May 2, 2007

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    Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

     

    No deal is better than one that ignores labor realities.

    REVIEW & OUTLOOK

    Immigration Spring
    No deal is better than one that ignores labor realities.

    Wednesday, May 2, 2007 12:01 a.m.

    Yesterday’s May Day immigration demonstrations dominated cable TV, but they were more sound than substance. The bigger news is the recent Wall Street Journal report that illegal border crossings have slowed by more than 10% this year. The Bush Administration credits stepped-up enforcement, but our guess is that the cause is mostly labor supply and demand.

    A slump in the housing market has resulted in fewer jobs in the building trades, which are increasingly filled by Latino immigrants. With fewer jobs available, fewer immigrants are headed north. It’s another example of the market’s ability to determine how much foreign labor our economy needs. It also indicates that immigrants come here primarily to work, not to idle and collect welfare.

    We’d like to think these economic realities will inform any legislation produced this year. Based on the selective leaks from Capitol Hill, it’s hard to know what kind of “reforms” Congress is cooking up. But smoke from the backroom suggests that the status quo might be preferable to some of the proposed bipartisan compromises. Given that illegal immigration is caused above all by a worker shortage for certain types of jobs in the U.S., any reform that doesn’t take into account labor-market needs won’t solve the problem and risks making matters worse.

    Unfortunately, the immigration draft proposal recently circulated by the Bush Administration all but ignores the economic factors that drive illegal immigration. Aside from that, the proposal is unduly restrictive and thus probably unworkable.

    Its anti-family provisions would end the ability of U.S. citizens to sponsor their parents, children and siblings for immigration. In addition to departing from U.S. tradition, this would have a damaging impact on immigrant entrepreneurs, who typically rely on relatives–think of your dry cleaner or the corner bodega–to help run their small businesses. It’s also a startling about-face for President Bush, who promised immigration reforms that would “encourage family reunification” and repeatedly has said that “family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande.”

    As for dealing with the estimated 12 million illegal aliens already here, the White House is bowing to GOP restrictionists. To gain legal status, an immigrant would have to pay $3,500 in fines and fees for a three-year visa. He could renew the visa once, for another three years (and another $3,500). To get permanent legal residency, he’d have to return to his home country and pay an additional $10,000 fine to re-enter the U.S. (if and when the application is approved).

    Such measures all but guarantee low compliance. Few illegal immigrants will be able to afford the steep fines, and fewer will want to come forward if it means giving up their jobs for weeks or months to return to their native countries. This so-called “touch-back” provision will be viewed in the migrant community as deportation by other means. Returning to the U.S. is unlikely to be as easy as advertised, as red tape is deployed to discourage re-entry. The result would be that most illegals would stay in the shadows.

    The proposal’s guest worker provision for handling future labor flows is also problematic, as Stuart Anderson of the National Foundation for American Policy points out in a recent paper. It would require an immigrant to pay $1,500 to obtain a visa good for two years, at which time he would be required to return home for six months. This amounts to a tax on workers and a needless disruption for both immigrants and employers. Businesses want to retain their best workers, not see them sent home by the feds according to some arbitrary two-year deadline. Instead of matching jobs with workers, this kind of guest worker provision would merely encourage a black market in labor.

    We hope a compromise is still possible, and we think a realistic guest worker program would make sense both for the U.S. economy and the needs of post-9/11 security. But any policy overhaul that provides little incentive for illegals in the U.S. to acknowledge their status, and then prices legal entry out of reach for most future workers, is likely to increase illegal immigration. Which is to say that any reform failing to recognize labor market realities is worse than no reform at all.

    Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

     

    Today’s Papers

    Promise Keeper
    By Daniel Politi
    Posted Wednesday, May 2, 2007, at 6:55 A.M. E.T.

    The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times lead, while the Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox, with news that President Bush made good on his promise to veto the $124 billion war-spending bill, which Congress passed last week. “Setting a deadline for withdrawal is setting a date for failure, and that would be irresponsible,” Bush said after issuing the second veto of his presidency. Democratic lawmakers remained defiant, although everyone notes some sort of compromise is likely since they don’t have enough votes to override the veto.

    USA Today leads with the results of a six-year international study that shows there has been a sharp decline in the number of deaths and heart failure among patients hospitalized for heart attacks or severe chest pains. Researchers believe the results are tied to an increase in the use of angioplasty as well as new drugs designed to treat heart conditions.

    Everyone knew the veto was coming, so Democrats and Bush tried to make the most out of the day with symbolic gestures. Democrats held an atypical signing ceremony that was set to coincide with the fourth anniversary of Bush’s speech on an aircraft carrier where, under a banner that read “Mission Accomplished,” he declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq. The LAT notes that at that time 139 Americans had died in Iraq, a number that has increased by 3,213. Bush spent much of yesterday at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, where he was briefed by commanders and spoke before military leaders from around the world. When it was time to sign the veto, the president used a pen that was a gift from the father of a Marine who was killed in Iraq.

    Bush will host congressional leaders at the White House today to discuss possible compromises to the bill. Everyone seems to agree Democrats will probably drop the timelines and the next sticking point is likely to surround benchmarks that lawmakers want to impose on the Iraqi government. Republicans seemed open to the idea, and the NYT gets word that Bush might be willing to support them but only if they are nonbinding.

    USAT fronts word that the State Department will be conducting a mental-health survey of 1,400 employees who served in Iraq, after it was discovered that many of them suffer from the same symptoms as those that are affecting U.S. troops. With the survey, the State Department hopes to find out how many of its employees are suffering from mental problems because of their work in a war zone. Everyone notes Iraqi officials said the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq may have been killed but U.S. military officials could not confirm the claims.

    Everyone goes inside with word that two former World Bank officials said Paul Wolfowitz has misled those who are investigating the pay raise and promotion package given to his companion, Shaha Ali Riza. The former chairman of the World Bank’s ethics committee said that, contrary to Wolfowitz’s claim, his committee was never fully briefed on the package. The bank’s former general counsel claims that Wolfowitz insisted on keeping “professional contact” with Riza, a demand that everyone seemed to find unacceptable. In the end, according to the former official, neither the bank’s board nor the ethics committee approved the package that was awarded to Riza.

    The WSJ tops its business newsbox, and almost everyone else fronts, news that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. made an unsolicited $5 billion takeover bid for Dow Jones, the WSJ‘s publisher. Murdoch’s $60-a-share offer represents a substantial premium over the trading value of the stock. The WSJ, which has extensive coverage of the developments, goes high with speculation that Murdoch’s move might bring in other bidders. (Slate‘s Daniel Gross says that if “Dow Jones puts itself up for sale, it could kick off the mother of all auctions.”) Wall Street reacted enthusiastically to the news and Dow Jones shares increased more than 50 percent.

    The key to whether Murdoch’s bid will be successful lies with members of the Bancroft family, who control more than 60 percent of the company’s voting power. In a statement yesterday, a representative said that family members who hold more than 50 percent of the voting power would oppose the bid. Murdoch remained undeterred and insisted there is still “plenty of time.” Everyone ties Murdoch’s desire for Dow Jones with News Corp.’s plans to launch a new financial news channel this summer. In a separate piece inside, the WSJ wonders whether Murdoch’s high-priced offer is meant to deter other bids and questions if the mogul views Dow Jones “as a trophy property that would cap decades of media deal making.”

    Everyone goes inside with word that there was no sign of Fidel Castro during yesterday’s May Day parade in Havana. This was the third time in 48 years that Castro missed the march. Before the parade, there was wild speculation that Castro was going to make his first public appearance since undergoing surgery nine months ago. In the United States, yesterday’s protests for immigrants’ rights across the country were much smaller than last year. The LAT fronts the Los Angeles rally, where the day ended with clashes between demonstrators and police.

    The NYT fronts a look at how U.S. officials are trying to figure out a way to prevent British citizens of Pakistani descent from being able to enter the country without a visa. Officials say they are concerned that many of the terror plots uncovered recently involve Britons who have ties to Pakistan, and just like any British citizen they could enter the United States without a visa. For some reason the paper decides to refer to this, in the story and headline, as a “visa loophole.”

    Bipartisanship is wonderful … Referring to the negotiations on the war-spending bill, Republican Sen. George Voinovich tells the Post that “some kind of compromise has to be worked out. … That’s how it’s done. Everybody holds their nose and maybe a couple of times vomits, but you get it done.”

    Daniel Politi writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.

     

    What happens when a racket turns into a religion? Mormonism.

    God Is Not Great
    What happens when a racket turns into a religion? Mormonism.
    By Christopher Hitchens
    Updated Friday, April 27, 2007, at 7:24 A.M. E.T.


    From: Christopher Hitchens
    Subject: Religion Poisons Everything
    Posted Wednesday, April 25, 2007, at 1:31 PM ET

    There are four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.

    I do not think it is arrogant of me to claim that I had already discovered these four objections (as well as noticed the more vulgar and obvious fact that religion is used by those in temporal charge to invest themselves with authority) before my boyish voice had broken. I am morally certain that millions of other people came to very similar conclusions in very much the same way, and I have since met such people in hundreds of places, and in dozens of different countries. Many of them never believed, and many of them abandoned faith after a difficult struggle. Some of them had blinding moments of un-conviction that were every bit as instantaneous, though perhaps less epileptic and apocalyptic (and later more rationally and more morally justified) than Saul of Tarsus on the Damascene road. And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement between Professor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins, concerning “punctuated evolution” and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication. (My own annoyance at Professor Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, for their cringe-making proposal that atheists should conceitedly nominate themselves to be called “brights,” is a part of a continuous argument.) We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and—since there is no other metaphor—also the soul. We do not believe in heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever find that without these blandishments and threats we commit more crimes of greed or violence than the faithful. (In fact, if a proper statistical inquiry could ever be made, I am sure the evidence would be the other way.) We are reconciled to living only once, except through our children, for whom we are perfectly happy to notice that we must make way, and room. We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.

    Most important of all, perhaps, we infidels do not need any machinery of reinforcement. We are those who Blaise Pascal took into account when he wrote to the one who says, “I am so made that I cannot believe.”

    There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness. We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man’s most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no spot on earth is or could be “holier” than another: to the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the gallery to another, or to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty. Some of these excursions to the bookshelf or the lunch or the gallery will obviously, if they are serious, bring us into contact with belief and believers, from the great devotional painters and composers to the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Newman. These mighty scholars may have written many evil things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow. Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism, as did, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis for his refusal to collude with them. We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness.

    While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way—one might cite Pascal—and some of it is dreary and absurd—here one cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewis—both styles have something in common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear. How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible! The Aztecs had to tear open a human chest cavity every day just to make sure that the sun would rise. Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more times than that, perhaps, lest he be deaf. How much vanity must be concealed—not too effectively at that—in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan? How much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one’s own sin? How many needless assumptions must be made, and how much contortion is required, to receive every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to “fit” with the revealed words of ancient man-made deities? How many saints and miracles and councils and conclaves are required in order first to be able to establish a dogma and then—after infinite pain and loss and absurdity and cruelty—to be forced to rescind one of those dogmas? God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.

    The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did. Still less can they hope to tell us the “meaning” of later discoveries and developments which were, when they began, either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them. And yet—the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what “he” demands of us—from our diet to our observances to our sexual morality. In other words, in a vast and complicated discussion where we know more and more about less and less, yet can still hope for some enlightenment as we proceed, one faction—itself composed of mutually warring factions—has the sheer arrogance to tell us that we already have all the essential information we need. Such stupidity, combined with such pride, should be enough on its own to exclude “belief” from the debate. The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be protracted.

    The argument with faith is the foundation and origin of all arguments, because it is the beginning—but not the end—of all arguments about philosophy, science, history, and human nature. It is also the beginning—but by no means the end—of all disputes about the good life and the just city. Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other. For this reason, I would not prohibit it even if I thought I could. Very generous of me, you may say. But will the religious grant me the same indulgence? I ask because there is a real and serious difference between me and my religious friends, and the real and serious friends are sufficiently honest to admit it. I would be quite content to go to their children’s bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to “respect” their belief that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant, or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations. And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition—which is that they in turn leave me alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing. As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything.



    From: Christopher Hitchens
    Subject: Was Muhammad Epileptic?
    Posted Thursday, April 26, 2007, at 10:28 AM ET

    There is some question as to whether Islam is a separate religion at all. It initially fulfilled a need among Arabs for a distinctive or special creed, and is forever identified with their language and their impressive later conquests, which, while not as striking as those of the young Alexander of Macedonia, certainly conveyed an idea of being backed by a divine will until they petered out at the fringes of the Balkans and the Mediterranean. But Islam when examined is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require. Thus, far from being “born in the clear light of history,” as Ernest Renan so generously phrased it, Islam in its origins is just as shady and approximate as those from which it took its borrowings. It makes immense claims for itself, invokes prostrate submission or “surrender” as a maxim to its adherents, and demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain. There is nothing—absolutely nothing—in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption.

    The prophet died in the year 632 of our own approximate calendar. The first account of his life was set down a full hundred and twenty years later by Ibn Ishaq, whose original was lost and can only be consulted through its reworked form, authored by Ibn Hisham, who died in 834. Adding to this hearsay and obscurity, there is no agreed-upon account of how the Prophet’s followers assembled the Koran, or of how his various sayings (some of them written down by secretaries) became codified. And this familiar problem is further complicated—even more than in the Christian case—by the matter of succession. Unlike Jesus, who apparently undertook to return to earth very soon and who (pace the absurd Dan Brown) left no known descendants, Muhammad was a general and a politician and—though unlike Alexander of Macedonia a prolific father—left no instruction as to who was to take up his mantle. Quarrels over the leadership began almost as soon as he died, and so Islam had its first major schism—between the Sunni and the Shia—before it had even established itself as a system. We need take no side in the schism, except to point out that one at least of the schools of interpretation must be quite mistaken. And the initial identification of Islam with an earthly caliphate, made up of disputatious contenders for the said mantle, marked it from the very beginning as man-made.

    It is said by some Muslim authorities that during the first caliphate of Abu Bakr, immediately after Muhammad’s death, concern arose that his orally transmitted words might be forgotten. So many Muslim soldiers had been killed in battle that the number who had the Koran safely lodged in their memories had become alarmingly small. It was therefore decided to assemble every living witness, together with “pieces of paper, stones, palm leaves, shoulder-blades, ribs and bits of leather” on which sayings had been scribbled, and give them to Zaid ibn Thabit, one of the Prophet’s former secretaries, for an authoritative collation. Once this had been done, the believers had something like an authorized version.

