, the emphasis still is squarely on planning, not execution.

Added to the lack of training in execution is the fact that strategy and planning in most business schools are taught in "silos," by departments or disciplines, and execution suffers further. The view that marketing strategy, financial strategy, HR strategy, and so on is the only "right" approach is deleterious to the integrative view demanded by execution.

It appears, then, that most MBA programs (undergrad, too, for that matter) are marked by an emphasis on developing strategies, not executing them. Bright graduates are well versed in strategy and planning, with only a passing exposure to execution. Extrapolating this into the real world suggests that there are many managers who have rich conceptual backgrounds and training in planning but not in "doing." The lack of formal attention to strategy execution in the classroom obviously must carry over to a lack of attention and consequent underachievement in the area of execution in the real world.

If this is true—if managers are trained to plan, not to execute—then the successful execution of strategy becomes less likely and more problematic. Execution is learned in the "school of hard knocks," and the pathways to successful results are likely fraught with mistakes and frustrations.

It also follows logically that managers who know something about strategy execution very likely have the advantage over their counterparts who don't.

If managers in one company are better versed in the ways of execution than managers in a competitor organization, isn't it logical to assume, all other things being equal, that the former company may enjoy a competitive advantage over the latter, given the differences in knowledge or capabilities? The benefits of effective execution include competitive advantage and higher returns to shareholders, so having knowledge in this area would clearly seem to be worthwhile and beneficial to the organization.

Let the "Grunts" Handle Execution

Another problem is that some C-level and other top-level managers actually believe that strategy execution or implementation is "below them," something best left to lower-level employees. Indeed, the heading of this section comes from an actual quote from a high-level manager.

I was working on implementation programs at GM, under the auspices of Corporate Strategic Planning. In the course of my work, I encountered many competent and dedicated managers. However, I also ran across a few who had a jaundiced view of execution. As one of these managers explained:

"Top management rightfully worries about planning and strategy formulation. Great care must be taken to develop sound plans. If planning is done well, management then can turn the plans over to the grunts whose job it is to make sure things get done and the work of the planners doesn't go to waste."

What a picture of the planning and execution process! The planners (the "smart" people) develop plans that the "grunts" (not quite as smart) simply have to follow through on and make work. "Doing" obviously involves less ability and intelligence than "planning," a perception of managerial work that clearly demeans the execution process.

The prevailing view here is that one group of managers does innovative, challenging work (planning) and then "hands off the ball" to lower levels for execution. If things go awry and strategic plans are not successful (which often is the case), the problem is placed squarely at the feet of the "doers," who somehow screwed up and couldn't implement a perfectly sound and viable plan. The doers fumbled the ball despite the planners' well-designed plays.

Every organization, of course, has some separation of planning and doing, of formulation and execution. However, when such a separation becomes dysfunctional—when planners see themselves as the smart people and treat the doers as "grunts"—there clearly will be execution problems. When the "elite" plan and see execution as something below them, detracting from their dignity as top managers, the successful implementation of strategy obviously is in jeopardy.

The truth is that all managers are "grunts" when it comes to strategy execution. From the CEO on down, sound execution demands that managers roll up their sleeves and pitch in to make a difference. The content and focus of what they do may vary between top and middle management. Nonetheless, execution demands commitment to and a passion for results, regardless of management level.

Another way of saying this is that execution demands ownership at all levels of management. From C-level managers on down, people must commit to and own the processes and actions central to effective execution. Ownership of execution and the change processes vital to execution are necessary for success. Change is impossible without commitment to the decisions and actions that define strategy execution.

The execution of strategy is not a trivial part of managerial work; it defines the essence of that work. Execution is a key responsibility of all managers, not something that "others" do or worry about.

Planning and Execution Are Interdependent

Even though, in reality, there may be a separation of planning and execution tasks, the two are highly interdependent. Planning affects execution. The execution of strategy, in turn, affects changes to strategy and planning over time. This relationship between planning and doing suggests two critical points to keep in mind.

Successful strategic outcomes are best achieved when those responsible for execution are also part of the planning or formulation process. The greater the interaction between "doers" and "planners" or the greater the overlap of the two processes or tasks, the higher the probability of execution success.

A related point is that strategic success demands a "simultaneous" view of planning and doing. Managers must be thinking about execution even as they are formulating plans. Execution is not something to "worry about later." All execution decisions and actions, of course, cannot be taken at once. Execution issues or problem areas must be anticipated, however, as part of a "big picture" dealing with planning and doing. Formulating and executing are parts of an integrated, strategic management approach. This dual or simultaneous view is important but difficult to achieve, and it presents a challenge to effective execution.

Randy Tobias had this simultaneous view of planning and doing. Even as he was formulating a new competitive strategy for his AT&T division, he was anticipating execution challenges. Competitive strategy formulation wasn't seen as occurring in a planning vacuum, isolated from execution issues. Central to the success of strategy was his early identification and appreciation of execution-related factors whose impact on strategic success was judged to be formidable. Execution worries couldn't be put off; they were part and parcel of the planning function.

In contrast, top management at a stumbling Lucent Technologies never had this simultaneous view of planning and execution.

When it was spun off from AT&T, the communications, software, and data networking giant looked like a sure bet to succeed. It had the fabled Bell Labs in its fold. It was ready to hit the ground running and formulate winning competitive strategies. Even as the soaring technology market of the late 1990s helped Lucent and other companies, however, it couldn't entirely mask or eliminate Lucent's problems.

One of the biggest problems was that management didn't anticipate critical execution obstacles as they were formulating strategy. Its parent, Ma Bell, had become bureaucratic and slow moving, and Lucent took this culture with it when it was spun off. The culture didn't serve the company well in a highly competitive, rapidly changing telecom environment, a problem that was not foreseen. An unwieldy organizational structure, too, was ignored during Lucent's early attempts at strategy development, and it soon became a liability when it came to such matters as product development and time to market. More agile competitors such as Nortel beat Lucent to market, signaling problems with Lucent's ability to pull off its newly developed strategies.

One thing that was lacking at Lucent was top management's having a simultaneous view of planning and doing. The planning phase ignored critical execution issues related to culture, structure, and people. The results of this neglect were extremely negative, only magnified by the market downturns in 2000 and thereafter.

Execution Takes Longer than Formulation

The execution of strategy usually takes longer than the formulation of strategy. Whereas planning may take weeks or months, the implementation of strategy is usually played out over a much longer period of time. The longer time frame can make it harder for managers to focus on and control the execution process, as many things, some unforeseen, can materialize and challenge managers' attention.

Steps taken to execute a strategy take place over time, and many factors, including some unanticipated, come into play. Interest rates may change, competitors don't behave the way they're supposed to (competitors can be notoriously "unfair" at times, not playing by our "rules"!), customers' needs change, and key personnel leave the company. The outcomes of changes in strategy and execution methods cannot always be easily determined because of "noise" or uncontrolled events. This obviously increases the difficulty of execution efforts.

The longer time frame puts pressure on managers dealing with execution. Long-term needs must be translated into short-term objectives. Controls must be set up to provide feedback and keep management abreast of external "shocks" and changes. The process of execution must be dynamic and adaptive, responding to and compensating for unanticipated events. This presents a real challenge to managers and increases the difficulty of strategy execution.

When the DaimlerChrysler merger was consummated in 1998, many believed that the landmark deal would create the world's preeminent carmaker. Execution since has been extremely difficult, however, and the six years after the merger have seen many new problems unfold. The company has faced one crisis after another, including two bouts of heavy losses in the Chrysler division, a series of losses in commercial vehicles, and huge problems with failed investments in an attempted turnaround at debt- burdened Mitsubishi Motors.iv Serious culture clashes also materialized between the top-down, formal German culture vs. the more informal and decentralized U.S. company. Angry shareholders at the 2004 meeting created and mirrored internal dissent and issued an ultimatum to Jurgen Schrempp to turn things around fast.

The six years after the merger presented problems unforeseen at the time of the merger. Execution always takes time and places pressure on management for results. But the longer time needed for execution also increases the likelihood of additional unforeseen problems or challenges cropping up, which further increases the pressure on managers responsible for execution results. The process of execution is always difficult and sometimes quarrelsome, with problems only exacerbated by the longer time frame usually associated with execution.

Execution Is a Process, Not an Action or Step

A point just made is critical and should be repeated: Execution is a process. It is not the result of a single decision or action. It is the result of a series of integrated decisions or actions over time.

This helps explain why sound execution confers competitive advantage. Firms will try to benchmark a successful execution of strategy. However, if execution involves a series of internally consistent, integrated activities, activity systems, or processes, imitation will be extremely difficult, if not impossible.v

Southwest Airlines, for example, does many things differently than most large airlines. It has no baggage transfer, serves no meals, issues no boarding passes, uses one type of airplane (reducing training and maintenance costs), and incents fast turnaround at the gate. It has developed capabilities and created a host of activities to support its low-cost strategy. Other airlines are hard pressed to copy it, as they're already doing everything Southwest isn't. They're committed to different routines and methods. Copying Southwest's execution activities, in total, would involve difficult trade-offs, markedly different tasks, and major changes, which complicates the problem of developing and integrating new execution processes or activities. This is not to say that competitors absolutely cannot copy Southwest; indeed, other low-cost upstarts and traditional airlines are putting increasing competitive pressure on Southwest. This is simply arguing that such imitation is extremely hard to do.

Execution is a process that demands a great deal of attention to make it work. Execution is not a single decision or action. Managers who seek a quick solution to execution problems will surely fail in attempts at making strategy work. Faster is not always better!

Execution Involves More People than Strategy Formulation DOES
In addition to being played out over longer periods of time, strategy implementation always involves more people than strategy formulation. This presents additional problems. Communication down the organization or across different functions becomes a challenge. Making sure that incentives throughout the organization support strategy execution efforts becomes a necessity and, potentially, a problem. Linking strategic objectives with the day-to-day objectives and concerns of personnel at different organizational levels and locations becomes a legitimate but challenging task. The larger the number of people involved, the greater the challenge of effective strategy execution.

I once was involved in a strategic planning project with a well-known bank. Another project I wasn't directly involved in had previously recommended a new program to increase the number of retail customers who used certain profitable products and services. A strategy was articulated and a plan of execution developed to educate key personnel and to set goals consistent with the new thrust. Branch managers and others dealing with customers were brought in to corporate for training and to create widespread enthusiasm for the program.

After a few months, the data revealed that not much had changed. It clearly was business as usual, with no change in the outcomes that were being targeted by the new program. The bank decided to do a brief survey to canvas customers and branch personnel in contact with customers to determine reactions to the program and see where modifications could be made.

The results were shocking, as you've probably guessed. Few people knew about the program. Some tellers and branch personnel did mention that they had heard about "something new," but nothing different was introduced to their daily routines. A few said that the new program was probably just a rumor, as nothing substantial had ever been implemented. Others suggested that rumors were always circulating, and they never knew what was real or bogus.

Communication and follow-through for the new program were obviously inadequate, but the bank admittedly faced a daunting task. It was a big bank. It had many employees at the branch level. Educating them and changing their behaviors was made extremely difficult by the bank's size. Decentralized branch operations ensured that problems were always "popping up" in the field, challenging employees' attention and making it difficult to introduce new ideas from corporate to a large group of employees.

In this example, the number of people who needed to be involved in the implementation of a new program presented a major challenge to the bank management. One can easily imagine the communications problems in even larger, geographically dispersed companies such as GM, IBM, Deutsche Post, GE, Exxon, Nestlé, Citicorp, and ABB. The number of people involved, added to the longer time frames generally associated with strategy execution, clearly creates problems when trying to make strategy work.

Poor white South Africans blame reverse discrimination

2009-02-26T21:51:00.003-08:00

Soil & Pimp Sessions Summer Goddess

2009-02-16T00:52:00.000-08:00

Gilles Peterson Interview (Part 2)

2009-02-16T00:50:00.001-08:00

From Emmerald,

Emm: What’s up in New Orleans?

Gilles: I just want to go there. They’ve got that French thing there. I’d love to go to Atlanta as well, yes. But I don’t want to go back to other places in the states. Like I went to Detroit; it’s such a dark city, isn’t it? I mean I don’t mind going there and hearing the music because there's some great stuff coming out of Detroit, but I don’t really want to go and play there. There’s a film I saw, I think it was filmed in New York, but it was dark like Detroit. “21 Grams”, have you seen that film yet?

Emm: No, I haven’t seen that.

Gilles: Yes, it was a really heavy film. It was nominated for an Oscar, I think. I actually, I was in Australia on tour and I was like I am now, a bit jetlagged, and I was like three days in and I had to do a gig that night, and I wanted to do something. It was three in the afternoon, it was too hot, so I was like I’m going to see a film. So I went to the movies in the afternoon in Brisbane, but the film was so heavy in dialogue I had to leave half way through.

Emm: (laughs) I’ll have to check that out, but I’ll wait until I’m in the right mood for that. What were you doing in Brisbane?

Gilles: I did a festival. It was a tour; it was a really good tour actually with Miguel Migs, Bugz in the Attic, Soul to Soul, Blackalicious, Gang Starr, Mad Professor, Nitin Sawney. It was a really good lineup, some reggae, some broken beat too. There were like twenty-five thousand people at the show in Sydney.

Emm: Wow.

Gilles: Yes, we did Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and Perth, yes, the middle of nowhere.

Emm: Yeah, literally.

Gilles: Yes, it was fantastic. New Zealand’s actually much better for music, but I like going to Australia because the girls are better looking there. (laughs) That’s not true actually; I prefer it in New Zealand. But then the weather’s always better in Australia, a little bit. It goes to ten degrees hotter. New Zealand’s like being in England in the summer. How did you discover Worldwide?

Emm: I was looking for that Irfane song. (laughs) “Just a Little Lovin’”.

Gilles: And how did you hear that?

Emm: At the Jazzanova show. Jazzanova played down in Athens Georgia, and they played that, “Just a Little Lovin’ “.

Gilles: Right.

Emm: And I was like what the hell is that?

Gilles: Right.

Emm: So anyway, and I guess I must have done a Google search for it and it probably came up on a play list of yours.

Gilles: Wow.

Emm: And then I found the show. However, I have the “Incredible Sound of Gilles Peterson”, which is one of my favorite CDs, and somehow I never connected that with your radio show.

Gilles: And then you just sort of, then you listened to the show?

Emm: Listened to the show and I was like…

Gilles: And was it good quality?

Emm: (laughs) Yeah, it was alright for an internet radio show.

Gilles: Right. And then you got onto the messageboard. It’s great having that community, the messageboard. But it’s a bit weird sometimes. You kind of, I mean the people are really, really nice, the people who are on it, are really, really nice cool people, they’re not… they’re not the people you’d think.

Emm: You would think they’d be crazy.

Gilles: Yes, a little bit. I was thinking if I was to go away or something, it’s almost, even though. . . I mean I do know most of them now, but I’d feel really, really sad about it, if I had to go.

Emm: Oh, yes, yes.

Gilles: You become emotionally attached to the people there.

Emm: Absolutely. Like when I started my new job, with the transition, I couldn’t be on the messageboard all the time, and I was missing all these people I have never met, it was strange.

Gilles: Yes, yes. The people there are really dedicated. But they could be that dedicated and they could be a little bit -- it could become a bit too anal and boring. I mean it does get a bit boring sometimes I have to say. But there are a few people on that board who are really intelligent and interesting and say some really cool things that are not related necessarily to music, it’s just a lifestyle.

Emm: Yes, yes, I think that’s what everybody likes about it. Like we can all talk about music, but we also talk about other things. We could talk about sports. We talk about movies. We talk about food. We could talk about whatever, and that’s what’s really cool.

Gilles: Are they controlling it a bit too much? They have a controller, don’t they?

Emm: Yes, the mods. They get blasted. (laughs) But I've only gotten whacked because I’ve done stuff I wasn’t supposed to do, like if I put an email address on or something. I never had a post whacked because it was inappropriate or off topic, but I know other people have. I don’t know how they come up with what’s off topic though.

Gilles: I’d love to get pictures up of some people on it.

Emm: Oh, that would be awesome. We need a little facebook, like a yearbook or something. (laughs)

Gilles: Have you spoken to anyone, does anyone mail you?

Emm: I have corresponded like with Dayo, Ade P, Bailey, and Marilyn, and I’ve traded CDs with Matiji and Paulboards. . .

Gilles: He writes really well.

Emm: Ade P? Yeah, he’s an amazing writer.

Gilles: There’s a guy on there from Japan, I think, Samba Magic. That’s the other great thing. There’s people from all over on there, not just the U.K. Like I had no idea you were in the states. I just thought okay, Emmerald, whoever that is. (laughs) But there’s all kinds of people.

Emm: Oh yeah, it’s great. The musical knowledge on that board is absolutely insane.

Gilles: Yeah. It used to be quite heavy man. Like, I used to get a lot of criticism, which is great, of course, but then again you sort of take criticism to heart a little. But it can be kind of difficult.

Emm: Yeah, that’s got to be hard. I wonder sometimes if people are more cautious about what they say because they know you’re reading it.

Gilles: I don’t know, but I like that. I like for people to be comfortable and say what they want to say. I think it’s an easy community for people to feel comfortable in.

Emm: Yeah, I think people are honest for the most part. And it’s cool that they can be. What’s really cool is that you actually check it out. I mean, you could easily be like, oh these crazy kids, they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Gilles: Is it a bit addictive?

Emm: Uh, yeah. (laughs)

Gilles: From my point of view, sometimes I wonder like. ..if it’s an ego thing. Like I wonder what are they saying today. (laughs) It is good though, because I really get a lot of information from it. You learn what people really like.

Gilles Peterson Interview Part 1

2009-02-16T00:39:00.003-08:00

From Emmerald

What started as a simple and inexpensive CD purchase ($7.99 at a used CD shop), literally changed my whole outlook on DJing and music. I’d just started learning how to mix records when I purchased “The Incredible Sound of Gilles Peterson”. Like all DJ larvae, I was trying to make sense of my records and trying to determine how best to convey the collection of sounds I’d amassed. Since I started relatively late in the game, my collection reflected my broad taste in music as it had developed over the years. It wasn’t a large collection (still isn’t), but I had everything from Sixousie and the Banshees to John Coltrane to The Bar-Kays, to 4 Hero, and I had no clue if any of that would ever make sense together, until I heard Gilles Peterson.
A master of what he terms “joining the dots”, Gilles’ weekly radio show “Worldwide” on BBC Radio 1, and his various compilation CDs (“Incredible Sound of Gilles Peterson“, “Worldwide Programme” 1, 2, and 3, and his 2 “Trust the DJ” comps) have paved the road for those of us searching for the strand of harmony that connects various, sometimes incongruous, genres of music. Every Wednesday, for two hours, Gilles takes his listeners on journeys through jazz, funk, hip-hop, and dance, through the old and dusty, the new and never-to-be-released, classics and classics-to-be. For his faithful listeners, Gilles sets not trends, but standards, conveying and inspiring above all else, a pure love and appreciation of music. Gilles taught me that music has a life all its own, and the best way to determine how to put songs together, is not only to listen, but to watch and feel how and where each tune grows. The dots come together naturally; you’re just there to draw the line.

Emmerald: You must receive a ton of music a day. How do you decide what gets played and what doesn’t get played?

Gilles Peterson: Well I tend to look at labels that I know first of all. And my radio show goes through a production company, so I have a producer--

Emm: Is that Karen?

Gilles: Yes, that’s Karen. A lot of music gets sent to her and the real rubbish, she’ll clear out. So before it gets to me most of the rubbish is gone. But if ever I find out that Karen’s not given me a record that I like that she thought was rubbish, it’s always bad for her, (laughs) so it hasn’t happened for a while. I’ve only got two hours on the radio and it’s quite an influential radio show. There are a lot of bands and artists and producers coming through who want exposure. So I feel I have a responsibility to those people that I listen to their music. And that means that I play a lot more new music than I used to.

I try not to listen to too much music on the day of a show, so I tend to hit my music on Mondays and Tuesdays. Otherwise I could end up listening to music all day on a Wednesday. I do three different shows. I do the one on the BBC; I do a syndicated show which goes out to lots of different stations around the world, and I do a show which is for things like British Airways. I keep really busy with the shows and other things. For example, coming here in Miami this week, I’ve had to record two Radio 1’s, two syndicated shows, and a British Airways show all like in three days, which is a lot you know. So, anyway, to cut a long story short, I usually try to pace it with my music. I clear my music out regularly as well. I used to keep everything, and then I realized I can’t do it. I just can’t live with all this stuff. I’m so badly organized as an individual anyway that if I had too much music there it would just kill me, so I do clear out my music often. I mean obviously the stuff that I’ve played and I like, I’ll keep, but all the other stuff that’s half and half, I just clear out. Every now and again I realize I’ve made a big mistake and I’ve let something go that I’ve heard some DJ playing somewhere in a club. Then I’m like oh my God, I used to have that album and I got rid of it. That kind of thing happens but that’s the way it goes.

Emm: How long have you and Karen worked together?

Gilles: Well I had a guy called Benji B who used to work with me. He came to me when I was working on Kiss FM. He was like fifteen then and he was still at school. And he said he wanted to work on my show and so I started got him into Kiss, and we just became really good friends. He came all the way through until I did Radio 1. Now he’s become a DJ and a broadcaster himself, and so last year we had to basically let him go so he could do his own thing. When I started off at Radio 1 he brought in Karen as an assistant producer for himself so she’s been there for a bit of a while. She’s given the show a really nice twist. She's my little angel.

Emm: How does your syndicated show differ from your Worldwide show?

Gilles: I do the syndicated show at my house. And there’s less talking, more music.

Emm: Is the music the same?

Gilles: Sometimes. I kind of amalgamate them a bit, but it depends. Sometimes I’ll do a completely different show for both of them.

Emm: Do you plan out what you’re going to play on your shows?

Gilles: Not really. I mean I have some idea of what I want to play. But there are definitely times when I bring records to play, but I don’t end up playing them, you know.

Emm: You're doing a new night in Paris?

Gilles: Yes, I’m doing a night at the Rex Club in Paris. The thing about the Rex is that it’s a techno club. It’s the club where Laurent Garnier made his name. It’s a rave club, quote unquote. So it has a reputation for being quite young and ravey, but it has the best sound system in Paris by miles. Last year they asked me to come and DJ for the fifteenth anniversary of Rex. I think it was their fifteenth or twentieth year. I played there with Laurent Garnier, and they had all these other different DJs; it was a really good set of people. I’m half French so I’ve always been going to Paris, but I’ve never really had a good time there because there's always something wrong with the sound, or the people are just not into it or whatever. But in the last year it’s really changed in Paris, so I’m really happy to get on the train and go there on Thursdays and pop it out. It’s really massive; it’s great fun and a there’s great sound system at the Rex, so I’m really enjoying it there.

It’s funny, Paris has got a few musicians, good DJs, but they’ve never really had a club scene, no club culture. Like England’s done really well with this music and taking American music and kind of repackaging it a little bit and creating a club culture. And in America, the club culture scene was obviously really important in Detroit and Chicago, but it was quite gay a lot of it. A lot of the house music was very gay so you had to really want to go and get that music. A lot of people would not play in those sort of places. Whereas in England, club culture is very essential to carry on with everything. I think club culture has been really important to spread a really good circuit around the world. Japan and Germany have taken the club culture thing, and they repackaged it really well for themselves. And you’ve got the music festival down here and all that stuff.

