Finding Shakespeare

Finding Shakespeare

A dramatic quest to stage the first-ever professional “original pronunciation” production of Shakespeare’s work in New York City.

By Daniel Fromson

The Atavist Magazine, No. 28

Daniel Fromson is a copy editor for the website of The New Yorker. His writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, New York, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Washington Monthly.

Editor: Charles Homans
Producers: Olivia Koski, Gray Beltran
Research and Production: Vonecia Carswell, Lila Selim, Chris Osborn
Cover Illustration: Andrew Bannecker
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Videos: Courtesy Hamilton Meadows, Courtesy Diana Swinburne
Photos: Courtesy Hamilton Meadows
Audio: Courtesy David Crystal, Ben Crystal and YouTube
Audiobook Music: “Rest Awhile You Cruel Cares” by John Dowland, Performed by Jon Sayles

Published in August 2013. Design updated in 2021.

“It is not to yesterday that we would take you now, but to a day before innumerable yesterdays, across the dead sea of Time to a haven mutable yet immortal. For the Elizabethan era is essentially of the quick, although its dead have lain entombed for centuries.”
—William Farquhar Payson, John Vytal: A Tale of the Lost Colony (1901)

One

On Easter Sunday 2011, a 39-foot sailboat motored into the Chesapeake Bay. “Tangier Island!” its captain cried. “Dead ahead, about five miles off of the starboard beam.” He said these words even though he was alone, bouncing through a choppy sea toward a place where he knew no one. He recorded himself with a handheld camera, as if starring in an adventure film of his own creation.

The sailor’s voyage had begun a day earlier, on April 23—the day, many believe, that William Shakespeare was born, in 1564. He called his ship the Tempest, a reference to both Shakespeare’s play and the storm that had wrecked the boat years before he bought and rebuilt it. Sailing without radar or other instruments, he had dropped anchor that evening and spent the night in the cabin, a warren of unfinished wood, dangling wires, and peeling metal foil suffused with a distinctly lived-in shabbiness. Now, however, he stood on deck in the afternoon sun, glided into a marina, and tied up at a berth amid stacks of crab traps and thickets of salt-marsh cordgrass, silencing an engine that had no reverse.

Shaped like an apple turnover, Tangier Island—officially Tangier, Virginia, as its inhabited portions are known—measures three miles by one mile, sits just a few feet above sea level, and is so grooved with waterways and pounded by waves that several acres, every year, simply vanish into the bay. The place lends itself to hyperbole: Writers have called it “an island out of time” and “the quaintest and most isolated community in the United States.” Its 500 or so residents, descended from Englishmen who arrived in the late 1700s, drive golf carts instead of cars, passing clapboard houses and stone coffins that protrude above the saturated ground. “Interesting to notice how many people here don’t put up curtains at night, living with no fear,” the sailor wrote in his journal. “Never experienced that before”—and he was nothing if not experienced in the world’s diverse living arrangements, from a former embassy in Dubai to the space under an evergreen in Central Park.

For a few days, the sailor prowled the island with his video camera. He looked younger than his 65 years, with blue eyes that flickered between glowing and dim, framed by delicate, childlike lashes. On either side of a strawberry-shaped nose, his ears jutted crookedly from a bald skull. He often moved, despite his gut, with vigor, his face blossoming into extravagant smiles and frowns, but on Tangier Island he seemed lost. That, at least, is what Debra Sorenson—an artist who ran the Tangier History Museum and was a rare nonnative citizen of the island—thought when she spotted him near the local grocery store. His name, he told her, was Hamilton Meadows.

Meadows said he was a Shakespearean actor and filmmaker from New York City, although his acting résumés had typically listed a number of additional “special skills”: “offshore sailor, scuba diver/underwater cameraman, commercial fisherman, lumberjack, US Army ranger Viet Nam, expert marksman, stonemason, carpenter, undertaker’s assistant, wedding photographer, home birth assistant.” For several years, he told Sorenson, he had longed to see Shakespeare’s plays as they were performed centuries ago in Elizabethan England—and after he’d started repairing the Tempest in a Virginia shipyard, in 2007, he had learned that Tangier Island’s fishermen still spoke with the Elizabethan accent of their ancestors. Meadows hoped to convince some of them to recite Romeo and Juliet and to let him film them doing so. He would then return to New York and replicate their readings in an Off-Broadway production of the play, in which actors would speak Shakespeare’s words as they originally sounded.

Sorenson wondered how this plan could possibly succeed. Since moving to the island the previous August, she had come to know Tangier as a place where people cheerfully sold day-trippers ice cream cones but, even as they smiled, eyed outsiders with clannish distrust. Nearly half of them belonged to just three families—the Crocketts, the Pruitts, and the Parkses—and they went by nicknames that revealed their insularity. These included Ooker (“Tried to mock a rooster when he was a little kid,” in the words of one local), Nickel (“He’d always go up to his uncle and ask him for a nickel”), and Number Nine (“He was some girl’s ninth—ninth sexual encounter”). Sorenson figured that Meadows would have to stick around for at least a few months to pull off what he intended to accomplish.

Still, if Elizabethan English was what he was after, the island was about as good a destination as any in the United States. Tangier, like Maryland’s Smith Island and North Carolina’s Ocracoke Island, is home to an accent that sounds like modern speech from southwestern England. (In 1995, a linguist reported having played samples of the “Ocracoke brogue” to a group of 15 Britons, who unanimously identified it as a British dialect.) On Tangier, the word “time,” for example, is pronounced closer to “toime” or “tuh-eem.” A rich indigenous vocabulary accompanies the accent, such that a crab—depending on its appearance, age, and sex—might be called a sook, softy, snowbelly, doorknob, lemon, punk, shiteater, jimmy, dick, or jimmy-dick. Another local linguistic phenomenon is called talking backwards: “She’s ugly” is often a compliment, and “Yeah, I’m going,” uttered in a slightly high pitch and with subtle facial expressions, can mean “I have no interest in going.”

It was less than surprising, then, that during Meadows’s first few days of introducing himself around town, several islanders had told him they would read Romeo and Juliet—but almost none of them showed up at the meetings they agreed to. When he and Sorenson parted ways after their conversation, he found himself alone yet again. On April 28, Meadows retreated to an empty beach, walking its length in the howling wind and letting his camera linger on a fish skeleton, a swarm of ladybugs, and himself. “Fears + self-doubts, old history flooded in,” he wrote in his journal. “So much old pain in my soul and regrets.”

Meadows wouldn’t seriously attempt to get anyone else to read Shakespeare for another several days. In the meantime, he made friends. He went “toading” with 14-year-old Thomas Eskridge, filling a basket with the puffer fish that the islanders call toads. He ate dinner with a housewife named Claudia Pruitt. Sorenson let Meadows use her laundry facilities and her Internet connection at the history museum; he, in return, offered to help her build a porch onto a shed that she was converting into a small lending library. Meadows made the museum his base for the next phase of his project: two days of auditions for his readings of Romeo and Juliet, which he advertised by blanketing the island with hot pink fliers. “ALL those chosen will be paid $20 at reading,” they promised. But the only people who showed up were a handful of kids, whose accents were much fainter than those of their parents. Meadows began spiraling into despair.

A storm battered the Tempest after the failed auditions, and damp air whistled through the cabin as Meadows tried to sleep. In the morning, he placed his camp stove on the floor and started burning the last of his propane, squatting over the flames to keep warm. He wanted to escape from what now struck him as an oppressive mound of sand. Later that day, at the grocery store, he saw one of his Romeo and Juliet fliers in the garbage. They couldn’t wait to tear it down, he thought. But when he returned to the Tempest, he vowed to try again. “I’m restored,” he wrote in his journal, “I can’t quit, it’s here, I must win these people over—and I will. I’ll build them this library porch behind the museam [sic], that will show them to believe in me.”

The next day, Meadows threw himself into the work, tearing down the shed’s old steps in a final effort to woo the locals. It was, he later wrote, a “magical day”: People started agreeing to read Romeo and Juliet. He filmed Claudia Pruitt performing the part of Juliet’s nurse. Several days later, he shot footage of Thomas Eskridge’s father, Tommy, and a schoolteacher, Duane Crockett, who read the parts of Friar Laurence and Prince Escalus. Erin Pruitt, a waitress, read Juliet. Then, on May 14, Meadows untied the Tempest and set sail, filming the island as it receded into the distance, leaving as suddenly as he’d arrived.

“The most interesting thing about Hamilton is the way he says goodbye,” one of Meadows’s few longtime friends, Topaz Adizes, says. “It’s like, ‘Alright, see you later,’ and he’ll just turn away and it’s over, a minute before people would say goodbye in a normal situation. I think he avoids the fear of saying goodbye.”

The people of Tangier still weren’t quite sure what to make of their unexpected visitor, who sent them two copies of William Shakespeare: The Complete Works as a thank-you gift and swore that someday, having put on his play, he would return to their island. But before he left, they had granted him an uncommon honor. In the land of Ooker, Nickel, and Number Nine, Meadows had acquired his own nickname. On Tangier Island, he would be known, henceforth, as Shakespeare.

Meadows in costume as Vincentio in “The Taming of the Shrew”, 2010.

Two

I probably never would have crossed paths with Hamilton Meadows if I hadn’t shared, at least casually, his curiosity about a certain enigmatic community in the Chesapeake Bay. On Halloween 2011—when I was living in Washington, D.C., about 100 miles from Tangier Island, and had been reading about the place on and off for a year or so—I came across a story in the Salisbury, Maryland, Daily Times. A “New York City Shakespearean actor,” the article said, had spent three weeks on Tangier searching for its Elizabethan accent. “The actor’s dream,” it went on, “is to produce and stage Shakespeare’s plays ‘as faithfully as possible,’ using what theater insiders call ‘Original Pronunciation,’ abbreviated OP—referring to the way the Bard himself would have spoken the lines at the time he wrote them.”

Intrigued, I visited Meadows’s website and emailed him. I also began perusing the Internet for information about the Elizabethan speech he hoped to re-create. The English of the 1600s, I learned, was believed to have sounded entirely different from the wherefore-art-thou-Romeo “Shakespearean” accent adopted centuries later. There was also a small movement of scholars intent on reviving it—who indeed called the reconstructed language Original Pronunciation.

An hour into my research, Meadows replied to my email. We spoke on the phone that evening. “I used to be Ben Kingsley’s double,” he said by way of an introduction, breathlessly rattling off a few other biographical details before turning to the subject of Tangier Island. In the months since his visit, Meadows explained, he had reluctantly accepted that the islanders’ accent might not be truly Elizabethan. (He inserted an extra syllable into the word, pronouncing it “E-liz-uh-be-thee–an.”) But he had recently learned of the system known as OP, which really did replicate Shakespeare’s English as accurately as possible. “We’re going to do all 37 plays this way,” he said—Shakespeare’s entire canon. “Two a year. I’d like to do three, actually.” He intended to start with Twelfth Night; another director, he had discovered, had already done an OP Romeo and Juliet. “It’s going to definitely be Off-Broadway. Having said that, between now and when it goes up, we might move into a bigger theater.”

I asked Meadows how he planned to pay for the project. “The money so far has been funded by the government,” he said. When I asked if he had received a grant of some kind, he clarified: “I was in Vietnam, and I am 100 percent service-connected disabled, so I get checks every month from the VA. It’s almost $1,000 a week.”

Meadows spoke in an unbroken monologue, and soon I found myself listening as the arc of his life unfurled before me. After serving in Vietnam, he had studied film, he told me, moved to Iran, fled during its revolution, and partnered with a sheikh’s nephew to shoot commercials in Dubai. Then he filmed a TV program about Miami’s South Beach and became a film and TV actor in Hollywood. None of this really explained why Meadows wanted to do 37 Shakespeare plays in OP—although it indeed seemed possible that he was a veteran with some sort of disability. Whatever the case, I wanted to meet him.

We met a month later, at Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal. In his wool blazer, white shirt, and khakis, Meadows looked like a cross between a stockbroker and an elf. As we walked to a Starbucks, he radiated energy, and stories continued to pour out of him—including one about a motorcycle pilgrimage across Europe, which led to a stint in prison in rural Turkey, where, he later told me, the warden commanded him to dance, so he twirled like Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek. Meadows said that although he often crashed with a friend on the Upper West Side, his only permanent homes were the Tempest and a second boat, the Easy Wind. He had post-traumatic stress disorder. He’d grappled with alcoholism and depression. In recent years, before the government recognized his PTSD, he’d mainly worked not as an actor but as a handyman, operating a business named I Can Do That. He called his new Shakespeare venture I Can Do That Theatrical Productions. “In a way, my whole life, you might say, has been to get me to this point,” he told me.

Only then did I think to ask Meadows about his past directing experiences. “Well, I have only directed one play,” he said. A photographer he knew had written it, and Meadows had mounted it in a 35-seat black-box theater. Still, he insisted, “I’m a very good director. I’ve directed a lot of film. I have no hesitation whatsoever about my ability to direct a Shakespearean play.” He was so confident, he pointed out, that he planned on investing his entire savings and all of his disability and social-security money—more than $10,000, he said—in what he was calling Twelfth Night OP. “Ticket sales should be robust,” he said. “Over the years we’ll build mailing lists, the tours will definitely make money, and I think it’ll be a great way to sail off into the sunset.”

I would go on to spend weeks with Hamilton Meadows, then months. At first, what drew me toward him was the chance, however small, that he might really revive Shakespeare’s accent. But what pulled me closer was a deepening sense of the project’s meaning to Meadows—of its place in what he imagined as a theatrical, even Shakespearean life story. I sometimes wondered whether he was telling the truth—about the Turkish prison, about his exploits in Vietnam, Dubai, and Hollywood. But his accounts were detailed and consistent. He also gave me access to his email history and years’ worth of journals, and I eventually accompanied Meadows to Virginia, where he cut the lock on a cluttered self-storage unit and ushered me inside. I also drove with him from New York to Georgia, where a relative handed over an enormous trunk. The ad hoc archives yielded several large boxes’ worth of materials: photographs, letters from Iran, military and medical records, VHS tapes of South Beach celebrities and an old Emirati bottled-water commercial, even scraps of paper on which he’d scrawled his dreams and nightmares. Studying it all, and speaking at length with Meadows and people who knew him—even, at his recommendation, his psychotherapist—I concluded that he rarely, if ever, lied.

Over time, I also started to perceive the darkness that Meadows’s Shakespeare project hid—or, alternately, the void that it might fill. His hoarded relics and moldering papers, with their microbial patinas of grays, greens, and pinks, suggested the ragged contours of a life of trauma. There was an imagined dialogue he had written between a boy and the parents who betrayed him; a photograph of a beautiful woman who vanished; a painting of dozens of stick figures falling into what looked like flames; doctor’s notes containing such phrases as “Fears he might be killed” and “Relives it over & over.” Especially notable was a loosely autobiographical screenplay about “a heavy drinker and a troubled soul” who sails into a storm in a boat named Destiny. Meadows scrawled a working title on a page of notes: “Living on the edge of the sea of storms.” “This is his last shot,” he wrote in a synopsis, “and he knows it.”

It was difficult not to see the screenplay’s parallels with Meadows’s foray into Original Pronunciation. He referred to Twelfth Night OP as the start of his “last journey,” and he spoke of how he was guided by fate. “He feels he lives in a mythic world,” Meadows’s therapist, a Jungian analyst named Gary Brown, told me. For reasons it took me months to begin to understand, Meadows had come to view an obscure linguistic quest, overlooked or dismissed by most theater professionals, as the thing that would define his whole life—and as a chance to achieve a sort of immortality, even if it meant bankrupting himself. “After I’m gone,” he told me the first time we met, “other people can carry on these things. Then it becomes another way to do Shakespeare. It never dies.”

Three

The language of Queen Elizabeth I’s England, over which she presided from 1558 to 1603, is often described as the most beautiful English ever spoken. It is an idealized tongue, synonymous with a golden age that followed the barbarism of the Middle Ages, preceded the chaos of the English Civil Wars, and shaped our understanding of what came after. As the historian Jack Lynch details in The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson, this idealization caught on during the 1700s, when writers and other thinkers were stricken with unprecedented self-consciousness about their native tongue. The language, Jonathan Swift wrote in 1712, had fallen victim to such evils as “Enthusiastick Jargon” and “Licentiousness”; Samuel Johnson denounced its “Gallick structure and phraseology.” The British sought pure linguistic ancestors to emulate and found them in the Elizabethans—especially Shakespeare. “In our Halls is hung / Armoury of the invincible knights of old,” William Wordsworth wrote. “We must be free or die, who speak the tongue / That Shakespeare spake.”

A fixation on Shakespeare’s English also emerged, later but no less fervently, in the United States. As interest in his plays surged throughout the 1800s, “American writers emphasized the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ roots of American culture and celebrated ‘our Shakespeare’ as a figurehead behind which a nation made increasingly diverse by immigration could unite,” the scholar Helen Hackett has written. “In particular, American English was claimed to be purer and closer to the English of Shakespeare’s time than was the language spoken in Victorian Britain.”

The first major inquiry into how Shakespeare spoke his own words, according to the journal New Shakespeareana, was thus undertaken not by a Brit but by a lifelong New Yorker, a prominent cultural critic named Richard Grant White. White described himself as the leader of “a sort of linguistic detective police,” and in 1865 he published an “Examination of the Elizabethan Pronunciation with Especial Reference to Shakespeare,” an appendix to his own edition of the plays. Soon a whole fraternity of sleuths had joined him. Some scholars tried to go beyond analyzing the DNA of Elizabethan English—or Early Modern English, as they began calling it—and attempted to clone the dinosaur, Jurassic Park style. The phonetician Daniel Jones presented “Scenes from Shakespeare in the Original Pronunciation” at University College London in 1909. The director John Barton taught students Elizabethan pronunciation for a drama-club production of Julius Caesar at the University of Cambridge in 1952.

Still, professional directors and producers didn’t embrace what became known as Original Pronunciation, even as they sometimes resurrected other aspects of historical performances. Perhaps they considered it an archaic curiosity—but it is more likely that they didn’t know of it at all, or feared, as London’s reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre did, that it would sound so primitive that people wouldn’t understand it.

But that all changed in late 2003, when a linguist named David Crystal offered to help the Globe put on three OP performances of Romeo and Juliet. A white-bearded Irishman who retired from the University of Reading in 1985 to lead a life of independent scholarship, Crystal, the preeminent detective of the modern OP community, is the author of more than 100 books—enough, and in enough editions, that even he has lost track of exactly how many—including The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. His investigation for Shakespeare’s Globe, like those of the trailblazing researchers whose work he consulted, relied on three main forms of evidence.

The first was spelling. During the Elizabethan era, words had not yet ossified into their modern versions, so Crystal was able to deduce pronunciations by comparing early spellings to modern ones. In Shakespeare’s First Folio, for example, “poppering pear”—a pear from the Belgian town of Poperinge, and, figuratively, a penis—is written “Poprin Peare.” So poppering must have had only two syllables (“pop-rin”), and speakers wouldn’t have pronounced the g. Examining many words, Crystal concluded that both of these traits—the compression of multisyllable words and the dropping of the g from -ing endings—were common in OP.

The second source of evidence was detailed accounts of pronunciation written by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, such as his fellow playwright and poet Ben Jonson. The letter r, Crystal believed, was pronounced after vowels, in part because Jonson was one of several writers who had commented on how people had used the growl-like “dog’s letter.”

The final clues were sound patterns, particularly rhythms and rhymes. Crystal used lines from Shakespeare’s plays to determine which of a given word’s syllables would have been stressed in everyday speech. Other findings came from rhymes that don’t quite work in modern English, such as a couplet from Romeo and Juliet that rhymes the words “prove” and “love”—the assumption being that Shakespeare never would have let such a clunker infiltrate his verse. Had “prove” sounded like “love,” or had “love” sounded like “prove”? Or had their modern sounds both diverged from a common ancestor?

In such scenarios, Crystal would use spellings and other instances of the words to make educated guesses. He knew not only that it was impossible to re-create some sounds with precision, but also that the Elizabethans, like their descendants, didn’t all speak alike. A regional accent, he believed, would have always colored the era’s underlying pronunciation system. Nonetheless, by the time Crystal met the Globe’s associate director, Tim Carroll, in February 2004, he had arrived at what he considered a close approximation of true Original Pronunciation.

Carroll, who was overseeing the Romeo and Juliet production, seemed anxious; despite his enthusiasm for Elizabethan costumes, music, and choreography, he had spent years avoiding what he later called “the final frontier.” Crystal was nervous, too. He had no idea how Carroll would react to sounds that deviated from Received Pronunciation, the elegant accent that most people hear in their heads when they imagine Shakespeare’s voice. RP, as it is known—the accent of the Queen, Shakespeare in Love, and legions of documentary narrators—is in fact a product of the 18th and 19th centuries, when obsessions with class, manners, and proper English swept Britain, privileging the speech of polite Londoners above provincial dialects. Adopted at public schools such as Eton, and of course at Oxford and Cambridge, RP became the accent of the British Empire, the BBC, and Shakespearean theater. It cemented Shakespeare’s air of authority—but it is not how Shakespeare spoke.

Crystal proceeded to read Carroll the prologue of Romeo and Juliet in OP. It sounded decidedly rustic. As the actors soon discovered during rehearsals, the pronunciation of r after vowels reminded listeners of Ireland or the southwestern English provinces known as the West Country. Other features of OP reinforced the aesthetic, such as the dropped g’s, dropped h’s at the beginning of words, and a prominent modification of certain vowel sounds that made lie, now, and joy sound closer to “luh-ee,” “nuh-oo,” and “juh-ee.” There was also the general style of speech: casual and fast, with actors breezing through short words and skipping consonants and vowels. Friends would be “friens”; natural would be “nat’ral.” “A courtly bearing starts to feel strange,” one actor told Crystal in an email. “RP’s stiff upper lip dissolves away.”

After weeks of intensive preparations—which relied on Crystal’s detailed phonetic transcriptions of the play and a set of audio recordings—the actors seemed to agree that OP was transformative. The actress playing Juliet said it made her bolder; another said it “brought vitality and removed pomposity”; another thought it rendered the language “more accessible and less precious.” “In RP this always feels like poetry,” the actor playing Mercutio said. “In OP, suddenly it felt real.”

According to Crystal, the distinction wasn’t lost on members of the audience, who said OP made the actors easier to identify with. During an intermission, Crystal asked a group of teenagers what they thought. “Well,” a 15-year-old said, in a Cockney accent, “they’re talking like us.” This conclusion, Crystal says, isn’t limited to speakers of regional British English: Since merchants and colonists spread the accent around the world, it became the spring from which all Anglophone accents flowed, such that people from America to Australia, hearing it for the first time, perceive aspects of their own speech. Critics took notice, too. The New York Times’ John Rockwell, in 2004, called OP “revelatory.” John Lahr, of The New Yorker, who reviewed a follow-up OP test run the Globe put on in 2005, found that the sounds “give the audience a frisson of extra drama” (though he concluded that they did little to save an otherwise uninspired production).

The critics’ attention soon faded, however—as did the Globe’s after a new artistic director came on board in 2006. Although Crystal published a book about what he called “the Globe experiment,” its influence was mostly limited to a couple of peers who attempted their own OP productions. Then, in March 2011, Crystal received an email. The sender’s name was Hamilton Meadows.

The email consisted of just one sentence: “Shooting doc on Shakespeare accents, using Taming of the Shrew for production in NYC this year, love your views.” Crystal wrote a brief reply: “I have plenty of views, but am not sure from your message how you want to hear them.” Meadows did not respond until the following month, when he emailed Crystal a photo of what appeared to be a sailboat. “Headed to Tangier Island this week to document accents of locals,” he wrote. “Will send you footage when I return.” This time Crystal didn’t reply. Crystal later told me that he viewed Meadows with suspicion, and that, compared with everyone else who wants to do OP Shakespeare, “Hamilton comes from a very different sort of background.

“There are lots of Shakespeare enthusiasts,” he said, “who are simply nuts.”

Four

Shakespeare has always attracted misfits: the phrenologists who once hoped to disinter his skull; the Oxfordian and Baconian conspiracists who have doubted his existence; P. T. Barnum, who tried to buy his birthplace; and a loose cohort of amateurs who, for roughly as long as scholars like Crystal have pursued Shakespeare’s English, have claimed to have found it, alive and well, in the contemporary world. These adventurers and clergymen, journalists and genealogists, have historically latched onto an Edenic notion, believing that in some corner of civilization untarnished by modernity, people still speak like the Elizabethans. Exemplary of this group was a zoologist, dilettante, and science-fiction author named Alpheus Hyatt Verrill.

A Yale man in the mold of the explorer Hiram Bingham, Verrill spent much of the early 20th century traversing Central America as a collector for New York’s Museum of the American Indian. In his memoir Thirty Years in the Jungle, he described a 1920 visit to a remote part of Panama, where he was searching for a village of Indians, members of a tribe he called the Boorabees. After ascending a steep ridge, he wrote, he spotted four huts on the other side of a gully, which was bridged by a single tree trunk. As Verrill started crossing, the Indians—adorned with beads, teeth, and feathers—gathered outside their huts and stared at him. Then Verrill lost his balance. He flailed his arms and made a mad dash for the opposite bank, tripping and plowing into two Indians like a bowling ball. A third, meanwhile, shouted “the weirdest, most incongruous exclamation that ever issued from an aborigine’s lips”: “Gadzooks!”

Verrill had literally stumbled into “the language of our Elizabethan ancestors,” he later claimed. Among the isolated Boorabees, “the quaint old-fashioned English words and phrases of buccaneering days had been preserved,” alongside quaint English manners. The village’s chief asked Verrill to “bide” in his house, and Verrill “both ‘drained’ and ‘quaffed’ chicha and palm-wine” with his new friends. As a newspaper article later put it, “Though they never heard of Shakespeare, the Bourabbees of Panama speak an English that sounds as if they were characters right out of his plays.”

Verrill’s story clashes with the wisdom of modern linguistics, which holds that Shakespeare’s English cannot be any living person’s native tongue, if only because all spoken languages are always evolving. Even a colony of 17th-century actors, stranded on a faraway island during the reign of Elizabeth I, would speak differently hundreds of years later. Still, since the 1800s, people have reported hearing Elizabethan English, or at least an “Elizabethan accent,” not only in Panama but in Appalachia, Bermuda, Cornwall, Devonshire, Northern Ireland, the Ozarks, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Nova Scotia, North Carolina’s Roanoke Island, Newfoundland’s Fogo Island, the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, the Pitcairn Islands of the South Pacific, and, of course, Tangier Island.

But Verrill’s version, more than most others, encapsulates the idea’s allure. In his essay “In the Appalachians They Speak Like Shakespeare,” the linguist Michael Montgomery argues that the notion that Shakespeare’s language lives on functions as “a myth of the noble savage”: it “satisfies our nostalgia for a simpler, purer past, which may never have existed but which we nevertheless long for because of the complexities and ambiguities of modern life.” Verrill wrote of how his Panamanian friends treated Elizabethan English as “a sort of fetish, a charm, a part of their religion even”; he might as well have been talking about his own people. The words link us to an imagined age of bygone freedom—of pirates, pioneers, poets—whether the alleged speakers are Boorabees or hillbillies. “In the Kentucky mountains to this day there are people all of a sort who still speak Elizabethan English,” John Steinbeck wrote in 1966. Or as Emerson Hough put it in 1918, “When and what was the Great Frontier? We need go back only to the time of Drake and the sea-dogs, the Elizabethan Age.… That was the day of new stirrings in the human heart.”

Hamilton Meadows considered himself a throwback to exactly this sort of earlier era—an explorer, a sailor, and a man of honor who had tried to live a rambling life of extreme autonomy. His ideas about Shakespeare’s English, similarly, echoed those of earlier believers: He imagined the language of the Elizabethans as a rough-and-tumble contrast to Received Pronunciation’s crisply enunciated couplets. “They were almost like the hippies,” he told me. “It was wild. It was absolutely insane. It was free. So that’s what we’re trying to find.”

On May 16, 2011, Meadows sent David Crystal another email. “Mr. Crystal,” it read:

I’ve just returned from T.I. where after three weeks, documenting these remote islanders speaking Shakespeare, for me, on camera, which was not easy, I’ve concluded that, indeed, there is something in the tone, the rhythm of speech which is different than how we speak English in the United States today.… If you are interested in helping to give audiences a real experience in hearing and watching a Shakespeare play as it was done in the early 1600’s, I will send you a copy of all my research, for your help in tracking down these roots to Elizabethan times. I recognize that I am not a scholar in these issues, only a lover of these works, but I am very determined to continue with these efforts, and will carry on until I succeed.

This time Crystal responded. Over the course of several messages, he told Meadows that he’d been to Tangier in the 1980s and had heard only occasional echoes of Elizabethan speech—a statement he was perhaps uniquely qualified to make, since he had identified, with what he felt was at least 80 percent accuracy, the sounds of the English spoken during Shakespeare’s lifetime. Tangier Island talk “was indeed very different from other US accents,” but, as Crystal later told me, the notion that Shakespearean English survived “was a load of bollocks—this is a myth that’s been around for years and years and years.” Crystal didn’t hear from Meadows for several weeks. He figured he’d never hear from him again.

“Then,” Crystal told me, “suddenly he comes up with this concept of performing every play in OP, which really took me a little bit aback.” Crystal was about to advise an OP Hamlet at the University of Nevada. So that fall, Meadows flew west and interviewed his would-be mentor face-to-face, to demonstrate his commitment. It was then that he learned the details of how Crystal had re-created Elizabethan pronunciation and of Crystal’s pioneering Globe experiment. He also realized, about half a year after sailing to Tangier Island, that even though OP didn’t sound like the Tangier dialect, he hadn’t been entirely wrong. It really was wilder than the buttoned-up speech of typical Shakespearean actors. It really was a sort of liberation.

Crystal still wasn’t so sure about Meadows. Before they met in person, he had emailed Meadows to say that the fee for him to prepare the Twelfth Night script in OP and record an audio version of it would be $3,000. Meadows replied that he couldn’t afford such a sum until after the show began a few months later, around Christmas.

“Thanks for your message,” Crystal wrote back. “But I must say it worries me.” He continued:

I can’t see how it could be possible to mount a production with good quality OP in such a short time frame and without the apparatus that is needed to get the actors properly trained. All the other productions I’ve been involved in have had at least a six month preparatory period, and several specialists involved to ensure that the OP is high quality. Even then, it would have been good to have had more time, as some actors need more help than others. A certain amount of seed money is essential, and the fact that you do not have any does not inspire confidence.

Meadows replied, “I would like your help as you know, but I am moving forward with OP one way or the other.”

Five

To Crystal, Meadows had started to seem like Tigger in Winnie-the-Pooh: all energy and no sense. But he also realized that Meadows was the sort of person without whom OP might never have a chance of taking root in mainstream theater. Crystal sometimes spoke of how OP Shakespeare was growing into “a movement,” but the only U.S. productions had been academic exercises: one in Reno, another in New York, another in Lawrence, Kansas. He sent Meadows the OP transcription of Twelfth Night and, eventually, a recording of himself reading it.

And so, by early December 2011, Twelfth Night OP—which Meadows intended to debut in February for a one-week run—had begun to take shape. Meadows had temporarily moved into a derelict, long-deserted luxury apartment in Brooklyn Heights, which he had agreed to renovate for an acquaintance in exchange for being allowed to live there until the remodeling was finished. It was warmer than the Tempest, and, more important, it was a place where he could build a set.

More and more people, meanwhile, were being drawn into Meadows’s orbit. His coproducer was a friend, an actor whom Meadows knew through Off-Off-Broadway theater. But the others—a recent University of Kansas graduate who had studied OP and would serve as a dialect coach; a gaggle of young actors, many of them recruited through an ad in Backstage magazine; a composer whose work had been performed at Carnegie Hall—hadn’t known Meadows at all. Some were drawn to the notion that they would make history by appearing in the first professional OP Shakespeare production in New York. Also important was Meadows’s contagious enthusiasm—and the fact that hardly anyone knew anything about his lack of money and directing experience.

The facade couldn’t last forever. At the start of the second week of December, actors started asking about the “salary” that the Backstage listing had promised, and Meadows was forced to admit that he would pay each person an equal share of a third of ticket sales or a flat $250. Soon, all but three actors had quit. The coproducer left, too, his friendship with Meadows ruined. By December 14, when the dialect coach announced her departure—“This is a project worth believing in,” she wrote to Meadows, but “to continue like this is a terrifying prospect”—the production was in freefall. The following day, Meadows emailed David Crystal. “David,” he wrote, “I’m canceling this production of 12th Night in OP here in NYC.”

In Brooklyn Heights, as people went about their holiday errands, Meadows collapsed into bed and started drowning himself in the cheapest vodka available at the liquor store around the corner. “I looked at the consequences,” he told me. “If I give up now, I will never, in my lifetime, amount to anything. And that’s the truth.”

He didn’t give up. Instead he published a new casting notice, scheduled auditions, and attended a performance of Twelfth Night directed by Ron Destro, an acting instructor whom he’d interviewed before sailing to Tangier Island. After the show, he asked Destro whether he and some of his actors might want to do the play in OP.

“My first impulse was to say no,” Destro recalled. “But as he talked about it, I thought, Well, you know, we’re making history.”

About a week later, I met Meadows a block and a half from Broadway at the Network, a complex of rehearsal studios. He was sitting by himself in a practice room, preparing for his first reading of the play with his second cast.

The newcomers, many of whom had little experience and were just thankful to have roles, had agreed to do the show for no pay at all. Meadows was musing about how he’d lost his first cast. “I have a feeling that part of it was the fact that”—he formed his fingers into air quotes—“‘I’ve never directed Shakespeare before.’ You have to understand,” he added, “that in Shakespeare’s day, they didn’t have directors.” He turned his head toward the hall. “Ron,” he said, “in Shakespeare’s day, they didn’t really have formal directors, did they?”

“No,” Destro replied.

“I didn’t think so,” Meadows said.

The cast and crew of Twelfth Night OP gradually filtered into the room—mostly twenty-somethings, with several notable exceptions. Destro, the founder of the small Oxford Shakespeare Company and Twelfth Night OP’s “associate producer,” had the exaggerated features and mischievous grin of an aging Disney character. He also dabbled in Shakespeare conspiracy theories; he later slipped me a DVD of a homemade documentary, the cover of which asked, “Was the man from Stratford-on-Avon an impostor?” “This is my heresy,” he said with glee.

Liz DeVito, the production’s “office manager,” was Meadows’s close friend, a former employee of Booz Allen Hamilton whose comfortable Riverside Drive apartment was a regular crash pad for Meadows and home to his two cats, Karma and Dharma. She and Meadows shared an interest in astrology, but her existence was mostly the opposite of his, an Upper West Side life with a piano in the living room. She had met Meadows when he renovated her windows.

The true sphinx of the group, meanwhile, was 74-year-old Diana Swinburne, who said she was a former ballerina. She wore marble-sized pearls, loved classical Greek drama, and spoke in an accent tinged with Received Pronunciation. “I worked for 20 years as a dancer and I hurt my back and I got all sorts of degrees,” she told me. “I came back to the theater in 2006, 2007—when everybody I used to know was dead.” Because of her age, Meadows hadn’t given Swinburne a part, but he didn’t want to exclude her. “I thought maybe she could come in and help with the OP,” he said.

“Whatever I can do,” Swinburne replied. “I actually wanted to tell you that as far as OP goes, I do know six languages, more or less.”

But Swinburne wasn’t a real vocal coach, and to Destro’s dismay, there wasn’t one at the first rehearsal. The actors noticed other oddities, too. “Everybody grab a chair and put your stuff down, and let’s get this thing on its feet,” Meadows said as the rehearsal began. He didn’t offer any words about schedules, his vision for the play, or any other sort of introductory speech. Instead, he gestured to a rectangle of brown construction paper he had unspooled at the end of the long, narrow room. It represented a platform that Meadows intended to erect in the middle of the stage, and he encouraged his cast to experiment with movement as they read their lines.

The actors glanced at each other. There would be no sitting around for the close reading of the script that is usually phase one of any production. Some of them started crunching across the paper, eliciting laughs as the noise mingled with their words until Meadows tore up his mock platform, hugged it into a ball, and cast it aside.

Several days later, Meadows invited me to the Brooklyn Heights apartment and showed off a coffee-table book of ethereal Alexander McQueen tunics that he hoped someone could replicate as costumes, after which we went out on the gusty, below-freezing street. It was a little more than a week after Christmas, and discarded trees littered the sidewalk. Meadows sized up a pile, grabbed a fat specimen, and, with a tiny saw, started cutting off branches, which we stashed in a couple of garbage bags so he could use them to decorate his set.

Rehearsals continued at the Network, and by the third—there were only two a week, three hours each—Meadows proclaimed the readings “absolutely, absolutely excellent.” “It was almost performance level,” he said. He still didn’t have a vocal coach. The actors listened to David Crystal’s OP recordings, but their accents sounded Irish, American, and even French.

It was also becoming clear that Meadows had an unusually dark vision of Twelfth Night’s central themes—in contrast to Destro, who like most readers considered the play an airy comedy. After all, it concerns a love triangle in which Viola, the protagonist (who cross-dresses as a man), falls in love with Count Orsino, who in turn is in love with Lady Olivia, who in turn is in love with Viola. There’s also Malvolio, the famously uptight servant at the center of several silly subplots.

But Meadows fixated on the storm that appears in Act One, when Viola is shipwrecked in the mysterious land of Illyria and disguises herself, a scene in which he wanted to feature a torn sail from one of his boats and clouds of smoke. “You really are in a situation where you could be easily raped if you can’t figure out, right now, in this very moment, how you’re going to survive these next five minutes,” he told his actress. As Meadows wrote in a brief synopsis of the play, Twelfth Night was about “people who are lost and have nowhere to go.”

Meadows himself would be playing Sir Toby Belch, Lady Olivia’s uncle, who is often described as jolly and Falstaff-like but whom Meadows considered a fool and a drunk. “I think I probably am Sir Toby Belch,” he said at one point, with a weary laugh. The question of Meadows’s identity also lingered among his cast. “I wasn’t sure, really,” an actress told me, “who I was even auditioning for.”

Six

Hamilton Meadows’s maternal great-grandfather, Charles Lacy, was a state senator in Mississippi. Lacy’s son Eugene, Meadows’s grandfather, ran for Congress there and lost before leaving to practice law in Washington, D.C. Eugene’s daughter Honora became a barmaid and gave birth to Hamilton in 1946, at the age of 19. His father was James Meadows—a traveling salesman, Hamilton believes—whom Hamilton never knew. The couple quickly divorced, and Honora married Weems Franklin, an attorney, with whom she started a new life in Cutler Ridge, Florida, near Miami. She never told Hamilton that Franklin wasn’t his father. He thought his name was Hamilton Franklin.

Established in 1954, Cutler Ridge—which billed itself as “South Florida’s Newest, Most Modern Community”—was a good place to try to escape the past. Meadows had three half-siblings and felt close to them, but his mother was verbally abusive, he says, and Franklin was distant. (If you want to understand Meadows’s childhood, Gary Brown, his therapist, told me, read Faulkner.) Even though he had only one friend, he says he was happy. Biking east, he explored strawberry fields and mangrove swamps and went fishing at the beach, baiting his hooks with white bread. To the west lay Route 1 and its shopping center, which included a bowling alley and a drugstore.

One day when he was about 10, Meadows recalls, he was rummaging in his mother’s dresser for change to buy a milkshake at the shopping center, as he often did, when he came across a folded-up piece of paper titled “Certificate of Live Birth.” Several lines lower was written, in cursive, “Hamilton Lacy Meadows.” He brought the paper into the kitchen, where his mother was washing dishes, and asked her who Hamilton Meadows was. She burst into tears. Franklin, hearing her, came in. “Ham, let’s go for a drive,” he said.

At the bowling alley, Franklin ordered him his milkshake. “And he just looked at me in the face and said, ‘I’m not your father,’” Meadows told me. “And that’s when my world crumbled.”

Meadows became even more of a loner. He began biking to a stand of pines near the strawberry fields, and there, hidden among the trees, he’d light a campfire and cook bacon in a cast-iron skillet, feeling secure as he ate it alone. He started breaking into his neighbors’ houses during the day, marveling at the quiet interiors, hoping to catch a glimpse of how normal people lived. As his misbehaviors piled up and reform school loomed on the horizon, his grandfather intervened, whisking him away to Arlington, Virginia. But he was still troubled, and in October 1963, with only two years of high school under his belt, he enlisted in the U.S. Army.

After his basic training, Meadows was stationed at Fort Benning, in Georgia. “I was 18 years old, small and immature to the point that the other soldiers would pick on me,” he would later write to the Department of Veterans Affairs. During the summer of 1964, he wrote a letter to his grandfather:

Of course I am not in trouble but I have been in the army over nine months now and it seems like a life time. Of course I am all right and … have no trouble with the army it is just that I am so homesick, and it gets worse ever[y] day.

Two months later, in September, Meadows went AWOL.

He recalls driving west all night in a Chevrolet, taking turns at the wheel with two fellow runaways. In Texas, they got jobs with the Ice Capades, spraying water on the floors of convention halls. He was later spotted in Phoenix and imprisoned at California’s Fort Ord. Officers at the base wrote to Meadows’s grandfather: “Pvt Meadows … stated that he had no next of kin or relatives” and “was willing to say anything in order to be discharged from the United States Army.”

After Meadows faced a court-martial and was freed in 1965, however, he returned to the military and volunteered for Vietnam, eager to put his past behind him. According to an official document stamped with the seal of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, Meadows was assigned to its 21st Ranger Battalion—even though his U.S. military records note that he’d been trained as a typist. Meadows says he simply approached a squad of Rangers and asked to tag along. “This act of volunteering for danger was the first of many acts to follow,” Gary Brown would later write in a letter on Meadows’s behalf. “In these acts Mr. Meadows at once symbolically tests his manhood, exhibits his sense of worthlessness, and throws himself into the arms of fate.”

Discharged in 1967, Meadows returned to the United States and drifted, taking premed courses in Alabama and Maryland and ending up at Miami Dade Community College. There, for the first time, he began acting. The phase wouldn’t last long, but it set the tone for the ensuing decades: Meadows would dedicate himself to an up-and-down life of odd jobs and creative pursuits and harbor a desire, years later, to return to the stage. He studied drama at Miami Dade but did not graduate, and he moved to New York, where he drove a cab at night and tried to launch an acting career. He lived with a woman named Salee Corso, whom he married in 1971, after the couple moved to California. He was 25; she was 19. Their daughter, Jessica, was born in Los Angeles, where Meadows briefly studied filmmaking. But the marriage dissolved, and Meadows fled again, eventually buying a one-way ticket to London. The boy who ran away had become the man who ran away.

Meadows spent the fall of 1976 crisscrossing Europe on a motorcycle and sleeping in barns. One day, near Berlin, he hitched a ride with a man in a Fiat. They parted ways, nearly 2,000 miles later, in Turkey, where Meadows kept following the route to Tehran and beyond known as the Hippie Trail. But by 1977, travelers to Iran were looking for more than a hash-addled stopover: Tens of thousands of fortune seekers hoped to taste the fruits of the development taking place under the Shah. Tehran, as Meadows wrote to his family about a month after he arrived, was a “good place for free thought, free enterprise, and storing your money in a Swiss Bank.” There, he said, “all will be well again.”

Meadows says he found work with an ad agency and the local offices of Bell Helicopter. He lived in an apartment building behind the Commodore Hotel, in what turned out to be an outpost of the religious cult known as the Children of God. “We were sort of like the Lost Generation,” recalls Ron Bagnulo, a Dubai-based voice-over artist who says he was involved in the cult and lived with Meadows. When I called him, Bagnulo told me he had not heard from Meadows in decades. “I think everybody,” he told me, “will be surprised that Hamilton’s still alive.”

On the eve of the Iranian Revolution, Meadows and Bagnulo say, a diplomat friend offered them passage to the United Arab Emirates. According to Meadows, the man also introduced him to Sheikh Hasher bin Maktoum al Maktoum, a nephew of the ruler of Dubai. (“As soon as I heard the name, I do remember this man,” Sheikh Hasher told me when I asked if he knew Meadows in Dubai.) By November 1978, when protestors swarmed Tehran and flames billowed from the Commodore, Meadows was on the other side of the Persian Gulf, laying the groundwork for Hamilton Meadows Films. Two years earlier he’d been sleeping in barns. Now, he says, he had a sheikh for a business partner. “It’s a big world,” he wrote to his family, “so much to see, don’t think I’ll stop for many years, and don’t think I’ll live in America ever again.”

Seven

By 1979, Dubai, previously a village of pearl divers and gold smugglers, had become a boomtown, thanks to oil discovered just 13 years earlier. Not long after Meadows arrived, Queen Elizabeth II inaugurated its first skyscraper. But from his balcony overlooking the Dubai Creek, which divides the city, Meadows could still see triangular-sailed wooden dhows gliding across the water. “There was always something to look out over the balcony at,” says Phil Fraser-Brenchley, a British engineer who worked with Meadows. “And we weren’t too far from the gold souk and the spice souk—the smell was around all the time.”

Meadows’s film studio sprawled across the second floor of a building with French doors and broad staircases; Meadows and Bagnulo recall that it was the former Saudi embassy. His specialty was commercials—for cars, wristwatches, air conditioners—though he says he often fled his studio sets for more adventurous locales, living in the desert with Bedouins for a time while creating a documentary on camel racing. “We’d go through sandstorms and shit like that,” he says. “It was just like a movie.” On a giant map in his assistant’s office, he marked cities all over the world, future outposts of an imagined film-production empire. When his ex-wife sent their daughter, Jessica, then about eight years old, to live with him, Meadows even seemed poised to heal his relationship with his only child. For Meadows, Dubai was a place to dream. It was also a place to fall in love.

Sabrina Taylor was in her early twenties, an ad-agency receptionist who still lived with her parents, Christians from southwestern India, and had the fine features and incandescent smile of a midcentury starlet. Soon after Meadows first laid eyes on her, the two were inseparable. He makes his years with Sabrina sound like one big party, a montage of substance-fueled revelries and trips to the beach, where they scuba-dived with friends. A photo he showed me seems to sum it all up. She wears a red dress, and his right arm wraps around her. He wears a stylish watch, holds a plastic cup, and looks straight into the camera, confident.

Sabrina was also at his side in 1980, at a hotel in Brussels where they attended the Clio Awards, the advertising world’s Oscars. It was the pinnacle of his success. His 30-second spot for Masafi mineral water, a Clio finalist, aired in a nearby cinema. The commercial showed a caravan, loaded with crates of Masafi, that rescues a Westerner who is stranded in the desert. The ad presented a cartoon-like vision of the Middle East, one that was too good to be true.

Things started to come apart, Meadows says, sometime around the fall of 1980. He says his ex-wife, Salee, showed up in Dubai and started making trouble, taking back their daughter and hiding her from Meadows. (Salee was also involved in the widely reported sale of “the world’s largest flawless diamond”—a diamond, The Washington Post reported in 1981, that didn’t exist. “I never once ever stopped Hamilton from seeing his daughter,” she told me.) His business began to suffer, too, in part because he spent so much money that he asked his assistant to hide his checkbook.

But the greatest pain stemmed from what happened a year or so later, a series of events that Meadows memorialized in his autobiographical screenplay about the sailor in the boat named Destiny. Sabrina wanted to get married, but Meadows told her he wanted a more open relationship. Then Sabrina called him one day while he was out of the country. She told him that she had gotten pregnant. She had obtained an abortion, she said, and was supposed to see the doctor again for a follow-up.

“Wait until I get back, and we’ll go together,” Meadows remembers saying. But when he returned to Dubai, he was in bed with a Palestinian woman in his apartment one night when he heard the door open and abruptly shut. The only person with an extra key was Sabrina.

Two days later, Meadows recalls, Sabrina’s father called him and said his daughter hadn’t come home the night before. Around the same time, Sabrina’s car was discovered on the street, her belongings seemingly untouched—including a diary indicating that the day after she walked in on Meadows was the day she intended to visit the doctor for her follow-up. The police, according to Meadows and his then-assistant, Carolyn Aspinall, summoned him to their offices for questioning. While there, he observed the interrogation of the Egyptian doctor who had performed the abortion.

“We’ve all watched too many detective programs, so we were all trying to figure out what could have happened, who could have done it,” Bagnulo says. Meadows believes the doctor raped and murdered Sabrina and was ultimately deported. But whatever actually took place, one thing was certain. As Aspinall puts it, “When she disappeared, Hamilton kind of disappeared with her.” Guilt, depression, and alcoholism consumed him; Sabrina’s parents, he says, told him that if their daughter hadn’t known him, she’d still be alive, and he found himself agreeing with them.

Meanwhile, his ex-wife, he says, was still keeping him from seeing his daughter. His business, mismanaged, was crumbling. His creditors evicted him from the film studio, and in late 1982, he says, he fled to London, where he tried to finish his camel-racing documentary but ran out of money. By midwinter he was sleeping under a bridge in Germany.

Meadows turned himself in at the American consulate in Frankfurt, where the officials snapped a passport photo. The copy he has is now smudged, and what stand out are his eyes, which look somewhere beyond the camera.

Meadows’s years in the Middle East established a pattern that would repeat in variations over the next two decades: an improbable ascent out of poverty and insignificance, a catastrophic collapse into depression and self-blame, and a hasty escape.

Repatriated in Miami, he got a job with a film studio, bought a sailboat to live on, and ran aground while drunk near Key Largo, where he met Nona Ramsey, whom he married in 1984. They moved to a farm in Virginia. Meadows sold life insurance, and his first son, Ramsey, was born. “It was a very, very tranquil period of time,” he says. But a little more than a year later, in 1986—when Nona gave birth to a second son, Hamilton, in the front seat of a car—the family was living on a boat docked in Staten Island, Meadows says, and his marriage was disintegrating.

After he and Nona separated, Meadows returned to Miami and opened a wedding-photography studio. But the work depressed him, and soon he had bankrupted himself by channeling his photography profits into a failed TV pilot about South Beach. Although he would eventually reconnect with his daughter, he would have almost no future contact with Ramsey and Hamilton—a fact that is among his most painful regrets. By October 1994, he was living with his mother in Mississippi, brokenhearted and perpetually drunk. “I now see the connection between Sabrina’s death and the loss of my sons,” he wrote in a journal. “My loss of my dream.” In another entry, he described his depression: “Suiside is an ever appealing alternitive to this life that I’m living, or not living. I’ve no direction, no purpose, a failure as a father and a man.”

Come January, however, Meadows was more optimistic. “My future is in my hands—my work,” he wrote. It was time once again to create—and to act. He set out for Los Angeles, where he supported himself as a stonemason while working as an extra and body double; he also tried to launch a self-help TV show for divorced fathers. He likes to brag about how he worked as Ben Kingsley’s double in the 2000 sci-fi comedy What Planet Are You From? He doesn’t like to tell people how he got so drunk at a party with the cast and crew that he thought his career was over. So he ran again, back to New York.

The move did little to improve his prospects. Meadows wrote a screenplay about the infamous 1999 shooting of the unarmed Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo by the NYPD, but the film never went anywhere, and soon he was living among drug addicts. He wrote himself a letter:

Hamilton – We’ve got to chat. Why don’t you dream? You now aged what, 55½, right? Totally broke, in debt with child support and a few odd bills, living in a flophouse room over a bar in The Bronx! Does this tell you anything? … You must continue your course, it’s your only one that is right for you! So work harder—you have a lot of catching up to do!

A month later, Meadows went downtown to work a gig handing out fliers for a political candidate near the World Trade Center. It was September 11, 2001.

Eight

On January 11, 2012, Meadows and his cast gathered in a practice room at the Network to meet their vocal coach. Handsome, with parted silver hair that he often tousled into feathery tufts, John Windsor-Cunningham was as tall as Meadows was compact, as British as Meadows was American, as unwavering in his career path as Meadows was meandering, and as calculatedly naughty as Meadows was guileless.

“I’ve worked with every major theater company in Britain, and I got fed up with it six years ago and moved to America,” Windsor-Cunningham told the actors. A former student at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he had recently been teaching Venezuelans to be English-language broadcasters and leading theater workshops for Alzheimer’s patients, and he had once appeared in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. But his calling was the stage. “I don’t have dogs and cats and children because I’m an actor—I don’t have no fucking time for that shit,” he told me later when I visited him at his apartment. “I’d rather slit my wrists with a fork than do anything else.”

Windsor-Cunningham had gotten involved at the suggestion of Diana Swinburne; it didn’t hurt that Meadows had offered him a fee of $1,500, making him the only member of the cast and crew whom Meadows intended to pay. Yet like Ron Destro and many of the others who had rescued Meadows after he lost his first cast, Windsor-Cunningham also believed that Twelfth Night OP might be a historic milestone. “An awful lot of the big things that have happened in the theater,” he said, “have started from peculiar situations.”

At the Network, with Twelfth Night OP scheduled to open in just five weeks, Windsor-Cunningham told Meadows and the actors what he hoped to accomplish. He wore a rakishly unbuttoned blue Oxford shirt and looked restless. “The main thing that I have to do with you lot,” he said, “is to help you do this play in OP, and that could be quite a difficult thing to do, mildly depressing.…” A few laughs broke out. “Could be hard going on the audience,” he continued, “and all sorts of other problems could occur. I just feel that in my bones. So I’m extremely keen that we should kick off with approaching this as simply as possible.”

He told the actors that he would be teaching them a streamlined version of OP that would focus on a couple dozen key sounds. He said that the moment he felt he could urge someone to go further, he would, and besides, it was more important to have fun and really understand one’s lines before tackling the accent. He made his point by working himself into a frenzy, writhing on the edge of his seat. “You just KNOW the lines,” he bellowed as he shook himself. “SO much. You just KNOW them.” The accent, he told the actors, “will take care of itself.”

Actors began gathering at Windsor-Cunningham’s Garment District apartment for OP sessions that ran as long as two hours, cozily sitting at the foot of his twin bed, near two shelves of alphabetized plays and under the watchful gaze of a plush rabbit. Many of the twentysomethings started to view him as a guru, a sassy Shakespearean Yoda. During a session at the end of January, he was correcting their “I” sounds into “oi” sounds one minute and laughing with them at the pronunciation of “count” the next. (In OP, the word sounds as if it doesn’t have an o.) The same rustic flourishes that had enthralled David Crystal’s actors during the Globe experiment began to emerge. “It’s really changed my perception of Shakespeare,” one actress told me. “It’s made me realize that maybe Shakespeare’s characters are actually a lot more grounded than we give them credit for. They’re not these highfalutin people floating in the air. They’re a lot like you and me.”

Meadows seemed to soar with energy during the early rehearsals with Windsor-Cunningham. But even as he put on a show of confidence, he was plummeting. Additional small-group meetings of actors, which were supposed to take place at his Brooklyn apartment, hardly ever happened. Destro was turning into a doomsday prophet, warning Meadows that “the casting scares me a lot,” that the actors were whispering among themselves, and that he might have to reconsider his decision to be involved. Meadows, fearing a second mass desertion, furtively recruited more actors to serve as backups.

The hand-sewn, Alexander McQueen–inspired tunics didn’t pan out, so Meadows settled for thrift-store tuxedos and evening dresses. He still had to deal with PR and the set, which thus far consisted only of the Christmas-tree branches he’d gathered on the street. He also hadn’t learned his lines. His actors didn’t know that half a dozen years earlier, he had suffered a transient ischemic attack, a blockage of blood flow to the brain that is often called a mini-stroke. He’d had trouble with memorization ever since.

On a Tuesday afternoon, Meadows met Windsor-Cunningham for his first personal OP session. Meadows arrived late, his face shabby with stubble, in his herringbone coat and a wool cap. He hadn’t been eating properly, he hadn’t slept, and his blood pressure was high. He was also sick—so sick, he said, that he thought he might choke to death. Meadows slumped into a chair and, as he often did, turned on his video camera.

Windsor-Cunningham told him there was a serious risk of failure. The actors didn’t have credible accents, he said, and were misinterpreting the meaning and context of nearly every line. “People will be queuing up to get out of the theater—if they’ve turned up in the first place,” he said. “I mean, it could be just ridiculous.”

Meadows cracked. “You don’t understand—we have 28 days,” he said. “Twenty-eight days for us to be able to work together as a company. And that’s it. On the 15th of February, we’re on stage.” His voice rose until he was yelling. “Twenty. Eight. Days. I’m under a tremendous amount of pressure. I’m depending upon you, alright, to help me, as my equal, fifty-fifty, to pull this thing off. I don’t want you talking to these actors anymore about what the subtext is.”

“But they won’t be able to do the accent,” Windsor-Cunningham protested, “unless they understand—“

“We don’t have the time.”

“They won’t be able to do the accent unless they basically understand what the scenes are about.”

“This is all going to be destroyed if we don’t pull this together,” Meadows said. “I want them to listen to David Crystal’s tapes. I’m spending $15,000 of my fucking money. I need you to be my partner. I need to know that as I’m doing all those other things like costumes and sets and shit like that, and learning my own fucking lines—excuse me for being so blunt with you, my friend—that I’ve got you in my corner.” As he went on, Meadows calmed down, like a fire turned to embers. “They all know that I’ve never directed a Shakespearean play. I’m a fucking filmmaker! But I can do it. And I need your help.” He added, “I don’t know what I’m doing, but I know that I’m gonna do it.”

“You have more balls than I have,” Windsor-Cunningham said.

On the subway back to Brooklyn, Meadows hunched forward in his seat and pulled out his copy of Twelfth Night. There, in a crowded car, he began softly reading aloud from warped and underlined pages.

Nine

Two weeks later, I found Meadows at his apartment in Brooklyn Heights, where, unbeknownst to the acquaintance who was letting him live there, he was busy assembling a peculiar wooden structure whose components reeked of fresh paint. Energy drinks and cans of beer in various states of consumption littered the living room, as well as planks of lumber and narrower lengths as thick as a man’s wrist, which were propped against the walls and stretched nearly from floor to ceiling. “We still have 17 days until we open,” Meadows said, as if he had 17 weeks.

Meadows had distracted himself from his acting and directing problems by focusing on the countless production tasks that had nothing to do with Original Pronunciation. He had set up a page on the fundraising website Indiegogo: the only contribution so far, twenty dollars, had come from his friend Liz DeVito, but perhaps Diana Swinburne, who had transitioned into a role as marketing deputy, could turn things around. With the help of an actor’s graphic-design skills, Meadows had started drawing up posters and other PR materials, and he had found both a lighting designer and a sword-fighting coach.

Building the set remained the biggest project. As it neared completion, Meadows brushed sawdust off a couch while a young actor from the cast sat on the floor, stabbing a dull power drill into what looked like a rectangular, spindly-legged card table for giants. It was the platform Meadows had spoken about during his first rehearsal with the current cast. It was also slowly bleeding glue. “It’s still not strong enough to walk on,” Meadows admitted. I asked where his blueprint came from. “Oh,” he said, “just out of my imagination.”

The days of slow work, coupled with beers and delicate sips of energy drinks, had led Meadows to open up about his past, and now he said something I didn’t expect: “I told you that story about that one day when I was down there, and I walked in. Remember that?” He was referring to September 11th.

He hadn’t told me much, but I remembered some of the details. Meadows had been handing out political fliers near New York Downtown Hospital, several blocks east of the towers. He had watched victims jump. Then, when the South Tower collapsed, Meadows took a dust mask from a doctor, covered his nose and mouth, and “walked in,” as he put it—toward Ground Zero.

“Everybody ran past me to get away from the falling building,” Meadows recalled. “The North Tower was still standing, still burning. And I walked in. Why I walked in I have no idea.” He paused. “But I went in, all by myself, and there was no police to stop me. Ash on the ground by that point was up almost to my calf. Pieces of paper were falling all around me like snow. All their edges were burned. And it was quiet. It was really quiet.”

Meadows said he walked through the abandoned Financial District, occasionally looking up to see the sun obscured by smoke. He made his way to Maiden Lane, encountering only a handful of people, who faded in and out of the scene like characters in a Cormac McCarthy novel. There was the man who yelled at Meadows and called him crazy. There was the fat cop, his face covered with a red bandanna. And as Meadows approached the intersection of Maiden Lane and Broadway, about the length of a football field from the towers, he saw a line of six or seven firefighters perhaps 200 feet in front of him. Then the North Tower started to collapse. It sounded, Meadows recalls, like gravel being poured down a playground slide. He saw the debris engulf the firefighters.

That’s when he finally turned and ran, taking shelter in the lobby of a nearby building. He made his way north, toward the room in the Bronx where he was living at the time. On the way home, Meadows says, he began vomiting blood. In Harlem, he bought a can of malt liquor, took gulps as he walked, and started sobbing. The dust mask was still around his neck, and his skin was gray and ghostly. He remembers passing a woman who was sitting on a stoop. “Don’t worry, baby,” he recalls her saying. “It’s going to be OK.”

Not knowing where else to go, he visited a friend. “It was surreal when he came in,” the man later told me, “because I was just watching it on TV, and he showed up,” covered in what looked like asbestos. “He was crying, and then almost screaming. He grabbed me by the shoulder and shook me pretty hard.” In the weeks that followed, he says, Meadows visited his apartment more than once “with a garbage bag of all of his things, which was kind of disturbing—that he was almost as close to being homeless as you can be.”

Meadows sank into a deep depression and did, in fact, briefly become homeless, sleeping in Central Park near the Metropolitan Museum of Art, under an evergreen where he figured no one would notice. Eventually, he found work as a contractor and began living out of his boss’s van, then graduated to a mouse-infested room in Harlem. But walking toward the towers had been crazy, and he knew he needed help. So when he learned that the September 11th Fund would cover the cost of therapy, he began seeing Gary Brown twice a week. “The referral came through one of my colleagues,” Brown told me. “She said, ‘He scares me.’”

In March 2003, three months after Meadows began seeing him, Brown wrote a letter stating that Meadows “continues to suffer the aftereffects of the event: hyper-alertness, hypo-irritability, depression, and a sense of lowered self-worth.” He added, “In my assessment his condition meets the criteria for P.T.S.D. He is consistent and persistent in his work with me and is showing good progress.” Perhaps most important of all, Meadows’s creative activities began to evolve, encouraged by Brown and guided by his Jungian emphasis on the unconscious, dreams, and universal archetypes of the sort one finds in myths. Now, for the first time, Meadows’s efforts would be self-consciously therapeutic, a way to make sense of his past.

Meadows started to paint. His canvases were often three feet wide or larger, and he applied the vivid pigments with his bare hands, looking for images in his unconscious. He unearthed sharp-sailed dhows below a blood-red sky, three spectral figures representing the children to whom he had been a ghost, a hellish scene of a hundred or so falling 9/11 victims. The most haunting image of all was a massive purple face with lidless blue eyes.

Meadows also began to act again, feeling his way back toward the world of New York City theater whose margins he had touched more than 30 years earlier. He was cast as Lord Capulet in a Long Island–based production of Romeo and Juliet, advancing toward Shakespeare tentatively. He studied at the American Globe Theatre, but he also started his I Can Do That handyman business, and his third wife, whom he married around the same time—a writer named Yvonne Durant—pressured him, he says, to focus on his day job. They screamed at each other constantly, so much so that Meadows says one of their fights induced his transient ischemic attack, and he still drank heavily and smoked large amounts of marijuana.