    If true, this would date the Koran to a time fairly close to Muhammad’s own life. But we swiftly discover that there is no certainty or agreement about the truth of the story. Some say that it was Ali—the fourth and not the first caliph, and the founder of Shiism—who had the idea. Many others—the Sunni majority—assert that it was Caliph Uthman, who reigned from 644 to 656, who made the finalized decision. Told by one of his generals that soldiers from different provinces were fighting over discrepant accounts of the Koran, Uthman ordered Zaid ibn Thabit to bring together the various texts, unify them, and have them transcribed into one. When this task was complete, Uthman ordered standard copies to be sent to Kufa, Basra, Damascus, and elsewhere, with a master copy retained in Medina. Uthman thus played the canonical role that had been taken, in the standardization and purging and censorship of the Christian Bible, by Irenaeus and by Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria. The roll was called, and some texts were declared sacred and inerrant while others became “apocryphal.” Outdoing Athanasius, Uthman ordered that all earlier and rival editions be destroyed.

    Even supposing this version of events to be correct, which would mean that no chance existed for scholars ever to determine or even dispute what really happened in Muhammad’s time, Uthman’s attempt to abolish disagreement was a vain one. The written Arabic language has two features that make it difficult for an outsider to learn: it uses dots to distinguish consonants like “b” and “t,” and in its original form it had no sign or symbol for short vowels, which could be rendered by various dashes or comma-type marks. Vastly different readings even of Uthman’s version were enabled by these variations. Arabic script itself was not standardized until the later part of the ninth century, and in the meantime the undotted and oddly voweled Koran was generating wildly different explanations of itself, as it still does. This might not matter in the case of the Iliad, but remember that we are supposed to be talking about the unalterable (and final) word of god. There is obviously a connection between the sheer feebleness of this claim and the absolutely fanatical certainty with which it is advanced. To take one instance that can hardly be called negligible, the Arabic words written on the outside of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem are different from any version that appears in the Koran.

    The situation is even more shaky and deplorable when we come to the hadith, or that vast orally generated secondary literature which supposedly conveys the sayings and actions of Muhammad, the tale of the Koran’s compilation, and the sayings of “the companions of the Prophet.” Each hadith, in order to be considered authentic, must be supported in turn by an isnad, or chain, of supposedly reliable witnesses. Many Muslims allow their attitude to everyday life to be determined by these anecdotes: regarding dogs as unclean, for example, on the sole ground that Muhammad is said to have done so.

    As one might expect, the six authorized collections of hadith, which pile hearsay upon hearsay through the unwinding of the long spool of isnads (“A told B, who had it from C, who learned it from D”), were put together centuries after the events they purport to describe. One of the most famous of the six compilers, Bukhari, died 238 years after the death of Muhammad. Bukhari is deemed unusually reliable and honest by Muslims, and seems to have deserved his reputation in that, of the three hundred thousand attestations he accumulated in a lifetime devoted to the project, he ruled that two hundred thousand of them were entirely valueless and unsupported. Further exclusion of dubious traditions and questionable isnads reduced his grand total to ten thousand hadith. You are free to believe, if you so choose, that out of this formless mass of illiterate and half-remembered witnessing the pious Bukhari, more than two centuries later, managed to select only the pure and undefiled ones that would bear examination.

    The likelihood that any of this humanly derived rhetoric is “inerrant,” let alone “final,” is conclusively disproved not just by its innumerable contradictions and incoherencies but by the famous episode of the Koran’s alleged “satanic verses,” out of which Salman Rushdie was later to make a literary project. On this much-discussed occasion, Muhammad was seeking to conciliate some leading Meccan poly-theists and in due course experienced a “revelation” that allowed them after all to continue worshipping some of the older local deities. It struck him later that this could not be right and that he must have inadvertently been “channeled” by the devil, who for some reason had briefly chosen to relax his habit of combating monotheists on their own ground. (Muhammad believed devoutly not just in the devil himself but in minor desert devils, or djinns, as well.) It was noticed even by some of his wives that the Prophet was capable of having a “revelation” that happened to suit his short-term needs, and he was sometimes teased about it. We are further told—on no authority that need be believed—that when he experienced revelation in public he would sometimes be gripped by pain and experience loud ringing in his ears. Beads of sweat would burst out on him, even on the chilliest of days. Some heartless Christian critics have suggested that he was an epileptic (though they fail to notice the same symptoms in the seizure experienced by Paul on the road to Damascus), but there is no need for us to speculate in this way. It is enough to rephrase David Hume’s unavoidable question. Which is more likely—that a man should be used as a transmitter by god to deliver some already existing revelations, or that he should utter some already existing revelations and believe himself to be, or claim to be, ordered by god to do so? As for the pains and the noises in the head, or the sweat, one can only regret the seeming fact that direct communication with god is not an experience of calm, beauty, and lucidity.



    From: Christopher Hitchens
    Subject: Mormonism: A Racket Becomes a Religion
    Posted Friday, April 27, 2007, at 7:23 AM ET

    If the followers of the prophet Muhammad hoped to put an end to any future “revelations” after the immaculate conception of the Koran, they reckoned without the founder of what is now one of the world’s fastest-growing faiths. And they did not foresee (how could they, mammals as they were?) that the prophet of this ridiculous cult would model himself on theirs. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—hereafter known as the Mormons—was founded by a gifted opportunist who, despite couching his text in openly plagiarized Christian terms, announced that “I shall be to this generation a new Muhammad” and adopted as his fighting slogan the words, which he thought he had learned from Islam, “Either the Al-Koran or the sword.” He was too ignorant to know that if you use the word al you do not need another definite article, but then he did resemble Muhammad in being able only to make a borrowing out of other people’s bibles.

    In March 1826 a court in Bainbridge, New York, convicted a twenty-one-year-old man of being “a disorderly person and an impostor.” That ought to have been all we ever heard of Joseph Smith, who at trial admitted to defrauding citizens by organizing mad gold-digging expeditions and also to claiming to possess dark or “necromantic” powers. However, within four years he was back in the local newspapers (all of which one may still read) as the discoverer of the “Book of Mormon.” He had two huge local advantages which most mountebanks and charlatans do not possess. First, he was operating in the same hectically pious district that gave us the Shakers and several other self-proclaimed American prophets. So notorious did this local tendency become that the region became known as the “Burned-Over District,” in honor of the way in which it had surrendered to one religious craze after another. Second, he was operating in an area which, unlike large tracts of the newly opening North America, did possess the signs of an ancient history.

    A vanished and vanquished Indian civilization had bequeathed a considerable number of burial mounds, which when randomly and amateurishly desecrated were found to contain not merely bones but also quite advanced artifacts of stone, copper, and beaten silver. There were eight of these sites within twelve miles of the underperforming farm which the Smith family called home. There were two equally stupid schools or factions who took a fascinated interest in such matters: the first were the gold-diggers and treasure-diviners who brought their magic sticks and crystals and stuffed toads to bear in the search for lucre, and the second those who hoped to find the resting place of a lost tribe of Israel. Smith’s cleverness was to be a member of both groups, and to unite cupidity with half-baked anthropology.

    The actual story of the imposture is almost embarrassing to read, and almost embarrassingly easy to uncover. (It has been best told by Dr. Fawn Brodie, whose 1945 book No Man Knows My History was a good-faith attempt by a professional historian to put the kindest possible interpretation on the relevant “events.”) In brief, Joseph Smith announced that he had been visited (three times, as is customary) by an angel named Moroni. The said angel informed him of a book, “written upon gold plates,” which explained the origins of those living on the North American continent as well as the truths of the gospel. There were, further, two magic stones, set in the twin breastplates Urim and Thummim of the Old Testament, that would enable Smith himself to translate the aforesaid book. After many wrestlings, he brought this buried apparatus home with him on September 21, 1827, about eighteen months after his conviction for fraud. He then set about producing a translation.

    The resulting “books” turned out to be a record set down by ancient prophets, beginning with Nephi, son of Lephi, who had fled Jerusalem in approximately 600 BC and come to America. Many battles, curses, and afflictions accompanied their subsequent wanderings and those of their numerous progeny. How did the books turn out to be this way? Smith refused to show the golden plates to anybody, claiming that for other eyes to view them would mean death. But he encountered a problem that will be familiar to students of Islam. He was extremely glib and fluent as a debater and story-weaver, as many accounts attest. But he was illiterate, at least in the sense that while he could read a little, he could not write. A scribe was therefore necessary to take his inspired dictation. This scribe was at first his wife Emma and then, when more hands were necessary, a luckless neighbor named Martin Harris. Hearing Smith cite the words of Isaiah 29, verses 11–12, concerning the repeated injunction to “Read,” Harris mortgaged his farm to help in the task and moved in with the Smiths. He sat on one side of a blanket hung across the kitchen, and Smith sat on the other with his translation stones, intoning through the blanket. As if to make this an even happier scene, Harris was warned that if he tried to glimpse the plates, or look at the prophet, he would be struck dead.

    Mrs. Harris was having none of this, and was already furious with the fecklessness of her husband. She stole the first hundred and sixteen pages and challenged Smith to reproduce them, as presumably—given his power of revelation—he could. (Determined women like this appear far too seldom in the history of religion.) After a very bad few weeks, the ingenious Smith countered with another revelation. He could not replicate the original, which might be in the devil’s hands by now and open to a “satanic verses” interpretation. But the all-foreseeing Lord had meanwhile furnished some smaller plates, indeed the very plates of Nephi, which told a fairly similar tale. With infinite labor, the translation was resumed, with new scriveners behind the blanket as occasion demanded, and when it was completed all the original golden plates were transported to heaven, where apparently they remain to this day.

    Mormon partisans sometimes say, as do Muslims, that this cannot have been fraudulent because the work of deception would have been too much for one poor and illiterate man. They have on their side two useful points: if Muhammad was ever convicted in public of fraud and attempted necromancy we have no record of the fact, and Arabic is a language that is somewhat opaque even to the fairly fluent outsider. However, we know the Koran to be made up in part of earlier books and stories, and in the case of Smith it is likewise a simple if tedious task to discover that twenty-five thousand words of the Book of Mormon are taken directly from the Old Testament. These words can mainly be found in the chapters of Isaiah available in Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews: The Ten Tribes of Israel in America. This then popular work by a pious loony, claiming that the American Indians originated in the Middle East, seems to have started the other Smith on his gold-digging in the first place. A further two thousand words of the Book of Mormon are taken from the New Testament. Of the three hundred and fifty “names” in the book, more than one hundred come straight from the Bible and a hundred more are as near stolen as makes no difference. (The great Mark Twain famously referred to it as “chloroform in print,” but I accuse him of hitting too soft a target, since the book does actually contain “The Book of Ether.”) The words “and it came to pass” can be found at least two thousand times, which does admittedly have a soporific effect. Quite recent scholarship has exposed every single other Mormon “document” as at best a scrawny compromise and at worst a pitiful fake, as Dr. Brodie was obliged to notice when she reissued and updated her remarkable book in 1973.

    Like Muhammad, Smith could produce divine revelations at short notice and often simply to suit himself (especially, and like Muhammad, when he wanted a new girl and wished to take her as another wife). As a result, he overreached himself and came to a violent end, having meanwhile excommunicated almost all the poor men who had been his first disciples and who had been browbeaten into taking his dictation. Still, this story raises some very absorbing questions, concerning what happens when a plain racket turns into a serious religion before our eyes.

    It must be said for the “Latter-day Saints” (these conceited words were added to Smith’s original “Church of Jesus Christ” in 1833) that they have squarely faced one of the great difficulties of revealed religion. This is the problem of what to do about those who were born before the exclusive “revelation,” or who died without ever having the opportunity to share in its wonders. Christians used to resolve this problem by saying that Jesus descended into hell after his crucifixion, where it is thought that he saved or converted the dead. There is indeed a fine passage in Dante’s Inferno where he comes to rescue the spirits of great men like Aristotle, who had presumably been boiling away for centuries until he got around to them. (In another less ecumenical scene from the same book, the Prophet Muhammad is found being disemboweled in revolting detail.) The Mormons have improved on this rather backdated solution with something very literal-minded. They have assembled a gigantic genealogical database at a huge repository in Utah, and are busy filling it with the names of all people whose births, marriages, and deaths have been tabulated since records began. This is very useful if you want to look up your own family tree, and as long as you do not object to having your ancestors becoming Mormons. Every week, at special ceremonies in Mormon temples, the congregations meet and are given a certain quota of names of the departed to “pray in” to their church. This retrospective baptism of the dead seems harmless enough to me, but the American Jewish Committee became incensed when it was discovered that the Mormons had acquired the records of the Nazi “final solution,” and were industriously baptizing what for once could truly be called a “lost tribe”: the murdered Jews of Europe. For all its touching inefficacy, this exercise seemed in poor taste. I sympathize with the American Jewish Committee, but I nonetheless think that the followers of Mr. Smith should be congratulated for hitting upon even the most simpleminded technological solution to a problem that has defied solution ever since man first invented religion.

    Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

     

    Pirates of the Multiplex

    The Internet

    Under U.S. pressure, Swedish authorities are going after the popular Pirate Bay Web site for illegal distribution of video files. But if Hollywood wants to stop online pirates—who cost the industry some $7 billion in 2005—it needs to join them, not beat them.

    by Steven Daly March 2007

    ‘Steve TV’

    Pirate Bay co-founder and resident boy genius Gottfrid Svartholm, 22, photographed at the site’s headquarters, in Solna, Sweden. Photograph by Jonas Karlsson.

    I was a reluctant convert, to say the least. When I got the call from my old friend Richard back in late 2005, he sounded far too enthusiastic about the latest Internet gimmick that was going to “change my life.” Richard, you see, is prone to great enthusiasms, and I was not particularly disposed to listen to his ravings about some Web site called UKNova, which supposedly let him download all kinds of amazing British TV shows completely free of charge.

    I relented and signed up for UKNova membership. The site functions as a “torrent tracker,” a skeletal database that allows users to locate and share digital files with other users. Unlike some previous peer-to-peer content-sharing programs, the files are not located on a Web site or taken from any single source; they’re shared among members in the form of tiny digital fragments that are eventually reconstituted, like a completed jigsaw puzzle, as a single file on your desktop. The operation—which incidentally makes it difficult to sue members of a site like UKNova—is enabled by an ingenious little software application called BitTorrent, a paradigmatic advance in file sharing that has engendered many variants since its 2002 advent.