So yes, so that’s Paris. It’s good in France. I’ve already been on the radio in France actually. They’re into jazz there as well. They’re quite intellectual, the French. They like to talk about the music. They’re the kind of guys--if I’m DJing immediately after I’ve finished they all discuss it, you know what I mean. They’ll always have a meeting. They enjoy the breakdown of the thing more than they do the thing itself. Some people go to see film, go to the cinema, they kind of enjoy talking about it more than actually seeing the film, that’s what the French are like.

Emm: So have you see any kind of drop off in the London club culture? There seems to be a drop off in dance music in general. The music isn’t selling that well, and some artists seem to be having a hard time with it.

Gilles: Not really for me, because I’ve got the radio, you know. And I’m lucky that I can always travel, so I’m not overexposing myself in one place. If you play every week in the city, you're not special to that city. Your people just take you for granted and it’s like whatever. I can always travel, so I can always be fresh wherever I am, and luckily the scene is very international. And, I mean I still do my residency in London now, I play there when I can if I’m in town.

Emm: Is that Bar Rhumba?

Gilles: Bar Rhumba, yes. London isn’t about being hot or selling out Fabric or whatever, London to me is just where I love to go out. On a Monday I’m in my town, London people come and see me. We get a couple of hundred people. I always have the best time in there and I have my fans and my people who work in there, and I can let off and have a good time. But I don’t think about it like if I’m going to play then, I’ll just do once every three months in London, then I’m going to be a real big pull. I don’t look at London like that; do you know what I mean?

Emm: Yes, yes.

Gilles: But I think club culture has definitely been hit. There are all sides of the scene that seem to go through these things. I’m really pleased that the dance thing has gone anyway, I mean has gone down, because it was rubbish a lot of it. And a lot of the people involved in it were rubbish as well. I didn’t really want to be associated with those sorts of people in what I was doing, because it was just cold and corporate and everything. So I’m kind of please that everyone's come out of that, and then the people who are really into the shit survive. It’s the men and the boys thing. I’ve been DJing for twenty years now and I’ve been through so many ups and downs and in the end you just keep going. If you’re hit listed, if people like you at the moment it’s great but if they don’t, then I don’t care either. That’s how I approach it, and I’m still enjoying it and making it.

Emm: Cool, that’s good. Twenty years?

Gilles: More actually, it’s twenty-five, yes, I’m forty this year.

Emm: How did you initially get into radio?

Gilles: I started my own pirate station. I got some transmitters and stuff. In those days pirate stations didn’t go on for twenty-four hours. They’d go on for like four or five hours on a Sunday. There was one station called Radio Invicta, which was the first black music pirate in London back in the day, and they lost their equipment. Their gear got taken by the home office, by the police, and they were like, oh my God, we haven’t got a transmitter. And they’d heard there was this young boy that had a transmitter. The guy who built their transmitter put them on this annoying little bloke who lived in south London (laughs). So they the called me and they said can we use your gear. And I said, well as long as you give me a show.

Emm: Right, sure.

Gilles: I was seventeen by then and I started working for Radio Invicta, and that was really cool, because that was where the best DJs were and they were playing good shit. It was like just all soul so it was quite urban. It was very much to the London audience rather than the suburbs. In England you’ve got two scenes. You’ve got the kind of urban scene, and then you’ve got the suburbs. And so if you look at like the DJs who are here in Miami, people like Pete Tong or Judge Jules, they’re very suburban, you see what I mean? And these stations were very much more urban, so they were blacker in a way, but it appealed to a more mixed crowd. So for me being on that station, it was really cool. From that point onwards, I started working at little clubs. My mum didn’t know I was DJing, so I’d have to lie. I’d tell her that I was just going out. I used to work in a gay club actually, on a Sunday. And I’m not gay, but I mean basically I’d go there because they kind of liked the look of me. I used to do nine to one on a Sunday and they wanted gay music. They wanted a kind of gay disco, and I played more boogie kind of stuff like Prelude, D Train and Unlimited Touch, things like that. I started getting a bit of a black crowd coming into the club, and the gays started complaining because it wasn’t a strictly gay thing anymore, so I got barred from that. That was my first sort of travesty. And then I started working in clubs all over the place. I had to earn my money, you know, because I didn’t have a job and I’d fucked up my exams. My studies had gone out the window. I was really into football. I was a sports boy when I was little. I played quite seriously, football, and rugby amazingly.

Emm: Which is your favourite football team?

Gilles: I’m an Arsenal fan. Yeah, so I was doing a lot of sport but then suddenly I just got into music and that really took me away. I never really thought of it as being a career thing, as a child. My mum and dad left England when I was seventeen. My dad is French, so they moved over there, but I stayed, and I just made it on my own. I made a living, so I’m happy about that.

Emm: How do you compare the experience of being a radio DJ versus playing out? Are there aspects of one that you like better than the other?

Gilles: Well, I’ve got a family and I’ve got kids and so I need to do a little bit less DJing and clubbing, but I love it. That’s the thing; it gives me a lot of energy which I hope I bring onto the radio. I think that’s what gives my radio show that edge in a way. I’m listening to music from a club and radio perspective. So I can hear how certain records work. If I’m listening to them at home, I’m like that’s alright. But if I’m playing in a club, certain records just take a whole different light. So in that respect I think the show’s been a quite good line between the club and the home with the headphones kind of thing. And actually I get more money doing gigs. That’s my main source of income. You don’t really make a lot of money on radio, in England anyway. I don’t know but it’s probably the same here.

Emm: I’m sure it’s the same here, yes.

Gilles: The money side is good, but the real the truth is I love DJing. I still love going out and meeting people, and it’s when I’m in clubs that I hear the other DJs playing and that keeps me in the scene. Part of what I do is upfront and I’ve got to be upfront. You’ve got to be on it. Maybe there will be a time when I’ll just stop and find a new role. I mean, I want to do a jazz show, really, that’s what I’d like.

Emm: Yes, I’m sure you do.

Gilles: I get into trouble if I play too much jazz on Radio 1.

Emm: Really?

Gilles: Well I don’t really get into trouble; they don’t dare say anything to me. They’re very cool with me actually. But I hear “if you play too much of that jazz, you don’t get a better show”, (laughs) and I want a better show so it’s a fine line. So I think, again, the whole thing about what I do, you know, if I can play “Impressions” by John Coltrane next to new tunes. That’s what it’s about for me. The show I loved recently was-- I don’t know if you heard the Roy Ayres show? That was a great show.

Emm: Yes, definitely. That was one of the best shows I’ve heard, honestly.

Gilles: If you can just spend time with people and let them talk. I mean the thing is with these legends you’ve just got to set it up right. You can’t just go up to them at the end of the gig and say can we do an interview. That’s really one of the most fantastic things about this job, the fact that you can listen to these people talking. They’ve got so much to say. I want to get more with them because there’s not that many of them left and they’re going to fade.

Emm: Right.

Gilles: I wish I had interviewed Miles Davis, and big people like that. I interviewed Q-Tip last week though, and that was good. It was over the phone. I really want to meet him.

Emm: You’ve never met him?

Gilles: No, no. I mean, I know a lot of those people but I’ve never met him. I don’t think Q-Tip likes Europe. He’s a New Yorker. He’s very New York. Whereas people like Madlib or Jazzy Jeff, those guys, they see what the UK has and what it can do for them.

Emm: Right.

Gilles: Q-Tip’s just a home boy from Brooklyn or whatever, but yes, he’s my hero actually.

Emm: Yeah?

Gilles: Yes, I think he’s my hero. Because when he put out that first album, that freaked me out.

Emm: The one that got shelved?

Gilles: No, the very first, the first…

Emm: The first Tribe album?

Gilles: Yeah, you know with “Push It Along” and all that stuff, that was just amazing. It blew De la Soul apart, which, I mean I like De la Soul, so that was just like spot on. That was spot on because it was hip-hop and it was a bit dark. I like it that way. You need that record in every record collection. And then he went off and did “Low End Theory”, and he got Ron Carter to play bass and I was like you’ve got it going more than anyone. And now he's just done this film, he’s acting and he’s good. The thing is, I didn’t realize that his house burnt down, you know?

Emm: I heard that, yes.

Gilles: With all his records.

Emm: Yeah, that’s crazy, very unfortunate. Actually, speaking of record collections, tell me about yours.

Gilles: Well my record collection took my life over and I had to leave my house. I truly had to leave my house.

Emm: (laughs) I believe you.

Gilles: So I had a house in Finsbury Park, which is near Arsenal in north London, a flat, a four bed roomed flat actually. And I had my wife and we had the kids there. And then by the time the baby was one, the records had--there wasn’t any room for any adults or children. So either we had to move out and buy a big house for everything or—then,I thought actually no. What I’ll do is I’ll buy a house down the road. So I live down the road now and my records are in the house. I’ve got like, I’ve got six bedrooms worth of records. Big rooms, big rooms. I’ve got a lot of records. I’ve got some good records though. And that’s very important as long as you’ve got quality, that’s very key.

Emm: Right. Quality is number one, right. There’s a lot of music out there and a lot of crap.

Gilles: Yes. I’ve spent a lot of money on records, a lot. I mean I’m really bad. I mean I’ll spend all my fee. I’ll do a gig and it will go that way. I’ve done that all my life. If I’d have saved all that money…

Emm: What does your wife say about that? I mean clearly she deals with it but…

Gilles: There are no records in our new house, so it’s fine. We don’t have a record player in our house. We’ve got a CD and that’s it. And I think it’s important also to have my other space. We have a really lovely house, a lovely family and I’m very much in love, and my wife kind of accepts my job. Not really in January, February or March though.

Emm: Yeah?

Gilles: Because I go to Australia in January, it really fucks her up. Because it’s cold she’s got to take the kids to school.

Gilles: So that’s not a good one. And coming here for the week I had to work on that one pretty much. But we get on, it’s all OK. She understands. I was already fully into it when she met me.

Emm: Oh, yeah, so she knows it’s an occupational hazard. You have to know that.
Gilles: Yes. It’s not easy though.

Emm: Absolutely, it’s not.

Gilles: So who do you think is going to win the elections this year? Is Bush going to win again?

Emm: I would say so, barring something really crazy. I mean, he’s so powerful, and is still pretty popular.

Gilles: And he’s quite good in a way. I mean I hate to say it. I’m not a Bushite whatever, but I just saw him doing a few speeches when he came to England and he's got better at that.

Emm: Talking? (laughs)

Gilles: Better, yes, he’s got better at that. He’s got a bit better standing in England.

Emm: Yeah, it seems like he has. You know I love to watch Question Time. I always wonder how Bush would fare if Congress could just fire off questions at him like that.

Gilles: Do you get that here?

Emm: Not the show “Question Time”, but the parliamentary questions. They show it on C-span.

Gilles: Oh, oh yes. The parliamentary question time, where they’ve got the cameras in the House of Commons.

Emm: Right. I love that.

Gilles: It’s pretty controlled though, I think.

Emm: I bet. I wonder if Blair gets the questions ahead of time, do you know?

Gilles: I don’t know, I’m sure he does. Nothing really surprises him.

Emm: I liked Blair a lot when he was--- I guess it was when Clinton was in office, and they were boys. I really liked Clinton too, though. I was really surprised Blair bought into Bush and this war thing the way he did.

Gilles: Yeah, he had to. I couldn’t believe how he sold his soul on that one. He came across as very admirable. He had a lot of humility as Prime Ministers, people in power go. He came across as very honest, and he just basically, he was told you’ve got to go with us. And he had to lie through his teeth to go. Actually, last year, when we were here, the day that I did my show from here, he was on the seven o’clock news, which is midnight England, and when I started, I could hear the news bulletin saying how America, all the allies had just started bombing Iraq. It was such a downer. And so it just felt really strange being here actually.

Emm: Yeah, I remember that. Such and unfortunate day. So what’s next for you? You’re here in Miami this week and then. . .

Gilles: Well I’m doing a show in New York on Thursday.

Emm: That’s cool. You don’t play over here in the states that often.

Gilles: No, I don’t really. I really want to play in New Orleans too, man.

Black Colleges Fight Erosion of Their iche

2009-02-15T21:48:00.003-08:00

By GAYLE WHITE

Historically black colleges and universities, like many other schools, are struggling with both fewer resources and a growing demand from students for financial aid.

But the institutions known as HBCUs have another problem that some leaders contend is theirs alone: Many African-American students are finding their needs met elsewhere.

In 1977, 35 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded to black students were from historically black colleges. By 2002, the share was down to 22 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, even though the number of African-American students earning bachelor’s degrees from historically black colleges actually grew.

In the days of segregation, African-American students had limited options. Now, with a wide range of choices, only 13 percent of African-American college students are enrolled in HBCUs.

Kristin Mason, a junior English major at Atlanta’s Spelman College, is one. Mason, who is from Colorado, chose Spelman, she said, because of the “sense of belonging” she felt surrounded by smart black women.

Morehouse College senior Shaun Harris, a business major from Illinois, said he was “looking for brotherhood” at the Atlanta men’s school whose alumni include the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

But Mark Gamble of Columbus said he “embraced the diversity” at Georgia State University, where about 60 percent of the students are white, 26 percent African-American, and the rest are other ethnicities or identify themselves as multiracial.

“I like being around whites, blacks, Asians and all the other minorities,” said Gamble, a sophomore film major.

Georgia State freshman Mercedes Callaway of Atlanta said she chose the state research university over Spelman, a private women’s HBCU, because of money. A friend at Spelman is “getting a good education,” said Callaway, who is on the HOPE scholarship. “But she’s in debt to pay for school.”

HBCUs are losing students to a range of institutions, said William “Sonny” Walker, who graduated from a historically black college in Arkansas and has served on the boards of three others, including, currently, Atlanta’s Morris Brown College.

“Many of the students who came from middle- and upper-income families, whose parents could afford to pay tuition, are going to Harvard, are going to Georgia, are going to Georgia Tech, are going to Vanderbilt,” Walker said.

Many historically black schools have lower endowments than other colleges, making less money available for scholarships, school officials say. But those institutions play an important role, said Leonard L. Haynes, executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

At historically black institutions, he said, students of color can “get an education, get nurturing, get to mature and get to be good citizens after they graduate” in an environment that celebrates their cultures. “If they didn’t exist today, they would have to be created,” Haynes said.

The current economic climate — which is hitting universities across the country, public and private — is making it harder to pay the bills, exacerbating problems both for families of students and for the schools themselves, officials of local colleges say.

Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse and Spelman all revealed this month that they are cutting back on expenses.

Clark Atlanta President Carlton E. Brown said 70 faculty members and 30 other staffers were being laid off because of an “enrollment emergency” after years of declining numbers. At least 200 students recently dropped out or transferred to state colleges because they could no longer afford Clark Atlanta, Brown said.

Morehouse officials confirmed that they had not renewed the contracts of about 25 adjunct professors, about a third of the school’s part-time instructors.

And Spelman officials announced that they are eliminating 35 positions, 23 of them staffed, phasing out the college’s department of education and discontinuing some programs.

Spelman, whose donors include Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey, is in high demand among black women, said its president, Beverly Tatum.

“Students want to go to Spelman,” she said. “The issue is whether they can afford to go to Spelman.”

Morris Brown has struggled for years. It faces a Feb. 17 deadline to pay the remaining $214,000 of past-due water bills to the city of Atlanta. The college lost its accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in 2002, largely because of financial instability.

The Morris Brown board and its president, Stanley Pritchett, say they are looking at specialty programs and projects that might save the school, which, he said, would probably not be able to continue as a traditional liberal arts college.

Despite their troubles, historically black colleges and universities have fierce defenders.

“We need to find a way to preserve these institutions,” said state Sen. Emanuel Jones (D-Decatur), chairman of the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus. “Our universities have struggled

to survive just as we as a people have struggled to survive.”

Historically black colleges “speak to the legacy of our forefathers,” he said.

Jones, whose degrees are from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University, packed his oldest child off to college this fall.

He’s a freshman at Johns Hopkins University.

Aaliyah - More Than A Woman

2009-02-15T01:49:00.000-08:00

Egotistical Bastards

2009-02-15T01:46:00.000-08:00

Dead mag helps VH1 talk about race, from Ice Cube to Elvis to Costello

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Deep in the Broadway offices of VH1, Gabriel Alvarez and Elliott Wilson, two-fifths of the Ego Trip brain trust, are debating an issue that could forever alter race relations in the Empire State—should Puerto Ricans be allowed to use the word nigga? "If these Spanish kids are on the train saying 'nigga this,' 'nigga that,' " says Wilson, "this old black man is looking at them like they're crazy because he's experienced some real-ass racism."
"I try to explain to him," says Alvarez, gesturing at Wilson, "that Puerto Ricans have African blood in their ancestry."

Oh yeah, that's real convenient coming from a goddamn Puerto Rican.

"That's the thing," notes Alvarez, laughing awkwardly. "I'm Mexican."

It is this type of inane yet complex racial debate that has helped Ego Trip go from defunct underground zine to arbiter of the color line. The Ego Trip crew has produced two books and, this year, a special for VH1's TV's Illest Minority Moments. Now they're slated to make three more specials for VH1 under the rubric of "Race-O-Rama." Proposed shows include Dude, Where's My Ghetto Pass? and Black-O-Phobia!

"Most of the time VH1 just looks back at the stuff we love, or makes us laugh or whatever," says Joey Anuff, supervising producer at VH1. "But when you take a look at Ego Trip's books, you see they're looking at the same stuff with a much more charged lens. In a way they're the perfect VH1 project."

Well, not on the face of things. While VH1 likes to focus on the intricacies of John Hughes flicks and the "Where's the Beef?" lady, the Ego Trip aesthetic wallows in such highlights of racial dialogue as Elvis Costello calling Ray Charles "a blind ignorant nigger," Ice Cube threatening to "go down to the corner store and beat the Jap up," or the black community's penchant for conspiracy theories.

Ego Trip came into being in 1994 as a magazine co-edited by Sacha Jenkins and Wilson, who at the time were both working as hip-hop journalists. The duo borrowed $8,000 and printed up a new issue whenever they had the funds. Ego Trip began strictly as a hip-hop zine, but later expanded to rock and finally to what Jenkins calls "the new pornography"—race. "A lot of people thought that a magazine that covers rock and hip-hop and has decent writing had to have some white boys behind it," says Jenkins. "So, we created a fake publisher, and he was a white, racist, and out of touch. He'd write these editorials he thought were progressive. That attitude that we created in the magazine trickled out into our other projects."

The magazine stopped publishing in 1998, which didn't bother Jenkins and Wilson much, because they'd always seen Ego Trip as a concept that could take a variety of forms. "We didn't look at ourselves as businesspeople," says Wilson, who now edits the hip-hop magazine XXL. "We were creative people, but we recognized that we were creating a brand. The Ego Trip brand became a magazine but it also became our own joint sensibility."

After shutting down the magazine, the Ego Trippers added three more members to their cabinet (Alvarez, Brent Rollins, and Chairman Jefferson Mao) and then published two books—Ego Trip's Big Book of Rap Lists and Ego Trip's Big Book of Racism. Both featured exhaustive research, but the second is both more arresting and more disturbing. What passes for race talk today usually amounts to painfully stilted arguments that seem not to have shifted since 1970. Ego Trip's Big Book of Racism replaced discussions of ethnic diversity and democracy with more pertinent questions like "Whatever happened to baseball players named 'Whitey?' " and "If I should associate with the knights of the Ku Klux Klan, what will be required of me?"

Flippant as it all may sound, Ego Trip's brain trust is convinced that the truth lies not in the polemic but in the mundane—and the insane. "We are always fascinated by ignorance," says Alvarez. "When you listen to people talk and say things that are ignorant, you have a better understanding of where they're coming from, and maybe they'll hear what they're saying."

The Big Book of Racism's penchant for abrasively noting the places where pop culture and race intersect eventually attracted the attention of VH1, and thus spawned "Race-O-Rama." And while the relationship has produced the occasional corporate headaches (like "Race-O-Rama" being slated to air during Black History Month), it's also afforded the crew an opportunity to launch a discussion that demonstrates exactly how much race matters—not that anyone will ever mistake them for Cornel West. "We're down with Cornel West," says Jenkins. "We think he looks like Gene Shalit. We're down with that."

Riffing On Race

2009-02-15T01:26:00.003-08:00

In their latest book, the multiracial maniacally funny guys of the defunct hip-hop magazine ego trip turn their smart-ass, studiously well-informed attention to the subject of race.

With the disclaimer that "we just hate everybody," the book is a reference guide of sorts, crammed with lists, trivia, rants, and parodies. Together, they make a hilarious and occasionally insightful commentary on race and racism in culture, media, current events, and entertainment, with sometimes silly ("the hidden hate in Wite Out") and sometimes biting ("10 Popular Films in Which Middle Easterners Must Die in Order for the Good Guys to Win") results.

Have you ever been guilty of racial/ethnic stereotyping of certain groups-if so, which ones and why?

BRENT ROLLINS: This country was built on two things: competitiveness and racism--how can you not be prejudiced? Even blacks who talk a lot about white-man-this and white-man-that, go and turn around and treat some other struggling group like basura, sometimes. That's pretty hypocritical. People think that once they've established themselves, their little piece of the pie is sacred and no one can touch it, instead of realizing that we can always bake more pies.

JEFFERSON MAO Asians are constantly embarrassed or coming to grips with the stereotypes of our own behavior. When I watch the kids version of Jeopardy, I see the little Asian kid killing the math and science categories and then, when its time for "Final Jeopardy," he calculates and bets just enough to win the whole thing by a dollar. I'm both proud and horrifired.

What do you think of the contradictions of race in American culture today compared 'with those of previous decades?

GABE ALVAREZ People are so far removed from history it boggles the mind. How a white person can feel totally comfortable saying the n-word as a term of endearment is nuts! My feeling is that white people can't stand being told what they can and can't do.

The difference between those signs at restaurants that stated: "No Negroes, No Mexicans, No Dogs" as recently as the 1950s, and trying to figure out what happened with the last presidential election--where scores of black voters in Florida were kept from the polls through various devious means-comes down to what's worse: being obviously discriminated against? Or being opressed in manners that you have to dig beneath the surface to see?

BRENT ROLLINS: The '70s were great. GREAT. You had open dialogue and acknowledgement of other races and ethnicities--like the "You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's bread" ad campaigns--showing black kids, Chinese, and Native Indian men eating Jewish rye bread. Who would have the balls to do advertising like that now? In our book we have a spread entitled "Whatever happened to?" which lists all these kind of "forgotten" racial pop-ephemera and terminology. It just sort of illustrates how American culture sort of neutralizes race.

What might the more recent immigrant groups do well to understand and be prepared to confront while in the U.S., in terms of race and how it's determined/experienced here?

SACHA JENKINS: They must understand that, at the airports, anyone who is a shade darker than J-Lo (hey, she's white now...ask her sexy hubby) will be detained and derailed and then told to have a nice day--and that that is their patriotic duty, this detention.