By the fall of 2005, Durant and Meadows were headed toward divorce, and she convinced him to see a psychiatrist at the Department of Veterans Affairs, who diagnosed him with depression and probable bipolar disorder. In 2006, another doctor jotted down his problems—guilt, paranoia, recurring nightmares—and sometimes quoted him directly. “Totally broke.” “I’ve been fucked over all my life.” “If I can’t create, I’m gonna kill myself.”

Meadows also began meeting regularly with a VA psychotherapist, with whom he started to share what was probably his biggest secret: the details of what happened in September 1964, when he was a private at Fort Benning and decided to go AWOL. The incident involved the man he later painted with the purple face and lidless eyes.

The following account of the events at Fort Benning comes primarily from a letter Meadows addressed to the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2006. “One night, late, I heard a muffled sound that woke me up,” Meadows wrote. He saw his sergeant, whom I’ll call Smith, “seated on a prone soldier’s bunk.” Meadows was so close to Smith that he could smell the alcohol on the older man’s breath. Smith, Meadows realized, was trying to kiss the other soldier, who was silently resisting, and Meadows, confused, propped himself up on one elbow. Smith heard Meadows and looked right at him. Then he walked away.

Early the next evening, Smith ordered Meadows to report to the sergeant’s sleeping quarters. “I was a young private of 18 years, a virgin,” Meadows wrote, “a boy scout, trusting, scared, defenselessness, a child, who never had a father, an immature boy who just wanted some protection, some guidance, some help for a kid that nobody else wanted to know, only beat up and humiliate, a boy who wanted to have friends. Then [Smith] said, we’ll be friends.” Smith told Meadows he’d look out for him, that Meadows “needed a friend to be safe.” “Hey, let’s you and me go out for some beer,” he said. Clutching a six-pack of Budweiser, he led Meadows outside, into the dark, where they sat against the concrete wall of the barracks.

Meadows continued, “We drank a couple of beers and then, he said, let’s go into the woods, private like, he wanted to show me something. I had never had sex with a girl, or anyone, so innocently I with him crossed a strip of grass before the woods and then went. We walked about fifty yards; I could still see the barracks through the trees. Then, he ordered me to take off my clothes, I didn’t want to make my powerful protector [angry], and so I did, having no idea, whatsoever, what was to happen next.” There, in the middle of the woods, Meadows was pinned down and raped.

“I don’t remember anything after that,” he wrote. Two nights later he went AWOL.

Meadows at age 17, during basic training, 1963.

Ten

The retelling alone was so upsetting, Meadows says, that after speaking about the rape with the VA psychotherapist, he stood on a subway platform and considered jumping in front of a train. In hindsight, Meadows would associate what happened at Fort Benning with the first great trauma of his youth, the day in Cutler Ridge when he came across his birth certificate in his mother’s dresser. Here were two betrayals, two slashes at an identity not yet formed. The first, he felt, had led to the second, the second to his rise and fall in the Middle East, to his wanderings, to everything that followed.

“That’s why I gravitated toward Shakespeare,” Meadows told me. “Because it is so powerful, and there have been so many intense moments in my life. Those moments, I don’t forget them, and I try to use them. Hell, what better use of that negative energy? To try to transform it into something that other people can come and watch.”

His history would provide not only a motive but a means: In 2006, Gary Brown and other therapists Meadows had seen helped him apply for Department of Veterans Affairs disability status, and the rape formed the core of his case. On March 1, 2007, Meadows became eligible for monthly payments of $2,471. He was officially disabled—diagnosed with PTSD. Not long after, Meadows walked down West 54th Street and presented himself at an Off-Off-Broadway performing-arts complex known as the American Theatre of Actors, to audition for a production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. As James Jennings, the ATA’s president and artistic director, recalls, “When he came to me, he said he only wanted to do Shakespeare.”

Jennings cast Meadows as a few of the play’s minor characters, even though Meadows told him he’d had a stroke that had impaired his memorization abilities. Meadows tried to quit during the first rehearsal, but in the end he stayed on, and Jennings, when the show went up that June, was impressed. Meadows, however, still felt stuck: As he wrote in a journal that year, he was “still floating, but not able to sail away”— adrift, alcoholic, and spending his disability money on his latest divorce. He was also living in a squat in the East Village without running water, across from a man who seemed intent on hooking him on crack cocaine. A couple of times, Meadows says, he tried it. He needed a new home. So he searched online until he found a storm-wrecked, 39-foot sailboat whose owner was willing to part with it for only $5,000.

One day in September 2007, Meadows drove a rental car through the cornfields of Virginia’s Northern Neck, a peninsula of farmland and forests that juts toward the Chesapeake Bay like the butt of a rifle. Pulling into the Coan River Marina, he immediately recognized the boat’s gnarled metal railing and battered mahogany trim from the photographs. Wasps and spiders lurked in its dirt-caked cabin, which had long ago been relieved of its doors, ladders, instruments, and cabinets. Still, Meadows happily spent the night inside.

As he patched gashes in the hull and stripped grime from its interior, he tried to imagine where to go from here. Did he want to repair sailboats for a living? Act full-time? Or simply sail to who knows where? He lived off food stamps and often had nothing in his bank account. In New York, his divorce hearings struck him as Kafkaesque, the rest of his life a black comedy that he described in terse journal entries: “Got up, drank—went to therapy! Came home, drank, passed out, watched DVD’s,” he wrote. “Feel like I’m waiting for something to happen.”

Something did. In October, Meadows was cast in another play, and a new, determined voice started appearing in his journal:

“I have a growing NEED! to get back into acting as a full time endevor.”

“Now, this play. Everything that causes distractions must go now. EVERYTHING!”

“My part is both exciting and overwhelming. The number of lines is by far greater than anything else thus far in my emerging acting carrier. Yet, I feel confident & sure of a success. In fact, I believe this show is a life changing event and a new me has emerged.”

The play, Fever, never opened with Meadows as part of the cast: The playwright called off the early 2008 run at Manhattan’s Li’l Peach Theater because he wanted to revise the script, Meadows says. But it was the first in what would come to seem like an unbroken string of acting jobs in which Meadows, during rehearsals, returned to difficult memories from his past. Rehearsing Fever, an epic about two warriors based on a tragedy by Sophocles, Meadows—cast as the villain—thought about all the evil he’d experienced. Later, in Death Wears a Suit and Tie, Meadows played Roland, an oil tycoon who is dying of cancer. “This is an opportunity for a dress rehearsal of my demise, early,” he wrote in a journal. “How else can I play this, if not for, on several levels, for real.”

Nothing, however, would seem as real to Meadows as the plays of William Shakespeare. In hindsight, he would view the production of The Winter’s Tale at the ATA as the show that changed everything, the one he would often cite when explaining how he had found his calling. Now he sought out Shakespeare roles one after another. His own existence, after all, felt Shakespearean in ways that those of most other actors were not.

“When I was on stage performing Shakespeare—whether I was Julius Caesar, or Banquo in Macbeth, or Master Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor, or whatever play I was doing—I was really able to believe it, because I had experiences that were similar to that in my life,” Meadows told me. “Et tu, Brute? It was like I was there.” The act of becoming someone else while still being himself, and thus turning a painful past into something of artistic value, was addictive, and he found that it led to a single thought. How, Meadows wondered, would Shakespeare’s characters have been embodied centuries ago at the original Globe Theatre?

By the fall of 2008, Meadows had moved out of the squat in New York City and put his belongings into storage. He no longer went to therapy regularly, and he had even made contact with his daughter, Jessica—now grown and living in Florida—and had begun to build an approximation of a real relationship with her. A couple of friends in Virginia, meanwhile, had told Meadows about Tangier Island, which sat 30 miles from the marina where he was about to christen his boat, just down the coast and across the bay. The islanders, they said, spoke like Shakespeare. Suddenly, Meadows had a destination. He gave his sailboat a name that summed up his new trajectory: Tempest.

Eleven

The 140-seat Chernuchin Theater, the largest venue at the American Theatre of Actors, sits just south of Manhattan’s Columbus Circle, in the same building that houses the Midtown Community Court, which means that an actor languishing in the metal-detector line might find himself waiting behind a vendor of knockoff handbags. The theater itself occupies a 19th-century courtroom on the second floor and is best known for launching Urinetown, the improbable hit musical about proletarians who are required by law to use filthy public restrooms. The show seems to have set the tone for the Chernuchin’s present-day air of sticky neglect. When Meadows’s cast first arrived at the space, on January 30, a handwritten sign above one of the dressing-room toilets advised, “DO NOT KICK or STEP ON FLUSHER. PUSH 3 TIMES.”

Nevertheless, for Meadows, directing at the Chernuchin was a homecoming of sorts: it was here that he had played Banquo, Cymbeline, and his favorite role, Julius Caesar. Besides, the monumental central staircase that led up to the theater, coiled around an antique wrought-iron elevator shaft, retained a certain power to impress, as did the Chernuchin’s own two-tiered stage, with its wraparound catwalk. “I’m so ’appy,” exclaimed one of Meadows’s actors, trying out her Original Pronunciation as she explored the theater. “I’m so ’appy.”

The plan was to spend two weeks rehearsing in the Chernuchin—the final phase of preparations. Meadows remained haunted by the possibility that Twelfth Night OP, like nearly all of his past creative endeavors, would fail. He had just recovered from yet another threat to the production into which he was sinking all his money, and which, he reminded me, was “the most important thing I’ve done in my life.” An argument had erupted a week and a half earlier when Meadows introduced the cast to a composer who had agreed to write and perform a live score. “That seems to me ludicrous,” said Ron Destro, as the actors looked on. “This is at the breaking point.”

Destro, Meadows was all too aware, had brought many of the others on board, and he feared a second exodus if Ron defected—as he had already threatened once. “It seems the goal was to help audiences experience, with the OP, what the original Shakespeare experience would have been,” Destro wrote to Meadows in an email. “Each recent element that has been added (at a very late date, quite frankly, for a very weak cast who has still not been given their blocking to learn) seems to take us away from that goal.” The score (“definitely NOT an authentic element”) and Meadows’s choice of costumes (the tuxedos and evening dresses) would be distractions, Destro said, and the acting was so embarrassing that he was considering not inviting anyone to the show. Some actors were working on OP with John Windsor-Cunningham, but some were hardly practicing at all.

Grudgingly, Meadows abandoned the idea of music. “Imagine if Columbus’s crew had said, ‘Oh, we can’t man the sails and explore for a new world,’” he sputtered. “Small-mindedness is just such a disaster to anything. Anything!”

Still, instead of letting the actors focus on OP and blocking, Meadows spent much of the first rehearsal at the Chernuchin explaining an extra scene he had conceived to start the play. Everyone would mill around as if at a cocktail party, and they would spontaneously start to sing “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Suddenly, thunderclaps would blare from the loudspeakers while someone behind a curtain dropped dry ice into buckets of water and blew smoke across the stage. Everyone would slowly back away, and the first real scene would begin.

It was as if Meadows had to invent a storm so the play could align with his own tempestuous reality. Others didn’t see the point, particularly a young actress named Samantha Dena. “It’s just a lot of elements coming together,” she told him. “Like, party! Christmas song! And then there’s smoke! And then there’s a storm!” Perhaps sensing she’d crossed a line, she added that she didn’t want to step on any toes.

“I have no toes to step on,” replied Meadows, who said he wanted the play to be “directed by all of us.” Still, he didn’t alter the scene.

Meadows spent much of the second on-stage rehearsal, a brutal five-hour affair, working with just one actor, a lawyer named J. B. Alexander, while other cast members wasted time. For reasons no one really understood, Meadows had recently recruited Alexander to split the role of Orsino with another actor. “Do it one more time, but this time really feel it,” he said.

“I’m trying,” Alexander said, stumbling through half-memorized lines.

“I don’t want to see you even touching that script,” Meadows said as the rehearsal wore on, raising his voice. “If you want a line, you call for it.”

Destro emailed Meadows the next day. “Your treatment of JB was HORRIBLE last night, barking at him to go run his lines. I know you didn’t mean it that way, but everyone was taken aback.” He added that if Meadows kept mistreating actors, they would quit. Diana Swinburne told him the same thing. “Just visualize love shining all around,” she said. “Gentle, kind, sweet love.”

So at the next rehearsal, Meadows tried to be loving. “It’s got to be twice as loud as it is now,” he told Jonathan Rentler, a blond-maned former Peace Corps volunteer. “And I will, with all gentleness and love, remind you of that.”

But soon Swinburne was bowing her head in shame. “I’m sorry—I love you to death, but I don’t believe a word of what you’re saying,” Meadows yelled at Rentler. “And until you can own this text, no one’s going to believe what you have to say. So take it from the top, and don’t say a word unless you believe it.” Meadows went on like that for a full half-hour, popping open a white button-down to reveal a gray T-shirt he’d been wearing for three days straight. “You’re arguing with yourself,” he told Rentler.

“Alright, I will try it that way,” Rentler said.

“You will do it that way,” Meadows said. “I know I’m driving you crazy,” he added. “I don’t care.” Then he told Rentler to do another speech while constantly pacing back and forth. “You stopped!” he shouted. “You stopped!”

“I have a fucking long speech, Hamilton,” Rentler said.

“You’re stopping,” Meadows said. “You’re stopping. You’re stopping. You’re stopping. You’re stopping.” A minute later, after Rentler had finished his speech, Meadows clapped his hands and shouted “Beautiful!” Turning to Swinburne, he said, “Wasn’t that wonderful? Am I God or what?”

Thus the night unfolded, as Meadows, knowing little about directing yet enamored with his authority, yelled at one actor after another, urging each to “be a poet” and to “make love to these words.” Eventually, he started hissing “yes, yes, yes.” He closed his eyes and swayed across the stage while moving his hands as if conducting a symphony. He looked like a man dancing with a phantom, or perhaps merely with himself.

“I’m insane,” he muttered that night. “No doubt about it.” Having alienated more or less all of his actors, Meadows sarcastically scolded them for not replying to his emails, sipped an energy drink, and wound down the evening with a pep talk.

“I look at myself all the time,” he said, “and I look at all the warts and the blemishes and”—he hesitated—“the problems. And I say, ‘Who in the hell are you?’” He didn’t go into detail about the life he’d once described to the VA as “this lost wild existence.” “But down the road,” he continued, “those things go away, and what we’ve done sticks.” He added, “And people will remember us. Our names will be engraved in granite.”

Destro would later tell Meadows that several actors were shaking and nearly in tears over the way he’d abused Rentler. Once again, Meadows was plummeting.

Twelve

Evening after evening, Meadows pushed forward. He often summoned actors to the Chernuchin with a volley of cell-phone calls—he still hadn’t emailed them a schedule—then paced and muttered for hours, without breaks, until an occasional siren from a nearby police station pierced the late-night air and everyone sagged like travelers stuck in an airport. With only a dozen days to go and even fewer rehearsals, it was becoming clear that Twelfth Night OP would be amateurish at best and nonexistent at worst. Meadows finally had to admit that the production suffered from a potentially fatal flaw: Hardly anyone had come close to mastering Original Pronunciation.

John Windsor-Cunningham, in fact, had almost entirely stopped trying to teach the accent. “If three people in the show are doing very well, a few others are generally completely OK, and there are a few inexperienced people in the background, well that’s bloody alright with me,” he said. As it had become clear that the show would fall short of its ambitions, Windsor-Cunningham had settled for a kind of theatrical triage. His biggest concern wasn’t the OP, and it wasn’t the acting. It was that words, if spoken at a normal volume—and particularly in the rural tones pieced together by David Crystal—had a way of being sucked into the muffling maw of the Chernuchin and reduced to gibberish. What the audience heard had to sound clear and purposeful. “If it isn’t, you are fucked,” he told the actors. “You are fucked. They will queue up to get out.” Meadows, meanwhile, was more worried about whether the play would happen at all.

One day, Meadows disappeared from the Chernuchin. I found him sulking near an ancient vending machine downstairs—withdrawing yet again. “We lost Antonio,” he said. “The actor who’s playing that part just decided to quit.” Antonio was a minor character, but there was only a week until opening night, and Meadows was shaken, reminded of when his cast defected en masse. He was also reeling from opposition to yet another last-minute element he wanted to add to the production: a choreographed jig, which is how the actors coached by David Crystal had ended their Romeo and Juliet at the Globe. On top of everything else, Meadows still didn’t know perhaps a third of his own lines.

Back in the theater, an actress complained that he’d misspelled her name on the promotional postcards he’d ordered. Then the evening’s run-through of the play began, and Samantha Dena, the actress who had already questioned the logic of the introductory scene with the storm, asked Meadows about it again.

“Everybody’s milling about having a party,” he explained.

“Milling about,” she said, arms crossed. “Milling about. Why?”

Meadows started talking about tuxedos and dresses and thunder and lightning, but he sensed it was time to lay his vision down. “Let’s kill the party scene at the beginning and go straight to the play,” he said.

That was the final blow. An hour later, during the run-through, a grotesque gulping sound started emanating from where Meadows stood in the shadows at the edge of the former courthouse seats, as if he were about to throw up and could barely hold it in. He sniffled and wiped a corner of one eye. He appeared to be tearing up. Already wearing a hooded sweatshirt, he put on his herringbone coat, like a man with the chills, and dragged a hand across his face. Then he strode onto the stage as Sir Toby. As 10 p.m., then 11 rolled past, Meadows missed entrances, cut other people off, and forgot numerous lines. “Damn,” he said at one point, rubbing his chest. With heavy steps he thudded out of the theater. When he returned, he doubled over and gripped his sternum.

By now the other actors were visibly concerned. Meadows thought he was about to have a heart attack.

Meadows was suffering not from heart disease but from panic. He was almost out of time and almost out of money. He was subsisting on a daily ration that often consisted of a single prepackaged curry dinner or Filet-O-Fish, couldn’t afford to see Gary Brown, and hardly slept. But his handyman savings and disability checks had paid for all the essentials, including a promotional email blast that was sent to about 90,000 people, resulting in an immediate 39 tickets sold after many days of just two, one, or zero. There was always some small hurdle: his phone had died, or his actors were locked out of the Chernuchin. But he kept working, and he kept suggesting his odd ideas: that Swinburne, whom he had just taken out to dinner for her 75th birthday, should play an “officer”—Twelfth Night’s law enforcement—or that an actor’s nose should be augmented with putty.

After Antonio, nobody else quit. The actors, united by admiration of their vocal coach and puzzlement at the exasperating antics of their director, had developed an unusual solidarity. Some had grown so close, one of them told me, that they texted each other in OP and used the accent to belt out classic-rock lyrics. A few had even acquired an odd affection for what Jonathan Rentler called Meadows’s “Hamilton-ness.” “We all stayed—that is the crazy thing,” Rentler said. “That’s kind of the magic of Hamilton: There’s something in him you want to believe in, even if you’re trying to fight against it.”

Thus the rehearsals continued, and on February 13, two days before opening night, Meadows illegally parked a U-Haul pickup truck in Brooklyn Heights. He and two actors filled the bed with black plywood and the other disassembled pieces of Meadows’s set, plus the bags of Christmas tree branches he had gathered six weeks earlier and several discarded wreaths. With the tailgate down and the load unsecured, Meadows sped off. That afternoon, after erecting the platform, he swept sawdust off the stage. Then he silently started decorating the theater with the salvaged holiday greenery.

An unprecedented seriousness filled the Chernuchin that night, during what amounted to both a tech rehearsal and the most complete run-through of the show thus far. The lights were constantly going on and off as Meadows’s lighting designer tested his installation. Meadows stumbled about in a tuxedo. Everyone else wore their costumes, too, and during Act III, Samantha Dena found Meadows near the back of the theater. “We have a picture of what it will look like,” she said, touching him on the arm. “It’s no longer like, ‘This’ll be here, and this’ll be here.’ It’s great.”

The next night, after Twelfth Night OP’s final rehearsal, Meadows addressed his cast. “I’m happy,” he said. “I’m happy.”

Later, after everyone else had trickled out, Meadows invited me to share a celebratory drink with him—a dusty bottle of cheap sparkling wine that he’d been using as a prop, having pilfered it from the apartment in Brooklyn. A few vintages too old, it had gone flat. Meadows was sure that Twelfth Night OP would keep getting better, and he reminded me that he intended to produce Macbeth in the fall, and all of Shakespeare’s other plays after that. “It’s my belief that you have to take what’s coming at you and mold that into a cohesive unit that’s the best you can come up with,” he said. “I strongly believe in that: that it’s a work in progress, and you have to have the confidence, you have to have—what’s another word?—you have to have the faith that your ideas will work.”

His project, he seemed to be saying, was more about constant transformation than any final creation, more about belief in a future than the actual outcome. These were the spiritual, even existential terms in which Meadows discussed both Twelfth Night OP and his own life. “I still have this weird feeling that I’m dying,” he had said that afternoon. “I do. I feel like I’m dying. It may be a psychological thing where one way of life is ending and another one begins.”

Thirteen

On February 15, the day of the first performance of Twelfth Night OP, Meadows arrived at the Chernuchin Theater just before noon, about six hours before his actors. He had slept little, having stayed up past four in the morning willing half-forgotten lines into his mind, but he fortified himself with a large coffee and a Filet-O-Fish, and met Liz DeVito for a pint of soup—more food than I had seen him consume in weeks.

“This really is historic, you know?” DeVito said. She marveled at the opportunity Meadows was giving his actors: “They’re in the first OP production in New York City.”

“They’ll go down in the history books,” Meadows said. “They’ll be there for perpetuosity.”

“Per-peh-too-ih-tee,” DeVito said, laughing as Meadows grinned. “You just worry about your lines.” It was nearly three in the afternoon. Twelfth Night OP would open at eight.

The closer Meadows got to eight o’clock, the harder he seemed to work and the more he seemed to veer off course. First he wasted time going to a market in search of corn syrup and food coloring for an impromptu concoction—fake blood—that he wanted to apply before his final scene, in which a wounded Sir Toby Belch appears with a “bloody cockscomb” sullying his head. Meadows settled on dark eye shadow and a tube of red icing. Back at the theater, he taped up Twelfth Night OP posters in the building’s spiral staircase, then paused. “I’m gonna have a drink,” he said. He opened a bottle of port from the Brooklyn Heights apartment, drained a plastic cup of it, began practicing his lines again, and went back for a refill.

As the actors started arriving, Meadows did something a director is never supposed to do on opening night: He kept directing. He wanted to change elements of scenes they’d been practicing for weeks. “I know you think I’m nuts,” he told one actor. “But I’m not!”

“I’m a little worried,” the actor said. “For it to all sink in, in an hour…”

Meadows, deflated, said, “You’re right. You’re right, you’re right, you’re right, you’re right. We need another month.” It was six o’clock.

While another actor finally wove Meadows’s Christmas tree branches around the railing of the stage’s upper level, Meadows began giving part of the set another coat of black paint, periodically disappearing into the dressing rooms to tell someone to try doing a scene differently. (“Do not yell at me!” scolded one actress, her words echoing into the theater.) He mopped the stage—“That’ll be dry by eight o’ clock, right?” DeVito asked—and proceeded to change into his ill-fitting tuxedo.

By 7:15, the first member of the audience was sitting in his seat: John Windsor-Cunningham. As actors stretched and did yoga poses, he quietly took in the scene filling the former courthouse and wondered whether any theatergoers would come at all. Then, slowly, while orchestral music played in the background, people filtered in—about 35 in total, he estimated. Shortly after eight, the music faded and the lights went out. Windsor-Cunningham, like everyone else, turned his attention to the stage.

The hard r’s and unfamiliar vowels of Original Pronunciation filled the room. First on stage, in an elegant gown, was Swinburne, whom Meadows had asked to begin the production with a melancholy song that appears later in the play: “For the rain it raineth every day,” she sang, her voice quavering. Ron Destro mischievously flitted around in a jester cap. Meadows, as Sir Toby Belch, came out wearing his herringbone coat over his tuxedo jacket and brandishing the bottle of port he’d opened several hours earlier. He occasionally took a swig.

There was a strangeness to the evening, Windsor-Cunningham realized, an uncanny sort of tension. He regretted not having taken the cast aside before the show to tell them to have fun. Even during moments of comedy, the audience barely laughed. Windsor-Cunningham also noticed a man in front of him who was scribbling notes. A critic, he thought. He knew it would be incredibly easy for someone to disparage almost anything about Twelfth Night OP and that a likely target was the OP itself. The actors hadn’t mastered David Crystal’s pronunciation system. One or two still sounded Irish, and at least one sounded more or less American.

After the intermission, however, the audience and the actors loosened up. Meadows, meanwhile, struck Windsor-Cunningham as an unexpectedly commanding presence. He paraphrased lines but rarely forgot them entirely. Undoing the cuffs of his tuxedo shirt and letting a button pop open to show his belly, he danced and stumbled across the stage, confidently inhabiting Sir Toby.

In the dressing room before his final scene, Meadows regarded himself in a full-length mirror. He held his tube of red icing in one hand, unscrewed the cap with the other, and dabbed a bloody Mohawk onto his head, sucking his fingers clean. He added a black eye, too, smearing purple-green eye shadow into his socket. Then he reentered the theater and stood in one of the aisles, near the back. He just stood there in the darkness and listened to the sounds of Original Pronunciation. “I can feel it,” he whispered to himself. “I can feel it.” For the rest of the performance, from his final scene to the moment he emerged with the other actors and took a bow, Meadows seemed filled with a sense of peace.

Meadows, once again, had bankrupted himself. He would later calculate that Twelfth Night OP’s five-performance run had cost him $12,095, and a couple of days after the last show his two bank accounts contained a combined -$314.67. Twelfth Night OP received two reviews, both of them on regional arts websites. One described it as a “catastrophe”—“a production that seems to be put up at the last minute with actors who have barely read the script.” (“There’s also the puzzling question,” the reviewer wrote, “of why everyone seems to be going for an Irish accent.”) The other critic called the play “very admirable.” The OP, he said, “made us listen harder than we might, engrossing us all the more.”

Other audience members wrote comments, mostly positive ones, on slips of paper asking for feedback that Meadows and his team had tucked into their programs. “I would subscribe to a season of Original Pronunciation, and would buy recordings,” one person said. “This OP production deserves a wider presentation,” another wrote. Many attendees had the same reactions that Crystal documented in 2004 during the Globe experiment. Original Pronunciation, they told me when I spoke with a dozen or so people during intermissions, sounded more everyday than the Shakespearean English they were used to, earthier, more musical—less like it was being handed to you on a silver platter, in one listener’s words, and more like it was uttered in Shakespeare’s London. “Once in a while,” someone said, “you feel you’re there.”

Ron Destro, too, praised the production: “There were ups & downs, but you should be very proud that you did it!” he wrote to Meadows. Meadows’s daughter, Jessica, wasn’t able to attend, but she was still impressed: Her father, she knew, was a dreamer, and this seemed like the first time he’d actually followed through with one of his dreams. When Meadows emailed David Crystal about what he’d done, Crystal sent his regards and featured Twelfth Night OP on a website he had created about Original Pronunciation. News of Meadows’s success even traveled as far as Tangier Island, where Debra Sorenson sat down at her computer and posted a message on Meadows’s Facebook page. “I’m delighted to hear this!” she wrote. “Job well done, Shakespeare.”

Fourteen

Three months after Twelfth Night OP’s final performance, Meadows decided it was time to keep his promise to return to Tangier Island, so he rented a car and invited me along. He had finished renovating the apartment in Brooklyn Heights and had recently visited his daughter, her husband, and their one-year-old son in Florida. “Just kind of did the grandfather thing,” he said. “I’d never done that before.”

I Can Do That Theatrical Productions no longer existed: Meadows had renamed his venture the Shakespeare OP Company, and he had already begun soliciting résumés for his next show, Macbeth. He still wanted to do all of Shakespeare’s plays, ideally three per year. John Windsor-Cunningham was still on board, as was Liz DeVito, and Meadows now also had a chief technology officer, a former financial-software consultant named Larry Breindel, who was accompanying us to Tangier Island. As we left Manhattan and began the drive to the town of Callao, on Virginia’s Northern Neck, Meadows told Breindel about motorcycling through Europe and being imprisoned in Turkey. “So I got up and I started doing my Zorba the Greek imitation,” he said. While Meadows sped south, they mused about what lay ahead.

There would be an American Institute of Shakespeare OP, or, at the very least, their own theater in Manhattan—and perhaps shows in Central Park or even in Harlem at the Apollo. Breindel wanted an intern; Meadows wasn’t so sure. They would send tours to Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, and Miami, and Meadows hoped for a Shakespeare festival on Tangier Island or maybe a box set of full-length Shakespeare OP films.

In truth, he had no idea what the coming years would bring. But he had a sense of how they might end. After we arrived at the Tempest and darkness settled over the marina, we sat on the deck as Meadows uncapped a bottle of whiskey and told us that, when he died, he wanted Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” to be played at his funeral, as loud as possible. Then his son-in-law, who monitors storms for the federal government, would drop his ashes from a weather-reconnaissance airplane into the heart of a hurricane.

The next morning, after sleeping on the boat, we untied it and drifted backward into the harbor, pushing off the dock’s pylons. There was hardly any wind. A swath of clouds yielded to sun, and as the Tempest motored across the glasslike water of the Wicomico River and into the Chesapeake Bay, Meadows leaned on the weathered wooden steering wheel. “It’s a great ship,” he said. “They said it was too broken to fix.” Suddenly, the wind picked up, and Meadows let Breindel steer as he paraded up and down the deck, cranking winches and unfurling a sail. “Very nice, a little bit more to port!” he cried, watching the canvas fill with air. “Oh, we’ve got a good sail going now! Oh yeah! This is what it’s all about.”

Meadows fell silent and stared into the distance, and as his T-shirt billowed around him, I thought of something he had told me before we left, when I asked what day we would come back to New York. “We’re never coming back,” he said. I wasn’t sure I’d heard him properly. “We’re never coming back,” repeated the man who was now feeling the wind on his face and gazing toward a spot on the blue horizon—toward a sliver of marsh and sand where he had earned a new name. “It’ll be just like in Peter Pan. We’ll stay there forever.”

The Oilman’s Daughter

The Oilman’s Daughter

A dark family secret, an immense fortune, and one woman’s search for the truth.

By Evan Ratliff

The Atavist Magazine, No. 26

Evan Ratliff is the editor of The Atavist Magazine. His writing appears in Wired, where he is a contributing editor, The New Yorker, National Geographic, and other publications. He is also the story editor of Pop-Up Magazine, a live event.

Editor: Charles Homans
Producers: Olivia Koski, Gray Beltran
Audio Production: Nadia Wilson
Research and Production: Vonecia Carswell, Lila Selim
Music: Jefferson Rabb
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper

Published in June 2013. Design updated in 2021.

One

In the summer of 1972, when Judith Adams was 16 years old, a strange woman knocked on the front door of the shotgun house where she lived with her mother, on the south side of Baxter Springs, Kansas. Judith opened it. The woman was small and thin, a brunette, and Judith detected an angry edge, as if she were in a hurry to get somewhere and the teenager now in front of her was standing in her way. She demanded to see Judith’s mother. “Mom!” Judith shouted back to the kitchen. “There is someone here who wants to speak with you.”

Sue Adams stepped past Judith onto the front porch, pulling the door closed behind her. It was a small deck, just wide enough to set out a couple of chairs when the weather was nice, looking out over a flat little front yard with a maple tree and a driveway that ran up the side. Judith heard the women raise their voices and tried to peek through the little window in the door. Her mother glanced back at her, then reached her hand up to block the glass. Moving to the living-room window, Judith saw three men at the end of the driveway, next to an old black pickup truck. What stuck with her most, remembering the moment decades later, was the way the men stood with their backs to the house.

After a few minutes, the strange woman stormed back to the truck. She and the three men climbed in and drove away. “What was that?” Judith asked when her mother came back inside.

“It was nothing,” was all her mother would say. A few days later, however, she sat Judith down for a talk. “If a lady ever pulls up in a car and tells you to get in with her,” she told her, “don’t go with her.”

“Why?” Judith asked.

“That woman that came the other day said she was your mother,” Sue Adams said.

“Was she?”

“No.”

Judith had known for most of her life that she had been adopted. Sue and George Adams had thought she should hear the truth as soon as she was old enough to understand it. But they’d never said who her birth parents were, and Judith never asked. Her early childhood had been hard; she was born with scoliosis, forced to wear a Milwaukee brace to straighten out her spine. Sue and George had helped her through it, been the only parents she felt she needed, even after they divorced when she was 13 and she and her younger sister had stayed with her mother.

Judith’s friends always laughed about how Sue could be overprotective to the point of paranoia—how she kept Dobermans in the yard and guns in the house, and waited for Judith in the parking lot when she attended school dances and went roller skating. Sue had a thing about strange cars, always telling Judith and her friends to watch out for them. Her sister was also adopted, but it was Judith whom Sue seemed to worry about the most.

In 1989, Sue Adams was terminally ill with heart disease. Judith was 33 then and working at a collection agency in Joplin, Missouri, just across the state line. She got a call from her father, George. “I need to talk to you about something,” he said.

When Judith arrived at his house, her adoptive father told her that he’d just heard from a woman named Ethel Louise Williams. Williams, he told Judith, was her birth mother. “I didn’t want to hold this back from you,” he said. “I want you to make your own decisions. I’ll give you this number and stand behind you whatever you do.” Five days later, Sue Adams died.

The timing of Judith’s biological mother’s appearance was unfortunate, even cruel. Judith couldn’t imagine what the woman wanted with her now, three decades after she’d given her up and just days before her adoptive mother’s death. But after a couple of days, curiosity got the better of her. She called up Williams and agreed to meet at the home Williams shared with her husband in Baxter Springs, just a few blocks from the house where Judith had lived as a child.

She drove over from Joplin the following afternoon. When she knocked on the door, a small woman with graying brown hair opened it. “You look just like your father,” she said.

Judith followed Williams inside. “I’ve got something for you,” Williams said, “and I’ve been holding on to it for a long time.” She handed her daughter a clutch of papers. “A lot of people want this transcript, but I told them that nobody gets it but you.” It looked like a typed letter, and contained in its pages, Williams said, was the story of Judith’s birth. Then she proceeded to tell it herself.

“Your father is a very important man,” she began. His name was M. A. Wright, and he was an oilman in Texas—not just any oilman but a wealthy and prominent one who had run Humble Oil and Exxon, two of the most powerful companies in the world. And he was still alive, down in Houston.

Judith stared at the papers. Though she didn’t yet realize it, the woman in front of her had forever divided her daughter’s life into two parts: the time before she knew, and everything that would come after.

Two

Five years ago, I was visiting New York City from out of town and sat down for lunch with my literary agent. Or at least he was an agent who generously allowed me to think of him as my agent, despite the fact that it had been years since I had sold a book to a publisher, a book that was purchased by only a few thousand people. But this agent had been loyal in the way you’d hope agents would be but most probably aren’t. He always made time for me amid his successful clients.

One of them, as it happened, was Dominick Dunne, the well-known writer of sordid crime stories. It was because of this fact that the agent had recently received a phone call, out of the blue, from a woman who introduced herself as Judith Wright Patterson. She was from Missouri or Kansas—the agent wasn’t sure. The story of her life, she’d insisted, was the kind of tale that Dunne should write for Vanity Fair magazine. Her story seemed rather convoluted, but as far as the agent could make it out, the woman had discovered in midlife that she was the daughter of a wealthy oilman in Texas who’d quickly disowned her. Now she was trying to prove it, but the oilman was dead and her mother’s family had turned against her.

At the time, Dominick Dunne was working on a novel, and my agent thought he was probably too busy to tell her story. Dominick Dunne probably heard a dozen stories as crazy-sounding as this one, every day. But the agent took down Judith’s number anyway. Over lunch, he recounted the story to me. “Actually, that sounds kind of interesting,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “maybe you should call her then.”

A few days after I got home from New York, I dialed Carthage, Missouri. Judith picked up after the first ring—she is without question the fastest phone answerer I’ve ever met—and I introduced myself as a reporter. I told her that I’d only heard the outlines of her story but that it sounded remarkable.

“Evan, I’m going through a living hell,” she said. “I need your help.”

She then spoke for a half-hour, maybe. I interjected rarely, typing notes as she talked; she spoke slowly and carefully, so it wasn’t hard to get everything down. Later, when I met her in Missouri, I found that this deliberateness carried over in person. She was a natural storyteller, a presenter of the highest order. Her hair was always permed, her eyelashes curled, and her makeup touched up before I arrived. She walked gingerly due to lingering back problems from her scoliosis, which only served to enhance her sense of purposefulness. She had almond eyes and a can-you-believe-I’m-telling-you-this smile that exposed a set of prominent canines.

Five years after that first call, I am faced with hundreds of pages of notes describing dozens of hours’ worth of conversations with Judith Wright Patterson, in which I have dutifully recorded her telling and retelling a story as complex as it is strange. For most of that time, I wasn’t really sure what to make of it. But I kept returning to Judith’s tale, I realize now, because I was seduced by the question at the center of it: If a stranger suddenly appeared in your life and offered you the chance to become someone else—to rewrite your own history and possibly your future—would you take it?

Three

The story that Ethel Louise Williams told Judith began in 1955. That spring, Williams—then Ethel Louise Harris—took a Greyhound bus headed south out of Baxter Springs bound for Tulsa, Oklahoma, looking for a new start. Her life so far had been one set of troubles after another. She was 21 years old and already had three children: two daughters, Diana and Roberta, and a son, Rickey. At 17, she had married a local man named Robert Harris and moved to California with him, but he had abused her and so she’d moved back home, though she had left Roberta with him. Now Louise, as people would later come to call her, was heading south to find a way to support the two children she had left.

Somewhere on the way to Tulsa, she noticed a man asleep in the backseat of the bus. She didn’t pay him much attention until there was a commotion and she looked back to find that he’d rolled off the seat and onto the floor. The passengers around him laughed, realizing that he hadn’t been asleep but rather stone drunk and passed out. Something about his expensive-looking suit caught Williams’s eye, though, and she took the water bottle and washrag she’d brought for her kids, helped him back into his seat, and started washing his face.

He reeked of alcohol and drunkenly introduced himself as one M. A. Wright. As the bus rolled on to Tulsa, he told her that he worked in the oil business and was headed to Oklahoma from New York. He said that he’d just traveled to Peru and Venezuela, where he’d been scouting property.

When the bus arrived in downtown Tulsa, she started to take him over to skid row, thinking that he’d find a place among other down-on-their-luck folks. But Wright insisted that they walk around. When he was on his feet, she noticed how handsome he was in spite of his oversize ears, with olive skin and brown hair just graying at the temples. And he was tall—tall enough that Louise could stand under his arm.

They wandered around, her two kids in tow, while he tried to find his bearings. He kept saying over and over that he was looking for a suite. “I’m sweet,” she said, flirtatiously.

“I know you’re sweet,” he said. “Boy, I sure can tell you’re from a hick town. I’m looking for a room with a bathroom in it. That’s what I want.”

They passed by the Adams Hotel, an art deco building on Cheyenne Avenue downtown. Wright seemed to know it and decided he’d find a room there. Louise, not understanding how he’d pay for it but needing to find a room of her own, took her kids and headed for a boardinghouse.

For Louise, Tulsa was bustling with the opportunity that had been lacking in Baxter Springs, a declining lead-mining town of several thousand residents whose primary claim to fame was the historic Route 66 highway that passed through its downtown. Within a few days, she had landed a job working as a waitress at the Dutchman’s, a steak house on the east side of Tulsa. But she hadn’t forgotten the man from the bus. One afternoon, walking down the street near where she’d last seen him, she ran into him again. She was pleased to find that he recognized her.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said. “Where have you been?”

They were standing next door to the Mayo Hotel, far and away Tulsa’s finest at a time when the city was awash in oil money; industrialists, oil barons, and celebrities regularly crossed its marble floor. Wright told her he’d taken a suite there. “Come on in,” he said. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

As they sat in the hotel’s café, several of Wright’s acquaintances happened by: a pair of sisters who said their last name was Phillips, accompanied by two men. It was only when the older of the two introduced himself as Waite Phillips that Louise realized she was in the presence of one of America’s great oil families. The Phillips brothers—Frank and L.E.—had built the oil company of the same name that now spanned the globe. Waite, their younger brother, had started his own oil company to rival his brothers’, made a fortune, and sold it to them in 1930. From the way the Phillipses joked with Wright, Louise could tell they were good friends.

She started spending the evenings with Wright. They would eat at the Mayo and tour around the bars downtown, the meticulously dressed, 44-year-old oilman in his suits and turtleneck sweaters, the diminutive 21-year-old beauty wearing the jewelry he’d bought for her at Vandevers department store. She loved the way his hazel eyes changed color depending on the light. He smoked cigarettes out of a little silver case and grabbed nips from a flask he kept in his boot. Then one evening he invited her up to his room, and they kissed. She stayed the night.

They fell into an affair, and he moved her into a room next door at the Adams, paid for her to board Rickey and Diana with a woman in south Tulsa. He bought Diana a fluffy pink dress and put her in a private preschool. He told Louise that he’d been married and also had a daughter. Although she was never quite clear on the details, she was under the impression that he was divorced. Louise herself was still married to Roberta and Rickey’s father, but in name only; she didn’t even know where her husband was.

Wright bought her a set of luggage and a mink stole, a diamond watch and a diamond bracelet, pearls and earrings to match. He gave her a glamorous evening gown, made of a metallic-looking fabric, and squired her to dinners and parties with his wealthy friends. At a white tablecloth banquet out at the Tulsa Fairgrounds—part of some kind of oil exhibition, she remembered—she got to meet John Paul “J. P.” Getty, a real oil baron, the wealthiest industrialist in the world and one of its first billionaires. He was a jolly man, she said later, always laughing. The Phillipses were there, among other oilmen, whose names all ran together. And she certainly remembered Howard Hughes: He had a thing about washing his hands, she would tell people when she would recount the story decades later, and carried a shirt under his arm—an extra, she assumed, in case he spilled something on himself. When Wright introduced her to him, though, all Hughes said to him was, “What are you doing, trying to rob the cradle? She’s nothing but jailbait.” He’d said it right in front of her.

Spring edged into summer, and they remained lovers. She talked about getting their engagement photograph put into the paper; it seemed to her that things were moving in that direction. But Wright hedged. He didn’t like to have his picture taken, he said.

He was mysterious with her in other ways she didn’t understand. For one thing, he hadn’t told her what M.A. stood for. “I want to know who you are,” she finally told him one afternoon, walking down the street. “It’s not right for you to do me this way.”

“Marcus Arrington Wright,” he said.

“No, that’s not right,” she said, “because up there at the Mayo Hotel I’ve heard them call you Mike.”

Wright started to get agitated. “Call me M.A.,” he said.

So she dropped it. And then one night she was in his room at the Mayo. He put his arms around her and then stopped. She was pregnant, and he knew it.

Judith Wright Patterson, age 5. Photo: Courtesy Judith Wright Patterson

Four

What happened after that became all mixed up in Ethel Louise Williams’s memory. She later recalled that M. A. Wright became upset, hysterically so. He “couldn’t even lay his pants on the bedpost,” he told her, without her getting pregnant. It was no good for them to get married, he said, because she’d have a dozen kids.

But he also told her that he would take care of everything. He called someone—she thought it was a lawyer maybe. He argued with the man. It was his property, Wright shouted, and he could dang well do what he pleased with it. She later remembered he hung up the phone and told her not to worry. “Go ahead and get your picture in the paper,” he said. He had business in Houston, had to get out of town in a hurry. He wrote down some numbers and told her to hold on to them.

Something about it all made her feel cheap—“like a whore or something,” she later said. So she tore up the numbers and threw the scraps in the trash. The day he was supposed to leave they fought again, and he stormed out of the hotel room, leaving her crying and reaching after him. At the bottom of the stairs, just above the marble floor of the Mayo Hotel lobby, he looked back at her and told her that he’d never see her again. She knew in that moment that he was speaking the truth.

“So when he left you knew he was gone?” she was asked in a deposition 40 years later.

A: I knew he was gone. You know, I knew that I had—I was in a spot. I knew that I was in trouble because I would never ever see him again.

Q: Then why did you go get your pictures made?

A: I didn’t.

Q: Well—

A: I did get my pictures made. I went down and got pictures taken, taken and everything because I was so proud of what I had. You know, I come from nothing, you know, and if you’ve got—maybe I’m wrong but the way I felt personally myself, back then, if you’ve got some nice clothes and you’ve got real jewelry—I’m not talking about stuff that’s cheap. I’m talking about something that’s real. A real set of pearls, a real diamond watch. You knew it was real, real. You want to show it off, you know.

…

So I went ahead and had a picture taken of me and—but I didn’t—and I thought about putting it in the paper but then when I got to thinking about it, you know, and then putting it all together, piecing it together, and then him telling me that—that he would never be back. I’d never see him ever again. And I didn’t know very much about him. He hadn’t told me who his family was, you know. How can I put something in the paper, you know?

So Louise gathered her things and her kids and moved home to Baxter Springs. On January 30, 1956, she gave birth to a daughter and named her Judith.

Louise’s own mother was furious with her, cursed her and humiliated her. Louise was still married, but her husband was missing, so she gave the child her maiden name, Bryant. Not long after, she divorced and then married a local man. They had a son and daughter, but that didn’t last either. In 1960, she married Charles Williams and took his last name to become Ethel Louise Williams. By then she’d given Judith up for adoption.

Five

As Louise told her story, Judith remembers trying to keep from laughing in her mother’s face. Look at this sad poor woman, she thought, telling me that my father was a big oilman down in Texas. It was a strange way to assuage her guilt over giving her up for adoption. But now she at least knew who her birth mother was. She also found out that she had seven half-siblings and got in touch with one of them, Louise’s oldest daughter, Diana Stiebens, who lived in Kansas.

As the two were getting to know each other on the phone, Judith brought up what her mother had told her. “Can you believe this crazy story that my father was M. A. Wright?” she said. “How ridiculous is this?”

“It’s not ridiculous at all,” Diana told her. “That is your father. I met him.”

Stunned but still suspicious, Judith decided to do some research of her own, just to find out if M. A. Wright was real. She started with the library in Joplin, figuring that if the man had existed, and he was as big as her mother had said, there would be some record of him there. The librarian agreed to help her and a few days later called back to say she’d found news stories about an M. A. Wright meeting with politicians. Then she called the Tulsa library, which sent her an article with a picture of an M. A. Wright who had been an executive at Exxon.

His name was not Marcus Arrington but rather Myron Arnold Wright, and he had been born in Blair, Oklahoma, in 1911. As a child he’d moved with his family across the state from one tiny town to another, from Altus to Shattuck to Waynoka. Wright was industrious even in his youth, selling newspapers as a boy and working his way through Oklahoma State, where he captained the tennis team while earning a degree in civil engineering. After graduating in 1933, he passed on a municipal engineering position in favor of an $87.50-a-month job as an oil field roustabout for Carter Oil, a division of Standard Oil of New Jersey.

It was a gamble for an educated young man in the thick of the Great Depression, eschewing the security of a civil servant’s job for life on an Oklahoma pipeline gang, living in a $4-a-month bunkhouse. At the time, the oil industry in the United States was suffering as a result of market surpluses, a situation compounded by the country’s broader economic woes. When the business started to pick up, though, Wright’s engineering background proved valuable; college graduates with technical skills were few and far between on the oil patch. He soon moved into management, and the company relocated him from Oklahoma to New York City.

Mike, as his colleagues called him, held executive jobs at two Jersey subsidiaries and eventually became the production coordinator for Jersey itself, overseeing the company’s expansion in Libya. He earned a reputation, as a profile in the company magazine The Lamp described it, of a corporate everyman who “enthusiastically tackles the mountain of paper that daily rises on his desk” and made his way through half a dozen cups of coffee before lunchtime.

Wright was “a full-briefcase man,” in the words of one associate. “He always does his homework and always knows what he’s talking about,” another executive explained. “There’s no magic about getting ahead in a corporation,” Wright told an interviewer, “but you do have to work harder than the fellow next to you.” In hiring, Wright said he looked for similar qualities, judging “how hard a man works, for one thing, and his determination to succeed.” But he also looked at a man’s “character, his integrity, basic honesty, his personal life—all of these things are also extremely important.”

Wright and his wife, Izetta, an Oklahoma native he’d married just out of college, settled down in Scarsdale, New York, as he climbed the ranks of the company. Wright was active in a local civic group and kept up his tennis game. He passed the summers in Colorado Springs with his family and filled his office, one visitor said, “with paintings of Indians and the Old West.” The oil business over which he presided, meanwhile, was shedding its cowboy past and growing into a transnational colossus. In April of 1955, around the time that Ethel Louise Williams boarded the bus for Tulsa, world oil output hit a record high, with U.S. production averaging 6.9 million barrels a day. At age 44, Wright “had the looks of a streamlined John Wayne,” as one interviewer put it, and had climbed his way to the top of the industry that powered the new American empire.

In 1966, Wright was named the CEO of Humble Oil, at the time the country’s largest producer of crude. That same year he was made president of the United States Chamber of Commerce. He’d already served on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s National Water Commission, and by the late 1960s he was named to the board of governors for the U.S. Postal Service by President Richard Nixon. On his desk he kept a ceramic tiger representing Humble’s famous slogan, “Put a tiger in your tank.”

In demand on the business speakers’ circuit, Wright hired on a sharp young economics graduate student named Kenneth Lay as his ghost writer, who helped him pen speeches decrying the creeping dangers to capitalism from government regulation and environmentalism. (A published version of one of his stem-winders was deemed worthy of a 1974 hatchet job in The New York Times by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who described Wright as “a man of profound, even perverse, inadequacy in communication.”) Then, in 1973, Humble and other Jersey companies were realigned under the name Exxon, and Wright was chosen as the first chairman and CEO of the new conglomerate, commanding one of the most profitable and powerful companies in the United States—one that could project more influence in some corners of the world than the U.S. government itself. He presided over a corporate structure known for its ruthlessness and enforced loyalty, along with a value system that preached faith and piety above all.

Wright finally retired from the company in 1978 and worked for another decade as the CEO of Cameron Iron Works. After retiring from Cameron, he returned to a kind of emeritus position at Exxon. He was in his office in the company’s Houston offices one day in 1990 when he received a surprising phone call.

Judith Wright Patterson, as a young woman. Photo: Courtesy Judith Wright Patterson

Six

At the time she began digging into M. A. Wright’s life, Judith was divorced and living in Joplin, the mother of her own teenage son. The details of Wright’s ascent seemed like dispatches from another universe, and she was seized with the desire to know whether the man in the newspaper clippings was truly her father.

One day in 1990, she called the number for Exxon’s corporate offices in New York and managed to get the chairman’s secretary on the phone. Judith told her she was trying to reach an M. A. Wright whom she believed worked for Exxon. The secretary asked what the call was about. “I’ve found out I’m his illegitimate daughter,” she said.

The secretary told her she’d have to look into it. “We can’t help you,” Judith recalls the woman saying when she rang back. “But you sound like a determined person. You’ll find him.”

Next, Judith tried Exxon’s office in Houston, where she worked her way through the company’s automated voice mail until she reached a man in the royalties and deeds department whom she remembers as Mr. Fitch. Fitch appeared sympathetic to her story and told her that yes, M. A. Wright did still have an office there. He put through a message to Wright’s corporate secretary with details that Judith had given him, like Louise and Diana and Rickey’s names.

“Those names got you through the door,” Judith recalls Fitch telling her when he called her back. But Wright had denied that he was her father, he said, and refused to speak with her. Then Fitch, for reasons that Judith could only guess at, gave her Wright’s office number, in exchange for the promise that she wouldn’t call for a few days.

Judith dialed the number the next day. When Wright’s secretary put her through, she told him who she was. “This is kind of an awkward situation,” she said, “but I’ve been told that you are my biological father.”

“You’ve got me mixed up with somebody else,” Judith recalls Wright saying. She apologized and hung up.

But Wright’s answer did not sit well with Judith. She didn’t want to accuse the wrong man of having a child out of wedlock, but the more research she did, the more the details of Louise’s story seemed to point right back to the man from Exxon. So she called him again.

This time Wright was unexpectedly polite, and he answered Judith’s queries with an enigmatic question of his own. “What’s this about, your grandmother?” she remembers him asking. “Let me ask you a question,” he said when she seemed confused. “Is your mother’s husband bothering you wanting money?”

“No, they’ve never asked me for anything,” Judith said. But when she thought about it, it was strange how her mother had suddenly sought her out after all those years. “I will be honest with you,” she told Wright. “I do think it was about money that they looked me up.”

“Your thoughts are the same as mine,” he said, according to Judith. “I don’t want to talk anymore, I think this is blackmail.” And with that, he hung up again.

Judith pulled out the document that her mother had written, the one telling the story of how she and Wright had met, and called him back. Before he could get out another denial, she said, “I have a transcript of detailed things that only you and my birth mother would know. I want to send it to you.”

“Read it,” he said.

She did. Before she finished, she remembers, she could hear him crying on the other end of the line. “I owe you an apology,” he said. “This was not what I thought it was. You have not gotten what you deserved.”

Seven

After that conversation, Judith would call and speak to Wright regularly. They talked about their lives, Judith says, and he peppered her with questions about her family. Wright would never fully admit to being her father, and after a while she decided not to press him on it and risk what little relationship they had. “I said, ‘All I want is just to meet you,’” she later told me. “‘Just meet me one time. I’ll go away and never see you again.’” He said it wouldn’t do either of them any good to meet. “I have a family, too, you know,” he said. His first wife, Izetta had passed away in 1967, but he’d married again two years later, to Josephine Primm Wright, who had five children from her first marriage. And he had his own daughter to think about.

But Judith says that he apologized, at least, that he couldn’t seek out more of a connection with her. “He said, ‘This is not your fault,’” she told me. “If he said it once he said it a hundred times.” He warned her to be careful around her birth mother’s family, even though he was never clear on why exactly. “You do not belong in that circle,” he told her.

One day in the late summer of 1991, finally feeling like she wanted answers, she called and confronted him with the facts she had acquired in her research. “I know you were married at the time” of the affair, she told him.

“A lot of what you are saying is true,” he said.

“I know that you are my biological father!”

Wright stayed on the line but didn’t say anything. She repeated herself, and still he remained silent. Finally, she hung up on him.

Over a year passed before she called him again. When she did, his secretary, whom Judith had come to know well, picked up. “Mr. Wright passed away,” she said.

Some people might say that what Judith did next was about greed. But those people wouldn’t understand how close she’d grown to the man she now believed was her father. Precisely because she felt so much for him, she also felt aggrieved by his silent rejection, his refusal to own up to her existence or complete the fragmented story she’d begun to assemble. “My thoughts weren’t about money but that I could find the truth,” she told me. “This was a big mystery to me. It was like a jigsaw puzzle.”

She’d never asked Wright for anything when he was alive, except for the chance to meet him. But now that he was dead, she began to think that maybe she was owed something. That phrase he’d once uttered was lodged in her mind like a splinter: You have not gotten what you deserved.

A few weeks after Wright’s death, she got a lawyer down in Tulsa, a friendly ex–Marine Corps JAG officer named Terry Funk, to file a claim on the Texas estate of Myron A. Wright in Houston. Wright had died with a substantial fortune; how much exactly Judith didn’t know. But a portion of his will later released in court showed that he held $7 million in stocks and bonds alone. Most of his assets were to be divided between his second wife, Josephine, and his daughter from his first marriage—unless, of course, Judith could prove that he was her father as well.

M.A. Wright, 1975. Photo: Clarence B. Garrett/Baltimore Sun

Eight

In February 1994, a lawyer for M. A. Wright’s estate traveled from Houston to Tulsa to depose Ethel Louise Williams. Once Louise was sworn in, the lawyer coaxed from her an intimate and at times excruciatingly sad account of how she and Wright had become lovers. The lawyer pressed her on her specific memories of the man, asking if she remembered anything unusual about his physical appearance.

A: I recall his ears being big. He had huge ears, I mean—

Q: Big ears?

A: I mean, big ears.

…

Q: Was he well built? I mean, was he muscular?

A: He was a very well-built man. He had a—large shoulders and he was—he carried hisself very well.

…

Q: You did have an intimate sexual relationship with him?

A: Yes.

Q: Was he circumcised?

A: I don’t think he was.

…

Q: What sticks out in your mind as being the most—the thing you remember most?

A: The thing that I remember most was that he was—he was such a gentle person, you know.… I deeply loved him.

When it came to the events that occurred after their affair had ended, however, Louise’s recollection grew muddled and contradictory. She remembered that he sent or gave her a deed—to what exactly she couldn’t say, maybe an oil field in Texas—and that she tore something up. She remembered receiving some checks, perhaps, in the first years after Judith was born—checks with little holes punched along the edge, signed by M. A. Wright. “It was very nice handwriting, penmanship,” she told the lawyer. “It was just—it was really nice.” She’d deposited a couple of them at a bank in Joplin, but they’d stopped coming.

She said she had not spoken to Wright after she last saw him, at the foot of the stairs of the Mayo Hotel in July 1955, until March 1990, when Judith—who had already contacted Wright—had asked her to call and confront him with the truth. “I don’t want to hear this,” he’d repeated over and over when she told him who she was, Louise testified.

“You don’t want to hear no more about it because you, you made a mess out of everything,” she’d replied. “You didn’t give a damn what happened to me.”

“There’s nothing I can do about this now,” he’d said. So she hung up on him and never called back.

Judith had come down to Tulsa for the deposition as well; Funk had told her to bring paperwork from a blood test, to be submitted to the court, and she’d done so. Louise, too, was to supply her medical records or a blood test. If there was a match, Funk had told Judith, the estate would likely want to settle.

After the deposition, Judith and her mother drove back north. Then, a few weeks later, according to Judith, Funk called her and said that the estate was offering her $50,000 to end the case. “He said, ‘Judith, you should take it,’” she told me. But something about it didn’t feel right, not having the results of the blood tests, not having seen any documents. “I asked for some kind of paperwork,” she said, “and that’s went it all went strange.”

In July of 1994, Funk abruptly withdrew from the case. Not long after, the judge threw out Judith’s claims. Her pursuit of a share of M. A. Wright’s estate, and with it a court’s seal of approval of her identity as his daughter, seemed to be over.

Nine

Judith’s former life, the one in which she was just the daughter of George and Sue Adams couldn’t be recovered. She came from somewhere else, she knew, not just a physical place but an unfamiliar world populated with rich and powerful people. But what good was that knowledge? It destroyed something and built little in its place.

The court case in Texas, as Judith understood it, had ended mysteriously. She couldn’t figure out why exactly she’d lost, why the blood-test results that would’ve revealed the truth had never come back. In any case, M. A. Wright’s money was gone, most of it to Wright’s second wife and his daughter by his first marriage. By the mid-1990s, Judith was, irrespective of her lineage, a struggling single mom with another young son to raise: Ryan, who had been born in 1993. Another marriage came and went, but she kept the man’s last name, Patterson. She worked as a telemarketer and then sold cosmetics. There wasn’t much time to dwell on what the money might have meant for her and Ryan.

But if Judith’s newly discovered birthright hadn’t brought her a fortune, her mother’s reappearance had brought her a new family. Louise’s other children came to accept her as a blood relative, and Judith reached out to as many of them as she could find. She kept up with her half-sister Diana in Kansas and occasionally talked on the phone with Vicki, who was out in California. She got to know her mother a little better, too, although they were never what you’d call close.

Judith spent the most time with her half-brother Rick Harris, who turned out to live just a few miles down the road. In 1995, he had opened up Rick’s Appliances in Joplin, which wasn’t far from Carthage, where Judith and Ryan now lived. (Shawn, her older son, was in his early twenties by then and out of the house.) One day, Rick called to ask if she could fill in for an absent employee at the appliance store. What started out as a favor soon became a regular job.

There was a darkness around the edges of her mother’s family, though. It crept up on Judith slowly, as she and her son were drawn into Louise’s orbit. Robert Harris, Louise’s first husband and Rick’s father, was said to have killed himself sometime in the 1960s or 1970s—“stuck a gun in his mouth and blowed his head off,” Louise had said in her deposition, although she couldn’t remember when it had happened. There were drug problems in the family. One of Louise’s sons had some kind of brain condition that prevented him from working; Louise had once said matter-of-factly that it was the result of her own mother hitting her in the stomach with a chair when she was pregnant with him. Vicki, Judith later told me, died mysteriously in 2001.

But Judith figured they were family now, and every family came with some drama. Maybe this one just had a little more than usual.

For several years, Judith had a recurring dream. She was at an opera with M. A. Wright, sitting in an ornate hall filled with people. He was dressed in a suit and tie but never spoke. She couldn’t remember much about the opera itself; in real life she’d never been to one. The vision haunted her in her waking hours. Every time she managed to bury her thoughts about the man she believed to be her father, the dream would exhume them.

After the dream came to her again one night in 2006, Judith called her friend Alice Burkhart. “We need to pray about this,” Burkhart told her, and they did. Judith asked God to help her find out everything, to uncover the truth about who she was and what had happened to her family.

The first step was finding out what exactly had happened in the Texas case more than a decade earlier. So she called up the lawyer down in Houston who had represented M. A. Wright’s estate in the battle over his will. “I know I’m late in looking,” Judith told her, “but what happened?”

“I really can’t talk to you about this,” the attorney said, according to Judith. “But it was that lawyer that you had.” Judith hadn’t lost the case really; her filings had been thrown out because her attorney, Terry Funk, hadn’t been licensed to practice law in Texas.

It shook Judith deeply to discover that someone she’d trusted to help her had failed her like that. Even worse, she thought, was the fact that he’d never told her what had happened, so that she might somehow fix it before it was too late.

Judith got to talking with the Wrights’ attorney about Judith’s scoliosis, and the lawyer told her that M. A. Wright had suffered from it as a child as well. Judith asked what had happened to Josephine, Wright’s widow. The lawyer said she heard that she’d died, but she didn’t know the details.

Tracking down an obituary for Josephine, Judith discovered that Wright’s widow was living in Seattle at the time of her death. She located a lawyer in Washington who agreed to represent her on contingency and filed a petition in an attempt to recover something from Josephine’s estate. The money had already been dispersed back in 2004, most of it to M. A. Wright’s daughter from his first marriage. (According to the terms of the will, once Josephine died, a good portion of Wright’s money was designated for his “issue.”) But under Washington law, if Judith could prove that she was Wright’s daughter and had been unlawfully excluded from the will, she could still recover whatever portion of the money a court deemed should have been hers.

M. A. Wright’s first daughter fought the petition—her name, incredibly, was also Judith—and was joined by one of Josephine Wright’s daughters. Judith’s lawyer handed the case off to an accomplished litigator named Michael Olver, who argued in filings that when Wright’s will stated that he intended his fortune to pass to his children, it was written in a way that should include not just his legitimate daughter but Judith as well. The blood tests that could have proved definitively that Judith was Wright’s daughter had never been completed, but DNA could now provide the answer just as easily. “The biological mother has twice sworn that Judith Patterson is the issue of M. A. Wright,” they wrote “Simple noninvasive testing with cotton swabs will confirm it.”