    Loath as I am to admit it, UKNova did change my life—at least as far as my viewing habits are concerned. After downloading free BitTorrent software, I could use UKNova to procure—slowly at first—television shows that would have hitherto obliged me to beg British friends and relatives to record them for me on VHS (remember tapes?) and send via airmail. The unalloyed thrill of watching all this downloaded Brit-TV stuff easily outweighed the nagging shame of staring at a computer screen for hours on end.

    Mock if you will, but I assure you that this was nothing but top-drawer telly: a typical evening’s viewing schedule might include an episode of Peter Ackroyd’s magisterial history of London, the upsetting documentary Rock Family Trees: The Prog Rock Years, and another on postwar British universities that made me feel vindicated for bypassing higher education. And thanks to the many kind souls who are digitizing their dusty VHS stacks for UKNova dissemination, I’ve acquired all manner of presumed-lost British TV classics, from the sci-fi mockumentary Alternative 3 to the groovy 1970 kids show Here Come the Double Deckers.

    I began storing all my UKNova downloads on blank DVDs—first on spindles of 10, then 25, then 50. I soon had enough material to program my own TV channel—Steve TV!—for weeks on end; my Time Warner Cable box was switched on only for live soccer games and weekly HBO favorites. This UKNova habit went well beyond the recreational-use stage: according to site statistics, I have downloaded a frankly embarrassing 800 gigabytes’ worth of files—well over 1,500 hours of programming. And since UKNova expects members to maintain a decent balance between material uploaded and downloaded, my computer stayed connected to the Internet for, more or less, 18 months straight in order to allow other users access to my file fragments. The cost of two burned-out hard drives seemed like a small price to pay.

    Then this BitTorrent junkie discovered that Philips made a DVD player (Model DVP642) that would play, straight from the disc, UKNova files that previously required hours of reprocessing to watch on a standard player. Which is when I started making over-enthusiastic phone calls to my friends.

    Surprisingly, not everyone was receptive to my BitTorrent evangelism—in fact, some went as far as to suggest I had turned into some kind of cyber-criminal. Sure, I knew that the Motion Picture Association of America claimed worldwide losses of $18.2 billion to movie piracy in 2005, $7.1 billion of which was ascribed to Internet file sharing. And I knew that even though the U.S. government had shut down prominent Internet operations for violating copyright laws—eDonkey, Grokster, Kazaa—there are now many BitTorrent mega-sites that continue to thrive; in particular, the Pirate Bay (ThePirateBay.org), based in Sweden, stands as probably the prime destination for anyone looking to download, unrestricted, the very latest in Hollywood movies, video games, TV shows, music, software, and pornography.

    But I was not some snickering teenager looking to get cool shit for free. I was a tasteful, middle-aged gent with a victimless hobby. The sprawling, lawless frontiers of the file-sharing universe looked too much like the Wild West to me—I was happy to stick to the Victorian tea party that is UKNova. In file-sharing terms, UKNova (originally created for soap-opera-craving British expats) is a genteel anomaly, a highly regulated community whose many rules include a strict ban on any material commercially available on DVD. Nonetheless, with its limited membership list and impressive inventory, the site shines through the surrounding chaos as an exemplary—albeit rudimentary—model of digital media distribution.

    As my exquisite digital-video library threatened to overrun my apartment, even my original BitTorrent pusher Richard was starting to talk about the dark side of the file-sharing phenomenon: according to him, this fun little application was going to bring about nothing less than the end of the entertainment industry as we know it. Typically hyperbolic, I thought—until my friend cited the damage file sharing had done to his former company, a marketer of left-leaning documentaries. Then again, weren’t his products targeted at exactly the same demographic of pesky young troublemakers who have the time and ingenuity to copy DVDs and share them over the Internet?

    Without doubt the entertainment industry is feeling the financial effects of Internet-based piracy—but, really, how bad could it get? There will surely always be a huge portion of the population far too busy to learn about intricate new file-sharing technologies, just as there will always be a large category of DVD releases for which only the legitimate version will do. I mean, what self-respecting film snob wants to show off his Criterion classics on a plastic spindle? And what father would give his little daughter a copy of the 20th-anniversary edition of The Little Mermaid with the title scrawled in Sharpie?

    When I awoke from my UKNova-induced idyll and looked at the bigger picture, it seemed like Sharpie stock must be on the rise. Legitimate-DVD sales have been slowing down for some time now. The movie studios as a whole are in trouble, and piracy is—along with rising costs—one of the main factors being cited. DVD revenue is a critical component of Hollywood’s bottom line, and with theatrical box-office receipts believed to be in long-term decline, DVD sales look set to become an increasingly important revenue stream.

    As long ago as November 2005, Warner Bros. abruptly laid off 260 employees (more than 5 percent of its staff) on a single day, this after a very healthy fiscal year. Soon after, Disney announced plans to cut more than twice that many jobs (which it did in summer 2006), and to drastically reduce the number of films on its annual production slate.

    The dominoes continued to tumble through late 2006 as we read countless business-section stories about Hollywood’s financial woes, along with heart-wrenching tales of movie-star salaries’ being cruelly slashed by millions of dollars. When multiplex titan George Lucas came out with the startling announcement that his company had decided that making feature films was now “too expensive and too risky” in the current climate, my friend Richard’s apocalypto vision of the show-business future started to seem more plausible than I could have ever imagined.

    The industry has assigned the task of repelling the pirate hordes to the Motion Picture Association of America, a body best characterized by a 2006 public-service announcement that shows action-movie oldsters Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger riding twin motorcycles in front of green-screened freeway mayhem. “Let’s terminate piracy!” bellows Schwarzenegger. Your more sentient Hollywood graybeards will have flashed back to 1982, when then M.P.A.A. president Jack Valenti fired off a warning to Sony about its newfangled Betamax video recorder. This sinister device, said Valenti, would do to the American film industry what “the Boston Strangler did to a woman alone.”

    The modern M.P.A.A., as if to prove itself capable of a more nuanced approach to the file-sharing threat, recently collaborated with the Boy Scouts of America, who are now offering a merit badge for anti-piracy activities. Another P.S.A. argues that people who buy pirated films are hurting Hollywood’s ordinary folks, the humble artisans who toil backstage building pedestals for the stars. The M.P.A.A.’s case might have carried more weight had it not featured the heartfelt testimony of Ben Affleck, a man who was paid $12.5 million to star in Gigli.

    Showdown

    If the online file-sharing universe is the Wild West, Sweden is Deadwood—a place where the rule of law leaves barely a footprint. Thanks to a combination of national copyright laws, laissez-faire social attitudes, and inexpensive and superior bandwidth, gentle little Sweden—which refers to itself as Europe’s “duck pond”—has become a file-sharing fortress in which more than 10 percent of its nine million citizens trade digital material, much of it provided by the country’s Pirate Bay site.

    Early on the morning of May 31, 2006, Swedish police launched the kind of cleanup operation the M.P.A.A. had long been craving. Law-enforcement officials raided eight locations related to Pirate Bay, with more than 50 police officers involved in arresting the site’s operators and seizing their computer equipment. As one Swedish Internet entrepreneur puts it, “When was the last time the Swedish police had 50 people doing anything?“

    Pirate Bay’s co-founder Fredrik Neij, at the Pirate Bay headquarters. Photograph by Dan Hansson. From SvD/Scanpix.

    When Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm first heard that there was police activity at the site’s main location, he jumped in a cab and headed straight there, only to be pulled over by a police car with lights flashing and siren blaring. Svartholm’s business partner, Fredrik Neij, had also been alerted to the raid in progress, and was able to back up most of Pirate Bay’s files before showing up and doing a bit of “who-are-you-ing” with the invading lawmen.

    If Svartholm and Neij’s experience sounds like something out of a generic mid-90s cyber-thriller, neither of them is exactly leading-man material. Neij, a 28-year-old who is the more gregarious of the pair, is a scruffy, impish type who regards his outlaw status with wry detachment; Svartholm is a sad-eyed 22-year-old with wispy hair and near-translucent skin that positively scream out “Dungeons and Dragons Master.”

    Although this pair of Internet scofflaws (or criminal masterminds, if you prefer) now live with the threat of prison sentences looming over their heads, neither seems particularly jittery as they conduct a brief tour of their modest empire on a sunny afternoon in Stockholm. The police raids focused particularly on the basement premises Pirate Bay occupies in the back of an office building in Solna, an unremarkable suburb of the city.

    Pirate Bay HQ is a shabby, low-ceilinged concrete bunker that bears little resemblance to anyone’s idea of a high-tech Death Star that is threatening to annihilate Hollywood. A handful of cheap desks are strewn with standard dude detritus: empty beer bottles, scattered paperwork, take-out-food cartons, and so on. In the middle of the floor stands a red-and-black Honda Super Sprint motorcycle belonging to Neij. It was moved inside after some of the kids in his neighborhood tried unsuccessfully to break the heavy-duty chain around the front wheel; instead, they burned a patch of paint with a lighter. “I don’t mind copying,” Neij notes, “but I don’t like taking.”

    Neij certainly didn’t like it when the Swedish police entered this facility and confiscated 186 pieces of computer equipment, most of which were servers, from him and his partner—particularly since only about 20 of those machines were connected to Pirate Bay. The other equipment belonged to PRQ, the legitimate Internet-service provider from which Neij and Svartholm make their living. In a back room there are now a few replacement servers stacked up in small, uneven piles.

    Despite the hardware hardships inflicted by the raids, Pirate Bay managed to find a temporary home in the Netherlands within 24 hours, and, thanks to borrowed equipment, the site was fully functional within three days. Fredrik Neij takes great pride in the way this rapid regeneration wrong-footed the authorities. “The prosecutor didn’t know we were back up,” he says. “A journalist asked him what he thought, and had to explain that the site was back up. The anti-piracy chief said, ‘They won’t be back up.’ When he was corrected, he said, ‘Well, it still works a bit bad.’” The Swedish government had been outdrawn by the fastest guns in Deadwood. (Incidentally, the HBO series of that name continues to be available for free download through Pirate Bay—along with such recent movies as Borat, Blood Diamond, Apocalypto, and Night at the Museum.)

    Pirate Bay has now taken careful steps to ensure that any future raids will inflict minimal disruption to the service. “We have divided the servers up geographically—they are hidden,” explains Svartholm. “If they come after us again they will only find our front end. A single metal box with a short message stuck on the front: ‘You forgot to take my label writer.’”

    In reality Svartholm does not expect another raid: “At this point it would be political suicide,” he says. Shortly after the raid more than 1,000 citizens attended Pirate Bay rallies in central Stockholm and Sweden’s second-largest city, Gothenburg, events which were captured by the quickie documentary Steal This Film. The recently formed Pirate Party doubled its membership, and even mainstream politicians—mindful of Sweden’s million or so file-sharing voters—weighed in on the Pirates’ behalf.

    As Neij pilots his red, rusted Chevy Van 20 toward another scene of the May raids, he explains that he himself is too busy to maintain a serious file-sharing habit. In keeping with the classic computer-geek stereotype, he admits to “pretty much downloading every episode of every sci-fi series that’s out there.” The late-night animated show Robot Chicken is the entertainment of choice for Svartholm, the Pirate Bay partner who posts diligently bitchy replies whenever the site receives threatening letters from corporate lawyers.

    The other locus of the Pirate Bay raids was a giant data-storage facility that is also used by many of Sweden’s major banks. It so happened that the company responsible for operating the surveillance cameras at this location relied on Svartholm and Neij’s PRQ company for its Internet connection—which may be why grainy footage of the raid appeared on the Internet soon after it happened.

    The publicity generated by the Pirate Bay raids gave a huge boost to the site’s traffic, which already stood at more than one million visitors per day, and forced the company to hire five new workers to cope with merchandising demand. There are thousands of back orders for the original Pirate Bay T-shirt, which features a skull and crossbones with a cassette tape in the center. When Neij was wearing the shirt on a 2006 business trip to San Francisco, he was surprised to find how far the Pirate cult had spread. “There was a school class lined up outside a museum, a big group of eight- or nine-year-old American kids. And a bunch of them started pointing at me: ‘Hey! Pirate Bay! Cool!’”

    The New Frontier

    As befits an organization of global disrepute, Pirate Bay had its beginnings not in Scandinavia but in far-off Mexico City, where Gottfrid Svartholm was working, in 2003, for an Internet-security firm. As a devout member of Sweden’s pro-piracy Web site Pirate Bureau, Svartholm agreed to use the security firm’s servers to launch the Swedes’ BitTorrent venture, and when he returned home the following year, he found a new accomplice in Fredrik Neij, a self-taught programmer who got his first job through a criminal act. “I hacked a company’s service provider and put up obscene messages,” says Neij. “The company said work for us or we prosecute.” Asked why he committed the original act of vandalism, Neij responds brightly, “Because I could!”

    By the time Neij got involved with Pirate Bay (there is a third, silent partner, named “Peter”), the site had effectively outgrown its host. “We had no idea it would happen,” says Rasmus Fleischer, co-founder of Pirate Bureau. “It started off as just a little part of the site. Our forum was more important. Even the links were more important than the [torrent] tracker.”

    With a membership of more than 60,000, Pirate Bureau was originally devoted to the unofficial distribution of music files; expanded bandwidth enabled the transmission of video files. Fleischer neatly summarizes the ethos of his site: “We don’t want to reform copyright law—we just don’t want the state to enforce it.”

    Fleischer likes to frame the copyright issue in historical and theoretical terms, expounding on ideas about “how value is produced in the cultural sector.” He sees the notion of music copyright in particular as a transitory construct. “This has been the business model for some bit of the 20th century,” he says. “Music has always worked in different economic ways, and copyright has only applied to a few genres historically.”

    As dryly academic—and, frankly, downright Swedish—as this analysis might sound, it was effectively endorsed several years ago by one of the most consistently innovative figures of the rock era. Speaking to The New York Times in 2002 about the future of the music industry, David Bowie said, “Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity.”

    Another of Pirate Bureau’s founders, Marcus Kaarto, believes that the U.S. entertainment industry itself is, ironically enough, responsible for the rise of the BitTorrent protocol that is now sending the Hollywood community into such a tailspin. “The record industry destroyed Kazaa,” says Kaarto, referring to the once popular file-sharing service. “They hired companies to fill it with bogus content and viruses—and that drove users to BitTorrent.” And the new software happened to be far more efficacious for transmitting video files. What had begun as a music-business problem was now, thanks to sites like Pirate Bay, starting to send gusts of panic across the television and movie industries.