And they should ask: how come every time a boat load of Haitians arrives on American soil, looking for a better way...the Haitians are sent to detention camps while their Cuban hermanos often find warm soup and a nice firm bed waiting for them, just inches away from South Beach?

What aspects of race and racism do you take on in the book and how would you describe your approach?

GABE ALVAREZ: We tackle everything with humor, in a way that only non-white people could--and as the comedic greats like Richard Pryor proved, the best humor is based on truth. The book's info is presented in bite-sizes, and there's plenty of silly shit in it--but we were fully aware of all the jokes we were making, even the more offensive ones.

BRENT ROLLINS: Our approach is a blender. Throw it in there and watch it spin around. The entire concept of punk rock and hip-hop is central to our process.

While you have to be already a little predisposed to this topic to even think about picking up a book with the title Big Book of Racism, even those people are going to have preconceptions about how the topic of race should be presented. The intelligentsia and other people who write books spend too much time talking to themselves, but don't affect change. I respect anyone who devotes their lives to this race-shit, but really... who has more impact on shaping American culture--Cornel West or [pro wrestling star] The Rock?

Camp Lo - Black Nostaljack AKA Come On

2009-02-15T00:36:00.001-08:00

Green Carpet

2009-02-15T00:33:00.000-08:00

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The carpet outside last Monday’s Hip-Hop Inaugural Ball was not red but green, in honor of Heineken, one of the event’s sponsors. The green also could have stood for the price of the ticket—five hundred dollars for general admission, twenty-five hundred for “Sky Level.” The proceeds were promised to Russell Simmons’s Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, a group that has spoken out about everything from ending the Rockefeller drug laws to defending hip-hop lyrics before the F.C.C. The ball was held at the Harman Center for the Arts, on F Street, where heated white tents had been erected to contain the green carpet and any overflow. Nick Cannon, a long white scarf around his neck, shook hands outside the main lobby. On the green carpet, Don King, in rhinestone-studded denim, posed in profile for the paparazzi. A few feet away, Simmons, the co-founder of Def Jam records, took questions. He wore a long dark jacket, a black Yankees cap, white shell-top Adidas, and a pin-striped shirt buttoned to the collar with no tie.

Upstairs, the V.I.P. area was called the Hennessy Lounge. African-Americans reportedly purchase as much as eighty per cent of the Cognac imported to the United States. Hennessy, knowing its customer, was premièring a limited-edition bottle “in honor of our 44th president,” with a portion of the proceeds going to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. Smiling women in black blouses served cocktails engineered with the Presidential hooch. A flat screen flashed images of the bottle. A row of models of indeterminable race, wearing black dresses, stood off to the side having their photographs taken with various guests.

Simmons ambled in with a small entourage, and the room got tighter. He pulled aside the rapper T.I. and talked to him about the importance of mentorship. In March, T.I. is expected to go to jail on federal weapons charges. He was to be honored at the ball for “bringing an awareness to this election season,” according to his Web site. He introduced Simmons to a teen-age boy from Georgia whom he’d taken on as a mentee, along with a few others. “This is just one of them,” he told Simmons.

Simmons had flown in from Utah, where he’d been screening a new movie about Run-DMC’s late d.j., Jam Master Jay, and marketing SpongeBob diamonds, part of a jewelry line that he and his ex-wife had helped start. He stood next to a display of Hennessy 44 bottles and did a series of TV interviews, rattling off several packaged points. He called Obama’s election a “shift in consciousness.” He mentioned his own work on three elections. He talked up the environment and compared Obama’s rise to Run-DMC’s. “Nobody from the black congress believed,” Simmons said. “I remember when Run-DMC was on MTV. Nobody else black was on there but Michael Jackson.”

When he was done, he mentioned that Obama’s security team had come by earlier to check the place out. “I don’t think he’s going to show up,” Simmons said. But, he added, “I wouldn’t expect John Kerry to come.” Ushered onward by a handler, Simmons began making his way out. At nearly every step, he was stopped by an admirer and was asked to pose for a picture. He was tired, and his smile was work—the mouth forced to spread, the eyebrows at half-mast. Once outside the lounge, he darted down several flights of stairs, past different ballrooms with different d.j.s playing different music, until he was in the basement. He went through a door with his name taped to the front, into a makeshift dressing room,and introduced an Abercrombie & Fitch model named Katie Rost, his date. “She’s smart and she writes,” he said. “She went to Boston University and got a degree in journalism.” (Later, on her blog, Rost quoted from T.I.’s acceptance speech at the ball: “So I’mma thank Him for everything. . . . I’mma thank Him for making me sell crack. I’mma thank Him for making me have shoot-outs. I’mma thank him for allowing me to watch my partners die in my arms, so I’d be fearful enough for my life and paranoid enough to go out and cop machine guns and silencers so I catch a fed case and I have to put up $3 million for my bond . . . just so I be validated enough to get out there and touch the youth because they know that I done been through it.”)

In 2008, Simmons took a leave from H.S.A.N. and went around the country campaigning for Obama. The President’s relationship with hip-hop is complicated. Nas hosted an official event for the campaign, and the President’s staff has noted that he has some Jay-Z on his iPod. But he was forced to denounce the rapper Ludacris for writing a song with the lyrics “Hillary hated on you, so that bitch is irrelevant.” The inaugural concert featured performers of all strains of American music, but, aside from Will.i.am singing a duet with Sheryl Crow, there were no rap performances.

Simmons talked a bit about Obama and hip-hop. “He embraced it as much as a politician can,” he said. “I was amazed by his willingness to put some of us in the room. If I was running for President, I wouldn’t want me to speak for me, so I was amazed. He let those of us who love him work for him.”

He also mentioned hosting Louis Farrakhan at his first Hip-Hop Summit: “I’m a big fan of Minister Farrakhan, but I was concerned that my association with him might rub off on Obama.”

Simmons had two more balls to get to, but he was considering heading to bed instead. He then ticked off his various projects—working with 50 Cent on the Jam Master Jay film, pushing Governor David Paterson toward retroactive repeal of the drug laws, teaching yoga classes sponsored by Smartwater. He said, “Every morning, I stand on my head for five minutes.” ♦

Funny Boys

2009-02-15T00:29:00.001-08:00

Success and the city.

by Rebecca Mead

When Josh Abramson, Ricky Van Veen, Jakob Lodwick, and Zach Klein decided in the spring of last year that they wanted to live in New York City, their preparation consisted largely of what they called “Sex and the City” nights. They would rent DVDs of the HBO series and watch for hours at a time, while drinking gin-and-tonics and imagining what delights the city held in store.

Their purpose in watching the programs was not really to learn about the habits of women they were likely to encounter in Manhattan; Josh, Ricky, and Jakob are twenty-three, and Zach is a year younger. Most of the girls they knew who’d moved to New York were not so much juggling lovers or purchasing fabulous designer clothes as struggling to get a job, or find an apartment. Instead, the four friends found themselves identifying with the four television characters. Josh, Ricky, and Jakob had been living together for a year in San Diego (while Zach was completing his senior year), and they had discovered that, although the California sun and beach were pleasant enough, San Diego was the kind of place where, as Josh liked to put it, if you were motivated you bartended four nights a week.

The friends finally arrived in New York last summer, and took up residence in a newly renovated, forty-two-hundred-square-foot, five-bedroom loft in Tribeca, which rents for ten thousand dollars a month—a move that bears about as much relation to the typical postcollegiate experience as “Sex and the City” does to the demographic it purports to represent. The friends have avoided the hardships endured by some of their peers, such as being obliged to live in the outer boroughs, owing to the business they run out of their fifth bedroom, a Web site called CollegeHumor.com. The site features articles written by students or recent graduates on subjects such as “Everything I Learned About Life I Learned in First Semester” and “The Guide to a Great IM Profile,” but the mainstay of its content is visual: digital photographs and video snippets of dorm-room fun submitted by the online readership, and updated daily. It is visited by nearly eight million unique users a month.

CollegeHumor.com was started in 1999 by Josh and Ricky, who grew up in a suburb of Baltimore called Timonium and have been friends since sixth grade. The site began as a place to collect all the jokes, links, and silly photographs that college students like to e-mail around, and served as a kind of nerdy diversion for Josh, who went to the University of Richmond, and Ricky, who was at Wake Forest. Eventually, they recruited Jakob, a student at Rochester Institute of Technology (whom Ricky and Josh met online, although he also grew up in Timonium), to help manage the site; Zach, a college friend of Ricky’s from Wake Forest, joined later.

The site came to dominate the waking hours of all four collaborators, whose formal educations were neglected. In certain instances, this was probably not a bad thing: the textbook used for one class in e-commerce that Josh took toward his degree, in finance, had been rendered obsolete by the dot-com crash of 2000; according to its calculations CollegeHumor.com should have been bringing in fifteen million dollars a month.

The numbers were nowhere near that good, but they were good enough for the friends to decide that they could attempt to make the site their full-time job. In the year and a half since Josh, Ricky, and Jakob left college, traffic to the site has grown three hundred per cent. In December of 2003, CollegeHumor.com generated $45,400; in December of this year, the revenues were $405,000, nearly half of that coming from sales of faux-vintage T-shirts with slogans— “What Would Ashton Do?”; “I Gave My Word to Stop at Third: 1987 Teen Abstinence Day Suffolk County Public Schools”—which they started marketing last spring under the brand name Busted Tees.

Hence the apartment, which is decorated, in only semi-ironic fashion, according to the CollegeHumor guys’ idea of urban sophistication, with a mixture of purchases from stores in SoHo and from Bloomingdale’s. These include a leather couch; a dining table perpetually set with a runner, placemats, and napkins in napkin rings, in readiness for grand dinner parties of which they have so far had one; a piano on which Josh, who supplemented his income in high school with piano-bar appearances, is able to play the entire Beatles catalogue; and a cabinet filled with crystal wineglasses donated by Josh’s mother. In perhaps the best measure of post-adolescent male luxury, there is a cumulative total of a hundred and fifty-three inches of flat-screen television scattered around the dwelling.

Although the quartet has not avoided some real-estate pitfalls that savvier New Yorkers might have been able to anticipate—the empty lot outside the loft’s windows was transformed, within weeks of their move, into a construction site, the future location of a twenty-one-story apartment building—their home serves not just as a workplace and a shelter but also as an expression of how they would like to be perceived. Readers of CollegeHumor.com might suspect, or hope, that its creators live in a den of beer bongs, pinball machines, and unwashed dishes. This is just what the College Humor boys, who have recently discovered the joy of port, wanted to avoid. “Josh was at this advertising convention, and they were giving out drinks, and the waiter looked at him and said, ‘I can get you an orange juice,’ ” Ricky said one recent afternoon, while lounging in the apartment and explaining the drawbacks of youthful success. “It’s hard being taken seriously when you are our age. But, here, people can walk in and say, Obviously, these guys are doing something right.”

What does college humor consist of, judging from the contents of CollegeHumor.com? Girls without their tops on are one very popular source of college humor, as are girls kissing each other. Vehicular mishaps also count as college humor; in one, a crane being used to fish a car out of the water topples over and itself falls in. Cute animals, such as a sleeping kitten propped between the pipes of a radiator, are funny, and so are highway signs, like one outside a McDonald’s that reads “Our salads are the shizzle dizzle.” But what is really funny is beer. “People love to send in photographs of their refrigerators filled with beer,” Josh said. Also popular are photographs of beer-can mobiles hanging from dorm-room ceilings, and of beer cans incongruously placed around the foot of a potted plant, which is, in turn, incongruously placed in a men’s communal bathroom, and so on.

In addition to receiving random submissions, the guys of CollegeHumor have recently seen the advantages of generating their own content—or branding content in the public domain as their own. In October, the site made available, thanks to TiVo, a video clip of Ashlee Simpson’s “Saturday Night Live” meltdown—she hurried offstage after her band and her lip-synch track didn’t mesh—only minutes after the event had actually occurred. That clip garnered close to a million hits in two days. The site has similarly been a popular destination for those who didn’t see Ron Artest’s assault on an N.B.A. spectator sufficient times in replay, and who want to witness it over and over again in Windows Media. Clips like these have earned CollegeHumor.com its first links from such heavily read sites as the Drudge Report, which is to the world of Web sites what having your book promoted on “Oprah” is to the world of publishing.

Another innovation was the Election Erection ’04 contest, which served as an opportunity for first-time voters—a bloc that was thought by pundits to hold the key to the nation’s future—to state their political preferences by decorating their bodies with the names of favored Presidential candidates. By Election Day, the site featured more than three hundred mostly female students, who showed a considerable range of inventiveness in their use of display type. Many opted for a message (“Kerry Me Away” or “Bush ’04”) written in lipstick or marker pen in more or less the place where a T-shirt logo would have been, had a T-shirt been worn. There was also, in a number of instances, the innovative use of official campaign stickers as pasties; and the witty pairing of a full Brazilian bikini wax with the slogan, inscribed just below the navel, “Say No To Bush.” The final tally of submissions, which had Kerry beating Bush nearly two-to-one, demonstrated that the moral values of at least some Republican voters do not exclude posing, “Girls Gone Wild” style, with “Bush” scrawled on one buttock and “Dick” on the other.

The responsibility for choosing which photographs will be featured falls to Ricky, who serves as the site’s editor. Josh handles business, Jakob deals with the technical side of things, and Zach takes care of design. The workload at CollegeHumor.com has grown so great that recently the four advertised on Craig’s List for an intern, a position for which they received more than a hundred applications, mostly from recent college graduates, although there was one from what Josh called a “forty-five-year-old guy” with a background in retail sales.

“Ricky doesn’t actually have to think it’s funny; he just has to know that college kids think it’s funny,” Josh explained. A key to college humor, the four have realized, is that students like to think they belong to a small in-crowd that understands the joke, while the public at large remains clueless. Take the phrase “More Cowbell,” which is a slogan appearing on one of the most popular of the company’s Busted Tees; it comes from an instruction given in a skit on “Saturday Night Live.” “Not everyone saw that episode, so the people who did see it think it is that much cooler because nobody else knows,” Josh said. Another familiar trope of contemporary college humor is a hand gesture known as the shocker, in which the ring finger of the hand is held down by the thumb while the remaining three fingers stay rigid. “No one over the age of twenty-five knows what it means, but I guarantee you that ninety per cent of college students know what it is,” Josh said. (The gesture indicates a method of pleasuring a female partner, though not one that looks to be easily undertaken without incurring hand cramps.) Ricky had the idea of manufacturing a large foam hand, the Big Shocker, like those on sale at sports events. So far, close to twenty thousand have been sold through CollegeHumor.com, for a profit of about ten dollars apiece. “We figured that other people would copy them, so we took a patent out on it,” Josh said. “So we have a U.S. government document that has a picture of the shocker on it. It’s kind of funny.”

Advertising is also a source of revenue, some of it from such companies as DreamWorks, some of it from sports-gambling sites, and some of it from other manufacturers of T-shirts and venders of novelties. The CollegeHumor team has been struggling with the question of whether it is worth sacrificing the raciness of the site’s content—which does not stray beyond the equivalent of being R-rated, but does not stop much short of it, either—in order to attract more prudish but more lucrative advertisers. “The Navy won’t want to have its ad on a page with a girl lifting her shirt on Mardi Gras,” Josh said. “But that’s why people are coming to our site, to see a girl lifting her shirt on Mardi Gras.”

Attracting female readers other than its exhibitionistic contributors to the site is another concern; right now, the readership is about seventy-five-per-cent male. There is one female columnist, Mindy Raf, who writes about “Sex, Relationships, and NYC Life” (examples: “Single and Braless: A Sunday Afternoon in New York City”; “Alcohol and Ovulation: Another Saturday Night at the Bar”). Other strategies are being considered, such as having a regular column devoted to “The O.C.,” the Fox show, which is a huge hit among girls in their twenties—so much so that the CollegeHumor boys have discovered that discussing the show’s plotlines is an excellent way of striking up a conversation with a girl.

Attracting females, not just to the site but to themselves, is also something of a preoccupation of the four pals. But dating in New York, they have discovered, is unlike dating in other places. “It is a more difficult scene to penetrate if you are not used to it,” Josh explained. “Going out and starting to talk to somebody and having them automatically not like you—it’s not like that in other places.” Another potential dating hazard identified, if not yet experienced, by the four is the possibility of attracting women whose real interest is in their purchasing power rather than their personalities. “I thought New York girls would be higher maintenance than what I have experienced, but I haven’t had to take anyone out to really nice restaurants or anything,” said Jakob, whose dates, toward the end of last year, included a visiting British student who was, he declared one night before going to meet her, perfect for him, her perfection including the fact that she was returning home at the end of the semester. The friends do go to nice restaurants; one of their new favorites is Landmarc, on West Broadway, which they think is a good place for steak frites, so long as you don’t mind being carded.

Students have been prone to bawdy humor since at least the Middle Ages—witness Chaucer’s “The Milleres Tale”—and the themes of American college humor have proved remarkably resilient over time. An editor of a book published in 1950 entitled “A Treasury of College Humor” remarked that “although the atomic bomb, and other timely trivia, may momentarily intrude, broad and universal themes—the fate of the football team, the perusal of sex, and the imbibing of alcoholic beverages—remain predominant.” (The Iraq war does crop up among CollegeHumor.com’s photo collection: one picture, entitled “2004 Shocker World Tour Hits Kirkuk,” shows three men and a woman in U.S. uniform on an airstrip giving the shocker.) College humor publications date back as far as 1830, with the publication, at Princeton, of the short-lived Chameleon and of The Thistle; by the late eighteen-hundreds the Yale Record, the Princeton Tiger, and the Harvard Lampoon had all been established. Some of the pages of those publications would not provoke a smile among today’s undergraduates—those featuring punning poems requiring a knowledge of Greek verb declensions, for example—but there is much that differs only in degree from what is now considered hilarious. (The Emory Phoenix ran, in the last years of the nineteenth century, a guide to “The Art of Kissing,” which advises, among other things, “Don’t glue your face to hers and have a good time all to yourself while you’re flattening her nose all over one of her cheeks.”)

The nineteen-twenties are regarded as the golden age of college humor magazines, when writers such as James Thurber and Robert Benchley could be found making remarkably unfunny contributions to their pages. By that time, more than a hundred comic periodicals were being produced at colleges around the country, their contents aggregated periodically by a single magazine called College Humor, which sold as many as eight hundred thousand copies. By the late nineteen-thirties, the culture of college humor was sufficiently depraved to merit note in the Times, which quoted Irving H. Berg, the dean of New York University College of Arts, as saying, “What college students seem to think funny is pitifully lacking in real humor.” Berg also complained that “the so-called humorous publications emanating from various college and university campuses seem to deal exclusively with the subject of sex.” (Berg’s present-day successor at N.Y.U., Dean Matthew Santirocco, who admits to having been unfamiliar with CollegeHumor.com until it was recently brought to his attention, says of the site, “It is commercial and self-promotional, and it seems to me that what is essential about humor is that it is not commercial or self-promotional.”)

College humor suffered a decline in currency in the nineteen-sixties and the first half of the nineteen-seventies, when campus concerns such as civil rights and the draft proved impossible to translate into the magazines’ typical vernacular of antic japery. But there was a restoration in the late seventies and early eighties, aided by the National Lampoon, which was founded in 1969 by several graduates of the Harvard Lampoon and which had its greatest success with the release of the film “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” in 1978. The National Lampoon, in its heyday, is the media model to which the CollegeHumor boys aspire: a book, “The CollegeHumor Guide to College,” is in the works, and they have had informal talks with program-development people at VH1. A CollegeHumor Comedy Tour has just been launched, and the goal is to develop a stable of talent with which to produce TV shows or movies, though the four founders have yet to figure out how, exactly, to translate beer-and-breast-based amusement into forms more dependent on narrative. (Even “Porky’s” had a plot.)

A more direct descendant of the style of humor favored by the National Lampoon can be found in The Onion, a parody newspaper that was started by two undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1988. Josh, of CollegeHumor.com, is happy to point out that his site has surpassed The Onion in traffic, “though I can’t say we are better.” There is a crucial difference in content between The Onion and CollegeHumor.com: while the success of the former depends on the wit of its writers, the appeal of the latter is closer to that of “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” CollegeHumor.com offers found humor of the sort pioneered by, among others, Steve Allen and David Letterman. Yet CollegeHumor.com isn’t the expression of a governing comic sensibility determined to entertain an audience with, say, Stupid Pet Tricks; rather, the audience decides what is funny, and entertains itself. CollegeHumor.com doesn’t just cater to the lowest common denominator; it’s cooked and served by the lowest common denominator, too.

On Thanksgiving weekend, Ricky and Josh attended their five-year high-school reunion, which took place in a bar in downtown Baltimore. The bar was decorated in the manner of an Upper East Side frat-boy hangout, with sporting equipment such as lacrosse sticks and rowing oars mounted on the walls, and large TV screens displaying a college basketball game. Ricky ordered a gin-and-tonic from the open bar, while Josh, anticipating future crowding, ordered two beers at once, holding a full one in his left hand while drinking from the one in his right. Neither was driving—they’d got a ride with a classmate who was studying at night for his M.B.A., working for a brokerage firm during the day, and living at home with his parents. All of Josh and Ricky’s old friends knew, of course, that the pair were living in New York and doing well, but no one paid it very much attention. Most classmates had stayed in the Baltimore area, including Ricky’s high-school girlfriend, who had just bought a house with her boyfriend, and a woman who had gone to the same college as Josh and was now working as an accountant. The class president, who had been very cool and had ridden a scooter, was now attending motorcycle-repair school in Arizona. One young woman, who was wearing a high-necked white sweater and black pants rather than the low-cut top and low-cut jeans favored by most of her classmates, was rumored to have become a nun, but that rumor was soon determined to be false, if diverting.

Someone had brought a shoebox full of photographs taken by the class archivist, and they were scattered across the bar, there for the taking by those who wanted a memento of their even younger, even fresher years. There were shots of costume parties, shots of jocks mugging for the camera, shots from the prom, where girls with wrist corsages slow-danced with gawky boys, and lots of shots of kids just hanging out in the cafeteria or the gymnasium, grinning at the photographer. They weren’t very different from the pictures that appear on Ricky and Josh’s Web site—amounting to a simple visual statement: We were here.

Ricky flicked through the pictures and slipped a couple into the inside breast pocket of his jacket, which he’d recently bought at H & M, going into the store and ordering a whole outfit directly off one of the mannequins. There was one of a girl whom he said Josh had always had a crush on; and there was one of himself holding up a big, cumbersome camera—the kind of camera people used before students started snapping themselves with tiny digital cameras or cell phones, and before photographs became things to e-mail or look at online. Josh picked up one or two pictures at random, and for a moment looked nostalgic—not so much for the content of the pictures as for the form. “I kind of miss these,” he said.

MIguel Migs - So far

2009-02-14T22:37:00.003-08:00

The old devil

2009-02-14T22:01:00.001-08:00

by ANDREW DAVIDSON

Felix Dennis, former counter-culture icon and now full-time millionaire, is behaving badly.

"Bring me some fucking beer, Marie-France," he bellows from one end of the garden to the next, across the tennis court, over the ornamental pond, past the rolling lawns. Marie-France, a tall, angular woman who seems to be operating as chatelaine at his Warwickshire manor, pops her head out of the kitchen door and nods. Two other women lounge in the sun on the terrace, giggling as we go past.