To fully pursue her new identity, though, Judith was going to have to undo her old one. To bolster the case, her Washington lawyers suggested she go to court in Kansas to have her adoption nullified. Josephine Wright happened to have moved to a state that specifically barred children given up for adoption from later claiming inheritance from their biological parents. The lawyers contacted a well-respected attorney in Kansas City named Gene Balloun, who agreed to represent Judith and filed to have her adoption vacated in the state of Kansas. To do so, however, he was going to need Louise’s testimony.

So one morning in August of 2006, Judith drove Louise two hours up to Kansas City. Ryan, now 13 years old, came along, as did Judith’s friend Alice Burkhart. That afternoon, Judith and Louise sat in Balloun’s office with a court reporter, and just like back in 1994, the lawyer asked Louise to recount every detail of her affair with M. A. Wright. Balloun walked her through the whole story, from the bus ride to the idyll at the Mayo Hotel to Wright’s discovery of her pregnancy and her return to Baxter Springs. The deposition was wrapping up when Balloun decided to clarify one detail for the record. “How long was it then before you ever saw your daughter again?” he asked.

“What was it, ’89?” Louise said.

Judith turned to her mother. This wasn’t right, she knew; she remembered the afternoon when she was 16, the strange woman on the porch, the men standing around the truck in the driveway. “You came to my house on 413 22nd street,” she said.

“Oh yeah, sure,” Louise said. “Probably around ’72, but I didn’t actually see her.”

“And how did that come about?” Balloun asked.

Louise suddenly looked wild-eyed and scared, Judith remembers. “I came down there to see if Sue would let me take her to Houston,” she finally blurted out. “Because they wanted me to—they wanted to see her. They didn’t believe that there was a daughter or something.”

“So you went down to Baxter Springs to see her?” Balloun continued.

“Yeah.”

“Did you actually get to see her?”

“No, not really. I saw her from the door, but I didn’t. Sue had two kids.”

Judith broke in again. “I answered the door, Mama.”

“Well, I didn’t know it was you.”

Judith felt the room pressing in on her. For a second time, the woman sitting across from her had collapsed the story of her life as she knew it. After that last night at the Mayo Hotel in 1955, Wright hadn’t disappeared without a trace. Louise had somehow been in contact with him, or his proxies at Exxon, and then he’d even sent someone to find her—to bring her to Houston so that he could see her for himself. You have not gotten what you deserved. Now that statement contained so much more meaning than Judith had understood.

When the deposition concluded, Judith drove back to Carthage, Ryan in the front seat and Louise and Alice in the back, all four sitting in near silence. When Judith and Ryan returned to their house late that night, there were messages on the machine from her half-brother Rick Harris wanting to know how the trip to Kansas City went. That’s odd, Judith thought. She didn’t recall telling him that they were going.

Ten

The next evening, a stranger came to the door. When Ryan answered it, the man asked if his father was home. Thinking better of revealing that it was just him and his mother living there, Ryan said, “He’ll be home any minute.”

The man had left the trunk of his car open. He walked over to it and returned with three peaches. “There’s three of you?” he said. “Here are three peaches.” He handed them to Ryan and Judith, who had joined her son in the doorway, then got in the car and drove away.

A week and a half later, Judith was napping in the bedroom when Ryan rushed in. “Mom, that man is back, and he’s driving a different car,” he said. “He’s trying to disguise himself.” The man had parked in the driveway, left the driver’s side door and back door open, and was ringing the doorbell. This time, Judith called the police. When they arrived, the man pulled a box of peaches out of the trunk and said he was just delivering an order. The cops laughed at that. They started calling the man “Peaches.”

Up in Kansas City, Gene Balloun had obtained the depositions from the original court case over M. A. Wright’s will, nearly 15 years earlier. He mailed Judith copies, and when she opened them her unease turned to dread. Now all the inscrutable things that Louise had said back then suddenly made sense. M. A. Wright had once tried to make things right, and something had gone terribly wrong.

At the end of the deposition, Louise had described to the lawyers how her mother and her aunt had taken the jewelry that Wright had bought her, stolen it from her flat out, along with the deed. “The pearl necklace, it was wrapped up in real pretty velvet,” she said. “And I had the ring in a ring box and the watch in a box. My mother’s sister, June Van Horn, came over there and started taking my stuff away from me, and her and I got into a fight. And she broke my necklace and Diana stuck the pearl up her nose and I had to take her to the doctor and get the pearl.” Van Horn, she said, had ended up with everything.

Later, after she’d moved out of her mother’s house, Louise had been back there and found “envelopes after envelopes from Humble Oil Company.” They were empty, she told the lawyers, and her mother had told her that they’d just been utility bills.

The tale grew stranger from there. In the 1960s, Louise had said, she found a letter at her mother’s house from a Houston lawyer named George Devine, telling her she urgently needed to contact him. When she called him, her mother took the phone away and hung it up. Then her aunt called Devine back pretending to be Louise.

Louise said that after that she wrote letters for years to Humble Oil in Houston, always addressed to “dear sirs,” trying to get ahold of Wright. “I had built him on a pedestal,” she said. “I felt like he would protect me and all my things was taken away from me, and I felt like that he would help me get Judy back.”

She never got an answer, she said, but in 1972 she did get a letter from Humble Oil asking her to return any documents she had. So she decided to go down to Houston and try to find M.A. herself. After she was unable to convince Sue Adams to let her take Judith, she brought her third husband and her son Rick, now a teenager, and managed to meet Humble’s then-president, Randall Meyer. “He said that he wanted me to come back that afternoon and we would probably get this matter all straightened out,” Louise recalled. But her husband had gotten a parking ticket when they went for lunch. Flustered and fed up with his wife’s oilman tales, he demanded that they drive back to Kansas and abandon the whole thing.

Louise’s memory seemed uncommonly sharp on certain details but foggy on others. “A lot of this stuff is blank in my mind,” she said at one point. “I’m going to tell you the truth, the way it’s happened. My mother beat on me ever since I was a child, and my mother was very angry with me when I got pregnant by M.A., because back in the ’50s, you didn’t get in trouble. You didn’t have a baby out of wedlock, and you didn’t live with people not married or anything. And lot of this stuff I don’t remember. I can’t remember.”

The family Judith had begun to feel close to, she now saw, had some connection to M. A. Wright beyond just Louise’s several-month affair. Once-cryptic details—Wright’s query, “What’s this about, your grandmother?”—suddenly clicked into place.

And yet the story remained a collection of fragments: Wright had somehow tried to send money and oil deeds to Louise, and maybe even to Judith. They had been intercepted along the way. It was unclear if her mother was a perpetrator or—if her deposition was to be believed—a victim of her own crooked family. Whichever it was, Judith was beginning to suspect that the new family she’d embraced had drawn her close for reasons she’d never imagined.

Still, Judith pressed on with her attempt to nullify her adoption. Even if elements of the family she was joining appeared increasingly sinister, she needed to be legally part of it to attain the place among Wright’s heirs that she so badly wanted. In November 2006, a district judge in Cherokee County, Kansas, issued a judgment voiding Judith’s adoption and confirming the facts of the case as Judith herself now understood them. “Ms. Patterson was born Judy Diane Bryant on January 30, 1956,” he wrote. “Her birth mother was Ethel Louise Harris, also known as Ethel Bryant, and now known as Ethel Louise Williams. Her birth father was Myron A. Wright.”

There it was, at last, on paper. As soon as the verdict came down, Judith started going by Judith Wright Patterson.

Eleven

When I called Judith for the first time in the spring of 2008, it had been two years since her adoption had been dissolved. Her suspicions about her mother’s family had calcified into a certainty shot through with anger and fear. She knew now, she told me, that her mother’s family had robbed her of the money that M. A. Wright had sent her for decades—and she was convinced that they were now conspiring to do worse. “My life will never be the same,” she told me.

In September 2007, Judith had lost her initial lawsuit in Washington over Josephine Wright’s will. The case hinged on the fact that the will specifically bequeathed most of M. A. Wright’s remaining fortune to his “lawful issue,” excluding any illegitimate children. Her lawyers were appealing the verdict. Meanwhile, she was engaged in a new legal battle, this one in Missouri, against her mother’s family. She’d enlisted a local lawyer to pursue a civil case alleging that her mother and her half-brother Rick—whom she saw as the ringleaders—along with half a dozen other relatives, had engaged in a conspiracy to intercept money from Wright that was intended for her.

“I think basically my dad did try to stop this, at least make sure this money was going to me,” Judith told me on the phone. “But I think these folks stepped in and had him over a barrel, saying that we are going to expose you. There wasn’t anything that he could do.”

“Were they living high on the money?” I asked her.

“That’s the catch: this is where they fooled everybody,” she said. “To look at these people, around this area right here, you would not suspect them in any way.”

Bit by bit over months, Judith described to me the scattered but tantalizing documentation she’d collected to prove that her family was not what it seemed. Through a blend of Midwestern friendliness and an almost frightening persistence, she had amassed a small mountain of papers. She’d employed private investigators in Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri to run traces on family members both immediate and distant. They’d found evidence, she told me, of aliases and hidden bank accounts, of money-laundering vehicles and strange trusts in distant states, of oil wells deeded to names that matched up with members of her family.

She’d pried loose some documents from Exxon, too, including one concerning an oil field that Louise had mentioned in one of her depositions. It was in Tomball Texas, just outside Houston. The field had changed hands over the years, but Judith had followed the trail of ownership through a series of oil companies until she found a link between one of the Tomball leases and an address Louise Williams had once used in Coweta, Oklahoma.

The documents indicated that some oil royalties had been sent to that address. According to a letter she received from Exxon, the payments had begun in the 1950s, only to be suspended sometime in the next decade. “It dawned on me: That’s why my mother contacted me in 1972!” she told me excitedly. “My father must have known that the money wasn’t going to the right people, so he sent an investigator down and stopped the payments.” She suspected that her mother had used another relative to impersonate her—which would explain some of the confused conversations she’d had with Wright on the phone before he died.

The most important document that Judith had gotten out of the Exxon archives, however, was a handwritten letter that the company had received back in 1958 when it was still Humble Oil. The letter read:

Humble Oil and Refining Co

dear sirs,

m. a. wright passed away after spending 3 years in a state mental hospital. I cashed his checks and sent him clothes until he died the bank will no longer cash them unless they are made to me. I am his sister the last in his immediate family the checks are not much but I am nearly blind and I can use it I want to put a marker at his grave. Wright’s funeral home Coweta okla could furnish death certificate.

Ethel Williams

Coweta, OK

Enclosed with the letter was a copy of a half-filled-out document marked “Record of Funeral” for one Marcus Arrington Wright. It was the name that M. A. Wright had given Louise during their tryst at the Mayo Hotel.

Judith and her lawyers were certain this meant that Louise had tried to extract money from Wright’s company by duping its executives into believing their employee was dead. It seemed like a clumsy con, but if that’s what it was, Judith believed, it proved that her mother had been trying to get her hands on Wright’s money for years.

Judith took the information she had gathered to the police department in Carthage, hoping to secure an identity-theft claim against her mother and half-brother. The cops didn’t laugh about “Peaches” this time, but they were flummoxed by the complexity of her allegations. They quickly ascertained that whatever had happened had occurred mostly outside their jurisdiction; Judith’s story ranged across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and New York.

But before the police dropped the case, Judith had managed to procure one more piece of evidence that would later prove valuable. One afternoon she went to Louise’s house and—despite their ongoing legal dispute—convinced her to ride down to the nearby Baxter Springs police station and give a new statement. Why her mother agreed to it is entirely unclear. Later she’d claim that her daughter had “kidnapped” her—raising the question of whether the statement was written under duress. But at the station that day, Louise hand-wrote and signed an affidavit witnessed by a clerk. “My entire family blackmailed M. A. Wright for money for gas and oil stocks property trust fund,” she admitted.

The document, like all the scraps that Judith had gathered, seemed at once to suggest everything and add up to nothing. But at the very least, someone had admitted, on paper, to blackmailing Wright.

Twelve

In early 2009, Judith’s lawsuit in Missouri was thrown out. If the family had stolen money from M. A. Wright, the court concluded, the proper place to pursue the claim would be in Harris County, Texas, where Wright’s estate had originated. Judith found a lawyer there and filed suit in Houston, where Wright’s will had been adjudicated back in 1994.

It was at this point that I began to discern a pattern in Judith’s legal representation. Her lawyers almost always took up her case on contingency, hoping to make their money back when she won—Wright’s estate, after all, had been worth millions, and in its basic outlines Judith’s case seemed like a promising one. But Judith would inevitably part ways with them along the road to justice. Whether the attorneys somehow lost faith in the cause or just grew weary of struggling with Judith’s story wasn’t always clear.

Every time I talked to her, it seemed, she’d added one lawyer and subtracted another, to the point where, after several years, I had trouble keeping them straight—even as she continued to bring up names I’d not yet heard. There was Terry Funk, of course, and a character named Jim Lloyd who had once represented her mother. There was Daniel Whitworth, a local attorney, and Gene Balloun, out of Kansas City. There’d been Michael Olver and Richard Wills in Washington, and then there were others who seemed to pop up in our conversations once and then never appear again. “Gary Richardson, attorney in Tulsa, I’m going to see if he can’t line up with this attorney that I have here,” read my notes from a conversation with Judith in September 2008. Richardson never did. Judith once suggested she was going to engage the famed celebrity lawyer Robert Shapiro. Nothing ever came of it.

When I tracked down Judith’s lawyers and investigators, they usually told me versions of the same story. “She gets excited and she just kind of goes on a roll,” Whitworth told me. “Normally, when you talk to people like that, you weigh it with a grain of salt. But the interesting thing is that when you dig into it, there appears to be merit in what she is saying. My opinion is that she’s right.” He paused. “I suppose I represent her, so I’m supposed to say that.”

When Michael Olver first heard Judith’s story, it sounded to him like “a Friday night movie of the week.” But over time, he told me, he came to trust her. “I can tell you that in dealing with Ms. Patterson, every time we’ve heard her describe something and we’ve checked it out, it’s been accurate,” he said.

Then there was Joseph Norwood, another Tulsa attorney who briefly seemed like the man to talk to about the case; Judith had described him to me as “kind of like my spokesperson” at one point in 2008. “Right now I’m still kind of getting my head wrapped around it and figuring out where to take the deal,” Norwood told me when I reached him at his office. “I do believe there is merit.” I began running through the litany of accusations and conspiracies that I’d piled up in my notes. “Here’s the problem,” he said. “Judith has been completely overwhelmed and turned obsessed on this situation. She sees things that are not there. She’s become damn near full-blown paranoid.

“I daresay I can’t blame her,” he added. “She’s been through a lot.”

A few months later, when I brought up Norwood, Judith told me he was no longer representing her. “He’s not wealthy enough to put together the case,” she said. “Brilliant man.”

And so lawyers came and went, drawn in by Judith’s story and then driven off by its complexity and the expense that would be necessary to make anything out of it. Judith herself, however, remained undaunted. By 2010, she had lost her appeal in Washington but was still confident that she could win in Texas. “I think this thing is going to blow wide open, is what I think,” she told me. She had enlisted the services of Jeff Zimmerman, a litigator from Kansas City, who had found out about Judith’s case when she rented a house from a former client of his. Now he was serving as a kind of consigliore, interpreting between Judith and her own lawyers.

When I called Zimmerman, I found myself listening to a refrain that by now was so familiar I could practically mouth the words along with him. “If you asked Judith to sit down for a couple hours and tell you the story, you’d say ‘that’s really kooky,’” Zimmerman told me. “But when you start to tie together all the evidence—I tell you, it’s probably the strangest case I’ve ever been involved with.”

Even as her legal battles were flagging, Judith was at last finding some purchase in the world Wright had inhabited. In 2005, she had looked up the phone number for the Oklahoma ranch that had belonged to the Phillips oil dynasty. In her depositions, Louise had described a pair of Phillips sisters and Waite Phillips as being close friends of Wright. Perhaps one of them could shed some light on the affair.

Judith eventually found her way to Jean Phillips, one of the few remaining members of the Phillips family from the same generation as M. A. Wright and a good friend of his. Phillips “wasn’t surprised at all when I contacted her,” Judith told me. “She said, ‘You were a secret through the Phillips family and in the oil industry for years.’”

The two women became friends. Phillips was one of the few people who accepted Judith for who she now wanted to be. “It was never like, ‘What makes you think he’s your father?’” Judith told me. “She knew he was. She said, ‘Honey, you need to hold your head up high. You come from good blood.’”

Phillips took a particular interest in Judith’s son Ryan, then a teenager, and once invited the two of them to Tulsa. “This was a million-dollar neighborhood; J. P. Getty had lived across the street,” Ryan recalled. “And walking in there, it was a whole different world.” Phillips, he said, treated them like they belonged. She told Ryan that he should get into the oil business like his grandfather had. “She said right off the bat, ‘That was your grandfather, be proud.’ We hadn’t taken any DNA or brought pictures, and she is showing family photos.”

But at the end of the day, it was time to go back. “You’ve got all these thoughts, and then you come back to your little town where you grew up, and you don’t see the same future in it,” he said. “You suddenly don’t feel like you belong. You go back to your friends—you can’t be that and be here. You’re in a Cinderella world. And you come back to this world and you are trapped in between.”

Thirteen

In December of 2011, I went to visit Judith in Carthage. I pulled my rental car up to a yellow one-story condo with a gravel front path, in a new-looking development of cookie-cutter buildings on the east side of town. When Judith opened the front door, she greeted me like an old friend. Which, in a way, I was; we’d talked every few weeks or so for the better part of three years now. She had dyed her hair black and wore it long. Her eyebrows were painted on, and her face was framed by oversize hoop earrings.

By this point, I’d evolved almost by sheer force of exposure from a reporter to someone she seemed to view as a mixture of confidant and potential advocate. At times I found myself overwhelmed by the complexity of her tale and the strange menagerie of characters who drifted in and out of it. Now, at least, I could cross-reference it with the evidence she’d described to me so many times on the phone, contained in bankers boxes of documents stacked up in her closet.

By the afternoon, we were sitting in her living room—decked out for the holidays with wreaths and a tree—with papers and photographs stacked in concentric circles around us on the carpet. The files seemed to be ordered according to some methodology that only Judith understood, so I leafed through documents randomly, occasionally setting aside ones that seemed to hint at some significance.

Judith pulled out a photo album. “These I treasure,” she said, paging through the pictures. “This is my heart. This is what I’m leaving to my kids. These pictures I’ll never be able to replace.” The album contained what looked like official corporate photos of M. A. Wright, along with photocopies of his college yearbook. These were interspersed with pictures of Judith on her trips to see Jean Phillips and encouraging letters Phillip had sent her over the years.

On the phone, Judith had recounted evidence that seemed to fit perfectly into the narrative she had assembled. When I sat down with her and went through all the documents myself, the puzzle was more challenging. It wasn’t that the documentation didn’t exist; it was that the conclusions Judith drew from it required a chain of connections that each rested on an additional piece of evidence. Documents like her mother’s letter to Humble Oil seemed tantalizingly close to proving her story but in some ways only invited more questions.

The evidentiary touchstone to which Judith kept returning was always Tomball. The oil field outside Houston that Humble Oil once operated had been transferred to another company and then another. But Judith had called all of them and eventually turned up a record of unclaimed money in M. A. Wright’s name, which indeed appeared to have been headed for Rural Route 1 in Coweta, Oklahoma, and was now held by the Oklahoma state treasury. One of her investigators found the same Rural Route 1 address associated with Louise Williams. That much of the story seemed tangible: At some point, oil companies had been sending checks in an M. A. Wright’s name to a Louise Williams, whether he knew it or not. Judith even convinced the Oklahoma Unclaimed Property Division to send her one of the checks, for $76.96.

Where the conspiracy had gone from there was a matter of speculation. Judith met and befriended a local woman named Violet Jean Vasquez, who had grown up down the street from Louise’s family and described having heard, while playing at their house as a child, Louise and her relatives discussing how they were collecting money from an oilman. Vasquez later dated Rick Harris and worked at Rick’s Appliances, and reported a wealth of suspicious details to Judith: his handling of large amounts of cash, strange life-insurance policies, and mysterious government checks.

By this point, Judith’s relationship with her mother’s side of the family had long since soured. This wasn’t surprising, given that they’d all been served papers for the fraud lawsuit she’d filed against them. Her half-sister Diana, who had once described to her meeting M. A. Wright in Tulsa as a child, now refused to speak to her. Things only worsened after a 2007 story on Judith’s lineage by local TV news anchor Dowe Quick. Quick managed a brief interview with Louise at her front door in which she angrily declared, “I’m the victim of all of this. I’ve had this stuff stolen from me, years ago.”

After that, strange events kept happening around Judith’s home. Her car’s engine went haywire, and one of her tires blew out not long after. She called the police about possible prowlers out behind the house and to report that someone may have tampered with her heating vents when she was out. She thought the house might be bugged. And there’d been the man who’d showed up at the front door claiming to be delivering peaches; later, Judith became convinced that he was connected to Rick Harris.

Years before, when Judith worked at Rick’s appliance store, she and her sons would attend weekend barbecues at his house. They took trips and even spent holidays together. But as they grew close, Harris had always struck her as a volatile man, with a lighting-quick temper and a haughty pride born from the fact that he’d come from nothing and made something of himself. To outward appearances, the appliance store never seemed like a thriving business, but he was extravagant with his money, flashing it around and gambling liberally on weekend trips to casinos outside Kansas City and spur-of-the-moment jaunts to Las Vegas. He bought new cars and a wood-paneled hot tub that he put in the yard out behind his house.

In July 2008, I called Judith and found her in an unusually agitated state. “I had something very traumatic happen today,” she told me. “There wasn’t much air coming in, and I called somebody to look at the air conditioner. And the guy said, ‘Ma’am, you better come out and look at this. Somebody has opened up your box and pulled out one piece, the relay. You’ve got somebody mad at you.’”

Judith said she didn’t know who was behind it, but she thought it quite a coincidence that Rick owned an appliance store and here someone had vandalized her central air. She called the police, who filed a report and agreed to send a patrol car by periodically to check on the house. Not long after, while out to dinner with Violet Jean Vasquez, a man followed them out of a restaurant and, Judith says, ran them off the road.

After one too many scares, she stopped letting Ryan ride the bus to school. He took to sleeping with a butcher knife between his mattress and box spring. Judith started sleeping in a chair in the living room, not knowing if she would wake up with someone standing over her. “I was scared to leave my own house for a long time,” she later told me. “I didn’t know if I was going to get a bullet put to me or what.” For a while, she and Ryan moved into Alice Burkhart’s’s house and only returned home by day to pick up clothes.

By then, however, it was too late for Judith to turn back. Unraveling the story of M. A. Wright had become her full-time occupation. The job at Rick’s shop had ended, predictably, when she served him with papers. She had thrown her back out working as a massage therapist back in 2006 and was living off the disability payments. By the end of 2008, she’d lost the house in Carthage and moved out of town temporarily, to a cheaper place in Loma Linda, a town outside Joplin. But the Texas lawsuit was up and running, and she felt like there was light coming at the end of a very long tunnel.

In April 2009, she flew down to Houston for a few days to meet with her lawyers. Ryan stayed with Alice, and they picked Judith up from the airport when she returned. As they made the last turn back to the house in Loma Linda, they passed a car coming the other direction.

“There’s Rick,” Ryan said.

“No way,” Judith replied.

When they pulled into the driveway, however, Rick pulled in behind them, blocking the way out. “He didn’t get out of his car,” Judith told me. “He just sat there” and stared. Ryan jumped out and ran to the neighbor’s house, but no one was home. So the three of them made a break for the garage, and inside Judith called the sheriff. Harris left before the sheriff arrived. Later, her neighbors said Rick had been asking around for her.

The next week, Judith went to court and got an order of protection against Rick. By the time I visited her in Carthage, she had become convinced that her half-brother was the mastermind, the linchpin to the whole conspiracy and the reason she’d feared for her and her sons’ lives for years. But after reading the police reports from the incidents Judith had described, I’d begun to wonder if they were really anything more than the confrontations you’d expect between feuding relatives. The only way to find out, I figured, was to go to Joplin myself.

Fourteen

Joplin, like Carthage, is nestled in the southwest corner of Missouri, where it meets Kansas and Oklahoma. Once famous for being the site of some of Bonnie and Clyde’s first bank robberies, it acquired a grimmer place in the national consciousness after the 2011 tornado that killed 158 people. Driving toward downtown, I could still see the lingering devastation: Whole tracts of suburban-style homes had been obliterated down to their foundations and never rebuilt. The local high school looked liked it had been hit with a bomb.

The section of Joplin’s Main Street where Rick’s Appliances was located had seen better days, but it at least appeared to have been spared the storm’s wrath. It was 4:30 p.m. on a Thursday when I pulled up there. The store was locked, despite the sign out front that said it was open until five. When I peered through the glass, no one appeared to be inside. At first it wasn’t clear that the store was in business at all. The showroom was virtually empty, with a few battered-looking washers and a refrigerator haphazardly arranged across a stained carpet.

I cupped my hands to the glass to get a better look and noticed a bearded, heavyset man visible through an open doorway to a back room. I knocked loudly on the glass and waved. The man turned his head slowly toward me, then turned back and wandered away. A moment later another man walked out from the back and approached the front door.

He was small—five foot eight, according to the arrest records I later obtained—with brown hair and brown eyes, wearing a pair of large metal-rimmed glasses. His hair was slicked over to one side. He unlocked the front door and cracked it open, glaring at me suspiciously. I introduced myself as a journalist and said I was writing about a lawsuit related to M. A. Wright. Did he know anything about it?

“Yeah, and it’s bullshit!” he shouted.

“OK, I just wanted to find out what you thought about it,” I said. “That’s all.”

“Get in here,” he said, opening the door wider and waving me inside.

“Alright,” I heard myself saying.

He slammed the door fully open against the wall and held onto it while the sound reverberated through the mostly empty shop. He clenched his teeth and closed his eyes, as if he was trying to hold back a tide of fury and anguish that was about to pour forth. “That fucking lawsuit is by Judy”—here he let out a kind of angry grunt—“fucking Patterson over in Carthage. That sonofabitch needs to be arrested!”

He leaned in toward me, and for a moment it looked like he was going to hit me. “OK,” I said again, leaning back. “I just want to talk about it.”

“She had that same goddamn lawsuit here in Joplin, back in ’08, and had three court hearings here! The case was dismissed because there was no damn truth to it whatsoever,” he said. “She’s a worthless motherfucker, man.” He slammed the door against the wall again. “Fucking sonofabitch pisses me off, man!”

“I can tell,” I said.

“Nobody owes her nothing!” he shouted. “My family don’t owe her a goddamn fucking dime. And the sonofabitch is just trying to get money out of everybody so she doesn’t have to fucking work for a living in this goddamn fucking world.”

Harris started backing me out of the store, stepping in close enough that I was forced into the threshold and then onto the sidewalk. I asked if there was a phone number where I could reach him. He stared at me blankly. “I’m not going to be here,” he said. “I’m locking this sonofabitch up.” He closed the door and disappeared into the back.

Judith wasn’t surprised that Rick had come undone in front of me, nor that the store itself seemed to be barely functioning. “That place should have been folded up beaucoup long time ago,” she said. “There’s not enough money there to keep the place going, but he was laundering money through that business.”

If that was the case, however, none of Judith’s investigators or lawyers had ever managed to produce any hard evidence of it. And the visit to Rick’s Appliances had brought to mind a lingering question I’d had since Judith first told me about the money that her family allegedly had stolen: Where had it all gone? Rick, for all his volcanic rage, struck me as an unlikely financial mastermind. His house was small and simple, on the edge of a trash-filled culvert. From what I could discern, none of the other relatives seemed to be living much better.

Louise, meanwhile, had gone missing. Judith hadn’t seen her in over a year. Judith was, in some sense, back where she’d started. And it wasn’t clear if by pressing on she had any hope of winning back more than she’d already lost.

Back home after the trip to Carthage, I tried to navigate the thicket of facts I had dutifully set down in notebooks and tape recorders. The longer I talked to Judith, the more difficult it became to write anything about her saga. The evidence was so simultaneously scattershot and voluminous that it seemed impossible to corral. Something extraordinary had happened to her, that much was certain. And something dark clearly had taken place in her family—indeed, it seemed to still be happening. But a great many of the answers lay in a time that was now out of any reasonable reach of memory. Judith was fighting a war against a basic erosion of historical facts, and I had unwittingly ended up fighting it alongside her.

At times her motivations seemed to slip into something like revenge. “I probably will never be able to ever, ever get back all this money that these people have taken,” Judith admitted to me at one point. “I hate the fact that Rick has any of this. But the public humiliation that he is going to have to deal with down the line, I wouldn’t want to be walking in his shoes.” The further I waded into the story, the more I wondered how I could possibly untangle what was important from the petty grievances of a messed-up family.

Several months later, I was reading through the court filings for Judith’s lawsuit in Texas, as it wended its way toward trial, when one document caught my eye. It was a note postmarked November 29, 2010, from Louise Williams to the court:

Dear Judge Weiman,

I have no money to travel and my Doctor won’t let me go that Far because of my Health. And Just about everything Judy Patterson has Said is a Lie.… This is about the Fourth time She has Done this she Wants to make a Movie of me and my family & Smear our names all over the world. If I had any money I would sue her.

Something Bad is going to happen to Because [God] Don’t like ugly.

Sincerely,

Ethel Louise Williams

Smear our names all over the world. Was she referring to me? I remembered back to my visit, when I’d been sitting in Judith’s living room and she’d answered a call on her cell phone. “Can I call you back?” she’d said. “Evan is here.” Not “that reporter” or writer or any of the ways I’d described myself to try and make clear the boundaries of our relationship. As many times as I explained to her that we weren’t really on the same side, that my journalistic motives were not necessarily aligned with her legal and personal ones, it never seemed to sink in. “I’m beginning to think that some sort of media attention would help us,” she confided to me at one point.

Reading Louise’s letter, though, I realized it was more than that. I’d set out to make Judith a character in my story, and instead I’d become a character in hers.

Fifteen

On January 30, 2012, Judith Wright Patterson finally got her day in court. She and her lawyer Seth Nichamoff appeared before Judge Larry Weiman of the 80th District Court in Harris County, encompassing Houston. By this point, the defendants in the case had been whittled down to Ethel Louise Williams and Rick Harris. Although she still suspected many of her other relatives were involved, she’d dropped her accusations against them after her half-sister Diana had fought the case with attorneys of her own.

Neither Rick nor Louise had ever hired a lawyer to defend themselves, nor did they show up that day for the court appearance. Even so, the judge proceeded to rule against Judith. Whatever her relatives might have done to M. A. Wright, she hadn’t proven that they’d stolen from her, and they didn’t owe her anything as a result. And that was it.

I was relieved to find that Judith considered the verdict final and, oddly, something of a victory. Even if the judge hadn’t ultimately ruled in her favor, she told me when I talked to her just after her court date, his comments in open court had persuaded her that he believed M. A. Wright was defrauded. He just didn’t believe there was enough evidence that she had been. Her decades of legal battles were over, and she’d lost nearly all of them. She would never see a dollar from Wright’s family or her mother’s.

Later, Nichamoff admitted to me that while he had hoped for a different outcome, he knew they’d never truly tied together the story’s loose ends in a way that would satisfy the judge. “Did they take property that specifically belonged to Judith?” he told me. “We just don’t have any evidence of that. We never did.

“My guess,” he went on, “at the end of the day, did these people extort money from Myron Wright? Yeah, it did happen. Absolutely, there is no doubt. But then what? These are people living in trailer parks. There is no honor and no victory, morally, legally, or financially, in making people’s lives more miserable than they already are.”

Sixteen

My conversations with Judith tapered off after the verdict, but a year later, in early 2013, I decided to go back to see her. I flew first to Tulsa and spent a few days driving around town, looking for the landmarks that had figured into Louise’s account of her affair with M. A. Wright. The Dutchman’s steak house where she’d worked is now a small strip mall anchored by an out-of-season Halloween store. The Adams Hotel, where she’d first left Wright and later lived for several months as a kept woman, still has its ornate art deco exterior, but it has long since been transformed into an office building, with a Mexican restaurant on the ground floor.

The Mayo, next door, fell into disrepair in the 1980s, but it recently came under new ownership and has been restored to something approaching its original glory. It now houses a small museum dedicated to its history, and I wandered through it, past the photos of the celebrities and politicians who’d stayed there in its heyday: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley. I stood atop the steps where Louise remembered standing when M. A. Wright told her that she’d never see him again.

On the other side of town I stopped in on Terry Funk, the lawyer who had represented Judith in her first lawsuit back in 1994. Judith had filed an ethics complaint against him, but they’d halfway reconciled, and she still called him occasionally to fill him in on the case’s progress. It was like that with Judith.

Funk, wearing a white button-down monogrammed with his initials, genially welcomed me into his glassed-in high-rise office. I sat across from him at his desk and pressed him to remember what he could of the case in which he had once been embroiled. “She had a good story,” he told me. “You get a lot of b.s. cases, but for some reason I tended to believe her.”

He remembered filing for her in Texas and warning her that he wasn’t licensed—“that ended up getting me in trouble,” he said—and confirmed that Wright’s lawyers had “made some kind of offer, I don’t even know what.” Nor could he remember the blood tests or the audiotapes that Judith told me she’d given him of conversations with Wright. It had been two decades almost, and many of the specifics of the case eluded him. But Judith’s other lawyers had long suspected that Funk remembered much more than he let on. Hoping to force his memory, I reminded him of something he had said in Louise’s deposition. He paused. “I kept a diary in Vietnam,” he said after a moment, “and I was reading through it the other day. I saw that ‘he did this, we did that,’ and I said to myself, I don’t remember that. But there it is on paper.”

The next day I drove up to Carthage and checked into the Best Western Precious Moments Hotel, just off the highway. I wanted to try one more time to talk to Rick Harris and Ethel Louise Williams, the two people who could still, if I managed to get them to talk, fill in the story’s gaps. With the legal battle over, I figured, maybe they would finally tell their stories.

Judith had told me that she’d heard that Rick had grown more erratic, attacking customers at the store. Indeed, on the website for the Joplin police I found the record of an arrest the previous year for assault, disturbing the peace, and resisting arrest. He’d failed to show up in court several times since. Now, she said, he’d disappeared, having moved out of his house to nobody knew where. When I drove by his shop, I saw it had been transformed into an antiques store. The proprietors had never met him but had heard stories of his outbursts.

The next day, on an oppressive ash-sky afternoon, I drove across the Kansas border to Baxter Springs, to the last address I could find for Ethel Louise Williams. The house was just off the old Route 66, but without the historical markers the street looked like any other in a small town. Williams’s home was a gray two-story house with a green roof. The yard was overrun with junk: an empty blue barrel, a small sculpture of a lighthouse, a green plastic cactus. The most prominent item was a wood-paneled hot tub with one side caved in.

There was a car in the driveway; I parked behind it and walked up to the front door. A sign on it read, “This is a no smoking house. Oxygen tanks in use.” Through the little window in the door I could see tanks strewn around and a stack of moldy-looking mail on a nearby table, but not much else. I knocked, then rang the doorbell. Nothing stirred.

I drove over twice more in the next two days, but nobody ever came to the door. In truth, I felt relieved. Ethel Louise Williams would be 79 years old, and apparently was in poor health. Her doctor had written a note to the court saying she had dementia.

Most of our stories pass into oblivion along with the dead. M. A. Wright died in 1992. Jean Phillips passed away in 2010. Wright’s second wife, Josephine, died in 2004, followed by Wright’s daughter by his first marriage, Judith Wright Reid, in 2008. They all died before I found time to call and ask them what in Judith’s story was true to their own experience. Even Dominick Dunne died in 2009, suggesting the counterfactual possibility that if Judith had really gotten to him, the account of her story might’ve died with him. I doubt it, though. Judith would have found someone like me eventually.

There are dozens of possible versions of the truth in Judith’s life story, alternate explanations for all the pages in the boxes stacked in her bedroom closet. I have hours of tape of Judith telling me the story in different configurations, starting at different points. After years of wading through it all, my own best guess at the truth is this: That M. A. Wright likely did have that affair with Ethel Louise Williams, and Judith was the result. That Louise, by her own admission, tried to obtain money from Wright after putting Judith up for adoption—money that, it should be said, she and Judith both would have deserved from him. That her family tried to get that money, too, an effort that may very well have metastasized into decades of blackmail and grifting. That Wright made a mistake of passion fifty years ago and largely avoided the consequences.

But that’s all it really is, in the end: a guess. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that sometimes I still wonder if this all could be some great hoax. That I sometimes wonder how Ethel Louise Williams’s memory of those days in 1955 could be so cloudy at times and yet so perfect when it came to the details that mattered. That after examining the chains of evidence I have concluded that they are almost all circumstantial, and sometimes even contradictory. That I, with a vested interest in my guess being correct, am perhaps no more reliable a narrator of Judith’s story than she is.

One day not long ago, I finally managed to track down Diana Stiebens, Judith’s half-sister, and reach her by phone. She had long since stopped talking to everyone in her family, she said. She’d felt betrayed when Judith named her in the lawsuits, and she’d spent thousands of dollars defending herself from accusations she claimed to not even fully understand.

But she was willing to tell me what she remembered about M. A. Wright. “He came to a boarding house where I was staying with my mother,” she said. “He was very, very pleasant, kind, spoke to me very nicely.” She remembered the nice preschool she’d been put into, but had only been told years later by her mother that he was responsible for it. I asked her if he seemed like a wealthy man, a man from another class. “This was from a child’s point of view,” she said. “It was a man dressed in plain khaki clothes, and he took his hat off in the presence of ladies. I remember those kind of things.”

As a girl, she’d heard her family talking about a child that Louise had given up for adoption, and she pieced together herself that it was the young girl named Judith in her town. She used to follow Judith around at a distance sometimes, she told me, curious about her mysterious sister. Diana had run away from home not long after, and she ended up in foster care as a teenager.

As for M. A .Wright’s money, she said, she’d never seen any of it. “Now, if I had all that money came to me, I wouldn’t have ended up in a foster home, for example,” she told me. “The only thing that was ever given to me, that I know, was that he bought me a pretty dress and put me in a preschool.” In any case, she said, “what difference does it make? My mother is probably about 79 now. My brother is about three years younger than me. I’m 62. My point of opinion is, why do we have to continue this on? There’s really nothing that can be done about it.”

I asked her whether, deep down, she thought there was some larger conspiracy in her family around Wright’s money. “One person says one thing, and another person says another, and all I can give you is what I believe and what people have told me,” she said. “What is the truth in all that? I know that a man visited my mother. I know that they called him M.A.”

Seventeen

Early on the morning before I was scheduled to leave Carthage, I awoke at the Best Western to the sound of my phone ringing. It was Judith, calling to make sure I had directions to get over to the police station, where I had an appointment to catch up with a sergeant there. As always, a brief call turned into a longer one, and she told me that she’d finally decided that she needed to get out of town. There were just too many bad memories here. Her adoptive sister had been in the hospital for years, unable to communicate after a brain aneurism. Her adoptive father, now 95, didn’t really even speak to her anymore. He’d remarried, and his wife didn’t want Judith to have anything to do with him since she’d dissolved her adoption. “I want out of here so bad, I can’t stand it,” she said.

She still had her sons, at least. Twenty-year-old Ryan was getting ready to move out of the house; he was doing well in his a job as a legal clerk and going to school part-time at a local college. But beyond that, she had few connections, just friends like Violet who’d backed her through the ordeal. “People like you, people like lawyers became my family,” she said. Over the course of a decade of lawsuits, Judith had managed to lose both her old family and her new one.

I remembered something Jeff Zimmerman had said when the three of us were sitting in Judith’s living room one evening more than two years earlier. “I think the moral of this story is that if you are curious about something, be careful,” he’d said. “I’ve told Judith several times, ‘You know, you might have been happier never knowing this.’” The danger of putting your life into the legal system, Zimmerman always warned his clients, is that “it requires you to live your present in your past.”

Judith didn’t deny that she might have been better off if she’d never responded to that first entreaty from her mother. But something had steeled her resolve. “I’ve got some pictures in my room that I’m going to show you,” she said. “When you see this, you’ll understand.” For a long time she’d seen photographs of M. A. Wright only in his later years, as president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or giving corporate speeches for Exxon: an older man with thinning hair, standing at a dais in a boxy suit. But a few years ago, one of her investigators had found a photo of him as a young man, just after he graduated from Oklahoma State.

“Ryan always had this look of his own,” Judith told me. “I could see me in him, but he kind of had a look of his own. And when I got that picture of my dad—oh, my God. I went around the house for, I don’t know, a good month off and on and all I did was cry. I saw my son. There was my innocent little boy, and I thought how innocent my father was of all of this also.”

Judith had blown up a photocopy of one of the pictures and hung it on her bedroom wall. Looking out from the wood frame was a relaxed and confident young man, with his prominent ears and his hair swept across his head. His mouth was set in a line, with just a hint of a smile reflected in his eyes. Below it was a framed picture of Ryan in high school, his lips pursed in the same way, his eyes displaying the same look of assured intensity. The more I stared at them, the more the two men seemed to resemble each other.

Coronado High

Coronado High

How a group of high school kids from a sleepy beach town in California became criminal masterminds.

By Joshua Bearman

The Atavist Magazine, No. 27

Joshuah Bearman has written for Rolling Stone, Harper’s, Wired, McSweeney’s, Playboy, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine, and he is a contributor to This American Life. He is currently working on his first book, St. Croix, a memoir.

Editor: Charles Homans
Producers: Olivia Koski, Gray Beltran
Animation: Colleen Cox
Web Design: Alex Fringes
Music: “Life’s a Gas,” written by Marc Bolan, copyright 1971 TRO/Essex Music International, Inc., performed by Islands
Animation Soundtrack: Jefferson Rabb
Research and Production: Vonecia Carswell, Lila Selim, Chris Osborn, and Nadia Wilson
Cover Photo: Courtesy of Gary Kidd
Audiobook Narrator: Brett Gelman
Fact Checker: Riley Blanton

Published in July 2013. Design updated 2021.

The Lost Coast

1976

There, on the horizon: a ship.

Dave Strather* could see it through binoculars, the sails ghostly against the water. He was sitting on an exposed cliff overlooking the Pacific. It was dark, and the beach was deserted for fifty miles in both directions. This was the Lost Coast, a vast swath of rugged, uninhabited, magnificently forested Northern California, the kind of place that made you understand why people have always been drawn to the Golden State. Dave chose the spot for landfall precisely because it was so empty. He and his team needed secrecy.

The sailboat was laden with contraband: 4,000 pounds of Thai stick pot, the latest in marijuana commerce, a product as potent as it was valuable, which Dave and his crew—a team of smugglers called the Coronado Company—would unload and sell for millions of dollars. Once Dave made visual contact, his team got on the radios: “Offshore vessel, please identify.”

“This is Red Robin.”

Finally. Smuggling always involves waiting, but Red Robin—the code name for a ship called the Pai Nui—was months overdue, and Dave’s nerves were frayed. The Company, as its members called it, was already a successful and sophisticated operation, importing Mexican pot by the ton, hugging the coast in fishing boats from as far south as Sinaloa. But this was a new type of gig, crossing the Pacific in a double-masted ketch. There were more variables, more opportunities for error. The Pai Nui had run out of gas before it even reached the International Date Line. Then, under sail, she was becalmed in the Doldrums. And then she disappeared.

“Red Robin, come in,” Dave had said into his radio a thousand times, in a daily attempt to reach the boat. He set up a radio watch, 500 feet above the ocean, for a better line of sight. The beauty of single sideband radio was that you could communicate halfway around the world, coordinating, as the Company liked to do, with your fleet at designated hours on Zulu time. The problem with single sideband—besides that it wasn’t secure, and anyone could listen—was that there wasn’t much bandwidth. Dave and the others would eavesdrop on conversations in dozens of languages, hoping to hear the captain of the Pai Nui. Back in September, it was pleasant to be perched on a palisade covered in redwoods, taking in the panoramic view, drinking a beer, tweaking the dial, watching the ocean go from silver to teal to green to blue in the late afternoon. By late December, however, everyone was cold and jumpy. But now, just before Christmas, their ship had finally come in.

Dave and his team snapped into action. Everyone was practiced and drilled—that was the Company’s style. They were a tight, coordinated unit, most of them friends who grew up together in Coronado, a secluded little beach town on a peninsula off the coast of San Diego. A decade earlier, they had been classmates at Coronado High. Some of them were surfers and would bring small bales of pot across the border after surfing trips to Mexico. A half-decade later, the Coronado Company was the largest smuggling outfit on the West Coast, on its way to becoming a $100 million empire, one the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration would later call the most sophisticated operation of its kind. “These kids were the best in the business,” James Conklin, a retired DEA special agent, says about the group he tracked for years. “They were ahead of their time. They operated almost like a military unit.”

The crux of the business was the off-load; the battle was won—or lost—on the beach. Everyone had their role. Dave ran field strategy. Harlan Fincher, who had a knack for equipment, was the logistics manager. Al Sweeney, a hobbyist photographer and silk-screener in high school, was the crack forger. Grease monkey Don Kidd was the chief mechanic. Allan Logie, a onetime motorcycle racer, was the flamboyant wheelman. Ed Otero, a great swimmer and athlete, provided muscle. Bob Lahodny, a handsome charmer whose 22-karat Baht chain signaled some mystical time spent in Thailand, had made the Company’s Asian supply connection. Lance Weber, who started the whole thing, was a fearless nut whom everyone called the Wizard on account of his thaumaturgical ways with engineering, especially the boat motors he rigged to run at smuggler speeds.

At the center of it all was Lou Villar. A former Spanish teacher, Lou had taught some of the guys back at Coronado High. Lance originally brought Lou along for his language abilities; it helped that he was a smooth talker. But when he got a look at all that money, Lou discovered an instinct for business. He organized the Company into a visionary outfit, with himself as the kingpin.

It was Lance’s idea to buy the DUKW, a 31-foot, six-wheeled, World War II–era amphibious landing craft that served as the audacious centerpiece of the operation, allowing the Company to drive right into the water and dock at sea with the sailboat. Lou had thought this was crazy—Oh sure, why not use zeppelins?—but after some research, Dave convinced Lou to approve the purchase of the 7.5-ton vehicle, which the crew had stashed in a barn near the tiny delta of Juan Creek.

Dave directed the boat south of the creek, where the beach, as expected, was deserted. (On the occasions when civilians wandered too close, they were intercepted by Dave, dressed as a park ranger, who told them that the area was the site of a wilderness-reclamation project and off-limits to civilians.) Lance went down the coast to Fort Bragg, 20 miles to the south, to get eyes on the local Coast Guard station. Company lookouts—code-named Nova for north and Saturn for south—took position out on the Pacific Coast Highway. At midnight everyone radioed in with a round of affirmatives. The coast, as they say, was clear. “Let’s get the Duck rolling,” Dave said over the comm.

With Ed and Don in the cockpit, the Duck pulled out of the barn, drove down the Pacific Coast Highway to the beach, and nosed into the water. They’d welded an additional wave shield to the bow so the Duck could break through the heavy California surf. Their compass turned out to be useless. But Ed, undaunted, plowed through the murky night—“nine feet up a black cat’s ass,” as Don put it—to meet the waiting ketch. They tied up, quickly transferred the load, and found their way back by aligning two lights Dave had set up onshore marking a safe passage. “Heading back,” he radioed Dave, who looked at his watch: So far, so good.

It was a funny thing to see the Duck rise from the darkness, shedding seawater like a real-life Nautilus—until it stopped rising. By now the tide had gone out, and the Duck, weighted down with Thai product, sank in the soft sand. The tide wouldn’t lift the vehicle for another six hours. By that time it would be broad daylight, and the Duck would be as conspicuous as a relic on Omaha Beach.

“Fuck,” Dave said over the radio. “We’re stuck.”

Ed hit the throttle and spun the wheels, sinking the Duck deeper into the sand. “Kill the engine!” someone yelled. Don got out, looked at the tires, and stood back. “Don’t panic,” he said. “I know exactly what to do.”

Don told Allan, who was on the beach, to get a couple of pickup trucks and a lot of rope. Like everyone else, he called the hirsute Allan “Fuzzy.” The two men were close, both a little wild, a couple of pranksters who got under Dave’s skin. But by God, they knew how machines worked. Now they assembled an elaborate pulley system connecting the pickups to the Duck’s winch. “Are you sure this is gonna work?” Dave asked.

Don didn’t flinch when the motors fired, and sure enough his ad hoc Archimedean apparatus enabled the Duck to lift itself out of the sand and back up to the road. It was a goddamn glorious sight. Cheers went up on the beach. Safely back in the barn, the Company hands unloaded the Duck’s fragrant cargo. It was a sweet reward to sample the supply; Don thought the faintly purple buds were thick and beautiful, the finest he’d ever smoked.

The cache was processed at the old general store next to the barn. It was the Company’s biggest haul to date: $8 million (about $33 million today). The Company had stepped up its game, bringing in better product with more sophisticated technique. The distributors would be pleased. By now they had been waiting a long time, too. Back in his cabana at the Beverly Hills Hotel—as the ringleader, he rarely set foot near the beach himself—Lou had had a hell of a time keeping them calm. He was worried that the Company’s reputation would be ruined if the supply didn’t show. It was a relief to call the dealers and announce, “The Eagle has landed.”

The exchange with the dealers always happened fast. Like in the movies, the money would come in Halliburton briefcases. Unlike in the movies, the Company usually waited to count it. And count it. And count it. And count it. It took so long to count that much cash, they got bored. When all was said and done, the partners each made half a million off the operation. For his rescue of the Duck, Don got the MVP award, a new Company institution, which came with a $25,000 bonus. Everyone else got their wad and scattered to the winds—the sweet scent of their trade wafting from their clothes.

It was exhilarating, the money and the camaraderie. Company members saw themselves as hippie outlaws. There was no violence—they didn’t even carry guns—just the threat of the law, which bound them together. They were criminals, but they were also a family.

Afterward, Lou and Dave sat in Lou’s cabana, going through receipts, looking at ledgers, accounting for a very good year. Later, they burned the receipts and went out to a Beverly Hills restaurant to celebrate. “Here’s to everyone’s efforts,” Lou said as they hoisted champagne flutes. “Let’s do it again soon.”

*Not his real name.

From The Beachcomber, the Coronado High School yearbook, 1972.

The Teacher

1964

Lou knew he wouldn’t stop until he reached the Pacific. He had left New York in his convertible on that modern-day westward migration, a midcentury Manifest Destiny, with the top down and the red metal-flake lacquer on his Corvette flashing in the sun. On the radio were Dick Dale and the Beach Boys, songs about girls, woodies, surfing. That’s where he was headed. He was 25 and looking to change his life.

Lou was born in Havana, Cuba, to a family of small-business owners. His mother brought him to New York City as a teenager, in 1954, and he liked it: the hustle, the gritty determination required to get ahead. Lou was smart-mouthed and got into more fights than he should have for a guy his size. Despite being small, however, he was a great athlete, and he held his own in the rough-and-tumble of Flatbush, Brooklyn.

After college, Lou studied law at Syracuse, but it was the early 1960s, and the California lifestyle was just dawning on America. Syracuse was awfully far from the beach, and when he heard about a job teaching Spanish at a high school in Coronado, he packed his bags.

Coronado was all Lou had hoped for, an easygoing beach town of 18,000 people, known for its handsome Victorian hotel, Navy base, and isolation. It was a funny mix, a sort of military Mayberry. Coronado was connected to the mainland by an isthmus, but it took so long to drive around that it might as well have been an island out in San Diego Bay. Lou loved the nonchalance that came with the geography. Everyone called it the Rock, or, playfully, Idiot Island: a place where people did their own thing.

At Coronado High, Lou quickly developed a strong rapport with the students. He was handsome and charming and cultivated a cool image. In addition to teaching Spanish, he coached swimming, water polo, and basketball. Lou liked to shoot hoops with his students after school; he was the kind of coach kids confided in. A lot of his students were Navy brats, raised in strict military families just as Vietnam was escalating. Lou had an ear for what the kids wanted to talk about. He was not much older than them, and he understood.

Lou’s father died when he was three, and his own high school basketball coach had helped fill the role; he knew everything that a coach could be. My boys, he called his players. But when the whistle blew, they knew it was time to work. Lou was a demanding coach, and his players loved him for it.

Among Lou’s Spanish students was Bob Lahodny, a popular kid with an easy smile, president of the class of ’68 two years in a row. Bob, a swim-team star, was a close friend of Ed Otero’s, class of ’72, another strong swimmer on the team. Ed’s nickname was Eddie the Otter, or sometimes just Otter. He was short and stocky, powerfully built, but he didn’t like practice and was difficult to control. Lou liked Ed and thought he could have been a great competitive swimmer, but he had no discipline.

Discipline was something you needed if you swam or played ball for Lou. He could be unforgiving even with his favorite players, like Harlan Fincher*, the star center of the basketball team. Harlan was tall and friendly—he’d been named Best Personality and Best Sense of Humor in his senior year—and he liked Lou’s coaching. Lou thought the same of Harlan’s playing, until the day Harlan snuck off with some friends and a bottle of Chivas after school and showed up dead drunk for the last game of the season. Furious, Lou took Harlan off the floor. “When you play for me,” Lou told him, “you give me everything.” He didn’t speak to Harlan again for the rest of his time at Coronado High.

The social scene in Coronado in those days was typical of its time: greasers, lettermen, and—by the time Gidget was on television—surfers. The greasers wore black Converse, the lettermen wore white tennis shoes, and the surfers tended toward blue Top-Siders. Over time there were more and more Top-Siders as surfing took hold. Not far behind Gidget was the rest of the ’60s: hair, rock and roll, and drugs. Coronado was fertile ground for the changing times, full of military kids eager to rebel.

Alarmed by the influx of drugs, the city government set up a pilot project at the high school to keep students on the straight and narrow. It was called the “no-bust policy,” and one of its counselors was Lou Villar. His approach was simpatico; he’d spent plenty of evenings in his kids’ homes, watching disciplinarian fathers fume and military wives crawl on the floor after three martinis, and he sensed the hypocrisy. He knew the kids were just looking for an outlet and suggested alternatives. “Why smoke a joint,” he’d ask, “when there are so many other ways to have fun in life?” It was persuasion over punishment, and Lou was nothing if not persuasive—until he stopped believing the message.

Lou had always been the bohemian teacher, the one who pulled into the faculty lot in a red Corvette and shades. When the school banned sunglasses, he wore his prescription Ray-Bans in class anyhow. For the students of Coronado High, this was a sign of solidarity: Lou was going through the same changes they were, reflecting a culture that was advancing at a frantic pace. Imagine starting high school in 1964, how fast it was all moving between freshman and senior year: from the Gulf of Tonkin to the Tet Offensive, from the Voting Rights Act to the Watts Riots, from Help! to “The White Album.”

Like his students, Lou started growing his hair and learned to surf. It was humbling at first, eating saltwater a thousand times before he managed to get up on the board. But once Lou could feel the ocean lift him up and bring him to shore, he was hooked; there was energy in that ride. He started inviting “his boys,” and some girls, over for dinner. Together they all smoked their first joints. Everyone was scared, convinced they’d go crazy. Instead, smiles gradually spread around the room. They talked waves while the hi-fi played the Doors, whose front man, Jim Morrison, had lived in Coronado.

Soon, Lou was counseling his kids against following in their parents’ footsteps. “That’s not a career,” he would say, pointing at the ships moored off the Navy Yard. “That’s a war machine.” Lou thought it was pretty cool that one of his favorite Spanish students, Dave Strather, a talented musician, wanted to become a rock and roller. Lou started dating Kathy, a beautiful former cheerleader—voted Most Popular the same year she was in the homecoming court—who had graduated from Coronado High a couple of years earlier. She was seven years younger than Lou, but Lou himself was not yet 30. We’re just kids, he thought, and the kids are finally in charge.

It was just a matter of time before he quit teaching. Nobody wanted to be in the establishment anymore. In the summer of 1969, the summer of Woodstock, he traded his Corvette for a VW bus. During his last week in class, Lou brought in his turntable, wore his shades, and listened to Jethro Tull with his students.

The bridge was going up that summer. You could see the caissons rising out of the bay, spelling the end of the Rock as a de facto island. In August it opened to traffic. The two-mile feat of box-girder engineering arced gracefully across the bay, connecting Coronado to the rest of the world. The locals gathered on the Coronado side, waiting to watch those first cars roll across, knowing things would never be the same.

Lance Weber (Photo: Courtesy of Rex Gammon)

The Boys

1969

Lance Weber was never cut out for the Navy. He had joined after graduating from Coronado High mostly so he wouldn’t get shot at in Vietnam. His father, a Navy captain, wanted him to be an officer, but when Lance’s service was up, his parents had to accept that he was just another washed-out swabbie loafing around back on the Rock.

One thing the Navy did do for Lance, however, was teach him how to turn a wrench. After his stint as an engineer on a submarine, he could make anything work. Back in Coronado, he tricked out a VW microbus with a Porsche engine and built the island’s first low-rider bicycle by hand. “Here comes the Wizard,” people would say, watching Lance cruise the beach on his tuned-up rig, barefoot, shirtless, his long blond hair flowing behind him and a stoned smile on his face. Easy Rider had just come out, and leaning back on two wheels was maybe the coolest thing you could do. When people said Lance was a space cadet, that meant they thought he was a rad fucking guy.

That summer marked the first great marijuana supply shock in the United States, the consequence of booming stateside demand and a drought in Mexico. Prices spiked, encouraging creativity. There were mules caravanning the desert, planes flying low over the Arizona mountains, tires stuffed with green at the border. It was the dream of every pot smoker to get a “block,” or a kilo, keeping some and selling the rest. And for the stoned surfers on the beach in Coronado, there was an enormous arbitrage opportunity just a few miles south. The trick was figuring out how to get the stuff home.

It was Lance who came up with the idea of taking to the water. At the Long Bar in Tijuana, he got his hands on 25 pounds of pot and swam it north from the beach by the bullring of the Plaza Monumental de Tijuana. He washed up on the U.S. side, on a beach with no name, no facilities, not even a parking lot—a perfect terminus for illegal night swims. He did it again, and again. It was dangerous, being in the water at night with only the blinking radio-tower lights for guidance, but it was worth it: Each delivery netted five grand.

Soon, Lance had a little team of marijuana marines working with him, swimming as many bundles as they could get their hands on. They were misfits, guys who couldn’t get girlfriends in high school before Lance put pot and money in their hands, and now they looked to Lance as their eccentric leader. He got busted in 1971, but the few months he served in Lompoc made him Coronado’s first hippie outlaw hero, a local legend.

When Lance got back, Paul Acree, one of Lance’s misfits, introduced him to a new connection, and they strapped on their fins again. A few bales later, however, they came up with a better idea: a Zodiac, similar to the inflatable rubber crafts used by Navy SEALs. One run in the Zodiac was good for 100 pounds of grass. It was easy money.

Looking to expand the little operation, Paul brought in Ed Otero. Ed was the archetypal California boy: blond, square face, cleft chin, like a letterman who had traded his varsity jacket for the waves. He was a former lifeguard, strong on land—he was known around town for tearing phone books in half—and in the surf. They would call him the Otter for his facility in the water, his ability to break through nasty surf with bales in hand.

A division of labor emerged: Paul arranged supply, Lance piloted the Zodiac, and Otter swam. The only thing holding them back was the connection, their guy in Tijuana. They called him Joe the Mexican, and since none of them had taken Lou’s class, they couldn’t understand a word Joe said.

Lou was in dungarees, standing on a ladder with paintbrush in hand, when Lance rolled up on his low-rider bike.

“You speak Spanish, right?”

“Sí,” Lou said. “Naturalmente.” It was a rhetorical question.

“Then come down here,” Lance said. “I got an idea.”

“I don’t have time,” Lou said. “I have to finish painting this house.”

“I’ll make it worth your time,” Lance said. He would pay Lou fifty bucks, he explained, to go with him to Tijuana for dinner.

Fifty bucks sounded good to Lou. He was painting houses for money, living in a little cottage. Since quitting Coronado High, he had become a bona fide beachside Buddhist, surfing, reading Carlos Castaneda, pondering the evils of materialism, making candles, and meditating with a local guru named Bula. He’d run into his old student, Bob Lahodny, among Bula’s disciples. He had also reconnected with Dave Strather, who had recently returned to Coronado after spending a few years as a studio musician in San Francisco.

Life was simple, and Lou and Kathy were having a great time—until free love got the best of them. After four years together they had split up, driven apart by jealousy. There was nothing wrong with their relationship other than timing; 1971 was a bad time to be young, good-looking, stoned, and married. Now Lou spent his days painting houses and his free time at the beach. That was where he met Lance, out on a jetty where people went to watch the sunset.

Lance had gone to Coronado High but graduated before Lou’s time. They started hanging out around the Rock and roasted some pigs together. (Luaus were the thing then.) Lou loved that life. But he didn’t love being so broke. Traveling down to Tijuana and translating for Lance was the easiest fifty bucks he ever made—until Lance offered him a hundred the next week to do it again.

During the second meeting, Lou sensed an opportunity for his friends and negotiated a larger load for a better price from Joe the Mexican. Impressed, Lance offered Lou a cut of the next shipment.

When it was time for the pickup, Lou helped Lance, Paul, and Ed inflate the Zodiac and load it offshore by the little salt-eaten Rosarito beach shack where Joe the Mexican delivered the goods. Once they got it across the border, Lou’s share was $10,000. It was more money than he had earned in the past several years. He gave away his painting equipment and never looked back. Like everyone else, Lou had been smoking pot for giggles, but then came a moment of clarity, when he took that joint from behind his ear, sparked it up, and saw the future.

The Gig

1972

Gigs, they called them. Or scams. Or barbecues, since they would plan them while throwing steaks on the grill at sundown. Everyone would get the call—“Do you want to go to a barbecue?”—when it was time to mobilize. The missions were simple at first, with just the 12-foot Zodiac running a couple hundred pounds at a time from Rosarito to the Silver Strand beach on Coronado’s tiny isthmus. But the loads were getting bigger, and even Eddie the Otter had trouble hauling 50-pound bags through head-high waves. And everyone knew it was unwise seafaring, to say the least, to negotiate the coast in that little raft with no lights and no navigation.

Still, Lance was an adventurer; he would have made a great swashbuckler, Lou always thought, or a test pilot. When Lance reached the Silver Strand, he’d signal with a flashlight and run the Zodiac right up onto the sand—Burn up the motor, he’d say, we’ll buy a new one. They would off-load the bags, deflate the boat, and pack it all into the van. It would be over in five minutes, the most exciting five minutes they’d ever experienced: everyone holding their breath until the van was on the road, knowing as they drove away that they each had just made twice their parents’ annual salary.

At first there was one gig a month. Then it was one a week. Within a year, the crew was scaling up from the Zodiacs to a clandestine armada of speedboats, fishing boats, even a 40-foot cabin cruiser. Some of the money they made went back into the business. Lance bought a Chris-Craft called the Lee Max II and rebuilt the engine so he could carry serious weight at top speeds. They hired beach crews to expedite the off-load.