    Among the underlying reasons that Sweden became the hub of the burgeoning culture of international file sharing, the most often cited are national copyright laws that were, until fairly recently, relatively lax toward Internet piracy. Other factors include tax benefits offered for purchasing computers and, more important, one of the most developed Internet infrastructures in the world. Kazaa was invented in Sweden by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who together went on to create Skype, the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) company that they ultimately sold to eBay for $2.6 billion.

    One of the main engineers of Sweden’s Internet pre-eminence is 34-year-old Jonas Birgersson, also known by the nickname “Broadband Jesus.” Birgersson is a former military-intelligence prodigy whose tiny Broadband Company became a major telecommunications player in the late 90s by laying fiber-optic cable across much of the country, giving Swedish consumers cheap access to vastly expanded bandwidth.

    In 2000, Birgersson was lauded in a Newsweek article that gushed over Stockholm’s high-tech success story and anointed the city “a Scandinavian Seattle.”

    Thanks to the Pirate Bay raids, Sweden’s cuddly image has, in the minds of many in the entertainment business, been supplanted by something much more ominous. Birgersson is among those who think the hostility is completely misguided. “Sweden is not the enemy,” he says. “Sweden is the prototype of society to come.”

    A Hollywood Production

    Not only had the Swedish police been heavy-handed in their seizure of Pirate Bay’s property, they had, on the evidence of a private investigator’s report, questioned a female acquaintance of Neij’s and searched her apartment. Also hauled in for questioning was Pirate Bay’s legal counsel, Mikael Viborg; for some reason police saw fit to take a DNA swab from the inside of his mouth, as they’d also done with Neij and Svartholm. Initial public outrage over the police’s actions only increased when widespread suspicion about the raids’ origin was confirmed. It turned out that the whole operation was indeed a Hollywood production.

    In late 2005, Sweden’s Motion Picture Association was imploring the country’s justice department to prosecute Pirate Bay for large-scale copyright infringement, but chief prosecutor Hakan Roswall decided that the site’s owners were doing nothing actionable concerning American films’ copyrights. Shortly after the raids the Swedish media discovered what had inspired Roswall’s change of heart.

    In June 2006, the Swedish media exposed a leaked March 17 letter from John Malcolm, head of anti-piracy for the U.S.-based M.P.A.A., to Dan Eliasson, state secretary to Sweden’s minister for justice. Malcolm’s missive referred to an earlier meeting between the pair and urged the Scandinavian official “to take much-needed action against the Pirate Bay.” Eliasson’s cordial reply was dated April 10.

    Malcolm and Eliasson had been brought together in October 2005 by Monique Wadsted, lead lawyer for Sweden’s M.P.A.; Wadsted also happened to have been a law-school classmate of Eliasson’s boss, Justice Minister Thomas Bodström. Frustrated by the lack of police resources allotted to her ongoing complaint against Pirate Bay, Wadsted successfully suggested that the M.P.A. hire a private detective to put together a file on the site. “We provided information to push on the investigation,” she admits.

    Wadsted found herself caught up in the public backlash against the Pirate Bay raids when her personal details were posted on the Internet by persons unknown. The lawyer complains vociferously about having her privacy violated, yet she refuses to allow that other Swedish citizens may also have had their privacy violated as a result of the M.P.A.’s scattershot intelligence gathering. “The private investigators haven’t done anything illegal,” Wadsted insists. “It’s a different thing to give people personal information on a lawyer and urge people to harass her. I’m not a criminal. I’m not even suspected of being a criminal.”

    As it turned out, Monique Wadsted and her local M.P.A. colleagues were little more than supporting players in a global economic power play that, according to many sources, has seen the U.S. government directly interfering in the domestic affairs of another sovereign nation. According to Swedish news reports, just before Easter 2006, a delegation from Sweden’s police force and its Justice Ministry visited Washington, D.C., where high-ranking U.S. officials reportedly threatened to put Sweden on a World Trade Organization “priority watch list” if it did not immediately clamp down on the nettlesome Pirate Bay. After initially denying that the raids were a result of these U.S. threats, State Secretary Eliasson relented; he admitted, on-camera, that the consequences of non-cooperation had been “explained” to him and his colleagues in D.C. The M.P.A.A.’s John Malcolm denies advance knowledge of this meeting.

    In terms of international-copyright malfeasance, Sweden found itself among some heavyweight company. The U.S. had, for instance, become extremely frustrated that it hadn’t insisted on China’s compliance with digital-piracy laws before China joined the W.T.O. And the very same issue has been one of the major obstacles to the admission of Russia, a nation where former military bases have been converted to factories that churn out millions of bootleg CDs and DVDs.

    On July 5 of last year, with the Swedish government still reeling from the Pirate Bay scandal, and ministers being subjected to investigation, there was momentary relief in the form of a national-newspaper article. The story alleged that Neij and Svartholm had all along been making a healthy financial score off Pirate Bay, in the form of advertising revenue. Posing as a potential advertiser, a journalist had approached the company that sells banner ads on Pirate Bay, and estimated that these must be generating, in Swedish advertising alone, as much as $80,000 per month, and claimed that these funds were being channeled into a front company in Switzerland.

    “I wish I earned that!” counters Neij. “Do I look like I have, like, $2 million?”

    Neij insists that whatever advertising revenue is generated is severely limited by the fact that the site operates in a legal “gray zone,” and Svartholm points out that they lost $60,000 worth of equipment in the raids. “It’s not free to operate a Web site on this scale,” he adds. In early 2007, one of the companies advertising on Pirate Bay was none other than Wal-Mart—touting DVDs, no less. Svartholm says he doesn’t know which third party bought the space on Wal-Mart’s behalf (it was an Israeli company), and he continues to maintain that the site yields only enough profit to cover operating costs. “If we were making lots of money I wouldn’t be working late at the office tonight,” says the pallid Swede. “I’d be sitting on a beach somewhere, working on my tan.”

    As the M.P.A.’s Wadsted is eager to point out, any conclusive proof that Pirate Bay’s owners are businessmen rather than amateurs would alter the complexion of the impending legal proceedings against them. “This would be a more serious matter altogether,” she says. “The judge could end up sending both of these guys to prison for five years.”

    Remote Control

    After my fact-finding safari in Sweden, I returned to Paris, where I was temporarily domiciled, and where my personal piracy habit was expanding quite impressively. During a settling-in period in France, my wife happened to mention how much she regretted missing the third season of Project Runway (which was supposedly even better than the first two). Proving that chivalry is not dead, I strayed from the genteel UKNova tea party and downloaded, through the torrent tracker mininova.org, all the new episodes of Bravo’s flagship reality series. It didn’t stop there: I went on to indulge myself with the pilot episodes (unscreened at that point) of Studio 60 and Knights of Prosperity, among other U.S. network treats.

    But I still drew the line at downloading movies. This was mainly because, in light of my irrational dislike of French TV variety shows, I had already prepared for our relocation by augmenting “Steve TV” with several months’ worth of illegally copied movies—meaning that I’d rented dozens of DVDs from Netflix and duplicated them using a fun (and completely illegal) little computer application called Mac the Ripper. There may be those who need their Criterion Collection DVDs in the lavish original packaging, but it turned out I wasn’t one of them—apparently I’ve become just another one of the millions worldwide who can’t resist the idea of getting stuff for free. “Because I can.”

    Among the few senior entertainment executives who have been able to absorb this seemingly basic aspect of human nature is Anne Sweeney, president of Disney–ABC Television. In her keynote speech at the October 2006 MIPCOM audiovisual-content market in Cannes, France, Sweeney broke ranks with her boardroom peers to make a bracingly pragmatic statement. “Piracy is a business model,” Sweeney said. “It exists to serve a need in the market—consumers who want TV content on demand. And piracy competes for consumers the same way we do: through quality, price, and availability.”

    The major television networks have been finding it far easier than the Hollywood studios to adapt to the dramatic technological shifts that will be reshaping the traditional media marketplace for years to come. The networks have already enjoyed the luxury of experimenting with different distribution models, from selling episodes on iTunes to the more realistic approach of giving them away on the Web with advertising intact.

    It has been more than a year since the 260 layoffs at Warner Bros. confirmed that Hollywood’s executive class is anticipating turbulent times ahead. And yet, in the interim, the movie industry’s response to digital piracy has been about as effective as a dawn raid by the Keystone Kops.

    In terms of offering consumers legitimate movie downloads, disunity and incompetence have been the order of the day. As far back as 2002, Paramount, Universal, MGM, Sony, and Warner Bros. joined forces to launch the download site Movielink, but the paltry fare offered is so hopelessly freighted with protective technical restrictions that BusinessWeek, in a 2006 article, poignantly described it as “difficult or impossible to use.” A similarly hidebound rival site called CinemaNow has proved equally unappealing to the millions who already consume their movies online for free.

    Last summer, Apple’s era-defining iTunes service strode into the movie-download arena amid much fanfare—but it initially offered only a meager inventory of around 75 films from Disney, the only company with which Apple had struck a deal. This is not surprising, given that Apple C.E.O. Steve Jobs is Disney’s largest shareholder, as well as a company director. So what is preventing other studios from signing up? One name: Wal-Mart.

    As the retailer responsible for shifting around 40 percent of the $17 billion worth of DVDs sold in 2006, Wal-Mart wields uniquely powerful influence over the way in which Hollywood studios choose to distribute their product. Until Paramount announced a deal with iTunes this past January, no studio other than Disney was willing to risk offending Wal-Mart, a company that they fear more than Pirate Bay itself. So even though DVD sales are slowing and online piracy is booming, Wal-Mart can restrict the studios’ downloading plans and hold them to a pact of mutually assured self-destruction.

    This past fall, Wal-Mart took its first baby steps into the movie-downloading arena, offering a rudimentary service to its online customers—not even the most paranoid Wal-Mart executive would be threatened by the other major legal-download service currently in operation, Amazon.com’s Unbox. In its current iteration Unbox boasts a reasonably large inventory of films, but with many unappealing restrictions: the movies it provides can be viewed only on Windows devices (i.e., video iPods not invited); hit-movie downloads are priced slightly lower ($14.99–$19.99) than physical DVDs, but they cannot be burned onto blank DVDs and they self-delete in 24 hours.

    In 2004, longtime M.P.A.A. president Jack Valenti was succeeded by Dan Glickman, the secretary of agriculture in the Clinton administration. While Glickman’s public pronouncements on piracy can tend toward Valenti-like belligerence, in person he is alarmingly reasonable when discussing Hollywood’s piracy problem. Glickman believes that the movie industry will soon give the public “a reasonably priced, hassle-free alternative” to illegal downloading. “Most people, if it’s easily available, will not steal it,” he insists.

    This assertion is not necessarily supported by the available data. For instance, although Apple’s iTunes service became known as the savior of the record business by generating millions of dollars a year through its legal, hassle-free downloads, the market share is less than healthy. A recent industry study estimated that iTunes accounted for a mere 2.5 percent of music files downloaded from the Internet. Glickman is undaunted by this grim statistic. “I see the glass half full, not half empty,” he states. Though he’ll admit that there is “a lot of trial and error going on” during this “digital transition,” he insists that Hollywood will soon get its act together.

    Glickman supports this positive forecast with two examples, neither of which really stands up to serious scrutiny: Yes, the studios have made BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen guarantee that his site (bittorrent.com) will no longer host any illegal content. So one pirate surrendered—the fleet is still growing by the day thanks to Cohen’s original software. Glickman’s other ray of hope is Guba, a marginal site that offers visitors a smorgasbord of YouTube-like amusements, plus commercial fare that again comes with severe technical restrictions. January 2007 saw the launch of Qflix, a movie-download system endorsed by all the major studios. Qflix sounded like a promising development and a marked improvement on existing services, but once again there was a catch: most customers would need to purchase a new DVD burner in order to use it.

    While the movie business continues to prove itself less than effective in combating the threat of digital piracy, the electronics industry has done very well by joining the pirates’ fleet. When electronics giants like Philips, Daewoo, and Samsung are flooding the market with DVD players specifically designed to play raw MPEG and AVI computer files, they are clearly enabling the viewing of illegally downloaded content on domestic television sets. This trend approached critical mass in late 2006 when TiVo unveiled its latest software update, which could play downloaded video files; when Steve Jobs introduced AppleTV in January, all the chatter about the computerization of television seemed to coalesce into an irresistible force.

    Meanwhile, Hollywood continues to depict its battle against Internet piracy as an almost biblical struggle between good and evil—much to the delight of its young adversaries in Sweden and elsewhere. These are people who regard the M.P.A.A.’s chest beating as something between a joke and a dare, and they will continue to facilitate mass file sharing simply “because they can.”

    Sweden’s beloved high-tech millionaire Jonas Birgersson derides the U.S. entertainment industry for its futile stand against evolutionary tides; he points out that although something like iTunes is regarded as a major boon to the music business, the innovative service was created by the computer industry. And now that iTunes has leveled the distribution playing field to the great disadvantage of major labels, Birgersson poses the question “What do you need these multi-billion-dollar companies with all their skyscrapers for? We shouldn’t sacrifice a lot of these gains to prolong that system for another few years.”

    At the risk of sounding sentimental—or even, God forbid, anti-progress—there surely has to be a moment for speculation on what could be lost if the current scenario plays out to its logical conclusion. Internet pioneer Jaron Lanier, the man who gave us the term “virtual reality,” is one of the few credentialed individuals to have spoken out against the coming age of “digital Maoism.” If Hollywood’s ancient regime is indeed swept away by unstoppable technological changes, the old patronage system may one day be regarded with nostalgic benevolence in light of the rising mob culture and YouTube novelty-storm that is replacing it.

    “There are new business rules, and some art forms won’t be able to be supported anymore,” Birgersson responds. “I mean, in ancient Rome they used to stage full-scale naval battles in the Colosseum. We don’t do that anymore.” Sweden’s “Broadband Jesus” appears to be suggesting that the sun is setting on the era in which Ben Affleck got paid $15 million for Paycheck.

    Birgersson still believes that Hollywood can avoid its own worst-case scenario, but only if it rapidly renounces business practices it has held as eternal verities since Louis B. Mayer was selling scrap metal. This would more or less involve concurring with Anne Sweeney of ABC-Disney that piracy is, in fact, a business model, then finding ways to adapt pirate-model technologies to deliver movie downloads at prices well below the current level.