Dennis, 48, short, bearded and bristling with aggressive energy, seems to have been on edge for hours. Perhaps it's the heat scorching the leaves of his beloved trees, or a hangover - Dennis is a man with a mountainous appetite and a large wine collection. Despite his Panama hat, top-to-toe linen and warp-around shades, he's sweating profusely, and spends the first five minutes of our meeting harrumphing around his sitting room saying he is going to hit someone because he cannot find the window lock keys.

Dennis is usually smooth and funny, say his friends, but on days like this you would think he has barely mellowed since his celebrated appearance as a defendant in the Oz magazine trial 24 years ago. He is talking fast and lewd, like a lubricious satyr, and guzzling tea, cigarettes, beer and sandwiches. "Try these, Andrew, try these," he exhorts. For all his occasional prickliness, Dennis is, by reputation, the sort of sentimental millionaire who waits for the "And finally" items on News at Ten and then sends off an anonymous cheque.

We start the afternoon in the pin-neat sitting-room of his thatched, picture-postcard manor near Stratford-on-Avon. Dennis, you would guess, has bought into the myth: topiaried yew and York stone, exposed beams, leaded windows and antiques. It's beautiful, but too neat, a house full of those fussy flower arrangements you only get in glossy magazines. You have to go upstairs to get a sense of his real playfulness. On the wall of his study there's a large Hockney, and a Warhol outside, and next door the Egyptian bathroom, which is decked out with pharaohs and hieroglyphics. But everywhere, everything is tidy. Tidiness is one of his obsessions.

All somewhat different, of course, from his mouldy hippie days, when even his friends complained about the state of his hygiene. At that stage, Dennis the menacing millionaire was but a glint in his own eye. Then came the moment when he, Richard Neville and Jim Anderson were charged with producing a magazine designed to "corrupt the morals of children". They spent only a few days in jail, but earned lifelong notoriety after the most famous obscenity trial of the Seventies.

Back then, Dennis told the High Court that, hey man, money corrupts, even though he was already frightening his hippie friends with his aggressive commercial instincts. He also, famously, got a shorter sentence than his co-defendants because the trial judge, Michael Argyle, who was later found to have misdirected the jury, thought he was "less intelligent". Ha! Now he is worth somewhere between pounds 110 million and pounds 200million, has residences in London, Warwickshire, New York, Connecticut and Mustique, and has reached that stage when multi-millionaires start to think of posterity and take to building gardens and setting things straight.

So, while Dennis is normally a man who keeps his head below the parapet - overseeing his stake in a large computer accessories business in America, running his British magazine empire, and generally enjoying his wealth, you might say, rather than building it - recently he has been popping up all over the place. Earlier this summer, he extracted a crawling apology and an out-of-court settlement from the Spectator after it rehashed the whole Oz affair on the back of Richard Neville's new memoir, Hippie Hippie Shake. The Spectator had printed a piece by Michael Argyle which intimated that the Oz team had peddled drugs to schoolchildren and fully deserved their jail sentence. The pounds 10,000 Dennis extracted went to charity. Easy money, and he could have asked for a lot more.

Vengeance at last? Dennis laughs: "And the Lord saith, vengeance is mine!" But it isn't quite. He has wisely backed off suing Argyle himself. "Oh, I don't want to make him a martyr of the Right: there's no glory to be had in suing an 80-year-old man and taking his house away from him. It was just a totally obvious libel." Argyle, however, had been repeating it for years, ever since he left the bench; and everyone who knows Dennis says the trial judgment ("less intelligent") has always nagged at him - so was he just biding his time? "I never wait," he says tartly. "I've got better things to do than wait." (Argyle declines to give his side. "I have absolutely nothing to say about that man," he told me.)

Now Dennis has other fish to fry. Last month, after buying David Bowie's Mustique estate for pounds 5 million, he emerged as one of the main backers of Spiked, a new fortnightly rival to Private Eye produced by the Scallywag team. Those with long memories will recall that the original Oz carried a Spike section and that, back in the late Sixties, the Aussie hippies that ran Oz and the British public school satirists on Private Eye loathed each other for most of the time.

So is Dennis - Surbiton-born but, he claims, "an honorary Australian" - just settling old scores? No, he laughs, pacing the room. "We used to say rude things about them and they used to say rude things about us but, when push came to shove, they waded in when we were in the shit and I've got to thank them for it."

It seems a funny form of gratitude. But Private Eye, he says, has gone soft, and he likes the mischief of the Scallywag team. Scallywag, of course, is best known for the furore it caused printing rumours of a relationship between John Major and his caterer, Clare Latimer. Dennis says he has put "a substantial sum" into the new title - less than pounds 100,000 - and doesn't care if he gets any return on it. But he hasn't become a director, and so cannot be sued for anything it prints.

The Scallywag team says his move encouraged four other investors to reach into their pockets, but it will be interesting to note if Dennis's involvement, even at arm's length, now makes him a target for Private Eye. If he is worried, he is not showing it. "With all due deference to Ian Hislop, he is a lot better on television than he is in the editor's chair at Private Eye. It's become part of the Establishment now."

Part of the Establishment? That seems a bit rich from a man setting himself up as landed gentry, but Dennis, if you hadn't realised it by now, is a master of contradictions. He built his fortune out of adroit investments, first in Bruce Lee kung fu books, then one-shot poster magazines, computer titles (Personal Computer World, MacUser, PCPro) and, most profitably, in an American software company called Micro Warehouse Inc. Yet he has never moved easily among the publishing plutocracy.

He describes himself as a "contrarian", but thought nothing of threatening to get the Spectator, that most contrarian of magazines, pulled from every newsagent, a move which many thought extraordinary behaviour from someone who used to complain about the "pigs" harassing Oz. He explains that he just had to put the record straight for his mum's sake. His mother brought Dennis and his brother up single-handed after his father walked out; she is installed in a farmhouse on his estate and, at 76, still exerts a strong influence.

Despite the trappings of the self-made man, there is still a restless iconoclasm about him, as if he despises the club he has worked so hard to join. Some believe he is constantly at war with himself: his old hedonistic, hippie side never coming to terms with his single-minded drive to prove himself. Prove himself as what? Intelligent? An achiever?

He obviously has a knack. His old friend and lawyer, Michael Nixon, says it is simply a remarkable eye for what will sell. "He's incredibly foresighted; he always knows what the public wants to buy." He cites Dennis's early move into computer magazines and now periodicals on CD-Rom. But others note that these days Dennis is ambivalent about business. He has dabbed his toe in the mainstream magazine market with the launch of Maxim, the young men's title, but it is a crowded sector and it is unclear how much he wants to build on its early success.

He does love his wealth, though. He drags me to the kitchen to look at his cheques to the Inland Revenue, copies of which are pinned behind the door: they are for pounds 2 million, pounds 1 million and pounds 900,000. Next to the cheques are an array of photos of Felix with female friends spilling out of swimsuits. His fondness for women is well- known. "But you know," says one friend, "they are all long-term relationships. If you go to his place, you see the same people there year after year."

Isn't he ever tempted to settle down and have children? "You realise how many hairless monkeys there are?" he retorts, looking horrified. The "hairless monkey" line is a favourite of Dennis's, which he uses to explain everything from motivation to morality. "I am gutless," he continues. "I haven't got the courage. How these people can just casually have children which, if they are any kind of responsible human being, will utterly transform their life forever, is totally beyond me. I know it would take over my life."

Some say that, because his Dad walked out when he was young, he married money-making instead; others, that it is a hangover from the innate misogyny which characterised the hippie scene of the late Sixties. Crap, responds the artist George Snow, an old friend: "Felix was the first guy on the block to be a 'new man'. His company had female publishers, editors, designers way before anyone else." He is also, by repute, extraordinary loyal to his friends, both male and female. When I ask Dennis, impertinently, if he has to sleep with all his female friends, he looks genuinely upset, as if I couldn't have got him more wrong. No, he replies - but there remains an edge to our conversation. When I ask if he is surprised at how wealthy he has become, he seizes on it. "And when did you stop beating your wife, eh? Eh? It's the John Lennon question, isn't it? How did a git like you get from there to here, right? Right?" Yeah, sure, right. At this stage, I am beginning to estimate the distance between my chair and the door.

But that's just Dennis: he gives as good as he gets. The next minute he is explaining to me why he was useless at school. He had never told anyone this before, he says, but the defining moment of his childhood was when, aged 13-and-a-half, a relative gave him a bunch of records from America. Till then young Felix had been doing fine at school. So one night, after his mother had gone to bed, he says he sneaked the records on to the radiogram. "And I can tell you what it was, and who it was, and for the next five years it was all I was."

Dennis then leaps up, pushing his face so close I can see the beads of perspiration, and screams, "If you hear me howlin', howlin' for my darlin', oooooohhhh, oooooohhh, oooooohhh, weee!" in a pretty passable imitation of the blues singer Howling Wolf. Dennis, by all accounts an ace singer and drummer, could have gone into the music business. The thing is, he says, he could always imitate other singers, but didn't have a voice of his own.

Richard Neville's Hippie Hippie Shake puts a different spin on his ambitions, with Dennis turning up on the Oz doorstep demanding royalties for a tape he'd sent in, apparently penniless after selling his drum kit to pay for a girlfriend's abortion. Dennis's huge libido is one of the book's running jokes. When I ask him, tongue-in-cheek, if he is even more attractive to women now that he is rich and famous, he answers, rather po-faced, "I think you will find, reading Richard's book, that I had no trouble in that department ever. I am a ladies' man." Then he lets out a barking laugh. "'Course I am attractive because I am rich! They want the money! That's not female psychology; that's hairless monkey psychology!"

Anyway, he lost his youth to the blues. His father, a jazz pianist and bomber navigator in the War, had left for Australia when he was three. The thought of another budding musician must have given his mother the shivers, he says. His father did try to contact him, much later, when he was older, but he rebuffed him. He also put his mum through quite a lot - expulsions, academic failure, dropping out - while his brother was the complete opposite, very quiet and straight; he became a master lens grinder, but currently works for his big brother.

Dennis ducks and dives when he's asked what now motivates him. He told a recent, fawning Central TV documentary that the secret of his success was easy to encapsulate: "Dear Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz! My friends all drive Porsches. . ." So what does he do all day? He spends a few days in the country, a few in town, a week in America, keeping an eye on his businesses. "My guiding principle is, 'I know a man who can', and I let them get on with it," he says cheerfully.

Right now he is occupied with Blender, Britain's first CD-Rom only magazine. "It's sensational," he says, leading me up to his study. Halfway there, he taps an oil painting of a bullock. "Vermeer," he says, waggling his eyebrows. Funny - surely Vermeer never painted cattle. "Wait till you see this," he continues, and switches on his AppleMac. "It will knock your socks off."

The disc has five hours of interactive TV, with pop features, movie reviews and star profiles. You flick from one to another, and it talks, it moves, it sings. Great, but where's the portability? You have to be plugged in to use it. That will all come, says Dennis, excited as a kid with a new trainset, and, when it does, his company will be at the forefront. The irony is, he doesn't much like computers, and has never been that computer- literate. But he knows a revolution when he sees one.

Beyond his study window, the Vale of Evesham rolls off towards the Cotswolds. There is a whisper among his friends that, as well as building a large estate - he buys anything that moves around Dorsington, then hands it over to the farming family running it all for him - he also wants to build his own mausoleum, a strangely morbid aim for someone not yet 50. Intimations of mortality? Perhaps. He has already had one dice with death. "You're looking", he explains, "at the only survivor of Legionnaires disease you will ever see." He caught it in America, in 1989. He remembers the doctor in Connecticut who saved his life continually shaking him and saying: "It's really simple. You're over 40 years old. You obviously smoke, you drink like a fish, and probably take illegal drugs. You have contracted legionella and, if you go to sleep, you are probably going to die." He stayed awake. Now he describes what's left of his life as "bonus time".

He says he has grown tired of the manor and all the houses in the village he has bought for guests, and moans that he never gets any peace. The new plan is to build another mansion from a barn half a mile up the road. He has already planted beside it a maze spelling the name "Oz", with the "O" as the centre. "This", he says, gesturing round the old manor, "is going to be my day-house." The two will be linked by the gardens and woods he is creating.

Is he happy? Today, at least, it seems that you could spend hours with him and never really get to grips with what he is about. "Oh, what a question," he explodes, slapping his thigh. "People always want me to say I am miserable. I am not miserable!" He is shouting. "You know, I have lived, and continue to live, the life of Reilly. I have, all my life. I have never clocked in, never said 'yes, sir'. I don't wake up feeling miserable. I do whatever I fucking well want every day of my life. I always have - and it isn't the money. I did the same without the money!"

Yet, I add piously, you need others to clock in to maintain your empire.

"And Amen to that!" he yells

Camp Lo - Double Doors

2009-02-10T18:04:00.000-08:00

Rikers Fight Club

2009-02-10T17:58:00.002-08:00

After indications for more than a year that guards were using inmates as enforcers, New York's jails are rocked by a pair of indictments

By Graham Rayman

Eighteen months after the Voice first reported cases of jail guards using inmates as enforcers, Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson has made a criminal case that slices to the core of the problem.

The indictment, unsealed January 22, alleges that guards Michael McKie and Khalid Nelson handpicked and oversaw a gang of inmates who beat and terrorized other inmates, and extorted money and privileges from them over a four-month period in a teenage unit at the Robert N. Davoren Center (RNDC), culminating in the murder by inmates of 18-year-old Christopher Robinson on October 18. They called their operation "The Program."

The indictment lists at least seven teenage victims, but there were "scores" more who were victimized, Assistant District Attorney James Goward said at the arraignment two weeks ago. Numerous inmates gave information to investigators to help build evidence that showed a troubling pattern of misconduct right under the noses of jail officials.

"[McKie] was not simply the author of a crime," Goward told a judge. "He was the architect of a criminal enterprise that recruited and trained inmates to inflict violence. They turned jail into almost a nightmare environment."

The blockbuster case forced Correction Commissioner Martin Horn, for the first time, to discuss the issue before the assembled media. But he took a defensive posture, saying that he had no inkling of the problem. "I don't know that any of us believed that anything like this could happen," he told reporters at the Bronx District Attorney's office.

In fact, Horn was well aware of the problem. The Voice had been writing articles on the subject long before Robinson's death. The newspaper first put questions to Horn and his aides about guards deputizing inmates (often members of the Bloods gang) as enforcers in the summer of 2007, and kept writing articles about the problem over the next year and a half—articles that some law enforcement officials credited with placing a public spotlight on the problem.

Even though Horn was receiving information on these incidents during that entire period, it remains unclear whether he did anything to address the problem in the months leading up to the Robinson murder.

It was only after Robinson was killed that he took action: He suspended several officers, transferred several mid-level managers, forced the retirement of a chief, and reshuffled the roles of his senior staff.

Horn told reporters that he installed video cameras in the jails and now has the right to monitor inmates' phone conversations. "We investigate every serious injury," he said, pointing out that the Robinson homicide was the first at Rikers in four years. "We train our officers to maintain a standard of care. If the allegations prove true, these officers have stained the good name of thousands of officers."

Rose Gil Hearn, commissioner of the city Department of Investigation, called the case "the worst" she has ever seen in the jails, and has recommended adding more video cameras and making changes to policies surrounding access to telephones and the commissary.

Horn's spokesman, Stephen Morello, later provided the Voice with a list of things the commissioner has done and is doing to address the problem, including improving the staff-inmate ratio in high-risk teen housing areas to 1 in 25—a move that advocates have been demanding for years.

Morello says Horn has also ordered guards to check inmates' torsos for bruises and other evidence of violence at RNDC. He has expanded a program that provides better training to guards who work with teens—another thing that advocates wanted. And, according to Morello, Horn has ordered staff members to investigate every serious injury, including apparent accidents.

"While one inmate homicide is too many, the NYC jails compare quite favorably with other large city systems on this point," Morello says, citing federal stats that show the homicide rate in the city jails being far better than those of Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, or Chicago.

As for Horn's comment in the press conference, Morello tells the Voice that the commissioner "did not say that he was never aware, nor did he claim no prior knowledge of the possibility or even actual allegations" of officers deputizing inmates as enforcers.

"He commented that the nature of the officers' complicity charged in the Robinson indictment and its consequences exceeded any such thing in his experience," Morello says. "In other words, he and we are, of course, aware of prior cases."

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According to the indictment, McKie and Nelson handpicked up to 12 inmates to act as enforcers on each of the two wings of the RNDC housing unit known as "One Main."

The enforcers were called "The Team." The guards taught them how to use wrestling holds, like a full nelson, to secure victims during a beating. They told them to punch the torsos of their victims so as not to leave injuries that would be easily seen by other staff. In exchange for performing beatings on their orders, the members of the Team had the right to extort phone privileges and a fixed percentage of the commissary account from the other inmates.

What that meant is that they could use other inmates' phone accounts to make calls, force them to buy snacks for them, get extra food, and even choose where they sat in the day room. The members of the Team also got to roam the units freely, unlike the other inmates, and they had the power to tell inmates whether they were allowed out of their cells and whether they could go to the bathroom.

The practice evolved its own kind of slang. Inmates were asked, "Are you with the Program?"—or, in shorthand, "Are you with it?" If the inmate refused, he would be beaten. The beatings were called "spankings."

Prosecutors say McKie and Nelson also developed a series of signals to warn each other that a supervisor was arriving in the unit. They also failed to report assaults, lied in reports they did file, ordered inmates to make false statements, and hid injured inmates in cells to avoid scrutiny from supervisors.

The campaign climaxed on October 18, when several inmates beat Robinson to death after he refused to go along with the Program. Robinson likely bled to death internally over a long period, perhaps 12 hours. One of his ribs pierced his lung, causing the fatal bleeding, sources said.

Robinson might have avoided the fatal beating altogether had the department listened to the recommendation of a deputy warden and transferred the youth into a more secure area, following his involvement in a prior fight. He also might have survived had his injuries been treated in a timely manner. His family has asserted that he sought medical care in the jail's clinic, but was turned away because he did not have a pass.

McKie, Nelson, and a third officer, Denise Albright, pleaded not guilty to gang assault, conspiracy, and corruption in their arraignment last week. They were not charged in Robinson's death.

"This case is a web of lies built by inmates," said McKie's lawyer, Joey Jackson. "My client has a record of unblemished service. He has served with honor and justice. In an effort to save themselves, the inmates are pointing fingers."

Carolyn McKie told the Voice that her son won a basketball scholarship to Buffalo State, but returned home to care for his child. "None of this is true," she said. "He never had a record. What is going on here?"

Norman Seabrook, head of the correction officers' union, said the department was scapegoating the officers to avoid taking responsibility itself. "This is just another case of the department looking to blame someone else for its own mistakes," he told the Voice.

Sidney Schwartzbaum, union leader for deputy wardens and assistant deputy wardens, agreed with Seabrook. "Had they followed the recommendation, we wouldn't even be having this conversation," he said. "My mother used to say what gets done in the dark will come to light, and that will be true in this case as well."

The Robinson case was only the latest example of a problem at RNDC and other jails that the Voice has been following since the summer of 2007.

There was the case of Camillo Douglas and Luis Soriano, two inmates in RNDC, who were assaulted by Bloods members after their cell doors mysteriously opened shortly before 11 p.m. on April 16, 2007. RNDC is the same facility where Christopher Robinson was killed.

Douglas and Soriano both sustained stab wounds and bruising, but they also fought back against their attackers.

The men who assaulted Douglas and Soriano had been part of the "house gang," inmates who were tapped to clean up the facility and were, in return, given extra privileges by the guards. While it has yet to be proven in court, the fact that their cell doors opened when all the other inmates were locked in, just before lights out, suggests there was guard involvement in the assault.

The Voice found other examples that suggested guard involvement in punitive beatings of inmates at RNDC by other inmates.

Paris DeSuze, 18, filed papers with the city, claiming two guards failed to stop inmates from breaking his jaw in three places on April 13, 2007. Afterward, a guard told him to tell investigators that he was injured in a fall.

DeSuze's lawyer, Michael Hueston, told the Voice: "Young people tell me when they go in there, the culture is such that the kids control the jail. The COs know this happens, and they look the other way."

But the case that really should have set off alarm bells in the commissioner's office was the indictment in February 2008 of Correction Officer Lloyd Nicholson, who was accused of using teen inmates in RNDC to target other inmates. He, too, called his operation "The Program." The case allegations mirror the allegations made in the McKie and Nelson indictments.

For example, in both cases, the inmates enforced order and, in exchange, had the officers' permission to extort commissary, telephone privileges, and property from other inmates. And in both cases, the motive was laziness—the inmate gang freed the officers from having to monitor the floor constantly during their shifts.

"Basically, it was like the movie A Few Good Men," a source told the Voice last March. "Either you were in the Program or not. [Nicholson] thought the ones who weren't abiding with the Program were misbehaving, and he used other inmates to discipline them."

If any inmates misbehaved, Nicholson told them, there would be a "moment of truth," where they would be taken into the day room and beaten. He allegedly also told his enforcers to avoid the face because it would leave tell-tale marks—another element which mirrors the McKie indictment.

One of the inmates suffered a collapsed lung, but was denied medical treatment for several hours, until he was finally transported to Elmhurst Hospital. He barely survived the assault, prosecutors said in court.

Sources said Nicholson tried to delay reporting the injury until the next shift, but he finally relented when one of the inmates told him the injured youth desperately needed medical attention. Nicholson, the sources said, also told the inmates he would try to get the blame for the injuries pinned on them. "Some of you are going to go down for this," he told them, sources said.

Nicholson also allegedly beat an inmate himself. "He both watched and participated," a prosecutor said during the arraignment.

Last week, officials said Nicholson worked in another unit and was not connected to the McKie operation. In addition, Horn told reporters that when McKie and Nelson were not working, the practice did not extend to other officers. But some jail observers were skeptical of this claim, saying it had to be more than coincidental that both operations were called "The Program."

"What they are saying is that One Main was a vacuum, which doesn't make a lot of sense," a correction source said.

Housing units typically include two hallways with about 30 cells each, with a "bubble" or glassed-in observation booth at the hub with a day room and television on either side. Three officers control security in these units—one on the left wing, one on the right wing, and one in the bubble. There are three officers per shift, so at least nine officers cycle through the unit on any given day. In addition, the unit is visited once or twice per shift by a captain. On top of that, assistant deputy wardens and other higher-level supervisors might pass through.

What that means is that on any day, at least 18 correction employees might come through a unit. So it seems unlikely that no one other than the three implicated guards would be aware of the Program.

"It's tragic that it took the death of an 18-year-old to bring to light this terrible scheme, but it has to be asked whether it was more extensive," said the Robinson family lawyer, Sanford Rubenstein. "Someone in a position of power and authority should investigate it."

Even the New York Post, which rarely devotes much space to jail incidents, wrote an editorial expressing doubt that the operation was limited to just three guards. The editorial pressed officials to continue their investigation: "How could only three guards organize such an operation—with at least 12 inmates involved—without more people knowing what was going on?" wondered the Post's editorial board. "It defies credulity to assume that this is all that was going on."