It was risky, bringing more people into the operation, but it was Coronado, and everyone knew each other. “If we take care of them,” Lance said, “they’ll take care of us.” And the partners could afford to be generous. Still in their twenties, they were walking around with $50,000 in their pockets, then $100,000, then a quarter of a million dollars. “Don’t you love it,” Lance once remarked, “when life goes from black and white to Technicolor?”

Lou walked into a bank, asked for the balance of his mother’s house, and paid it off in cash. Once, when he was buying first-class tickets to Hawaii for himself and his girlfriend, it dawned on him that he had enough money to hang out there and surf for the rest of his life. And he might have, had Ed and Lance not flown over personally to retrieve their partner. “Come on, Señor Villar!” Ed said. “There’s more money to be made!”

It got to be like clockwork, enough so that sometimes Lance’s and Lou’s girlfriends would tag along on the supply runs to Tijuana. It was about this time that Lance started calling Lou “Pops,” a nickname that caught on. “What do you think, Pops?” Lance asked one evening, drinking Coronas on the beach in Baja.

“I think we got a good thing going here,” Lou said. “Let’s not fuck it up.”

Lance Weber, top right, and friends from Coronado pose with the Coronado Company’s DUKW amphibious landing craft. (Photo: Courtesy of Gary Kidd)

The Agency

1973

When the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration opened its office in the San Diego suburb of National City in 1973, it had just six field agents. The DEA was a brand-new agency, assembled from various other departments, including the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), a tautologically titled bureaucratic relic that was poorly equipped to fight the war on drugs that President Richard Nixon had declared in 1971.

The impetus for the drug war was a congressional report issued the same year stating that as much as 15 percent of U.S. soldiers serving in Vietnam—a conflict that put hundreds of thousands of Americans in close proximity to the Golden Triangle—had come back hooked on heroin. The same report said that half of the service smoked pot. Alongside other law-enforcement agencies like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the FBI, the DEA was tasked with fighting what Nixon called “the new menace.”

Bobby Dunne was one of the first agents working out of the new office. He’d started his law-enforcement career in National City a dozen years earlier, as an animal-control officer. After working his way up through the ranks of the local police department, he’d become a federal narcotics agent in 1968 and spent several years working in Guadalajara, Mexico. Dunne was excited to be abroad but quickly realized that corruption in Mexico made his job nearly impossible. When he came back to the States, he asked to join the DEA’s San Diego office, because “the action,” as they called it, was at the border.

The new agency needed all the local savvy it could get. San Diego was a world apart from drug interdiction on the East Coast, where well-understood organized-crime syndicates brought heroin in through the ports. California was a new front, the Wild West. Newly arrived agents couldn’t believe it: In one 12-hour shift at San Ysidro, you’d get three or four hauls of 100 kilos. Dunne was the first officer to pull a full ton of pot out of a truck heading north.

Dunne was a field agent, and in San Diego the work lived up to the title. In other DEA offices, you went to work in a suit and tie and spent a lot of time at your desk. In San Diego, the agents were veterans of border details and dressed like vaqueros: boots, jeans, guayaberas, cowboy hats. They spoke Spanish, wore beards and mustaches, and spent the nights in Tijuana bars with informants and local cops. To get anywhere, you had to roll up your sleeves and go drinking down in Revolución, getting to know the people on both sides of the border trade.

None of that shoe-leather work, however, clued the DEA into the new homegrown smuggling organization right under their noses, on the other side of San Diego Bay. The DEA’s first tip about the Company came from a Coronado police officer who had heard through the grapevine about some local guys and a former teacher running bales of pot up the coast. The beach runs weren’t in Coronado proper and were beyond police jurisdiction, so the officer called the feds.

Dunne was intrigued. He was assigned to a special unit that worked closely with local police and other law enforcement, and he debriefed the Coronado officer. He arranged for the Coast Guard to run some exercises with Zodiacs and realized that the small crafts could cruise the coast without showing up on radar. Very clever, he thought. Then the DEA got wind of a boat called the Lee Max II, owned by a local kid named Lance Weber who had done time in Lompoc a couple years before for smuggling. There were reports of the Lee Max II on the water at 3 a.m., and Dunne doubted they were out fishing.

Once, following a late-night sighting of Lance’s boat, the DEA posted agents at regular intervals along the coast, hoping to catch the smugglers in action. They saw the boat motoring away from a lonely stretch of beach in Carlsbad, north of San Diego. Dunne and the other agents rushed to the scene and scoured the beach, but it was too late. All they found were footprints going up the dunes to a house overlooking the ocean.

Professionals

1974

Lately, Lou had been spending more time in North County. There was money up there, in Carlsbad, where he rented a house, and new hot spots like Del Mar and La Costa. One night, Lou met the owner of the Albatross, a nice seafood restaurant housed in an old church in Del Mar. He thought the place was groovy: good food, drinks, and music, and well attended by rich dopers. The owner of the restaurant was a big-time distributor himself.

Lou had come to recognize that smuggling was as much about personality as it was about know-how. To climb the ladder, you had to play it cool. Which is what he and the restaurant owner did, warily revealing their mutual interest, pulling their cards away from their vests to talk about how they might fit into each other’s business models.

“How much can you handle?” Lou asked.

“How much can you bring?” the owner replied.

The Albatross crowd offered Lou entrée to a new class of distributors, the kind of dealers who dressed well and belonged to racquet clubs. Lou began joining them for dinner, talking books, travel, and wine. They turned Lou on to a wine importer up in San Francisco, and he started ordering Bordeaux and white Burgundies. Refinement suited him. By now he had cut his hair and traded his hippie beads for silk shirts. When Lou suggested bringing in a ton, and the dealers said they’d pay cash on the barrelhead, he saw the horizon expanding before his eyes.

Lance delighted in the prospect of expanding their little navy. But carrying more weight meant more people on the beach—five, ten guys running bags up and down the sand—and they needed to tighten the screws on the organization. Lou started strategizing. He turned to his good friend and former student Dave Strather.

Dave’s band was still playing around town, and he had recently married a tall, good-looking hippie girl named Linda. But Lou knew he was struggling financially. “Are you interested in some profitable moonlighting?” Lou asked him one day.

Dave, a solid bodysurfer, handled himself well in the waves and started as a loader. But he was a gifted planner, and it wasn’t long before Lou gave him more managerial duties. Lou wanted a right-hand man, and Dave was a natural. He was a drummer, after all, used to keeping time, being the backbone. Even in his hippie days he was fastidious, shampooing his long hair every day (and belying his nickname, Dirty Dave). That hair was gone once Dave started running around with a clipboard and checklists, buying and storing equipment, running smuggling gigs like a stevedore superintendent.

That put Dave at odds with Ed, whose run-and-gun style had been central to the early days of the operation but was fast becoming obsolete. Ed was a beloved figure around Coronado, a fun guy, the life of every party. But he was impulsive. When Ed was a lifeguard, he liked to drive his truck down the sand at full speed—and that’s how he’d flipped it right into the water. Dave bristled when he would show up at a gig at the last minute and start bossing people around, imperiling Dave’s meticulous plans. Dave would appeal to Lou, who tried to promote Ed out of Dave’s hair. “You don’t want to be a grunt on the beach,” he told him. “You’re in management. Let Dave roll up his sleeves.”

That mostly worked, at least at the smuggling sites. Off the beach was another matter. Ed was young, wild, and flush—a dangerous combination in a small town. Here he was, no known job, celebrating one of the organization’s first big paydays at the Chart House down on the Embarcadero, cozying up to some girl with his hands full of cash. “Look what I got, baby,” Ed told her, laying out ten grand in bills. Lou would’ve jumped on the table to cover it up, but the whole place had seen it already. We need to cut these shenanigans, Lou told his colleagues. We’re gonna bring heat on ourselves.

What he didn’t know was that they already had. The DEA was onto Lance, watching him run the Lee Max II like a daredevil, at full speed on autopilot, ripping through the swells like a lunatic. And Lance was as flamboyant on land as he was cavalier in the cockpit. He knew he was known to the authorities, and he loved pushing his luck. “I like making the cops look bad,” he’d say. “It’s fun.”

Not to Lou, it wasn’t. One night after a gig in Carlsbad, they’d planned to meet at a coffee shop near Oceanside Harbor after the beach crew unloaded the shipment. Lou was sitting in his booth with a fork in a slice of cherry pie when he looked up and saw Lance drive past in his truck, pulling the Lee Max II on its trailer, two squad cars in tow. The cops tore the boat apart, right in front of the coffee shop, but found nothing. Lance relished his little victory—and then walked in to meet Lou. “Don’t even talk to me,” Lou said, jumping up to leave. “Just keep walking.”

It was the same night Special Agent Dunne found footsteps on the beach near Lou’s house. The DEA agents had followed Lance in his boat to the marina, but when the boat came out clean, the district attorney refused the DEA a search warrant for the house.

It was a close call. Lou didn’t realize how close when he moved to Solana Beach and relocated the entire smuggling outfit out of Coronado. It was the first time some of its members had lived anywhere besides the Rock. By then, everyone on the island knew what they were up to. They even had a name for their hometown smugglers: the Coronado Company.

The name stuck; Lou had misgivings about it, but it suited the group’s professional aspirations. By now they were evolving quickly. Lou turned out to be not just a natural leader, but also an organizational genius. The one-time anti-materialist candlemaker became a business visionary, laying out plans for the Company to dominate its market niche. As he had when he was a coach, Lou knew how to motivate people, establish mutual trust, and make the members of his squad believe in their abilities. Pops was now a father figure to a new kind of team. It was fun in those early days, he told his boys in the Company, but amateur hour is over.

The new organization left little room for Paul Acree. Paul was always his own worst enemy. He was cold and had a nasty gift of gab. He could be funny, but always at the expense of others. Paul had found the crew’s original line of supply in Tijuana, but Lou knew he wasn’t the right guy to make the bigger connections the operation needed to grow. You couldn’t look like a hood at the next level. His idea of business—give me the money, you get the pot—was oafish. Where was the salesmanship in that? Where was the finesse?

And lately, Paul had started sniffling and rubbing his nose. Nobody knew when exactly he had become an addict. Maybe it was when everyone got rich and he could suddenly get as much heroin and coke as he wanted. Once driven, he was coasting now, showing up at meetings with watery eyes. He looked terrible. He was Lance’s friend, but even Lance knew that you couldn’t trust a junkie. When the Company convened to vote Paul out, it was unanimous.

One of the Company’s Mexican contacts, known as Pepe de Mexicali, had told Lou about the time he had to get rid of an associate who had been caught with his fingers in the jar by taking him on a “one-way plane ride.” The Coronado Company’s style was more genteel than that; if you got fired, they just stopped calling you. With Paul, the partners decided, they would simply move away. They left him with $10,000. It wasn’t much in the way of hush money, especially for a guy who was speedballing, but that was the offer.

With Paul gone, Lou took on an even larger role within the Company, and he started to act the part. He conducted business from his new house in Solana Beach, on a cliff overlooking the ocean, with his malamute, Prince, at his feet. There he’d preside with his girlfriend, Kerrie Kavanaugh, a waitress he’d met at another tony spot in nearby Cardiff-by-the-Sea. Lou had left her a $100 tip one night, followed the next day by 20-dozen roses, along with a card bearing a poem he wrote. Kerrie thought the roses were a bit tacky—a nice little bouquet of handpicked wildflowers would have better suited a girl like her—but the poem was nice. She showed up at Lou’s house, where she found him sunbathing on the deck.

Lou had spent a few years floating between girls, but he saw immediately that Kerrie had a spark. She was smart, with a bright smile and an eager outlook on the world. Lou was older, wealthier, and more worldly than the boys who hit on her on the beach. He doted on her, gave her gifts and several cars, paid for her dance classes. Soon she moved from her beach trailer into Lou’s place. They would entertain the rest of the Company guys and their girlfriends there, drinking greyhounds until dinner and then smoking and doing lines while dancing to the Average White Band until three in the morning. The next day, they’d wake up and start all over again.

Lou initially told Kerrie he was an interior decorator, but she didn’t believe it for long; his place was well decorated, but she never saw a single catalog or bolt of fabric around. It wasn’t a surprise when Lou finally confessed that he was a drug kingpin, nor did it change how she felt about him. Kerrie was the kind of girl who watched the Watergate hearings from beginning to end. With her anti-establishment sympathies, Lou’s profession had a renegade appeal.

For his part, Lou saw himself as a new kind of CEO. He just wanted to excel at what he did. He was already a multimillionaire, as were his partners. They thought that was all the money in the world. They were wrong.

Kerrie Kavanaugh and Lou Villar shortly after they first met, in the mid-’70s.

The Don

1975

Lou and Dave were south of the border, in a Tijuana flophouse near the racetrack, surrounded by a dozen men with machine guns. They were drug-lord foot soldiers; you could tell from the chrome-plated pistols in their belts. No one moved. Dave and Lou waited. The seconds felt like hours.

They had gotten themselves into this situation on purpose, after deciding that the Company should do some supply-chain outreach. Dave had run across a guy they called Rick Pick who said he knew Roberto Beltrán. The Don. The head of the Sinaloa-based trafficking syndicate, one of the biggest drug dealers in the world. Lou and Rick met and sized each other up. Once they decided that they trusted each other, Lou said, “Introduce me to the Don.”

Thus began a series of false starts and frustrations. Late at night, Lou and Dave would get a call and rush to the appointed meeting place under the San Diego side of the Coronado Bridge, only to find nobody there. Finally, when the real call came to meet in Tijuana, Lou arrived two hours late on purpose. That’s the Mexican style of business, he thought. Mañana! Keeping them waiting, Lou reasoned, would show that they were equals.

But now, trapped deep inside the syndicate’s flophouse, they knew they were not equals. And Beltrán’s guys didn’t look happy. Dave was terrified. But Lou kept his game face. He was still wondering if the meeting was for real. “Are we going to see the Don?” he asked. Finally, the Don’s bodyguard, who went by the name El Guapo, led them into a small room. There, reclining on a king-size bed, was Beltrán.

Dave and Lou were surprised to see that the Don looked like a maharishi, or maybe a bum: scraggly hair, jeans, unshaven. When they walked in, he didn’t get up. It was a weird scene, standing at the foot of the bed, unsure of what to do. Dave thought they were dead. Especially when Lou decided to take a pillow and lay down on the bed, right next to Beltrán. Dave silently said a prayer.

One of the things Dave liked about Lou was his finesse. Dave’s own father was the executive officer of the Navy base on Coronado, a tyrant whose explosive temper kept him from ever becoming an admiral. He had trouble forming real relationships with anyone, including his son. Dave hated his father, and he admired Lou for being the opposite in every way. Dave thought he had an aristocratic bearing, an elegance that could charm people in any situation. But this situation was different. This was Roberto Beltrán. And he wasn’t smiling.

Lou and the Don were chatting softly, faces inches apart. Within a few minutes, Beltrán was grinning, then laughing. Lou’s instinct was right; the Don respected the wildly daring initiative of showing up like this, offering a new service to the syndicate. No one from the States had ever approached him. “What do you have to lose?” Lou told him.

Lou knew the Mexicans were sending half-tons north every way they could think of and losing a lot of it at the border. It was a model that made money—the supply that got through paid for the rest—but still, there was a lot of smuggler’s shrinkage. This is what Lou told Beltrán, in so many words: The Coronado Company can reduce your shrinkage. “Let’s do business,” the Don said.

The days of cabin cruisers were over. Lance hired a commercial fishing vessel and a sailor of fortune who went by the name Charlie Tuna. The boat arrived for pickup at an isolated beach on the Sea of Cortez. Beltrán’s bodyguard drove Dave and Lou; they were rumbling along the barely paved highway in the shadow of the Sierra Madre Occidental when they saw roadblocks flanked by soldiers on the road. The jig is up, Dave thought, but their caravan was waved right through. The men were from the Don’s security team, part of his service package as a supplier. Federales on the Don’s payroll guarded the beach operation.

Out on the water, Charlie Tuna maneuvered his boat through the beach mud, getting as close to shore as possible. The boat was loaded with hundreds of bales, passed from sand to canoe to Zodiac to deck, along with some cases of beer for the crew’s return trip. “See you in Malibu,” Charlie said over the radio.

Onshore, Lou shook hands with the Don. The whole deal was on credit. And now the Company owed the Sinaloa suppliers $3 million. It had never occurred to Lou what might happen if something went wrong. “Good luck!” Beltrán told Lou. “You’ve got some real cojones, you know?”

Fifteen tons, Dave thought, right on the goddamned beach? The Mexican job was an enormously challenging off-load, an order of magnitude bigger than their usual runs. Dave bought more sophisticated equipment and procured several houses to use as staging sites and covert entrepôts, including a rental right off the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu.

That was where the team assembled. The company had added some new recruits, including Allan “Fuzzy” Logie, a surfer turned motorcycle racer. Fuzzy was amazed at the scale of the Company’s operation and quickly took a liking to Don Kidd, another trafficking tenderfoot recruited by Lance. Don hailed from Coronado—Lou had taught his brother Spanish—and he would have been class of ’69 if he had graduated instead of going to Vietnam. The Company had brought Don on as a gofer, but he quickly distinguished himself as a talented mechanic whose expertise would eventually elevate him to chief engineer.

The midnight chaos reminded Don of Vietnam, exciting but perilous. They were in plain view of the neighbors, whose lights were on. And they were out there on the water for hours, buzzing around in the Zodiacs, carrying everything by hand.

Luckily, it was overcast, and the reflected glow of the city gave them extra light. They got the job done, but it took forever. Fuzzy ran for eight hours straight. In the end, they managed to fit all 15 tons in three rented Ryder trucks. The next stop was the processing site. As the convoy pulled away from the beach, they drove right past a highway patrol cruiser on the shoulder with lights flashing. Fuzzy smiled as they passed; the officer was writing some poor bastard a speeding ticket while a truck packed with thousands of pounds of pot sailed by at 60 miles an hour.

At the warehouse, where Dave had organized an assembly-line-style repackaging system—every brick was weighed to the gram, bagged, marked with a sticker, and recorded—Lou showed up to inspect the wares. It was a job well done. When everyone got their cut, Fuzzy asked if he could get paid in weed. He had to settle for cash instead. “Well,” he told the others, “I hope I get invited to another barbecue.”

Lou, intent on impressing the Don, decided to deliver his money immediately, in person, without being asked. When Lou and Dave flew to Culiacán, Sinaloa, and, once again surrounded by machine guns, handed over duffel bags containing $3 million in cash—they had carried them on the plane and snuck through customs with swiped inspection tags—the Don smiled. “We owe you a party,” he said. That night, he feted them at a restaurant in Culiacán, where he and Lou arranged the next consignment: another 20 tons.

When they got the shipment into the safety of a warehouse in Santa Cruz, the load was ten feet high. Ed pulled out some blocks and arranged them into a chair, and they all took turns sitting on the throne of hard-packed kilos. The Coronado Company were now the biggest pot smugglers on the West Coast. What they had done, at their age—Lou, the oldest among them, was just 34, and most of the rest were in their mid-twenties—was without precedent. They were a bunch of young hippies sitting atop an empire.

Company members pose on top of a shipment of marijuana. (Photo: Courtesy of Gary Kidd)

The Insider

1976

People around Coronado told different stories about how exactly it was that Paul wound up talking to the DEA. Some said he just wanted to get back at the Company. Others said he was arrested trying to steal some navigation gear and, jonesing in jail, made a deal. Whichever it was, the moment Paul started talking was the moment that Dunne and the other agents discovered just what they were up against.

They were shocked at the Company’s scale. As far as they knew, smuggling on the West Coast was a haphazard business. And here was Paul telling them how the Company was landing thousands of kilos on a beach with SEAL-like precision not three miles from their office. They were operating at a level far beyond the DEA itself; the agency’s National City office, only a few years old, barely had the budget and personnel to cover San Diego County, much less go toe-to-toe with an organization like the Company.

Paul, meanwhile, had nothing to lose. His money was gone, but his drug habit wasn’t. All he had left was information. Paul might have been excommunicated from the Company, but he was still connected to Lance. Although Lance had moved away from Coronado with the rest of the partners, his girlfriend, Celeste, still lived on the Rock. When he was in town, he hung around with the old crowd, even Paul. Sensing opportunity, Dunne let Paul go, sending him out to gather more information.

Coronado was a natural rumor mill, and word got around quickly that Paul was snitching. But Lance was a chatterbox, and he couldn’t help himself from filling in Paul on the Company’s latest exploits anyway. Back in the DEA office, a picture began to come together. The agents heard about the organization’s humble beginnings, the deal with Roberto Beltrán that pushed the Company into the big time, and, the following year, a trip to Morocco.

That gig started with a meeting at a Black Angus Steakhouse in La Mesa and took them to the Canary Islands, Casablanca, and Tangiers. The idea had come from the younger brother of Lou’s ex-wife, Kathy. He had done some frontier surfing on the edge of the Sahara, the scene of some legendary perfect right breaks, and came back talking about hashish, the potent black tar of the Berbers. The Company found a new captain—Charlie Tuna’s friend, who (no joke) went by the name Danny Tuna—and a new ship, a 70-footer rigged for albacore fishing called the Finback. There were bumps along the way, like Danny running out of money and trying to sell his equipment to confused dockside Canary Islanders. Lance and Ed flew to Tenerife, where they found Danny, drunk, lost, and carousing with British girls on holiday. They got the Finback to Algeciras, at the Strait of Gibraltar, resupplied, and then steamed back in rough weather across the Atlantic and Caribbean.

It turned out that the Finback’s cargo wasn’t actually hash but rather kief, a less valuable precursor product. But the DEA agents understood the operational significance of the mission. These guys had crossed oceans and solved major logistical problems on the fly. No one in the office had ever seen anything like it.

It had been years since Lou had seen Bob Lahodny. Since the two crossed paths as earnest disciples of the meditation guru Bula on the beach in Coronado, the onetime class president and swim champ had gone abroad. He’d bought the Pai Nui, a handsome, teak-decked sailboat, and sailed around the South Pacific. He was in Bali when he fell in with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Like-minded expatriates from Southern California, the Laguna Beach–based group was known for proselytizing about the benefits of LSD—they were close associates of Timothy Leary and had once worked with the Weather Underground to help him flee the United States. They also ran a vast drug-smuggling network, manufacturing and distributing acid in the United States and running hashish from Kandahar, Afghanistan. The Brotherhood had connections in Thailand, too, and Bob brought them back to Coronado. “You guys can make the same money from two tons of Thai stick as 20 tons of Mexican pot,” Bob told his old pal Ed when he reappeared in the States.

Thai stick had enjoyed an aura of mystique ever since U.S. soldiers started coming back from Vietnam tours with batches of the extremely powerful varietal knotted around bamboo skewers. It had developed a reputation as the new marijuana gold standard; One Hit Shit, they called it. The DEA at the time believed it to be among the most profitable commodities in existence: a ton bought in Bangkok for $100,000 went for $3.5 million stateside. The hard part was getting it there. Unlike drugs flowing north from Latin America, Thai stick had to come in by boat. And boats happened to be the Company’s specialty.

Bob came on as a partner, bringing in his connections but steering clear of the operation. He was, in Lou’s words, a “good-time Charlie rather than a brass-tacks guy.” Still, the first shipment he brought back aboard that Pai Nui was a multimillion-dollar proof of concept of how Thai stick would revolutionize the Company. When Dave did the math, his eyes widened. The Company could earn more—far more—while being more discreet. It was a smuggler’s dream.

By now, the Company had earned a begrudging respect from its pursuers; the DEA agents in National City regarded Lou and his crew as smart businessmen and tactical geniuses. But Dunne had an idea about how to tighten the screws on their investigation. A veteran agent, he was one of the few people in his office who knew how to write up a conspiracy case. The tactic was mostly unknown in the DEA at the time, but it was a legal tool that would allow for deeper investigative powers and bigger indictments.

Once Dunne and the other agents learned the full magnitude of the Company’s activities, they started laying the groundwork for the case. Using the information that Paul had fed them, the agents began piecing together the facts of a conspiracy. By the spring of 1976, as the Company was contemplating its leap into the Thai trade, Dunne had enough to convince the U.S. attorney in San Diego to convene a grand jury.

Now the DEA’s investigation had a name. Operation CorCo was in full swing.

Freeway All the Way

1977

“You nearly clipped Bambi!”

Fuzzy pulled up alongside Dave in fourth gear. They were straddling a pair of enduros, off-road motorcycles they’d brought up to the redwoods, where Fuzzy was teaching Dave how to ride. Dave was getting the hang of it, opening up the throttle on the open forest roads, taking in the hum and rattle and the prismatic sun filtering through the canopy. He hadn’t noticed a spotted fawn grazing on the shoulder. Fuzzy saw Dave’s tire brush its bushy white tail. “You’re lucky to be alive!” he said, grinning.

The two had been up there for weeks, cruising the backcountry of the Lost Coast, looking for even more remote loading sites after the success of the Pai Nui. Finding the right spot was an art. Dave constantly studied maps, scoping out prospective landing sites as far north as Alaska. But the empty beaches of the Lost Coast, many of them accessible only by old unpaved logging trails, had the advantage of being conveniently close to San Francisco.

The nimble, long-range enduros, their reach extended by gas cans stashed in the woods, were the best way to negotiate the difficult terrain of one of the country’s most beautiful landscapes. The whole territory was a refuge of dropouts and outlaws: Hells Angels, ex-cons, hippie communes. But the forest was vast enough to swallow all of them, and Dave and Fuzzy would be alone with the trees for hours.

One day, they bumped their way down a road that followed the coastal bluffs of the Sinkyone Wilderness to a small cove. They stopped their bikes, scanning the terrain from above. The cove faced south and kept the roiling Pacific at bay. There was a nice break, but Fuzzy knew there’d be no time for surfing. Dave looked at the map. The cove was marked as Bear Harbor. In the late 19th century it had been used for loading lumber onto ships, but the wharf was long gone. “This is just what we’re looking for,” Dave said.

Sometimes Lou’s story was that he was a trust-funder. Sometimes he was the son of a Texas wildcatter. Once he was mistaken for a member of Kiss, and he let that story linger. Whoever he was, Lou owned it. “I’m in oil,” he’d say. “And if you ask any more questions, I’ll ask you to leave.”

If you wore money well, Lou thought, you could be whoever you wanted. You could live for months at a time at the Beverly Hills Hotel or the Waldorf Astoria in New York, paying $1,500 a night in cash. Maybe you were a movie producer or a chief surgeon somewhere. No one asked questions; the money made you invisible.

Lou made the drug business look like any other business. He would rendezvous with his distributors on tennis courts in Palm Springs, meet in the open, change from a coat and tie into tennis whites, let the other guy win the set, shake hands, and make the deal. There were no rough edges. Nobody in the Company wanted to be a gangster. They wanted to fit in, to live the good life.

Lou had long since traded his VW bus for a Ferrari. In the trunk, he carried a valise full of “fun tickets,” $100 bills to satisfy any whim. He and Ed and Bob bought palatial homes, acquired a taste for antiques. Bob and Ed, who had climbed Machu Picchu together, added Mesoamerican touches to their Asian aesthetic. Lou’s tastes ran toward the eclectic; among other things, he had bought a carved opium bed from China. He would jet to Paris on the Concorde and spend the weekend buying $5,000 worth of shoes. He spent $15,000 on a fake passport under the name Peter Grant, bought a Mercedes as James Benson, shopped at Wilkes Bashford as Richard Malone. This was the name Lou was known by in La Costa and in Lake Tahoe, where the Company liked to vacation. One day, Lou surprised Kerrie with tickets to Jamaica, where they lived for a month on a remote lagoon, disconnected from everything, just snorkeling and reading. It was there, at Dragon Bay, that Kerrie discovered that she was falling in love with him.

In 1976, Lou had bought a place in Tahoe for himself and Kerrie. Dave and Linda moved there as well, to a condo nearby. Dave felt like he was coming into his own in the Company. Lou trusted Dave’s judgment without question, and Dave respected the vision that had gotten them this far. He treated Lou like an adoptive father, and Lou, who had no kids of his own, treated Dave like a favored son. Dave still wasn’t a partner, but he had moved beyond beach master to something like a general manager, with final word on operational decisions.

Tahoe became a refuge for the Company, a place where the couples hung out together and received a steady stream of guests. Lou bought a beautiful vintage Chris-Craft boat called the Rich and Dirty for waterskiing, and he’d spend all day blasting Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours on the eight-track while Kerrie carved a slalom wake behind him. At night, Kerrie would fish for deepwater mackinaw trout and stuff it whole for dinner. Kerrie had grown close to Bob and loved how Ed lived big and laughed all the time. The same style that had caused problems on the beach made Ed the life of the party, the kind of guy who’d walk into a room bellowing, clapping along as Dave and Bob played stoned duets on the piano.

Sometimes they’d invite their investors to the lake, guys Lou brought in to spread the risk. Lou was good at intuiting potential partners. Some of them were already trade insiders, but others were straight: bond brokers and lawyers and other pedigreed people who couldn’t resist the 2- or sometimes 3-to-1 return Lou was offering. The Company had its own accountant, buying properties on its behalf, creating shell companies with names like Mo Ching Trading Co., Tow Tow Ltd., and Ku Won Investment Co., Ltd.

Another frequent guest in Lake Tahoe was Phil DeMassa, a San Diego area criminal defense attorney. Lou had met DeMassa a few years earlier, at one of the birthday bashes Ed liked to throw for himself. DeMassa was known in the drug trade as a high-priced but effective attorney. He was a litigator who liked the fight, worked long hours, and was successful at keeping the government at bay. Lou wanted that kind of firepower and gave DeMassa $300,000 in cash to come aboard. Just don’t deal in anything white, DeMassa advised Lou, and he’d take care of the rest.

There, above the electric blue lake, a thought dawned on Lou: Money is energy. A frictionless medium for amplifying your will. Once, Lou asked Kerrie to come and stand with him in front of $2 million that he had arranged in $10,000 stacks. “Can’t you feel it?” he said, looking at the bundles. With the cash it had on hand, the Company could do whatever its principals dreamt up—“buy the road,” as Ed liked to put it.

On a practical level, that was Ed’s job. His rough style turned out to be good for the dirty work required to run a multinational criminal enterprise: paying off local officials, buying boats in seedy foreign ports, vetting sellers abroad. Others thought those assignments were dangerous, but Ed saw them as adventures. His passport—under the name Kenneth Eugene Cook, Jr.—filled with stamps from India, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Senegal, the Seychelles, and the Panama Canal Zone.

Expansion plans were under way closer to home, too. Word from buyers was that the East Coast was dying for smoke. Switching geography, the Company figured, would help throw off the heat, too. Dave had studied his maps and praised the gods of fractal geometry for giving distant Maine as many miles of coast as California. He purchased a beach house on Dennison Point in Cutler, overlooking Little Machias Bay; an equipment house outside the small town of Freedom; and a communication house near Skowhegan. Across the globe, Ed attended to the maritime details: cargo-ship certifications, port clearances, tonnage certificates. Soon the shipment, seven tons of Thai stick, was on the move.

By now the Company had perfected a cell structure, flexible but tightly organized, bonded by friendship and mutual trust. Company guys lived around the country, under assumed names, and communicated by 800 numbers with answering services, where they’d leave coded messages with callback numbers to pay phones. Everyone always had a bag of quarters. Dave was an early adopter of beepers and used techniques from a class at the Bornstein School of Memory Training to encrypt key numbers onto a chart that crew members could stick to the backs of their watches. You’d get a message—“Burma Christmas”—and know who to call back. With this system the Company could disappear for months at a time and then reemerge at the ready.

Heading up the Maine operation with Dave was Harlan Fincher, the Coronado High basketball team’s former center. Harlan had gone off to school on an athletic scholarship and then returned to Coronado to work as a printer. Since his drunken appearance at the last game of his varsity career, Harlan hadn’t heard from Lou—until, one day at work, he received a call out of the blue. “Hi, Harlan,” a familiar voice said, “long time.”

It was Harlan’s job to transform into reality the elaborate schemes that Dave had dreamed up for the Maine operation. The project had many technical hurdles. The house on Dennison Point sat near the edge of a cliff, looking out over the waters where the first naval battle of the American Revolution was fought. The beach below the cliff was a serious bone patch—rocks everywhere, some the size of VWs—and the tides were huge and fast-changing. This wasn’t like back home in Coronado, with 300 yards of flat sand.

It was Don who came up with the solution: installing a yarder, a five-ton piece of industrial logging equipment, in the house’s garage. The yarder would lower trucks by cable straight down the face of the cliff so they could negotiate the rocks out to the dock the Company had built at the water’s edge. The trucks would be loaded and driven back to the palisade, then winched back up the cliff face and into the garage. It was outrageous but clever, an improvised mechanical marvel.

The rest of the gear was stored in a 19th-century barn, beneath a giant sleigh of similar vintage hanging in the rafters. For months the team worked there, tending to mission preparations. Fuzzy tested the outboards and doused the spark-plug cylinders in starting fluid. (You didn’t want to be out there in the dark pulling cords.) He altered the gravity feeds Dave had bought to move the bales, using his arc welder to make them adjustable.

Elsewhere in the barn were the new Maravias, 35-foot-long Kevlar barges they had bought for towing the pot back from the mothership. Dave had them custom-made; he told the Maravia sales agent that they would be used to transport cattle across the Rhine. Where Dave came up with that, he didn’t know. It was the kind of cover story that just rolled off his tongue by now, the instinctive cloak-and-dagger of a life built on anonymous P.O. boxes and money orders and answering services and forged identities.

The fake IDs were Al Sweeney’s department. Dave brought him in because he remembered from high school that Al could point a camera and print well. Al was the science-club type: quiet, smart, focused. He’d meet with Company guys at the San Francisco Hyatt, carrying a turquoise garment bag that doubled as the backdrop for the California ID photo, which he could reproduce within 48 hours. Even after the DMV instituted a new band of invisible ink, a supposedly unbreakable security measure, Al figured out how to duplicate it.

In addition to being the Company’s master forger, Al had been a ham-radio hobbyist in high school, and with Company money he created a totally secure communications system, installing military-grade crystals in their radios so they could transmit on protected channels. In Maine, he was stationed at the communication house, 110 miles from Machias in Skowhegan, to operate the 60-foot antenna they’d installed to stay in touch with the ship. A lot of juice ran to that 5,000-watt tower; when you turned it on, the lights would dim, the room would hum, and you’d get warm standing next to it, waiting for word to come that the mother ship, code-named Cowboy, was nearing Little Machias Bay.

Cowboy finally arrived in October, negotiating Maine’s difficult inlets at night, guided by the two main towers of the Navy’s submarine communications center, just across Little Machias Bay. The crew motored the Zodiacs out to meet the ship in smuggler’s blackout, beneath a moonless sky.

They dropped chem lights in milk bottles as buoys to mark the way back. The man in the bow of each Zodiac held up a piece of aluminum so the mother ship could pick them up on radar. The crews wore thick black wetsuits; the Zodiac pilots had hockey helmets rigged with radio headsets. They looked ridiculous with six-inch antennae sticking up from their heads, but that’s what Harlan improvised so they could work hands-free. From the beach, Dave monitored their progress with a Starlight night-vision scope he’d seen in the pages of Soldier of Fortune.

The operation went off without a hitch: After traveling 10,000 miles, the Thai stick breezed through the final stretch, from the boat to the beach and up the cliff. It was another flawless operation. And it felt great. While the load was being sorted in the equipment house, Ed brought the investors in for inspection. The equipment was packed and stored, and the stash was loaded into a Dodge van. A Company detachment, all of them dressed in deliverymen’s Dickies, drove down the Eastern Seaboard, the van and a chase car a mile apart, dropping off boxes marked “Generators” in the wee hours. It was $20 million worth of product in all. It seemed just right when Steve Miller came on the van’s radio one night, singing “Take the Money and Run.”

In a suite at the Waldorf Astoria, the partners divided the spoils. One of the investors, Bruce Tanaka, had a lead on some Mercedes 450 SEL 6.9s, which were semi-street-legal and had to be imported from Europe via an underground dealer. Tanaka was taking orders. As a reward for a job well done, Lou and Ed each bought one of the luxury sedans, in complementary colors.

The victory celebration, as usual, was epic. In an age of excess—the idealism of the ’60s had long since given way to the indulgence of the ’70s—the Company could afford to be more excessive than most. “Why settle for a glass of champagne,” Lou would say, “when you can have a magnum?” It was vivid living, surrounded by friends, seeing your champagne flute filled as soon as it was empty, unless you followed Pops’s lead, draining your glass and throwing it into the fireplace. Toasting big, stumbling out to the limos at dawn with a girl on your arm—it felt like you were going to live forever. It’s what Ed meant when he and Al stood looking out at the ocean one day, toward ports east, and he said, “You know what? It’s just freeway all the way.”

Heat

1978

Lou was on the slopes in Vail, Colorado, when he learned about the indictment: eight counts in San Diego’s district court, naming him, Ed, Lance, Bob, and 22 others. The DEA’s Operation CorCo had convinced the grand jury. The indictment hadn’t been unsealed yet, but Phil DeMassa’s office had gotten wind of it early. “The bloom is off the rose,” DeMassa said, after a call came in from his office. Lou frowned, planted his poles, and kept skiing.

Lou figured that if the authorities knew where they were, they’d have been arrested already. He was right—the DEA had no leads on Company members’ whereabouts, and the agents in San Diego lacked the resources to go after fugitives, especially if those fugitives had deep pockets. The agency could gin up indictments, but it lacked what agents called “habeas grabus,” the capacity to make big arrests.

Lou and Dave arranged to meet DeMassa at the Mark Hopkins hotel in San Francisco. As DeMassa walked down Sutter Street, they watched from the eighth floor through binoculars to make sure he wasn’t being followed, then led him through a back entrance into the hotel. “As your attorney, I advise you to turn yourself in,” DeMassa said once they were safely in the room. Then he grinned. “Now, with that out of the way, let’s get down to business.”

Using carefully worded hypotheticals, DeMassa briefed the Company on how to survive as fugitives. He told them to protect their cash and documents in sealed envelopes addressed to him, so they would be shielded by attorney-client privilege and could be opened only with a warrant. He parsed the charges, the felonies and misdemeanors. The three of them agreed that the principals should stay on the run and that some others might surrender and strategically cooperate so as to get light sentences but not give up the goods.

This was a new idea, doing time for the Company. But things were different now, more complicated. Lou would have to turn on the coach charm and tell his team that sacrifice was necessary. The rest of the indictees would show up in court, en masse, on the day the indictment was unsealed. “We can get slaps on the wrist for the underlings,” DeMassa promised. Then he told Lou that he’d spent his latest $300,000 payment already. Lou sent him on his way with another fifty grand in cash.

Hiding in plain sight, the Company’s principals went further upscale, relocating to Santa Barbara. Bob, who was already hanging out with his Brotherhood of Eternal Love friends up there, moved into a huge Spanish-style hacienda. Out back was a tennis court, where he and Lou would have fierce five-hour matches. Ed bought a house near Bob, and both of them took up polo, stabling 20 ponies apiece at the Santa Barbara Polo & Racquet Club. Ed wasn’t great at the game—still the bull in the china shop—but Bob had real finesse. Lou thought he looked beautiful in the saddle.

Bob’s friends called him “Light Show” Lahodny on account of his love of the glamorous life, and he was living up to his nickname in Santa Barbara. People took notice of his good looks and smile; he was Kennedy-esque, they thought, like a ’70s-style, feel-good Bobby. Maybe that was what the members of the local Chamber of Commerce were thinking when they asked him to run for a newly opened state Assembly seat. He politely declined—a wise decision for a drug smuggler living under a false name.

On his visits to Santa Barbara, DeMassa protested half-heartedly about all the public revelry. But the truth was that he was fond of Bob and Ed and liked going to those parties, too. All of them did. Still, it was a dangerous game, being that high profile. Ed was probably the most conspicuous. He couldn’t reinvent himself as a patrician the way Bob and Lou had. The more money he had, the more he looked like a criminal. It was a matter of style: The Company guys all called Ed “the Kid,” because he called everyone else “kid,” as in, “Hey, kid, how about some more wine over here?”—the kind of demeanor that got plenty of second looks at the Polo Club. In many ways, Ed was in fact a big kid, always looking for fun and excitement, and when Lou gave him a Ferrari one Christmas, surprising Ed by leading him, eyes closed, to a baby blue convertible with a big red bow on it, Ed smiled and said: “Damn, kid! You shouldn’t have.” Now Lou agreed that he probably shouldn’t have, watching Ed clock 100 miles per hour down Shoreline Drive or pull drunk donuts in the parking lot of Santa Barbara’s ritziest joint, appropriately called Talk of the Town.

But Ed earned his keep. He ran point on the Thai supply chain, which Lou considered a lion’s den. It was Ed who traveled overseas, connecting with growers, cutting out the middlemen and increasing the Company’s profits—the kind of profits that made it possible to throw money at DeMassa, hold the feds at bay, and keep the Company machine running smoothly, moving product, while the partners played with their ponies. The bigger problem for the Company partners was not in Santa Barbara at all.

Lance claimed that it was his decision to leave the Company. The other partners were under the impression that they’d fired him. He had become too much of a liability, they thought; his showboating had gotten out of control. He may have cut his hair short, but he was still the same old Lance, standing out rather than blending in, opening suitcases full of money wherever he went. Lance’s other nickname was Ensign Hero: the Navy washout who thought he was invincible. In Tahoe, after the indictment came down and they were all on the lam, Lance would be out on the lake, testing the high-powered cigarette boats he’d built, getting yelled at over a police helicopter loudspeaker for speeding.

The real trouble with Lance was his leaking. “We know you’re talking to Paul Acree,” Ed told Lance one day. Lou remembered the day Lance showed up on his bike, like some kind of stoned angel, asking him to get off the ladder and go to Mexico. There would be no Company if not for Lance, he knew. But now he and Bob and Ed had no choice but to buy him out.

They eventually settled on an “exit package” of $400,000. In the spring of 1978, DeMassa met Lance in the parking structure of the Orange County Courthouse, where they chatted briefly. “Stay out of trouble,” DeMassa told him. As he was leaving, he pointed to a briefcase he’d set between them. “Oh,” he said, “I think this is yours.” When he opened the briefcase, Lance felt jilted. It contained $180,000: half the agreed amount, less DeMassa’s “transaction fee.”

Part of the reason everyone moved to Santa Barbara was to ditch Lance. But Lance wouldn’t go away that easily. He had more to lose than Paul. He was named in the indictment along with everyone else. He was a fugitive like them, but he was on his own. Out in the cold, his only value to anyone was what he knew.

Lost At Sea

1978

Success, Dave knew, was a fragile thing. So many parts of a smuggling operation could go wrong, it was necessary to have not just a Plan B but also a Plan C and a Plan D. Still, even the best risk manager could never make the risk go away entirely.

The first sign of trouble with the latest gig occurred right at the beginning, when Danny Tuna, after being contracted by the Company to bring five tons of hash back from Pakistan, vanished. Danny was a drinker, and he’d gone on a bender and disappeared. Enter Plan B: Ed flew to Singapore, bought a 130-foot boat called the Tusker, under the auspices of a shell company called Ocean Survey and Studies, Limited (based, naturally, in Beverly Hills), and hired a new captain, Jerry Samsel. The Company had never worked with Samsel before. None of the members of his crew were regulars. And not long after the Tusker left Pakistan bound for Maine, they stopped hearing from him.

Back in Maine, Al Sweeney listened for the Tusker during their radio appointments but heard nothing but static. Dave was confused. He had supplied the Tusker’s crew with the usual coded Mylar charts to give encrypted positions and provided them with several radio systems: single sideband, VHF, UHF, and CB. What Dave didn’t know was that Samsel had turned paranoid and ordered a total radio blackout. This was in September. The Tusker wasn’t due for 10 weeks. All the Company could do was wait.

Tensions were high. Fuzzy and Harlan were at each other’s throats. Dave was so frantic one night that Fuzzy slipped opium into his joint to calm him down. And quiet, shy Al was coming undone, getting edgier each day and claiming that he could hear messages from the missing ship coming through the static. Then, one day in October, the feds appeared.

Dave saw them first. Andy, a new hired hand, had picked him up at the airport in Bangor, Maine, and they were driving to the house atop the cliff in Machias when a man sitting in a car by the side of the road did a double take, flipped a U-turn, and started following them. One of the neighbors, it turned out, was a retired cop, and he had grown suspicious about the house’s occupants. He reported the address to the police, who suspected smuggling and contacted the DEA. A title check revealed a mysterious buyer whose only listed address was a P.O. box in Boston. The DEA didn’t know they had stumbled on the Coronado Company fugitives from California. But local agents had been mobilized, and now they were behind Dave and Andy. Dave took a deep breath and stepped on the gas.

The truck Dave was driving happened to be one that Fuzzy had enhanced with lift kits for ground clearance and a “down and dirty” switch that turned off the brake lights and head- and taillights—a feature that came in handy for evasive driving in the backwoods of Maine. At one hairpin turn, Dave slowed, told Andy to take the wheel, jumped out of the truck, and rolled into the woods. The agents sped past. Dave hiked for nine miles to a pay phone, where he called for Fuzzy to pick him up.

Andy was arrested, the Company’s first casualty in action. Dave made it back to the equipment house near Freedom, which remained safe. But the Tusker’s silence had now become a much more serious problem. The Company house was made—and the boat, oblivious and somewhere out on the ocean, was headed right for it.

“Listen, listen,” Al kept saying, handing Dave the radio headset. “They’re talking to us.” Dave heard only squelching, but Al was writing down positions. Fuzzy thought he was going batty. Yet Al was so convinced that sometimes Dave thought he could hear voices, too, off in the distance. Someone was saying something, but you couldn’t understand what. It was spooky, watching Al every night, listening intently, eyes closed, recording the advance of a ghost ship.

Al’s wireless séances didn’t convince Ed, who decided on a daring Plan C: He would go find the Tusker himself, from the sky. He traveled to South Africa, chartered a plane, and began flying a grid pattern over the Atlantic to intercept the Tusker before she steamed into a trap. He spent hours over the ocean, passing back and forth and scanning the surface, ready with a series of messages he’d drop to the ship if he spotted her. It was a desperate measure, but if he could direct the Tusker to an alternate site, disaster would be averted.

The plane never spotted the Tusker, because the boat was already north of Ed’s search area. The miscalculation was not Ed’s fault. Dave had told the ship’s captain he should under no circumstances arrive before Christmas, but Samsel had ignored him and was, in fact, making great time. The Tusker appeared in Little Machias Bay two weeks early, anchored in the private cove by the house, and sent a party ashore. Samsel had left his antenna up in the weather and it had frozen off; now that he wanted to break radio silence, he couldn’t. Two crew members knocked on the Company house door and were confused when no one answered.

The feds were on alert when Dave mobilized Harlan and another hired hand, nicknamed Rabbit, for Plan D: an amphibious intercept. Harlan and Rabbit fired up a Zodiac and approached the cove from the sea. There was the Tusker: a sitting duck, just 50 yards offshore. Harlan radioed an emergency call to Dave, boarded the Tusker, and told the captain to make a break for it. As he and Rabbit sped away in the Zodiac, Harlan could see the blue lights of the Coast Guard boats behind them.

Harlan beached the Zodiac, and he and Rabbit scrambled ashore. They grabbed their emergency kits, which were issued to every Company employee: backpacks stocked with a compass, rations, matches, gloves, some Pemmican beef jerky, and other supplies. What they needed now were the burlap leggings. They had been furnished at the suggestion of a wilderness expert and tracker who worked for the Company out west. If there’s a manhunt, he’d said, the police will have dogs, and burlap on your legs will hide the scent. Harlan sat down on the beach, pulled on two burlap sacks, and ran into the forest.

When Dave stopped hearing from Harlan, he radioed the equipment house, where Fuzzy answered. Dave then sent Fuzzy and another scout to the house—a classic tactical mistake in the fog of war. On their second visit to the house, Fuzzy was pulled over. As the police approached the car, he tore up his fake ID and slipped the pieces into the driver’s-side door panel.

The Tusker didn’t get far before it was boarded by the Coast Guard. At first glance, the guardsmen found nothing. The hash was in a cargo hold only accessible from the exterior of the ship; it was December in the North Atlantic, and the Tusker was so thickly iced over that they missed the hatch cover. The guardsmen instructed the Tusker to follow them into port, then pulled away in their own vessel. En route, the Tusker’s crew axed off the ice, opened the hatch, and started throwing the cargo of sealed cylindrical containers overboard. Arriving at port ahead of the Tusker, the guardsmen were confronted by irate DEA agents and, realizing their mistake, raced back to the Tusker in time to see the crew on the deck pitching the hash into the sea.

The entire crew was taken into custody, as were Rabbit and Harlan, whose burlap leggings did not save them. They all called DeMassa, who called Lou, who authorized $50,000 in defense and hush money for everyone: five grand apiece. Dave avoided capture, left Maine, and reconvened with Lou. Together they worked damage control. It was a heavy blow to the Company, but not a fatal one. The DEA had only arrested the help. They didn’t realize Harlan had a supervisory role, but even if they had, Harlan would never have talked. Five arrests and no one had a thing on them but some sextants, a matchbook from the Ambassador Hotel in Singapore, and Dave’s mysterious little Bornstein School charts. But the fishermen of Little Machias Bay were pulling high-quality hash from their nets for days.

DEA special agent James Conklin, left. (Photo: Courtesy of James Conklin)

Fugitives

1978

The code of silence stuck. Fuzzy and Harlan took the fall, pleading guilty to small counts in the indictment. Still, the Company was less than happy. Several million dollars’ worth of product had been tossed from the Tusker. While no one had rolled over on the Company, the seams of the operation had been exposed. And for the first time in its decade of operation, the Company found itself with a management-labor divide.

It hadn’t gone unnoticed that since the indictment had come down, the Company partners had been riding polo ponies and sauntering around Santa Barbara in white V-neck sweaters while their employees went underground. When the Tusker operation fell apart, the partners were a thousand miles away. Lou was safely ensconced at the house he’d bought in Hilton Head, South Carolina, at the Palmetto Dunes Oceanfront Resort. Now that it was all over, even Dave was having doubts. For God’s sake, he thought, I jumped from a car at 20 miles per hour. I watched my friends get arrested.

“Listen, Lou,” Dave said one night over dinner. “It might be time for me to quit. I can’t do this anymore.” The desperado life was starting to wear on him, he said. They’d been fugitives for more than a year. It was enough to make Dave paranoid, always looking in rearview mirrors and store-window reflections. He was gone more than he was home and often couldn’t call his wife, Linda, for weeks at a time. After the indictment came down, the couple had moved to Denver—a city they’d chosen at random—and now Linda was lonesome. She couldn’t see her family. To call his own mother, Dave had to use codes and pay phones. Relations with his sister were even more difficult: She was an assistant district attorney in San Diego, and Dave had to hide his whole life from her.

“I hear you, Dave,” Lou said. “I feel it myself.” Kerrie, too, had become frustrated with their lives, he said, especially once she and Lou moved to Hilton Head. But “the Company needs you,” Lou went on. “I need you. Without you, the Company is nothing.”

So Dave stayed. The money was too good, the work still thrilled, and Dave still wanted to make Pops proud. He liked excelling at something. In spite of everything, he still thought of himself as a Company man.

Intercepting the Tusker had been a lucky break for the DEA. The agency didn’t even realize that they’d stumbled across the same smugglers named in an existing indictment on the West Coast. It was hard for the agency to coordinate nationally, and the CorCo case had lost its office champion when Bobby Dune transferred from San Diego to Boise, Idaho.

Then a special agent named James Conklin picked up the case. Like Lou, Conklin had come west for his own piece of the good life under the sun. The Detroit-raised son of an FBI agent, Conklin had earned a philosophy degree from St. Bonaventure University in upstate New York and then gone to Vietnam, where he served two tours as a Marine Corps captain. The America he came home to in 1969 wasn’t the same one he’d left four years earlier. He worked a couple of regular jobs, but after being in a war zone, the deskbound life felt limp. He sat there thinking: Is this as good as it gets?

As Nixon’s war on drugs escalated it grew less metaphorical, and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs was actively recruiting military officers fresh from Vietnam. In 1973, when the agency was absorbed into the new DEA, there was a need for staff in San Diego, the new epicenter of border trafficking. Conklin, recently married, was tired of living in New York—the weather, the cost, the chaos. The following year, he and his wife loaded their things into a U-Haul.

By the time Conklin came across the Operation CorCo file in 1978, the case was cold. Despite Dunne’s work and the resulting indictment, the DEA brass had taken little interest in the Coronado Company. They wanted heroin busts. Or maybe coke, which was just starting to make a beachhead. Pot was small potatoes: “Kiddie dope,” they called it. Hell, Conklin figured, half the prosecutors smoked it themselves.

Reviewing the dormant CorCo file, Conklin realized that the sheer scale of the Coronado Company put it in the top tier of smuggling operations. He told his bosses about the tonnage, the tens of millions the smugglers had made. That got the pencil pushers interested, and the San Diego office authorized Conklin to go after the Company partners.

Conklin knew what he was up against. The Company’s leaders were smart, the DEA had run out of leads, and the agency was still poorly funded, working out of derelict federal buildings and borrowing boats from the Coast Guard for naval busts. When Conklin started, his unit had just four cars: two American Motors Javelins, a seized purple Plymouth convertible, and a seized Riviera with bullet holes in it. New agents got guns but no holsters; they wrapped their .38 Specials in rubber bands so they wouldn’t slip out of their waistbands. As late as 1979, when the Company was landing $7 million shipments of Thai stick, there wasn’t a single DEA interdiction agent north of Los Angeles on the West Coast.

But the DEA crew was finding its legs, slowly but surely. The agents were dedicated—married to the job, their ex-wives would say—and they were used to being in the trenches. And the government, Conklin knew, had time on its side. A trafficker, after all, was really just another kind of addict. They couldn’t stop. They loved the rush. The great smugglers could change the odds for a time, but like a blackjack player in a casino, their long-term prospects were dim. The only way to beat the house was by taking your winnings out the door—but smugglers left their chips on the felt. And even the best operation had a lowest common denominator. Somewhere, someone was eventually bound to do something stupid.

Lance tried to go legit. After parting ways with the Company, he hung around Lake Tahoe, working on developing the ultrafast cigarette boats he hoped to sell. He claimed to have serious interest from the military and potential clients in the Persian Gulf. But his boats—long, thin hydroplanes tricked out with such powerful engines, you could see daylight beneath the hull at top speed—were too fast to be good for anything: fishing, waterskiing, even smuggling. The only buyer for Lance’s boat would have been James Bond, and even Bond wouldn’t want a 30-foot rooster tail flying out the back. He told Fuzzy, with whom he was living at the time, that he was thinking about going to Switzerland. He could hide his money there, hit the autobahn, chase blondes.

Lance felt himself inching further and further out on a limb. Though he remembered Lou’s story, the one from Pepe de Mexicali about pushing troublesome associates out of a plane, he knew that the Company wasn’t his real problem—prison was. He had a bad time in Lompoc after his 1969 bust, being a small, pretty blond and all. He vowed he was never going back there.

The Gamble

1980

Dave was at 5,000 feet, riding shotgun in a Cessna four-seater, looking down at the vast green wilderness of the Olympic Peninsula, near Seattle. At the controls sat Hugo Butz, a Vietnam chopper pilot turned bush flier who was game for smuggling sorties and aerial surveillance. He had connected Dave with two pals, a pilot and a mechanic with the Air National Guard at nearby Fort Lewis for the Company’s most audacious plan yet: off-loading 10 tons of Thai stick in one of the U.S. military’s own helicopters.

The John L. Winter was another fishing boat the Company contracted for a trans-Pacific smuggling run. The guardsmen were going to “borrow” one of Fort Lewis’s double-rotor Chinooks to lift the load off the deck of the ship in one swift action. There’d be no beach exposure at all. The whole operation would take only a few minutes. Then the ship would be gone, the stash would be deposited in the woods at a secluded clearing, and the Chinook would return to base.

That’s what they were reconnoitering in Butz’s plane now, a nice spot where the Chinook could set down its cargo not far from protected waters. They were all the way at the tip of the peninsula, over the Makah Indian reservation, a nearly unpopulated landscape of forest and salmon streams. From the air, they picked out a cove near Neah Bay: totally isolated, the last stop on the peninsula, and a mile from a flat patch of land clear-cut by loggers. They had found their landing zone.

Lou and Kerrie were spending most of their time in Hilton Head, tanning and playing tennis on the custom clay court at Lou’s beachfront estate. But the game was getting old for her, as was the isolated luxury of Hilton Head. She didn’t want to live like a rich retiree on the lam. It got to you after a while, serving guests with a smile while calling yourself by a fake name. After years living double lives, their only real friends were other people in the Company. In Tahoe or Santa Barbara, at least everyone was together and you could be yourself.

But Lou thought the Company social scene was dangerous. He was in Hilton Head to lay low, away from the conspicuous frolicking in Santa Barbara. He wasn’t exactly out of sight, either, ensconced in a mansion and all, but at least he was keeping quiet. Kerrie had gotten heavy into coke. Ed and Bob were partying hard, too. They were bored with their polo ponies; powder was the only thing that approximated the rush of smuggling.

Lou would indulge a few lines socially, or stick a hot knife into a ball of opium he kept around, inhaling the smoke off the blade to mellow out after a bad day. But he wasn’t the addictive type, and he thought the danger with drugs was getting caught up in the lifestyle. You wound up hanging out with weirdos. And that was how you brought attention to yourself.

For Kerrie, the luster of living with Lou was gone. She felt the years going by; nearing 30, she was thinking about children, a family, a career. In Hilton Head, it hit her hard: This would never be a normal life. Lou was more anxious now, more absorbed in the business. He kept more secrets, and Kerrie started catching him in lies. Maybe they were small ones, but they told a larger story: Once you leave the truth behind, it’s hard to find it again.

When the end came, they didn’t talk much about it. One day, she just packed her things and told him she was going back to La Costa to work as an aerobics instructor.

It was a surprise and yet not surprising. Lou was, in fact, making plans to get out of the business altogether, hiding away money and planning a move to the Bahamas. The islands were beautiful and ran on a dollar economy—a safe haven for illicit cash. They could live like they had in Jamaica. But that feeling had faded, he knew. Five years together and the two of them had never bickered or argued or said an unkind thing to one another. When she left, Kerrie looked back at that beautiful palmetto-ringed house, the only one on that stretch of beach, and knew she’d never see it again.

Lou was too busy to be heartbroken—or at least that was what he told himself. Between the Company’s ongoing legal mess, managing personnel, and planning for the next operation, there was plenty to do. It was getting expensive, keeping the Company together. DeMassa kept asking for more and more money—fifty grand here, forty-five there. It was some consolation that at least Dave could still be counted on.

“Helicopters?” Lou asked, going through the plans for the Neah Bay gig.

“It’s a great idea,” Dave replied. “If it works.”

But Dave was more paranoid than ever. He was having trouble keeping track of the double, triple, quadruple life he was living. Sometimes when he was asked for his name at a sales counter, he would forget who he was supposed to be. Lou tried to talk Dave through it, but he, too, had close calls. On one trip to San Francisco, he left his clutch full of fake IDs in a hotel lobby. When he was summoned by security, he pretended to be a businessman on a gay tryst to explain it.

On top of it all, Dave now had a family to look after; it was a hassle to arrange for his daughter to share his real name instead of his fugitive alias. Dave was torn between his loyalty to the Company and to his family. He felt like the little Dutch boy, plugging holes in the dike. How do you hold back the sea, he wondered, when you run out of fingers?

Back in Hilton Head, Lou worried, too. He drank his Bordeaux, looking out at the ocean that, every so often, rose up in a storm and took everything with it. Lou recalled how it was when they started back in Coronado. We were all just normal people, he thought. Friends on the Rock, their lives unwritten. He could remember that feeling of promise, when they were young and there wasn’t yet time for tragedy.

Lou Villar’s house at the Palmetto Dunes Oceanfront Resort in Hilton Head, South Carolina. (Photo: Courtesy of Lou Villar)

Lucky Break

1980

When Conklin’s DEA task force busted the low-level street dealer, they quickly realized they had a guy who didn’t want to go to prison. While in custody, the dealer happened to mention crossing paths with “a big-timer up in Santa Barbara.” That big-timer was Ed Otero.

The dealer was reluctant to talk, and Conklin worked him gently. Conklin was as straight as they come—he had never even tried marijuana—but he didn’t judge people. Plenty of his friends smoked pot, and when he went to parties they’d joke with him, call him “the narc.” He had no interest in locking up every street dealer. It made him an outlier in the take-no-prisoners milieu of the DEA, but it also made him good at cultivating informants. “This is a way out for you,” Conklin told the dealer. “You can go back to a regular life and never worry about seeing me again.”

In exchange for leniency, the dealer provided an address. It was the first concrete lead the DEA had gotten on the Company members’ whereabouts. When Conklin’s team checked out the place, it was empty, but a visit to the local post office showed that the mail was forwarded to someone named Bambi Merryweather—Bob’s girlfriend and Lou’s secretary, although Conklin didn’t know it. Conklin ran her name through the DEA’s database and got a hit out of an agency office in Virginia. The local office, Conklin discovered, was already working some information on a suspected drug dealer in Hilton Head, and Bambi Merryweather was mentioned in the file as well. Two building contractors in Hilton Head, Mike and Jerry Agnor, had reported that a man whose mansion they were renovating was a drug smuggler. They didn’t know his real name, but they called him Mr. Thai Pot and mentioned that he had a secretary named Bambi. The name was too unusual to be a coincidence.

Conklin flew the Agnor brothers to San Diego. He had been assembling a book of the entire Thai smuggling scene, from suppliers to traffickers to distributors, and filling it with pictures of the insular, elusive network. He asked the Agnors to flip through it. They immediately picked out Lou Villar.

At Neah Bay, the receiving crew was in place, stashing 500-gallon tanks of aviation fuel at the LZ for the helo, setting up Dave’s custom cargo cage, and bringing in a semi-trailer truck to move the pot. By now more of the regulars were gone. Don had left by mutual agreement; he had managed to save up some money from the gigs to invest in his VW shop in Oregon. The crew was full of new faces: locals, friends of friends. It made Dave nervous, what with all the heat on the Company.

After losing Al Sweeney, Dave hired a guy Harlan knew who worked for a contractor that made surveillance equipment for the CIA. Dave’s paranoia had led to all kinds of purchases, like a voice stress analyzer and audio scramblers, the latter of which became standard issue for Company partners. But now he requested something new: a bug.

One of the new guys on the crew was disappearing alone, every night, at the same time. One night Dave followed him; he was going to a pay phone. Dave planted the bug in the booth’s mouthpiece and began listening in. The mysterious transmissions, he discovered, were just sweet nothings to the guy’s girlfriend.

Dave was relieved, but the bug was still a nifty toy, and he thought he’d have a little fun with it. He planted it under the kitchen table at the Company’s equipment house. Over several days, he listened to the crew chatting, and then casually surprised people in conversation by mentioning bits of what he’d heard. One night Dave came into the kitchen where everyone was assembled, wearing headphones and a big grin. “Gotcha!” Dave said, reaching under the table and pulling out the bug. “Cute, right?”

Harlan didn’t think so. The Company was built on trust, and the very idea of eavesdropping was a slippery slope. He didn’t see Dave’s stunt as a practical joke. What he saw was a bad omen.