    Should the movie industry decide that any appeasement of file sharers would be tantamount to surrender, and keep trying to put the digital genie back in the bottle, Birgersson believes, it would be virtually guaranteeing its own obsolescence. In a recent briefing to Swedish media executives, he said, “You say you’re going to war. Pray that these people don’t believe you.” Drawing on his military-intelligence background, Birgersson says the entertainment industry’s hostile declarations on piracy are entirely counterproductive. “The harder you push people to go in one direction, the harder they’ll push in the opposite direction,” he says. “And right now the pirates are having the time of their life.”

    One person who is relishing the idea of asymmetrical warfare with the M.P.A.A. is Pirate Bureau chief Rasmus Fleischer. “Mark Getty [the photo-archive mogul] said that intellectual property is ‘the oil of the 21st century’—and oil apparently means war,” states Fleischer. “Copyright is so incompatible with so many cultural and technological developments. This is going to be a growing problem for years ahead.”

    M.P.A.A. chairman Dan Glickman may have erroneously hailed the raids on Pirate Bay as “a reminder to pirates all over the world that there are no safe harbors for Internet copyright thieves,” because the ultimate ruling in the case against Svartholm and Neij will have virtually no effect on Hollywood’s losing war against file sharers.

    Regardless of whether the Pirate Bay case is finally judged by the Swedish courts—and sources close to the prosecutor are confident that charges will be brought in May—it is likely that both Pirate Bay and BitTorrent will be replaced as leading facilitators of Internet piracy. And as has happened repeatedly in the past, file sharers will gravitate toward delivery methods that are more powerful and more problematic for law enforcement. Sweden’s pirate contingent is already developing a new file-sharing program that will grant a sturdy shield of “anonymization” to its users—whether they be movie downloaders or persons of the darkest criminal intent.

    So, the question remains: Will Hollywood adapt and survive, or will it continue to escalate its apparently futile battle against the collective intelligence of a million resourceful and highly motivated computer geeks worldwide? (The kind of people who recently unlocked the supposedly resilient copy protection on Hollywood’s new HD DVD format.) Once again, the situation was adroitly summed up in the words of Anne Sweeney, no matter how unpalatable they may have been to the lunchtime crowd at the Ivy. In her 2006 MIPCOM speech, Sweeney plaintively stated, “We want to go wherever our viewers are. Viewers have control and show no sign of giving it back.”

    I wonder what’s on Steve TV tonight?

    Steven Daly is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. He is co-author (with V.F.‘s David Kamp) of The Rock Snob’s Dictionary (Broadway Books).

    Las Vegas population growth

    Las Vegas area population up 5.3 percent to 1.9 million

    April 25, 2007 11:56 AM PDT

    The population of the Las Vegas area grew 5.3 percent from a year ago to 1.9 million last year. The Clark County population grew by 97,000 people, or about 8,000 new residents a month.

    That’s according to an annual comprehensive profile of southern Nevada called 2007 Las Vegas Perspective that was released today. The booklet also says median household income rose 12 percent to $53,100.

    But in evidence of the overheated housing market, total home sales fell 27 percent to 71,500 units and housing building permits fell 13 percent to 33,900. The median price for new homes rose nearly ten percent to $334,000. The median price for existing homes was up a half a percent to $287,000.

    The authors of the survey said the residential market continued to seek out a new equilibrium after the resale home inventory levels rose rapidly last year.

    (Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

     

    Solving a Serial Murder mystery

    Sarah Stolfa for The New York Times

    Charlie Hess in front of the Kwik-Stop where the serial killer Robert Browne met Rocio Sperry

    El Paso County (Colorado) Sheriff’s Office/Corbis

    “The Devil’s Right-Hand Man” Robert Charles Browne has claimed to have murdered 48 people in nine states.

    April 29, 2007

    The Confessor

    By CHIP BROWN

    At this late hour of his life, Charlie Hess said the question “Why?” didn’t matter anymore. After all the years he spent in the F.B.I. tilting at the criminal mind, all his years in private practice running lie-detector tests, his time extracting secrets as a C.I.A. agent in Vietnam, he was no longer interested in “Why?” What counted were simple, incontestable facts: who, when, where, what. Names, dates, locations; cause and manner of death — these were his goals as he tried to flesh out the transgressions of a man who, by his own account, killed 48 people. Robert, can you remember what year that was? Was the body north or south of the highway? Where did you get the ice pick? “Why?” was bottomless and slippery and often fraught with useless moral overtones. “Why?” didn’t close cases. “Why?” was for intellectuals, and Charlie Hess had seen enough of them to say there were two kinds of people: intellectuals and those who got things done.

    Now here he was at 2 a.m. on a cold November night, escorting an interviewer to a rental car parked outside his trailer in a poor neighborhood on the east side of Colorado Springs. “I could pack up and move tomorrow — just give me my woman and my dogs,” he said, craning his head back at the torrent of stars above the Front Range. He said that the footloose spirit came from Gypsy blood on his father’s side, but he was 80, and after two heart operations, a brush with death from kidney failure, and two hip-replacement surgeries, you had to wonder if his wanderlust had a leg to stand on. Under the wan streetlight, he looked a little like Spencer Tracy after a hard winter.

    For the past five years, Hess had worked as a volunteer in the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office’s cold-case unit in Colorado Springs. He’d helped to organize files no one had looked at, in some cases, for decades. Then he began poring over one case in particular. He’d started writing letters and tracking down names. He’d done hundreds of interviews. He’d made dozens of trips by car for meetings at the penitentiary an hour south, near Canon City. He’d faxed police jurisdictions all over the West. He’d sifted through jewelry boxes for a stolen wedding ring. Two or three times frustrations got the better of him and he had quit. But he always came back, persevering as the months rounded into years. It wasn’t as if he lacked other interests. He could have been fishing. He could have been walking the dogs. He had two daughters. A grandson. Two great-granddaughters. And his wife, Jo, with whom he was so happy he could scarcely bring himself to eat when she left to visit relatives. So: Why? Why spend so many hours trying to beguile a man already locked away for life with no hope of parole?

    “There are five or six reasons,” he said with a long-suffering sigh.

    He’d already mentioned he didn’t care for golf. He’d already explained he wanted to be of use before he was ushered off the stage. He’d already confessed to a competitive streak, and the satisfaction of showing the office hotshots he still had chops. One of the deepest reasons was not a secret at all: his son-in-law had been murdered in Colorado Springs in 1991.

    “Some I’ve told you about,” he reminded me. “But the others I won’t.”

    “Could one assume the others have to do with feelings you have about things that happened in the past, maybe when you were with the bureau or in Vietnam — things you feel now you want to atone for in some way?”

    He seemed almost amused, like Garry Kasparov contemplating a poisoned pawn from a high-school chess-club upstart.

    “You’re a very good interrogator,” he said. “But you’ll never get that out of me.”

    2. The Apple Dumpling Gang

    El Paso County is a Delaware-size district on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains with a population of about 575,000; a murder rate well below regional and national averages; and, outside the city, fewer than two dozen unsolved homicides going back to 1969. The injustice of any one unsolved murder probably looms larger in a community where murders are rare, but the cold-case unit informally established in the county sheriff’s office in 2001 owes its existence less to the expressed values of an uncallused electorate than to the zeal and friendship of three retired volunteers: Scott Fischer, Lou Smit and Charlie Hess. Tickled by their ages — now 61, 72 and 80 respectively — an office manager in the sheriff’s office teasingly nicknamed them the Apple Dumpling Gang, after the bumbling dimwits in the 1975 Disney movie.

    Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, the gang meets for coffee at the Old Heidelberg Pastry Shop and Cafe on South Tejon Street. Then they shuttle over to their office in a beige, two-story building in the center of downtown Colorado Springs. Sheriff Terry Maketa’s suite is across the hall; the rest of the brass are a few doors down. Except for a poster-size photo of Hess, Smit and Fischer with a haul of yellowtail caught on a fishing trip in Mexico last summer, the cold-case headquarters is all business: gray metal desks, chairs, a computer and metal shelves racked with unclosed case files in dozens of black three-ring notebooks. On the spine of each binder is a high-school-yearbook-style photograph of a murder victim. From the doorway, the array of faces looks like a crowd on a balcony waiting for a play to begin.

    The godfather of the Apple Dumpling Gang was Sheriff Maketa’s predecessor, John Anderson, who held the top law-enforcement post in the county from 1995 to 2003. Charlie Hess’s daughter Candy managed Anderson’s first campaign. During a strategy meeting at her house in 1994, Hess met Lou Smit, who served with Anderson on the Colorado Springs Police Department in the 1970s and ’80s.

    Smit was a legend in Colorado law-enforcement circles. A veteran of more than 200 homicide investigations, he had a knack for solving tough cases that seemed to entail an almost mystical connection with victims. His dedication to the job was unrivalled. When Smit had applied to the Colorado Springs police force in 1966, the department still had a 5-foot-9-inch height requirement. Smit measured in half an inch short. He asked to be retested, and the night before, he persuaded his cousin, who was already on the force, to hammer him on the head with his nightstick. The next morning, extended half an inch by the mother of all welts, he got the position.

    Hess and Smit’s friendship developed quickly over regular racquetball games and frequent meals. They each could improvise in difficult circumstances. They each had quick senses of humor. They each appreciated the degree to which cases sometimes required tactics and methods that weren’t always in, or by, the book.

    “Lou and I are very much alike,” Hess said. “We both understand that if you want to see into the abyss, you’ve got to walk near the edge.”

    John Anderson ran for sheriff in 1994 with an ambitious agenda that included raising salaries, professionalizing officer training, digitalizing communications and enlisting more volunteers. Mindful of advances in fingerprint and DNA analysis, he also thought more could be done to revive stalled investigations. One unsolved homicide in particular was very disturbing to him and almost everyone else in the county.

    The case arose three years earlier in the northern part of the county known as the Black Forest, when a 13-year-old girl named Heather Dawn Church disappeared from her family’s house. Heather was one of four kids, and on the night of Sept. 17, 1991, she was home baby-sitting for her 5-year-old brother, Sage. There was little chance she’d run away. As she’d written on a Mormon Church questionnaire that eventually made its way into a police file of some 15 volumes, her “short-term goals” were to be nicer to her brothers and get straight A’s. She liked animals, dollhouses, swimming, biking, playing the violin and tag. Her favorite passage of Scripture was “Love one another.”

    Two years after she vanished, her skull was found down a hillside off Rampart Range Road, about 30 miles from her house. More than 40 suspects had been considered, including Heather’s father, Michael Church, who separated from his wife around six months before Heather’s death. The case was televised on America’s Most Wanted.

    When he took office in January 1995, Anderson appointed Lou Smit captain of detectives and directed him to revisit the Church case. “I became a grunt,” Smit told me last fall. “I started putting together all the case files. I went through all the photos again. I made a timeline. I called the parents. I developed lead sheets for burglaries in the area. We looked at a lot of kids and checked alibis. When I was talking to one of the guys in the lab, he said, ‘Maybe we ought to send out the prints again.’ “

    The best piece of forensic evidence the investigators had was fingerprints lifted off the frame of a window screen. The prints had been sent out to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and the F.B.I., but no match had turned up. At the time, the fingerprint data banks of each state and of the F.B.I. were not all interconnected. (The so-called Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System began in 1999.) Smit told the county fingerprint specialist, Thomas Carney, to prepare 8-by-10-inch photographs of the fingerprints and then mailed them to 52 jurisdictions, each with its own set of computerized records.

    The effort hit pay dirt in March 1995. Colorado authorities learned that the man who had handled the screen was a hazel-eyed white male, 6 feet 2 inches, 180 pounds, with a Southern accent, good teeth and “no visible deformities.” He’d been convicted of motor-vehicle theft and burglary in Louisiana. Further investigation disclosed he was living in a mobile home in Colorado Springs, about a half-mile down the road from Heather Church’s house.

    His name was Robert Charles Browne.

    County search-and-rescue personnel knocked on the door of his mobile home the morning after Heather vanished, but Browne said he knew nothing about the girl. F.B.I. agents canvassing the neighborhood later on had bypassed Browne’s house because it was just outside the perimeter of their search.

    When Browne was brought in four years after the murder for a videotaped interview, the El Paso County detectives were at pains to establish whether he’d ever been at the Church house before Heather vanished. Ever done any construction there? Ever cleaned out a gutter, or put up a screen? Ever dropped by for a visit? No, no, no. Never been there in his life, he said.

    “We said, ‘Thank you very much!’ ” Smit recalled. Browne looked shocked when detective Mark A. Finley, who was conducting the interview, dropped the bombshell that his fingerprints had been found at the scene. There must be some mistake, Browne insisted; they should run the prints again.

    There was no mistake, but other than the fingerprints there was no physical evidence, which is why law-enforcement officials were surprised when Browne changed his story and, on May 24, 1995, pleaded guilty to the murder of Heather Church. He told a placement counselor that he had surprised the girl and killed her in her house by strangling her or breaking her neck. Judge Gilbert A. Martinez of the Fourth Judicial District Court sentenced him to life without parole.

    “I think he was dodging the death penalty,” Smit told me. “We’d sent a detective down to his hometown in Louisiana to do a background check. It turned out there was a girl who had lived next to him who was missing and a girl who lived on the other side of him who was found murdered. The cases had never been solved. I don’t think he wanted us looking into his past any more than we already had.”

    During his time as captain, Smit created a new format for organizing case files. All interview reports, crime-scene photographs and lead sheets were bundled into notebooks; time lines were drawn up; every name was indexed and cross-referenced. The process of “building the book” enabled new detectives to get up to date quickly on a particular case and helped detectives already involved see patterns that might otherwise be obscured in the welter of details.

    Smit had wanted to organize the backlog of cold cases in similar fashion, but he retired in 1996 to help his wife, Barbara, who was suffering from cancer. During a period of remission before she died in 2004, Smit was asked by the district attorney in Boulder County to help investigate the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. When he was done with that work, he volunteered his services to the sheriff’s office, eager to organize the county’s unsolved murder files. Charlie Hess had a similar hankering.

    And so in the spring of 2001, the two racquetball partners found themselves batting around about 15 unsolved homicides going back more than 30 years. They’d been working about two months when John Anderson came by with another volunteer, Scott Fischer, freshly retired from his job as publisher of The Colorado Springs Gazette. Fischer had no formal law-enforcement background, but in his early 20s he photographed homicide crime scenes for the local sheriff’s office in New Mexico and he was handy with a computer. After seven months with Hess and Smit, Fischer was inspired to enroll in the county’s reserve-officer program and attend the training academy.