And there were examples of the problem in other facilities dating all the way back to 2004, with the fatal beating of Tyreece Abney, 21, who was the last inmate murdered in the jail system before Robinson.

Abney, a mentally disabled man who probably never should have been in general population, was stomped to death in the George Motchan Detention Center by Bloods members after he had a loud argument with a correction officer. About 30 minutes before the fatal assault, a guard told the inmates in his unit: "You men in the house, you need to speak to the new inmates—you need to get your house in order," court testimony showed. Shortly thereafter, three inmates cornered Abney and attacked him, with one inmate saying he better "fly right."

During the investigation, authorities learned that one of Abney's assailants had been receiving extra phone and mail privileges from a correction officer.

In March 2007, the city agreed to pay $500,000 to settle a lawsuit involving a near-fatal assault by the leader of a "house gang." Inmate Kirk Fisher hit Donald Jackson, and Jackson fell, his head striking a piece of protruding metal in the floor. Jackson almost died. Fisher later testified that a correction officer told him to assault Jackson. "Before you do anything [he said], I'm going to go to the other side, and do what you got to do," the guard told Fisher, according to Fisher's deposition.

Describing his duties, Fisher said, "It was my job to enforce certain rules. Anybody that acted up in the house, it was my job to put them in line."

"The inmates tell us it's a really common setup," said Jackson's lawyer, Andrew Stoll, in the Voice's 2007 article on the case. "In a lot of the houses, the correction officers use the house gang as enforcers and pay them with cigarettes and extra commissary."

During the course of the Jackson case, Stoll was able to track down a former correction officer, Roger Cullen, who was on duty at the time of the assault. In his deposition, Cullen confirmed Fisher's claim: "It was like he was in charge," Cullen said in sworn testimony. "Any officer knows you're not supposed to do that. It's wrong."

Cullen was fired before he could be vested as a correction officer. As he told the Voice in 2007, he blamed the firing on his efforts to report corruption in the jail. The department investigated his claims, but in a cursory manner, and closed the case without taking action. "I tried to do the right thing," Cullen said in his deposition.

The McKie indictment has raised another issue. For many years now, the department has relied on statistics regarding stabbings and slashings in public testimony as its indicator of violence in the jails. Whenever the issue of violence is raised, officials trot out the low number of stabbings and slashings to show that the jail system is safe. Indeed, the figure has declined sharply over the past 15 years.

But this case vividly demonstrates that the figure is a poor indicator of the level of violence in today's environment. For one, it does not count beatings, broken bones, smashed noses, broken ribs, bruising, and many other kinds of injuries. Christopher Robinson's murder, for example, will not be counted as a stabbing or slashing.

Moreover, both the inmates and guards knew how to conceal injuries from the beatings, and they knew how to extort their victims into hiding the beating or lying about it. In other words, the system has evolved its own methods to avoid the heightened scrutiny that comes when a slashing or stabbing takes place.

In the end, no matter what the stats show, the number does not provide an accurate picture of the level of violence in RNDC.

The psychology of conmen

2009-02-05T14:14:00.000-08:00

How do conmen convince you to part with your money? Who are they? And how do they choose their victims? Learn their secrets from someone who has studied their dark arts. Magician Nick Johnson has some interesting insights into psychology of scams...and some suggestions on how to stop your money from going up in smoke!

Damien Carrick: Now from secrets that get lifted from government, to how you and I sometimes inadvertently hand over information or money to con men. How do scammers manage to convince people to hand over their hard-earned cash?

To find the answer, perhaps we could talk to a police officer or a criminologist. But someone with a lateral take is magician Nicholas Johnson. He reckons that both magicians and scammers use the same box of tools: psychology and sleight of hand. In fact he's studied the dark arts of the scamster, and has some suggestions on how to stop your money from going up in smoke.

Nicholas Johnson: I think what I love most about con artists and the world of scammers is that they're criminals who manage to get their victims to hand over their possessions freely. Most thieves and robbers and the like, tend to use force, or deception, in order for them to take things, whereas a con artist manages to get their victim to freely give up their stuff. And I think that's what really fascinates me the most.

Damien Carrick: What makes people susceptible to con men?

Nicholas Johnson: The main thing that really makes people susceptible to con artists is the idea that we're going to get something for nothing. So it really buys into our greed; it buys into sometimes our lust, and at the same time, sometimes even our sense that we're going to do something good, so we're going to get a great feeling from helping someone out, we're going to make some money, we're going to meet a beautiful girl—it really ties into our basest desires, and that's what the con artist relies on.

There was a study done in the UK just in train stations. They would go up to people and ask them to do a survey, and said 'If you could just answer these ten questions, we will give you a free pen at the end.' And one of the questions was 'What is your security number?' So your PIN, or your email number and so on. And a whopping percentage of people were more than happy to hand over that information to a complete stranger in a train station, in exchange for a free pen, because the person looked like they were official.

Damien Carrick: Not much of a bargain.

Nicholas Johnson: Not much of a bargain, no, it was a pretty nice pen, though.

[On stage: I think it's important that if you are going to be a con artist that you learn how to lie to people. So what I thought we should do is actually bring up here on the stage some of the best liars in the room and see whether we can spot who's really good at it, and who's really bad at it. So I'm just going to have a look. Just by looking at people who here looks as if they may be a good liar. So we're looking for people with sort of cold, dead eyes, the kind of people who would just stab you for your Metlink card. Oh, right there, brilliant, fantastic. Come up, and give him a big round of applause. Fantastic ... ]

Most con artists rely on this idea that the victim is in control. The victim is the one who is controlling the situation. So a great example of that is the classic Nigerian email scam, the person who writes to you and says, 'I've got this money that I need to get out of the country, and I need your help.' So you're in control, you can help them, you can do a good deed, you can make some money, you've got this fantastic opportunity, and the con artist needs your help. It's not the con artist doing you a favour. So really, you feel like you're the one who's controlling the situation when really it's the con artist who knows the real deal.

On stage: That's a good guess, that is a very good guess. It's not a correct guess, you owe me $2. No, no, no, we'll settle up at the end of the night, that's fine. OK? What you really should have done is to actually bet on this one over here, but it's completely up to you whether you want to call me a liar and bet over here or whether you want to go with my choice which is right there. So what's it going to be? Are you going to bet there, or are you going to bet there? Am I telling the truth, or am I lying? OK, you do realise I'm a con man, that's $4 you owe me, OK, it's actually right there.]

Damien Carrick: Now you cut your teeth around carnival people and circus people, but have you also spoken to, or learned skills from the Real McCoy, the actual con men, the actual criminals?

Nicholas Johnson: Yes, I think the real con artists are the people who can really teach you the most. You can read books about it, you can talk to people who've had experience, the victims, but unless you can really get inside the mind of a con artist, you really won't ever understand exactly how it works. I've communicated a lot with some of the Nigerian scammers, the people who write those emails, because if they think maybe they're going to make a few dollars, they're always happy to spill the beans. And it's amazing that most of those people see it as a legitimate job. For them it's a bit like being a telemarketer, they're just working in an office, in a cubicle, sending out emails, trying to get leads just like a salesperson.

Damien Carrick: And they were happy to have an email dialogue with you?

Nicholas Johnson: They were, yes, but obviously they were fairly cagey about exact details of who they were and what they were doing, but I was surprised, many of them admitted that they were working for organised crime figures and organisations in their home country of Nigeria, and many of them were quite happy to say that they worked on commission and they made a bit of money based on how much money they brought in, and they were quite upfront about it. I think for a lot of con artists they're very proud of their work, and they like people to know exactly what they've gotten away with.

Damien Carrick: Tell me about some of the conversations you've had with people here in Australia.

Nicholas Johnson: I've met up with a few people who are pickpockets, and do small scale short cons, so they're the cons which are done on the street, door-to-door, some of them are people who've been caught and gone to jail and done their time, but some of them are still out there, and I was surprised how willing they were to sit down and have a beer and actually discuss what they do. The real thing I think about the Australian con artist, the ones we have here in Australia, particularly the short cons is that it's very much about personality, it's really—they love to buy into that whole idea of that sort of the larrikin Australian and the joker and the trickster that we love so much, and for many of them, they really feel like even if they get caught, or even if they don't get away with it, they feel like they're giving their victim a good story, you know, something to dine out over, something to discuss down at the pub. They think that's OK, you can scam somebody out of a couple of hundred bucks, because they're getting a good story in return.

Damien Carrick: That's one way of getting to sleep at night I guess.

Nicholas Johnson: Yes, it is interesting the justifications that con artists use. Some say it's a job, just like any other, 'I'm no different from a used car salesman, I'm selling a dream instead of selling a car.' So I like that one. The other explanation is, 'You can't con an honest man.' Now that's this idea that because you're buying into people's greed and their gluttony and their lust and so on, that those people are guilty. The victim is just as guilty as the con artist, and therefore they get what's coming to them.' Of course we know that's just not true and that it's really just an excuse that they're using.

Damien Carrick: Tell me about some of these short cons that the Australian people that you've spoken to engage in.

Nicholas Johnson: Sure. My all-time favourite one only makes the con artist a few dollars every time he does it, but I absolutely love it. These guys used to go door-to-door in the 1970s selling lightbulbs and they would offer to replace every single lightbulb in your house, so all your old lightbulbs would be replaced with a brand new lightbulb, and it would cost you, say $5, so a fraction of the cost of what new lightbulbs would cost. So the man comes in, he replaces each lightbulb, every single one in the house, and does it, you can check, and they all work, and then he takes all the lightbulbs that he's just taken from the person's house, goes next door and then sells them the same lightbulbs again. So it's really just moving lightbulbs from one house to another and charging people a fee to do it.

But there's all sorts of those homemaker scams, people offering to seal your roof so they say, 'We'll put a fresh coat of tar on your roof', or 'We'll re-seal your driveway'. In actual fact all they do is get old black sump oil and smooth it over the roof or smooth it over the driveway. You come home and it looks like wet tar, and so 'Don't step on it for 24 hours', and of course 24 hours later they're long gone with the money, and you're left with a sticky, smelly driveway.

Damien Carrick: You've spoken to some of the con artists. Have you ever spoken to any of the victims?

Nicholas Johnson: I have. I've spoken to a lot of victims. I get a lot of emails from victims and for me, I really love the world of the con artist and I have a real grudging respect for what they do, and I love hearing the stories. But hearing from the victims, you really realise that these scams have a real financial and emotional impact on the people involved. I spoke to a man just the other day who'd lost $5,000 investing in what he thought was an internet marketing company, and it was just a scam, it was basically an American-based pyramid scheme where the only way you make money is of course to try and convince other people to sign up to the scam. And he was absolutely heartbroken. He could afford to lose the money, for him it was only a few thousand dollars, but it wasn't that he lost the money that upset him so much, it was the fact that he really lost control, that he thought he was in control of what was going on, and that he really felt like that he couldn't trust the internet, couldn't trust other people making particular offers to him, that he couldn't really trust himself and his decision-making abilities. And that's really I think for a lot of people, where they feel the hardest hit.

[On stage: All right, so we're going to bet them. Here we go. You bet $1 and then I see your dollar and raise $10, then you bet $10 I bet $100, and then I bet $1,000, then it'll be your shoes, I bet my jacket, you bet your wife, I bet my first-born child. We put everything we own on the table, I reach into my pocket, put my last dollar down on the table and call, What do you have?' Two sixes. Yes, I think I've got you beat, because I have one, two, three, four, five, six of a kind. Six kings, ladies and gentlemen. Give him a big round of applause though anyway. Thank you very much for playing. Thank you.]

Damien Carrick: When I saw your show the other night, you hammered a nail up your nostril and it was horrible, it was funny, and it was compelling. And how common are scams involving that kind of physical illusion, and what kinds of motivations do they have?

Nicholas Johnson: Sure. What you're referring to there is what they call 'psychic surgery', so you'll see photographs of people and video of people reaching inside somebody's stomach, blood spurting everywhere, they'll pull out a tumour which they'll throw into a bowl, wave their hands over the person's stomach and they're instantly as good as new and restored with absolutely no cut whatsoever. Or in the case of the nail in the head, they'll get a nail and actually hammer it into somebody's face, just below the nostrils, that's sticking out horizontal. You maybe get a pair of forceps and sort of force them in there and pretend to pull something out, and these kind of gruesome, disgusting displays are so compelling to watch and so intense to experience that people feel that it must be doing you some good, it must be medical and it must be worth paying for. And sadly, lots of people hand over cash for these bogus operations.

Damien Carrick: And that happens here in Australia, or are we talking about vulnerable uneducated people in Third World countries?

Nicholas Johnson: No, it happens all over Australia. We had a guy in the Western Suburbs of Sydney trying to pull this a few years ago, and he was using a technique and a particular device which can be bought for $10 from any magic shop. So it's like a magic trick, and he was using it in order to pretend to be reaching into someone's stomach and pulling out guts and disgusting things. So it happens in Australia, it happens overseas more often, however because people in Western countries have perhaps more money and more resources, what happens is you'll get tour organisers will get together and they will get a group of people who are very sick and actually fly over to the countries, pay thousands of dollars, say in the Philippines, get themselves 'cured', and then come back to Australia. So you've actually got not only are the people performing the surgery making money, you have tour operators, hotel operators and various other people along the chain actually making money from the sick and the vulnerable, even though they're not performing the scam themselves.

Damien Carrick: Magician Nicholas Johnson, who likes to refer to himself as 'Australia's Honest Con Man'.

Damien Carrick: That's The Law Report for this week. A big Thank You to producer Erica Vowles and also to technical producer, Joel Church.

Guests

Nicholas Johnson
Magician

Presenter

Damien Carrick

Producer

Erica Vowles

The End of White America?

2009-02-01T13:47:00.001-08:00

by Hua Hsu

The Election of Barack Obama is just the most startling manifestation of a larger trend: the gradual erosion of “whiteness” as the touchstone of what it means to be American. If the end of white America is a cultural and demographic inevitability, what will the new mainstream look like—and how will white Americans fit into it? What will it mean to be white when whiteness is no longer the norm? And will a post-white America be less racially divided—or more so?

"Civilization’s going to pieces,” he remarks. He is in polite company, gathered with friends around a bottle of wine in the late-afternoon sun, chatting and gossiping. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?” They hadn’t. “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

He is Tom Buchanan, a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a book that nearly everyone who passes through the American education system is compelled to read at least once. Although Gatsby doesn’t gloss as a book on racial anxiety—it’s too busy exploring a different set of anxieties entirely—Buchanan was hardly alone in feeling besieged. The book by “this man Goddard” had a real-world analogue: Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, published in 1920, five years before Gatsby. Nine decades later, Stoddard’s polemic remains oddly engrossing. He refers to World War I as the “White Civil War” and laments the “cycle of ruin” that may result if the “white world” continues its infighting. The book features a series of foldout maps depicting the distribution of “color” throughout the world and warns, “Colored migration is a universal peril, menacing every part of the white world.”

As briefs for racial supremacy go, The Rising Tide of Color is eerily serene. Its tone is scholarly and gentlemanly, its hatred rationalized and, in Buchanan’s term, “scientific.” And the book was hardly a fringe phenomenon. It was published by Scribner, also Fitzgerald’s publisher, and Stoddard, who received a doctorate in history from Harvard, was a member of many professional academic associations. It was precisely the kind of book that a 1920s man of Buchanan’s profile—wealthy, Ivy League–educated, at once pretentious and intellectually insecure—might have been expected to bring up in casual conversation.

As white men of comfort and privilege living in an age of limited social mobility, of course, Stoddard and the Buchanans in his audience had nothing literal to fear. Their sense of dread hovered somewhere above the concerns of everyday life. It was linked less to any immediate danger to their class’s political and cultural power than to the perceived fraying of the fixed, monolithic identity of whiteness that sewed together the fortunes of the fair-skinned.

From the hysteria over Eastern European immigration to the vibrant cultural miscegenation of the Harlem Renaissance, it is easy to see how this imagined worldwide white kinship might have seemed imperiled in the 1920s. There’s no better example of the era’s insecurities than the 1923 Supreme Court case United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, in which an Indian American veteran of World War I sought to become a naturalized citizen by proving that he was Caucasian. The Court considered new anthropological studies that expanded the definition of the Caucasian race to include Indians, and the justices even agreed that traces of “Aryan blood” coursed through Thind’s body. But these technicalities availed him little. The Court determined that Thind was not white “in accordance with the understanding of the common man” and therefore could be excluded from the “statutory category” of whiteness. Put another way: Thind was white, in that he was Caucasian and even Aryan. But he was not white in the way Stoddard or Buchanan were white.

The ’20s debate over the definition of whiteness—a legal category? a commonsense understanding? a worldwide civilization?—took place in a society gripped by an acute sense of racial paranoia, and it is easy to regard these episodes as evidence of how far we have come. But consider that these anxieties surfaced when whiteness was synonymous with the American mainstream, when threats to its status were largely imaginary. What happens once this is no longer the case—when the fears of Lothrop Stoddard and Tom Buchanan are realized, and white people actually become an American minority?

Whether you describe it as the dawning of a post-racial age or just the end of white America, we’re approaching a profound demographic tipping point. According to an August 2008 report by the U.S. Census Bureau, those groups currently categorized as racial minorities—blacks and Hispanics, East Asians and South Asians—will account for a majority of the U.S. population by the year 2042. Among Americans under the age of 18, this shift is projected to take place in 2023, which means that every child born in the United States from here on out will belong to the first post-white generation.

Obviously, steadily ascending rates of interracial marriage complicate this picture, pointing toward what Michael Lind has described as the “beiging” of America. And it’s possible that “beige Americans” will self-identify as “white” in sufficient numbers to push the tipping point further into the future than the Census Bureau projects. But even if they do, whiteness will be a label adopted out of convenience and even indifference, rather than aspiration and necessity. For an earlier generation of minorities and immigrants, to be recognized as a “white American,” whether you were an Italian or a Pole or a Hungarian, was to enter the mainstream of American life; to be recognized as something else, as the Thind case suggests, was to be permanently excluded. As Bill Imada, head of the IW Group, a prominent Asian American communications and marketing company, puts it: “I think in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, [for] anyone who immigrated, the aspiration was to blend in and be as American as possible so that white America wouldn’t be intimidated by them. They wanted to imitate white America as much as possible: learn English, go to church, go to the same schools.”

Today, the picture is far more complex. To take the most obvious example, whiteness is no longer a precondition for entry into the highest levels of public office. The son of Indian immigrants doesn’t have to become “white” in order to be elected governor of Louisiana. A half-Kenyan, half-Kansan politician can self-identify as black and be elected president of the United States.

As a purely demographic matter, then, the “white America” that Lothrop Stoddard believed in so fervently may cease to exist in 2040, 2050, or 2060, or later still. But where the culture is concerned, it’s already all but finished. Instead of the long-standing model of assimilation toward a common center, the culture is being remade in the image of white America’s multiethnic, multicolored heirs.

For some, the disappearance of this centrifugal core heralds a future rich with promise. In 1998, President Bill Clinton, in a now-famous address to students at Portland State University, remarked:

Today, largely because of immigration, there is no majority race in Hawaii or Houston or New York City. Within five years, there will be no majority race in our largest state, California. In a little more than 50 years, there will be no majority race in the United States. No other nation in history has gone through demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time ... [These immigrants] are energizing our culture and broadening our vision of the world. They are renewing our most basic values and reminding us all of what it truly means to be American.

Not everyone was so enthused. Clinton’s remarks caught the attention of another anxious Buchanan—Pat Buchanan, the conservative thinker. Revisiting the president’s speech in his 2001 book, The Death of the West, Buchanan wrote: “Mr. Clinton assured us that it will be a better America when we are all minorities and realize true ‘diversity.’ Well, those students [at Portland State] are going to find out, for they will spend their golden years in a Third World America.”

Today, the arrival of what Buchanan derided as “Third World America” is all but inevitable. What will the new mainstream of America look like, and what ideas or values might it rally around? What will it mean to be white after “whiteness” no longer defines the mainstream? Will anyone mourn the end of white America? Will anyone try to preserve it?

Another moment from The Great Gatsby: as Fitzgerald’s narrator and Gatsby drive across the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan, a car passes them, and Nick Carraway notices that it is a limousine “driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl.” The novelty of this topsy-turvy arrangement inspires Carraway to laugh aloud and think to himself, “Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge, anything at all …”

For a contemporary embodiment of the upheaval that this scene portended, consider Sean Combs, a hip-hop mogul and one of the most famous African Americans on the planet. Combs grew up during hip-hop’s late-1970s rise, and he belongs to the first generation that could safely make a living working in the industry—as a plucky young promoter and record-label intern in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and as a fashion designer, artist, and music executive worth hundreds of millions of dollars a brief decade later.

In the late 1990s, Combs made a fascinating gesture toward New York’s high society. He announced his arrival into the circles of the rich and powerful not by crashing their parties, but by inviting them into his own spectacularly over-the-top world. Combs began to stage elaborate annual parties in the Hamptons, not far from where Fitzgerald’s novel takes place. These “white parties”—attendees are required to wear white—quickly became legendary for their opulence (in 2004, Combs showcased a 1776 copy of the Declaration of Independence) as well as for the cultures-colliding quality of Hamptons elites paying their respects to someone so comfortably nouveau riche. Prospective business partners angled to get close to him and praised him as a guru of the lucrative “urban” market, while grateful partygoers hailed him as a modern-day Gatsby.

“Have I read The Great Gatsby?” Combs said to a London newspaper in 2001. “I am the Great Gatsby.”

Yet whereas Gatsby felt pressure to hide his status as an arriviste, Combs celebrated his position as an outsider-insider—someone who appropriates elements of the culture he seeks to join without attempting to assimilate outright. In a sense, Combs was imitating the old WASP establishment; in another sense, he was subtly provoking it, by over-enunciating its formality and never letting his guests forget that there was something slightly off about his presence. There’s a silent power to throwing parties where the best-dressed man in the room is also the one whose public profile once consisted primarily of dancing in the background of Biggie Smalls videos. (“No one would ever expect a young black man to be coming to a party with the Declaration of Independence, but I got it, and it’s coming with me,” Combs joked at his 2004 party, as he made the rounds with the document, promising not to spill champagne on it.)

In this regard, Combs is both a product and a hero of the new cultural mainstream, which prizes diversity above all else, and whose ultimate goal is some vague notion of racial transcendence, rather than subversion or assimilation. Although Combs’s vision is far from representative—not many hip-hop stars vacation in St. Tropez with a parasol-toting manservant shading their every step—his industry lies at the heart of this new mainstream. Over the past 30 years, few changes in American culture have been as significant as the rise of hip-hop. The genre has radically reshaped the way we listen to and consume music, first by opposing the pop mainstream and then by becoming it. From its constant sampling of past styles and eras—old records, fashions, slang, anything—to its mythologization of the self-made black antihero, hip-hop is more than a musical genre: it’s a philosophy, a political statement, a way of approaching and remaking culture. It’s a lingua franca not just among kids in America, but also among young people worldwide. And its economic impact extends beyond the music industry, to fashion, advertising, and film. (Consider the producer Russell Simmons—the ur-Combs and a music, fashion, and television mogul—or the rapper 50 Cent, who has parlayed his rags-to-riches story line into extracurricular successes that include a clothing line; book, video-game, and film deals; and a startlingly lucrative partnership with the makers of Vitamin Water.)