No one likes digging through the trash, but you’d be surprised what people throw away. In addition to naming Lou, the Agnor brothers had helped Conklin connect the Company to a San Diego accountant named Andy Willis. Conklin got a search warrant and began accompanying the local garbage crew to Willis’s office, getting up early, riding the side of the truck, and dabbling in waste management.

Willis, it turned out, would’ve benefited from a paper shredder. In his garbage, Conklin found an epistolary trail connecting Willis to Lou, mostly operating under aliases. Soon Conklin had uncovered a whole network of pseudonymous assets, like Bob’s partnership in an oil well in Arcadia Parish, Louisiana, and the bank accounts of the Mo Ching Trading Co., which happened to own coastal properties in sparsely populated areas. “We got gold,” Conklin told his partner Larry McKinney.

As the CorCo case grew more complicated, more agents were brought in to help follow the money, including an expert on loan from the Internal Revenue Service. Thus was formed the financial-asset removal team—acronym: FART—which Conklin hoped would pick up the income trail and fill in the blanks. They began to piece together the Company’s financials, assembling the asset case by showing unclaimed income through expenditure on houses, cars, and other luxury line items. The last time Lou filed a tax return, he was a teacher in Coronado making $7,000 a year. Bob was still filing, as a drywall installer with a $10,000 annual income. He had spent nearly three times that much on tack for his polo ponies in one year alone.

But Conklin couldn’t just start arresting people. Even when he presented his superiors with documentation supporting his estimate that Lou, based on the value of his houses alone, was worth $6 million, it wasn’t enough. The Justice Department wanted more evidence. Conklin was miffed but patient. He and his team had been on Operation CorCo for years now, and, truth be told, they were having a blast. Conklin liked matching wits with the Company. They were worthy adversaries, guys who’d be good at anything, he thought. It just so happened they were really good crooks.

Code Red

1980

The Company had timed its Neah Bay gig for late summer, when the Pacific Northwest’s legendary gloom usually breaks. But when the John L. Winter arrived on August 23, the coast of the Olympic Peninsula was still shrouded in dense fog. Helicopters couldn’t fly in those conditions at night, and waiting for the fog to lift was a problem. The ship’s captain came onshore; he and his crew didn’t want to wait around out there to get plucked by the Coast Guard. The pilot pointed out that joyriding a military helicopter was tough to reschedule. Dave was pissed—at them, at himself, at the weather. His supremely elegant plan had been spoiled by an unseasonable dew point.

So for the first time in years, Lou showed up on-site. He met the chopper crew at the Tumwater Inn south of Olympia, turned on the charm, and managed to convince the pilot to attempt an even riskier daytime operation. It helped that Lou sweetened the deal, and noted that the pilots were already implicated. If one of them went down, they all went down.

On the day the weather finally turned perfect, however, the Chinook was a no-show. Another helicopter at Fort Lewis had been damaged on takeoff that morning, and the rest were grounded. Or at least that was what the pilot said; Dave suspected he just chickened out. He cursed the smuggling gods and went back to the drawing board.

The Company fetched its classic beach equipment—the Zodiacs, barges, gravity feeds, 4×4 pickups—and hired some locals from the Makah reservation to assist with their fishing boats. By now tempers were short. Offshore, the John L. Winter’s crew was jittery. As the days passed at Neah Bay, there was plenty of time for anxious speculation. Bringing in the Indians at the last minute was a risky move. They were charging $150,000, an exorbitant fee—the kind of deal you strike only in an emergency—and were wild at the wheel, unable or unwilling to get their ships into proper position. On the night the off-load finally commenced, Fuzzy could hear everyone arguing on the radio, blabbering back and forth for hours. It was the opposite of the streamlined command structure the Company was known for.

It was a bad start, hours late, already past midnight. Earlier on the beach, Fuzzy watched tiny waves lap at his feet, but his surfer’s instinct told him—from the mist, the sense of the atmosphere—that these waters would rise. By the time they started work, eight-footers were crashing on the rocks. Fuzzy fought his way out with a Zodiac and one of the Maravia barges, and docked at sea with the John L. Winter. The Indians met him there in their boats. It was raining, and the swells made work difficult, but together they managed to transfer six tons of Thai stick off the ship and onto the barge. Luckily, the high tide allowed a small vessel to shoot the mouth of the tiny Soo River, which emptied into the ocean near Neah Bay, so the Indians started ferrying the stash, 500 pounds at a time, into the shelter of the river.

Dave was positioned on a hill, watching through his night scope as a collection of green figures ran back and forth on the beach, battling the sea. It was a battle the Company was losing. The tide was going out. The boats were scraping the shallows. The hastily hired help was not following orders. When Turk Markishtum, one of the fishermen from the reservation, knocked his hull on a rock, he refused to continue. “I’m worried about my boat,” he said.

“How much does your boat cost?” Dave asked over the radio.

“$125,000,” Markishtum said.

“We’ll buy you two goddamn boats if you keep going,” Dave said. “Just bring the shit in!”

But now the tide was almost all the way out. No boat with a keel could get into the mouth of the river, and there was $10 million worth of Thai stick still sitting out there on the barge. The local fishermen took off. On the horizon, the black of night was giving way to the first pale hint of tomorrow.

“I’m getting that barge!” Fuzzy yelled into the radio. With the scope, Dave watched him break a Zodiac through the pounding surf and race out to sea. He tied the barge to the Zodiac. The Maravia was 35 feet long but flat-bottomed, and even with the bales stacked several feet high on its deck, Fuzzy figured he could tow it into the Soo.

“Go for it, man!” Dave yelled through the radio, watching Fuzzy make for shore with daylight emerging behind him. “Gun it!” Fuzzy couldn’t hear Dave over the whine of the outboard, and could barely see through the ocean spray, but he got the barge close. And then, just as he entered the mouth of the river, Fuzzy felt himself rising.

Dave watched as the monster wave curled up and lifted Fuzzy, his Zodiac, the barge, and the Thai stick 10 feet above the beach. Fuzzy managed to surf the tethered inflatables on the wave momentarily, until the crest toppled. He felt the weight of the barge land on top of the Zodiac, pinning him to the rubber floor—a potentially lethal position, trapped under several tons of cargo, with a million pounds of water behind it. A fatalist, Fuzzy was stoic. The party was over when it was over. And how ironic, he thought, to be killed by my own stash.

The wave started to swamp the Zodiac, and Fuzzy realized that his hand was still on the throttle. He instinctively gave the little motor all the gas, and when the wave shifted, the Zodiac broke free and shot down its face. Seconds later the towline broke and the barge swamped, dumping some of its load into the water. After tumbling through the foam, it came to rest on the beach. The beach crew unloaded what remained on deck and collected the rest of the bales from the river. Dave had come down from the hill and welcomed Fuzzy back onto the beach. “You barely got out of there with your life!” Dave said.

“It’s like I always say,” Fuzzy responded. “When in doubt—punch it!”

Dave and the beach crew scrambled to get the load into a U-Haul truck. First light was upon them. There was only one way in and out of the heavily forested area, the stash house was 10 miles away, and time was running out.

The road out of the forest was slick and canted, and the truck didn’t get very far before it slid off the asphalt. Dave’s nightmare was coming to pass: Everything was going wrong at once. “Leave the truck,” Dave said, now officially panicking. “Transfer the stash to the pickups.” That’s when Fuzzy discovered that the U-Haul’s rear door was jammed. The truck’s whole frame box was warped and wouldn’t open. “Get an axe!” Dave yelled. But there were no axes.

Dave looked around. The crew was losing faith. Birds were singing, announcing the morning. The scale of the disaster was dawning on everyone. “All right, everybody,” Dave said wearily over the radio. “This is a code red.” He had never said those words before. He couldn’t believe he had to give the order to abort. The Tusker was a lot of bad luck, but this was defeat. They had failed.

They had 60 bales in the pickups—a small fraction of the load. The rest they left on the beach, along with the boats and motors, the conveyor belts and generators. Dave instructed everyone to get their emergency kits, which contained oiled rags for clearing fingerprints. “Wipe it all down, boys,” he said. Fleeing the scene in the bed of one of the Company’s pickup trucks, Dave wondered what he would say to Lou.

The recovered bales went to pay back the investors. The rest was a loss. And the Company was already feeling the pinch. Smuggling is speculative and expensive: It had cost a lot to stage this fiasco, a million bucks spent to lose twenty. Dave, ever faithful and feeling guilty, bought Lou a gold Patek Philippe as an apology, even though everyone knew it wasn’t really his fault. At least no one was arrested on his watch, Dave thought. Hours later, Walter Cronkite was reporting on the CBS Evening News about the mysterious drug-trafficking incident on the Olympic Peninsula. The police discovered the entire smuggling operation in situ—the bales in the water, the truck, and all the gear—but they didn’t find a single fingerprint.

One Last Score

1981

Lou moved back to Santa Barbara, against his better judgment. Spooked by Neah Bay, the Company partners had decided to mount a final mission and then disband. Lou saw his psychic, a common form of business guidance in California at the time—who warned him, “I see bad things on the horizon.” Lou took note but didn’t listen. He and the rest of the Company partners wanted to retire big. The proverbial temptation of the last big score was too great.

Lou took up with a local artist and, somehow, her sister at the same time; they lived together in a house situated on a 100-acre orchid farm. There, the Company organized its final gig: four tons of Thai stick delivered to Bear Harbor, the kind of operation they’d pulled off without incident many times. Danny Tuna was back in the employ of the Company after promising to clean up his act. He had a new boat, the Robert Wayne, and promoted his first mate, John Engle, to captain it back from Thailand. The idea was to keep it small, easy, and lucrative.

Things seemed to be going fine until, a few months later, a ham-radio operator in the Philippines picked up a distress call from the western Pacific. It was the Robert Wayne; the vessel had been hit by a rogue wave, Engle said. It smashed the windows and swamped the gear, including the radio. Engle had managed to get out an SOS by splicing the CB to a high-gain antenna.

A few days later, the Robert Wayne’s propeller shaft broke. The ship was drifting now, a few hundred miles off the coast of Japan. As the hold was full of drugs, Engle couldn’t exactly call the Coast Guard. Fortuitously for the boat’s crew, it turned out that Danny’s sister was an escort at a Tokyo bar called Maggie’s Revenge, where she was popular with some yakuza men. (Danny’s sister was an exotic girl for a Japanese gangster to have on his arm—six feet tall, blonde, congenitally blind, and, according to Conklin, who later interviewed her, “a total knockout.”) Danny managed to arrange an intervention from the yakuza, who agreed to tow the boat to Yokohama and oversee repairs.

The yakuza wanted $300,000 for their services, on top of $250,000 for the Robert Wayne’s repairs. Ed negotiated a loan from a Company investor and brought the down payment to Chichi-Jima, a tiny island in the Pacific, in a suitcase. As insurance, the yakuza kept Danny Tuna with them “as a guest” until the mission was complete and the rest of the money was delivered.

Incredibly, the Company’s crisis management came through. The Robert Wayne made it to California and the off-load went smoothly. Some of the cargo was converted to cash, and the rest was transported back to Santa Barbara, to be sold in a few days. Lou agreed to store some of the pot and cash at his house—a breach in his usual security protocol, but he figured they’d get it to distributors in a few days. In the meantime, the Company threw a classic victory party at Bob’s place. This score would put everyone over the top, they thought, a couple million each for the partners. It felt good to be together again, everyone smiling, laughing, raising a toast to a clean getaway.

Conklin looked at his watch. It was 11 a.m. on November 5, 1981. He and his team were in position around Santa Barbara, waiting. Then another agent called in an approaching silver four-door Mercedes, license plate 1ATM158. The car turned west on Alston Road and then south on Cima Linda Lane, where other surveillance units made the driver: Ed Morgan, a.k.a. Kenneth Eugene Cook, Jr., a.k.a. Edward Otero.

It was early November, and the DEA had been sitting on the houses of Ed, Bob, and Lou for months now. Lou had no idea his Hilton Head contractors had led the heat to his doorstep on the opposite coast. The Agnors had told the feds that they’d been burned by Lou, stiffed $50,000 for services rendered. (Lou would claim that the money discrepancy was actually their lost investment in Company commerce.) Now Conklin had teams in place. “Let’s do it,” he said.

Ed saw the tail and tried to run, but he didn’t get far. The DEA boxed him in at the wheel of the car he loved so much, less than a mile from his house. Shortly thereafter, DEA agents saw Lou driving his matching Mercedes 6.9 and started following him.

Lou was by himself, heading for Bob’s house. It was a beautiful day, and Lou had just had lunch with the girls at home. He was feeling good, thinking about the pot in his basement and how much it was worth. When he saw that he was being tailed, he turned down the radio. He changed course, but the car followed. After a half-dozen turns, Lou found himself in a cul-de-sac. The cops didn’t even need to flash the lights.

“Keep your hands on the wheel,” Lou heard. Before the feds got a chance to yank him from the leather-lined interior, Lou recalls, one of the agents had pulled his .45 and stuck it in Lou’s mouth. The agent’s hand was shaking, as if he was overwhelmed by finally seeing the man he and his colleagues had been chasing for years. “You will never forget this day,” the agent said. “And your life will never be the same.” Lou knew he was right.

The DEA had caught up with Bob and Dave, too. They happened to be riding in Ed’s car when he was caught. For all his investigative efforts, Conklin didn’t realize who Dave was or the important role he played in the organization. But in Ed’s car, along with $20,000 in cash, the agents found Dave’s valise, which contained two fake IDs, an airline ticket, and several notebooks—all detailed accounting ledgers. It was a phenomenal bit of luck; the DEA had caught the Company principals en route to an accounting meeting.

By the end of the day they were arrested, and Bob’s house was surrounded with yellow tape, its contents tagged as evidence: three safe-deposit keys, photos of landing sites, and records showing payments to ship captains. At Lou’s house, Conklin found $557,829 and 892 pounds of product from the latest shipment, worth about $3 million. In Lou’s enormous safe were envelopes, each containing $25,000 and labeled “Johnny,” “Terry,” and “Fred”—pay for the crew. Lou had never before accepted delivery of pot on the premises. Now, handcuffed in his own living room, he could hear the agents in the basement taking down the secret panels that hid the stash. “Holy fuck,” one of them shouted. “We hit the fucking jackpot!”

It was quite a haul—for Conklin, too. He’d worked for years, with inferior equipment and funding, to put cuffs on these guys. His resources were so thin, in fact, that his agents had nearly run out of gas on the way to Santa Barbara; they were over their fuel budget and had to refill out of pocket to catch their targets. But now the Company’s leadership was all in a cell together, and the DEA had confiscated $12 million in cash, contraband, vehicles, and property from the organization. (To Conklin’s chagrin, he never did find the Duck.) When the news broke, McKinney told reporters that the Company had grossed $96 million over the past decade. At a minimum, Lou thought in his cell.

Private detectives Sanda Sutherland and Jack Palladino, 1979. (Photo: Corbis Images)

Cat and Mouse

1981

Fuzzy heard about the arrests on the news. Drug lords busted in upscale Santa Barbara. Sounds familiar, he thought. Then the phone rang. “Hey, Fuzzy, it’s been a while.” Fuzzy would’ve recognized that goofy nasal voice anywhere. “I’m sure you know why I’m calling,” Lance went on. “I got you into this. And now I’m going to get you out.”

Lance had already arranged for Fuzzy to sit down with the DEA. Fuzzy was conflicted, but as he considered the cards he had been dealt, he realized that he had only one to play. “It’s every man for himself,” Lance said.

The DEA loved Lance and Fuzzy from the moment they walked in the door. “You guys were the A-team,” Conklin said when Fuzzy and Lance sat down in the San Diego DEA offices, a tape recorder in between them. “Light years ahead of everyone else. We want to know how you did it.”

Fuzzy recognized one of the agents who had been on hand when he was arrested in Maine. Another agent, Fuzzy noticed, had pulled into the parking lot in one of Ed’s Corvettes. Fuzzy looked at the DEA team assembled around him, everyone with their notepads and Hawaii 5-0 suits. He rationalized that he would just confirm what they already knew. Besides, he had taken a fall once, and become a convicted felon, in the service of the Company. This time the feds were threatening 30 years. That was a long time away from his motorcycle. So Fuzzy gave them a tape he’d already recorded, describing the information he knew that would be valuable to the DEA. “Hi,” the tape began. “My name is Fuzzy, and I’m going to tell you a story about the Coronado Company.”

At the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego, where the Company members were housed, the higher-ups were still sticking together. Lou was running damage control, even managing collections from jail. At their individual arraignments, the partners gave DeMassa instructions to collect money from distributors, through their attorneys, whom they’d fronted. Some of it DeMassa used to pay the beach crew from the last operation, some he kept, and some he gave to the partners’ girlfriends.

“I need information,” DeMassa told Jack Palladino one night over lobster bisque at the Stanford Court Hotel. Palladino was DeMassa’s trusted private detective, one-half of the husband-and-wife detective agency Palladino & Sutherland; together they’d worked with DeMassa on other major criminal-defense efforts, defending the Hells Angels against the government’s RICO investigation. Jack and Sandra’s job was to gather as much information as possible about the DEA’s case against the Company and how the agents had gotten their evidence; maybe it was coerced or otherwise tainted. Find out what people know, DeMassa told Jack, and how they know it.

But the DEA already had a strong case. With the testimony of Fuzzy and Lance—now known as Confidential Informants SR2820012 and SR2820013, respectively—Conklin was able to issue a second round of indictments with wider scope and more detail, the kind that comes from inside information. DeMassa wanted Jack and Sandra to figure out who’d flipped.

There was no shortage of suspects. Coronado was full of people the Company left behind who had nursed resentments for years. “They burned a lot of bridges,” one early beach-team member told Jack. Any number of disgruntled ex-employees could have dropped a dime. During grand jury testimony, Jack sat in a white van with painted-over windows in front of the courthouse where the jury convened, taking pictures of everyone who walked in, but found no familiar faces.

Having mostly worked in criminal defense, Jack and Sandra had a philosophical opposition to informants. In her office, Sandra kept an original World War II–vintage poster that warned: “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” Their odds-on favorite, of course, was Lance, but nobody had any proof. Meanwhile, Lance was playing his own game. More than once as Sandra traveled around the country talking to Company associates, she found that Lance had gotten to them first, fishing for intel he could use as a bargaining chip with the DEA.

The private detectives met with Lance over a few dinners and meetings, each side hoping the other would slip up. At first everyone involved played coy, pretending they were on the same team. “Who do you think is talking?” Sandra would ask.

“Who do you think is talking?” Lance would reply.

The encounters settled into a routine of I-know-that-you-know-that-I-know-that-you-know-what-you-don’t-know gamesmanship. Jack and Sandra saw these meetings as opportunities to allow Lance, who always talked too much, to impugn his own credibility. They wore wires, hoping he’d put his foot in it. Extortion, for instance, would count him out as a government witness, and Lance had intimated that money might make him “go away.”

Lance knew they were taping him, and he tried to get around it. At one meeting, at a hotel in Reno, Jack bugged the room. Lance switched rooms at the last minute. He figured (correctly) that Jack was miked anyhow, and to be safe, he walked in with a note announcing that the entire meeting would be conducted on Magic Slates, the children’s writing pads where you pulled up the cellophane flap to make the words disappear. There they were, two private detectives and a drug smuggler, sitting in silence, negotiating on a kid’s toy. Nothing was said or written, and there was no record of their meeting, which Jack thought was very clever.

Lance didn’t like turning on his friends, but all’s fair in love and war, he thought. He felt bad threatening Ed, Bob, Dave, and Lou—they all still had affection for one another—but the Company had screwed him over. Now it was their turn to get screwed.

For months, Lou sat in the San Diego Metropolitan Correctional Center, still waving his scepter against Company foes. With money there was yet power. According to DeMassa, Lou wanted to bribe his way out. Judge, jury members, maybe a congressman if he had to. Ed, Bob, and Dave were all on different floors of the jail. They never talked directly, coordinating instead through DeMassa. Harlan and Dave both started teaching themselves law, to get into the statutes themselves.

Dave faced an “848,” the federal government’s continuing criminal enterprise statute—it was the trafficking equivalent of RICO, dubbed the drug kingpin law, carrying the prospect of decades in prison. Dave wasn’t a kingpin, but a heavy charge was how the government put on the squeeze, looking for cracks in the foundation. The Company felt abused by the inflated charges, but from the DEA’s perspective, it was the sole means of pressing an advantage. When a crew was as successful and as tight as the Company was, the DEA had to find leverage where it could. So the feds wheeled out the 848s, investigated friends and families, and, for good measure, indicted all the Company girlfriends.

Jack and Sandra tried to trace the DEA’s footsteps, looking for evidence that the agents overstepped their bounds. Sandra went around reminding everyone not to talk without a lawyer present and offering protection to people like Ed’s father, a Navy janitor, whose pension the DEA had threatened. At one point, Jack discovered that he was under surveillance himself. A well-known rock photographer let the DEA use his apartment, across the street from the Palladino & Sutherland offices, to spy on them.

There was more than enough resentment to go around. The DEA hated DeMassa; he was, according to Conklin, a “shyster attorney” who used “crooked detectives” to get criminals off. Jack and Sandra thought the DEA took it personally that anyone would dare stand up to the agency. “It wasn’t common to do that,” Jack recalled later. “And we were good at it.”

But the DEA was chipping away at the Company. DeMassa was on the defensive; he knew that the agency was gunning for him as well. Bob eventually chose to go to trial, but DeMassa encouraged Ed and everyone else to plead out. Lou arranged a plea bargain before he could be charged with an 848. The kingpin never faced the kingpin law, but he got 10 years anyway. So did Ed, who struck the same deal. During Lou’s sentencing, he looked up at the judge and told himself that he would never again lose his freedom. When he got out, he vowed, he would change his life, again. Freedom wasn’t worth all that money. But what was it worth?

In 1982, Lou was transferred to the Federal Correctional Institution on Terminal Island, just off Los Angeles Harbor, to “do his dime,” as it was called in the yard. He looked around and thought: I can’t spend 10 years here. In the MCC library, he had met a prisoner who traded homespun legal advice to his fellow inmates for cookies. “Want my advice?” he told Lou. “Get yourself out of here. That’s what all these other motherfuckers are trying to do. And they’re actually supposed to be in here.”

The jailhouse lawyer knew a former U.S. attorney named Kevin McInerny, who talked Lou through becoming an informant. Conklin was shocked when he got the call from McInerny: “Lou Villar wants to talk.”

The Deal

1982

It was controversial within the DEA whether or not to let Lou turn. He was too high up in the Company, some said—what was the point of rolling up the organization if you were going to let the kingpin walk? But Lou could provide detail on financing, suppliers, and dealers—the entire Thai network that Conklin had in his sights. Conklin had been able to indict a lot of those people based on Lance’s and Fizzy’s testimony, but for convictions he needed someone to take the stand. He also had his eye on a target closer to home. He wanted to go after DeMassa.

Lou already felt cheated by DeMassa. The Company had paid him half a million in fees, and in Lou’s mind all he did with it was negotiate some rather unfavorable plea bargains. Lou asked McInerny to reach out to Dave. Lou knew Dave could get out if he wanted to. So far he’d held firm, even though DEA agents had visited him in prison, stalked his wife, and harassed his sister, the prosecutor. Dave’s family had pleaded with him to turn on the Company. Finally, Conklin came to him and told him he had one last chance. He showed Dave the 848 paperwork with his name on it. “There’s a train leaving the station,” the agent told him. “Do you want to be on it or under it?”

Conklin felt like he was doing Dave and the others a service. In a way, he thought, the Company guys were lucky to get caught now: The days of fun-loving hippie smugglers were giving way to the violence and gangsterism of cocaine culture. Arrest was a way out, informing a path to redemption. “You have a chance to be a regular guy again,” Conklin told Dave. Dave waited until he thought everyone who had worked for him had been dispositioned, so his testimony wouldn’t affect his employees. And then he switched sides.

In his cell at the MCC, Harlan was still fighting the prosecutors, poring over court documents. He’d been imagining that Pops and the Company might still mount a cavalry charge. Instead, his boss and friends would testify against him.

It was understandable that Lance would turn state’s evidence; he’d been shafted. Maybe Fuzzy, too; he was an outsider, never one of the Coronado boys. But Lou? Lou had been at the center of everything. It was as if the Godfather broke omertà. And that broke Harlan’s heart.

He remembered when he did his first piece in jail, how Lou took him aside and coached him on doing his time. Now it was Lou’s turn, and Lou was skipping out. We were a fucking championship lineup, Harlan thought. And Lou was the coach. Harlan sometimes still felt an echo of remorse from 14 years earlier, when he disappointed Lou on the basketball court. He never imagined then that Lou would disappoint him in return. “We loved him,” Harlan would later tell the journalist Mike Wallace. “And he rolled right over on us.”

On one of Harlan’s trips to the courtroom, he was being led into the elevator when he ran into Lou, accompanied by prosecutors, on his way to testify. Harlan was dressed in corrections orange. Lou was in his civilian clothes, looking sharp as always, with a big smile on his face. “How are you doing?” Lou said. He looked Harlan in the eye and shook his hand. “Don’t worry, kid,” he said, just like in his coaching and Company days. “Hang in there.”

They got off on different floors. Harlan spent six more months on the ninth floor of the MCC and was then transferred to Terminal Island for the rest of his sentence. Lou walked out of the building and into the California sunshine.

The fallout from Lou and the other informants’ testimony was widespread. Many Company members and their associates did time. The Fort Lewis helicopter pilots were court-martialed. The Indians from Neah Bay were arrested. A third indictment came down in 1984, naming more suppliers and distributors; Conklin was disabling the Thai network, just as he had hoped. Eventually, more than one hundred people were indicted. Lou gave up many of them himself, even Kerrie’s brother Kent, who had worked with the Company on the beach. Some people, like Kent, spent just a few months in prison, others years.

The DEA raided DeMassa’s office, taking all his files, and eventually arrested him, charging him with harboring Bob Lahodny as a fugitive and 16 counts as a co-conspirator in the Company case. He went to trial in 1985. Facing 20 years, DeMassa pled guilty to three felonies and served six months in a halfway house.

Bob Lahodny went to trial in 1985. After 10 days—during which Lou, Dave, and Fuzzy all testified—Bob changed his plea to guilty and was sentenced to five years. He got out in 1989 but was arrested again that year, along with Ed Otero, after the two attempted another smuggling gig in Northern California.

Ed was serving his second sentence when he saved the life of a prison guard who was being held hostage by two armed prisoners, and was released early. Seven years in prison was enough to straighten him out. He moved to Palm Springs, started a legitimate—and successful—air-conditioning business, and bought himself a boat with his own hard-earned money.

Dave was released in 1983. He was relieved that he could see his family, but he knew he couldn’t go back to Coronado. He moved away and got into real estate. The first time Dave saw Lou after being arrested was on a plane to Maine, where they had both been subpoenaed to testify in a case related to the Little Machias Bay bust. Dave was still angry at Lou for informing on him before he turned state’s evidence himself. By the end of the flight, however, the two men were cracking tiny bottles of booze and rekindling their friendship. Other relationships, however, couldn’t be recovered. Lou never again saw Bob, Ed, Lance—or Kerrie. “What really hurt,” Kerrie says, “is that Lou never apologized.”

2013

The man who walked into the pizza place was barely recognizable as the tanned playboy I’d seen in pictures and newspaper articles. At age 76, he looked like a retiree, with white hair and a warm smile. “No one else besides the people who lived it has ever heard this story,” Lou Villar said.

Arranging the first meeting had been complicated, requiring the kind of cloak-and-dagger planning that Lou knew from the days of the Coronado Company. I showed up at the restaurant, waited, and was finally approached by Lou after I “checked out.” He was spry, fit, and still sharp as he jumped into a story that hadn’t been told in thirty years.

As I spent time with Lou, I could see the charming and charismatic man who had drawn so many people into his orbit at the Company. But I also saw the tragedy of his story. By the time we met, I had spoken with many who still felt the sting of his betrayal.

Lou himself served nearly two years in prison. After he was released, he was resentenced to a year of unsupervised probation. He managed to hold on to a bit of money, some of his furnishings from Hilton Head, and his wine collection.

Did Lou have regrets? He did. He’d testified against people he cared about. It was an agonizing decision, one he couldn’t rationalize away: “I told my story in exchange for freedom, and I’ll always have to live with that.” He hadn’t spoken to a reporter since 1985, shortly after he got out of prison. At the time, he said he regretted his Company days; they’d affected his family and destroyed most of his friendships. But things looked different to him now, with nearly three decades of perspective. “Those were lessons that had to be learned,” he told me.

He understood why his friends were angry. Still, he told himself, some of them could have taken a deal like he had. They had chosen to stick with honor among thieves, but Lou thought that was just a hollow criminal piety. Maybe that, in turn, was a hollow informant’s piety. But Lou now says that for him, time behind bars was an opportunity to accept defeat and learn how to live a legitimate life again. In his forties, he changed his name and started over. He was successful in his new career, he told me, but it wasn’t the same as the Coronado Company. “Then again,” he says, “what could be?”

When Lou and Dave spend time together now, their wives have forbidden them from talking about the halcyon days of the Company, because it can go on for hours. No matter how nostalgic he gets, Dave says he wouldn’t do it again. Lou says he would. The highs, the lows, the hard lessons—“those are the things,” he says, “that made my life.”

Lou Villar (Photo: Courtesy of Lou Villar)

Epilogue

2013

Ed Otero died in January 2013 of a heart attack while fishing for tuna off the coast of Mexico. “Ed rode the wave of life through the ’70s and early ’80s,” his obituary noted, “which included many adventures.”

Dave Strather divorced, remarried, and raised his daughter. He still has one of the Company’s voice scramblers and can reproduce the Bornstein chart from memory.

Bob Lahodny moved back to the San Diego area after his second prison term, got married, became a stockbroker, and lived, according to friends, “a festive and happy life” with his wife until they divorced. After that, Bob struggled to find his footing again. He died in 2010, from complications from hepatitis C, which he contracted while traveling in Asia.

Lance Weber never got his performance-speedboat business off the ground. He moved back to Coronado and met a new girl, Deanna, whom he married a few years later. He invited Jim Conklin and other DEA agents to his wedding, where Conklin presented him with a pair of handcuffs in a shadowbox with an engraved plate reading, “Congratulations on Your Life Sentence!” Lance and Deanna had two children. He died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2000.

Allan “Fuzzy” Logie made it through 10 years of probation without incident. He still rides motorcycles but had to stop surfing after he crashed his bike and injured his back. He remembers every mechanical upgrade he ever made to a vehicle.

Al Sweeney received five years of probation and moved back to Coronado. He died of a brain hemorrhage in 1985.

Don Kidd still runs his garage in Oregon, where he still specializes in the impossible. “It gets annoying,” he says. “People always bring me the shit they can’t fix.” He and Harlan Fincher have stayed friends, visiting each other every few years.

Harlan Fincher served four years in prison. When he returned to civilian life, he owed the government tens of thousands of dollars he didn’t have, on account of the IRS asset case against him, which made it hard for him to recover financially. Between that and his felony record, he had difficulty finding work that made use of his many talents. He married in 2006 and manages a ranch.

Paul Acree disappeared before the initial Coronado Company arrests in 1981. None of the other Company veterans know where he is or if he is still alive.

Phil DeMassa returned to law after his conviction; the California Bar Association did not pull his license, on the grounds that his crimes did not “involve moral turpitude.” Still, his practice never quite recovered. He died in a scuba-diving accident in 2012.

James Conklin spent 26 years with the DEA and still admires the ingenuity of the Company. After finishing the CorCo case, he was given a plum assignment in Thailand, where he was tasked with taking on the Company’s supply at the source. He spent four years there, essentially eradicating the entire Thai stick trade. He retired in 2004 and moved to Las Vegas, where he started a private-investigation firm with his son.

Jack Palladino and Sandra Sutherland are still private investigators and have worked on behalf of many high-profile clients since the Coronado affair, including John DeLorean, the auto executive charged with smuggling cocaine in 1982, Bill and Hillary Clinton during the 1992 presidential campaign, and Jeffrey Wigand, the tobacco-industry whistle-blower portrayed in the film The Insider. They now live and work in San Francisco’s Upper Haight neighborhood and are aided in their investigative efforts by their cat, Tipsy, who likes to sit on the files.

Kerrie Kavanaugh took a few years to move beyond what she now calls “the follies of the early ’80s” and eventually went back to school to pursue her culinary interests. She worked as a chef on private yachts, where she met her husband, a ship’s captain. They moved to the Pacific Northwest and had a daughter.

Lou Villar hasn’t talked to Kerrie in 35 years, but he kept a copy of the poem he wrote her.

The Legends of Last Place

The Legends of Last Place

A season with America’s worst professional baseball team.

By Abe Streep

The Atavist Magazine, No. 24

Abe Streep’s writing has appeared in Outside, The New York Times Magazine, Men’s Journal, Popular Science, Mother Jones, The Southern Review, Bloomberg Businessweek, and elsewhere.

Editor: Charles Homans
Producers: Olivia Koski, Gray Beltran
Photographs: Ryan Heffernan, Nick Sedillos
Research and Production: Nicole Pasulka, Rachel Richardson
Fact Checker: Thomas Stackpole
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Music: Abe Streep

Published in April 2013. Design updated in 2021.

Prologue

Another monsoon. The rain beats against the grandstand, drowning out John Fogerty’s growl on the aging Fort Marcy Park sound system. There aren’t many people here yet, a couple dozen fans but few of the regulars—no sign of the lefty pitcher’s brother or the guy who carves the big wooden Virgin Mary statues. The home team sprints off the field toward us, 25 young men slipping over concrete in metal cleats and trying to beat the storm. Their jerseys, made of thin red mesh, read SANTA FE. The grandstand is the only shelter at Fort Marcy, so all of us, players and spectators, huddle together listening to the rain. It’s the last home game of the 2012 season. The summer’s final batting practice is a washout.

The fans do not whisper when the players flop down next to us. No autographs are sought. The Santa Fe Fuego are the newest addition to the Pecos League, a group of six independent minor league baseball teams in Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. The players earn $54 per week and live in homestays with Santa Fe families. They use the same bathroom as the fans, a small concrete cave. (At least there are doors on the stalls, a recent development; for most of the summer, curtains provided the only privacy.) Later tonight, after the crowd has left, the players will scour the grandstand for trash, collecting stray napkins and mashed foil containers holding the remnants of our $3 burgers. There are no grounds crews in the Pecos League.

The Fuego sip from outsize gas-station soda cups and work their way through thick wads of chewing tobacco, waiting for the game to begin. Though players cycle through the Pecos League with revolving-door regularity, I’ve been following the Fuego long enough now—since the beginning of their debut season—to know the ones who’ve stuck around. There’s Brandon Thompson, a mountainous, hard-throwing reliever from Montana, who looks as though he should be hauling some large vehicle in a strongman competition. There’s Andrew “Archie” Archbold, the quick center fielder, with his bad goatee that doesn’t entirely link up at his bony chin. His jersey dangles off him as if from a hanger. Bill Moore, the Fuego’s manager, says that Archie “weighs 120 pounds when he’s got rocks in his pocket and it’s raining.” It’s raining.

Late July is monsoon season in northern New Mexico. Storms gather over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the afternoon, then dissipate or roll in and briefly batter the town, cooling the high desert. Tonight’s opposition, the Roswell Invaders, a far superior team by every statistical measure, don’t join us under the grandstand. They huddle beneath the small roof of the visiting dugout, getting wet. Call it a home-field advantage.

The pounding eventually lets up and sun filters through the clouds, filling the sky with the kind of wild light that helps fuel Santa Fe’s economy, drawing second-homers and tourists who come to paint watercolors of the evenings. More fans arrive. The Invaders emerge from the visiting dugout in jerseys the color of antifreeze. Archie sprints to center, leading the home team onto the field for the last time this summer.

With the exception of the center fielder, the Fuego are big, powerful men who do not embody the Platonic ideal of athleticism. They fill out their uniforms in the belly and ass. They are strong hitters, with the second-best batting average in the league. Defense is the chink in their armor. The Fuego’s pitchers have, on average, given up nearly one run for every inning of the season; their cumulative earned-run average is more than 8.00. (A good major league pitcher’s is around 3.00.) The fielding has been a bounty of errors. July was particularly merciless. The Fuego have lost 16 of their last 23 games.

The players like to point out that many of these losses came by one run. They like to say that with a break here or there, things might have turned out differently. But blind pride is a job requirement for athletes, and no amount of it can sway the hard fact that the Fuego have an anaconda grip on last place in the Pecos League.

Independent leagues sit at the bottom of professional baseball’s sprawling caste system. They are essentially the minor leagues’ minor leagues, consisting of players trying to reach the Single A, Double A, and Triple A farm teams affiliated with major league clubs. The publication Baseball America, which is the authority on these matters, has ranked North America’s independent leagues by payroll. The Pecos didn’t even pay its players enough to make those rankings. According to a Baseball America official, the Pecos is “the lowest level of professional baseball” currently in existence.

To occupy last place in the Pecos League, then, is to lay claim to a singular title. Absolute superlatives are tossed off too often and easily in the sports world, but this one is not negotiable: As of July 25, 2012, the Santa Fe Fuego are, empirically speaking, the worst professional baseball team in America.

And yet here I am. I’ve spent too many hours this summer at Fort Marcy. Maybe it’s everything the Pecos League lacks: scouts, agents, corporate funding, and the kind of dancing-bear kitsch that fills most minor league productions. Or maybe it’s just nostalgia, the baseball junkie’s favorite opiate. Out here on the concrete bleachers, I sometimes feel as though I’ve been dropped into a pre-steroidal epoch when the second basemen were short, the relievers were fat, and you could almost see yourself out there on the field. You’d never go to an NFL game, watch the centaurs lobotomizing one another, and think, Man, that could have been me. But the fantasy of self-projection, an old and fading tradition in baseball, is still alive down here in the Pecos League. These are not the automatons who have taken over the New York Yankees I grew up rooting for. On blue nights like this, I envision myself out in center getting a jump on a ball to the gap. The marvelous opening line of one of the great baseball books, Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, once again arrives in my head: “I’m 30 years old, and I have these dreams.”

If this all sounds a little ridiculous, well, I am 30 years old, I still own my cleats from college, and I’ve spent the better part of the summer eating $3 burgers. Besides, underdogs are easy to love. Over the past three months, inside what has at times seemed like a throwaway season in a throwaway league, I have found an extremely tough group of athletes who are willing to take real risks and make deep sacrifices in pursuit of a quixotic goal. Their dedication has reminded me of something essential about sports: Outside the confines of a major league stadium (or your TV screen), they are an occasionally comedic, often brutal endeavor with truly high stakes. There are unexpected bursts of inspiration—a 90-mile-an-hour fastball, a tape-measure home run—to remind you that these guys do, in fact, have a chance to scrap their way out of the cellar and into the higher reaches of pro ball. The Fuego play hard, and they play hurt, and they play to win. It just usually doesn’t pan out that way.

One

On November 9, 2011, Rodney Tafoya stood in a long line at Santa Fe city hall. He was clean-shaven and wearing a sharp beige sports jacket, his black hair immaculately sculpted with gel. His trim, five-foot-nine build was betrayed only by the first swellings of a middle-aged belly. He had two minutes to speak, and he had no notes, but his intentions were unambiguous. He planned to convince the city government to give him one more shot at greatness. He felt a passion rising inside him. Time was running short. He was 47 years old.

In the fall of 2010, Andrew Dunn, a former college ballplayer turned part-time real estate agent and Internet programmer, had managed to scrape together enough money to start his own small league. He’d previously owned a team in the foundering Continental League, and when that organization folded, Dunn saw opportunity. (Lacking the major league economic backing that the more prestigious, affiliated leagues enjoy, independent leagues are constantly refinancing, going out of business, or joining forces and rebooting under new names.) The Pecos League’s inaugural 2011 season was relatively successful, but following the summer two of the six teams folded. Dunn decided to replace them with two expansion teams. He wanted to put one in Santa Fe.

The team didn’t yet have a name. (At one point, Dunn had proposed calling it the Sangres—the Bloods. This did not go over well.) More urgently, Dunn didn’t have permission to sell beer at Fort Marcy, a public park and the only ball field in Santa Fe with adequate seating. (A city ordinance bans the sale of alcohol in public parks.) In a league where teams made nearly all their money from beer and ticket sales, this effectively prohibited games from being played at all. But Dunn had an ally on the city council, an avid baseball fan named Ron Trujillo. With Trujillo’s aid, Dunn proposed an amendment that would allow Santa Fe’s fledgling club to sell beer at Fort Marcy. A spirited debate ensued, fought on the op-ed pages of the local papers and at a series of public meetings, culminating in the November gathering at city hall. At the end of the meeting, the fate of the Fuego would be decided. Any Santa Fe resident was welcome to comment. The line of speakers stretched around the walls of the room, past the long desk where the council members sat.

The debate divided largely along class lines. The team’s supporters seemed to consist mostly of young families. The opposition was older and lived in the vicinity of the park. Fort Marcy sits at the intersection of two roads: One of them leads to the lush village of Tesuque, where Cormac McCarthy owns a house, the other to a series of gated communities and the local ski area. The opposition’s argument was simple: Beer and baseball would aggravate the town’s not insignificant drunk-driving problem. The team’s supporters accused the wealthy residents of elitist NIMBYism.

The president of the local chamber of commerce spoke in support of the team, as did a man in a faded Albuquerque Dukes shirt who brought photos of his father playing at Fort Marcy in 1951. The owner of Santa Fe’s most popular bar worried that the pros would mess up the playing surface for his softball league. An elderly man who lived near the park barked, “There will be car crashes, there will be drunken driving!” A woman in a rainbow scarf alleged a conspiracy between the city and the league, calling it a “D-u-n-n deal.”

Then it was Tafoya’s turn. Tafoya, a vice president at an Albuquerque branch of Bank of the West, was something of a local celebrity. He grew up in Santa Fe, where his brother, Jack, showing foresight, taught him to throw left-handed by tying his right arm behind his back. The boys’ father fought in Normandy; their mother worked in a nursing home. Tafoya starred in little league and high school and acquitted himself well playing for two small colleges, but he was not drafted. He pieced together a career pitching in minor leagues throughout the United States and Mexico before an injury drove him into banking.

Rod Tafoya speaks before the Santa Fe City Council.

Now Tafoya stepped up to the mic, placed his hands on either side of the podium, and spoke firmly. He told the crowd two things. One was that baseball and beer were synonymous. “I played in Canada, I played in Mexico,” he said. “I played in the minor leagues here in the United States. There was never a venue that didn’t sell beer. How can you have baseball without beer? I mean, come on.”

The other was that Tafoya was planning a comeback. He hadn’t pitched professionally since 2006, with a Mexican team, but he had the itch again. He told the city council that he wanted the opportunity to take the mound one last time in his hometown. “I will be the oldest pitcher in the United States in independent baseball,” he said, but “I can still throw an 86-mile-per-hour fastball. So in my heart, if they give me a spring-training tryout, you can bet your life that I’m going to make this team.” He raised his fist to enthusiastic cheers.

Four hours after the meeting began, the council voted. The panel split evenly, four for the amendment and four against. The mayor cast the deciding vote: There would be beer, and there would be baseball.

The task of assembling the Fuego fell to a 67-year-old veteran college coach named Bill Moore. When Andrew Dunn came calling in the fall of 2011, Moore was living in Mesa, Arizona, where his wife, Billie, ran a beauty center in an assisted-living home. Moore had spent the previous three years managing the Bisbee Copper Kings, in the Pacific Southwest League—a wood-bat summer league for college players—where he had achieved a 93-28 record, winning the conference three years running. That fall, however, the league had folded under the weight of unforeseen financial turmoil.

When Moore visited Santa Fe, he was unimpressed by Fort Marcy Park’s diminutive dimensions. The field measured 340 feet from home plate to left field, 355 to dead center, and 285 to right. Most pro parks are at least 320 feet down the lines and 400 in center. Fort Marcy’s small size combined with the thin mountain air—Santa Fe’s elevation is 7,300 feet—would guarantee plenty of home runs, but Moore preferred fundamentals and small ball: singles, bunts, stolen bases. Still, the chance to start a team from whole cloth was enticing. And though he’d spent three decades in baseball as a coach and scout, at one point even consulting with the Montreal Expos, he’d never managed a pro team. More pressingly, he was out of work. Dunn had found his manager.

Most of the hundred-odd players who showed up for tryouts that winter were in their early or mid-twenties: independent league veterans, recent college graduates, a few older guys hoping to reignite careers that had gone cold. Independent league players are scrappers, dreamers, and drifters hanging on to one common goal: getting out. One hundred and thirty eight players from the Pecos League have moved up to higher leagues in the past two years, but none have made it to the majors. Playing in the Pecos is thus somewhat akin to betting everything on a single hand of blackjack.

Bill Moore had no major league dreams. He just wanted to win. He had a budget of $2,000 a week and a simple plan: recruit power hitters who could consistently knock balls out of Fort Marcy. He was going to fill up the scoreboard. He started calling former colleagues and players—“somebody who might know somebody,” as he put it to me—and lining up prospects from college ball, professional leagues in Australia and Sweden, and other Pecos League teams that had succumbed to financial realities.

Forty-seven players were invited to a weeklong spring training at the beginning of May. Tafoya was among them. So were two players from a Kansas summer league: Scot Palmer, a 245-pound catcher who had played at Kansas’s Newman University, and Andrew Archbold, the skinny center fielder.

Palmer was surprised to get the call. At the end of the 2011 summer season, following a lackluster senior year at Newman, he’d dislocated a hip in a collision at home plate. He hadn’t expected to hear from any pro teams. When Moore asked about his health in October 2011, Palmer said he was 100 percent. At the time, he was using a cane and working as a valet at a Wichita casino. But he rehabbed furiously, and in April he and Archie caravanned to Santa Fe. Both men drove old Saturn sedans. Fifteen miles outside Trinidad, Colorado, Palmer’s engine blew up. He took what he could carry, threw it in Archbold’s car, and sold the remains of his vehicle for $125 to a guy he found in a gas station.

Palmer had not fully understood what he was getting into. It turned out the Fuego didn’t pay for players’ lodgings during spring training, and he had $37,000 dollars in student loans to pay off. To save money he ate only granola, and he quickly began to lose weight. He worried about his chances of making the team; there was another catcher in camp, too, a terrific defender from Australia named Kieran Bradford who’d played in the Pecos League the previous year. One night, at the Motel 6, he and Archbold noticed that Archie’s trunk was popped. Someone had broken in and stolen the center fielder’s baseball bag with all his gear. He and Palmer trolled the parking lot and found the bag dumped behind a car. The thieves had only wanted Archie’s iPod.

Palmer had had enough. He told a teammate he was planning to return home to Kansas, that he couldn’t afford to try out for the Fuego. But when he got back to the hotel following practice, he saw everyone packing. They had a new home: Tafoya’s house. Fifteen of them bunked there, on couches, on chairs, on the floor. Evan Kohli, a bruising first baseman from Minnesota, packed his six-foot-three, 205-pound frame into a recliner. Palmer slept on the hardwood floor. One night, Tafoya cooked everyone hot dogs.

In the second week of May, Moore announced the opening-day roster. Twenty-two of the 33 players were active, which meant they would make $54 per week plus travel expenses. The rest were the “taxi squad.” They would be invited to all home games, but they wouldn’t be paid and had to cover their own travel and hotels if they wanted to accompany the team on the road. Palmer, Kohli, Bradford, and Archbold made the active team. So did Tafoya. The comeback was on.

Tafoya called his teammates with the semipro Albuquerque Athletics and told them he would not be widely available for the summer. He didn’t need permission from anyone else. He had never married and had no children. “I would love to get married, I would love to have a family,” he told me. “But the one thing I’m not willing to give up is baseball.”

Two

My own encounter with the Fuego began with a fastball to the head. It was a bright, cold night in May, and more than 1,000 fans turned out, many of them clad in Fuego red, to see the first pro baseball game in Santa Fe’s history, against the Triggers of Trinidad, Colorado. Several friends and I decided we would check out the action, too. Beer sales weren’t yet up and running, the public-address system went in and out, and the scoreboard barely worked. No matter. The crowd greeted the Fuego with glee.

Tafoya got the start. There may have been more deserving pitchers, but Tafoya had a sort of emeritus status on the team for reasons both honorary and practical: He was the Fuego’s oldest and most experienced player, and half the guys still slept on his floor. Even Moore, the manager, bunked in the guest room. He was wise to keep Tafoya happy. A group of fans, led by a 59-year-old part-time artist named David Nava, who’d grown up on Tafoya’s street, stood at the back of the grandstand with cardboard signs spelling out the pitcher’s name.

Tafoya wound, kicked, and delivered a fastball: strike one. This was followed by two sliders, which were called balls, and another fastball, which the leadoff batter for the Triggers obliterated. It sailed over the right-field fence. One–zero, Triggers.

The game slowed dramatically after that. The Fuego scored their first five runs without getting a hit, on account of the Triggers’ generous pitchers, who walked ten, and fielders, who committed eight errors. Three hours after the opening pitch, it was still the fourth inning. In the stands, glee was fast turning to boredom.

The crowd was filtering out when an imposing, six-foot-six Triggers pitcher threw a fastball into Fuego utility man Nick Muller’s head. It sounded like an ax hitting dry wood. The activity of the crowd—the bustle at the burger stand, the occasional tepid chants—came to a halt. Muller staggered, listing forward and aft. The Fuego poured off the bench.

The crowd—I’ll confess to being complicit here—chanted “Wild Thing!” Once peace was restored, the man on the PA announced that those in attendance had a “terrific opportunity to get involved with Fuego baseball” by hosting one of the players for the duration of the season. A friend of mine scoured the field, looking for cute potential tenants, but found none to her liking.

Four more Fuego batters were hit over the course of the game. Brawls were averted, though a Trinidad coach was ejected. The Fuego emerged victorious, but disagreement persists over the score, which the Santa Fe New Mexican reported as 14–8 and the team’s website reported as 16–8. Archbold showed promise, with three hits and five runs batted in. Tafoya, who gave up eight hits, five walks, and eight runs over three-plus innings, saw room for improvement. “If I can keep the ball down and make a few adjustments,” he told a newspaper reporter, “I know I’ll be fine.”

Before I get much further, I should own up to a certain lack of critical distance.

I have something of a baseball problem. I inherited it, unoriginally, from my father, who at one point proposed naming me Homer. I grew up worshipping at the altar of the Yankee second baseman Willie Randolph. During my freshman year at Yale, I walked onto the baseball team, the only Bulldog who hadn’t been recruited specifically to play ball. The dugout was full of outsize guys from Florida and North Carolina who threw 90 miles per hour. With my five-foot-nine frame and dearth of recruiting letters, I earned the nickname Scholar. My teammates were surprised that I’d made the squad at all.

All the incoming freshmen players except for me pledged the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (George W. Bush’s). After hitting the weight room in the morning, they would walk around campus in a small pack, hats flipped backward, first to the dining hall for piles of eggs, then to their classes—which, it seemed, they all took together. But they were not on the team for the camaraderie. They were there to dominate. I was not. I dreaded the weight room, the locker room, even the field. The sport felt survivalist.

At the end of the semester, I transferred to Middlebury College, which had recruited me for baseball. Vermont breathed something back into my relationship with the game. When I say that I was not a very good player, I am not engaging in false modesty. One year, on the first day of practice, I broke my foot playing pickup basketball. In my best season, I started in right field, batted ninth, hit .340, and stole a few bases. In my senior year, I dove into a fence, wrecked my back, and batted an anemic .239. But baseball was once again a source of joy. It was the absurd rituals, the inside jokes, and the prevailing feeling that, if nine guys worked in unison, a group could produce something worthwhile. This notion proved to be unfounded for our team, which never made the league playoffs, but why not pull up your socks and engage in a little delusion? That’s the point.

My attachment to the more marginal forms of baseball lingered after graduation. During a summer spent fishing in Montana, I earned extra cash by working as an usher for the local minor league team. I don’t recall the Missoula Osprey winning a single game I worked, but there were a charming group of homeless fans who convened regularly on a hill above center field to vocally brutalize the opposition. You don’t get that at the new Yankee Stadium. You get sushi and Delta banners.

If the Osprey seemed old-school, the Fuego were downright prehistoric. At the beginning of the year, I had gone as far as considering trying out for the team. When I told Moore, he smiled kindly. “Everyone thinks they can play,” he said. “If you’re feeling froggy, show up to batting practice in some baseball pants.” I didn’t put on the baseball pants. I wasn’t good enough, even for the Fuego. But I did keep showing up.

Three

Beer sales proved more problematic than Dunn had anticipated, due to miscommunication regarding the permits. The drinking area, it turned out, had to be isolated from the rest of the crowd by fencing. On May 24, though, two weeks after the home opener, the requisite paperwork was filed, the bureaucrats were satisfied, and the Santa Fe Brewery set up a properly fenced-in beer garden up the left-field line.

This had the effect of isolating the drinkers from the rest of the crowd and prohibiting parents from enjoying a beer. Still, you take what you can get. It was about time for some good news. The team was now three and seven, and attendance had dipped considerably since the first, glorious thousand-fan game. But the Fuego had the chance to win back the home crowd. It was a cool summer night, and the White Sands Pupfish were coming to town.

The Fuego had played, and lost to, White Sands on their first road series a week and a half earlier. The Pupfish’s home field is in Alamogordo, New Mexico, not far from the White Sands Missile Range, a 3,200-square-mile swath of desert where the U.S. Army tests weapons. The area’s signature inhabitant is the oryx, a large African antelope introduced in the early 1970s by New Mexico Department of Game and Fish chairman Frank C. Hibben, a mercurial archaeology professor and big-game aficionado, so he could hunt them for sport. The oryx would have been a natural local mascot for the White Sands team—its long, spearlike horns demand attention—but Andrew Dunn, for unknown reasons, had instead chosen the pupfish. A threatened species native to the desert’s streams, the pupfish is about two inches long and has been described as a biological relic. The jersey designers didn’t bother trying to incorporate its image into the White Sands uniform.

The Pupfish could hit, though, and as the fifth-place team they were the closest thing the Fuego had to a bitter rival. When Santa Fe arrived in town on May 15, White Sands had recently cut two players: Jason Hyland, a burly outfielder from Massachusetts, and Trent Evins, a pitcher from eastern Oregon. Before the first game, Pupfish coach Chris Paterson had offered the two to Moore. Moore snapped them up, cutting a couple of lesser Fuego players to make room.

Evins had been scouted by the Red Sox but was never drafted. He was tough, though, a fighter with a husky build and unkempt facial hair. He wore cowboy boots and a cowboy hat and worked in a plywood mill in the off-season. Moore told him that he had one shot to make it with the Fuego. Evins packed his bags and moved across the field.

The Fuego lost the first game Evins started, against the Cowboys of Alpine, Texas, but Moore liked what he saw. Evins threw hard, and he threw strikes. The coach invited him back to Santa Fe. It was an eight-hour drive; Palmer rode back with him in Evins’s old Audi. They talked about baseball, girls, and fathers. Evins’s, a former pro ballplayer who’d played with one of the San Diego Padres’ farm teams, had died of a heart attack when Evins was in high school. Soon after Evins and Palmer got back to town, they discovered that a homestay for two players had opened up with a mother of two named Andrea Probst. They moved in together. Their first night in the house was awkward until Probst offered them beers. Then they sang karaoke to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” with their new teenage home brother and sister.

Now back on the Fuego’s turf, Moore was starting Evins against his former teammates from White Sands. Evins was out for revenge. He opened strong, striking out five batters through the first four innings. His slider bit. His changeup made his heavy fastball look harder than it was. Then the Pupfish managed to get two balls in the air, both of which carried over the short Fort Marcy fences.

Out in left field, Dunn was speaking to local reporters near the beer garden. The commissioner, who is about five foot ten, with a trim, athletic build, wore a blue Pecos League polo shirt, creased black slacks, and a Bluetooth headset. He spoke quickly, in a flat tone, and did his best to avoid his interviewers’ eyes. One reporter asked how long the city would possibly support the team, given the Fuego’s poor performance. I couldn’t make out Dunn’s answer. From the beer garden a fan called out, “Somebody buy a beer for Coach Moore!” On the mound, Evins kept mowing down Pupfish: the fifth, sixth, and seventh innings passed without another run crossing the plate. The Fuego, it seemed, had found their ace.

In the bottom of the seventh, Archbold hit a single and stole second easily. Another batter walked, and then Hyland came to the plate. He was angry. He hadn’t been given an opportunity on the Pupfish before they cut him, and he’d been struggling since the Fuego picked him up. Hyland was a proud jock in early winter. Nine years earlier, he had led the University of Tampa to the Division II College World Series, where he won the most valuable player award. Following his senior year, however, he suffered a herniated disk and had two spinal-cord surgeries. Now he was attempting a comeback. But at 29, he was an old man in the Pecos League. He did not hide his emotions. Before the game he’d been jawing at the Pupfish.

The White Sands starter, Kyle Smart, served up the pitch, and Hyland unloaded on it. The ball soared over the right-field wall and disappeared from view beyond a row of tall trees. Hyland dropped his bat, watched the ball, jogged slowly toward first base, then whooped and twirled his finger in the air, the universal sign for a home run. The Fuego had the lead. Someone handed Dunn a plastic bucket. The voice crackled over the PA system: You will see commish Andrew Dunn passing the hat for Jason Hyland for hitting a three-run home run to put us in the lead!

The crowd chanted: “Fill the hat! Fill the hat!”

You can host a player and find out what it’s like to be involved in major league—in semi—in pro baseball here in Santa Fe!

“Fill the hat! Fill the hat!”

As Hyland passed third, the Pupfish started barking at him. Moore was displeased.

All donations are tax deductible and go directly to the player!

Evan Kohli was up next. The Pupfish pitcher threw a fastball into the square of his back, clearly an act of retaliation for Hyland’s theatrics. Man on first, one out. The bucket kept circulating through the crowd. I threw a dollar in.

These guys toil all day just like the big guys but don’t get the same paycheck!

The pitcher served up a meatball, and Josh Valle, the third baseman, hit it over the short right-field wall. Kissed his fingers, tapped his chest, pointed to the sky. Six–two, Fuego.

In the top of the eighth inning, Moore removed Evins. He had struck out 13 Pupfish. Moore sent in a reliever named Joey Garcia, who allowed, in short order, one fly out, two singles, a hit batter, a walk, and three home runs. Moore removed Garcia, but the damage was done: The Pupfish were back in the lead, the crowd deflated.

Palmer hit a home run in the bottom of the eighth—Let’s pass the hat for Scottie “Big Stick” Palmer!—but it was too little, too late, especially because, one inning later, the Pupfish managed a grand slam. The scoreboard, unable to process the number of runs the visitors had just scored, broke.

Remember, fans, tomorrow is dollar hot dog night!

Four

Two days later I drove to Rod Tafoya’s house, now the Fuego’s unofficial headquarters and bunkhouse. A row of wood bats were lined up on the porch next to a stack of copies of Tafoya’s autobiography, Ageless Arm: My Passion Lives in the Core!, which a small New Mexico publisher had put out the previous year. A 1980s Chevrolet Corsica sporting faded stickers from the Erie Sailors and the Boise Hawks was parked on a driveway made of worn Astroturf. Ballplayers wandered around the street dressed in a manner familiar to anyone who has been to Florida in March: tight tank tops, gelled hair, baggy shorts, flip-flops, metallic necklaces. Tafoya was away, working at the bank.

Moore, who is about five foot five, greeted me at the door wearing denim shorts, old Top-Siders, no shirt, and his permanent smile. He was fit and muscled, all torso. His skin was sun beaten and wrinkled in a grid around his neck. The number 25, which he has worn his whole career, was tattooed on both of his shoulder blades. A straight white line divided his chest evenly, the result of emergency quadruple-bypass heart surgery two years earlier.

One morning in March 2010, Moore woke up with heart palpitations. Soon he was in the operating room watching the doctors shave his chest. While he was on morphine in intensive care following the surgery, Moore foresaw his death. He immediately and frantically started counting baseball games. “I tried to figure out how many games I’d played and coached in,” he told me. “Keep in mind I was drugged up, but I came to some conclusion it was around 5,000.” He was back on the field two months later for opening day with his Bisbee team, though he did give up Copenhagen, of which he’d previously chewed a can a day—two during doubleheaders.

Baseball was one of two great constants in Moore’s life; the other was his wife, Billie. He had committed himself to both shortly after returning from Vietnam, where he’d served in the Navy for four years, five months, and eleven days—“not that I was counting,” he said. At 22, he tried out for the team at Phoenix Community College. The manager had offered him a role as a player-coach, and he’d sat on benches ever since. In between coaching gigs, he supported his wife and two daughters by running a used-car dealership, Aloha Bill’s Garden of Gears, which he sold in 2000. Since then, Billie had pulled in the lion’s share of the family income. For the past 40 years, whenever he was on the road, Moore had written Billie a weekly love letter. He occasionally sent them when they were under the same roof, too. The mailman would pick up the letter on Monday and deliver it back to the house on Wednesday.

Moore led me into Tafoya’s house, which smelled of cologne. A television nearly the size of a pool table occupied one corner, and jars of nutritional supplements and creatine were everywhere. Moore poured coffee; it was the one habit he hadn’t given up since the operation. He seemed undaunted by the Fuego’s losing streak, which was now up to seven games. He was encouraged by Evins’s performance, and he had added other promising players, including a 25-year-old outfielder from Georgia named Parris Austin, who had been drafted relatively high by the New York Mets a few years back and cut after one year in Single A ball. “I’m psyched about him,” Moore said. To make room for the additions, he had cut Hyland. This came as no surprise to the other players on the team. Coach Moore did not go in for showboating.

Moore was looking forward to ending the White Sands series, which had been unforgiving, and to facing the first-place Las Cruces Vaqueros and the second-place Alpine Cowboys. “Alpine kicked our ass badly last time,” he said. He attributed the losses to his pitching staff, which had thrown nothing but “titty-high fastballs.”

That trend, however, showed no sign of abating. On June 1, Tafoya started against the Vaqueros and gave up ten hits in five innings for a 9–4 loss. He was not making adjustments, he was not keeping the ball down, and he was not fine. He was working on a new pitch, a cut fastball, which was working with only minimal effect. He was 0-2.

By this point in the season, I was regularly sneaking away early from my job to attend Fuego games. I had become accustomed to the quirks of the Pecos League. The players hung out behind the home dugout eating snacks before the game and occasionally mingling with fans. The scoreboard usually broke around the fourth inning or whenever one team scored more than 10 runs. Half the time, nobody really seemed to be in charge. You could pay for your ticket if you wanted to wait in a line, or you could just walk in and sit down. The announcer, a guy named Rick, got players’ names wrong. More often than not we lost.

On June 5, the afternoon before the Fuego once again faced the Alpine Cowboys, I was standing on the field with Moore when one of the Alpine coaches approached. He wanted ice and water.

“It’s not here yet,” Moore said. “It’ll get here. I just don’t know when.”

“I need ice for my pitchers’ arms.”

“Well, I need ice, too,” Moore said. “And I want a fucking tractor and a mat. And pitching mounds for the bullpen. But I don’t have them. This is the City Different, Santa Fe. What do they call it?”