    Within a couple of years virtually all the cold cases of El Paso County were on computer disks that could be searched in an instant. In late April 2002, Hess, Smit and Fischer were sitting over coffee at the Heidelberg wondering what to do next. Hess turned to Smit. “Have you ever worked a case where you thought the guy was a serial killer?”

    “You know, I think I have,” Smit said.

    “Who?”

    “Robert Browne.”

    “You think I might write to him?” Hess asked.

    3. First Serve

    Thus began a relationship that in its ebb and flow — its diplomatic evasions, its deepening air of trust and collaboration — resembled a sort of marriage. At the outset Hess was certain of little but his approach. The initial overture was almost always pro forma: “You put your cards on the table. You tell the person who you are, what your background is, what you want, and you end with some subjunctive thing like ‘perhaps we can be of mutual benefit to each other.’ ” If he got a reply, he would improvise from there.

    From case files, Hess learned that Browne, born Oct. 31, 1952, was the youngest of nine kids. He was raised in Coushatta, La., where his father, Ronald, worked as a deputy sheriff in the Red River Parish Sheriff’s Office. Depression apparently ran on his mother’s side. Browne’s maternal grandfather committed suicide by throwing himself into a cistern with a weighted chain around his neck. Despite his intelligence — later I.Q. tests would put him in the borderline-genius range — Browne’s grades were unremarkable. There was no obvious explanation for what would later seem his fathomless antipathy toward people, women especially.

    In 1969, three days before his 17th birthday, Browne dropped out of high school and joined the Army. He did two tours in Vietnam and one in Korea before he was dishonorably discharged for drug use in 1976. He worked a miscellany of jobs at a paper company and a wholesale business in Louisiana; he delivered flowers in Texas. He worked the counter at a Kwik-Stop in Colorado Springs in 1987. He married five times; all of his wives were slight, small-boned women, not much more than five feet tall. And all of them were still alive. His fifth wife told detectives Browne confided in her that he hated women and cops. His fourth wife told reporters from The Colorado Springs Gazette that Browne had once put a pistol to her head and pulled the trigger, and when nothing happened asked her to shoot him. His third wife said Browne beat her because she forgot to put a spoon in the gravy. “He’s the devil’s right-hand man,” she said. “Call me when you pull the switch.” Browne’s second wife was Vietnamese and gave birth to his only child, a son named Thomas. The first marriage ended in divorce after three years. Browne’s criminal record wasn’t extraordinary. There was a warrant for his arrest in 1981 for stealing a church bell. In 1986 he stole a Ford truck. There were police reports linking him to cruelty-to-animal incidents, drug use, burglaries and arson.

    Of much interest to Hess was that Robert Browne had already exchanged some letters with El Paso authorities. A couple of days after the fifth anniversary of his arrest, he sent a cryptic four-line poem to the Fourth Judicial District attorney in Colorado Springs: “In the murky placid depths,/ beneath the cool caressing mire,/ lies seven golden opportunities./ Missed opportunities?” It was signed “Lovingly, Robert Browne.”

    Detective Finley took up the task of replying, writing a week later: “I have tried to anticipate what you are wanting to do and I believe I have a general idea of at least some of the things you refer to in your letter. . . . Certainly I am willing to come speak with you if that is what you want. I will tell you up front no other agencies are interested unless you are willing to provide bona fide information that will be of assistance to them. I took the liberty of writing this letter, rather than make a visit to access [sic] exactly what it is you want to do. It would be a waste of time to show up and speak in rhymes.”

    A week later, Browne sent Finley more doggerel, four AABB-rhyme-scheme stanzas saying, in roundabout fashion, that the “seven sacred virgins” were buried in El Paso County and were therefore county cases. With the verse was a hand-drawn map outlining nine states — Washington, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. There was a number on each state. Colorado had 9; Louisiana had 17. A note Browne included read: “The score is you 1, the other team 48! Are you willing to settle for this? You have the information to make the score 8 to 48. Somewhat better, but you seem not to have the insight or ambition to score! In addition if you were to drive to the end zone in a white Trans Am, the score could be 9 to 48. That would complete your home-court sphere. Do you wish to retire into obscurity? Or would you like to live a life of notoriety and wealth? Let’s see if you have the insight, ambition and drive to be somebody! Again you have your information! Do not contact me!!!”

    To Hess, Browne’s cryptic cat-and-mouse communiqués clearly seemed intended to taunt the investigators who put him away for life. As he told me one day last fall: “My general feeling was that Robert Browne wrote those goofy poems because he had been incarcerated for five years and he was angry and he wanted to get the guys who put him in jail.” If nothing else, Finley’s letter demonstrated the in-your-face approach wouldn’t work. Hess took the opposite tack. Scott Fischer typed up Hess’s handwritten draft. It was dated May 9, 2002:

    Dear Mr. Browne,

    My name is Charlie Hess and I work as a volunteer at the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, mostly working on cold murder cases. My background is that I was a Special Agent in the F.B.I., was a C.I.A. agent in Vietnam and ultimately retired as a polygraph examiner with the San Diego Police Department.

    In my endeavors here, I had occasion to review certain details of your case. I must say I was very intrigued by the correspondence you directed to the district attorney’s office here, subsequent to your incarceration. The information you alluded to brings to mind previous high-profile matters I handled and [I] am wondering if you feel it in your interest to grant me an interview.

    It has been my experience that intelligent, unique individuals often times are in a position to illuminate matters that could never come to light via any other avenue.

    Hoping you feel that a contact would be of mutual value, I remain

    Sincerely, Charles J. Hess.

    To the amazement of the detectives in the sheriff’s office, he included his home address. It was a standard part of his method for cultivating rapport. He’d served. Would the ball come back?

    4. G-Man

    Law enforcement was the last thing Charlie Hess expected to divert him from a life coaching football and showing anglers where to cast. He was an only child, born in 1927 to Charles and Beatrice Hess in Cicero, Ill. Before Charles Sr. went to work as a tailor he played briefly on the semipro team that eventually became the Chicago Bears. Beatrice was a seamstress who during the Depression helped make ends meet by sewing lingerie for rich people in Chicago.

    When Hess was 15, his parents invested all their savings in a run-down resort on Fishtrap Lake, about four miles outside the north-central Wisconsin town of Boulder Junction. Hess expected he would manage the resort when his parents retired, but at the urging of his father, after an 18-month stint as a cook in the Navy, he used the G.I. Bill for a college education.

    At Superior State College, Hess shared a coal-heated house with three military veterans. One of his roommates, Leonard Ojala, first noticed the “driven quality” that Hess would later bring to his work at the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. when Hess was always getting into fights with his football teammates. “Charlie has always wanted to prove something,” Ojala told me. “We Finns have an expression called sisu, which is a kind of stubborn determination to continue in spite of overwhelming odds. I think some of it rubbed off on Charlie. He’ll deny it, of course.”

    Hess asked Ojala if he thought he would make a good husband for his college sweetheart, Joanne, and then promptly ignored his advice and tied the knot at the end of his sophomore year. Chris, the first of his two daughters, was born in 1949. Candy followed in 1951.

    In 1952, lured by a $6,200 salary, he landed a position as a special agent for the F.B.I. Hess, just shy of his 25th birthday, was assigned initially to San Antonio. He learned Spanish at the F.B.I. language academy and was later posted to El Paso and then to Alpine, Tex., beside Big Bend National Park. He showed a flair for cultivating informants on both sides of the border; within six months of the start of his stint in San Antonio, he had 20 people passing him tips. Almost everything he learned about getting people to talk to him he credits to the intuitive approach of the Texas sheriffs he met on his rounds.

    Hess put in 10 years with the bureau, and then 3 as the city manager of National City, just south of San Diego. But with his 40th birthday looming and his marriage getting rocky, he was restless and ready for an adventure. He ran into an old classmate from the F.B.I. Academy who had been hired by the U.S. Agency for International Development (Usaid) to teach police work to the South Vietnamese. Hess was hired by Usaid, and late in the spring of 1967 he flew to Vietnam as a foreign-service officer of the State Department. “I don’t think I was in favor of the Vietnam War ideologically as much as I just wanted to find out what was going on over there,” he told me.

    One day in the summer of 1967, Hess went on an inspection tour in a plane with a C.I.A. paramilitary officer named Robert Wall, who outlined a joint American-South Vietnamese program that the C.I.A. was organizing to “neutralize” the Vietcong political cadres. Wall offered Hess a job as a deputy coordinator for the Phoenix Program.

    The Phoenix Program remains as controversial today as it was during the war. Depictions of it range from a flawed but valuable intelligence and counterinsurgency operation to a lawless, terror-for-terror assassination program that paved the way for some of the more dubious tactics in the United States’ current “war on terror.” Hess supervised Phoenix operations in III Corps, a group of 11 provinces comprising 53 districts. Wall noted in a 1968 report that Hess “actually pioneered the investigative aspects of the program, and the success he has achieved has led . . . to the implementation of his concepts and ideas in other Corps areas.”

    When I pressed him on the issue, Hess said he had not participated in, or witnessed, the more brutal interrogation practices that were aired in Congressional hearings in the early 1970s, when United States soldiers gave accounts of prisoners being thrown out of helicopters, or “rung up” by electric shocks from hand-cranked field telephones, or pierced through the eardrums by sharpened bamboo dowels. Hess, who has a hat stitched with the message, “Vietnam — If You Weren’t There, Shut Up,” also made a point of telling me he had no objection in principle to such techniques during wartime: “In a war, and this is strictly my opinion, you do whatever is necessary to save American lives. The only people who know if it’s appropriate are the people who are doing it at the time.”

    Within six months or so, around February 1968, Hess knew the program he had helped design was working poorly. “Essentially we did not understand the Vietnamese culture,” he told me. “Our tactics were based on what we had accomplished with informants in the West, especially in Europe during World War II. We were too stupid and ignorant and misinformed to understand that in Vietnamese culture it was O.K. to be a traitor and leave your village, but it was not O.K. to be a traitor and go back and be a mole.”

    After Vietnam, Hess went back to school to begin a new career as a polygraph examiner. His marriage was coming to an end when he met his second wife, Jo Marino, on a blind date in 1978. He had his first quadruple bypass that year (and a second 19 years later); and then, in 1984, the G-man escaped to the Baja peninsula. For six years he and Jo, the daughter of a commercial fisherman, lived 400 miles south of the United States border on the wild beaches of Bahia de Los Angeles. They built a cabin. They ate what they could catch, truck in every three months or tender ashore on a small boat. They had no mail, no phone, not even legal standing in the country, just the beauty of arid mountains, dawn light and sunset, the neon yellow-blue of dorado flashing in the turquoise sea. They could have stayed forever had Jo not begun to worry how they would manage getting old.

    They returned to the States in the fall of 1991. Just a couple of months later, in the early hours of Christmas Eve 1991, Hess was staying in Cedar City, Utah, with Jo when the phone rang. Hess’s son-in-law Steven Vought Sr., the husband of his younger daughter, Candy, had been shot interrupting a burglary at his brother’s house in a rural area of El Paso County, about 15 miles southeast of downtown Colorado Springs. He slumped on the porch and bled to death in Candy’s arms.

    Hess and his wife drove all afternoon and arrived in Colorado Springs Christmas Day. The intruders were three 17-year-olds said to be members of the Four Corner Hustlers gang. One teenager was caught almost immediately, having injured himself on a barbed wire fence while trying to flee; the two others turned themselves in on Christmas Day, accompanied by their parents. They were charged as adults. Hess intended to remain in Colorado Springs as long as Candy needed him. He and Jo built an apartment attached to Candy’s house. They put a wrought-iron fence around her yard, and bought a male Rottweiler named Zeppelin whose welcoming bark when Candy pulled into the driveway told her no one was inside waiting to harm her. In 2005, Candy remarried and moved out of the state. Her father, with work to do, stayed on.

    5. Hello Charlie Hess

    A week after Hess’s first letter to Robert Browne, a handwritten reply dated May 16, 2002 arrived in his mailbox:

    Hello Charles J. Hess,

    A face-to-face interview, at this time, is not acceptable. However I might be willing to correspond on matters that interest you.

    What specifically were you intrigued by?

    What high-profile matters were brought to mind?

    What matters would you like to be illuminated?

    My perception (accurate or distorted) will have a great bearing on the amount of, and what, I share.

    ‘Til then, Robert Browne

    Hess and Fischer and Smit were all surprised how quickly Browne had answered. What they didn’t learn until later was that four days before Hess’s letter to Browne, Browne, after a two-year hiatus, had tried to resume his correspondence with Detective Mark Finley, who was no longer with the sheriff’s office. Browne had posed a “hypothetical” question: “If a person were to identify a murder which occurred in El Paso County, and then plead guilty to this murder in exchange for a sentence of death . . . how long would it take for the execution to take place? I would appreciate an answer by mail. No visits.”

    Hess saw the coincidence as another example of Lou Smit’s maxim that you never know what will happen when you give the pot a stir. Now he had to follow up. Hess wrote his second letter by hand on a yellow legal pad in June. Scott Fischer typed it up:

    Dear Mr. Browne:

    Thank you for answering my letter. I would have responded sooner, but I was out of town. I note that you too were in Vietnam. I directed the C.I.A. Phoenix Program in III Corps. I spent most of my time in Cu Chi, Tay Ninh and Long An; headquarters in Bien Hoa. I however did not earn a Bronze Star, a worthy accomplishment.

    As to the questions you posed: 1) I was intrigued by the unique manner in which you originally chose to communicate, the map, the poetic verse etc. 2) the cases it brought to mind were Ted Bundy, Henry Lucas and Otis Toole, as well as two Security/Intelligence cases handled by the F.B.I. In those cases, authorities as well as the accused carried on a dialogue. The first three were especially reminiscent as they were serial cases. 3) In response to the question in your letter, the matters where I sought illumination were those unsolved cases to which you alluded.

    It did appear you wished to provide details by virtue of the information you provided. I feel you do have a desire to clear up some pending matters. I of course have no idea as to your goal(s).

    As to my goal, several years ago our family experienced a tragic event. My son-in-law was murdered when he walked in on a burglary in progress. Those involved were apprehended and the case was adjudicated. The void created by my son-in-law’s death can never be filled, but there is great solace in closure. I decided to do as much as I can to assist others in finding closure. I have wondered if you, too, would experience a form of relief by revealing information that would give some peace to parties who have a relationship to any case where you have information.

    Perhaps we can both achieve our goals. Mine, closure. Yours?

    Both the district attorney and our office are aware of the fact that we have written each other. I hope you will consider to continue.

    Sincerely, Charles J. Hess.