But hip-hop’s deepest impact is symbolic. During popular music’s rise in the 20th century, white artists and producers consistently “mainstreamed” African American innovations. Hip-hop’s ascension has been different. Eminem notwithstanding, hip-hop never suffered through anything like an Elvis Presley moment, in which a white artist made a musical form safe for white America. This is no dig at Elvis—the constrictive racial logic of the 1950s demanded the erasure of rock and roll’s black roots, and if it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else. But hip-hop—the sound of the post- civil-rights, post-soul generation—found a global audience on its own terms.

Today, hip-hop’s colonization of the global imagination, from fashion runways in Europe to dance competitions in Asia, is Disney-esque. This transformation has bred an unprecedented cultural confidence in its black originators. Whiteness is no longer a threat, or an ideal: it’s kitsch to be appropriated, whether with gestures like Combs’s “white parties” or the trickle-down epidemic of collared shirts and cuff links currently afflicting rappers. And an expansive multiculturalism is replacing the us-against-the-world bunker mentality that lent a thrilling edge to hip-hop’s mid-1990s rise.

Peter Rosenberg, a self-proclaimed “nerdy Jewish kid” and radio personality on New York’s Hot 97 FM—and a living example of how hip-hop has created new identities for its listeners that don’t fall neatly along lines of black and white—shares another example: “I interviewed [the St. Louis rapper] Nelly this morning, and he said it’s now very cool and in to have multicultural friends. Like you’re not really considered hip or ‘you’ve made it’ if you’re rolling with all the same people.”

Just as Tiger Woods forever changed the country-club culture of golf, and Will Smith confounded stereotypes about the ideal Hollywood leading man, hip-hop’s rise is helping redefine the American mainstream, which no longer aspires toward a single iconic image of style or class. Successful network-television shows like Lost, Heroes, and Grey’s Anatomy feature wildly diverse casts, and an entire genre of half-hour comedy, from The Colbert Report to The Office, seems dedicated to having fun with the persona of the clueless white male. The youth market is following the same pattern: consider the Cheetah Girls, a multicultural, multiplatinum, multiplatform trio of teenyboppers who recently starred in their third movie, or Dora the Explorer, the precocious bilingual 7-year-old Latina adventurer who is arguably the most successful animated character on children’s television today. In a recent address to the Association of Hispanic Advertising Agencies, Brown Johnson, the Nickelodeon executive who has overseen Dora’s rise, explained the importance of creating a character who does not conform to “the white, middle-class mold.” When Johnson pointed out that Dora’s wares were outselling Barbie’s in France, the crowd hooted in delight.

Pop culture today rallies around an ethic of multicultural inclusion that seems to value every identity—except whiteness. “It’s become harder for the blond-haired, blue-eyed commercial actor,” remarks Rochelle Newman-Carrasco, of the Hispanic marketing firm Enlace. “You read casting notices, and they like to cast people with brown hair because they could be Hispanic. The language of casting notices is pretty shocking because it’s so specific: ‘Brown hair, brown eyes, could look Hispanic.’ Or, as one notice put it: ‘Ethnically ambiguous.’”

“I think white people feel like they’re under siege right now—like it’s not okay to be white right now, especially if you’re a white male,” laughs Bill Imada, of the IW Group. Imada and Newman-Carrasco are part of a movement within advertising, marketing, and communications firms to reimagine the profile of the typical American consumer. (Tellingly, every person I spoke with from these industries knew the Census Bureau’s projections by heart.)

“There’s a lot of fear and a lot of resentment,” Newman-Carrasco observes, describing the flak she caught after writing an article for a trade publication on the need for more-diverse hiring practices. “I got a response from a friend—he’s, like, a 60-something white male, and he’s been involved with multicultural recruiting,” she recalls. “And he said, ‘I really feel like the hunted. It’s a hard time to be a white man in America right now, because I feel like I’m being lumped in with all white males in America, and I’ve tried to do stuff, but it’s a tough time.’”

“I always tell the white men in the room, ‘We need you,’” Imada says. “We cannot talk about diversity and inclusion and engagement without you at the table. It’s okay to be white!

“But people are stressed out about it. ‘We used to be in control! We’re losing control!’”

If they’re right—if white America is indeed “losing control,” and if the future will belong to people who can successfully navigate a post-racial, multicultural landscape—then it’s no surprise that many white Americans are eager to divest themselves of their whiteness entirely.

For some, this renunciation can take a radical form. In 1994, a young graffiti artist and activist named William “Upski” Wimsatt, the son of a university professor, published Bomb the Suburbs, the spiritual heir to Norman Mailer’s celebratory 1957 essay, “The White Negro.” Wimsatt was deeply committed to hip-hop’s transformative powers, going so far as to embrace the status of the lowly “wigger,” a pejorative term popularized in the early 1990s to describe white kids who steep themselves in black culture. Wimsatt viewed the wigger’s immersion in two cultures as an engine for change. “If channeled in the right way,” he wrote, “the wigger can go a long way toward repairing the sickness of race in America.”

Wimsatt’s painfully earnest attempts to put his own relationship with whiteness under the microscope coincided with the emergence of an academic discipline known as “whiteness studies.” In colleges and universities across the country, scholars began examining the history of “whiteness” and unpacking its contradictions. Why, for example, had the Irish and the Italians fallen beyond the pale at different moments in our history? Were Jewish Americans white? And, as the historian Matthew Frye Jacobson asked, “Why is it that in the United States, a white woman can have black children but a black woman cannot have white children?”

Much like Wimsatt, the whiteness-studies academics—figures such as Jacobson, David Roediger, Eric Lott, and Noel Ignatiev—were attempting to come to terms with their own relationships with whiteness, in its past and present forms. In the early 1990s, Ignatiev, a former labor activist and the author of How the Irish Became White, set out to “abolish” the idea of the white race by starting the New Abolitionist Movement and founding a journal titled Race Traitor. “There is nothing positive about white identity,” he wrote in 1998. “As James Baldwin said, ‘As long as you think you’re white, there’s no hope for you.’”

Although most white Americans haven’t read Bomb the Suburbs or Race Traitor, this view of whiteness as something to be interrogated, if not shrugged off completely, has migrated to less academic spheres. The perspective of the whiteness-studies academics is commonplace now, even if the language used to express it is different.

“I get it: as a straight white male, I’m the worst thing on Earth,” Christian Lander says. Lander is a Canadian-born, Los Angeles–based satirist who in January 2008 started a blog called Stuff White People Like (stuffwhitepeoplelike.com), which pokes fun at the manners and mores of a specific species of young, hip, upwardly mobile whites. (He has written more than 100 entries about whites’ passion for things like bottled water, “the idea of soccer,” and “being the only white person around.”) At its best, Lander’s site—which formed the basis for a recently published book of the same name (reviewed in the October 2008 Atlantic)—is a cunningly precise distillation of the identity crisis plaguing well-meaning, well-off white kids in a post-white world.

“Like, I’m aware of all the horrible crimes that my demographic has done in the world,” Lander says. “And there’s a bunch of white people who are desperate—desperate—to say, ‘You know what? My skin’s white, but I’m not one of the white people who’s destroying the world.’”

For Lander, whiteness has become a vacuum. The “white identity” he limns on his blog is predicated on the quest for authenticity—usually other people’s authenticity. “As a white person, you’re just desperate to find something else to grab onto. You’re jealous! Pretty much every white person I grew up with wished they’d grown up in, you know, an ethnic home that gave them a second language. White culture is Family Ties and Led Zeppelin and Guns N’ Roses—like, this is white culture. This is all we have.”

Lander’s “white people” are products of a very specific historical moment, raised by well-meaning Baby Boomers to reject the old ideal of white American gentility and to embrace diversity and fluidity instead. (“It’s strange that we are the kids of Baby Boomers, right? How the hell do you rebel against that? Like, your parents will march against the World Trade Organization next to you. They’ll have bigger white dreadlocks than you. What do you do?”) But his lighthearted anthropology suggests that the multicultural harmony they were raised to worship has bred a kind of self-denial.

Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University who is a fan of Lander’s humor, has observed that many of his white students are plagued by a racial-identity crisis: “They don’t care about socioeconomics; they care about culture. And to be white is to be culturally broke. The classic thing white students say when you ask them to talk about who they are is, ‘I don’t have a culture.’ They might be privileged, they might be loaded socioeconomically, but they feel bankrupt when it comes to culture … They feel disadvantaged, and they feel marginalized. They don’t have a culture that’s cool or oppositional.” Wray says that this feeling of being culturally bereft often prevents students from recognizing what it means to be a child of privilege—a strange irony that the first wave of whiteness-studies scholars, in the 1990s, failed to anticipate.

Of course, the obvious material advantages that come with being born white—lower infant-mortality rates and easier-to-acquire bank loans, for example—tend to undercut any sympathy that this sense of marginalization might generate. And in the right context, cultural-identity crises can turn well-meaning whites into instant punch lines. Consider ego trip’s The (White) Rapper Show, a brilliant and critically acclaimed reality show that VH1 debuted in 2007. It depicted 10 (mostly hapless) white rappers living together in a dilapidated house—dubbed “Tha White House”—in the South Bronx. Despite the contestants’ best intentions, each one seemed like a profoundly confused caricature, whether it was the solemn graduate student committed to fighting racism or the ghetto-obsessed suburbanite who had, seemingly by accident, named himself after the abolitionist John Brown.

Similarly, Smirnoff struck marketing gold in 2006 with a viral music video titled “Tea Partay,” featuring a trio of strikingly bad, V-neck-sweater-clad white rappers called the Prep Unit. “Haters like to clown our Ivy League educations / But they’re just jealous ’cause our families run the nation,” the trio brayed, as a pair of bottle-blond women in spiffy tennis whites shimmied behind them. There was no nonironic way to enjoy the video; its entire appeal was in its self-aware lampooning of WASP culture: verdant country clubs, “old money,” croquet, popped collars, and the like.

“The best defense is to be constantly pulling the rug out from underneath yourself,” Wray remarks, describing the way self-aware whites contend with their complicated identity. “Beat people to the punch. You’re forced as a white person into a sense of ironic detachment. Irony is what fuels a lot of white subcultures. You also see things like Burning Man, when a lot of white people are going into the desert and trying to invent something that is entirely new and not a form of racial mimicry. That’s its own kind of flight from whiteness. We’re going through a period where whites are really trying to figure out: Who are we?”

The “flight from whiteness” of urban, college-educated, liberal whites isn’t the only attempt to answer this question. You can flee into whiteness as well. This can mean pursuing the authenticity of an imagined past: think of the deliberately white-bread world of Mormon America, where the ’50s never ended, or the anachronistic WASP entitlement flaunted in books like last year’s A Privileged Life: Celebrating WASP Style, a handsome coffee-table book compiled by Susanna Salk, depicting a world of seersucker blazers, whale pants, and deck shoes. (What the book celebrates is the “inability to be outdone,” and the “self-confidence and security that comes with it,” Salk tells me. “That’s why I call it ‘privilege.’ It’s this privilege of time, of heritage, of being in a place longer than anybody else.”) But these enclaves of preserved-in-amber whiteness are likely to be less important to the American future than the construction of whiteness as a somewhat pissed-off minority culture.

This notion of a self-consciously white expression of minority empowerment will be familiar to anyone who has come across the comedian Larry the Cable Guy—he of “Farting Jingle Bells”—or witnessed the transformation of Detroit-born-and-bred Kid Rock from teenage rapper into “American Bad Ass” southern-style rocker. The 1990s may have been a decade when multiculturalism advanced dramatically—when American culture became “colorized,” as the critic Jeff Chang put it—but it was also an era when a very different form of identity politics crystallized. Hip-hop may have provided the decade’s soundtrack, but the highest-selling artist of the ’90s was Garth Brooks. Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods may have been the faces of athletic superstardom, but it was NASCAR that emerged as professional sports’ fastest-growing institution, with ratings second only to the NFL’s.

As with the unexpected success of the apocalyptic Left Behind novels, or the Jeff Foxworthy–organized Blue Collar Comedy Tour, the rise of country music and auto racing took place well off the American elite’s radar screen. (None of Christian Lander’s white people would be caught dead at a NASCAR race.) These phenomena reflected a growing sense of cultural solidarity among lower-middle-class whites—a solidarity defined by a yearning for American “authenticity,” a folksy realness that rejects the global, the urban, and the effete in favor of nostalgia for “the way things used to be.”

Like other forms of identity politics, white solidarity comes complete with its own folk heroes, conspiracy theories (Barack Obama is a secret Muslim! The U.S. is going to merge with Canada and Mexico!), and laundry lists of injustices. The targets and scapegoats vary—from multiculturalism and affirmative action to a loss of moral values, from immigration to an economy that no longer guarantees the American worker a fair chance—and so do the political programs they inspire. (Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan both tapped into this white identity politics in the 1990s; today, its tribunes run the ideological gamut, from Jim Webb to Ron Paul to Mike Huckabee to Sarah Palin.) But the core grievance, in each case, has to do with cultural and socioeconomic dislocation—the sense that the system that used to guarantee the white working class some stability has gone off-kilter.

Wray is one of the founders of what has been called “white-trash studies,” a field conceived as a response to the perceived elite-liberal marginalization of the white working class. He argues that the economic downturn of the 1970s was the precondition for the formation of an “oppositional” and “defiant” white-working-class sensibility—think of the rugged, anti-everything individualism of 1977’s Smokey and the Bandit. But those anxieties took their shape from the aftershocks of the identity-based movements of the 1960s. “I think that the political space that the civil-rights movement opens up in the mid-1950s and ’60s is the transformative thing,” Wray observes. “Following the black-power movement, all of the other minority groups that followed took up various forms of activism, including brown power and yellow power and red power. Of course the problem is, if you try and have a ‘white power’ movement, it doesn’t sound good.”

The result is a racial pride that dares not speak its name, and that defines itself through cultural cues instead—a suspicion of intellectual elites and city dwellers, a preference for folksiness and plainness of speech (whether real or feigned), and the association of a working-class white minority with “the real America.” (In the Scots-Irish belt that runs from Arkansas up through West Virginia, the most common ethnic label offered to census takers is “American.”) Arguably, this white identity politics helped swing the 2000 and 2004 elections, serving as the powerful counterpunch to urban white liberals, and the McCain-Palin campaign relied on it almost to the point of absurdity (as when a McCain surrogate dismissed Northern Virginia as somehow not part of “the real Virginia”) as a bulwark against the threatening multiculturalism of Barack Obama. Their strategy failed, of course, but it’s possible to imagine white identity politics growing more potent and more forthright in its racial identifications in the future, as “the real America” becomes an ever-smaller portion of, well, the real America, and as the soon-to-be white minority’s sense of being besieged and disdained by a multicultural majority grows apace.

This vision of the aggrieved white man lost in a world that no longer values him was given its most vivid expression in the 1993 film Falling Down. Michael Douglas plays Bill Foster, a downsized defense worker with a buzz cut and a pocket protector who rampages through a Los Angeles overrun by greedy Korean shop-owners and Hispanic gangsters, railing against the eclipse of the America he used to know. (The film came out just eight years before California became the nation’s first majority-minority state.) Falling Down ends with a soulful police officer apprehending Foster on the Santa Monica Pier, at which point the middle-class vigilante asks, almost innocently: “I’m the bad guy?”

But this is a nightmare vision. Of course most of America’s Bill Fosters aren’t the bad guys—just as civilization is not, in the words of Tom Buchanan, “going to pieces” and America is not, in the phrasing of Pat Buchanan, going “Third World.” The coming white minority does not mean that the racial hierarchy of American culture will suddenly become inverted, as in 1995’s White Man’s Burden, an awful thought experiment of a film, starring John Travolta, that envisions an upside-down world in which whites are subjugated to their high-class black oppressors. There will be dislocations and resentments along the way, but the demographic shifts of the next 40 years are likely to reduce the power of racial hierarchies over everyone’s lives, producing a culture that’s more likely than any before to treat its inhabitants as individuals, rather than members of a caste or identity group.

Consider the world of advertising and marketing, industries that set out to mold our desires at a subconscious level. Advertising strategy once assumed a “general market”—“a code word for ‘white people,’” jokes one ad executive—and smaller, mutually exclusive, satellite “ethnic markets.” In recent years, though, advertisers have begun revising their assumptions and strategies in anticipation of profound demographic shifts. Instead of herding consumers toward a discrete center, the goal today is to create versatile images and campaigns that can be adapted to highly individualized tastes. (Think of the dancing silhouettes in Apple’s iPod campaign, which emphasizes individuality and diversity without privileging—or even representing—any specific group.)

At the moment, we can call this the triumph of multiculturalism, or post-racialism. But just as whiteness has no inherent meaning—it is a vessel we fill with our hopes and anxieties—these terms may prove equally empty in the long run. Does being post-racial mean that we are past race completely, or merely that race is no longer essential to how we identify ourselves? Karl Carter, of Atlanta’s youth-oriented GTM Inc. (Guerrilla Tactics Media), suggests that marketers and advertisers would be better off focusing on matrices like “lifestyle” or “culture” rather than race or ethnicity. “You’ll have crazy in-depth studies of the white consumer or the Latino consumer,” he complains. “But how do skaters feel? How do hip-hoppers feel?”

The logic of online social networking points in a similar direction. The New York University sociologist Dalton Conley has written of a “network nation,” in which applications like Facebook and MySpace create “crosscutting social groups” and new, flexible identities that only vaguely overlap with racial identities. Perhaps this is where the future of identity after whiteness lies—in a dramatic departure from the racial logic that has defined American culture from the very beginning. What Conley, Carter, and others are describing isn’t merely the displacement of whiteness from our cultural center; they’re describing a social structure that treats race as just one of a seemingly infinite number of possible self-identifications.

The problem of the 20th century, W. E. B. DuBois famously predicted, would be the problem of the color line. Will this continue to be the case in the 21st century, when a black president will govern a country whose social networks increasingly cut across every conceivable line of identification? The ruling of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind no longer holds weight, but its echoes have been inescapable: we aspire to be post-racial, but we still live within the structures of privilege, injustice, and racial categorization that we inherited from an older order. We can talk about defining ourselves by lifestyle rather than skin color, but our lifestyle choices are still racially coded. We know, more or less, that race is a fiction that often does more harm than good, and yet it is something we cling to without fully understanding why—as a social and legal fact, a vague sense of belonging and place that we make solid through culture and speech.

But maybe this is merely how it used to be—maybe this is already an outdated way of looking at things. “You have a lot of young adults going into a more diverse world,” Carter remarks. For the young Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s, culture is something to be taken apart and remade in their own image. “We came along in a generation that didn’t have to follow that path of race,” he goes on. “We saw something different.” This moment was not the end of white America; it was not the end of anything. It was a bridge, and we crossed it.

The Minority Report

2008-12-02T21:23:00.000-08:00

Will the threat of a class-action lawsuit force advertising to finally solve its diversity problem?

Dec 1, 2008

-By Andrew Adam Newman

Black athletes, musicians and actors figure more prominently in ad campaigns than ever, but the chances that African Americans actually created those ads are pretty slim.

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data from January 2008, the advertising field -- defined as advertising and PR agencies, as well as media, direct mail and other operations exclusively devoted to creating and delivering ads -- is just 5 percent African American, 3 percent Asian and 8 percent Hispanic or Latino. Those numbers are particularly stark considering that New York, the city with the highest concentration of ad agencies, is only 45 percent white, according to U.S. Census data. USA Today recently dubbed the ad industry "a poster child for a dearth of diversity."

For more than four decades, civil rights groups have accused the ad business of violating equal-opportunity hiring laws. In 2006, the New York City Commission on Human Rights (NYCCHR), acting on a complaint from Sanford Moore, an African American who had worked at agencies including BBDO, launched an investigation of 16 prominent New York firms, including BBDO, DDB, Ogilvy & Mather, Saatchi & Saatchi and Young & Rubicam. The agencies settled with the commission, committing to increase diversity over three years.

In the wake of that settlement, some agencies have increased the number of minorities working in their shops. And the industry as a whole is making progress, according to Nancy Hill, who became the American Association of Advertising Agencies' first female CEO this year, and whose commitment to diversity has been lauded by Moore and others. "I know the industry still has a long way to go," Hills says. "But a lot of things are starting to come together."

But the data suggest that some shops have merely donned a fig leaf -- offering bromides about how their hiring process is "colorblind," doing pro bono work for minority causes, but still hiring only those who look like them.

Soon, those shops could be in for a day of reckoning, as Cyrus Mehri, the civil rights lawyer behind several landmark racial discrimination suits -- including those against Coca-Cola (which settled for $193 million) and Texaco (which settled for $176 million) -- is now targeting the advertising business. The result could be the dropping of so many fig leaves that the industry will need a rake.

Mehri says he has been contacted by "people from inside the industry who have suffered discrimination" and that his firm will soon issue a report on African Americans in advertising. (Critics agree that the situation with African Americans is unique, since they have been confronting both racial stereotypes in advertising and the lack of professional opportunities for more than a half century.) Using Census and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data, the report will benchmark advertising against 28 other "persuasion" industries.

Among the findings in a preliminary report obtained by Adweek: African Americans make up only 3.2 percent of advertising's upper management in the U.S., well under half of the average of 7.2 percent in similar professions.

Mehri won't say whether he's preparing a class-action suit against agencies, but even if he isn't, he will likely leave the industry more diverse than he found it. Based on the remedies he and the late Johnnie Cochran prescribed in a study about the lack of black head coaches in the NFL, for example, the league adopted new hiring policies and more than tripled their ranks within four years.

Luke Visconti, co-founder of the magazine DiversityInc, who describes the ad industry's diversity efforts as "laughable," says advertising pros should take note that Mehri "can use the legal system to grind you to bits," but that he is reasonable in crafting constructive solutions.

As Mehri turns over rocks, there's no telling what he'll find. It behooves industry insiders to know what to expect from his efforts, how some of his prior targets have responded, and how certain companies -- some of them the ad industry's biggest clients -- have embedded diversity deep in their hiring and management practices.

Mehri's track record

"I've yet to see an industry that has such a consistent record of indifference to minority involvement," Mehri says of the ad business on the phone from his Washington law firm, Mehri & Skalet. "It has a history of purposeful discrimination. They've been on notice a long time, but they just go through the motions and allow a discriminatory climate to continue. They're real laggards, and it's hard to understand why."

One of Mehri's best-known cases, originally launched in 1996 on behalf of two management-level employees against Texaco, and which expanded into a class-action colossus representing 1,400 aggrieved black Texaco employees, alleged that in hiring and promotion the company had regularly chosen less-experienced whites over African Americans. Texaco fought the suit for more than two years, but after testimony that claimed managers had referred to workers as "niggers" and "porch monkeys," and a recording emerged of an executive referring to African Americans as "black jelly beans," Texaco sat down in 1997 to settle.

Along with $115 million that Texaco agreed to pay employees, it promised $35 million to fund an Equality and Tolerance Task Force -- consisting of civil rights lawyers, scholars, retired judges and executives -- that would increase diversity at the company. It also set aside $26 million to administer salary raises over five years to black employees.