“Mañana Land,” I offered.

“Mañana Land. It’ll get here, I just don’t know when.”

Moore was exasperated. He had been under the impression that the city was going to provide a certain amount of maintenance at Fort Marcy. But the deal that Dunn had struck with the council was bare-bones: The league paid a $1,750 fee to rent the field for the season’s 34 home games, as well as 10 percent of food and beer sales. The city would maintain the field surface as it did any other public park. But additional improvements, such as mounds in the bullpen or doors for the stalls in the bathrooms, had to come from the team. A volunteer trainer from the local hospital brought the ice.

“I need ice for injuries,” the coach repeated.

“Well, it’ll get here, but I got water for now,” Moore said. “I’ll be honest, though. My priority at the moment is seeing whether they finally put any shit paper in the bathroom”—there had been no toilet paper at Fort Marcy for a week—“and I’m about to find out.”

A couple of Fuego pitchers approached, seeking permission to go for a run. “Did you take care of your responsibilities?” Moore asked. In the Pecos League, all the minutiae that goes into producing the theater of baseball—raking the infield dirt, laying down the chalk lines, watering the field, cleaning the stands—falls to the players. The pitchers had completed their duties. “Go for it,” Moore said.

“OK,” one of the players said. “We’re going to do a five-mile—”

Moore waved them off. “Don’t tell me. You’re making me tired.”

That evening brought mercy. In the seventh inning, Austin laid down a good bunt between home plate and the pitcher’s mound, and Archbold slid home far ahead of the throw from the pitcher. Following the play, the two outfielders pointed at each other in ritual celebration.

But Archbold was aware that Austin represented a threat. He and Austin shared the gift of speed and little else. Austin was 25, Archbold 23. Austin was six foot three and built like a wide receiver, strong and lean; Archbold was five foot ten with a body type that called to mind uncooked spaghetti. Austin was aloof, with the breezy confidence of someone accustomed to walking onto fields and being picked first. Archbold was painfully quiet. In the off-season, Austin moonlighted as a model. Archbold worked the cash register at a Lowe’s in Wichita, Kansas.

Austin was the only member of the Fuego who had briefly placed a foot in the promised land. A high school star in Douglasville, Georgia, he was selected by the Mets in the 2004 amateur draft and made the Mets’ Class A affiliate Hagerstown Suns in 2006, at age 20. There he struggled, batting .281 with eight strikeouts, two stolen bases, and just one RBI in 32 at-bats. He was cut at the end of the season, cast from the anointed inner circle of affiliated ball out to the distant periphery of the independent leagues.

Two years later he signed on with the Alexandria Aces, in the Pecos’s precursor, the now defunct Continental League, to attempt a comeback at age 23. According to the Aces’ coach that year, a Salt Lake City–based high school teacher named Dan Shwam, “Parris was really a phenomenal athlete. One of the best athletes I’ve ever managed. His flaw was mental toughness, being focused every day. At times Parris acted like he really wanted to play. At times it seemed like he didn’t care to be there.… He had the makeup of a Triple A guy, but he never figured it out.” Shwam cut Austin at the end of the year.

Archbold possessed neither Austin’s natural gifts nor his disdain for work. He’d gone unnoticed in high school and had managed to walk onto the baseball team at Pennsylvania’s Waynesburg University after getting recruited to run cross-country. Two years later, he was playing in a summer league in Kansas when the coach from Sterling College recruited him. Archie starred at Sterling, batting .408 and stealing 29 bases in his senior year to lead the conference in both categories. He was conference player of the year and an all-American but never got a look from any affiliated minor league teams.

“As far as athletic ability, raw talent, he’s middle of the pack,” said Adrian Dinkel, Sterling’s manager, who was an assistant coach during Archbold’s senior year. “If you’re six-six and left-handed, you’re going to get drafted.” Archie wasn’t and didn’t.

Archie did have one singular talent: an uncanny ability to read the ball off the bat. I’ve never seen a center fielder—my former position—get reads like him. He was waiting under just about every fly ball that came his way that summer. It was a marvel to watch but seemed unlikely to get him far. Teammates valued what Archie delivered, but scouts preferred power, multiple tools, the opaque notion of potential.

The Fuego won 9–5 in their second game against Alpine, closing out the series with a 7-13 record. That put them just two and a half games behind fifth-place White Sands, who they were playing in their next road series. I wondered if Archie would be back when the team returned. I recognized Austin’s quiet cockiness; guys like him usually meant trouble for scrappers like me and Archie. I had learned in college ball that the spoils in sports often went to the players who grasped most fully that the team’s success and their own had little to do with each other. The Bulldogs I played with at Yale had three pitchers who went on to be drafted in high rounds, and the team came in last place in the Ivy League the spring after I transferred. A friend who played minor league ball once told me that at that level, you have to value the physical act of hitting or throwing a baseball far more than the notion of a team.

The Pecos League, for all its charms, was no different. I knew that the Fuego were killers. They had to be. You don’t live in homestays on $54 a week as a lifestyle choice. You do it in order to move up and move out. And getting cut from the Pecos League can be fatal. There are no lower landing pads.

Archie was not a mercenary. I say this not because he played my former position, or because I admired the gorgeous routes he took to the ball, or because, like me, he couldn’t hit much, or because he refused to talk poorly about other teammates. I say it because he was the rare ballplayer who genuinely didn’t care about statistics. I asked him how many bases he’d stolen—he was close to leading the league for a while—and he didn’t know. He took a karmic view of the game. “When you’re looking out for your teammates,” he told me, “looking to play for the team rather than yourself, you seem to be rewarded.”

This sounded awfully noble, but I wasn’t sure how far it would get Archie. The Fuego weren’t winning games, and losing breeds personnel change. Turnover was the only constant in the Pecos League. Even though I’d attended most of the games, by this point in the season I recognized only a handful of players. Moore received calls every day from former colleagues, players looking for work or coaches who’d had to cut guys they liked.

The volume of these calls began increasing in June, which was not unusual. Pro baseball’s amateur draft happens in early June, and it sends ripples throughout the various minor leagues. There are only so many roster spots; to make room for fresh prospects, affiliated teams cut players. The ones who don’t catch on with other affiliated teams filter down into the higher independent leagues, which then have to make cuts of their own. The dominoes fell through the fiefdoms, and eventually, Moore had his pick of new players.

When the Fuego came home from White Sands, I went to the ballpark. I saw Archie but not Austin. Where was Parris? I asked Moore.

“Our left fielder leads the league in home runs, and we have arguably the best defensive center fielder in the league,” Moore said. “Parris was the fifth outfielder.” He’d been sent home to Georgia.

Austin declined to be interviewed when I reached him to ask about his Fuego experience. I expected as much. He was a ballplayer. You have to be proud. It’s a professional requirement.

Santa Fe Fuego pitcher Rod Tafoya. (Photo by Ryan Heffernan)

Five

A sense of unease had settled over the Fuego by late June. In 2011, 43 players from the Pecos moved to higher independent leagues or affiliated teams. By the middle of the 2012 season, only a handful had. It became harder to ignore the fact that most Fuego players were destined to stick around and become that dreaded thing: a Pecos League veteran. Fifty-odd bucks a week, hotels with three beds in a room, grounds-crew duties, dinner at Applebee’s on a good night.

Even Tafoya, an inveterate dreamer, recognized how bleak the odds were. “Why go for a guy that can hit home runs in the lowest of leagues when you can get a guy who’s 18 out of high school with the same power?” he told me. “It’s just the way it works. They want youth.” Still, he was reluctant to say as much to his younger teammates. “You never want to destroy anyone’s hopes and dreams. Because in baseball you really never know what could happen. The odds are astronomical, but you never know. You just never know.”

Tafoya’s own career was a testament to this conviction. After finishing a promising college-ball career with no interest from minor league teams in the United States, he headed south to Mexico. He quickly rose through that country’s minor league ranks, earning an invitation in 1987 to spring training with Mexico City’s Diablos Rojos, powerhouse of the Triple-A Mexican League, which hosted many former and future major leaguers.

This was the big time. Tafoya was 23. He put on a suit and took a taxi to spring training, but when he hopped out of the car, the driver sped away with his clothes, cleats, glove, and passport. Then the Diablos cut him. A slightly inferior club, the Rieleros of Aguascalientes, picked him up. Tafoya was still close enough to touch the hem of major league ball: His starting shortstop was the former Texas Ranger Mario Mendoza, a defensive whiz whose prolonged offensive impotence infamously gave birth to the phrase “the Mendoza line,” which refers to a batting average of .200. He had been released by the Rangers five years earlier, in 1982, after it fell to .118.

Tafoya pitched in eight games alongside Mendoza before the Rieleros’ manager cut him. At three in the morning, Tafoya says, the team’s bus deposited him on the side of an empty highway, far from civilization. A coyote howled in the night. Miraculously, a taxi appeared from the blackness. Tafoya eventually made his way back across the border and farther north to Idaho, where he signed on with the Boise Hawks in the Northwest League. The Hawks were an independent team, but this was a Class A league; though Tafoya still wasn’t playing on an affiliated team, at least he was playing against them. He pitched to Mike Piazza and once struck out current Yankees hitting coach Kevin Long. He was the Little Caesars Pizza Player of the Week.

Not long after, though, Tafoya tore a ligament in his elbow while practicing his slider. He didn’t tell anyone and signed up to pitch for another independent team in Erie, Pennsylvania, without fully recovering. It didn’t go well. In 1993, while pitching for a team in Oregon, he took up banking as a side job, then gave up on pro ball in 1998 and moved home to the modest adobe in Santa Fe where he grew up. In his spare time, he began offering his pitching services to local semipro teams, with some success. (Semipro ball falls far below independent league ball in the sport’s hierarchy; games are held at night or on weekends, and players aren’t paid.) As the dream of professional stardom receded, his sports career attained a new focus: His goal in life from now on, he resolved, was to win 300 semipro baseball games.

Tafoya surrounded himself with reminders of his mission. It was on his website—“Countdown to 300!”—and on his car, a black BMW with a vanity plate that read WIN 300. It was the driving narrative arc of his autobiography, Ageless Arm. A year later, he was just 29 wins from his goal. He could taste it. But Tafoya was scrupulous in his accounting, and he did not mix pro wins and semipro wins in his countdown. The two “just aren’t the same thing,” he told me.

This meant that by chasing one last chance at professional baseball glory with the Fuego, he had voluntarily put the brakes on what was now his singular ambition. But a baseball player offered a shot—however remote—at the big time is congenitally incapable of not taking it. It might be hard to imagine that any of the Fuego or their counterparts truly believed that they were going to fight their way up through the ranks to play for the Red Sox or even for a Double A team. But they did. They had to. To be good at whacking a baseball takes an immense amount of concentration focused on a brief moment. It also takes a confidence that’s almost irrational. Perspective is not particularly useful, nor is a close examination of one’s life choices. You have to hope.

On June 20, the Trinidad Triggers were back in town. Tensions were high. The Fuego had recently been feuding with two of the umpires, whom they accused of being antagonistic and vindictive, eager to throw out coaches and players alike. A rumor was circulating that one of the men in question, a Puerto Rican ump named Edwin Ortiz who spoke only limited English, was trying to lead the league in ejections. “They are fucking atrocious,” Moore told me at one point. He pointed at my notebook: “You can put that in there.”

A certain amount of frustration on the umps’ part was understandable. In many ways, their careers paralleled the players’. They were at the bottom of professional baseball’s pecking order, looking to move up, making just $1,500 for the summer while paying their own travel expenses. They felt disrespected by the players; “Indy ball,” one veteran independent league ump told me, “is major league attitude with minor league talent.”

Things had come to a head the previous night in a game against the Vaqueros. Ortiz’s partner and de facto translator, a Santa Fe local named Harold Moya, had called the Fuego’s John Murphy out on two very dubious strikes. In response, Moore calmly walked over to the visiting dugout, picked up a bucket of baseballs, carried them to home plate, and dumped them over Moya’s head.

It was difficult to get suspended for abusing an ump in the Pecos League, so tonight Moore was once again in his customary spot up the third-base line. In the bottom of the first inning, with runners on second and third, Palmer hit a ball farther than he ever had in his life. It traveled out of the confines of Fort Marcy and over the firehouse that sits beyond the left-field wall. Palmer smiled as he jogged around the bases. Both his father, a former powerlifter and high school ballplayer, and his host mom, Andrea Probst, were in the crowd. The Fuego were winning four to nothing. His father went in search of the ball.

In the top of the third inning, Palmer noticed that one of the Triggers, a leadoff batter named John Fabry, was tipping pitches—using hand signals while on the base paths to cue hitters into what was coming next. This is a time-honored practice in baseball, but “don’t make it so fucking obvious,” Palmer told Fabry. He hinted that a fastball to Fabry’s ribs might be in order.

Retaliation came quickly. Later in the same inning, Palmer was standing in the third-base line, calling for someone to cut off an outfielder’s throw, when the Triggers’ shortstop hunched down and sprinted into Palmer at full speed, putting his shoulder into the meat of the catcher’s chest protector. Palmer somersaulted backward.

Even the most lugubrious, cellar-dwelling team achieves a temporary and riotous unity when their catcher is taken out. The Fuego poured from the dugout. Palmer got up out of the dirt and told them to back off. He was fine.

Then there was a single to center. Archbold deftly fielded the ball and threw a dart to Palmer. The catcher turned up the line, where a phone-booth-size designated hitter was rumbling toward him. The runner steamrolled him, and the Fuego cleared the bench again. This time Palmer didn’t stop them. He hobbled off to the dugout, holding his side.

Two days later, Palmer was still out of the lineup and recovering. He was sitting behind the dugout when a man and a young boy approached him. Palmer recognized the man, who looked to be in his mid-thirties. He often sat behind home plate, and Fuego diehards were few enough that an attentive player could identify them by sight. The man introduced himself as Mario Montoya. He worked at an auto-repair shop in town. The boy was his 8-year-old son, Isaiah, who wanted to learn to catch. Palmer showed him the basics: how to hold a ball across the seams, how to squat and set up.

After another game, Montoya’s uncle, David Nava, the artist and former neighbor of Tafoya’s who appeared regularly in the pitcher’s cheering section, approached Palmer.

“I want to talk to you,” he said.

“Yes?” Palmer said.

“That was nice, for you to play with the kid.”

Palmer said they could come by anytime, after any game. Before long, Isaiah and his siblings, 5-year-old Gabriel and 4-year-old Melodie, were bringing gloves to the park, throwing the ball behind the backstop with their cousins. After the games, Palmer would play with them on the field before he helped his teammates clean up the bleachers. Isaiah, Melodie, Gabriel, Montoya, and Nava attended just about every home game. Occasionally, they sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” over the PA system in the seventh inning.

At night, at Montoya’s house, the kids would play Fuego. Isaiah was Palmer, Gabriel was Tafoya, and Melodie was Scott Davis, the shortstop. Palmer started looking forward to seeing them at the games. It made for long evenings. But “baseball sort of became a job,” he told me. “It gave me peace of mind to see them throwing the ball, to throw with them.”

Santa Fe Fuego manager Bill Moore watches his team play the Roswell Invaders after being ejected from the game by umpire Edwin Ortiz. (Photo by Ryan Heffernan)

Six

It was impossible to immerse oneself in the happenings of the Pecos League and not come away with some burning questions about the basic conditions of its existence. How was the league solvent? How did it negotiate minimum-wage laws? Could it seriously not afford to buy some doors for the bathroom stalls?

Andrew Dunn was generally not one to humor such questions. In his limited dealings with the local sporting press, the Pecos League commissioner had acquired a skill for circular and evasive talk. It was sort of like speaking to a politician, but one who avoided eye contact and was prone to snap during the brief interviews he would agree to from time to time. He wouldn’t divulge the league’s finances beyond estimating that the Pecos ran on “about $1.5 million,” or about what Alex Rodriguez makes in a week. (Santa Fe’s 10 percent take of the beer concessions, ostensibly the Fuego’s main source of income, amounted to $831.43 for the entire 2012 season.) Dunn once obliquely mentioned that a former investor in the league had proved to have a criminal record. Who was it, I asked?

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

On another occasion, I asked him about the Fuego’s future or lack thereof. “We’re not going anywhere,” he barked. “I’ll just do it as a hobby if I have to. I don’t care. I just want to play. We’re playing indefinitely.”

What about the park? Would there be improvements for 2013?

“The surface will be better. I’ve heard that their scoreboard might get fixed. They’re going to do speakers.”

Who’s “they”?

“I don’t know. I do not know the answer to that.”

What about the players’ salaries? How were they legal?

“We’re giving them housing, and they’re progressing toward a skill set. They are seasonal workers.”

It was true that the Pecos League players, by virtue of their freelance status, were not subject to minimum-wage laws. Their hold on employment, such as it was, was tenuous in any case. Before the Fuego went south for its late June road trip to Las Cruces and Roswell, Moore received word from Dunn that he soon would have to trim the playoff roster to 25. Moore wanted to take 22 players on the road to save money. He hadn’t used Tafoya in nearly a month, since the June 1 loss. The manager was in a singularly awkward position. How do you cut the man whose guest room you sleep in?

Following the last Trinidad game, a 23–6 victory, Moore announced that he would be reading the names of the active players for the next road trip from a list. Tafoya’s name did not come out of the coach’s mouth.

That night, Tafoya went in his room and locked the door. His thoughts turned dark. He had sacrificed a great deal for the Fuego. He’d opened his home to them and temporarily set aside his goal of 300 semipro wins. He was working 100-plus-hour weeks and was approaching 50. He’d spent the summer driving all over the state in the hope that he would be summoned to throw baseballs, and now this had been taken from him with what seemed to be finality. He deeply loved baseball, and to lose it would be to lose hold of the anchor in his life. He had thrown 97,000 pitches. He didn’t know how many more there might be.

“There’s a very uncomfortable feeling in baseball,” he told me later. “It’s a feeling inside—things just aren’t like they were before. And it happens every day. Guys get released in pro ball every day. It’s just the way it is. You’re older.” Then somebody like Moore came along. “He gives you another shot, and you can’t get anybody out. So what do you do then? You’re at a fork in the road. ‘Do I have what it takes? Am I able to get hitters out?’ That’s it. Can you or can you not?”

Tafoya was lying in bed, thinking, when he heard a knock on the door. It was Moore.

“You got a minute?” the coach asked. Tafoya came out.

“You’re still on the team,” Moore said.

He explained that Tafoya was simply not coming in the van on the next road trip. He was welcome to drive down to Roswell the next weekend if he wished.

Six days later, Tafoya threw his glove and spikes in the WIN 300 BMW and drove the three-plus hours south to Roswell. It was Saturday, June 30, and Moore needed a spot start. The team had won two of five in Las Cruces, bringing its record to 15-27, but was short on pitching. Tafoya had another chance.

It did not go well. The first batter got on base on a shortstop’s error. The next batter singled. Tafoya threw a wild pitch. Fly out. Error. Single. Double. Single. Walk. Walk. Bases loaded. Single. Single, single, single, fly out. Single. The runners came and came and came, and before the third out arrived, Tafoya had given up 10 runs in one inning. Moore removed him.

Tafoya drove home to Santa Fe, where I met him not long after. “They were some big boys,” he said. “And there were some errors.”

I asked when he was starting again.

“When Coach says I’ll pitch, I’ll pitch,” he said, smiling.

Tafoya had brought me to a room in the back of his house, a vast expanse of black and white linoleum tile. It was his baseball room. The walls were lined with shelves full of game balls, all of them filed in chronological order, inscribed with the dates and statistical details of his triumphs: innings pitched, strikeouts, hits. There were 500 balls in the room, 200 of them representing victories. He showed me one from 2009, when he won two semipro games in a day in Puerto Rico, throwing 222 pitches. “That’s when they started calling me Ageless Arm,” he said.

Tafoya sat on the floor and instructed me to sit on the one chair in the room, which was covered with a number 32 jersey from the semipro Albuquerque Brewers. The number 32 was everywhere, on jerseys and in photographs of Tafoya at different stages in his career: young and thin in Idaho, older and with a full face in Puerto Rico. Always smiling.

The effect of the room was dizzying. I felt as though I was inhabiting the sort of monument to athletic achievement I had fiercely desired at age 14. About 15 wooden bats balanced upon one another in a spiral in the center of the room, creating a sort of precarious statue. One of the bats belonged to Kohli, the first baseman. He’d signed it for Tafoya.

“Thanks for being a role model and father figure to me,” it read.

“It doesn’t get much better than that,” Tafoya said.

The Fuego’s poor performance, and his own, upset Tafoya. But he preferred the long view. The playoffs were not mathematically unattainable. He just needed to keep the ball down. He would be fine.

He wanted to show me something. He’d come home to find a note on his door, he said. Philip Rowland, an outfielder Moore had picked up from White Sands, was still staying at the house on Cedar Street, though Moore had cut him after two games; he and Tafoya had become good friends. Looking for a new opportunity, Rowland had done some Internet research while the Fuego were in Roswell, and he’d found that an independent team in California had three batters hitting under .100. The note was scrawled on a bank envelope hanging from Tafoya’s front door:

HEY ROD I MIGHT BE LEAVING TODAY. WHAT’S YOUR PHONE NUMBER? I WANTED TO SAY FOR YOU TO BE 48 AND STILL BE PLAYING AND WORKING YOUR NUTS OFF MAKES YOU A CHAMPION IN MY BOOK. TAKE CARE ROD. PHIL

The Fuego traveled to Trinidad at the beginning of July. Palmer, trying to check his swing in the second game, felt a pop in his wrist. It hurt, but he didn’t think much of it, and he didn’t tell Moore. There was only one other true catcher on the team. Besides, Palmer’s grandmother and uncle had driven down from Wichita to watch him play. There was no way he was leaving the game. He hit a home run later that night and tried to forget about the wrist.

The Fuego finished the series with a 14-28 record. They were in fifth place, but the playoffs were not completely out of reach: The top four teams made the tournament, and the Fuego were only three and a half games behind fourth-place Trinidad. An awful lot of their losses had come by one run. There was reason for hope. They had the leading hitter in the league, Kohli, who was batting around .450, and the home-run leader, a left fielder named Chris Brown who bore more than a passing resemblance to Albert Pujols. Evins was pitching well. Palmer was punishing the ball, despite the wrist. Archie caught everything in the outfield.

But the Fuego needed to make a run. There were only 28 games left in the season. They began promisingly: First-place Alpine came to town, and the Fuego managed a coup, winning 27–10 with a league record for runs in a game. Santa Fe’s pitchers only walked two, and the defense committed no errors. Tafoya pitched an inning with minimal damage. Things were looking up.

Then the wheels came off. Kohli fell into a slump, his average dropping beneath .400. The pitching melted down. Errors mounted. The monsoons came, too. Occasionally, David Nava, Mario Montoya, and their crew would arrive early to help the players spread cat litter on the infield to dry it off. The Fuego won only one of their next 10 games. This was in the middle of a stretch of 16 consecutive games with no days off, and the players were hurting.

In a league with no disabled list, an injury means losing your job. The Fuego rarely took days off, and 80 games in three months beats a body. (This, incidentally, is why many ballplayers start taking performance-enhancing drugs—not to transform into freak shows of Bondsian proportions, but to stay on the field and rise through the ranks. All the players I spoke to denied seeing PEDs in the Pecos—“You try doping on $50 a week,” went the refrain—but I’d be shocked if no one was using.)

Archie tweaked his back badly taking a warm-up swing in early July. He told Moore, who said, “We need you.” Archie couldn’t swing with a complete follow-through. “Can you run?” Moore asked. He could. “Can you bunt?” He could. “Do what you need to do,” said Moore.

Palmer, meanwhile, was not improving. Toward the end of the Alpine series, he was having trouble holding onto the ball and fatigued easily. The wrist was constantly sore, but he didn’t want to come out of the game. His mother had come down from Wichita to watch the series. “The last thing I wanted to do,” he told me, “was not play.”

So he played, and said nothing.

Seven

One of Rod Tafoya’s favorite major league pitchers was a crafty, soft-throwing left-hander named Jamie Moyer, who debuted with the Chicago Cubs in 1986 and won 269 major league games before undergoing elbow surgery in 2010. He made headlines in 2012 when he embarked on a comeback with the Colorado Rockies at age 49. This made him the only professional baseball player in the country older than Tafoya. (The famed juicer Jose Canseco, at 47, was nipping at their heels; he made an independent league cameo—a common practice for aging stars—last August.)

Tafoya started tracking Moyer’s progress at the beginning of the season. In May, the Rockies cut him and he signed on with the Orioles, but Baltimore cut him in June, at which point Moyer signed on with one of the Toronto Blue Jays’ minor league affiliates. They dropped him on July 5, and this time no one else picked him up.

This was a week after Tafoya’s disastrous start at Roswell. But now Tafoya was once again on the Fuego roster, for the home series against Alpine. After pitching a scoreless inning in the Fuego’s 27–10 upset, Tafoya promptly posted an article on his website, AgelessArm.com. “Rod Tafoya Now Oldest Active Pro,” read the headline. “In Moyer’s illustrious 25-year MLB career, he is 269-209. In Tafoya’s case, he has had a few flashes of brilliance, however, he has yet to win a Pecos League victory.”

Following that game the Cowboys struck back, winning the next two by one run each. Then, on a hot Saturday afternoon, Kohli was lounging in the dugout before the game when an unknown man approached him. He was a scout for the Washington Nationals. He was there primarily to see the Alpine starting pitcher, but he handed Kohli a questionnaire to fill out and send back to him. This sent a surge of energy through the dugout. Attention was being paid.

Unfortunately, Moore was once again short on pitching. He started a six-foot-five, rail-thin right-hander named Ryan Westover he’d just picked up, but the Cowboys treated Westover’s fastballs like an open bar. By the end of the second inning, Westover had surrendered seven runs on eight hits, three of them homers. It was Westover’s first and last appearance of the season. By the bottom of the sixth, the Fuego had gone through five pitchers and were still trailing 16–3. Moore told Tafoya to get ready.

The lefty straightened his cap and jogged out to the bullpen to warm up. He went through his usual routine: fastballs, curves, cutters. He warmed up for two innings straight, working up a good sweat. Tafoya felt amazing in the bullpen. He was throwing as hard as he had all year, but for some reason he also had his control. He was at the fork in the road, and he was determined.

He jogged out of the bullpen and threw nine pitches. Seven were strikes. He struck out the first two batters and got the third, a righty, to fly out weakly to right field. And that was it. He was finished. He walked off the mound to faint cheers, slapped the hands of his teammates, and wrote his stats down on a game ball. It was the last time Tafoya would ascend the mound this season, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that, in that moment, he had once again tasted what he’d felt back in Idaho during the George H. W. Bush administration. The clouds that had been lingering since the day he was temporarily cut had parted at last. Tafoya had regained his anchor.

When I visited Tafoya at home some time later, I asked if he would be playing with the Fuego next year. Tafoya looked past me; there was still a lingering glow from his last stand against Alpine. “I just proved to myself and to everybody out there that knows my story that at 48 I can still compete professionally,” he told me. “Albeit at the lowest level out there. But I still proved that it could be done.

“I will probably die pitching,” he went on. “I don’t think I’m going to ever quit. I thought about it on my drive home tonight, and I just don’t see life without baseball in my future. There’s no reason for it to stop. In the amateur games I pitched this summer”—Tafoya had started more than a dozen games for the Albuquerque A’s — “I had an ERA under one!”

His voice rose. “Sixteen strikeouts per nine innings!” Now he seemed to be pleading. “How can you stop when you have those incredible numbers?”

I asked what he planned to do after he hit his goal. “Once I hit 300, I’m going to take a little break and take it all in, smell the roses a bit.” He smiled. “Then, who knows? I might go for another 100 and shoot for four.”

I showed up at the ballpark late. It was one of those impossible Santa Fe summer evenings. The monsoon had come and gone. A rainbow emerged from the remnants of the storm clouds and arced over the center-field fence. Blue shadows lit red mountains. We were hosting Las Cruces, and we were already down seven or eight runs.

Some guy I didn’t recognize was behind the plate. Palmer, I later learned, had finally asked out. He started the game and struck out in his first at bat on a pitch in the dirt, then finally approached Moore. “Skip,” he said, “I can’t do this.” He confessed that his wrist was killing him.

The Fuego went down 14–0 that night, and Palmer went to see a doctor on the trainer’s orders. His wrist was a mess. The doctor said that he had torn a ligament. Playing on it for weeks had been a poor decision, and now surgery was the only option. Palmer was devastated—he’d dislocated his hip and broken his arm before, but he’d never had major surgery. He decided to have the procedure back home in Kansas, but not until the fall. He liked being near the mountains, and he wanted to see the season through to the end.

He spent more time with David Nava, Mario Montoya, and the kids. Montoya invited him over to cook marshmallows; the kids were awestruck. They all started helping the team out with chores: one day they brought brooms to the game to sweep the bleachers so the players could rest. Without his $54 paycheck, Palmer was deeply worried about money. One day, Nava brought him a gift certificate to the Olive Garden. Another day, Nava brought five paintings he had made, which he said Palmer could sell. Then Nava literally emptied one of his piggy banks, giving Palmer a few bucks in change.

During one batting practice, I asked Palmer about his plans. He said he wanted to get the surgery done so he could get back on the field. He had hit over .400 that season, with 13 or 14 home runs, depending on whether you believed Palmer’s count or the Pecos League’s own frequently suspect statistics. There were opportunities. “I always told my mom, as long as I can provide for my family, my girlfriend, or myself, I’m going to play until I can’t play no more,” he said. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.”

In August, he went back to Kansas to see another doctor, who examined his MRI results and was astounded. Palmer had torn several ligaments and pieces of connective tissue just above his wrist. By playing through the injury, the doctor said, he’d pushed and rotated the intricate bones in his wrist out and to the right. Not only did he need surgery, he would never play baseball again.

A sunset over Fort Marcy Park in Santa Fe. (Photo by Ryan Heffernan)

Eight

The Fuego played their final home game of the season on July 25. Despite the fact that the playoffs were now out of reach, Santa Fe still had a whiff of influence as a spoiler: Their opponents, the Roswell Invaders, were in second place, not far behind the Alpine Cowboys. A win would hurt Roswell’s chances of overtaking Alpine for home-field advantage in the playoffs. I waited for the game to start, listening to Lynyrd Skynryd crackling over the PA. The small details of a night at Fort Marcy seemed especially vivid: the smell of meat fried in corn oil, the crisp folds of the American flag out beyond the center-field wall, the evening sun in the spent monsoon clouds. A solitary chant went up from the beer garden: “ET Go Home!”

Welcome, fans, to the final game of the season at Fort Marcy Park! the announcer thundered over the PA. This evening’s old-school classic-rock program is dedicated to Coach Bill Moore!

In the bottom of the second inning, with one man on and two outs, Archie made his way to the plate. Archie had toyed with his stance and swing repeatedly over the years. It was now a choppy thing that started with his hands way over his head. He usually strode into the ball and slashed his bat downward, attempting to whack ground balls that his long legs could turn into infield singles. Now he wagged the bat awkwardly, high above his body, and Roswell’s pitcher, a thin right-hander with an ungainly overhand motion, delivered a high, weak fastball.

Archie swung, and the ball took off down the left-field line, the only part of Fort Marcy that is major league size. It was a line drive, and it traveled too quickly for anyone in the park to process what had happened until it was over: Andrew Archbold had hit a home run.

At first, Archie didn’t seem to comprehend it, either. He sprinted around the bases, running right past Moore, whose mouth was open in a great laugh. Palmer came by the beer garden with the plastic bucket. I paid my money and thought of the message on Moore’s voice mail: “In the great game of life, there is baseball, and there is everything else.”

The crowd chanted: “Fue-go! Fue-go!”

Josh Valle hit a long home run over the trees, made the sign of the cross, banged helmets with Brown.

“Fue-go!”

Brown ripped a double down the left-field line, then scored on a sacrifice fly. Four–one, Fuego. The hits started to blend together, and the bucket kept coming around. This pitcher was a gift. Soon it was 7–3, Fuego, though you wouldn’t have known it from the scoreboard, which displayed only zeroes. Archie knocked in another run with a bunt single.

“Fue-go!”

“My wife would give up one of her bedrooms for Archbold,” said a fan in the grandstand.

“You’re not getting him,” replied a polite, small woman named Roberta Catnach, Archbold’s Santa Fe host. “He calls me Mom.”

In the middle of the seventh we were ahead nine to three, and Moore led the crowd in a gravelly rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Everything was falling together in a peaceful, easy way. The players looked happy. Moore looked happy. They were experiencing something fresh and calming after the sorrows of the second half of the season: the joy of a winning team.

Then the peace shattered. With two outs and the Fuego up 11–3, Roswell brought in a strike-zone-challenged pitcher who threw a series of wild pitches. One of them hit Edwin Ortiz, the home-plate umpire, in the face. Ortiz shook his head like a wounded bear. Maybe he was addled by the pitch. Maybe he was remembering the game down in Roswell when someone on the Fuego had written Ortiz’s name on a baseball next to a carefully drawn pair of testicles. Maybe the frustrations of the year became, in this one moment, too much for one man. Maybe he needed one more ejection to take the lead in the league. Whatever the reason, Ortiz and his partner, Harold Moya, began to collaborate on a series of calls that defied basic logic. Even Moya, after the fact, seemed to concede as much. “What I can say is between the two of us, we can’t say what really happened,” he told me. “We just don’t know.”

Kohli launched a ball deep into center field, and Roswell’s center fielder leaped for it at the wall. Man, fence, and ball met in an unfortunate kinetic gathering that left the metal gate swinging and the center fielder prone and motionless on the warning track. The ball was nearby, on the field, and Moya signaled that it was a home run. Kohli was trotting around the bases, and someone was throwing the ball in toward the infield, when Ortiz ran out and signaled that the ball was in play—that the hit was not, in fact, a home run. The shortstop tagged Kohli between second and third base. Ortiz called him out.

Moore ran onto the field, yelling. The center fielder regained consciousness and limped off. Moore began to yell and assault the dirt with his cleats. The fans booed. “Ump, you’re horrible!” someone behind me in the beer garden yelled. The Roswell manager turned to the fan. “No shit!” he shouted. “I’ve been saying that for three days.”

Ortiz ejected Moore with a grand gesture, yelling, “It’s my game!” Moore stared, mouth agape, for minutes, milking the boos. The Fuego players congregated at first base, raining a season’s worth of pent-up expletives down upon the umpires.

Bill Moore stomped into the grandstand, gesticulating wildly, dropping his hands and raising them upward over and over again. David Nava and Mario Montoya led the crowd in a rousing chant: “Bill Moore! Bill Moore! Bill Moore! Bill Moore!”

“You see me get ran?”

It was the next day, and Moore was drinking coffee at Tafoya’s. His dark mood had lifted. The Fuego had beaten the Invaders 11-3. “That’s the way it’s supposed to end,” he said.

He had two days left in Santa Fe before heading to Trinidad for the final series of the season. He was debating whether to return for 2013. In the event that he did, he said, he planned to blow up the team and “get me some rabbits”—small, fast athletes who could hit the ball to the middle of the field. He was tired of the losing and the fundamental errors and the big, slow hitters. He told me he’d like to fill a team with rookies, guys right out of college who hadn’t been on the Pecos League circuit. “If they’re a veteran in the Pecos League,” he said, “well, there’s a reason they’re a veteran in the Pecos League.”

Still, the impending end of the season, his departure from the young men he’d hired and would soon be firing, saddened him. “It’s never easy,” he said. “These guys, they’re embedded in you.” He acknowledged that his loyalty to them might have contributed to the failure of the team. “This is my only time being on a sub–.500 team, and that has really gnawed on me,” he said. “People keep telling me, ‘Oh, you got bad guys, you got this, you got that.’ Bullshit. It’s your own fault. If you got bad guys, why didn’t you do something about fixing it? Send ’em all home, bring in a bunch of new guys. It’s totally in your control.”

Moore went in the kitchen to get more coffee, and I spied a piece of yellow loose-leaf on the table: a letter to Billie. The words HELLO BEAUTIFUL WOMAN were scrawled across the top of the paper in neat, all-capital letters.

“I’m proud of the fact that I’m still hanging out,” he said as he offered me a cup. “I hope I’m doing it every day ’til I’m dead. Be great to die at a ballpark.” His cell phone rang: someone from a debt-collection agency trying to reach one of the players. “I gave him your message probably an hour ago,” he told the caller. “If he don’t want to call you back, that’s not my fault.” He hung up and turned back to me. “I’ll be interested to see what you write,” he said.

I hesitated. “I’m not going to write that you came in first place,” I said. “But I think empathy is important.”

“I like that you say empathy and not sympathy.”

Moore saw me to the door. “You know,” he said, “Trinidad is only a few ahead of White Sands for the final playoff spot.” His eyes widened, and he broke into a capacious smile that animated every wrinkle on his face. “If we could go up there and sweep ’em, and White Sands wins a couple, we could knock Trinidad out! How cool would that be? Ha!” His laugh filled the street. “Screw those guys!”

That weekend, up in Trinidad, the Fuego lost three of four. Rod Tafoya didn’t make the trip. He was down south, on the mound for the Albuquerque A’s, winning his 275th semipro game, bringing him within 25 of his goal. He wrote down his stats on the ball—six innings, 18 strikeouts—and put it on a shelf in his trophy room.

The Santa Fe Fuego wave goodbye to their fans at Fort Marcy Park after the last home game of the season, on July 25, 2012. (Photo by Ryan Heffernan)

Epilogue

Bill Moore is returning this year as coach of the Fuego. Rod Tafoya has signed with a new expansion team in the Pecos League, the Taos Blizzard. As of this writing, he is just 18 semipro wins from 300. He thinks he’ll reach the goal in August.

In his final at-bat of the season, at Trinidad, Andrew Archbold felt a pop in his shoulder: a sprain in his acromioclavicular joint. He decided to move forward with his life. He is driving shuttle vans in Boulder, Colorado, and thinking about what comes next.

Most of the other Fuego players I knew have stayed in the game, but elsewhere. Evan Kohli signed with the Rockford Aviators of the Frontier League just after the season; he never heard from the Nationals. Kieran Bradford spent the winter playing in Australia. In February, he got a call from the Wichita Wingnuts in the American Association. It’s a significantly higher league; a couple of the players on the team have big-league experience. He reports to spring training May 4. Parris Austin is returning to the Pecos League with the White Sands Pupfish.

Soon after the 2012 season, Trent Evins received a surprising message on Facebook. It was an invitation from Chris Paterson, the White Sands coach who had cut him in April, to come pitch in the Texas Winter League. He played well, and at the end of the winter season, Texas City, in the more prestigious United Baseball League, signed him. He informed Scot Palmer of the news by text message.

At the time, Palmer was rehabbing, studying to finish his bachelor’s degree at Newman and training to be a manager at a shoe store in Wichita. He had spent 11 weeks after his surgery in a cast from his shoulder to his fingertips. He wrote back to Evins:

“Do me a favor, man. Don’t ever take one pitch for granted. Don’t even take your training for granted. When you’re hurting and tired remember, you could be me. Never in a million years did I think before that game against [Las Cruces], ‘This will be the last time I strap them up, this will be the last time my name is announced as a starting catcher.’ I know it sounds corny man, but I’m proud of you, bro. You work hard, you play hard, and we both had that chip on our shoulders. Play for me too man. I miss it already.”

The Honeymoon Murder

The Honeymoon Murder

Young love turns tragic as a brutal carjacking leaves a beautiful newlywed murdered—and her husband the prime suspect.

By Joshua Hammer

The Atavist Magazine, No. 23

Joshua Hammer is a former Newsweek bureau chief and correspondent-at-large in Africa and the Middle East. He is the author of three nonfiction books: Chosen by God, A Season in Bethlehem, and Yokohama Burning. A contributing editor to the Smithsonian and Outside magazines, his writing also appears in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, and other publications.

Editor: Charles Homans
Producers: Olivia Koski, Gray Beltran
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Thomas Stackpole
Research and Production: Nicole Pasulka, Rachel Richardson

Published in March 2013. Design updated in 2021.

One

The township of Khayelitsha sits on the southeastern outskirts of Cape Town, in the middle of the Cape Flats, a dust bowl of nearly 200 square miles hemmed in by the Table Mountain range to the west, the Hottentot-Holland range to the east, and the coast of False Bay to the south. It is the fastest-growing township in South Africa and also one of the poorest, made up largely of shanties assembled from discarded materials—cardboard, tar paper, scraps of tin and plywood—and squeezed together amid the sand dunes. Outsiders rarely venture into Khayelitsha at night, which meant that, from the moment at about 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, November 13, 2010 when a 33-year-old government employee named Simbonile Matokazi found the foreigner standing on his doorstep, it was clear that something had gone very wrong.

The man pacing back and forth at the threshold was wearing an expensive-looking dark suit over an open-collared shirt. He was Indian, not black like Matokazi and virtually everyone else in Khayelitsha. He had been stumbling down the sandy road knocking frantically on doors, moving from one shack to the next in the darkness. “Excuse me,” he said. “Is there a nearby police station where I can report a hijack?”

Matokazi, reaching for his phone, asked where the car was. The visibly distraught stranger mumbled that he didn’t know. He was similarly uncertain about its model. By the time the officers from the South African Police Service arrived, however, he had regained enough composure to tell his story.

His name was Shrien Dewani, and he was a 30-year-old businessman from Bristol, England. He and his wife of three weeks, Anni Dewani, had arrived in Cape Town on the previous day for their honeymoon. Earlier that evening, the couple had embarked with a driver on a private tour of the townships east of the city. It was an unusual choice for a pair of well-heeled tourists; Cape Town’s outlying slums might as well have been on another planet from the , the $500-a-night waterfront hotel where the Dewanis had spent the first night of their visit.

At about 10:45 p.m., the Dewanis’ driver had stopped at an intersection in a township about seven miles west of Khayelitsha. Suddenly, two armed men appeared out of the darkness and commandeered the vehicle. A short time later, they forced the driver out. For 45 minutes they drove through the night, Shrien told the police, as he and Anni huddled in terror in the backseat. Finally, the hijackers came to a stop on a sandy road. They threw Shrien out of the car and sped off with his wife.

The police escorted Shrien back to the Cape Grace, and scores of officers began a methodical search of the townships. Early the following morning, the police received a call from a resident of Elitha Park, a neighborhood in Khayelitsha not far from Matokazi’s house. A gray Volkswagen Sharan minivan had been sitting alongside the road all night, she told them, on an asphalt strip bordering a weed-choked field.

It was about eight o’clock in the morning when police converged on the minivan. As wind whipped sand off a nearby sweep of dunes, the officers opened the rear right-side door and peered in. Lying across the backseat was the body of a young woman, soaked in blood. She had been shot once, at point-blank range, in the neck. The bullet, from a nine-millimeter pistol, was lodged in the seat. Her blood had soaked through the upholstery and seeped out the door, pooling on the asphalt.

In the hours after Anni Dewani’s corpse was discovered, police forensic experts descended upon Khayelitsha. The crime scene yielded one particularly valuable piece of evidence: a thumbprint and fingerprint recovered from the left fender of the minivan. The investigators quickly traced them to a 26-year-old unemployed laborer named Xolile Mngeni. Mngeni had been arrested five years earlier on suspicion of killing a man in a bar fight; the charges were dropped, but his fingerprints had remained in the national police database.

The police found Mngeni, a thin man who wore a gold ring in his right ear, in a shack near his grandmother’s small home in Khayelitsha, a few hundred yards from the field where the Volkswagen had been abandoned. Mngeni was lying in bed, with a man and two women, after a night of partying. The police rousted him out of bed, read him his rights, and arrested him. Searching the shack, they found a cell phone wedged between the mattress and bed frame. “Who does this cell phone belong to?” one of the investigators asked, according to a court affidavit.

“It belongs to the taxi driver,” Mngeni replied.

Two

Early in the evening on October 19, 2010, three and a half weeks earlier, 300 guests gathered on the lawn overlooking Powai Lake, a Raj-era reservoir in the hills outside Mumbai. Under a full moon, Anni Dewani’s uncle, brother, and two cousins carried her down the path on a golden sedan chair, poles resting on their shoulders. She had never looked more beautiful, thought Ami Denborg, her older sister.

Anni wore an emerald green bridal sari swathed in gold brocade. Gold and silver bangles adorned her wrists, and a gold and jade necklace hung around her neck. She stepped down from the sedan chair and walked to the mandap, a canopied, carved-teakwood platform garlanded with mango and banana leaves, palm fronds, and coconuts. Shrien was waiting for her there, in his beige wedding suit and turban, behind a curtain held up by two of his male friends.

Vinod Hindocha, Anni’s father, looked on proudly. The son of a prosperous trader who had left India’s Gujarat state as a young man, Vinod had grown up in Uganda, a member of the country’s close-knit Indian community. He was 23 years old in 1972, when President Idi Amin gave Ugandans of South Asian descent 90 days to leave the country, declaring, “We are determined to make the ordinary Ugandan the master of his own destiny, and above all to see that he enjoys the wealth of his country.” The Hindocha family fled and settled in the small town of Mariestad, Sweden. Vinod had thrived there, starting a business and raising two daughters and a son. He had hoped his children would think of themselves as Indian even as they lived their lives far from the subcontinent, as he had, and he insisted that they speak Gujarati around the house. He was thrilled that Anni had decided to be married in Mumbai—that she had decided, as Vinod would later put it, that “her heart was in India.”

Anni was 28, a bright, outgoing, and delicately beautiful young woman. Vinod knew he had spoiled his youngest daughter, but he couldn’t help himself. When she moved to Stockholm after graduating from college, to work in marketing for the mobile-phone maker Ericsson, her father bought her a new Volvo and a one-bedroom apartment in a tony neighborhood of the city. When she ordered thousands of dollars’ worth of hardwood flooring ripped out of the apartment after deciding she didn’t like the color, Vinod paid for it. Anni wanted every aspect of her life to be perfect, and Vinod wanted to help her.

When she began looking for a husband, in her mid-twenties, Anni pursued the project with the same deliberateness and precision that she had brought to bear on her interior decorating. She flew regularly to London, where she stayed at the homes of wealthy relatives—her maternal uncles owned the British pharmacy chain Waremoss—and spent weekends shopping and socializing. She had made up her mind that her husband would be Indian, and London offered better prospects than Stockholm.

One of Anni’s aunts had noticed Shrien Dewani at parties in London and liked his clean-cut good looks, his wealth, and his pedigree. A mutual acquaintance provided the aunt with his phone number, and she arranged an informal run-in between him and Anni at a coffee bar. The pair hit it off, and in September 2009 they went on their first date, to a performance of The Lion King in London’s West End. After another meeting—dinner at the Intercontinental Park Lane Hotel—Anni called her sister in a state of excitement. “I met a guy,” she told Ami, “and I’m going to meet him again.”

Their lives were practically mirror images of each other. Shrien Dewani’s family, like Anni’s, was Gujarati, and his mother and her parents had fled Amin’s Uganda for England. Shrien’s father had arrived there from Kenya—where his own family had immigrated from Gujarat state—to study pharmacology, later opening a pharmacy in Bristol and a nursing home that grew into a chain of health care facilities for the elderly. Shrien graduated from an elite preparatory school in Bristol and studied accounting at the University of Manchester, then spent several months teaching English and mathematics in Accra, Ghana, before moving to London to work for the accounting firm Deloitte. Within a year, however, he had left to help manage the fast-growing family business, PSP Healthcare, with his older brother, Preyen. Before his 30th birthday, Shrien was already a millionaire.

Shrien, like Anni, was gregarious and popular. Some people found him to be a show-off, the kind of affluent young man who seemed a little too enamored with his money. But beneath the flashy facade, his close friends saw a kind and generous person with a good sense of humor. This was what Anni liked most about Shrien, her sister would later recall: the way she could laugh and joke with him, the way he cared for and tried to protect her. A few months into their relationship, Anni was smitten. In February 2010, she gave up her job in Stockholm and moved into an apartment in Luton, north of London.

That spring, Anni’s parents traveled to Bristol to meet Shrien’s parents, who were staying in an apartment they owned in the city. When the Hindochas arrived, a fleet of BMWs, Mercedes, and Porsches, all with vanity license plates, were parked out front. It was the first time that Vinod realized the full extent of the Dewani family’s fortune. He was a bit intimidated by the display of wealth, but the Dewanis were warm and enthusiastic, and they quickly put Vinod and his wife, Nilam, at ease, taking them on a long tour of Bristol. The visit sealed Vinod’s approval of the relationship.

Shortly thereafter, Shrien took Anni to an airfield outside Bristol, where a private plane was waiting to fly them to Paris. That night at the restaurant in the Hotel Ritz, a waiter presented her with a silver platter. On it was a $40,000 diamond engagement ring balanced on a red rose.

Vinod promised his daughter a lavish wedding. “Anni, do whatever you want to,” he said. The Hindochas were not wealthy like the Dewanis were, but Vinod had been saving for his daughters’ nuptials since they were born. Ami’s wedding in Mariestad had been a grand affair, but Anni wanted something even bigger, and the Dewanis had agreed to cover a third of the cost.

The morning after the wedding, Anni ran into her sister in the lobby of Mumbai’s Renaissance Hotel. Ami was flying back to Sweden; Shrien and Anni were returning to London for two weeks before embarking on their honeymoon. When Ami asked where the newly married couple were heading, Anni laughed. Shrien had made plans, she told her sister, but he was being vague about the destination. She gave Ami a warm, lingering hug and kissed her two children. “I’ll call you when I get back,” she said.

Three

Shrien and Anni arrived at Cape Town International Airport from Johannesburg on the evening of Friday, November 12. Four days of game watching in Kruger National Park had left them exhilarated but tired, and standing outside the arrival gate with their designer luggage, Shrien looked for a taxi. He caught the attention of a driver with a Volkswagen Sharan minivan.

Zola Tongo was a squat, powerfully built man with a chubby face and an ingratiating manner. A 31-year-old former insurance consultant and building inspector, he had recently taken a full-time job as a limousine driver for a Cape Town tour company. But the demands of supporting his mother—a cleaning woman—and his 14-year-old sister, in addition to his wife and five children, weighed on him. He had started freelancing with the company minivan in his off hours, which was what had brought him to the airport that night.

Cape Town’s airport, which had been expensively remodeled into a sleek and soaring contemporary terminal in anticipation of the previous summer’s World Cup, was about a 20-minute drive on the N2 highway from the Cape Grace hotel. Like the airport, the hotel was an icon of the image that post-apartheid South Africa sought to present to the world: a handsome, five-story brick and stone building with a red-tile mansard roof rising over a private marina. The Cape Grace was the centerpiece of a 1990s urban-redevelopment scheme that had transformed Cape Town’s seedy docks into the slickly commercial Victoria and Alfred Waterfront. Under soft track lighting, guests relaxed in leather armchairs beside Zanzibar chests and looked out through French windows upon a quay lined with yawls and sloops. The Spirit of the Cape, a 56-foot luxury motor yacht, was moored alongside the hotel’s dock.

The drive to the hotel, however, was an object lesson in South Africa’s contradictions. Cape Town’s airport sits in the middle of the Cape Flats, on the barren periphery of the city. After South Africa’s Parliament passed the Group Areas Act in 1950, barring nonwhites from living within the municipal limits of Cape Town and other cities, Cape Town’s black and mixed-race populations were forced out of the city’s older, established neighborhoods on the slopes of Table Mountain and into newly formed townships on the scrubland of the Cape Flats. The better-off among them built brick and cinderblock bungalows on the tiny plots they were given. Others packed into densely populated squatter camps of cardboard shacks, lacking electricity, water, or sewers. Over the years, as migrants from even more destitute rural areas converged upon the townships, the Cape Flats’ population came to surpass that of the city proper.

The townships’ poverty outlived the apartheid government that had ordered them into existence. Cape Town’s tourist industry, however, had found a way to make use of them: In a local variation on Rio de Janeiro’s popular favela tours, adventurous travelers, accompanied by local guides, began traveling into Gugulethu, a half-century-old township that was home to about 200,000 people and had once been a center of anti-apartheid resistance. Visitors would tour historic sites and eat at Mzoli’s, a barbecue joint that British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver featured on the cover of his magazine in 2009, declaring it to be “totally sexy.”

After dark, however, the visitors returned to the wealthy districts of Cape Town; Mzoli’s closes at 7 p.m. For all its allure as a tourist destination, Cape Town is still one of the world’s most violent cities, with an unflagging epidemic of murder, rape, carjacking, assault, and home invasion. Gugulethu alone averaged more than 140 murders a year, roughly one every two and a half days. Tongo drove past it without stopping.

Before Tongo took leave of the Dewanis at the hotel, Shrien made plans for the driver to pick them up the following night for dinner. The couple spent most of the next day by the hotel pool. By the time Tongo arrived, at 7:30 p.m., a balmy and clear evening had settled over the waterfront. Shrien and Anni climbed into the backseat of the minivan, and Tongo steered back onto the N2 the way they had come the day before.

Shrien had asked the hotel concierge to make a reservation at 96 Winery Road, one of the Western Cape province’s most acclaimed restaurants, in the Helderberg Valley, a lush sweep of vineyards about 30 miles east of Cape Town, past the airport. On the way to the restaurant, however, Shrien and Anni decided that they weren’t in the mood for a full meal. If the newlyweds were interested in lighter fare, Tongo offered, he knew of a more downscale restaurant that had good Asian food. He pulled off the highway around 9:15 p.m. and onto a two-lane side road that wound through the swampy lowlands toward the coast.

The Surfside Restaurant was located in the resort town of Strand, a 30-minute drive southeast of Cape Town, a faded riviera of high-rise hotels and condominiums with back alleys full of casinos and strip clubs tucked away just off the beach. Nobody would’ve mistaken the dining room where the Dewanis were seated, with its green carpet and tacky tropical fish tank, for 96 Winery Road. But the large windows offered a sweeping view of the sea, and after dining on curry and sushi, the newlyweds strolled along the beach. At about 10:15 p.m., they climbed back into Tongo’s van, and he turned back onto the N2, heading toward Cape Town.

The plan, Shrien would later tell a reporter, had been to retire to the Waterfront district for a drink. “But Anni grew up in Sweden, and she felt as if the area around this hotel was just like at home: so clean and safe, a bit sterile,” Shrien said. She wanted to see “the real Africa.” So at Borcherd’s Quarry Road, just before the airport, Tongo veered onto the exit ramp.

The minivan turned down Klipfontein Road and made a right onto Gugulethu’s deserted main avenue, NY 112. (NY is short for “Native Yards,” an apartheid-era designation for a township which remains in use.) At an intersection beside an apostolic church and a primary school, Tongo halted at a stop sign. Suddenly, Shrien looked up and saw a man hammering on the windshield with a pistol, hard enough that Shrien thought that the glass would break. The next thing he knew, a man had shoved Tongo into the passenger seat and taken the wheel. Another man with a gun piled into the backseat with Shrien and Anni.

The Volkswagen peeled away from the intersection, bouncing along the rough asphalt. At a gas station, as Shrien recalled it, the two men pulled to the curb and forced Tongo out of the minivan. Then they got back onto the N2 and headed away from Cape Town, deeper into the Cape Flats. They sped down the highway for seven minutes, turning off at Khayelitsha. The hijackers drove around for 10 more minutes before the driver stopped the car. “Voetsek, voetsek! Get out, get out!” the two men shouted at Shrien.

The couple begged the hijackers not to separate them. “But they were so cold,” Shrien later recalled in a newspaper interview. “They put a gun in my ear and pulled back the trigger—it really was the stuff of movies.” Shrien held on to Anni. “Look, if you’re not going to hurt her,” he told the hijackers, “let us go.” Instead, they forced Shrien out of the vehicle and sped off into the night, Anni alone with the gunman in the backseat.

At about 11 p.m. on Saturday night, the phone rang at the Hindocha house in Sweden. Vinod answered; it was Prakash Dewani, Shrien’s father, calling from Bristol. He had just talked to Shrien. “Anni’s been kidnapped,” he said.

Vinod tried to stay calm. “Don’t worry,” he told Prakash. “We will sort out something. We’ll go to South Africa and pay them what they want, and we will get her free.”

A few minutes later the phone rang again. This time it was Shrien, calling from the Cape Grace. “Dad,” he said, his voice breaking, “I could not take care of your daughter.”

Vinod began to panic. “Don’t say those words,” he begged his son-in-law. “Why are you saying you could not?”

“Dad,” he repeated, “I could not take care of her.”

“You take it easy,” Vinod said. “I am on my way down there.”

The next morning, Vinod caught the first flight from Gothenburg. As soon as he stepped off the plane in Amsterdam, he switched on his mobile phone, but he was so distracted that he couldn’t remember the security code to unlock it. He ran through the terminal, found a public telephone, and called home. Nilam picked up. Vinod heard sobbing in the background. He sank to the floor.

Vinod Hindocha, Anni Dewani’s father, speaks to reporters outside Westminster Magistrates Court in London on October 12, 2012. (Photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

Four

I first met Vinod Hindocha on a gray and freezing afternoon in December at the Stadt Hotel, which his brother Ashok owns, in downtown Mariestad. He is 64 years old, with thinning black hair, an angular face, and large ears. When I met him, two years after his daughter’s death, he still appeared haggard and listless. He led me to his Mercedes, and we drove through the quiet streets of the town. Sleet battered the windshield—a foretaste of winter, when temperatures in Mariestad drop to 20 below. We skirted Lake Vänern, the third-largest lake in Europe, where Anni’s ashes had been scattered a year earlier.

When Vinod fled Uganda with his parents and three siblings in 1972, he told me, the family left behind everything they owned, arriving in Europe with just 55 British pounds to their name. Their first stop was a refugee camp in Austria, where they lived for months in a tent, until Sweden offered to take them in. Vinod found work near Mariestad as an electrical maintenance engineer in a chemical factory. He met Nilam, also a refugee from Uganda, on a visit to London, and they married four years later.

Shortly before the couple’s third child was born, in 1988, Vinod cofounded his own engineering firm. Soon it was thriving, with a dozen employees and contracts to manufacture electronic components for oil-exploration projects in the North Sea, Venezuela, and Russia. He bought a three-story house with a garden, a Jacuzzi and sauna in the basement, and a separate wing for tenants. Mariestad, with its 15,000-odd inhabitants, 18th-century cathedral, and quaint harbor, was the very image of stability. It was a place where Vinod could shield his children from the deprivations and dislocations that he had known.

The Hindochas’ house is tidy, with high ceilings and utilitarian Scandinavian furniture, the walls covered with framed photographs of Anni. Vinod took me upstairs to Anni’s bedroom, on the second floor, a small space with beige-yellow walls, full-length mirrors, and hardwood floors that he and Anni—particular even as a teenager—had installed themselves. Above the single bed was a large portrait of Anni in her wedding dress, a wedding gift from a friend. “Anni never got to see it,” Vinod told me. Underneath the portrait was an oil painting of a single rose. It had been given to Vinod by a stranger, a man who sold art from a stall at the Cape Town airport. “He hands me this painting, wrapped,” Vinod recalled, “and he says, ‘This is from me to Anni. Keep it in her room.’”

Nilam was puttering around the kitchen, making herself scarce. Vinod had told me earlier that she was recovering from stomach cancer and remained too shaken by the murder to speak about it. “Anni’s destiny was that her life lasted just 28 years,” Vinod said, settling on the living room sofa. “Everybody has to die. But the way she went is not acceptable, it is not right. Nobody should go through what we are going through.”

On that Sunday morning in November 2010, Vinod met Prakash Dewani at the gate in the Amsterdam airport for the flight to Cape Town. The two men embraced; Shrien’s father had also just learned of Anni’s death, and he was weeping. A flight attendant gently escorted Vinod onto the plane and brought him a glass of water. He passed the 11-hour flight to South Africa in a daze, crying and leaning on Prakash for support.

Over the year that he had known them, Vinod’s relationship with the Dewani family had acquired an easy familiarity. When Anni first told her father about Shrien in the fall of 2009—“He is sending me flowers at work every day,” she told him—Vinod reached across the Gujarati diaspora network to look into the young man’s background. An aunt in Nairobi vouched for the Dewanis; they were a good family, she said. Like the Hindochas, the Dewanis were Lohanas, members of the Indian merchant caste. When Shrien first visited the Hindochas, in November 2009, Vinod and Nilam were struck by how handsome he was, and they were moved when he knelt down and touched their feet in a gesture of humility and respect.

Still, Anni was concerned that her parents would find fault with one aspect of Shrien: She was not his first fiancée. Three years earlier, when Shrien was 26, he had proposed to Rani Kansagra, the daughter of the multimillionaire founder of the Indian budget airline SpiceJet. The couple announced their engagement with an extravagant party in London. Months later, however, Shrien abruptly called things off. A close friend of his attributed it, vaguely, to “petty family squabbles.” Wanting to clear the air, Anni had urged her father to have Shrien explain what had happened.

Vinod and Shrien drove to Lake Vanërn and walked along a rocky beach in the cold. “Dad, you can ask me anything about my personal life you want,” Shrien told him, already addressing him as his father-in-law. Vinod chose not to bring up the touchy subject. Anni and Shrien seemed to be getting along fine, and he had no desire to stir things up by prying into his prospective son-in-law’s past. “Look, Shrien,” he said. “I don’t want to know about your background. I just want to know, do you love my Anni? I am happy with that. All I want is for you two to be happy.”

Shrien told him that, indeed, he loved Anni very much. “I’ll take care of her,” he said. When the two men returned to the house, Anni asked her father how it had gone. “Go ahead,” Vinod replied. “He is a good boy.”

Diplomats from the Swedish and British Embassies, along with the police, met Vinod and Prakash at the airport and brought them to the Cape Grace. It was after midnight before Vinod saw Shrien. He hugged his son-in-law tightly, but Shrien seemed distant. “Everything will be fine,” Vinod told him, though he knew it wouldn’t; he was so shattered himself that he was barely aware of his surroundings. The two men said little to each other.

The next day, Vinod told Shrien that he was going to the morgue to view his daughter’s body. “Dad, you cannot see her today,” Vinod said Shrien told him. “She is all drained out. We have to pump liquid into her body to get her freshened up.” The comment struck Vinod as oddly cold-hearted, but he put it out of his mind. By now, Shrien and his father were mostly keeping to themselves. Shrien was busy all the time on his laptop, making funeral arrangements and communicating with his friends in Bristol and London.

On Tuesday morning, Vinod at last made plans to go to the morgue and asked Shrien to join him. “I can’t come,” his son-in-law replied, according to Vinod. Vinod assumed that Shrien wanted to grieve alone in the hotel. Later, he told me, he learned that Shrien had in fact gone to get a haircut and buy a new suit. At the time, however, Vinod was unable to think of much beyond his own heartache. He went to the morgue that morning without Shrien, escorted by the police, to identity his daughter.

The following day, Vinod, Prakash, and Shrien flew to Bristol with Anni’s body to prepare for the funeral. And back in Cape Town, police officers knocked on a door in Khayelitsha, in search of their first suspect.

Five

The most elite police force in South Africa is the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, also known as the Hawks, a special squad created in 2009 by the African National Congress–led government. The Hawks were responsible for investigating corruption, organized crime, and other high-profile cases. A murder in the Cape Flats, which sees more than 1,000 of them each year, would not ordinarily have been in their brief. But Western Cape province relies on tourism for nearly a tenth of its economy, and the authorities weren’t about to let the murder of a wealthy foreign visitor go uninvestigated.