    Browne wrote back in July as if the murky clues he’d given the El Paso authorities about “seven sacred virgins” buried under some sort of lake were so transparent any 9-year-old could have cracked the case: he repeated the clues, asked some more “hypothetical” questions about criminal responsibility and requested the addresses of the Ford Motor Company, truck and car development divisions. Hess replied 10 days later, in August. Still looking to establish a rapport, he tried to ally the nature of his training and work in Vietnam with Browne’s: “What a peculiar world in which we live. About 30 years ago we were both trained to dispatch human beings and sent 12,000 miles away for that purpose. Now you are incarcerated for just that, and I am investigating the who, what, where of it. The gods must be bewildered.”

    Hess included the Ford Motor Company address Browne asked for, the first of many errands he ran to curry favor. He also included a photograph of himself holding a yellowfin tuna.

    “There were certain words I would never use,” Hess told me. “Like the word ‘murder.’ I would use ‘case’ instead. I never said ‘stab,’ or ‘kill.’ I always tried to mix a little lightheartedness and something personal in with some solid questions. There has to be a certain ebb and flow to it. But no matter where you are in the correspondence, you always, always, always have to write in a respectful manner. Whether they’re a criminal, an agent, an ideologue, the whole trick is to be able to find some common ground and to do it sincerely, and not judge them. You cannot fake the fact that you may despise them, or what they’ve done. You can’t fake who you are.”

    With that snapshot of himself and the tuna, Hess got a bite. Browne knew what kind of fish it was and asked in his reply if it tasted as good as it looked. He didn’t have a lot of protein in his prison diet, he said. He didn’t think the gods were bewildered; he thought they were ecstatic. “The god of the Old Testament time and again killed thousands upon thousands of men women and children. . . . It eludes me how humans can worship such an evil, vindictive creature.”

    More important, in this third letter, he asked if Hess would like to hear the beginning of a “possible story” entitled “How to Create a. . . .” What followed was an account of a childhood — you can only infer that he was speaking of his own, because he was still being careful to hedge his disclosures:

    How old am I? Three, maybe? What am I feeling? Safe, secure, warm, loved, with a sense of belonging. All these feelings are about to end, never to be again. . . . I hear my mother say, ‘Don’t tell him!’ Don’t tell me what? . . . One of my brothers runs in and says, ‘They’re coming to take your bed, ha ha!’ I run and climb into my crib. I’m thinking they can’t take my bed. This is my place, they can’t take it. Someone, I can’t remember who, took me out of my crib. I am screaming and crying. Then they take my crib and put it in the back of a black pickup truck and drive away. I run back to where the crib was and curl into a ball and cry and cry and cry. Now it’s night and time for bed. My mother takes me into a strange room. There are two beds in this room. There are two older boys in each bed. Where am I going to sleep? She puts me in one of the beds between two boys. As soon as she leaves the boys start hitting me and telling me to get out of their bed. I start crying. . . . Each night I am put in one of the two beds. This nightly ritual goes on and on and on night after night after night. What a wonderful childhood I have. This is just the beginning of the endless joy of my childhood.

    It was not until the fifth letter, in September 2002, that Hess began to feel he had an idea of who Browne was and whether their developing “synchronicities” might yield confirmable facts. Browne had taken to saluting Hess with a jaunty “Hello Charlie Hess.” Hess felt familiar enough to address Browne as “Robert.” But he was also frustrated. Browne was now calling the Pontiac Trans Am a Grand Am. The oft-repeated allusions to a “high priestess” had sent Hess poring fruitlessly over the literature of Tarot cards and hunting in the Bible. “Robert,” he wrote, “are we talking about a real person, or is the High Priestess allegorical? I continue to feel you are trying to provide me with specifics but for some reason we don’t get over that last hurdle.”

    Hess was about to go into the hospital to have the first of two hip-replacement operations. He’d been stockpiling his own blood. He was 75, and there was always a chance he might not get off the table. Pressing in the name of the trust he felt he’d earned, he challenged Browne to explain himself, saying he’d put all his cards on the table: “Won’t you consider laying out just one verifiable instance? . . . If this is just a game, tell me and we can continue to correspond and exchange philosophies. . . .”

    “It was his put-up-or-shut-up letter,” Scott Fischer told me. “Charlie intentionally told the truth and risked inflaming the situation.”

    The appeal, the persuasion, the brinksmanship none of it worked. Browne came back six weeks later, in December, “relieved” to learn Hess made it through the operation but loaded for bear. He revived his complaint that he’d been framed by a planted fingerprint in the Heather Church murder. He mocked Hess’s occasional use of first-person plural. He said: “I will not hand it to ‘us’ on a golden platter with nothing to gain for my efforts. What I could possibly gain eludes me for now.”

    A week into the new year, Hess wrote: “You know, Robert . . . I do not believe I would put the details on a golden platter without first receiving the assurances you consider important. On the other hand, it makes one wonder why you wrote in the first place. You must have been moved by something. . . .”

    Browne’s reply nine days later was uncharacteristically reflective. “You were wondering why I wrote in the first place,” Browne said. “I don’t know that I could answer that to your satisfaction. I’m not sure that I even know.”

    But for the first time Browne printed both his name and his return address on the letter, not just on the envelope: a negligible detail perhaps but it seemed significant to Hess and Smit and Fischer. And subtly, altered perhaps by a few grains of introspection, the balance between Hess and Browne began to shift. Hess had already emphasized that almost everyone at the sheriff’s office thought Browne was giving him the runaround. And, sure enough, the indignation of a habitual liar unable to find a market for the truth flared in Browne’s letter at the end of January 2003: “As far as something tangible that will convince someone that there really are cases out there, I tried before with the white Grand Am. I guess some cases (people) don’t rate. Also the sanitation companies do a great job of disposal.”

    Still trying to establish his credibility, Browne wrote five weeks later that he thought he would “throw a couple of things your way in hopes of adding credence to the whole shebang.” He dropped two more details about the white Grand Am, which would prove to be crucial. The investigators ought to search the missing-persons files for a “young army wife,” he said. More pertinent, the husband recovered the car himself. “If that doesn’t ring any bells, nothing will.” And then he went on to a second matter:

    “In addition to bolstering credence, I am mainly curious of the outcome of the following. I thought long and hard about picking an incident that would not be lost among the many others. A very small town seemed to be my best bet. Small towns don’t forget such rare happenings. The town I choose is Flatonia, Tex. They don’t get much smaller. The year was approximately 1984 or 1985. A young woman was killed and her body was found near this town. The last I heard was that her husband was being charged with her murder. I’m curious as to the eventual outcome. Please let me know. Afterward we may talk some more on this. Texas does like to kill people! That should give you something to think about.”

    Indeed it did. Lou Smit learned via a phone call from the Fayette County, Tex. sheriff’s office that the death of a 22-year-old waitress named Melody Ann Bush fit Browne’s descriptions. She had had an argument in a bar with her husband the night she died. Her body was found in a culvert about two miles north of Flatonia on March 30, 1984. The coroner estimated she’d been dead five days. The cause of death was “acute acetone poisoning.”

    What may have been a kind of implicit pressure to uphold his end of an unspoken contract seemed to peak in May 2003, when Browne wrote an extraordinary five-page letter. It invited Hess on a hypothetical trip around the United States. It was, in essence, a text to go with that provocative map Browne sent to El Paso authorities in March 2000. The narrative was written as a jaunty travelogue, with each town or geographical location supposedly the burial site of a murder victim. It seemed as if the breakthrough Hess had been hoping for was imminent.

    “The information you provided certainly puts us a long way down the road, and I believe we are about to ‘move some of the big boulders,’ ” Hess replied eight days later. “Robert, we still need a local case or two where we actually find a body, and hopefully some attendant facts. The Grand Am thing may be a good place to start I mean all the specific information so we can use our time efficiently. . . . We have traveled a long way together and [I] hope that in some way we can make the rest of the trip easier on you.”

    Had they traveled further than Browne wanted to go? Not three months later, the line went dead. Browne wrote a letter on July 14, 2003, saying he wasn’t feeling well and wasn’t up to any visits or “interrogations.” He complained as he had often in the past about the medical treatment he was receiving. In what may be the paradigmatic moment of narcissism in the entire correspondence, the man who said he had been murdering people for 25 years was outraged that the Department of Corrections wasn’t living up to its legally-mandated obligation to provide him adequate health care. “I find the selective application of the law to be an indication of humanity in general,” Browne wrote. “I can only be greatful [sic] that I’m not part of this humanity.”

    And then, after that 14th letter from Browne, letters stopped coming. Hess wrote in September to ask what was up. No reply. Like some castoff suitor, he wrote again in February 2004, wondering what he’d done wrong. No reply. He reiterated offers he’d made to get Browne examined by an outside doctor. He mentioned again his contacts with an author who was still keen on writing about the adventures of Robert Browne. But nothing Hess offered drew a response. Another seven months went by. Hess was baffled. He could think of only one last thing to do.

    6. Face to Face

    The Colorado State Penitentiary was about an hour south by car, near Canon City. Scott Fischer drove Hess down in his GMC Yukon on the morning of Sept. 9, 2004. It was a drastic step, this “cold shot,” but what did they have to lose? Hess had made arrangements with the Colorado Department of Corrections to visit Browne. When they arrived, Fischer waited in the car. Hess was shown into a small visiting room where inmates usually met with lawyers. Shortly, escorted by guards, the man behind the signature came shuffling in. His hands were cuffed behind his back, his legs hobbled in irons. He was dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit and flip-flops. His beard came down to his chest.

    “Do you know who I am?” Hess said.

    “No,” said Browne.

    “I’m the guy who’s been writing you letters!”

    “Oh!”

    Hess reached around behind Browne’s back and awkwardly shook his cuffed hand. Hess asked why Browne had stopped writing. It was nothing personal: Browne said he was down to pennies in his prison commissary account and didn’t have the money for paper and stamps.

    For an hour Hess listened as Brown vented his frustration with the medical treatment he was getting. He had headaches; he had bad arthritis in his back and knees. He said the medication he was taking was making him dizzy. He had no faith in Department of Corrections doctors.

    “I hope I haven’t caused you any distress by just walking in here,” Hess said.

    “It’s O.K.”

    “Would you mind if we clarified some of that information we talked about before?”

    Hess brought up the Grand Am lady, whose identity the investigators had still been unable to establish. Browne said that when he lived in Colorado Springs in the late 1980s, he killed a young woman who lived in an apartment complex nearby.

    Killed. Hess was startled to hear the word, especially given how strenuously he and Browne had avoided it in their correspondence. And Browne in future meetings almost never used it again. It was one of a few words that were like the no-go red-coded roads in Vietnam: Kill. Murder. Rape. By comparison Browne seemed curiously comfortable with stab, strangle or the piece of diction that seemed to define his icy dissociation from the horror of his acts: disarticulate. Hess was struck by how nonchalant Browne seemed not just about his being there face to face, but also about what he was sharing. Confessing.

    They’d been sitting nearly three hours when the guards rapped on the door and said Browne had to be back in his cell in 10 minutes for the midday head count.

    “I appreciate the way we were able to talk,” Hess said. “Can we restart communicating?”

    “Yeah,” Browne said.

    “Any objection to me coming back to see you in person?”

    “No. Come whenever you want.”

    Two weeks after their visit, Hess had a $20 money order sent to Browne’s commissary account to help him buy stamps and paper. And in mid-October the first letter from Browne since the hiatus arrived in Hess’s mailbox. It laid out the quid pro quo, what Browne wanted in exchange for any further details about his “deeds of interest.” He wanted two things: one, a thorough examination by a “real” doctor coupled with assurances that all his medical problems would be addressed “commensurate with the 21st century”; two, to be transferred from the Colorado Department of Corrections. Tucked into the envelope with the letter outlining the terms of his cooperation was a separate sheet of paper proffering details about the death of Melody Bush. The message, in stark capital letters, read:

    FLATONIA

    ETHER/ICE PICK

    The details Browne offered were convincing not so much because they jibed exactly with the coroner’s report, which made no mention of ice-pick wounds and listed the cause of death as acetone poisoning, but because they were so specific and offered with such conviction. In follow-up interviews Browne said he had sprayed ether into a rag and held it over Bush’s face. He had ether handy because he used it to kick-start the diesel engine in his truck. No ice-pick wounds in the coroner’s report? Tell the Texas authorities to disinter Bush’s body and examine the area around her ribs for nicks, he said. The discrepancies in that case still have not been resolved, but El Paso detectives have no doubt Robert Browne killed Melody Bush.

    Hess went in for hip-replacement surgery in November and was not able to schedule a second visit with Browne until December. On that second visit, Hess persuaded the guards to uncuff Browne’s hands and he and Browne talked about a body found in Sugar Land, Tex.: Nidia Mendoza, a 17-year-old topless dancer from Panama. When Hess described that visit, I asked if, having seen the autopsy photographs of Mendoza’s corpse — which graphically showed how Browne had “disarticulated” her legs and severed her head with a dull butcher knife from the kitchenette in what he called the “rather nice motel” where he strangled her (and then carried the pieces of her body out to his flower delivery van in a suitcase and dumped them off Highway 59) — Hess had ever found himself too repulsed to sit and chat about the inmate’s health and how Browne’s beloved New Orleans Saints were faring that season in the N.F.L.? Was it hard to shake his hand knowing what it had done?

    “It upsets people when I say this, but it wasn’t hard,” Hess said. “I can’t let myself feel revulsion. If I feel revulsion in my gut he’s going to pick up on it. When we were talking about the Mendoza case, I’d ask him a question and he’d give me one-line answers, one after another. I’d say:

    ‘Tell me what happened.’

    ‘I met a girl in a bar.’

    ‘And then what?’

    ‘I took her to a motel.’

    ‘And after that?’

    ‘I paid her.’

    ‘And then?’

    ‘And then we had sex.’

    ‘What happened next?’

    ‘I strangled her.’

    ‘And then what did you do?’

    ‘Then I put her in a bathtub and cut off her legs.’

    ‘How’d you do that?’

    “And he showed me. He put his hand down near his groin and said, ‘You circumscribe the thigh with a knife here like this until you hit hard tissue you can’t cut, and then you twist it back and tear it off like a turkey leg.’ Now when I’m hearing this, I can’t jump up and say, ‘Jesus Christ, Robert, how could you do that?’ I have to say ‘O.K.’ like it’s something everybody does. I have to put the horror of it out of my mind. And when I walk out of the prison, by the time I get to the front gate, I’m not thinking about it, I’m thinking about getting some Mexican food. I never missed a night of sleep because of something Robert Browne told me.”