In 1999, Mehri's suit on behalf of 2,200 former and then-current employees against Coca-Cola claimed that blacks at the company were widely overlooked for promotions.

Coke's settlement of $193 million the following year was unprecedented in its heft. It was also noteworthy because Coke agreed to fund a task force, which would include a former secretary of labor and a former chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, to overhaul hiring practices. The company also agreed to tie executive compensation to diversity hiring goals and issue four yearly progress reports to the court.

Coke even asked the court to oversee its progress for a fifth year.

From 2000 to 2006, among senior executives -- the ranks which industries have struggled hardest to diversify -- Coke increased minority representation from 8 percent to 21 percent. For "pipeline" jobs a tier below, from 2002 to 2006, Coke increased the proportion of minorities from 21 percent to 27 percent.

"The work that we do and the decisions that we make all focus on inclusive and fair behavior," Steve Bucherati, chief diversity officer at Coca-Cola, wrote in response to questions from Adweek. Bucherati also noted that 29 percent of Coke's North America marketing and advertising division are minorities, as is the leader of the advertising team.

These settlements are emblematic of how vast class-action discrimination suits, by Mehri and others, gained popularity in the 1990s not just to recompense plaintiffs, but also to reshape hiring policies.

As Nancy Levit, a law professor at the University of Missouri's Kansas City School of Law, wrote recently in the Boston College Law Review, cases like Texaco's "have encouraged greater use of litigation to address deeply entrenched corporate practices." The goal often "is not damages but transformation of the company's treatment of employees" and the opportunity to "make a difference in workplace inclusivity."

Mehri's impact on the NFL was just as striking. In 2002, he and Cochran issued a report called "Black Coaches in the National Football League: Superior Performance, Inferior Opportunities." Though more than two-thirds of the players in the league are black, no team had hired a black head coach until 1989. When Mehri and Cochran issued their report, only two of the league's 32 teams had black head coaches.

The report recommended requiring team owners to conduct a face-to-face interview with at least one minority candidate when hiring in the future. The NFL agreed to adopt the rule, which became known as the Rooney Rule, after Dan Rooney, the Pittsburgh Steelers owner who chaired the league's Workplace Diversity Committee.

In 2003, Detroit Lions gm Matt Millen hired Steve Mariucci, who is white, as head coach without interviewing any candidates of color. The NFL slapped Millen with a $200,000 fine. Other team owners complied with the rule after that and while doing so might seem merely symbolic, the results were dramatic.

Four years after the Rooney Rule took effect, the NFL reached an all-time high of seven African-American head coaches. (Today, there are six.) Before 2007, no African-American head coach had reached the Super Bowl, but both coaches that year -- Lovie Smith of the Chicago Bears and Tony Dungy of the Indianapolis Colts -- were black.

"What is done in the NFL is really transferable to the business world, because at base the process ensures that those who are making decisions sit down with candidates and have a conversation about the position," says Jeremi Duru, a law professor at Temple University's James E. Beasley School of Law, who worked for Mehri's firm when it issued the NFL report. "If you sit down face to face and talk about issues of shared concern, racial biases tend to be diminished."

Where top marketers stand

One thing that often happens when Mehri gets involved in a case is that Weldon Latham's phone rings. Both Texaco and Coke hired Latham -- a partner in the Washington, D.C., law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine and chair of its Diversity Counseling Group -- to iron out a settlement with Mehri.

When it comes to the ad industry, though, Latham actually was on the scene before Mehri. Omnicom Group hired him when its agencies BBDO, DDB, Merkley + Partners and PHD were among the 16 shops named two years ago in the investigation by New York's human-rights commission.

Latham, who has worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies not just to defend them against suits, but to help proactively develop multicultural initiatives, says business-to-business industries like advertising have been slow to adapt to diversity.

"Consumer products companies that interact with the public directly are usually a lot better about recognizing the value of diversity than a business-to-business company," he says.

DiversityInc's Visconti says, "If you believe people are created equally, then talent is distributed equally. If it's all white men in your executive committee, something went wrong."

Visconti's magazine has been compiling a Top 50 Companies for Diversity list for eight years. This year, 352 firms were evaluated on factors including the racial makeup of their workforce, CEO diversity policies and the use of minority- and women-owned suppliers.

Iconic companies crowd the list: The top five this year, in order, were Verizon, Coca-Cola, Bank of America, Pricewaterhouse-Coopers and Procter & Gamble.

Conspicuously absent from the list is an advertising agency, and in eight years an agency has never appeared. (Full disclosure: Adweek currently does not employ a single person of color among the 16 members of its editorial and design staffs.)

Adweek cross-referenced the 2008 list with the top 100 U.S. ad spenders for the first seven months of 2008, and found that four of the top five diversity companies are also top ad spenders. In all, 22 of the top diversity companies -- nearly half -- were among this year's 100 top ad spenders.

P&G, the largest ad spender, has a unit within its so-called "talent supply" team that "solely focuses on diversity recruiting," according to Maxine Brown Davis, the company's chief diversity officer, who responded to questions from Adweek in an e-mail. The company, she wrote, attends professional conferences held by groups with "high-potential diverse candidates," like the National Society of Black Engineers.

Verizon, the fourth-biggest ad spender, provided a statement in response to Adweek's questions, saying the company is committed to looking like America because "customers and constituents are increasingly diverse and require diverse employee experiences." The company ties 5 percent of upper management's pay to diversity: half for promoting minorities and the other half for contracting with diverse suppliers.

How agencies are responding

Clients increasingly are inquiring about diversity on the agency side, according to Heide Gardner, chief diversity officer for Interpublic Group. "They're pushing their values along the supply chain and they are interested in our progress," she says. "More clients are including questions about workforce and supplier diversity in RFPs. I would guesstimate that at least a third of all RFPs include questions about supplier and workforce diversity."

Agencies, however, are not keeping up in certain areas.

As part of their settlement with New York's human-rights commission, the 15 agencies (down from 16, after Draft and FCB merged) reported their minority hiring numbers for 2007 to the commission, and the results appeared impressive: As a group, they committed to have 18 percent of new hires be minorities, and on average they actually hired 25 percent.

But according to data from the NYCCHR as reported in Advertising Age, the number of African Americans hired -- which had been the original issue -- were still paltry. Moore, who brought the complaint to the commission, said he was discouraged by the African-American numbers and unswayed by the bright spots elsewhere. "Blacks are not the minority of choice" for those doing the hiring, he says. And he adds that he's seen minority hiring spurts before, only to see people of color leave the industry after bumping up against glass ceilings.

The NYCCHR was not able to provide data about those agencies' 2007 hiring results to Adweek by press time.

"You don't let someone off the hook for decades of blatant discrimination because they hire a few people," Moore says. "Madison Avenue has been about supporting, subsidizing and propagating a value system that marginalizes blacks, black media institutions, black creativity and black culture."

And advertising, he says, requires neither special degrees nor a particularly keen intellect: "Madison Avenue is one of the last places where undereducated whites can still make big money." White executives for decades, he adds, have told him that diversity was "the moral issue of our time" and that their own shops had a "level playing field." To which he counters, "If it were a level playing field, black people wouldn't be rolling off the playing field."

This is not to say there haven't been concerted efforts to diversify. Over the last few years, a handful of ad agencies have hired diversity officers whose primary focus is to increase recruitment, and to structure mentoring programs and affinity groups within the agencies. The programs build a supportive culture within firms that, consciously or not, have not always supported people of color, and in so doing may be beginning to crack the glass ceiling.

Gardner was named director of diversity for IPG in 2003 and, in 2007, was promoted to svp and chief diversity officer, marking the first time a person of color has served as an officer in the company. (Last year, IPG appointed its sole African-American board member, Jocelyn Miller-Carter, who owns a Florida technology company.)

According to Gardner, a major challenge involves not just hiring minorities, but keeping them on board, since turnover with minorities is 30 percent higher than whites at IPG. "This really speaks to the issue of sustainability," Gardner says. "We have done a much better job of recruiting" for entry-level jobs, she says, "but now we have to focus on the mid- and senior levels."

Today, 20 percent of the company's junior staff are minorities, but of the nearly 100 agencies that Interpublic owns outright or partly, only two are headed by African Americans: Larry Harris in 2007 was named president of the newly formed Ansible, a mobile marketing agency that is a joint venture between IPG and mobile technology provider Velti; and Steve Stoute is founder of Translation Consultation + Brand Imaging.

Gardner says the company does not go so far as the NFL and require a diverse candidate slate, but it "recommends" it.

She also says that some, but not all, of IPG's companies tie bonuses to diversity goals, a practice some experts say is a key to achieving diversity. For a senior executive, it can account for 10 percent to 15 percent of a bonus, or $40,000-60,000, according to Gardner.

Tiffany Warren, vp and director of multicultural programs and community outreach at Arnold, says the company has achieved its level of 31 percent non-white employees without tying executive pay to diversity goals, since "what works for a Fortune 500 company doesn't necessarily work for us."

An old problem

In his recent book Madison Avenue and the Color Line, about African-Americans' role in advertising over the last century, professor and advertising consultant Jason Chambers links the historically negative depictions of black people in ads to their limited opportunities in the industry.

"If one looks at advertisements as documentaries, then the world for much of the 20th century was one in which whites enjoyed the fruits of consumption and blacks, if visible at all, contentedly served them from the margins," Chambers writes.

The book, among other things, details how civil rights groups and the NYCCHR have decried the lack of representation in the industry -- and how agencies have vowed to remedy the situation -- for more than four decades.

In 1963, the Urban League of New York released a study that found of the more than 20,000 employees in the city's largest ad agencies, only 25 African Americans were in "creative or executive positions." Five years later, a report from the NYCCHR said the scarcity of African Americans and Puerto Ricans employed at ad agencies was "a state of de facto segregation strongly suggesting discrimination."

In the wake of that report, writes Chambers, virtually every major agency instituted recruitment and mentoring programs and diversified, but the programs were expensive and disappeared because of the recession in the early 1970s.

Reached at his office at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Chambers puzzles at why ad executives seem to see diversity as a do-gooder issue rather than a bottom-line one. The firms' leaders, he says, should be asking themselves these questions: "Why aren't we as mediators between manufacturers and consumers pushing hardest for diversity? What level of insight creativity are we not getting because of that insularity?"

Leading a horse to water

After the NYCCHR began its latest investigation of the industry, the 4A's assembled a task force that culminated in a handbook, "Principles & Best Practices for Diversity and Inclusion in Advertising Agencies." It recommends establishing diversity goals and timetables, tying executive compensation to those goals, focusing recruiting both on minority universities and minority executive recruiters, increasing retention of minority employees through mentoring programs, and hiring more minority businesses as vendors.

Adonis Hoffman, the staff lawyer for the 4A's who wrote the handbook, says the trade group can only lead horses to water. "We can provide guidance and leadership and give them all the resources," says Hoffman, "but it becomes a matter of individual corporate will."

As for the forthcoming report -- and possible legal action -- from Mehri, Hoffman says agencies should accept his recommendations. "I wouldn't advise the companies to hunker down," he says. "I'd advise them to face this head-on and see what they can do, because it's an issue that has been bouncing around this industry for a long, long time."

Hill, the 4A's CEO, says the association is doing what it can. This includes the continuation of its AAAA Foundation, which has created a number of scholarships for multicultural aspirants, including the Bill Bernbach Minority Scholarship, the John Mack Carter Scholarship and Operation JumpStart.

In January, the association announced a partnership with Howard University to place multicultural talent in management at ad agencies, help African Americans transition from other industries into advertising and work with traditional black colleges to highlight the industry.

Also, Hill serves on the board of Together Our Resources Can Help (TORCH), which provides underserved New York City public high school students with exposure to career training and opportunities in communications and the arts. (Adweek publisher and editorial director Alison Fahey serves on the same board.)

On another front, Arnold's Warren hires interns to help out with the AdColor Awards, an initiative she co-founded last year to recognize creative achievement in five categories for multicultural talent both within agencies and at marketing departments in general-market companies.

One of those interns, Andy Deaza, is now 20 and recently moved to South Beach to study at the Miami Ad School. But Deaza, who is Dominican and Puerto Rican, did not find the ad business so much as the ad business found him. When he was a sophomore at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan, "I wasn't the best student and was kind of getting into trouble," he says. Deaza, whose favorite subject was art, was introduced to TORCH by his art teacher.

He threw himself into the program, was chosen to host its annual talent program (twice), attended an expenses-paid conference in San Francisco, and interned with JWT director of trendspotting Ann Mack and then Warren. Along the way, he says, he improved his grades and stayed out of trouble.

"There were definitely people helping guide the way," says Deaza. "If it wasn't for Debi [Deutsch, executive director of TORCH] and Tiffany, I wouldn't know about the industry. For whatever reason, white people know about the industry, but we don't -- I don't know why."

Hill met Deaza not long ago.

"The night I met this kid and heard his story, the hair on my arms stood up," Hill says. "What it says to me is that you have to attack this problem from many different angles and when you see the programs come together in one individual like Andy, you know our efforts are worth it."

Asked if he had a dream client he'd like to work for one day, Deaza does not even have to think about it.

"Nike," he says. "I've been a Jordan fan all my life and I'm too young to have seen him play growing up. But those Spike Lee commercials -- man, things like that are the reason I love this industry. To be able now to be so close to making something like that is surreal -- that gives me the chills. If I ever got to put a swoosh on the end of something, I'd be a happy man."

Do clients that spend more care more?

Is there a correlation between a company's diversity achievements and its level of ad spending? Below are the top 25 firms on DiversityInc's current list of the Top 50 Companies for Diversity. If the company also ranks among the top 100 U.S. ad spenders through the first seven months of this year, that rank appears after the firm's name. As you can see, four of the top five companies on the list are also among the top ad spenders in the country.

1 Verizon Communications (4)

2 The Coca-Cola Co. (44)

3 Bank of America (59)

4 PricewaterhouseCoopers

5 Procter & Gamble (1)

6 Cox Communications

7 Merrill Lynch & Co.

8 Johnson & Johnson (5)

9 IBM

10 American Express (61)

11 Marriott International

12 Sodexo

13 JPMorgan Chase (71)

14 Wachovia (97)

15 Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida

16 Deloitte LLP

17 Ernst & Young

18 HSBC Bank USA, NA

19 Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide

20 Cummins

21 Merck & Co. (74)

22 AT&T (3)

23 Turner Broadcasting System

24 Prudential

25 Monsanto Co.

Andrew Adam Newman is a frequent contributor to The New York Times whose work has appeared in New York magazine, Salon and on National Public Radio's "Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen."

The It Factor - Interview with Marc Ecko

2008-12-02T14:52:00.002-08:00

Marc Ecko sits down with NY Report Editor-in-Chief Rob Levin

December 1, 2008

By: Robert S. Levin

In 1984, Marc Milecofsky was a 12-year old boy airbrushing his sweatshirts and hats in the garage of his parents’ Lakewood, N.J., home. Fast forward 23 years, and that same kid, now called Marc Ecko, sits in a studio atop his global headquarters on 23rd Street in Manhattan, with artists on his payroll to do his painting for him. Marc Ecko Enterprises is a billion-dollar corporation that has survived highs and lows so drastic they would give a NASA pilot vertigo. Founded in 1993, the company produced the hip-hop-inspired designs that Gen Xers across the country had been clamoring for. Today the company consists of several apparel lines (including ecko unlimited, eckored, ecko kids, Cut & Sew, Zoo York and Avirex) and two media divisions (Complex magazine and Marc Ecko Entertainment, which develops video games). In addition to his wholesale business, Ecko has 70 retail locations and is aiming for a total of 150 by the end of 2010. The father of three (6, 4 and 2 years old) has also launched philanthropic initiatives to help underserved children in the U.S. and in the Ukraine.

While his parents’ garage in Lakewood is only 50 miles from his Chelsea headquarters, Ecko is in a whole different world. From close calls with bankruptcy and professional missteps to becoming a modern marketing innovator, Ecko is far from where he started. The success of his company, which now employs 2,000 people worldwide, does not rest solely on clever T-shirt designs. Ecko’s innate marketing savvy and relentless efforts to better understand his marketplace are the true drivers of his success.

Ecko, a Rutgers University School of Pharmacy dropout, takes pride in aligning himself with American pop culture. For example, in 2007, he bought the infamous Barry Bonds baseball — the one he hit out of the park to shatter Hank Aaron’s longstanding home-run record — for $750,000. Never one to shy from controversy, Ecko then held an online poll and allowed the public’s votes to decide the fate of the ball. More than 10 million people logged on to Ecko’s site, and the majority voted to put the ball in Cooperstown’s Baseball Hall of Fame with an asterisk symbolizing the widely held belief that Bonds achieved his record with the help of performance-enhancing drugs. Editor-in-chief Robert Levin spoke with Ecko, a direct and “illustrative” communicator, about rescuing his company from near ruin, marketing triumphs and Yoda.

RL: You started ecko unlimited at age 20. How did you get started in the fashion industry?

ME: I had a wide-eyed love for art and illustration, particularly graffiti, growing up. But I couldn’t go to write graffiti on trains since there really weren’t any trains running through Lakewood. The kissing cousin to the aerosol spray paint can was airbrush. So I tried to shine up my illustration chops.

When I got to high school, painting T-shirts was like a self-validation play among my peers because my peers would acknowledge me as “talented.” It all felt good, and it was something I did better than most, and I stood out. I excelled at art versus at academics or athletics.

After graduation, I went to Rutgers College of Pharmacy in 1990, and it really highlighted what I was good at, what I wasn’t good at, and what I was passionate about. In school, I was very average. After class, I would go paint T-shirts and sweatshirts and sell them. I had cash in my pocket all the time and I really fell in love with it. So, in the summer of 1992, I asked my dean [if I could] take a year off, and in 1993 I started my business. I went from painting one T-shirt at a time to screen printing them.

It was a typical do-it-yourself, sell-out-of-the-trunk-of-your-car kind of story. Nothing was really that unique, except for the fact that the line between my adolescent ambitions and my professional ambitions blurred together so completely that it kept a piece of my brain permanently between the ages of 16 and 22. Those years really shaped my point of view, and it’s pretty much been the core demographic that I’ve emphasized and grown my business on.

RL: How did you go from selling out of the trunk of a car to selling it to the stores?

ME: There were a lot of brands that existed when I was coming up that are no longer around or are still quite small. I remember there was this pressure — [the other young streetwear designers and I] all felt like we were presenting something that was unique. There was a lifestyle, sub- or counterculture fashion that emerged 20 years prior, and we were the second wave of that — the streetwear wave. I was fortunate to be there at a time in the market where we were all new and young, and we felt like we were part of a movement. But the difference between me and a lot of my peers was that I didn’t limit my ambitions to the group’s ambitions. I wasn’t a groupthink guy. I wanted to go for it all.

I remember my friends in the business were selling to Patricia Fields [a designer who had a store on Broadway in the Village] or Extra Large [the Beastie Boys’ store in the Lower East Side and L.A.]. I’d walk into these stores; they’d be as big as my desk, and all the T-shirts sold for $36 each. It didn’t make any sense to me. I wanted to have my T-shirts where people bought their sneakers. I remember going to Dr. J’s on Market Street in Newark, N.J., to pick up sneakers. I wanted to buy T-shirts at the same place I bought sneakers. But my peers at the time said, “Oh, my God, how can you sell there?” I’d say, “Because I want [my T-shirts] where real people are shopping and where people are going to see them. I don’t want it to be an inside joke.”

Maybe it was delusions of grandeur or maybe a little bit of a Napoleon complex, but I wanted to be the Ralph Lauren for my generation. I wouldn’t be about silk ties and peak lapels, but I aspired to what that meant in terms of the breadth and scope from a brand perspective. So I put my head down and I focused on that.

RL: So you were a designer and a marketer while your competitors were just designers.

ME: I didn’t know what the word “marketing” meant until I hired my third marketing executive. It was less about having marketing chops and more about having the common sense that the consumer was going to validate me. I was bold enough to not let anyone try to define my consumers so narrowly.

RL: You market to the 13 to 30 demographic and for a long time you were part of that demographic. As you get older, do you worry if you can still serve the 13- to 30-year-olds?

ME: My demographic is growing, but I don’t worry about getting older. Look at Bill Parcells, Tom Landry, Vince Lombardi or any great coach in history; especially coaches that were once players. How does a guy like Parcells manage to get guys a third of his age to break themselves for him? I’m going to get older. I can’t forever be in the sweet spot of my demographic, but I could compel my staff to heed some of my life experiences so that they could be more effective design leaders, marketing leaders and executives. Age and the fact that I’ve gotten to travel the world makes me more astute with the business and less emotional.

Growing Up on the Job

RL: How do you spend most of your time now? Are you providing leadership, or are you still getting involved in a lot of the details?

ME: You can’t micromanage your way to success and you can’t get overly caught up in all of the details. I micromanaged this company for the first six or seven years. I’d wonder why I couldn’t keep my really good designers. It was because I was micromanaging them and they would go work somewhere else. I didn’t have the tolerance to allow them to get some blood in their mouths. It’s no different than how I am with my two-year-old now. She bangs her lip on the stairs and I tell her, “Shake it off, put some ice on it. You’re OK.” But she’s my third child. With my first one, I was like, “Oh, my God, call the hospital. She’s bleeding!”

So, am in the weeds on everything? No. I’m more engaged with certain projects. For instance, right now we’re doing a lot of research for potential new licensing opportunities, and I will get very, very heavily engaged in the global, big idea there. Once the big idea is set, you have to let the ship ride its course. I am not going to be so arrogant to think that the first thing that comes out of my head is the absolute ideal thing for the market. No one person can do that, not even Steve Jobs.

RL: As a business owner, what do you think was the biggest mistake you made?

ME: Oh, goodness! I’m constantly making mistakes. I don’t know that there’s any one big one.

RL: In ’98, you had a big cash problem. Your business was nearly $7 million in debt. Was that one of your biggest mistakes?

ME: I almost went bankrupt, but that wasn’t my biggest mistake. They were dumb mistakes: not being aware of supply side, not knowing how to ship and receive, spending more than I had, not knowing how to keep a budget, and not knowing how to be unemotional about design.

When I think of those years of being $6.5, $7 million in debt, I don’t reflect on those as mistakes. I find them to be the most relevant parts of my learning experience, because I was forced to learn how to do more with less. When you don’t have [resources], it forces you to innovate. You have to compete with an idea rather than with the dollar, and that’s a discipline we always try to condition ourselves on. It’s still in the culture of this organization; even though now we are — from a gross sales point of view — quite large, we still find that the best ideas come out of this organization when people are really forced and reminded to innovate with less.

The biggest mistakes are those moments when you get a little drunk [on success] or when you think you can walk on water, and you fall into that [pattern] of repeating the same mistakes. That’s the biggest mistake that I’ve ever made — allowing myself to repeat my mistakes.

Creating Culture

RL: You mentioned earlier that you have to really focus on who your customers are. How do you instill that into your corporate culture?