The plainclothes police who went looking for Xolile Mngeni, the man whose fingerprints had been lifted from Zola Tongo’s minivan, on November 16 were led by Captain Paul Hendrikse, a 25-year veteran of the force. An Afrikaner with the archetypal trim build and close-cropped, thinning hair of a middle-aged cop, Hendrikse had been involved in a number of headline-grabbing cases in recent years and was regarded as one of Cape Town’s foremost investigators. Vinod Hindocha, who has met with him regularly over the past two years, describes him as “a very sharp, very confident guy.”

According to Hendrikse’s account in an affidavit he later provided to a West Cape court—he has never spoken to the media about the case—the detective had wondered from the beginning if the incident might be something more than an ordinary carjacking gone wrong. Why, for instance, had the Dewanis ridden from the airport with Tongo rather than the Cape Grace hotel car service? And why on earth would they have ventured into one of Cape Town’s most dangerous townships after dark? Surely even the most naive tourists knew better.

Mngeni confessed his involvement in the killing almost immediately. He told the police that he had had an accomplice, a man he called Mawewe. The officers drove him around to a half-dozen shacks in the township to find the man. When the search came up empty, they brought Mngeni to the Hawks’ headquarters in the northern suburb of Bellville. A lieutenant colonel took Mngeni into his office and interrogated him for several hours while other detectives continued the search for Mawewe.

They found him two days later. His name was actually Mziwamadoda Lennox Qwabe, and he was Mngeni’s neighbor, a baby-faced 26-year-old with a shaved scalp and a slight physique. After his arrest, Qwabe, too, quickly admitted to his role in the murder and offered further details about the crime. Then, on November 20, as 1,500 guests were gathering in a London concert hall for Anni’s memorial service, the police issued a warrant for a third suspect. It was the Dewanis’ driver, Zola Robert Tongo.

On November 22, Tongo was escorted into the Wynberg Magistrates’ Court, a brutish five-story brick building in Cape Town’s southern suburbs. His face was hidden by a white sheet draped over his body, down to his tennis-shoe-clad feet. The prosecutor, Rodney de Kock, announced that Tongo was likely to enter a plea bargain and receive a lenient sentence in exchange for information in the case.

Shortly after Anni’s murder, Shrien Dewani had told a reporter in Cape Town that at first he had suspected that Tongo was involved in the crime. “But he spent all of Sunday helping the police and was able to answer all the police’s questions,” he said. “By the end of it, I quite liked him.” Now back in London, Shrien told the Evening Standard that he felt “betrayed.”

But Vinod Hindocha wondered. From the beginning, his elderly mother had insisted that Shrien’s story didn’t quite add up. Vinod had angrily rebuked her. “Don’t say those words,” he said. Ami Denborg, too, had stuck up for Shrien. She had always liked an

Little things, however, had started to eat at Vinod. Shrien had hosted a pizza party the night before the funeral, which Vinod found disturbingly inappropriate. He had quarreled with Ami over who would dress Anni’s body for the funeral and then blocked her from speaking at the memorial service. Then his family had hired Max Clifford—a well-known London press agent who had once worked for Marvin Gaye and Marlon Brando but in recent decades had mostly represented celebrities’ jilted paramours, disgraced politicians, and other tabloid regulars—to handle the press. Shrien’s brother Preyen demanded that the Hindochas sign an agreement not to comment to the media about the case without consulting Clifford first. Vinod refused.

By this point, a week and a half after Anni’s death, Shrien had recounted the events to several newspapers, and Vinod had noticed inconsistencies between the stories. In his first interview after the attack, Shrien had told a reporter for the Daily Mail that it was Anni’s idea to visit the township. But in an interview with the Sun the following week, he said that it had been Tongo’s idea to take the side trip, to “see some African dancing,” and that the Dewanis had been skeptical about the plan. At first, Shrien had said he was thrown out the vehicle’s rear door while the car was moving. But in the Sun interview he said, “They couldn’t get me out because the child locks were activated, so they ended up dragging me struggling and screaming out of the window.” The Daily Mail had quoted “unnamed sources” saying that the police were puzzling over how, if either of these things had happened, Shrien had had no visible injuries after the attack.

“I have spoken with my son-in-law,” Vinod told a reporter for the Daily Mail, “and there are far more questions than answers.” He was also frustrated with the South African police, whom he felt were not keeping him adequately informed about the case. Finally, he decided to fly back to Cape Town himself, in time for Tongo’s next court appearance.

On the morning of December 7, Tongo was led into the Western Cape High Court, a century-old colonnaded building in the Cape Town city center. Vinod took his place in the upstairs galley of the oak-paneled chamber, clutching a picture of his daughter. There were dozens of other spectators there, as well as a clutch of news photographers who jostled for position along the rail behind the front-row bench, where the defendant would be seated.

At 9 a.m., police led Tongo from his basement holding cell into the chamber. The driver pulled his pale blue shirt over his face to shield himself from the photographers, then slumped onto the bench. De Kock, the prosecutor, had warned Vinod ahead of time that he should be prepared for “the worst.” Now de Kock stood up in front of the magistrate, Judge John Hlophe, with Tongo’s signed confession in his hand. The spectators in the gallery leaned forward in their seats. “The alleged hijacking was in fact not a hijacking, but part of a plan of subterfuge,” de Kock said. Shrien Dewani and Tongo had worked together to hide the truth, he went on. “The deceased was murdered at the instance of her husband.”

Six

Even by the standards of South Africa’s murder capital, it was, as de Kock described it, a remarkable crime. According to Tongo’s confession, shortly after the driver had taken the Dewanis from the airport to the Cape Grace hotel, Shrien Dewani had taken him aside and confided that he wanted “a client of his taken off the scene,” according to the confession. “After some discussion,” Tongo recounted, “I understood that he wanted someone, a woman, killed.” Shrien was willing to pay the killers 15,000 rand, about $2,200, to plan and carry out the murder. Tongo would get an additional 5,000 rand as a finder’s fee.

The murder plot would take barely 24 hours from conception to execution. Tongo said that he first reached out to a middleman, a hotel receptionist named Monde Mbolombo. Mbolombo led Tongo to Mziwamadoda Lennox Qwabe, a small-time drug dealer and occasional house-party DJ he knew in Khayelitsha. At noon on Saturday, Tongo met with Shrien again at the hotel, and the two men sketched the outlines of the crime. “The hijacking would be simulated,” Tongo recalled. “The agreement was that after the ‘hijacking’ of the vehicle, both Shrien Dewani and I would be ejected from the vehicle unharmed, after which the deceased would be murdered.”

According to the confession, on Saturday afternoon Tongo met with Qwabe and the accomplice he had found, a neighborhood hoodlum named Xolile Mngeni. As the men drove through Khayelitsha in Tongo’s car, they discussed the particulars of the killing: how they would carry it out and how the payment would be delivered. Tongo promised to leave 15,000 rand in the “cubbyhole”—apparently referring to a pocket behind the front passenger seat—of the Volkswagen in advance of the ambush. Then, that evening, he would drive the Dewanis to the intersection of NY 112 and NY 108 in Gugulethu, where Qwabe and Mngeni would be waiting.

During dinner at the Surfside Restaurant, Tongo alleged, Shrien took him aside again and “wanted to know if I had arranged for the guys. I confirmed … that everything had been arranged.” Then Anni and Shrien got into the Volkswagen, and they set out on the road back to Cape Town. During that trip, Tongo said, he sent a text message to Shrien reminding him not to forget about the money. Shrien texted him back, he said, assuring him that the cash was “in an envelope in a pouch behind the front seat.”

When they arrived at the intersection in Gugulethu, “Mngeni positioned himself in the front of the vehicle, and Qwabe was at my door pointing a firearm at me,” Tongo stated. He was told to unlock the doors. Qwabe climbed into the driver’s seat, while Mngeni got in the back. The Dewanis were ordered to lie down on the backseat, and Qwabe pulled away from the curb. “Shrien Dewani and I continued to pretend that we were being ‘hijacked’ by Mngeni and Qwabe,” the confession went on. “I knew that Mngeni and Qwabe would not harm Shrien Dewani and that he would be dropped off at some further point. I also knew that the deceased would be kidnapped, robbed, and murdered … after Shrien Dewani had been ejected from the vehicle in accordance with the plan.”

Police would later extract a confession from Qwabe that corroborated and expanded upon Tongo’s recollection of the crime. Qwabe recounted that Mbolombo had called him on Friday evening, after the Dewanis arrived at the hotel, and told him that a “job” needed to be done. Later, “Tongo told me that he will bring a couple into the township and that the husband wanted the wife killed,” he alleged. “The husband wanted the job done the same Saturday.” Waiting at the appointed intersection in Gugulethu, Qwabe said, he put on a pair of yellow rubber kitchen gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints.

The most significant point on which his account differed from Tongo’s was the identity of the shooter. In Qwabe’s version of events, it was Mngeni, not Qwabe, who brandished the gun, a Norinco 7.62 pistol. “Watti”—his nickname for Mngeni—“pointed it at Zola and ordered him out of the vehicle. Zola got … into the back with the passengers. I got behind the wheel and Watti got in on the passenger side.” Before they threw him out of the car, Tongo “whispered that the money is in a small packet behind the front passenger seat.”

Qwabe continued driving to Khayelitsha, where “we ordered the husband to get out of the vehicle.” A little farther down the road, according to Qwabe’s account, Mngeni—still seated in the front passenger seat—fired a single shot at Anni. According to the autopsy report, the bullet grazed her thumb, severed two major veins in her neck, perforated her spinal cord, then exited her back; she would have bled to death in seconds. Behind the wheel, Qwabe was “scared and nervous,” he said. He got out and felt around for the casing in the backseat. As he and Mngeni fled the scene, he threw it down a storm drain. Police later recovered the cartridge from the drain and found the gun in the shack of a Khayelitsha resident to whom Qwabe had given it for safekeeping.

Two days before his court appearance, Tongo and his attorney had struck a deal with the provincial government: Tongo would plead guilty to murder, aggravated robbery, and kidnapping, and agree to testify against all other participants in the murder. In exchange, he would receive a sentence of 18 years in prison, with the possibility of parole after 12. (The typical sentence for such a crime in South Africa is life imprisonment without parole).

As de Kock read the details of the murder plot, murmurs of surprise and shock reverberated through the gallery. About six hours later, a magistrate in Britain issued a warrant ordering Shrien Dewani taken into custody on suspicion of conspiring to murder his wife.

Shrien Dewani leaves Southmead Police Station in Bristol, England, on December 12, 2010. (Photo: Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

Seven

Shrien Dewani surrendered at the Southmead police station in Bristol at 10:38 p.m. on December 7, 2010. The next morning, at the High Court in Westminster, he appeared dazed and exhausted, glassy-eyed, as he stood at the bar beside his attorney. After two days in prison, he was released on £250,000 bond (about $380,000). He surrendered his passport, had an electronic bracelet attached to his ankle, and retreated to his family home in the Bristol suburb of Westbury-on-Trym.

Back in Mariestad, the Hindocha family was divided on the question of Shrien’s guilt. Ami Denborg spoke sympathetically of Shrien in interviews with the press, but Vinod had come around to his mother’s insistent conviction of Shrien’s involvement. His sense of betrayal had deepened during his most recent trip to Cape Town. After Tongo’s confession, officers from the Hawks took him and his brother Ashok for a drive through the townships, following the route taken by Anni and her killers. The three investigators had pointed out the sandy side street where Shrien had been ejected from the minivan. From there, Vinod counted the seconds until they reached the spot where the hijacker had fired the shot that killed his daughter. Anni, he realized, had spent three minutes alone, desperate, begging for her life.

While Shrien holed up at the Dewani estate, the evidence substantiating the claims against him kept piling up in Cape Town. The South African police said they had recovered phone records indicating that text messages had indeed passed between Zola Tongo and Shrien while they were on the highway. The police recovered closed-circuit television footage from the Cape Grace lobby, taken three days after the murder, that showed Shrien handing Tongo a white plastic package said by police to contain 1,000 rand—partial payment, they claimed, for Tongo’s role in setting up the murder.

Perhaps the most incriminating element in the case against Shrien was the assertion by South African police that Anni had not been raped. Though the forensic report had not been released to the public, both Paul Hendrikse and South African Police Commissioner Bheki Cele had stated that there was no evidence that any sexual assault had occurred, and the Hawks had stated the same thing to Vinod when they took him to the site of Anni’s murder in December. What reason, then, would the gunmen have had to separate the couple, other than premeditated murder?

The only thing missing, it seemed, was a motive. There had been no insurance policy, no will, nothing to suggest that Shrien had been interested in financial gain. Almost everybody who knew the couple talked about their deep affection for each other; no one had seen signs of discontent on his part.

Then, in December, a man named Leopold Leisser showed up at Scotland Yard. Leisser was a male escort from Munich, known professionally as the German Master; his website featured a photo of himself, unshaven and wearing leather gear and a police cap, biting down on a huge cigar, asking, “Are you ready for total domination?” He had seen Shrien’s photograph in the newspapers, he told the police, and recognized him as a former client. Within days, Leisser had reportedly sold an interview to London’s Sun tabloid in which he claimed that he’d had three paid sessions of “kinky sex” with Shrien in the months before his wedding.

Shrien denied knowing Leisser and threatened to sue him and the Sun for defamation. And it was true that a leather daddy who had emerged out of nowhere to extract a payday from a tabloid made for a less than credible figure. A few weeks later, however, a 53-year-old political aide in Parliament paid a visit to British investigators working on the case and told them that he, too, had had several sexual encounters with Shrien. The rendezvous point, the aide said, was a gay fetish club in London called the Hoist. He had come forward, he said, because he was outraged by Shrien’s denials of his own sexuality. “The man told detectives that Dewani was a ‘submissive’ who enjoyed sadomasochism and dressing up in leather,” the Daily Star, another British tabloid, reported. Nobody in Britain would have mistaken the Star or the Sun—with their topless model photos and soap-opera gossip—for a reputable source, but soon the story was given credence by more respected British newspapers, including the Guardian.

In February, the South African legal team seeking Shrien’s extradition told a magistrates’ court in London that they had obtained an affidavit from “a significant witness”—identified in the press as Leisser—who had agreed to testify that Shrien had been unhappy about his upcoming marriage. Shrien told him that “although she was a nice, lovely girl who he liked, he could not break out of the proposal to get married because he would be disowned by his family,” the South African attorney told the court. “He went on to say to the witness that he needed to find a way out of” the marriage.

The idea that Shrien’s double life would prompt him to murder his new wife might have been far-fetched, but it quickly gained traction with the Hindochas. In their view, he was terrified by the possibility of being exposed as a homosexual and of the scandal that might ensue. “If Anni knew [that he was gay] she would have left him, and if she found it out during the honeymoon, he would have panicked,” Ami told me. She and other family members argue that a failed marriage, following his earlier broken engagement, could well have destroyed his reputation within the close-knit, deeply conservative British-Indian elite. Maybe Shrien, they supposed, panicking and desperate to preserve appearances, decided to kill Anni rather than face the humiliation of a divorce. “This marriage was supposed to be perfect,” says Ashok Hindocha, who has frequently voiced his certainty that Shrien murdered his niece. “This is a religious family; they are very involved in society. Shrien could not have it come out openly that he was gay.”

There were also unrelated incidents that, in retrospect, appeared ominous. Ami described to me a phone call she had received from Anni three weeks before the wedding. Anni, in tears, told her she wanted to call off the ceremony. “I’ve thrown back the ring. I’m not going to marry him,” she told Ami. She said she had moved out of the hotel room she and Shrien were sharing in Mumbai and was staying at a friend’s apartment. “He’s so controlling, I can’t stand him,” Ami says Anni told her. She was sick of how Shrien berated her about petty things: not folding dirty clothes before tossing them into the laundry basket, eating ice cream and other sweets, leaving her belongings scattered about the room.

Chalking up Anni’s second thoughts to pre-wedding jitters, Ami tried to calm her. “It’s stress,” she said. “You’ve been planning this for two months.” Hundreds of people had already booked their flights, she reminded her sister, including their parents. Anni’s father and cousin and Shrien’s brother Preyen called her over the course of the night as well, and by the next morning the crisis seemed to have passed. But Ami would remember the advice she had given her sister. She had to go ahead with the wedding, Ami told her, and if things didn’t work out, “You can always get a divorce.”

Eight

Late in the afternoon on November 15, the day after the police found Anni Dewani’s body, a freelance reporter named Dan Newling walked into the lobby of the Cape Grace hotel. He spotted Shrien Dewani, who was standing in the middle of a group of well-dressed Indian men and women, and introduced himself as a journalist. Shrien declined to talk, and Newling told him that he would be in the hotel’s café if he changed his mind. He found a table in a secluded corner of the café, overlooking the waterfront, and settled in to wait.

Newling was 34 years old, a tall, good-looking Englishman whose disarmingly laid-back manner belied his tenacity as a reporter. He had spent seven years in London working for the Daily Mail, covering foreign news and working on long-term investigations. Earlier that year, his wife, a physician, had taken a job in Cape Town, and Newling quit the Daily Mail and followed her. The expatriate life agreed with him, and he had cobbled together some freelance work for the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, and half a dozen other British papers. Newling had as much of an appetite as the next tabloid reporter for a good crime yarn, but he also had a sharply analytical mind. The day before, an editor at the Daily Mail had phoned him after seeing a wire-service report on Anni Dewani’s murder and suggested that Newling check it out.

After an hour, Shrien walked into the café and sat down at Newling’s table. He had immense bags under his eyes. Newling told him he looked exhausted. Shrien replied that he had barely slept since the night before the murder; he had been awake for three days. For the next 45 minutes, he took Newling—the first reporter he had spoken to—step-by-step through what had happened on Saturday night.

He was polite and well-spoken in spite of his visible distress. “Of course I have an enormous amount of guilt about the whole episode,” he told Newling. “However, having gone through events over and over again in my mind, it is difficult to see how we could have done things differently.” When he talked about Anni, his eyes welled up with tears. “She loved people and she loved life and she was always, always happy,” he said. Newling didn’t question him aggressively about the hijacking. “I expected him to be traumatized,” he told me. It had not occurred to him that Shrien might be anything other than a victim.

Four days later, Bheki Cele, the national police commissioner, called a press conference in a community hall in Gugulethu township to discuss the case. Identifying himself as a British journalist, Newling asked Cele whether he considered Cape Town a “safe destination” for tourists. The commissioner, a large, bullet-headed man known for his shoot-from-the-hip style, glared at him. Instead of answering the question, he recounted a recent trip he had made to London, during which his taxi driver had “literally refused” to take him through the South London neighborhood of Brixton. “We should not come here as if we are spotless in our own countries,” he said. “You are not crimeless. Don’t talk as if you are crimeless.”

Newling had grown up in South London. Brixton was a bit rough, he knew, but hardly comparable to the township where the Dewanis had been hijacked. But the commissioner’s fierce defensiveness about Cape Town was shared by many in the South African media; several journalists rebuked Newling after the press conference. There is something funny here, he thought as he left the community hall.

As the case lurched through its bizarre twists and turns in the weeks that followed, Newling dutifully reported them, but the whole affair still seemed fishy to him. “From the very beginning of this case, I’ve been skeptical of the official account of Anni’s death,” he told me when I met him for lunch recently on Cape Town’s Long Street. He was a newcomer to South Africa, but he knew enough about the national police’s reputation not to take law-enforcement officials at their word. The South African police were haunted by the legacy of the apartheid years, when ill-trained cops carried out extrajudicial killings and used torture and planted evidence to win convictions. According to the country’s Independent Complaints Directorate, 294 people died in police custody between 2009 and 2010, and seven of them had been tortured to death. The police were also legendarily corrupt. Cele’s predecessor had been removed from the job the previous year over allegations that he had received more than a million rand in bribes from a prominent drug lord.

The enthusiasm and credence with which politicians and ordinary South Africans had rushed to embrace Tongo’s confession surprised Newling. Many Cape Town residents, he knew, were aggrieved by their city’s reputation for violent crime. For the one in ten of them who were employed by the tourism industry, that reputation wasn’t just an insult but a threat. The day after Anni’s death, Cele—a man with no prior law-enforcement experience who owed his public profile to his loyal membership in President Jacob Zuma’s African National Congress political party—had bitterly rued its potential impact. “It’s appalling that the actions of one or two thugs should bring our entire country into disrepute in the eyes of the world,” he told reporters. “South Africa hosts hundreds of thousands of tourists annually without any incident, as was proved during the 2010 FIFA World Cup.”

Shortly after Shrien was granted bail in London, Cele, speaking at a police ceremony in the northern province of Limpopo, was asked again about the case. “A monkey came all the way from London to have his wife murdered here,” he said. “Shrien thought we South Africans were stupid when he came all the way to kill his wife in our country.” William Booth, chairman of the criminal-law committee of the Law Society of South Africa, described Cele’s “monkey” comment as “bizarre and ridiculous,” arguing that the prejudicial statement could jeopardize South Africa’s case for Shrien’s extradition. (The following October, Zuma fired Cele for conflict of interest and corruption relating to the leasing of police-owned buildings to a business tycoon. A board of inquiry found that he was “unfit for office.”)

Several other details had started to bother Newling. How plausible was it, really, that two strangers had arranged a murder-for-hire during a brief conversation after a ride in from the airport? Similarly skeptical reporters for the West Cape News had tried to find out firsthand how easy it would be to do what Shrien had allegedly done. Using underworld contacts, they found three young men willing to carry out a hit for between 5,000 and 15,000 rand—but all three said that the killing would take days, maybe even weeks, to organize.

There was also the matter of the accomplice. Tongo had no criminal record, and there was nothing in his background to suggest that he would jump at the opportunity to play assistant hit man. Even if he had, it seemed to stretch credulity that Tongo would have considered the plot to be worth it. His salary at the tour company where he worked was 5,000 rand a month plus tips, and he made another 2,000 a month freelancing on the side. Would he really have risked a life sentence for less than one month’s pay?

But Newling kept running up against one detail that seemed to point strongly toward Shrien’s guilt: the police’s insistence that there was no sign that Anni had been raped by her abductors. When lawyers for the South African government formally requested Shrien’s extradition from Britain in January, they cited this fact to support their case. If not rape, what other reason than premeditated murder would the attackers have had to separate the couple?

Newling puzzled over that question. Then, one morning in early February, he decided to take a drive.

Nine

The neighborhood of Elitha Park, near where Anni’s body had been found, sits on the western edge of Khayelitsha, bordering a sweep of sandy wasteland where adolescent Xhosa boys, according to tradition, live alone in isolated shacks for a month following their ritual circumcisions. The more prosperous sections of the neighborhood are sealed off by high cement walls topped by barbed wire. Piles of trash line the roadside and collect in the weedy vacant lots between the houses.

Leaving his car on the same asphalt strip where Anni’s body had been found, Newling began knocking on doors. When he got to a house 100 feet from the spot where the Volkswagen had been abandoned, a young woman answered the door. A 20-year-old business student, she had been at home on the morning of November 14 when Anni’s body was found. Yes, she said, she remembered the incident vividly. Sometime between 7 and 8 a.m., she told Newling, her brother had told her to come outside—there was a dead body in a car, he said. She arrived on the scene just in time to see a police officer open the rear side door of the minivan. “When he did,” she said, “the lady’s head fell back and blood spattered onto the road below.” She had had a clear view inside the car. “The woman’s head was nearest us and she was lying on her back,” she said. “Her knees were up and her legs were apart. I could see that her dress was pulled up to her waist and that her underwear was below her knees.”

Newling asked her whether she believed that Anni had been raped. “It looked to me very strongly that they had done something to her,” she replied. “I couldn’t say if they raped her. But she had definitely been attacked. That I am sure about.”

Not long after, Newling was leaked a postmortem report, written on November 15 by a pathologist who had examined Anni’s corpse, that had been invoked by the authorities but never released. “No signs of any sexual assault were found,” Paul Hendrikse had written in his affidavit for the court. In the press conference that week, Bheki Cele had insisted that “there is no evidence at the present moment that there was a sexual assault.” But the pathologist’s report suggested that, at the very least, this wasn’t the whole truth. In fact, there had been four bruises “arranged in a semi-circular fashion” on the victim’s lower left leg. “These are reminiscent,” the pathologist wrote, “of fingerprint contusions.”

The prosecution’s story was being challenged elsewhere as well. On February 17, lawyers for Mziwamadoda Lennox Qwabe and Xolile Mngeni alleged in interviews with the Guardian that their clients’ confessions had been extracted under torture by the police. Thabo Nogemane, Qwabe’s lawyer, claimed that his client had been beaten with a flashlight by one of the officers. “He was hit all over his body,” he said. “The police in South Africa only hit in such a way that there are no marks, no evidence.” Nogemane told the Guardian that Qwabe’s “statement was a suggestion put to him by the police. They already had the allegations so they told him: ‘Just sign here.’”

Vusi Tshabalala, Mngeni’s lawyer, told the Guardian that police “physically assault[ed Mngeni] with fists and use[d] a plastic bag to suffocate him,” because they were desperate to solve a high-profile murder that threatened Cape Town’s booming tourism industry. (Neither lawyer’s allegations have been independently corroborated.) “They were under pressure,” Nogemane told the Guardian. “They had to act quickly and get information. They arrested the wrong people.”

On February 20, an ambulance was called to the house at Westbury-on-Trym. Shrien had taken an overdose of sleeping medication and was in serious condition. At the Bristol Royal Infirmary, “He told the staff … that he did not want to live,” according to a subsequent psychiatric evaluation. His publicist, Max Clifford, claimed that Shrien had lost 28 pounds since his wife’s death and was getting “weaker and weaker and weaker.”

Shrien was diagnosed with severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, and committed to the Priory Hospital in London, a mental health and addiction rehabilitation facility popular with British celebrities. Three days later, a new article by Newling appeared in London’s Daily Express. It was different from his earlier stories, this time written in the first person and betraying a barely concealed sense of outrage. The headline read, “Why I Believe Shrien Dewani Is Innocent.”

“There is no other reporter who knows the [Dewani] case better than I do,” Newling wrote. “So it has been with a growing sense of disquiet and anger that I have seen the traumatised widower I met three months ago turned, in the eyes of the world, into a killer. On the evidence I have seen, not only is Dewani unlikely to have killed his wife but he could be the victim of an injustice.”

While allowing that he could not say for certain what had happened on the night of November 13, Newling argued that “it seems highly unlikely that any criminal court—British or South African—would agree” with the prosecution’s theory of the case. The state’s witnesses were all hopelessly compromised. Zola Tongo “is a self-confessed liar,” Newling wrote, who had admitted to obstructing justice by misleading the police and had had seven years dropped from his sentence in exchanging for “helpful” testimony. The other witnesses had all been offered immunity from punishment in exchange for their testimony corroborating the prosecution’s story.

There could have been a perfectly innocent explanation for the envelope of money that Shrien was caught on camera handing to Tongo. While Shrien “likes to appear self-assured and worldly,” Newling wrote, “he is actually woefully naïve.” He had told Newling that in the days immediately following the hijacking, “he quite liked” Tongo, who had not been paid for the cab ride to Gugulethu. “If the guileless Briton was taken in,” Newling wrote, “then isn’t it possible that he could have fallen for a sob story a few days later and agreed to pay Tongo the fare they had agreed?” As it happens, the 1,000 rand that Shrien gave Tongo is about what it costs to take a taxi from the Cape Grace to the Strand—where the couple had eaten at the Surfside Restaurant—and back to the hotel.

In traveling into the townships late at night, the Dewanis had wandered into not just physically dangerous territory but also a perilous corner of the local public consciousness. “Talk about the Dewani case in South Africa and you risk getting into an argument,” Newling wrote. “People here are angry at the violent crime that plagues their country and at being reminded of it by foreigners. They are keen that their country—reborn after the horrors of apartheid—should not be a place where tourists get killed by cab drivers.”

Shrien Dewani appears in Belmarsh Magistrates’ Court in London on February 24, 2011. (Photo: Guy Corbishley)

Ten

In April 2011, Shrien Dewani got into a “heated discussion” with a fellow patient at Priory Hospital who had told him, according to a source close to Shrien, that he should “go back to South Africa.” A subsequent psychiatric evaluation determined that Shrien had developed “psychotic symptoms.” He was transferred to a psychiatric unit at Kewstoke and, two weeks later, to a higher-security facility in Bristol.

While Shrien underwent intensive treatment, lawyers, psychiatrists, and government officials wrestled with the matter of his extradition to South Africa. Two South African criminal justice experts, citing overcrowding and gang rape in South African prisons, warned that he would almost certainly face grave dangers if he were forced to serve a sentence there. “He fitted [sic] the profile of someone who was particularly vulnerable,” they wrote in their report. “He was youthful, good looking, and lacked ‘street wisdom.’” Shrien’s attorney argued that if he were ordered to stand trial in South Africa, he would likely commit suicide.

Nevertheless, in late September, the British home secretary ordered Shrien’s extradition. Shrien’s attorneys appealed the decision immediately. Six months later, a British judge temporarily blocked the order. He ruled that Shrien suffered from an “unusual combination of PTSD and depression to such a severe degree” that “extradition would present a real and significant risk to his life.”

That August, police extracted an official confession, in writing, from Mziwamadoda Lennox Qwabe, Tongo’s alleged accomplice. By the terms of his plea bargain, Qwabe was sentenced to 25 years in exchange for corroborating Tongo’s story—he would be eligible for parole after serving two-thirds of that time—and agreeing to testify as a prosecution witness in the murder trial of Xolile Mngeni, the only alleged accomplice in the plot who had not struck a plea deal.

Mngeni’s trial opened in August 2012. While in prison, he had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, and he staggered into the Wynberg Criminal Court each morning looking frail and using a walker. He listened impassively as his alleged accomplices implicated him in Anni’s killing. When Qwabe took the stand, prosecutors showed the court a videotaped statement he had made immediately after his arrest, which told the same story as his recent written confession. Anni’s killing was a murder for hire, he told police, and Mngeni had pulled the trigger.

It was Qwabe, Mngeni insisted, who had fired the fatal shot. “He stopped the vehicle,” Mngeni said. “He then took his firearm, and I thought we were going to leave. And he climbed off the vehicle and walked around to my side. He opened the passenger doors right behind me. And [Anni] was sitting at the back, next to the other door. He then pulled a small bag from this lady, and the lady was hanging on, crying, and she was scared. I heard one gunshot. Then I asked [Qwabe], the thing that he is doing, what caused him to do it? Then we started arguing. Then he told me I cannot tell him what to do.”

Any skilled criminal attorney would have homed in on the discrepancy between Qwabe’s and Mngeni’s versions of events and used those contradictions to attempt to poke holes in Qwabe’s story. He would also have brought up the plea bargain that Qwabe had taken in exchange for a mitigated sentence and questioned whether Qwabe had lied to spare himself a life term. But Mngeni’s lawyer offered no such challenges. He posed only a few feeble questions during cross-examination. The judge found Mngeni guilty of a premeditated murder-for-hire and sentenced him to life in prison without parole. Mngeni flashed an incongruous thumbs-up sign before he was escorted out of the courtroom, supporting himself on his walker.

But Mngeni’s account, set alongside Tongo’s and Qwabe’s conflicting confessions, left a morass of inconsistencies: the number of guns that had been used in the hijacking, the seating arrangement in the minivan, the identity of the triggerman. The South African authorities—who had once seemed eager to make a spectacle out of Anni’s murder—now mostly refused to talk about it. Eric Ntabazalila, the spokesman for Rodney de Kock, the prosecutor, provided me with some court documents, but when I pressed him for more information, he demurred, then stopped taking my calls. My last communication from him was a brief email, rebuking me for writing about the case. “I must say I’m very disappointed with you,” he wrote. “I won’t be able to assist with anything from now on.”

Meanwhile, one of the critical pieces of evidence against Shrien—the text messages about money that he and Tongo had supposedly passed back and forth in the car before Anni’s killing—had proved to be a chimera. In court the police were forced to admit that though they had computer records showing that Tongo had sent seven texts to Dewani the day of Anni’s murder, they had been unable to retrieve the actual messages. Though the police had seized Tongo’s cell phone from Mngeni’s home the day after the murder, the incriminating texts had apparently been deleted—perhaps by Tongo, perhaps by Mngeni. And, the police admitted, contrary to earlier statements, they had no computer record of Dewani’s sending any texts to Tongo during the drive.

By this point, Dan Newling’s reporting pointed to a different scenario: Tongo had sized up the Dewanis as easy marks and arranged with his accomplices for a fake hijacking in order to rob the couple of their money and valuables. (The police had recovered a number of the Dewanis’ items from the suspects and their acquaintances, including a Giorgio Armani wristwatch, a white gold and diamond bracelet, a leather purse, and a BlackBerry.) But his coconspirators lost control of the situation and themselves, shooting Anni to death during a rape attempt. Tongo, the theory went, then incriminated Shrien to reduce his own sentence, and the police, eager to recast the murder as a crime instigated by a foreign tourist, went along with Tongo’s story, or even coached him on it.

Xolile Mngeni appears in Cape Town High Court on November 19, 2012. (Photo: Michael Hammond/Foto24/Gallo Images/Getty Images)

Eleven

On a Saturday morning in December, I decided to trace the final journey of Shrien and Anni Dewani myself. At Mzoli’s, the barbecue restaurant in Gugulethu township, I met a local guide named Vusi. Together we drove to the crossroads where Mngeni and Qwabe had held up Tongo and the Caltex gas station where Tongo had been ejected from the vehicle. From there we turned onto the N2 and drove to Khayelitsha.

I had spent years reporting from some of the most dangerous corners of Africa and the Middle East, but even so, I found myself overwhelmed by the squalor as we drove deeper into the township. The wind kicked up sand, and through occasional gaps between the storefronts lining the shoulder I could see a sweeping bowl packed with corrugated-tin-roofed shacks—thousands of them, a vast human beehive. As we drove through Elitha Park, we passed Pentecostal worshipers in white robes gathered in a vacant lot, chanting and praying. The car descended a gentle slope and turned right at a T junction. Here, the shacks thinned out, and we passed a sea of empty dunes. It was somewhere on this deserted stretch of road that one of the two men raised his gun and fired a single shot.

We parked the car near the street where Xolile Mngeni lived, in a tidy if poor neighborhood of Khayelitsha consisting mostly of stucco and brick bungalows. Vusi had called Mngeni’s grandmother that morning, but she refused to see us. “She says the grandson has been sentenced, she sees no need to talk, and she says that you are giving her heartache,” he told me. Half a dozen adolescent boys playing in a makeshift video-game parlor next to the grandmother’s tiny butterscotch-colored house stared at me as I walked past.

Down the road we came upon a slim, bearded man wearing a golden earring and a red baseball cap, sitting on a stoop. It was Lwando Mngeni, Xolile Mngeni’s older brother. In return for an offer to buy him lunch, he agreed to talk a bit, and he got into the car with us. I asked him whether he believed his brother was guilty of Anni’s murder. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “I think it is impossible. Even the community was surprised. They saw him as a nice guy who would never do anything like that.”

Had Mngeni spent much time with Qwabe before they allegedly committed the crime? I asked. “Qwabe and Xolile and me, we were all together, playing music at some parties,” Lwando said. “If you didn’t have music for a function, you would always go and ask Qwabe. He had everything on his laptop—house music, R&B, ballads. But I didn’t know him as a criminal.”

The Mngenis’ mother, Lwando said, “died when I was eight years old, my brother was six years old. She died of poisoning.” He stopped, and for a moment I thought I could see tears forming in the corners of his eyes. “The only thing I remember is that the priest came and asked me to say good-bye to my mother, that I would see her in heaven.” He and his brother lived for a short time with their father in Gugulethu, but the man had a second wife and a new family, and he sent them away. “After that we grew up with my grandmother.” He had never graduated high school, and got by, he said, “doing piecework—two months here, two months there, cutting trees, manual labor.” Sometimes, he said, “I did some [comedy] sketches, acting with my brother” in a neighborhood playhouse in Khayelitsha. Lwando told me that he’d last seen his brother in court a week ago, before he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison. “He told me he was innocent,” Lwando said.

In a London courtroom a few days later, Vinod Hindocha sat in the gallery while Shrien’s attorney, Clare Montgomery, described her client’s diminished life. Shrien had become “a husk,” she said, who spent hours playing computer games in a camper van set up as a recreation room in the parking lot at Fromeside Clinic in Bristol, plagued by flashbacks of his wife’s killing. District Judge Howard Riddle ordered him relocated to another mental institution, one with a more “open, relaxed, and calm environment.” Then he postponed the extradition hearing until July 2013—putting on hold, once again, the final judgment of Shrien’s guilt or innocence.

By this point, it seemed to me that the initial confession that Mngeni had given after the crime was the most plausible of the many blurred accounts of what had happened the night of Anni’s murder—that it was a robbery, and possibly sexual assault, gone wrong. It was not out of the realm of possibility that Shrien had done what his accusers had said he’d done, of course—the scenario suggested by Dan Newling’s reporting would require a plot only slightly less elaborate than the one the police had accused Shrien of concocting. But the evidence against Shrien was too circumstantial, the witnesses too compromised, the motives too elusive to prove as much.

Perversely, the greatest barrier to establishing this once and for all was Shrien’s own unwillingness to travel to South Africa to prove his innocence. (Following his drug overdose in February 2011, a judge assigned to his case declared that it had been “a deliberate overdose to avoid engaging with the extradition proceedings.”) It was easy enough to see why he wouldn’t go: Was clearing his name really worth testing his luck in the prisons and courtrooms of a country that seemed so eager to find him guilty? But it was just as hard to deny the Hindochas’ demand that he do just that.

I spoke to Vinod for the last time in February, over the phone, after seeing a story in London’s Sun tabloid reporting that Nilam Hindocha had stopped eating because of anxiety and depression; she seemed to have lost the will to live. I sent Vinod a concerned email and received a quick response: “Nilam [is] better,” he wrote, “but NOT as it should be.”

When I called, I asked Vinod if, after all he had seen and heard, he could admit to any possibility that Shrien was innocent. “I’m not saying that he did it,” he replied. “I’m not saying that he didn’t do it. I’m saying, go to South Africa and give us answers.”

The Sinking of the Bounty

The Sinking of the Bounty

The true story of a tragic shipwreck and its aftermath.

By Matthew Shaer

The Atavist Magazine, No. 22

Matthew Shaer is a regular contributor to New York magazine and the author ofAmong Righteous Men, a book of nonfiction. His reporting and essays have appeared in Harper’s, Popular Science, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, among other publications.

Editor: Charles Homans
Producers: Olivia Koski and Gray Beltran
Copy Editor: Emily Votruba
Fact Checker: Thomas Stackpole
Research and Production: Nicole Pasulka and Rachel Richardson
Video: Edited from U.S. Coast Guard rescue footage
Audio Clips: Edited from the U.S. Coast Guard Bounty Hearing
Music: “Mingulay Boat Song,” performed by Charles Homans and Jefferson Rabb
Illustrator: Damien Scogin
Simulation: Professor Shuyi S. Chen, University. ofMiami

Published in February 2013. Design updated in 2021.

“And tell me, wasn’t that the best time, that time when we were young at sea; young and had nothing, on the sea that gives nothing, except hard knocks—and sometimes a chance to feel your strength…”

—Joseph Conrad, “Youth”

One

MONDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2012 5:30 A.M.

Five hundred feet over the Atlantic Ocean, Coast Guard Petty Officer Second Class Randy Haba jammed himself into the rear bucket seat of the Jayhawk helicopter and waited for the doomed ship to come into view. Through the window he could see the crests of the waves and a flotilla of detritus that seemed to spread out in every direction toward the horizon—wormy coils of rope, sharp splinters of yard, tatters of sailcloth. The phosphor screens of his ANVIS-9 night-vision goggles rendered the ocean neon green—a flat, unceasing green that bled into the gray-green of the clouds and the yellow-green of the sky. The kind of green that made it difficult to distinguish distance or depth of field, let alone the blink of the chest-mounted strobe that the guys up in the C-130 transport airplane had sworn was out there, somewhere in the hurricane-roiled sea.

Haba felt the helicopter lurch into a hover. The winds were blowing at close to 90 miles an hour, and in the cabin, Lieutenant Commander Steve Cerveny was fighting the sticks. “Left side,” Lieutenant Jane Peña, the safety pilot, called over the radio. “Got it?”

“Roger,” Haba, the crew’s rescue swimmer, replied. Setting down the ANVIS-9s, he pulled on his fins, dive helmet, mask and snorkel, and thick neoprene gloves. He checked the neck seal of the flame-retardant dive suit and the pockets above the harness, which contained flares, a radio beacon, and one very sharp, spring-loaded knife.

Haba, a six-foot-three former high school football star with hard blue eyes and a weather-beaten face, had been based at the air station in Elizabeth City, North Carolina for more than eight years, the majority of his Coast Guard career. He’d participated in plenty of rescues in the waters off Cape Hatteras, a dangerous patch of sea known by generations of mariners as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic.” There, past the pastel beach houses and salt-stained crab shacks, the North Atlantic’s cold Labrador current collides with the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, yielding frequent storms and high waves capable of swallowing a ship whole.

But Haba had never encountered a situation like this. An hour and a half earlier, he’d been snoozing on a lumpy leather couch at the air station when the call came in: A large wooden ship was in trouble 100 miles east of Elizabeth City with 16 people on board. The ship’s water-removal systems were malfunctioning, and it was limping into the path of Hurricane Sandy, the vast superstorm swirling over the North Carolina coast. Haba had trotted downstairs and rendezvoused with his helicopter crew. One of the command center staffers had printed out a picture of the ship in question from Google Images, and only when he saw it did Haba grasp how strange his morning was about to become. Because the distressed vessel wasn’t a yacht. It wasn’t a schooner. It looked more like a pirate ship.

Bounty, as she was known, was a working replica of the 18th-century tall ship of the same name, commissioned half a century earlier for a film. She measured 120 feet from stern to bow, and 128 feet from keel to masthead. Her three wooden masts held 10,000 square feet of sail. A couple of days earlier, she’d departed New London, Connecticut, under the command of Robin Walbridge, a veteran tall-ship captain. At first she’d tacked east, in an effort to avoid the worst of the storm, but at some point, Walbridge had turned the ship southwest, toward shore and Sandy’s perilous center mass. Until 4 a.m., when the crew abandoned ship, she’d been in contact with a C-130, which was still circling overhead at 1,000 feet. After that, there was only silence on the radio.

The number of survivors was uncertain. But the C-130 crew had spotted at least one figure bobbing alone amid the debris—a small shape swaddled in an immersion suit, with a blinking strobe on his chest. The straggler, they called him. Maybe he was dead—a floater—but maybe he wasn’t. Either way, Haba was about to find out. He clipped into the winch, gave a thumbs-up to the flight mechanic, and, the cable whistling behind him, dropped into the waves.

Almost immediately, he began to eat seawater. He was swimming against the current, against the wind. It didn’t help that Cerveny had the Jayhawk so low. The rotor wash was spectacular, drowning out any other sound. Still, Haba paddled like hell, and a minute later, he reached the straggler. The hood of the immersion suit was pulled tight around the guy’s head and all Haba could see was his face, which was covered in fresh lacerations. His skin was pale and his cheeks sunken. One arm hung limply at his side.

With some effort, Haba angled the sling under the man’s other armpit, and pulled the man close to his chest. Sometimes survivors fight back, out of confusion or panic—the surest way to drown is to fight us, rescue swimmers like to say. But the straggler was docile, barely even able to talk, and Haba made good time back to the winch. He gave the thumbs-up to the mechanic and waited for the cable to pull them skyward. Beneath the Jayhawk, illuminated by the rising sun, the tall ship Bounty was slipping under the surface of the sea.

Two

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25 11:00 A.M.

It amused the hands on the Bounty—a motley collection of retirees, bearded and tattooed twentysomethings, and midlife reinventionists—to watch the Navy guys go all weak-kneed at the sight of the 112-foot masts. Bounty sailors knew every inch of that rigging, from sheets to spar. But to the local nuclear submarine crew in New London, who had come aboard that afternoon for a demonstration in square-rig sailing, it was utterly unfamiliar territory. In the end, only a few of them were brave enough to strap up and attempt a climb. The weather was calm and overcast, a pleasant 58 degrees.

Later that day, after the sub crew departed, Captain Robin Walbridge convened a brief all-hands meeting. Walbridge was a naturally reserved man, but at musters he presented a calmly confident mien. Peering out over the top of his eyeglasses, a ball cap partially obscuring his brow, he outlined the course for the two weeks ahead. Bounty would depart New London that night—setting sail on a Friday was considered to be bad luck—and head south. If they kept up a pace of 100 miles a day, they could easily make Florida by the second week of November.

That would allow them to meet an obligation in St. Petersburg, a tour for members of an organization that promoted awareness of Down syndrome—and maybe even make a pit stop in Key West, where the crew could swim, hit the bars, and recharge after what was sure to be a difficult voyage south. In mid-November, the Bounty would sail around the tip of Florida, across the Gulf of Mexico, and into Galveston, Texas, where she’d be put up for the winter.

Walbridge was 63, with unruly silver hair and meaty, callused hands. He had come relatively late to professional seafaring, after a series of stints on oil rigs and a short career as a long-haul trucker. He’d grown up in St. Johnsbury, a cloistered town in northeastern Vermont, and claimed to have first sailed at the age of 18, although he was tight-lipped about that part of his life; when his crew members asked his age, he would offer an array of different numbers. Perhaps something painful lurked in his past, they thought. Or perhaps Walbridge simply preferred to talk about his ships.

He’d worked on plenty over the previous two decades, all of them throwbacks in one way or another. There was the 19th-century schooner Governor Stone; the HMS Rose, a tall ship built in 1970 to the specifications of 18th-century British Admiralty drawings; and the USS Constitution, the famous frigate christened by George Washington, on which Walbridge had once served as guest captain in the 1990s. But his true love was Bounty, a vessel he’d captained since 1995.

Tall-ship crews are usually drawn from two cohorts of people. First there are the amateur adventurers—the retirees and armchair admirals, the recent college graduates putting off adulthood. These volunteers might sail with a tall ship for a week, or a few months, or a year, but they are not paid; in many cases, they are actually billed for berth and board. The second cohort, the mates, tend to be experienced sailors who have decided to make a career out of tall-ship sailing. Generally speaking, they have worked their way up the totem pole, from volunteer to paid hand.

On average, the crew of Bounty numbered around 18, with a small cadre of paid officers, a paid cook, a few lower-ranking hands, and the occasional volunteer. Walbridge never discriminated among the various groups. If anything, he seemed to lavish more attention on the sailors who were still learning to navigate the ship, to take in line and climb the rigging. He was intoxicated by the old-fashioned way of doing things, and he was pleased to be around those who were in the process of becoming intoxicated themselves. “He considered square-rigged sailing a truly dying art, and he was the one keeping the idea alive,” one longtime Bounty hand has said.

And yet Walbridge was no fusty antiquarian. He had sailed the Bounty up and down the East Coast, through the Panama Canal and over to the West Coast, and twice across the Atlantic. Along the way, he’d seen plenty of bad weather, including a pair of hurricanes and pants-shittingly high waves that heaved across the decks, and he had acquired a certain bravado about it. Walbridge was “clearly brilliant,” says a former first mate of Bounty, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The kind of guy who could play three games of chess at once, who could take apart a diesel engine and put it back together with his bare hands. But the term ‘prudent mariner’ doesn’t really enter the mix.”

The former first mate recalled a series of harrowing close calls aboard the ship, including a “36-hour nightmare ordeal” off Cape Hatteras in 1998, when rough seas sent water pouring into the Bounty’s engine room. Both the Coast Guard and the Navy had sent vessels to the scene, and extra pumps were dropped on board to clear out the water. But in the end, Walbridge declined to be towed back to shore by the Coast Guard—fearing, the first mate believes, that it would prompt a federal investigation. Instead, Bounty managed to sail under her own power back to Charleston for repairs. In a few days, she was at sea again.

Around the same time that Walbridge was convening his crew on Bounty’s deck in New London, on October 25, a new storm, Hurricane Sandy, was arriving on the Florida coast, 1,000 miles to the south. Several crew members who were in the meeting on deck say that Walbridge believed Sandy would barrel up the coast and eventually track inland, somewhere near North Carolina. By sailing southeast before turning south, Bounty could stay windward of the storm. Remaining in Connecticut, Walbridge felt, wasn’t an option—he subscribed to the old maxim that a ship was always safer at sea than at anchor. In a crowded port like New London, there would be practically zero “sea room,” and Bounty would be hemmed in, dangerously close to the docks. Better to take our chances “out there,” Walbridge told the crew.

It was an unusual decision—few other captains in the region, and no other tall-ship captains, were taking any such gamble. And Walbridge, likely mindful of his less experienced hands, was careful to stress that no one was obligated to stay on the Bounty. “I know that quite a few of you all are getting phone calls and emails regarding the hurricane,” Chris Barksdale, the 56-year-old engineer, recalls Walbridge saying. “I wouldn’t blame anyone if you want to get off and I won’t think any worse of you and I won’t hold it against you.”

Josh Scornavacchi crossed his arms and nodded. Scornavacchi, 25, was short and stoutly built, with an earring in his left ear and a mop of unruly reddish hair, which he wore swept across his forehead and cowlicked up in the back. He’d grown up in landlocked Mohnton, Pennsylvania and studied biology at Penn State before signing on as a whitewater-kayaking guide in the Lehigh Gorge. It was there that he’d caught the adventure bug, and hatched a series of increasingly grandiose plans—someday he would hike Everest, float down the Amazon, travel to Congo and Papua, New Guinea. He would buy a boat and sail around the world. But in order to do that, he’d first need to learn how to sail, so in 2011 he’d signed on for a Hudson River tour aboard Clearwater, a sloop owned by the folk singer Pete Seeger.

After the tour, Scornavacchi returned to Mohnton, where he worked shifts at the local Red Robin and looked for another opportunity to ship out. The world of tall ships is tight-knit, and through a friend on Clearwater, Scornavacchi heard of an opportunity on Bounty. He interviewed with John Svendsen, the ship’s 41-year-old first mate, and in the spring of 2012, he flew to Puerto Rico to start a stint as a paid deckhand. The money wasn’t much, but Scornavacchi was deeply enamored with the ship. He loved scrambling up the high-masts, loved the sight of the big canvas under sail, loved the rhythm of life on board—the nights in his gently rocking bunk and the days exploring strange new cities.

With Bounty, Scornavacchi had sailed from Puerto Rico to Florida, up the East Coast to Nova Scotia and back down to Maine, stopping in dozens of ports along the way. Now he would have the chance to experience his first real hurricane. It was a prospect that had not particularly delighted his mother. Earlier that day, he had spoken to her on the phone, and listened to the way the worry made her voice heavy and syrupy. “Mom, I’m not going to die,” he told her. “I promise.” Walbridge was a veteran sailor, he assured her, a man who had crossed the Atlantic multiple times and maneuvered Bounty through some of the most dangerous passages on earth. And Walbridge was backed up by a pair of extremely able lieutenants: Svendsen, the long-haired and taciturn first mate, and second mate Matthew Sanders, an affable 37-year-old with a degree from Maine Maritime Academy. Together, Walbridge, Svendsen, and Sanders had decades of storm experience. “We trusted them,” Scornavacchi recalled later. “We all did. We trusted them completely. And we trusted the boat.”

In the end, none of the crew members took Walbridge up on his offer to get off in Connecticut. Around 8 p.m. that evening, Bounty glided out of the New London harbor, past the navigational buoys and the shuddering glow of the nearby boats, her dual John Deere engines rumbling underfoot, Long Island Sound opening up before her.

Three

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26 8:00 A.M.

All storms start in miniature, sucking in moisture and matter as they grow, and in this respect, at least, Hurricane Sandy was no different. She had been spotted in the radar images for the first time on October 19, in the Caribbean Sea, that blue breeding ground for hurricanes, an unspectacular whorl of cloud perched southwest of Puerto Rico. Meteorologists dubbed her Tropical Depression 18. She worked her way west, along the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia, before turning north toward Jamaica. Her status was upgraded with alarming regularity, from a tropical depression to a tropical low—a cyclone with a low-pressure core—to a tropical storm. By 11 a.m. EST on October 24, she was a full-fledged hurricane.

Outside the Jamaican capital of Kingston, a city that had not seen a hurricane in 24 years, a man was struck and killed by falling rocks. In Haiti, floods coursed across the lowlands and swept through the post-earthquake tent cities of Port-au-Prince, claiming 54 lives and the homes of 20,000 people. In Cuba, 11 perished and 200,000 homes were damaged or destroyed. In the Dominican Republic, the streets of the capital city of Santo Domingo were submerged and 30,000 people evacuated.

Still accumulating size and strength, Sandy rumbled northward. By October 25, she was just southeast of Florida. News reports indicated that she could eventually reach the magnitude of Katrina and impact the entire Eastern Seaboard from the Southeast to New England. “Now is the time to update your family communication plans, check your supplies, and stay informed,” a high-ranking Federal Emergency Management Agency official warned. “A hurricane isn’t a point on a map—it’s a big storm and its impact will be felt far from the center.” The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted gale force winds of up to 70 miles an hour in some areas and widespread storm surges—the rising of the Atlantic Ocean itself. The National Hurricane Center called for a “long-lasting event,” with “two to three days of impact” after the storm had hit.

But the morning of October 26, standing on the stern deck and gazing out in the direction of the Maryland shore, Doug Faunt found it hard to believe there was a storm out there at all. The day was calm and comparatively mild, and above the Bounty’s towering masts, the gulls were circling. Robin is right, Faunt thought. Get clear of the hurricane to the east, and then tack south. Nothing to it. They’d be in Key West in no time, drinking Coronas on the beach. They’d be laughing.

At 66, Faunt was the oldest person on Bounty, and the only volunteer. For most of his life, he’d been a computer engineer in Silicon Valley, a job that had made him plenty of money—not enough to be filthy rich, but enough that he was able to fully retire, without worry, shortly after his 48th birthday. He’d always been an avid reader, and among his favorite books were nautical adventures, like Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander novels. And so in the late 1990s, married but without kids, Faunt had set about finally fulfilling his sailing dreams. He’d taken a tour on the Rose, the tall ship re-christened Surprise for the 2003 Master and Commander movie starring Russell Crowe—the same vessel that Robin Walbridge had once helped helm—and sailed across the Atlantic on a century-old steel-hulled barque called the Europa. In his spare time, he rode motorcycles in the war-torn Balkans and backpacked through the western Sahara.

In 2008, as his marriage was disintegrating, Faunt had learned of a vacancy on Bounty, a ship whose history he had studied extensively. The original vessel, he knew, had been built in 1784, in the city of Hull, and christened Bethia, only to be purchased by the British Royal Navy and renamed HMS Bounty three years later. In December of 1787, Bounty had sailed from the port of Spithead, in Hampshire, England, under the command of William Bligh, a 33-year-old lieutenant who had once served with Captain James Cook. Bligh was bound for Tahiti, where the Bounty would pick up a hold’s worth of breadfruit trees and transport them to the West Indies. Sir Joseph Banks, a prominent naturalist with the ear of the king, hoped breadfruit, a meaty and filling food, could eventually become a staple in England; others saw it merely as a cheap source of sustenance for slaves in the colonies.

But Bounty was cursed almost from the outset. She ran into extremely rough weather near the southern tip of Chile, and after 30 days of unsuccessful attempts to round Cape Horn, Bligh was forced to head east, for the Cape of Good Hope and the Indian Ocean. Over the ten months it took to reach Tahiti, a deep and abiding tension developed between Bligh and his crew, especially the master’s mate, Fletcher Christian.

In early April, after half a year in Tahiti, Bligh announced that the procurement of the breadfruit trees was complete—Bounty would set sail for Jamaica, unload her cargo, and return to England. The members of the crew boarded the ship as ordered, but unhappily; many of them had started relationships with Tahitian women, and none of them much enjoyed the prospect of a return voyage as arduous as the first. A few days later, on April 28, 1789, 18 crewmembers under Christian’s direction led Bligh out of his chamber at gunpoint and deposited him in a 23-foot launch along with 22 loyal sailors.

In an exceptional display of seamanship, Bligh managed somehow to pilot the boat 3,618 nautical miles to the Dutch-held port in Timor and went on to enjoy a long if unspectacular career in the Royal Navy. The mutineers, meanwhile, sailed to Pitcairn Island via Tahiti—where they deposited a few of their number—and, after burning and sinking the Bounty there, established a small, self-sufficient colony. The mutineers who remained in Tahiti were eventually apprehended and sent in chains to England to stand trial. The Pitcairn crew, however, succeeded in staying out of view of the admiralty. Their outpost was only discovered in 1808, at which point almost all the mutineers were dead or gone, including Christian.

Beginning with Bligh’s publication of his own account in 1790, the Bounty mutiny became an enduring subject of public fascination, the facts of the incident increasingly obscured beneath layers of speculation and literary invention. Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall’s popular 1932 novel Mutiny on the Bounty—in which Bligh is cast as a sadistic disciplinarian and Christian a brave upstart—was adapted four times for the screen and once for the stage, with Christian portrayed by half a century’s worth of leading men: Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, and Mel Gibson.

It was for Brando’s outing that MGM Studios had asked the Smith & Rhuland shipyard in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, to build a replica—the most exacting and accurate that had ever been created for a film. The shipbuilders consulted the Bounty’s drawings in the archives of the British Admiralty. Their only significant amendments to the original were the ship’s size—the 18th-century ship was 90 feet from stem to stern, close quarters for a film crew—and a pair of diesel engines. Once filming concluded, Brando insisted that the ship be preserved and not burned for the final scene, as the producers had originally intended. So Bounty was sent to St. Petersburg, where she remained for more than 20 years.

In 1986, Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, acquired MGM’s entire library of film props, including Bounty. In the years that followed, the ship appeared in a handful of other movies—among them a 1990 Treasure Island adaptation starring Charlton Heston and, later, two of the Pirates of the Caribbean films—but Turner had no great desire to hang on to the ship. In 1993, he donated her to the Fall River Chamber Foundation, in Massachusetts, which in turn established the Tall Ship Bounty Foundation. Robin Walbridge was brought on a year later.

Under Walbridge’s direction, Bounty joined the community of tall ships that crisscross the globe in the summer months. It was a sort of inverse tourism circuit: The ships would lay up for a few days in one harbor, long enough for locals and visitors to admire the high masts and ballooning sails, then push off for another port of call. Maintenance, supplies, and crew salaries were financed with ticket sales, the ten bucks they charged people to climb aboard, wander belowdecks or pose for pictures beside the replica cannons.

Before joining the replica Bounty as a volunteer, in 2008, Doug Faunt made it his business to read every book he could on the original ship. He kept pictures of Bounty around his house in Oakland, and tacked additional images above his berth. The vessel bewitched him; he believed Walbridge when the captain told him that Bounty was “the most famous ship afloat in the entire world.”

And yet Faunt was not unaware of the subpar condition in which the Bounty found herself at middle age. In 2001, Robert Hansen, the millionaire founder of Islandaire, an air-conditioning company, had purchased Bounty from the Tall Ship Bounty Foundation. He had kept Walbridge as captain, and also provided a much-needed infusion of funds to help maintain the vessel and pay the sailors. But even with his respectable fortune, he seemed unable to keep up with the intensive and regular maintenance a ship of Bounty’s size required. There were always repairs to be done, and never enough money to do them.

Before arriving in New London, Bounty had spent several weeks in dry dock in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, where workers and crew members replaced some rotted planking and installed a pair of new fuel tanks. In Connecticut, two new stoves had been driven down by Tracy Simonin, an employee of the HMS Bounty Foundation, and installed by Faunt and Barksdale. Very much a work in progress, was how Faunt referred to the ship. Still, like practically all the hands on board, Faunt, one of Bounty’s volunteer engineers, believed the ship would get them to Galveston, where he had planned to undertake an array of improvements.

Now Faunt leaned against the railing on the stern deck, listening to the reassuring gurgle of the John Deeres. They were at full power, motoring fast southeast, and the entire ship shook with their effort. At the bow, his fellow sailors were double-checking the lines, shimmying up the mainmast. The wind was blowing, but not violently, and he could feel the sun on his neck.

Four

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 11:00 A.M.

The Saffir–Simpson hurricane scale separates storms into five categories. A Category 1 hurricane, the weakest on the spectrum, is defined as having sustained winds of 74 miles per hour; in a Category 5 storm, winds regularly reach 157 miles per hour—enough to rip the roof off a house. On Saturday, October 27, two days after Bounty left New London, Sandy was a mild Cat 1, flirting with tropical storm designation. And yet her low intensity belied her remarkable size. NASA satellite images taken at the time show a swirling gauze knot, with a compact core and tendrils that extended across a 1,000-mile swath of the Atlantic Ocean, from Florida to the Chesapeake Bay.

According to Laura Groves, Bounty’s 28-year-old boatswain—an officer in charge of equipment maintenance—beginning on Friday, the crew had printed out maps from the ship’s weatherfax. They posted them in the hallway belowdecks so all hands would have a chance to track the storm’s progress and the location of Bounty relative to it. Those maps would have shown Bounty approximately 200 miles from the Virginia shore, on the eastern edge of the storm. So far, so good—if the storm kept up its current pace and trajectory, the ship could still skirt the worst of the winds and bypass Sandy once she turned inland.

And yet it seemed increasingly probable that Sandy would soon clash with a fast-moving cold front, which had swept down from Canada and across the Midwest. As NOAA forecasters pointed out, the two systems, both dangerous in their own right, threatened to merge into one colossal “Frankenstorm.” The prospect was terrifying. The last major hybrid storm to hit the East Coast was the Halloween Nor’easter of 1991—the “perfect storm” immortalized by Sebastian Junger—which occurred when a low-pressure system from Canada swallowed the Category 2 Hurricane Grace and slammed into the coast of Massachusetts, killing 13 people.

On the Bounty, sea-stowing preparations began in earnest. Anything loose, from heavy appliances to the crew’s baggage, had to be lashed down. The crew furled most of the sails to reduce weight aloft, leaving only the forecourse, the lowest sail on the foremast. This was the Bounty’s storm sail—it would be needed to help steady the ship in a gale.

Doug Faunt spent most of the morning belowdecks. An inveterate radio geek, a couple of years earlier he’d installed a Winlink system that could be used to transmit email messages via shortwave radio signals in the event of an emergency. Faunt double-checked the wires and booted up the system—all was in working order. Next he made his way aft, where the washer and dryer, previously secured, had moved six inches. They had to be tied down again, this time with extra line.

Faunt was joined for part of his shift by Claudene Christian, one of the newest members of the Bounty crew. Christian was 42, a bleach-blond former beauty queen who seemed to have lived enough lives for 10 women. She had grown up in Alaska, where she’d competed in pageants from an early age. At the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, she’d been a cheerleader—experience she parlayed into a career when she founded the company Cheerleader Doll. In 1997, the Barbie manufacturer Mattel sued Christian and her father, Rex Christian, for patent infringement, and Claudene was forced to abandon the company. According to Los Angeles magazine, Christian subsequently sued her own lawyer for “gross misconduct,” and settled out of court for $1 million.