    In two years of letters and two face-to-face meetings, Hess had been able to get details from Browne mostly in dribs and drabs. But in late January 2005, having elicited key facts about the homicides in Flatonia and Sugar Land, Hess drew from Browne a story in which the inmate didn’t mince words about what he had done. He told Hess that in 1983, while living in an apartment complex owned by his brother Donald in Coushatta, La., he had stabbed his next-door neighbor to death with a screwdriver. From a Louisiana state trooper, Hess learned of an unsolved murder that fit the given details. A local newspaper reported that Wanda Faye Hudson had been fatally stabbed with a knife, but the autopsy report noted that the murder weapon was a screwdriver. Browne’s name surfaced during the initial investigation by Louisiana authorities because Hudson had told her uncle that Robert Browne had replaced the locks on her front door, and she thought he had a key. About two months after the January confession, Browne explained that he had worked as the maintenance man at his brother’s apartment building, and Hudson’s death was a “spur-of-the-moment thing.” He had opened the door, reached in with a screwdriver and removed the bracket that held the security chain. Hudson was asleep. Browne had a can of red ant killer which contained chloroform. He soaked a rag with it and put it on Hudson’s face. The autopsy report noted 25 stab wounds in the chest area, four in the area of the vagina. Not long after the authorities took Hudson’s body from the room, Browne himself moved in, cleaning up the blood he’d spilled, repainting the walls and even sleeping in the bed of the woman he’d slaughtered.

    At a meeting in mid-February of senior sheriff’s office investigators and officials from the Department of Corrections, Hess and Smit and Fischer gave a PowerPoint presentation of the evidence in the out-of-state cases. Sheriff Maketa, Chief Joe Breister of the Law Enforcement Bureau and Cmdr. Brad Shannon of the Investigations Division thought it was time to bring in a sworn officer. They assigned Jeff Nohr, 47, a methodical, detail-oriented detective who at one time was married to Lou Smit’s daughter.

    What remained maddeningly elusive was any corroborating evidence of a Browne homicide in El Paso County. Five years after Browne first mentioned it, the only local murder was still known as “the Grand Am lady” case. El Paso authorities might provide crucial information to other jurisdictions, but they couldn’t prosecute crimes that occurred outside the county. The enigma of the Grand Am lady bedeviled the Apple Dumpling Gang from the beginning. Now with Nohr aboard they made a concerted effort to break it open.

    Knowing El Paso authorities were working on a deal under which he might be transferred to another state-prison system, Browne began giving up details readily. With a map of the city Browne tried to locate the apartment complex near his where the Grand Am lady and her husband and daughter lived in 1987. Scott Fischer made a 360-degree panorama of photographs, and at a meeting with Hess, Browne was able to pinpoint the Grand Am lady’s apartment complex at 4410 East Pikes Peak Avenue, and to show where she had lived on the north side of the building an apartment later identified as either 107, 108 or 109. He pointed out the Kwik-Stop convenience store where he had worked, and where he had asked the young wife out on a date. She and her husband used to come in and rent videos. Her husband and their baby daughter had gone out of town, he said, either to Miami, or New Orleans. Browne and the Grand Am lady drove in the white car to a movie. Afterward, they went back to Browne’s apartment, and there he strangled her. He threw some blankets over the body, took her keys, went to her apartment and took a Sony color TV. He waited until the next night to dismember her in his bathtub, he said, because he was tired. He removed a “big cluster ring with a lot of small diamonds” before disposing of the body parts in a Dumpster.

    Browne’s information sent investigators off looking for TV-set serial numbers, long-gone security guards and stolen wedding rings. Without the victim’s name, or the names of her survivors, who might have filed a missing-persons or stolen-vehicle report, they didn’t have a case. They’d had the Police Department look at missing-persons files and check stolen-car reports, but nothing had turned up.

    Finally, in April 2005, they got a name.

    In March, Nohr asked the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to search for all stolen and recovered Pontiacs in El Paso County from 1986 to 1988. On April 14, a list came back of 172 vehicles. Using the vehicle identification numbers, Detective Rick Frady, who specialized in auto-theft investigations, was able to narrow the 172 Pontiac models down to nine Grand Ams. The detectives were hoping to match a registered Grand Am owner with one of the approximately 100 names they’d gotten out of a city directory of people who had lived at 4410 East Pikes Peak Avenue between 1986 and 1988. But none of the names matched. Detective Frady, however, recognized that one of the vehicle identification numbers had a mistake in it — a character out of place. When he had it rechecked, the name of the owner came back as Joseph Allen Sperry; and on the list of former tenants there was also a Joseph Sperry. Nohr couldn’t find a phone number for Joseph Allen Sperry, but an Internet database listed him as a possible associate of a woman named Amie Charity in West Palm Beach, Fla.

    The number was listed. He dialed. A woman answered. He explained who he was and asked if she knew a Joseph A. Sperry.

    “Joe, telephone!” she said.

    Sperry not only confirmed that he’d lived at 4410 East Pikes Peak, he also had the case number for the missing-persons report he had filed with the Colorado Springs City Police Department, which no one in the legal system had been able to find. He told Nohr that his TV had been stolen. And he gave the detective the full name and date of birth and complete description of his wife. He had last seen her around Nov. 1, 1987, when he left to take their 3-month-old daughter Amie to stay with his mother, Amie Charity, while Sperry and his young wife sorted out their marital troubles. The name of the local woman Robert Browne killed was Rocio Chila Delpilar Sperry. She was 15. Her body has never been found.

    It’s doubtful that the district attorney for the Fourth Judicial District could have ever made a case against Browne for the murder of Rocio Sperry without producing her body. Browne most likely pleaded guilty to her death to speed the transfer that was the price of his cooperation in the first place. At one point in July 2005, displeased with the progress of the discussions, he announced in a letter to Hess: “I have decided to end this whole affair. As of the above date, I terminate all negotiations, etc.” But he finally got the long-sought medical examination he wanted — by special dispensation, a doctor who attended Lou Smit’s church gave Browne a physical and found nothing that the prison doctors hadn’t been treating. Browne’s medical complaints abated after that. As for the transfer to another location, the Department of Corrections had worked out a deal with the Minnesota D.O.C. to move Browne to the Minnesota prison system. During a visit with Hess almost a year after the fate of Rocio Sperry had been clarified, Browne was fretting about the delays.

    “I wish there was a way to expedite this,” he said.

    “I can tell you how you can expedite it,” Hess replied. “You go in and you plead to the Sperry case.”

    Browne agreed, and on July 27, 2006, he was standing in district court pleading guilty to the first-degree murder of Rocio Chila Delpilar Sperry. In the courtroom that morning were Joe Sperry, who once served time for aggravated battery after getting into a fight because he’d been accused of murdering his wife; and Amie, his 19-year-old daughter, who had grown up thinking her father might have killed her mother. They spoke during the sentencing that immediately followed the plea. Joe Sperry cursed the man who in killing his wife, Rocio, had destroyed much of his life, too. Amie Sperry extended her “deepest gratitude” to the state of Colorado for bringing justice and ending her doubt. “And as for Robert Browne,” she added, “I would like to say may God be with his soul.”

    7. A New Correspondence

    The members of the Apple Dumpling Gang have probably swapped their last stories over coffee at the Old Heidelberg Pastry Shop and Cafe. During the winter, Scott Fischer’s wife, Roxanne, a nurse anesthetist, found a better job, and they moved up to the mountains in Breckenridge, Colo. This June, Lou Smit plans to leave to try to set up other cold-case units around Colorado, Arizona and Kansas.

    As for Charlie Hess, he celebrated his 80th birthday on April 21. He remains, he told me, “embarrassed” that the promises he made to Robert Browne have not been fulfilled. (The transfer to Minnesota fell apart when the Browne case became public last summer, and Browne remains at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility. El Paso authorities are still working to make good on their promise, according to Detective Nohr, who continues to work full time on cold cases.)

    A little more than a year ago, Hess got a new correspondence going with another inmate in another state — one who has a very different personality from Robert Browne’s but who also has murders to discuss. Hess says he hopes to close more cases soon, under different auspices. In January, he received the Sheriff’s Meritorious Service Award. There was a big dinner, lots of warm words. Only weeks before, he was asked by the El Paso Sheriff’s office to sign a confidentiality form. He was insulted — what had he ever done that suddenly the bureaucrats didn’t trust him not to compromise privileged information? He turned in his office keys. “Quit is too strong,” he said. “I’ve left.” With a co-author, Davin Seay, he is writing a book titled “Hello Charlie: Letters From a Serial Killer.”

    I called Hess at home one evening late last month, to take another run at the secret of his motivation. I tried the Readers Will Be Disappointed gambit. “You’re really clever!” he said, and then he must have turned to Jo because he said, “He thinks I’ll give it up to him because his readers really need it!” They had a good laugh, and even their dogs started barking. The missing puzzle pieces would be revealed in his book, Hess said. We got to talking about whether there were really more categories of people than Intellectuals and Those Who Got Things Done. Indeed there were.

    “You have educated people and uneducated people,” Hess said. “You have competent people and incompetent people. And you have people who are just average.”

    “What category are you in?”

    Innate suspicion made him hesitate. Then he said, “I’m in a category all by myself.”

    Chip Brown is a contributing writer for the magazine. His last article was about the new-media company Flavorpill.


     

     

    Is Reuters drinking bong water?

    Stupidest Drug Story of the Week
    Is Reuters drinking bong water?
    By Jack Shafer
    Posted Friday, April 27, 2007, at 6:46 P.M. E.T.

    Why don’t the hacks who cover the illicit-drug beat just turn their keyboards over to the drug-abuse industrial complex and let them write the stories?

    This week, Reuters moved a story based on a government press release about marijuana potency issued by the Office of National Drug Control Policy—the office of “drug czar” John P. Walters. The press release and the Reuters story state that marijuana potency has reached its highest level since the government started monitoring it in the late 1970s. The average levels of THC in marijuana now stand at 8.5 percent. (THC is the primary active ingredient in marijuana.) This compares to a little less than the 4 percent measured in 1983.

    Headlined “U.S. Marijuana Even Stronger Than Before: Report” on Reuters’ Web site, the piece quotes nobody outside of government as it channels drug warrior hysteria.

    As this drug-czar chart shows, the average percentage of THC in cannabis samples analyzed by the ongoing Marijuana Potency Monitoring Project at the University of Mississippi has increased over the years. Assuming for just a moment that these findings accurately reflect marijuana potency, I’ve got a question: So what?

    Back in 2002, when Czar Walters warned of the dangers of stronger pot in a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, drug scholar Mark A.R. Kleiman of UCLA responded with this item in his blog:

    What matters isn’t how strong the material is, but how intoxicated the users get. And there’s lots of evidence that marijuana users tend to have a target level of intoxication and learn how to titrate dosage to reach that level. Studies that ask marijuana users to roll a joint have found that the average size has halved, from about half a gram to about a quarter of a gram, and there’s anecdotal evidence that sharing a single joint has become more common.

    So much for the inherent dangers of superpotent weed.

    But how accurate are the government’s measurements of average THC? Writer Brian C. Bennett notes that the number of drug samples tested in the government study has varied widely, making meaningful comparisons of increased (or decreased) potency difficult. The collection of samples doesn’t appear to be as scientific as it does anecdotal. The czar’s press release asserts that two-thirds of the samples analyzed in the most recent study came from law enforcement seizures and purchases, and the rest from domestic eradications.

    Bennett writes that the kinds of marijuana seized and tested vary from year to year, also. In 2000, sinsemilla, the extra-potent flowering tops of the marijuana plant, constituted 3.66 percent of the tested samples. In 2004, 18.39 percent of the samples were sinsemilla. Guess which year produced a higher average measure of THC? In 2000, the figure was about 5 percent. In 2004, about 7 percent.

    The Reuters article also conveys the views of a National Institute on Drug Abuse official in reporting that “60 percent of teens receiving treatment for drug abuse or dependence report marijuana as their primary drug of abuse.” Kleiman’s blog puts the treatment numbers in perspective by pointing to the University of Maryland’s Center for Substance Abuse Research, which reports (PDF) that the increase in marijuana treatment admission is driven by the increase in criminal justice referrals. Marijuana arrests “have roughly doubled over the past fifteen years,” Kleiman writes in his blog, “with the vast bulk of those arrests … for simple possession. Other studies show that for juveniles, most non-criminal-justice referrals reflect parental pressure.”

    None of this is to champion the use of marijuana. I just want journalists to stop regurgitating whatever the drug warriors tell them. Bennett catalogs some of the most ridiculous claims about marijuana potency made by officials and published in the press during the last 40 years. If you take these statements at face value, a single joint rolled from today’s marijuana should carry a bigger punch than several tons of yesteryear’s Mexican grass.

    Addendum, April 29: Via e-mail, I asked Mark Kleiman if his views on potency and potency reports had changed since he wrote his blog item. After I filed my piece, he responded:

    In the real world, THC content seems to be continuing to drift up, though I wouldn’t take the Mississippi pot farm’s unsupported word for it.

    In our knowledge, the idea that THC content is the be-all and end-all of cannabis potency now seems to be discredited. The work by GW Pharmaceuticals suggests that the ratios of THC to cannabidiol matters, with high-ratio stuff more likely to generate problematic levels of anxiety. (Cannabidiol seems to be anxiolytic.)

    Users can titrate (though of course not perfectly) to avoid getting “too stoned” from more potent pot. But if there’s less cannabidiol per milligram of THC, it’s more likely that the amount of pot they have to smoke to get as high as they want to get will produce a panic reaction.

    My understanding is that hashish, which generally has a higher concentration of THC than unprocessed cannabis, also has lots of CBD and thus a low THC/CBD ratio. Therefore the “Indica” cannabis that increasingly dominates the market is actually more likely to generate bad reactions than is hashish.

    It seems to me that the bad faith of the anti-cannabis forces is showing. If the illicit market is creating dangerously potent (or, I would say, high THC/CBD ratio) cannabis, that’s an argument for creating a legal market where the potency and the ratio can be known to the user and regulated by the government. There’s no particular reason either buyers or sellers in a licit cannabis market should favor especially potent pot, any more than 150-proof rum has a big share of the alcohol market.

    ******

    I’ve never smoked marijuana and I don’t advocate its use. For compelling health reasons, kids should avoid it, and many seem to do just that. According to a Monitoring the Future study, the number of high-school pot smokers remains flat or down over the last decade. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

    Jack Shafer is Slate‘s editor at large.

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