ME: There are mechanisms in place that attempt to do that. We’ve got daily sales reports that go to all the key managers and give people daily updates on what’s selling and what’s not selling. This provokes conversation between designers and sales people. Then that discussion becomes part of the social context [at the company]. That’s a best practice of the industry — that’s not something we invented.

We’ve also created a culture within the marketing team that encourages them to always look for that next big crazy idea, of which probably 5% actually gets executed. But when that 5% actually happens, people get a tremendous sense of ownership, a tremendous sense of building something from nothing that wasn’t necessarily on a business plan. So there’s a 95% tolerance to do all this wild stuff that’s far out of the range or the scope of our plan or capacity or budget, but we allow it, we encourage it, we cultivate it.

RL: How do you cultivate that type of environment?

ME: Wild ambition is quite stimulating. My business partners and I are serial entrepreneurs and we’re not going to limit ourselves. When I brewed up the idea for Complex, I was way deep in debt. That idea could never have manifested its way to the top if this organization was publicly held or owned by a larger company. It probably would have been suffocated and stifled early.

RL: Given the culture of the company, are there specific qualities you look for in employees?

ME: We don’t have the most refined human resource process. Maybe the parent in me, the nurturer in me, wishes that we could be better at vetting, better at nurturing, but we don’t have that kind of a culture. We push people out of their comfort zones. People that don’t have the chops to deal with a little bit of anxiety aren’t going to be able to swim here. They’re going to sink.

We just try to let employees know coming in that it’s going to be disruptive, that things are fluid. The sands are going to shift, not because someone’s trying to undermine you or for some emotional reason, but because that’s the way the industry is. So people who aren’t adaptive don’t necessarily do well here. The multi-disciplinarians are the ones that are the most useful, for sure.

The Virtues of Retail

RL: What went into the decision to get into retail?

ME: Best practices of other brands tell me I have to do it. [Retail] was out of my comfort zone; therefore, I needed to make it my comfort zone. With retail, you control your own destiny — everything from controlling the marketing message at the point of sale to getting faster and more accurate feedback on the product. Having your own retail stores gives you an amazing aptitude to correct your product range. You could test something in real time in the market. Also, we can present our own brand in a more meaningful way than anyone else can present it for us. I only wish I did it sooner.

RL: Did your company have a lot of experience running retail?

ME: Zero.

RL: So how did you tackle that?

ME: You screw up. You have to have the tolerance for screwing up. There needs to be a line item in your budget that says, “Screwing up.” You might call it something prettier for the bank, like miscellaneous. But you’ve got to pad [the budget] and you have to have that tolerance.

I started the [retail] business in outlets to cut my teeth. If you look at Ralph Lauren’s numbers, his predominant retail business comes from his outlet business. [Outlets] are less cost per square foot and so I could take my time to figure out: Do I have the staff for this? Do we need to hire regional managers? What about computer systems, restocking from my warehouse as I react to the department store versus my own stores? Slowly, we kept tweaking, tweaking, tweaking, and finally we were ready for our first [full-price] store. Outlet and [full-price] are two different things, but you learn the basics, like working your way up to a black belt.

RL: How did your wholesale clients feel when they heard that you were going into retail?

ME: They’re fine with it. In fact, many of them were eager — especially the bigger box retailers — because it helps strengthen our brand equity. It helps put the flag in the ground that you’re not going anywhere.

Next Generation Marketer

RL: In addition to the fashion brands, you have Complex magazine and Marc Ecko Entertainment. Do you see those as tied into the brand?

ME: I see them as related. I don’t operate like an ambassador brand, like Nike. Nike owns all things sports — from Tiger to Jordan to Bo Jackson. That’s an ambassador brand. They came up during the ’70s and ’80s, when you could run a TV spot and actually make a dent. In those days, you could have a “revolution moment” like a Super Bowl ad. Those are best practices of another era, another time.

In this day, when media is so atomized and disparate, how do you communicate [to your market]? How do I make a dent? Some of the laws of authorship and branding have changed. It’s less about the heavy-handed branding and more about the authorship. I want to convince consumers that I can author other things and I get credit for being more than just a one-dimensional fashion designer.

RL: With Complex, for example, how do consumers identify it with Marc Ecko if doesn’t have “heavy-handed” branding?

ME: The core readers of the magazine know that it’s us. Besides, how can I be heavy-handed about my brand and expect Diesel to advertise inside there? The first six pages of ads in the magazine are competitors. So I needed to back away in order to make the advertisers comfortable. How do I transcend being just a designer? By doing something more than what a designer would do. That’s what Complex is about. It’s the same with Marc Ecko Entertainment. I’ve got the license for Dexter, the Showtime TV series, and we’re creating a [video] game that comes out in ’09. We’ll create an iPhone game also. But it’s not like players will be Dexter killing a guy wearing an Ecko T-shirt. We’ll have a small mention on the back of the box, but not in the game. Enough consumers will know it’s Ecko. It’s like a “Six Degrees of Marc Ecko” thing that I’m trying to create; I think it could be meaningful to the brand.

I could have just taken those resources and bought big outdoor billboards, but would it effectively create the same kind of emotional transaction as being a guy who could author a moment of pop culture? Who could author some new consumer product that’s kind of cool and sometimes very logically associated to the brand? It’ll make you scratch your head and think, “Wow! I didn’t expect that from him.”

RL: I imagine that people want to partner with you all the time. How do you decide which ones you’re going to go forward with?

ME: The most important thing [for] any designer, creator, business leader or anyone who is holding the pen to make the transaction to fund something is to decide what you don’t do. That’s the hardest thing.

RL: Marc Ecko Enterprises is a privately held company. Any plans to take it public or to exit?

ME: I don’t know. I can’t really see further than three or five years out. I don’t see any kind of exit in the short term.

RL: Why not?

ME: Because I think I’ve got a lot more to achieve. I think I’d be underselling myself. Maybe it’s a little ego or maybe it’s real. Also, I’m a little afraid to work for someone else and I’m a little afraid of not doing anything at all. Actually, I’m a lot afraid of that. Hey, I’m young.

Philanthropy

RL: Can you tell us about your philanthropy initiatives?

ME: I’ve got one organization called SEE, Sweat Equity Enterprises. It is a design education curriculum program for underserved kids. We take in a new batch of ninth graders every year. It’s amazing to see that three or four weeks of Photoshop or Illustrator [design software] classes changes the kids’ perceptions of what they could do with their doodling.

The other organization we have is Tikva Children’s Home in Odessa, Ukraine. My partner, Seth [Gerszberg], found the orphanage on a trip to Russia about seven or eight years ago. This orphanage was being run so badly, and these kids were just all over the streets. We could see what it could become. Tikva means “hope” in Hebrew. I think it was probably the first hostile takeover of an orphanage in history. Now we’ve got almost 400 kids in the program. Being in the philanthropy business is messy, man. In business, there’s no room for emotions. In philanthropy, you got to tolerate emotions, so it’s heavy stuff.

Pop Culture Enthusiasm

RL: Why did you buy Barry Bonds’s recordbreaking baseball?

ME: I bought the baseball because it was a great pop culture moment. People have really strong opinions about that ball. During Barry’s race up to breaking Hank Aaron’s record, you just felt a feverish tone. It is a rich debate that is loaded with so much meaning. And just like America, baseball has a lot of ugly bits and pretty bits and bits that you begrudge and bits that you hold up on a pedestal. It’s not perfect. And I thought that that was something really kind of cool to engage in. It would be in the spirit of watching American Idol.

It’s not the first pop culture [object that I’ve purchased], although it was probably the larger scale in terms of the transaction. I own Yoda. A lot of people don’t know that, but I got the original Yoda sculpture and model that they built all the casts off of.

RL: What does that have to do with Marc Ecko?

ME: It shows people the way I think. Maybe it’s a little bit of the P.T. Barnum in me. Maybe it’s the populist in me. Maybe it’s the narcissist. Maybe it’s all those things.

UrbanDaddy: A Publishing Success in Web 1.0 Simplicity

2008-11-27T18:59:00.000-08:00

The Gentleman Boxer

2008-11-27T18:55:00.000-08:00

Well-educated, well-off, from a good family . . . what makes Tor Hamer fight?

By Chloe A. Hilliard

So far, the knockout blow to boxing hasn't landed, but, like a punch-drunk fighter in the last round of a long bout, the "sweet science" is hemorrhaging badly after uppercuts from competitors like mixed martial arts; disinterest from a public increasingly turned off to the thought of brain damage as a public spectacle; and decades of its own corruption.

Why would anyone with half a brain—and a desire to keep it intact—have any interest in joining a waning enterprise like boxing?

But there he is, standing in one of the four practice rings at Gleason's Gym, the throwback heart of Brooklyn's glorious past as a boxing power.

New York's odd new hope in the storied heavyweight division is a young man with the marquee-ready name of Tor Hamer, who just might throw off professional pugilism's miserable recent record and bring back those rarest of days: the epoch of the educated, erudite Gentleman Boxer.

Hamer is thoughtfully considering the words of his trainer, with whom he is having a discussion that seems surprisingly philosophical for one taking place in a damp, sweaty, and stifling gymnasium: "How do I distinguish between a slip and a body shot?" the muscular young black man asks, sounding as if he could be discussing a business deal.

And in a way, he is. The fight he's preparing for will be his first professional bout after an amateur career of 34 wins and one loss.

The six-foot-two-inch 25-year-old weighs 225 pounds. He's a two-time New York Golden Gloves winner and an Empire State Games champion, and this past summer, he avenged his sole defeat to become the National Golden Gloves champion. Despite turning pro, Hamer will close out 2008 as the country's number one ranked amateur super-heavyweight.

It's an impressive résumé. But it's Hamer's other tale-of-the-tape that has sport's insiders marveling at him: He has a Harvard-educated father and a Villanova-educated mother, and a Penn State degree himself, and was brought up partly in Harlem but also in suburban Baltimore and upscale Manhattan at largely white private and charter schools.

"What the fuck is he fighting for?" the Voice overheard a veteran boxing reporter ask when he was informed of Hamer's pedigree.

It's not hard to get an answer to that question. Hamer is happy to discourse on that subject, as well as just about any other. He's talkative. He's charming. And when he fights, a small army shows up to support him—and this black fighter's entourage is mostly made up of white friends, some of whom he met in private school and college.

Hamer knows that he's an unusual man to enter the ring. But as long as he keeps winning, he may be putting together one of the most remarkable runs at boxing supremacy in memory—one that boxing itself, and the heavyweight division in particular, couldn't need more.

"Throw. Fake. Fake again. Bang! Bang! Yes, that's it!"

As Hamer spars at Gleason's, sweat dripping from his face and torso, his trainer, Shawn Razor, keeps shouting encouragement. A former boxer himself, Razor notes that the practice session is being watched closely by others at the gym: "Lots of people are anticipating this fight," he says. "So many people in here want to be like him. I don't mean to brag, but he's the best thing here."

Razor has been training Hamer since he walked into Gleason's Gym two years ago. "He has It," Razor says about his pupil. "Everything about him. His character. Penn State. His smile. He can fight. There is no American heavyweight with the charisma and mindset of Tor."

As Hamer works out, it's plain to see that he's quick and strong. But if there's one general concern about him, it's his size. For a heavyweight, he's not very tall. In recent years, America has given up its storied dominance of the heavyweight division to Eastern European giants: The Ukrainian Klitschko brothers stand at six feet six inches and six feet seven inches. Wladimir, the younger, holds the IBF, WBO, and IBO heavyweight titles; Vitali is the WBC heavyweight champion.

"Size isn't everything," says Razor. But he admits that it's the question he gets the most about his student. " 'He's too small to be a heavyweight,' they say. 'He's going to get killed,' " Razor says he hears all the time.

So far, the skeptics have been proved wrong. Hamer is quick to point out that his only loss as an amateur was actually a tie—the victory was awarded to Lenroy Thompson on a complex computerized tie-breaking formula. Hamer avenged the loss by beating Thompson a few months later.

If he came close to a perfect amateur record, however, turning pro is another matter. It took some soul-searching, but Hamer decided to hold off on his plans to enter a graduate program in urban planning at least until next fall. For now, he's going to keep going where his fists take him.

Fighting professionally isn't something he really set out to do, Hamer admits. But you don't get to be the country's top-ranked amateur and not turn pro, he says. After winning the National Golden Gloves tournament in May, he was approached by the sport's three biggest promoters—Oscar De La Hoya's Golden Boy Promotions, Don King Productions, and DiBella Entertainment. He decided to go with DiBella, which is based in New York and specializes in heavyweights. "I said I would never go pro without a suitcase full of money," he says.

"They offered me a suitcase."

With his academic plans on hold and a three-year contract under his belt, Hamer prepares for his debut on a bigger stage. But he's no Rocky Balboa—at least en it comes to pre-dawn decation.

"I hate getting up in the morning," Hamer says. "Most fighters are up for a three-mile run at 6 a.m. Then they train and spar. I wake up at 11 most days. And I've always worked out in the evening, since my days in high school. Karate, basketball, fencing practice—all of that was after school."

After his parents' divorce, Hamer spent his early childhood with his mother in a Baltimore suburb, where they were the only African-American family in a white neighborhood. At 13, he moved back to New York to live with his father.

"I came to New York and went to the Day School [now the Trevor Day School] and then a charter school, which was more diverse, but I already had my social network," he says.

"I've always had more white friends than black," he adds. "I'm used to it, being the center of attention. I'm either one of a few or the only African-American in my circle. I'm used to people saying, 'Who's the black kid?' "

As a teenager, Hamer had run-ins with the law twice, and both times, it made the news—at the time, his father was a high-ranked city official.

"The Daily News called him a thug," remembers Hamer's father, Irving, who is now the deputy superintendent of schools in Memphis. "Since I was a controversial figure, Tor drew more attention."

Irving received a master's degree and a doctorate from Harvard and began teaching in the late 1960s. He served as the New York Urban League's director of education, and then as a deputy commissioner in the city's Education Department. In 1998, he was appointed to the city's Board of Education—a body that was later disbanded when Mayor Bloomberg took control of the city's schools.

While he was on the board, however, Irving ran into controversy several times. He pushed for technological progress, advocating for students to have access to laptops and the Internet, but he caught flak when it was reported that he had a financial interest in a testing company seeking a contract with city schools. Irving subsequently left his position with the testing company.

In January 2001, Tor was charged with misdemeanor assault after he injured a man in a subway-station fistfight. A few months after the arrest, Irving and his colleagues were preparing to elect a board president, which would decide the philosophical direction of the board. Irving was expected, in a close vote, to side with a member who held similar views. Instead, he surprisingly cast what turned out to be the deciding vote for Ninfa Segarra, a woman who supported school vouchers and was diametrically opposed to Irving's own philosophies. Trying to make sense of the vote, several newspapers uncovered the fact that, on the day of Tor's arrest in January, Segarra had called someone she knew in the police department to help Irving get information about his son.

Irving told the Times that although he was grateful for Segarra's gesture, "I want to state emphatically that I did not trade my vote for assistance on my son's behalf."

"They made it seem like I was parenting a thug. He got arrested twice," Irving says. "They weren't crimes. It was more mischief."

Tor's two arrests were both results of fistfights. Besides the subway beating, the other happened after Tor says he was called a racial slur. "What I learned from those experiences is that I have an energy inside of me that needs to be expressed," he says. "Now, that energy is in a controlled environment, and I don't feel aggressive anymore. In boxing, you have to have something driving you besides money."

Before he put on gloves, Tor had long thrived at sports that let him express his aggression. He won 16 national championships in four different categories of martial arts and was also a competitive fencer.

"Tor was notorious—I think that should be his nickname," says Adam Cohen, a friend who met him through private-school friends and who now handles his publicity. "He has a name around the private-high-school world in Manhattan. He was an intimidating character. He was training in kickboxing—who does that in private school in Manhattan?"

It was only in college that Tor took up boxing. "My dad was completely against it. He told me I was a dilettante, and I should stick to school and work out," Tor says.

"Tor Hamer is the product of a mother and father who are well-educated. Boxing seemed to be counterintuitive. He has options," says Irving, who adds that he was surprised at how quickly Tor's success mounted. But for Tor, it felt like a natural fit.

"Individualized sports suited me much better. That translated to my persona. I'm an only child. 'Selfish' comes to mind, but not so much in a way that prevents me from interacting with people in a beneficial manner," he explains. "I've traveled. Opened doors. And I feel proud of myself. No kid wants to say, 'I want to be a real estate manager when I grow up.' I want to be the strongest man in the world. I get to kick ass for a living.

"The only problem is that I have to put myself on the line."

But Hamer is no dummy. He may work out at Gleason's, but he's also trying to work Gleason's.

The gym's owner, Bruce Silverglade, says he's seriously considering a business proposal the young boxer approached him with.

"I have people come to me with ideas all the time," he says. "He had a plan and good ambitions. I verified the information in his résumé. He gave a nice presentation."

Hamer wants to persuade Silverglade to re-establish a presence in Manhattan by opening a satellite gym in Harlem. And he's also talked to Silverglade about taking over the entire operation. "We've had discussions about buying the one in Brooklyn," Silverglade confirms. "He wants to open the one in Harlem, but he has ambitions to purchase the whole corporation."

Hamer has also impressed Joe Higgins, president of USA Boxing Metro, which oversees the amateur game in New York.

"He's done quite well for himself. Tor is a very talented intellectual, a fine example for my athletes. He was captain-type material. You'd make him the athletic representative on a board of directors," Higgins says. "Because he's such a good guy, I was concerned he wasn't going to take it seriously. This kid was special when I saw him—even when he was green. And I'm not just talking about him as a boxer. Way back when Barack Obama was beginning his race for president, Tor and I would have great discussions about politics, the presidential campaign. . . . What's better for boxing?" Higgins asks. "There is no one saying anything bad about him."

Sure, Hamer's got charisma and quick feet. But if he was such a great amateur, why didn't he go to Beijing? The U.S. amateurs had a miserable Olympics and could have used a winner.

Higgins explains that Hamer has come on quickly in the past year. But when the U.S. Olympic team was put together a year earlier, Hamer didn't enter the tournaments he needed to in order to be chosen. "I think if you ask him, he'll tell you he was in school. We would have boxing tournaments, and when he wasn't fighting, he would be doing homework," Higgins says.

"Tor is very similar to Joe Frazier, but he fights a little quicker and he's better. He hits as hard," Higgins says. (Hamer has actually trained with Frazier in Philadelphia.) "This summer, at the U.S. Championship, in the first round of a semifinal match, Tor knocked out his opponent and knocked his teeth out. Three or four of them. We felt terrible. People were saying Tor was a little too small for the heavyweight, but this opponent was from the Army, and he was wearing a mouthpiece and headgear. I've seen thousands of fights and, sure, I've seen a tooth get punched out. I'm talking teeth! I'd never seen that."

Not surprisingly, Higgins is very optimistic about Hamer's future as a pro. "He needs to build up the right way. Don't fast-track him to where he is overmatched," he says. "I could see in three to four years, he'll be fighting for a world championship. He'll get there. He's not doing this to not be great at it.

"He's a great story for America."

It's October 22, a Wednesday night. The crowd inside B.B. King Blues Club & Grill in Times Square is milling around until the start of the night's event—an eight-fight card presented by DiBella Entertainment's Broadway Boxing series.

Previous events in the series took place in the spacious Hammerstein Ballroom, but the decrease in the demand for boxing means a decrease in venue size.

"Watch this kid, Tor Hamer," DiBella, the promoter, says as he works the room. "I think he's going to be good." Standing at six feet four inches, DiBella is wearing designer jeans, a graphic T-shirt, and a leather blazer. Diamond earrings and a gold chain complete the ensemble. He glad-hands a group of older white men in sweaters and button-down shirts, then bounces over to a contingent of Europeans in colored leather jackets, with their collars turned up and enough product in their hair to compete with an Exxon oil spill. They're here to support a Montenegran fighter who's been training in the Bronx. DiBella then says hello to the Brooklyn constituency (read: the handful of black boxing fans). In the audience at a boxing match, at least, we really all do get along.

Backstage, Hamer is being fussed over by his friend Christopher Johnson, who is beaming with pride. He's a slim white guy in a blazer and a "Team Tor" baseball cap. While Hamer talks to others, Johnson pats him on the back like a proud parent.

"I first met Tor when he was training in Philly with Joe Frazier. We became close friends. He's a normal Joe," Johnson says. "I came all the way from San Francisco for this. I would never have missed this. I'm flying back out in three hours."

It's Hamer's professional debut, and if the venue is modest, there's also the odd color scheme: Part of tonight's proceeds go to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, which is why the ring is pink and the boxers are wearing pink boxing gloves.

When Hamer is announced, his small army of more than 100 friends—the majority of whom are in the $150 ringside VIP seats—stand and yell. It's the biggest response of the entire night.

Hamer's opponent is Joe Rabotte, a lumbering giant who outweighs Hamer by 40 pounds and has come up from South Carolina with a professional record of two wins and three losses. Sight unseen, Hamer had sized him up as a "tomato can" a couple of days earlier: "He's a guy who woke up one day and decided to try boxing. You ever see the first Rocky, where he's fighting in the smoky bar? That is the definition of a tomato can."

The bell rings for the first round, and Hamer charges from his corner, light on his toes. Rabotte has a heavier step. They exchange jabs and body blows. Tor angles his body low and manages to work in the very same slip-jabs his trainer had stressed days before.

Then Hamer unleashes two straight right hands, putting Rabotte on the canvas and into the ropes. Hamer hits him with another vicious right, and the bell rings.

The boxing reporters compare notes, liking what they see. Tor's attacks, they say, are tiring out Rabotte quickly.

At the bell for the second round, Hamer is dancing again. He sends a left hook into Rabotte's torso. Another left hook, a right jab, another left.

Rabotte's down again. And the referee ends the fight.

Hamer wins his first pro fight on a TKO.

His father, Irving, jumps to his feet and takes a bow. Hamer's friends hug and cheer.

Forty-four seconds into the second round of a match that was scheduled to last four rounds, Tor Hamer is now an undefeated professional heavyweight boxer.

A day later, DiBella tells the Voice, "One of the things that is missing is a heavyweight American that people can believe in. Tor isn't well enough known and has only had one pro fight, but I think a year from now, a lot more people are going to know who he is."

DiBella says his plan is to expose Tor in additional four-round fights, eventually getting him up to 10–12 rounders. "That's when you can make money."

A guy like Hamer, he says, can help an industry that's ailing. "Right now, boxing isn't at its high point," he says. DiBella was the former head of programming for HBO Sports before he left to start his own company in 2000. "If you look at ESPN—when I was young, it was paying $50,000 to $60,000 for a show. Now, they pay $20,000 to a promoter for a boxing show. The boxer is getting a $5,000 to $6,000 total purse to split with his people and to put his health at risk. All we need is for one heavyweight in the United States to become a champion, and that will give boxing a big lift."

And DiBella believes Tor has that kind of potential. "Being a college grad, he has a different fan base. He has a different core group than the guys from the 'hood. He has things that can transcend."

Hamer himself, as always, is philosophical. He's ready for the countless jabs he'll have to absorb if he's going to become a household name. But he's already got that plan about taking over Gleason's. And, anyway, money's not really that important: "It's not so much about becoming rich. My ambitions aren't that bold. I just want success," he says.

"And a world title."