Suddenly flush with cash, Christian bounced around the West Coast. She sang with a band named the Mad Tea Party, did PR for a racetrack in Hermosa Beach, and became a partner in Dragons, a trackside bar. She drank heavily, dated the wrong men, and acted erratically—at one point, she reportedly purchased an expensive, life-size statue of a policeman for her front porch. In 2007, she was diagnosed with a bipolar disorder and hospitalized. Her bank account nearly depleted, she moved back home. Several years later, she discovered the sea.

She shipped out for the first time in 2011, as a cook on the Niña, a 65-foot replica of Columbus’s ship. She spent three months on board, lived for a time in rural Oklahoma—where her family had moved—and in May 2012, trucked out to Wilmington, North Carolina, to join the crew of Bounty. When she was growing up, Rex Christian had always told his daughter she was a descendant of Fletcher Christian, the leader of the 1789 mutiny. This may or may not have been true, but Claudene certainly believed it; it was one of the first things she told the other Bounty hands.

Christian was immensely popular on board Bounty. She was charming, warm, and unflaggingly ebullient—a “sparkplug,” Faunt called her. But Faunt knew inner darkness when he saw it. His father had been an alcoholic, and his mother, who had struggled with mental illness, had committed suicide with a shotgun shortly after Faunt graduated from high school. He told Christian stories of his childhood, in South Carolina, and listened while Christian spilled the details of her own past.

For Christian, Bounty was a chance to start over—to make up for what she described as her “failures” in California. She threw herself into her daily duties with alacrity, taking on tasks others tried to shirk. In the evenings, sweaty and soused with salt water, she’d often join Josh Scornavacchi on deck for an impromptu jam session. Scornavacchi had brought a pair of bongos, and Christian sang along to old rock songs, her voice bright and unwavering.

Shortly before Bounty departed from Boothbay Harbor, Christian was promoted by Walbridge from volunteer to paid hand—a position for which she’d earn 100 bucks a week. “Volunteer with drinking money,” was how Walbridge phrased it, but Christian was immensely proud of her new position. It gave her status, but more importantly, it validated her feeling that she belonged on the Bounty.

But Christian was still a green sailor, and she had never experienced bad weather at sea. The approaching storm clearly scared her in a way that it did not scare the more seasoned hands. In an email conversation with her friend Rex Halbeisen after leaving Connecticut, she said she was “praying to God that going to sea was the right decision,” and expressed concern with the equipment on Bounty. “You know me, I am not a mechanical person but the generators and engines on this ship are not the most reliable,” she told Halbeisen. “They are always stewing over them. I would hate to be out to sea in a storm and the engines just quit or we have no power.”

But by the time she sent a subsequent text message to her mother, probably late on Saturday night, Christian seemed to have made peace with her misgivings. “Just be sure that I am ok and HAPPY TO BE HERE on Bounty doing what I love,” she wrote. “And if I do go down with the ship & the worst happens… Just know that I AM GENUINELY HAPPY!! And I am doing what I love! I love you.”

Five

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 1:00 P.M.

By Saturday afternoon, Bounty was a couple of hundred miles due east of the border of North Carolina and Virginia, and Robin Walbridge made the decision to change course. He would now steer the ship southwest, toward the coast.

It was a tactic he had used before when sailing in the vicinity of large storms. “You try to get up as close to the eye as you can, and you stay down in the southeast quadrant and when it stops you stop, you don’t want to get in front of it,” he said in a 2012 television interview. “You’ll get a good ride out of the hurricane.” As third mate Dan Cleveland later recalled, Walbridge reasoned that by October 27, Bounty had made it out far enough beyond Sandy’s eye that if he steered inland again, the winds whipping counterclockwise out along the margins of the storm would help propel the ship to St. Petersburg.

Walbridge reminded his senior officers that he had a good sense of how storms behaved. “He [was] never a yeller or a screamer,” Cleveland later testified. “When things would go wrong, you’d never see him freak out, he’d handle situations in a calm manner. I never saw him get nervous or scared. It made you feel like you could handle things.”

Cleveland, a 25-year-old former landscaper who other crew members say “worshipped” Walbridge, had been through a few bad storms on Bounty, too, including one in 2008 that hit the ship as she made her way north to Louisiana from the mouth of the Panama Canal. He had heard the saying, popular among crew members, that “Bounty loves a hurricane,” and although he was loath to go that far himself, he did believe that the ship handled well in strong winds. “She works hard and you work hard,” was the way he put it. In the end, neither Cleveland nor the other senior officers who might have had a say in navigational matters ever objected to the new southwestern tack.

But Walbridge had made a miscalculation. His plan assumed both that the forecasts of Sandy’s path would hold, and that it was possible to get around Sandy at all—that she was a hurricane of normal size, a few hundred miles across. Irene, in 2011, had been 600 miles in diameter; Katrina, in 2005, measured only 415 miles from edge to edge. Skirtable distances, if your ship was well-equipped and moving fast. But Sandy was not skirtable. Meteorologists later estimated that she was the largest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Basin, with a diameter of 1,000 miles, and a wind swath of 2 million square miles. If Walbridge had kept to his original southeasterly course, it was conceivable that he might have made it to Sandy’s edge. Instead, now he was unwittingly sailing Bounty directly into her maw.

That afternoon, the weather worsened. Winds were now reaching over 30 miles per hour, waves were climbing to 15 and 20 feet. A cold rain fell periodically overhead. Bounty rocked irregularly, making it hard to get any rest belowdecks. Even simple actions, like moving around the cabin or walking down the passageway to the head, required concentration and energy.

More distressingly, it had become clear that Bounty was taking on a considerable amount of water. It seeped through the ceiling and across the floorboards and through the forepeak. It spouted through the walls and squirted down from the ceiling and collected in greasy little pools in the corners of the cabins. The floors turned slippery, the stairs and ladders downright murderous. All wooden ships leak, of course, and some of the crew members comforted themselves with the fact that Bounty had pumped herself out of a few disasters before. There were five pumps on board—two electric, two hydraulic, and one “trash pump,” a smaller unit that could be hauled around to different locations on the ship. But the hydraulic and electric pumps were working at peak capacity, and still the water was rising.

At 8 a.m. on Sunday morning, after a long and mostly sleepless night, Walbridge gathered his mates in the navigation shack for a meeting. Chris Barksdale, the engineer, was also invited. Barksdale, a handyman by trade, was already seasick—later that day, when a crewmate gave him a pill for it, he vomited it back up. Walbridge pinpointed Bounty’s location on a map, and reviewed the plan for the day ahead: southwest and then south and straight on toward St. Peterbsurg.

At this point, Laura Groves later recalled, the seas were 25 feet and the wind was blowing at nearly 60 miles per hour. After the meeting concluded, around 8:45 a.m., she departed to help adjust the jack lines, the bow-to-stern lines that allow sailors to move safely around the deck of a storm-struck ship. Groves believed that the end was in sight, especially once they’d swung over the bottom quadrant of the hurricane and put the storm behind them. There was not yet much cause for concern, she thought.

This was not an opinion shared by Doug Faunt, who had spent Saturday night and much of Sunday morning in the engine room, monitoring the pumps. If the devices were unable to keep up with the seawater, the engine room would flood. And if the engine room flooded, Bounty would eventually find herself entirely at the mercy of the growing storm, batted about by the waves like a toy boat. The replica Bounty would be forced to rely solely on her sails, just as her namesake once had.

Faunt dashed from one engine to the next, minding the meters, tinkering with the levers, cursing under his breath. It must have been 120 degrees in that room, and humid as hell. He stripped down to his T-shirt and underwear and hiking boots, occasionally ducking through the hatch for a breath of fresh air. It was exhausting work, and at noon, he handed off the baton to another crewmember and crawled back upstairs to try to catch a few hours of sleep. When he got to his cabin, he found the room flooded and his gear soaked. He climbed naked into his sleeping bag. The bag was polyester, not cotton, and although the sensation was uncomfortable—not unlike folding your body into a used athletic sock—it did afford a bit of warmth.

Faunt had barely closed his eyes when he heard someone shout the “all hands on deck” call. You’ve got to be kidding me, he thought. He shouted his acknowledgment, fumbled for his sweat- and seawater-soaked clothing, and dressed in the damp darkness.

Six

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28 12:30 P.M.

Scornavacchi made it on deck a few minutes before Faunt. Looking up at the masts, he saw the reason for the all-hands call: the forecourse was split, and the canvas was flying free. The forecourse was the Bounty’s storm sail; it helped steady her. It had to be furled. So Scornavacchi began to climb. He was a strong climber, comfortable with heights, but the rigging seemed to just get smaller and wetter as he shimmied upwards. The wind whipped the ropes around him into a fury, lashing him on the arms and neck hard enough to draw welts. Nevertheless, within the next hour, Scornavacchi, Laura Groves, and John Svendsen were able to secure the sail to the gaskets on the top of the yard.

While Scornavacchi was aloft, Faunt and Claudene Christian were taking up or paying out the lines as needed. The task had fallen to them partially because they were late in arriving on deck, and mostly because Faunt was fatigued and Christian couldn’t be trusted aloft. Despite having been on the Bounty for several months, Christian was still very much a novice when it came to the workings of the ship. Faunt, who often shared shifts with her, regarded her as something of a slow learner. “It wasn’t that she wasn’t brave,” he would later recall. “She was. She was brave and she had a lot of heart and she had passion for the Bounty. But you usually had to repeat things several times before she really got it.”

Now she fixed Faunt with an intent stare, and complained that no one on the ship was listening to her. “What aren’t they listening to?” Faunt asked. He had to holler over the roar of the storm. Behind them, 30-foot waves were breaking over the foredeck.

“We’re taking on too much water. The pumping isn’t going well. We’ve got big problems.”

“I know,” he said. “We all know.” There wasn’t a person aboard the Bounty who didn’t know the ship was in trouble. But it did no good to complain about it. It was better to keep your head down and do what you could to make sure everyone got out of this mess alive. Faunt tried to reassure Christian. “Listen,” he said. “It’s going to be fine.”

That evening, Sandy closed in on Cape Hatteras. The storm had now merged as predicted with the easterly moving cold front. Meteorologists were reporting a noticeable drop in the atmospheric pressure off the coast of North Carolina, a sign that the storm was entering an even more dangerous phase. Bounty, a couple of hundred miles southeast of the cape, had found herself square in the middle of the storm system, with little hope of sailing her way back out.

As night fell over Bounty, visibility that had been limited enough at twilight, when a veil of rain enclosed the ship, was whittled down to practically nothing. The swells rose like battlements around her. Scornavacchi ducked through the aft hatch to check on his cabin. What he saw startled him: several boards had been ripped up from the floor and were swirling around in the wash. He understood the gravity of the situation, but he also felt strangely energized. Back home in Pennsylvania, he had longed for an adventure. Now he had found one.

Around 8 p.m., the winds again tore the forecourse loose, and again Scornavacchi was sent aloft to deal with it. He scaled the foremast with extreme caution. A hard hail pelted him in the face; he could barely see, let alone hear anything. A couple of dozen feet below him, the bow of the ship shot down the trough of one wave and up the sheer face of the next. Black water coursed across the deck. Occasionally, the ship would list nearly at beam-ends, the deck at an almost perpendicular angle to the sea and the crew clinging to anything they could get their hands on.

The sail furled, Scornavacchi made his way belowdecks. There, the water had risen further still, and the crew was working microshifts to keep it at bay, a couple of minutes lying down followed by a couple of minutes working the pump. Then, suddenly, the world went sideways, then straight again. There was a scream and then a moan. Scornavacchi and his shipmates assessed the situation. Having to abandon ship was now a real possibility. But surely the Bounty would stay afloat, even if she were to permanently topple over on her side. Surely she wasn’t about to sink just yet.

At this point, there were already two injured sailors aboard the Bounty. One was a 27-year-old named Adam Prokosch, who had been tossed headfirst across the mess by a particularly high wave. Christian set up a mattress in a dry part of the ship, and made Prokosch lie on his back, with his hands at his sides. It was clear that he was badly hurt; Christian worried that he might be partially paralyzed. She told him not to move.

Meanwhile, Walbridge had suffered an injury of his own, likely caused when he collided with the table in his cabin. Several sailors on board later recalled that he was moving only with extreme effort, bracing himself with both hands. Scornavacchi believes Walbridge broke his back; Faunt thinks it may have been a leg. Either would have been an ominous development. Unless you’re extremely lucky, escaping a sinking ship without full ambulatory control is all but impossible.

As Bounty’s engineer, it was Chris Barksdale’s job to maintain the generators, the pumps, and the diesel engines that powered the ship. In a subsequent interview with Popular Mechanics, Barksdale recalled that the pumps became clogged early Sunday afternoon; Walbridge himself did the unclogging, but it was to little avail. The water was flooding into Bounty much faster than it was going out. As the ship rolled, the water in the engine room and the bilge would heave up the walls and slosh back down over the equipment. The engines sputtered, churned, and sometime after nightfall, with a dull whine, gave out completely. The Bounty was now adrift.

At 9 p.m. Walbridge and Faunt descended to the radio room to call for help. Bounty was noticeably light on communications systems—most of the time, the crew members relied on their cell phones. Closer to the coast, in calm weather, this wasn’t a problem. But Bounty was now a hundred-odd miles out to sea, and no one on board had any reception. It was too windy abovedecks to conduct a conversation, which meant that the ship’s satellite phone—which got no reception belowdecks—was no good either. So Walbridge and Faunt decided to issue the Mayday call on the Winlink system. You almost had to laugh, Faunt thought—they were going to peck out their damn SOS via email.

Still, the system worked fine, and after confirming that the message had gone through, Faunt left Walbridge and made his way forward toward the galley, bracing himself with both hands. The generators were surging badly, and the lights were flickering on and off like disco strobes. After a while, the backup generator kicked in. In the yellow glare of the emergency lights, Faunt could see the other crew members organizing emergency supplies and tending to Prokosch, who was on his back on the mattress.

The next two hours passed in a delirious blur. Salt water would get into one light fixture, and Faunt would no sooner get it clean and working again than the next one would burst. There were electrical fires to put out, pumping to do in the engine room, and loose wood to secure in the tank room, which was now fully flooded. The Bounty was coming apart before Faunt’s eyes.

He dashed back to his cabin and took a quick inventory. He wouldn’t be able to bring much with him—he was going to lose his bicycle, most of his clothing, his radio gear, his books. In the end, he settled on his rescue knife and his teddy bear, Mush, which he strapped to his chest.

Engineless, the Bounty spun windward up the crest of one three-story wave only to be knocked leeward by the next. At around midnight, the first Coast Guard C-130, piloted by Lieutenant Wes McIntosh, came into range, and the Bounty was able to establish radio contact. There was a small cheer from the navigation shack. McIntosh requested that the crew shine a light on the rigging, and Faunt activated the search beam.

For the next couple of hours, the C-130, heavy with fuel, circled overhead, sometimes at 1,000 feet and sometimes at 500. “Someone tell that guy we’re 110 feet,” Walbridge joked. “He’s going to clip us!” There was still time for levity: according to Faunt, despite the six feet of water in the belly of the ship, Walbridge and Svendsen believed that the Bounty might yet be saved, if only the Coast Guard could find a way to lower some working pumps. But McIntosh could barely see half a mile in the rain, and the winds were blowing at between 80 and 90 miles an hour. A gear drop was impossible. The only thing the crew of the Bounty could do was hold on until morning, when a helicopter could be summoned from Elizabeth City. It seemed to Faunt an awful long time to wait.

Seven

MONDAY, OCTOBER 29 2:00 A.M.

Around two in the morning, the crew donned their bright-orange survival suits. Scornavacchi was still not convinced that the Bounty would have to be abandoned, but he knew it was better to be safe than sorry. The suits—what sailors call “Gumby suits,” after the bulbous, ungainly form their wearers assume—were made of heavy neoprene. They would protect against both cold water and flame, in the unlikely event that the electrical fires spread through the Bounty. Scornavacchi zipped the waterproof seal on the collar closed and attached a small rubberized plastic bag to his climbing harness with a carabiner. Inside the bag was his ID, a pocketknife—the essentials.

Svendsen, the first mate, was in the navigation shack, his Gumby suit only halfway zipped. He seemed to Scornavacchi to be much less concerned with his own safety than with the safety of the crew. He inspected each sailor carefully, like a commanding officer before a battle, tugging on straps, double-checking rescue lights, slapping shoulders and patting backs.

Scornavacchi thanked Svendsen, and joined Claudene Christian near the mizzen fife rail, which surrounded the aftermost mast. The clouds he could make out overhead in the darkness were low-bellied and full, and a strong wind blew across the deck. Christian was clearly scared but putting on a brave face for her friend, and she smiled brightly at Scornavacchi.

He looked up at the ghostly lights of the C-130 circling above him in the rain. Then he felt the deck lurch violently beneath him. The Bounty was once again leaning perilously over on her side. Bodies slid past him in the night, some silently and acquiescently, some with horrific screams, their hands desperately clawing for a handhold, a stray piece of rigging, anything at all.

He took a deep breath and jumped.

After receiving the OK from Svendsen, Faunt waddled sternward in his Gumby suit and lay down on the deck alongside Adam Prokosch, the sailor with the injured back. Prokosch was not paralyzed, as Christian had feared; he would later learn that he had separated his shoulder, broken two ribs, and severely damaged a pair of vertebrae. But it had taken time to get him up on deck, and he looked bad: his eyes were half-closed, and he had his hands crossed over his chest, kind of like a corpse.

The Bounty was heeling badly to starboard, 40 degrees or more, Faunt guessed. He wasn’t so much lying down as standing up now, with his feet on the railing, the sea frothing below him and lapping at his feet, the ship looming over him. The C-130 passed once overhead, the sound of its engines reduced by the storm to an insect-like whine. Gazing up, Faunt caught a glimpse of the big silvery wings of the plane, and the moon glowing faintly through the clouds, and then he was asleep.

That he was able to nod off on the deck of a doomed ship was a testament to the extent of his exhaustion. He had been working for 48 hours straight, give or take, many of them in the sweltering hell of the engine room. He was dehydrated, he was hungry, his joints ached and his lungs burned. He was strong, but he was also 66 years old, and he had his limits. Faunt later figured that he might have slept for an hour, but given the speed at which the Bounty rolled over, it was probably half that. When he opened his eyes again, the deck was fully vertical. He bent his knees and pushed off into the sea. The storm swallowed him.

Now commenced a jarring, vicious cycle. Faunt would push his way to the surface, and a wave would drive him back under like a hammer pounding the head of a nail. The Bounty’s engines were submerged now, and there was plenty of diesel in the water. Faunt was an experienced diver, and he did his best not to open his mouth. But the strength of the ocean was stupendous, and he couldn’t keep the salt water and diesel out of his throat. He spit out what he could and swallowed the rest.

At irregular intervals, a body in a survival suit would float past him, and Faunt would holler and wave, but it was useless. Nobody could hear him, and he couldn’t distinguish one sailor from another. Zipped into the Gumby suits, they all looked the same, cartoonish orange shapes silhouetted against the dark sea. He caught hold of a life preserver, but it appeared to be tethered to something—maybe to the ship herself, he thought. He was afraid she would plunge, and that he would plunge with her. So he let go.

What surprised Faunt—what he would often think about in the days to come, first back at the Coast Guard station, and then in his cluttered bedroom in Oakland—was the strange tenacity of the human brain. The brain, the mind, maybe the spirit—whatever you wanted to call it, the thing that did not allow Faunt to give up, even when he probably should have given up, dropping his hands and surrendering to the ocean. It simply never crossed his mind that he might be dying. The fact that it didn’t, he figured, probably saved his damn life.

A sinking ship creates a funnel on the surface of the sea—planks of wood, life rafts, and human bodies can be sucked down behind her. From his training, Scornavacchi was familiar with this effect, and after jumping clear of the Bounty, he fought hard to get a safe distance away from her. But swimming in a Gumby suit is incredibly awkward, and his progress was maddeningly slow. The sea around him looked like a flushing toilet.

Everything he grabbed at—stray planking, strands of line—was ripped out of his hand. Gasping, his lungs filling with salt water, he fought his way back to the surface. There appeared to be no one left on board the Bounty, which had now fully capsized. Indeed, there appeared to be no one around at all. Before he could ponder the particulars of his plight, he was yanked underwater again by some invisible force.

In movies, sinking ships lurch through the deep like whales, their every contour visible to the camera. Scornavacchi could see nothing. It was dark enough on the surface, and an inky pitch underwater. But groping around with both hands, Scornavacchi did figure out what was pulling him down: some of the rigging had caught onto the small bag of essentials lashed to his harness. The weight of the ship pulling on him made it impossible to unhook the carabiner, and the bag was made of heavy-duty PVC plastic, which offered little hope of breaking. He was going down—five feet, then ten, fifteen. He could feel himself starting to drown, losing the ability to think or use his muscles. His lungs were filling with seawater and diesel.

Just before the Bounty left New London, Scornavacchi’s mother had fretted about the storm. “Mom, I’m not going to die,” he had told her. Now here he was, about to break his promise. He was furious with himself. He thought about his 11-year-old brother, too, and of all the other people he would never see again. I’m sorry, he thought. I’m so sorry.

Eight

MONDAY, OCTOBER 29 4:15 A.M.

The two emergency life rafts on the Bounty were rated for 25 passengers each—nearly twice the number of sailors abandoning the ship. Inflated, the rafts resembled orange polyurethane igloos, with a wide base and a domed roof. Sausaged into their silvery casings, they were just a couple of feet long and pellet shaped. Now Chris Barksdale saw one of the capsules float past him. He instinctively reached out and grabbed hold of the line, he later told a reporter for Popular Mechanics. His other hand clutched a heavy piece of wooden grating, which the Bounty had shed as she sank. He was sharing the grating with a couple of other sailors, including Cleveland.

“Don’t let loose!” Cleveland shouted to him.

“You don’t have to worry about me letting loose of this son of a bitch,” Barksdale replied. “I’m going wherever it goes.”

Within an hour or so, Barksdale and Cleveland had inflated the raft and helped four other sailors inside: Drew Salapatek, Jessica Hewitt, Laura Groves, and Adam Prokosch. They tried to be optimistic, but it wasn’t easy—the storm, far from weakening, actually seemed to be blowing harder.

Several months after the sinking, Scornavacchi still could not explain his salvation in practical terms. He was drowning, he was going under, he was dead—and then he was not. The bag on his harness had somehow broken free of the rigging. He climbed fast upwards, pulling with his hands and kicking his feet. “I believe God did it,” he says. “That he helped me in some way.”

He surfaced, sputtering and coughing, alongside a makeshift raft of emergency supplies that Claudene Christian had assembled hours earlier. He clung to the side and took stock of his location. He was still dangerously close to the Bounty, which had rolled temporarily back to an upright position.

After a while, he saw Jessica Black, the ship’s cook, drape herself over the other end of the raft. Black was clearly panicking; her face was a mask of shock. Scornavacchi was making his way toward her when he heard a sharp crack, like a rifle shot. It was a large piece of the mast, breaking loose and crashing down toward the raft. The masts on the Bounty weighed several tons apiece; a direct hit would have been fatal. Instead, the piece of mast fell neatly between them, and sent both sailors flying high into the air, as if they’d leapt off a trampoline.

Black vanished into the waves. Plunging back into the water, Scornavacchi cursed to himself. He’d finally found another survivor, and now she was gone. He was alone again. Worse yet, when he’d been pulled underwater, his survival suit had flooded, and his boots were loose in the legs. He was trying to tread water with the equivalent of a 20-pound weight lashed to each ankle. And the water kept pulling him back toward the doomed Bounty.

The ship was equipped with hundreds of miles of rope, and now they had taken on a menacing life of their own, writhing in loops and coils in the dark water. Every time he tried to move, Scornavacchi felt one of them reaching for him. Nearby he could see the Bounty’s mizzenmast, the aftmost mast on the ship, lying flat across the surface of the sea. Out of other options, he hauled himself up on top of it, and held on.

Suddenly the Bounty, buoyed by a large swell, began to roll back upright. Scornavacchi, both hands wrapped tightly around the mizzenmast and hanging on for dear life, went with it. Soon he was more than 40 feet in the air. From somewhere out in the storm he heard a voice. “Jump,” the voice said. “You’ve got to jump.” And he did.

The next day, safe on shore, Scornavacchi would ask his shipmates who had issued the order, and receive only blank stares. No one remembered telling him to jump. No one had seen him up on the mizzenmast at all.

It was about 4:30 a.m. by the time Scornavacchi managed to reach one of the life-raft capsules. He was working to get it open when his shipmate John Jones bobbed up alongside him. Soon they were joined by two more, Mark Warner and Anna Sprague. For hours Scornavacchi had thought that everyone else was gone; now it seemed like a familiar face was popping up every few minutes. By now, Sandy’s central mass was likely a little more than 400 miles southeast of Washington, D.C., according to the National Hurricane Center, and bound for New York. The worst of the storm had now passed the Bounty, but the strong winds and high seas had persisted.

Once the raft was inflated, the four survivors were faced with the prospect of actually boarding it. The hatch was far above the water, the rubber was slick and the whole craft was pitching wildly in the waves. They were all exhausted from battling against the ocean for hours; Scornavacchi’s forearms were burning, and he found he could barely make a fist. He was helping to boost up Sprague when he heard voices nearby. On the other side of the raft were Doug Faunt, Matthew Sanders, and Jessica Black. One by one, they all piled inside and, shivering in the cold, settled down to wait. Scornavacchi, Jones, Warner, Sprague, Sanders, Black, and Faunt—seven in all. As far as they knew, they were the only surviving crew members of the tall ship Bounty.

Ingested in trace amounts, salt water is not particularly harmful to the human body. But swallowed in large quantities, it wreaks havoc on metabolism, impairs the nervous system, damages the kidneys, and dangerously elevates blood pressure. By the time Faunt climbed aboard the inflatable emergency raft, he had consumed, by his estimate, a couple gallons of salt water. He could still breathe normally, and his brain was functioning, but there was an ominous ache in his stomach. He lay back on the floor of the raft and evacuated his bowels into his Gumby suit.

To either side of him, the six other survivors had assembled in a circle, leaning back against the walls in an effort to keep the raft stable. Scornavacchi and Sprague suggested a group prayer, and although the other five sailors on hand were, by Scornavacchi’s reckoning, mostly atheists, everyone joined hands and asked in their own way for deliverance.

Having been involved in the communications efforts before abandoning ship, Faunt believed that help would eventually arrive. The only question was when. The Bounty was many miles from the shore, the weather was still squally, and there were no other ships in the area. Even the U.S. Navy had been wary enough of a run-in with Sandy that when the Bounty capsized, the nearest naval vessel was 260 nautical miles away. Faunt knew they could be facing a day or more in the orange raft.

Still, the crew members did their best to keep spirits high. They told stories about happier voyages aboard the Bounty, days when the weather was fair and the sailing smooth. They reminisced about the missing shipmates. They wondered when day would finally break. As they waited for dawn, Scornavacchi, Sprague, and Warner sang “Mingulay Boat Song,” a Scottish sea chantey. Lying on his back, Faunt listened to the words:

What care we, though, white the Minch is? What care we for wind or weather? Let her go boys; every inch is Sailing homeward to Mingulay.

Wives are waiting, by the pier head,
Or looking seaward, from the heather;
Pull her round, boys, then you’ll anchor
’Ere the sun sets on Mingulay.

Nine

MONDAY, OCTOBER 29 5:30 A.M.

By dawn, there were two Coast Guard helicopters hovering over the wreck of Bounty. It was Randy Haba, the rescue swimmer from the first of the two, who scooped up Faunt. The first thing Faunt saw when he was hauled into the cabin of the Jayhawk was the face of Svendsen—the straggler that Haba had spotted amid the wreckage of the Bounty. Svendsen had remained in the navigation shack long after the rest of the crew had jumped overboard, but eventually the Bounty heeled so vertiginously that he had no choice but to leap clear of the deck and into the water. Behind him, he could hear the VHF radio sputtering: Are you still there, Bounty? Do you read me, Bounty? Come in, Bounty.

Almost immediately, Svendsen was clocked by a falling piece of yard. He managed to shield his face, but the force of the impact shattered his hand. Maimed and badly shaken, he found himself snared by the foremast rigging, unable to wrest himself free. He felt like he was on a bad amusement park ride: Each roll of the ship lifted him dozens of feet into the air, then the next wave dropped him back into the waves, until Svendsen could barely distinguish the sky from the sea.

Working desperately with his good hand, he finally shook off the rigging and dropped into the water. Somewhere in the swirling wash, he found an orange “man overboard” buoy, the kind that inflated automatically when it hit the water, and he clung to it as hard as he could. Behind him was the ruined, heaving mass of the Bounty, backlit by the moon.

Faunt was ecstatic to see Svendsen—he’d worried that he had gone down with the ship. But he hardly had time to greet the first mate before the Coast Guard helicopter’s mechanic, Petty Officer Third Class Mike Lufkin, was hollering in his ear. “Take off the suit,” Lufkin said.

“I can’t,” Faunt replied. “I’ll foul your bird.”

“Just take it off,” Lufkin said.

Faunt didn’t want to expose the crew to the sight of his shit-stained Gumby, but he knew Lufkin was right. The cabin doors were open and the wind was blowing cold and Faunt was drenched. It was a recipe for hypothermia. He unzipped the suit and dropped it on the floor.

“I’ve really got to piss,” Svendsen shouted.

“Well, it’s already fouled,” Faunt said, nodding toward the suit. “Might as well piss in there.”

He turned away while Svendsen did his business. A few minutes later, with the Jayhawk rattling around in the rough air, an airsick Svendsen opened up the Gumby suit again and threw up inside. It was a veritable piñata of bodily fluids now, Faunt thought.

Haba was able to make three more trips to the raft to retrieve more survivors before the Jayhawk was low enough on fuel that the pilot announced he was turning back toward Elizabeth City. He had six survivors on board. It would be up to the other Jayhawk crew that had just arrived from Elizabeth City to retrieve the rest.

Scornavacchi, Jones, and Faunt spread out across the floor of the rubber raft in an effort to keep it steady. Without the presence of the four other bodies, the craft had turned skittish, scudding over the sea like a skipping stone. All Scornavacchi could do was hold on.

Around eight a.m., Petty Officer Third Class Dan Todd, the rescue swimmer from the second Jayhawk, poked his head into the raft’s hatch. Scornavacchi allowed Todd to strap him into the basket, and leaning on his side, took in the view. He could see the flank of the Bounty, lying on her side, and the snarled remainders of the 10 miles of line that had once kept her at sail. She was still afloat, but just barely, and she would not be for long.

The basket swung higher. There was a clank, and Scornavacchi pulled himself into the cramped cabin of the Jayhawk. Pretty soon there were 11 people crammed inside: Sanders, Jones, and Scornavacchi from the first raft; Barksdale, Cleveland, Salapatek, Hewitt, Groves, and Prokosch from the second; plus Todd and the Coast Guard flight mechanic. There wasn’t enough room to move, let alone strip off the survival suits, so everyone just kind of piled on top of one another, a knot of limbs and neoprene.

Two hours later, the helicopter set down in Elizabeth City. In a single-file line, the survivors limped across the tarmac. It always felt strange to have land under your feet after a few days at sea, but this time it felt stranger than usual to Scornavacchi. He walked gingerly, letting the blood seep back into his toes. A light rain was falling. A pack of local news photographers waited nearby, jostling against hastily erected barriers. There were camera flashes, shouts, the sound of someone crying. Scornavacchi kept his head down.

Inside the Coast Guard station, Faunt went to wash the shit out of his drawers and get a change of clothes. Prokosch and Svendsen needed patching up. Scornavacchi was led to a harshly lit conference room, where his mates from the first raft were waiting. There the tallying-up began in earnest. The Bounty had left New London with 16 sailors. Fourteen had been rescued. Robin Walbridge and Claudene Christian were still out there somewhere.

Among the last crew members to see them on board the ship was Laura Groves, the boatswain, who had helped conduct a headcount of the crew in the frantic last moments before abandoning ship. She would later remember that Svendsen was in the navigation shack, communicating with the C-130 pilots, and that Dan Cleveland was beside her, his Gumby suit halfway on, working on connecting a line to the capsules that held the inflatable life rafts, so they’d be easier to find if the ship capsized. Christian was on the mizzen fife rail. Walbridge was just forward of Groves, on the weather deck.

Time had gone baggy, elastic. Groves heard Svendsen shout that the foredeck was underwater, and she raced to help Cleveland get the rest of the way into his Gumby suit. Then the ship was on her side, Groves was kicking as hard as she could to keep her head above water, and Walbridge and Christian were gone.

Initially there was cause for hope. The Bounty had sunk only a few hours before, and the water was not particularly cold—a person in a survival suit could last for a day out there, easy. And hadn’t Svendsen been plucked alone from the water? Just because Christian and Walbridge hadn’t made it to a life raft, just because they weren’t sitting there now in that conference room, it didn’t mean they were dead. But the coastguardsmen said nothing, and as time passed, the shared optimism of the survivors dwindled.

Scornavacchi was in his room in an Elizabeth City motel when definitive word arrived. The crew from a third Coast Guard helicopter had finally found Christian in the water near the Bounty, but she was unresponsive, with no vital signs. Two Bounty crew members later said that her corpse bore the signs of severe cranial trauma: heavy bruising on one side of the face and a partially crumpled skull. That could have meant that she was killed by a blow from one of the falling masts, or it could have meant that she slipped unconscious into the water and quickly drowned. As for Walbridge, the search was ongoing. A day later, it would be called off.

Unresponsive, no vital signs. The official terminology, the way it depersonalized the dead and the lost, it unnerved Scornavacchi. He summoned an image of Christian as he had last seen her, lashing together the gear and supplies on the deck of the Bounty. She had looked almost peaceful there, even as the ship was going down, an easy smile on her face.

That night, Scornavacchi called his mother in Pennsylvania. She’d seen the news—she knew what had happened to the Bounty. “But I’m alive, Mom,” he said. “I made it.” He held the receiver to his ear and listened to his mother sob.

Ten

FEBRUARY 12, 2013 9:00 A.M.

It was not hard to pick out Dina and Rex Christian in the crowded ballroom. They sat a couple rows back from the microphones, alongside their lawyer. To their left was a battery of television cameras, and behind them, arranged across a wide expanse of brightly patterned carpeting, were the reporters, maritime lawyers, and local sailors with a few hours to kill.

Dina Christian passed most of the hours of the Coast Guard’s hearing on the Bounty sinking in rigid silence, sometimes dabbing her eyes with a tissue, sometimes shaking her head furiously, and sometimes leaning in to whisper to Rex, a rumpled man in his sixties. Anyone who looked closely at Dina—small, blond, with a gently upturned nose and round cheeks—would have noticed the striking resemblance she bore to her only daughter, Claudene.

The Renaissance Portsmouth Hotel and Conference Center in Portsmouth, Virginia, where the hearing was held, looms over the Elizabeth River. From the hallway outside the second floor ballroom, you could look out across the wind-chopped water to Norfolk, where a Navy aircraft carrier and a handful of smaller ships, bristling with scaffolding and plastic tarp, awaited repairs. Every morning, at precisely 8:50 a.m., Coast Guard Commander Kevin Carroll, clad in his dress blues, arrived and took his place in the front of the ballroom, a few yards from where the Christians sat.

Carroll is in his 40s, thickly built and tall, with a high-and-tight military style haircut and a brusque, if not entirely unfriendly, interrogative style. Three and a half months after the Bounty’s sinking, Carroll had been tasked with conducting the official inquiry into the incident, with sorting out the messy particulars of what exactly had gone wrong. He opened each day of testimony with a lengthy invocation of the pertinent federal regulatory code—a paragraph on marine casualties and investigations—followed by a standing moment of silence for the lost.

It had taken only a few days after the sinking for the second-guessing to begin. The questions percolated in the comments sections of articles about the incident, on the message boards and Facebook pages frequented by tall-ship buffs, in the letters pages of sailing magazines. Although they spoke fondly of him as a person, few of Robin Walbridge’s fellow tall-ship captains seemed able to comprehend his decision to sail through the hurricane—or, more bafflingly, to cut across its center mass on October 28.

In an open letter to Walbridge circulated in mid-November, Jan Miles, the captain of the schooner Pride of Baltimore II, had compared the Bounty’s sinking to that of the Fantome, a schooner that went down off the coast of Belize in 1998, killing all 31 crew members aboard—the worst Atlantic sailing disaster in 40 years. Like Walbridge, Miles wrote, Fantome’s skipper had tried to outrun a hurricane on a set of underpowered engines, and placed too much faith in the accuracy of hurricane forecasts. Addressing his still-missing colleague, Miles wrote,

[Y]ou aimed all but directly at Sandy. That was reckless my friend! Was it wise or prudent to set off into the teeth of Sandy in BOUNTY[?] Did it make any sense at all? Virtually all of your professional friends and colleagues back here do not think so … Yeah, you were a reckless man Robin. I would not have continued to proceed as you did.

Joining Miles in his criticism were the Christians, who believed that their daughter would still be alive if Walbridge had kept Bounty in port. “Fact: Walbridge took [Claudene] into the worse hurricane & did not except help from the [Coast Guard] until it was to late for her,” Dina wrote on Facebook in January. “When everyone else was in the water, she was seen holding on to the ship for dear life. Too scared to go into the water! After reading all this, how can any of you defend this Crazy Nut?”

There was one group of people who did not buy the emerging consensus that Walbridge’s navigational errors and hubris were wholly responsible for the Bounty’s end: the ship’s crew. As many of them would point out, the ship had been through bad storms before and survived them all. Bounty had crossed the Atlantic in foul weather, motored through gales in the Gulf, threaded some of the most treacherous passages on earth. And in each circumstance, Walbridge had acquitted himself well.

It stood to reason, then, that the sinking was not only a matter of the Bounty’s position relative to the hurricane on October 29—that factors beyond Walbridge’s control had turned an ill-advised voyage into a doomed one. In this scenario, the blame that had fallen on Walbridge belonged more properly to Robert Hansen and the HMS Bounty Foundation.

Hansen had long struggled to adequately maintain the ship with the meager funds earned from dock tours and day sails. Patchwork measures had been undertaken to get Bounty from one port of call to the next. “Being a Bounty alumnus was kind of a point of pride,” one former mate recalls. “You’re part of a club. And you’re part of that club because you’ve been sailing around the world on a boat that you’ve been constantly digging around in the bottom of the Lego drawer trying to put back together. Not to mix metaphors, but Bounty was the Bad News Bears of the tall ship world.”

According to one legend circulated among new crew members, shortly before a Coast Guard inspection in the 1990s, a small fire had broken out on the Bounty. It allegedly smoldered for a full three days, and was smoldering still when the coastguardsmen came aboard, but the crew—in a scene that sounded like something out of a bad sitcom—was able to keep the inspectors distracted and away from the fire. “I learned a lot about how to handle boats from Robin,” a former crewmember says. “And I learned far more about how to handle people.”

Since 2008, Hansen had been attempting to sell the Bounty, and Walbridge had taken an active role in the discussions. At one point, the captain had reached out to the British billionaire playboy Richard Branson, who had sailed on the Bounty, asking him to buy the ship; Branson declined. Later, according to Outside magazine, Walbridge established contact with the Ashley DeRamus Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating and raising awareness about people with Down syndrome, in the hope of outfitting the Bounty as “a place of learning and inspiration” for special-needs visitors. In St. Petersburg, in fact, Walbridge had planned a tour for the foundation’s members.

Coast Guard hearings do not have the authority to determine criminal responsibility or levy any civil penalties; Carroll was in Portsmouth as an investigator, not a jurist. But his findings—drawn from nine full days’ worth of testimony of survivors, coastguardsmen, surveyors, and ship inspectors—would be admissible in civil or criminal court. And since the Christian family was widely believed to be preparing a lawsuit against the HMS Bounty Foundation, the hearings had the feeling of a practice trial.

On one side were the Christians and Jacob Shisha, their lawyer, a veteran maritime litigator with a showman’s demeanor and a trace of a New York accent. On the other side were Tracie Simonin and Robert Hansen of the Bounty Foundation, and their two attorneys, Frank Ambrosino and Leonard Langer. There was also a third, unexpected party: John Svendsen, the Bounty’s first mate and the first survivor who had been pulled out of the water in the gray dawn of October 29.

The Coast Guard had named Svendsen a “party in interest” in the investigation. In maritime law, this can mean one of two things. A party in interest may be a person, company, or organization suspected of bearing some responsibility for the accident in question. Or it may be someone with an unusually large stake in the investigation’s outcome, one way or another—someone who stands to lose or gain from the inquiry’s findings, perhaps, or someone who holds the key to understanding what happened.

The Coast Guard did not specify the grounds on which Svendsen had been summoned to Portsmouth. But whatever Carroll’s reasoning, making Svendsen a principal in the investigation filled what would otherwise have been a conspicuous vacancy in the proceedings. Hansen had taken the fifth, and was not on hand for the hearing. Walbridge was lost at sea and presumed dead. So Svendsen, Walbridge’s deputy, became the de facto defender of the Bounty, and of the people who had looked after her maintenance and charted her course that last week in October. He was the stand-in for the captain whose actions, many now believed, had come at the expense of Claudene Christian’s life and his own.

As a party in interest, Svendsen was given a chair near the front of the room and the opportunity to question every witness. Shisha had petitioned the Coast Guard to give the Christians the same standing, and shortly before the hearings began, Rex and Dina were granted it. The reason for Shisha’s request wasn’t stated. But the implications seemed obvious: By directly questioning the witnesses, he could potentially begin building a case against the HMS Bounty Foundation.

Svendsen was the first witness Carroll summoned when the hearing commenced on the morning of February 12. The first mate had sustained serious injuries to his face, hand, shoulder and torso during the storm, and he moved slowly and deliberately to the front of the ballroom. He was dressed in a floral button-down under a black fleece, and his dirty-blond hair hung lankly to his shoulders. A conspicuous murmur arose in his wake. Seating himself in front of the microphones, Svendsen steepled his long fingers on the table, and allowed Carroll to walk him through the days leading up to the sinking of Bounty.

Of particular concern to Carroll was Walbridge’s August television interview in which he had spoken of chasing hurricanes. At the time, the comments had seemed like the boasts of a daring sailor. Now they looked a lot more like tragic foolhardiness—proof of Walbridge’s poor judgment.

“Did Bounty chase hurricanes?” Carroll asked Svendsen bluntly.

“Not in my opinion,” Svendsen replied. He maintained that Walbridge’s comments had been widely misunderstood. The captain had not been advocating the “chasing of hurricanes” as a matter of pleasure or thrill, he said. He had simply been stating the truth—that hurricanes can generate a strong but manageable boost of wind power to a full-rigger like Bounty. “I never witnessed Robin seeking out a storm. If there was a storm, he would put the ship in the safest position in the storm,” Svendsen said.

Svendsen appeared to imply that Walbridge had been correct in the abstract—“you’ll get a good ride out of the hurricane”—and wrong in the case of Sandy, which was much larger than Walbridge had assumed. As Brock Vergakis of the Associated Press later noted, Walbridge had inveighed in the same interview against ever getting “in front” of a hurricane—but by cutting southwest toward Cape Hatteras, Walbridge had inadvertently done exactly that.

Svendsen, however, made it clear that he did not hold Walbridge entirely blameless for the sinking. He recalled that he had stressed to Walbridge the historic nature of the storm and worried aloud about the Bounty’s ability to withstand it. “I had mentioned other options as far as staying in and not going out to sea,” Svendsen said.

These pleas were apparently offered semi-privately, in the presence of other mates, and in at least one case, privately to Walbridge. But Walbridge, Svendsen testified, had faith in the Bounty, and was determined to press southward. “Robin felt the ship was safer at sea,” he said.

Equally striking was Svendsen’s recollection that twice in the early morning hours of October 29, he had requested that Walbridge issue an abandon ship order. Twice Walbridge refused. The captain apparently believed that the Bounty, even without power, would remain afloat, and that the crew would be safer on board than in the life rafts. In hindsight, Walbridge had badly misjudged the condition of his ship. It was not safe at all—it was sinking fast.

Had Walbridge issued the abandon ship order earlier in the morning, when the ship was more stable, an orderly procession to the life rafts might have occurred. Instead, she began to roll over before the rafts were even fully inflated. Chaos reigned on deck, and in the end the entire crew was dumped more or less unprepared into the sea. For an inexperienced sailor like Claudene Christian, an earlier order might have meant the difference between life and death.

Eleven

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 13 10:00 A.M.

Hardly anyone on board the Bounty during her final voyage in October had failed to note that the ship was taking on water. Even in relatively calm weather, there was always a leak—a trickle here, some seepage there. Were those leaks ordinary for a wooden ship her age? Or were they evidence that Bounty was dangerously dilapidated?

The task of answering those questions fell to Todd Kosakowski of the Boothbay Harbor Shipyard, who had worked on Bounty during the month she spent in dry dock in the fall of 2012, shortly before she sailed for St. Petersburg. The crew at Boothbay had caulked leaky seams, installed new fuel tanks, replaced rotten planks, and touched up the Bounty’s paint job. Kosakowski, a clean-cut man who bears a closer resemblance to an accountant than a shipyard worker, had been the manager for the project. As such, he was one of the last naval professionals to see the Bounty in one piece.

Kosakowski told Kevin Carroll that shortly after the Bounty had been brought to the shipyard, he and his workers had pulled up some planking near the mizzenmast and mainmast and found significant amounts of rot—a “dry, almost charred-looking” kind of rot, Kosakowski said.

“Did you tell Captain Walbridge?” Carroll asked.

“Yes,” Kosakowski said.

“What did he say?”

“He was a little shocked when we first started looking into it,” Kosakowski admitted. “His shock turned to awe when we were prodding the other framing and finding the same signs of degradation. Once we started looking at the other frames, we saw it was more widespread.” Kosakowski came to believe that as much as 75 percent of the framing above the vessel’s waterline was rotten.

The rotten wood needed to be removed and replaced, Kosakowski said, and he had recommended to that he allow the shipyard crew to inspect the rest of the Bounty, cutting out the worst of the damage and installing fresh white oak in its place. Kosakowski testified that Walbridge agreed to a few replacements, but resisted a deeper—and inevitably more costly—investigation. “[Walbridge’s] response,” he said, “was that they would deal with the hull at the next year’s hull exam”—the annual inspection conducted by the Coast Guard. But that exam wasn’t scheduled until 2014, which worried Kosakowski.

He told Carroll that he met twice more with Walbridge to talk about the rot. On that second occasion, Walbridge told Kosakowski that he wanted the issue to “stay between the two of us,” Kosakowski testified, “and that he explained these problems to the owner, [and] that I didn’t need to be worried.”

An audible murmur passed through the crowd in the ballroom. The captain of a ship that would sail into a hurricane two months later, allegedly asking a yard worker to keep quiet the extent of the rot on his vessel—in the words of one prominent maritime safety analyst, the disclosure was nothing short of “stunning.” Had Walbridge, as he promised Kosakowski, actually informed Hansen about the rot? Or had he chosen to keep Kosakowski’s discovery to himself?

No one could say—one of the men was missing and the other had refused to testify or grant interviews since the wreck. But it wasn’t hard to imagine the horrible bind in which this revelation would have placed the captain. For Walbridge, everything was riding on Bounty’s fate. His sense of identity was irrevocably linked to the ship. Had she been mothballed, or forced into commission as a “moored attraction vessel”—a stationary museum, essentially—it might have been devastating to him. Would he have taken that risk and told Hansen? Or would he have done whatever it took to keep Bounty sailing?

The strongest counterargument to Kosakowski’s bombshell, as it happened, came from his own former colleague. Joe Jakomovicz, a veteran shipwright with a shock of white hair and a thick Maine accent, was a former yard manager of the Boothbay shipyard, where he had overseen previous repairs on the Bounty, including a 2006 renovation. Testifying before Carroll, Jakomovicz argued that Kosakowski was drastically overstating the extent of the rot on Bounty. Kosakowski, he pointed out, had “five or six years of experience,” while he had 40. “I’ve seen worse,” Jakomovicz said of the damage. “The key thing here is that it’s a 50-year-old boat,” he added. “You have to realize that that’s tired.”

That didn’t mean that the ship was seaworthy or that it wasn’t—Jakomovicz was retired when the Bounty arrived in Boothbay in 2012—only that Jakomovicz had encountered such situations before. He remembered seeing a few photos of the Bounty sinking, and had marveled that, despite the rough seas, the ship had not split apart. “I said, ‘My God, that boat’s still floating and intact.’ ” Jakomovicz recalled, shaking his head. “That was surprising to me.”

And yet the crew had seen it: the ocean sluicing through dozens of open seams, overwhelming the pumps. Dan Cleveland told the coastguardsmen as much in Portsmouth when it was his turn to testify later that week. Besides John Svendsen, Cleveland was the officer with perhaps the fullest understanding of Bounty, having spent five years on the ship, including a significant amount of time dealing with yard work and repairs. On the night the ship sank, while John Svendsen was in the navigation shack communicating with the Coast Guard, Cleveland was mostly belowdecks, trying to bail out the ailing vessel. Around midnight, Cleveland said, the ship had lost power, then flickered back to life again. But the Bounty was rolling hard now—hard enough that the starboard engine was temporarily underwater.

Casting about for options, Cleveland and his shipmates turned to the “trash pump,” the portable gas-powered pump that could be used to supplement the overwhelmed hydraulic units. They hauled it down to the engine room, but the thing wouldn’t start. “We got out the manual because we were trying to figure out if we were missing something simple,” Cleveland remembered. It was funny, maybe, in the grimmest way possible—a few sailors flipping through an old instruction manual while their ship sank and the seas surged around them.

Twelve

By the end of the hearings in Portsmouth, the Bounty’s loss had begun to take shape, in the way that shipwrecks often do, as an unsparing aggregation of mistakes. Any one of them, had it occurred in isolation, would not likely have been fatal; it was only gathered together that they acquired such terrible weight. Had Walbridge kept the ship in port, the Bounty might have lived to sail another day, even in her decaying state. If the Bounty had been in better shape, the storm might have been survivable; Sandy was extremely large, but her wind-speed never rose above Category 1 status, and vessels smaller than the Bounty have weathered much worse. If the generators had stayed online, if the pumps were able to keep up with the rising water, the Bounty might have limped back to shore as she did during her near-disastrous trip past Cape Hatteras in 1998. These are the hypotheticals that haunt a lost ship and her survivors.

In an interview with CNN in February, Claudia McCann, Walbridge’s widow, said she believed her husband acted honorably in steering the Bounty south, and she has made it clear that she intends to protect his legacy. This will be no easy task—the captain’s crew demonstrated loyalty in their testimony, but the story they told in spite of themselves was a damning one. In the most generous scenario, Walbridge made a single bad decision that was fatally complicated by terrible luck. But it was just as possible that he committed an act of unforgivable hubris, knowingly pushing a dilapidated ship beyond its limits and endangering the young, largely inexperienced crew he had sworn to protect.

Whether this ambiguous picture translates into legal responsibility may now be a matter for civilian courts to decide. Jacob Shisha, the Christians’ attorney, says he was only attending the inquiry to “listen,” but if a lawsuit is filed, the HMS Bounty Foundation will undoubtedly be the chief target. It is not inconceivable that Svendsen, as the highest-ranking officer after Walbridge, could find himself named as a defendant as well.

In November of 2012, the surviving crew members of Bounty went to New York to tape a segment for ABC’s Good Morning America. The producers shot more than an hour of tape, but used barely two minutes of it, a fact that annoyed some of the crew members. After that, they granted few interviews. Some took to switching off their phones or deleting emails from reporters without even reading them. Like soldiers returning from a particularly harrowing deployment, they worried that no one else would understand what they’d been through. They became even closer than they’d been on Bounty, sealing themselves off from the world. They started an email listserv to exchange memories from their time on the ship, and posted reassuring messages on each other’s Facebook walls.

Thinking of you, they wrote.

It will get better, they wrote.

I’m having bad dreams, too, they wrote.

On a recent winter afternoon, Doug Faunt stood on the back porch of his house in Oakland, surveying his tangled, overgrown backyard. An aging cat wove between his legs. Even a couple of months on, his stomach still bothered him. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about the storm and what happened out there,” he said, pushing a neon-yellow watch cap back over his brow. “I assume it will be that way for a very long time.”

But the funny thing was, he also couldn’t stop thinking of the things that he missed—the sound of canvas flapping overhead, the slap of saltwater on his skin. Lately he had found himself returning often to tall-ship forums online. Tall ships are typically taken out of commission during the winter months, laid up in October and back at sail by April or May. There was a ship sailing out of New York in the spring that he had his eye on—another full-rigger. Maybe she had room for one more sailor.

Stray Bullet

Stray Bullet

An inmate attempts to come to terms with his own actions, and turn his life around in prison.

By Gary Rivlin

The Atavist Magazine, No. 25

Gary Rivlin, an investigative reporting fellow at the Nation Institute, is a former New York Times reporter and the author of five books, including most recently Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.—How the Working Poor Became Big Business. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, GQ, and Wired, among other publications. He is currently at work on a book about the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Editor: Charles Homans
Producers: Olivia Koski, Gray Beltran
Research and Production: Nadia Wilson, Nicole Pasulka, Rachel Richardson
Fact Checker: Spencer Woodman
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Audio of Tony Davis’s Confession and Phone Call Home: Oakland Police Department
Audio of Tony Davis and Gary Rivlin: Courtesy Gary Rivlin

Published in January 2013. Design updated in 2021.

One

The room was the one you’ve seen on television, but dingier and more claustrophobic. It was as small as a prison cell, maybe nine feet by twelve feet—roomy enough for a large metal table, a few battered steel chairs, and little else. The table was scratched with graffiti, and the walls, made of acoustic tiling, were heavily gouged. The metal door looked as if it had been beaten with a sledgehammer. The sweat room, the detectives working the Oakland homicide unit called it.

Brian Thiem looked at the suspect in front of him, an oversize kid with round cheeks and a thick double chin. Tony Davis wore his hair in a scruffy high-top and had gaps notched in his eyebrows. That morning he had been sitting in his ’72 Chevy Impala, letting the old thing warm up, when Detective Thiem had come to arrest him. Thiem had brought four extra cops to help apprehend Tony, but he immediately felt ridiculous for going to the trouble. He could’ve walked up and said, “Tony, I’m the police. You’re under arrest,” and Tony would have gone along.

Now that he had Tony at the station house downtown, Thiem couldn’t believe this 18-year-old was the murderer he’d been looking for. He seemed docile and scared. Thiem had been working homicide for a couple of years—long enough to appreciate that most of the guilty who sat across from him in the sweat room weren’t born killers, just people who’d taken a life in a murderous moment. Even so, he’d later say that Tony might have been the least likely killer he’d ever arrested.

At first, Tony denied everything. Denied knowing about any drive-by shooting, denied owning a gun. But there had been two other kids in the car with him that night in July 1990, nine months earlier, and both had fingered Tony as the shooter. When Thiem confronted him with their stories, Tony changed his, insisting that the shooter had been another kid named Steve.

Thiem left Tony to sweat for a couple of hours, then returned, confronting him with the inconsistencies in his version. “He began crying,” Thiem later wrote in his police log, “asking what was going to happen to him. He then said he would tell [us] the truth.”

Thiem started his tape recorder.

Two

The phone rings, and the familiar 707 area code flashes on the display. Invariably, it’s dinnertime when Tony calls, or it’s a day when I’m looking at a tight deadline. But when your friend is calling collect from inside a state penitentiary—when he once told you that a highlight of his two decades behind bars was busting his ankle, because surgery meant a night spent in a real bed at an outside hospital—you pick up the phone. It’s not like I can call him back when it might be more convenient.

The call starts as it always does, with a mechanized voice that says, “This call and your telephone number will be recorded and monitored.” The voice then warns me that the person on the other end of the line is calling from inside a California state prison. Then, precisely every three minutes, our conversation is interrupted by a grating, automated message: “This recorded call is from an inmate at a California correctional facility.” It has been nearly 20 years since I first heard that message, and I’ve heard it many hundreds of times since, and I still curse under my breath each time. But Tony, accustomed to worse intrusions, never seems to mind. After 15 minutes—the time limit programmed into all the cellblock phones—the call abruptly ends.

Long ago, with Tony’s blessing, I got in the habit of recording our calls; I reasoned that if the California Department of Corrections was taping our conversations, I would, too. The recordings are painful to listen to in more than an I-hate-to-hear-my-own-voice kind of way. To choose one example: It’s January 2008, Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton are vying for the Democratic nomination, and Tony mentions that he’s been watching the debates. I ask him where—in the common area of the cellblock, with other inmates, or in his cell on the 13-inch TV he owns? Except instead of saying “cell,” I ask if he watches alone in his “room.” I immediately laugh at myself, but Tony finds the slip-up too significant to let slide. “Hell no,” he says. “I will never get comfortable to the point I call my cell my room.”

On the tape, my voice sounds amped up, like it always does when I’m on the phone with Tony. Maybe it’s knowing that the clock is ticking, that we have just 15 minutes until the call cuts off. But a lot of it, I’m sure, is the jarring sense of being momentarily transported from my apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Cellblock 12 at California State Prison, Solano. Just to get to the part of the common room where the phones are located, Tony must navigate the prison’s invisible territorial boundaries, passing through an area staked out by norteños—Latino inmates from Northern California—and another claimed by whites and the sureños from Southern California. Sometimes he will go months without phoning, because his facility is on lockdown yet again after a stabbing or a melee between rival gangs. Once, it was because a black inmate used a shower long ago claimed by the “others”—the inmates’ catch-all racial category for anyone who isn’t black, white, or Latino—prompting a minor riot.

The taped conversations are full of awkward moments in which I over- or underestimate the degree to which Tony’s world intersects with mine. “You know what email is, right?” I ask him at one point, prompting a sharp laugh on the other end of the line. He watches CNN, he reminds me. It’s 2008; he knows what email is. When he mentions borrowing recent copies of USA Today, I ask if he’s ever come across copies of The New York Times, where I worked at the time. Tony tells me that not only has he never seen the paper, he isn’t sure he could picture it. I mention that I’m about to go to Las Vegas on a work trip. “Before all is said and done,” he tells me, “I want to go to New York. I want to go to Chicago. And I want to go to Las Vegas.” That proves to be another conversation stopper.

Eventually, the phone calls always circle around to the most familiar and obvious of subjects: Tony’s plight, his fate, the mistakes he’s made that landed him in a prison cell serving an 18-to-life sentence. “I’ll be 37 in August,” he told me in 2008. “I can’t dwell on what happened, how I got here, or how long I’ve been here. I can’t be mad, because being mad ain’t going to help.”

Tony and I first met in the early 1990s, when I was a young reporter for a local alternative weekly writing about youth violence. I was looking to talk with a teenager who had killed another teenager. Tony had done exactly that. When we first started corresponding, he was two years into an indefinite sentence for a murder he had committed when he was 18, the killing of a 13-year-old boy named Kevin Reed. Reed’s murder and its principals became the focus of my 1995 book, Drive-By.

A decade passed, then another. Somewhere along the way, Tony, now past 40, ceased to be my subject and became my friend. It has been nearly 20 years since we last saw one another face-to-face. For the longest time, Tony discouraged me from visiting; I got the impression he didn’t want me to see him yet because he had not yet grown into the person he knew he could become. By the time he felt ready, I had moved east, and since then lockdowns have thwarted my efforts to visit him. Over the years, however, we have exchanged probably a couple hundred letters. Whatever the exact number, it’s a safe bet that I’ve written to him more often than to anyone else in my life. Tony is black, and from time to time his fellow inmates have asked him about the white man whose picture is on the wall in his cell. “He’s like the only real best friend that I’ve had in years,” Tony tells them.

Then there are the phone calls, more than I’ve had with all but a few of my closest friends. In between the mechanical voice’s interruptions, we talk about sports, politics, our lives. I update him on the kids—the 3-year-old’s mastery of a scooter, the baby who for two months has seemed on the cusp of crawling—and he asks me to give them a kiss from their Uncle Tony. The one constant topic of conversation, of course, is prison itself: his life locked behind bars, the strategies he has adopted for survival, and, especially over the past several years, his quest to win his freedom.

In early 2010, Tony started talking about his next parole hearing, scheduled for 2012. For someone serving a sentence of 18 years to life, as he is, the parole board represents the only path to freedom. Under California law, he first became eligible for parole in 2003, after serving 12 years of his term. But the “to life” at the end of his sentence—the “life tail,” as it is known to those who have one—meant that there was no cap on the length of time he might serve. If he could persuade the parole board that he was a new man, he’d be free, assuming the governor of California didn’t choose to reverse the decision.

But until he convinced the commissioners presiding over a parole-suitability hearing that he was worth a second chance, he would never get one. He had botched his first parole hearing a decade earlier when he grew flustered and tongue-tied. He had assured me that he had performed better in subsequent appearances, and sometimes he spoke with great anticipation about his upcoming hearing. Other times, though, it was with trepidation, if not outright dread. What if words again failed him just when they counted most? Two years in advance, he was already rehearsing in his mind what he might say.

The argument for keeping Tony locked up can be made in a sentence: He took the life of an innocent 13-year-old boy. He pulled the trigger of a .45 five times, firing from the back of a moving car. He was stoned at the time of the shooting and might also have been drunk. He would claim that he meant only to scare the group of kids he was shooting at, but it was Kevin Reed’s misfortune that the bullet that killed him was a ricochet off the pavement. The bullet perforated Kevin’s groin, causing him to bleed to death while waiting for an ambulance, which took more than 10 minutes to arrive. Tony’s shooting sent two other children, both 14-year-olds, to the hospital with gunshot wounds.

But that was Tony at 18. Now it was 2012, more than two decades later, and the 40-year-old Tony Davis who would face a parole hearing in March was a different man. “Davis has worked exceptionally hard to improve himself,” one of his GED instructors wrote of Tony a few years back. “His true desire and willingness to go the extra mile to reach his goal is commendable.” His work habits and good behavior had won him a transfer to a medium-security facility, where he seemed to have enrolled in every self-help and support-group program offered, from Narcotics Anonymous to a victim-offender reconciliation group. He volunteered with a program that helps younger inmates adjust to prison life. He was one of three inmates assisting a professional counselor in a course designed to get prisoners thinking about their crimes from the victim’s point of view. (“I’ve seen hardened dudes come to this and break down and cry,” he told me.) He had also experienced a religious awakening, which would help with the parole board, as would the credits he had earned toward an associate’s degree. He had even managed to meet a woman who lived on the outside and marry her.

All of this counted substantially in Tony’s favor. As Tony told it to me, the commissioners hearing his case in 2010 had given him every reason to feel hopeful about his chances the next time around; they had recommended that he come back in two years rather than three, as previous boards had done.

But above all it simply felt like time. Tony and his crime were both anachronisms from an era that had long since receded. He was a black teen from the ’hood in the first half of the 1990s, which stands as the most murderous five-year period in modern American history. He had been swept up in the crack trade that had flooded U.S. cities. He had committed one of the most iconic crimes of the era, a drive-by shooting—a video-game approach to settling scores celebrated in the West Coast hip-hop on the radio at the time. Even the cavalierly draconian nature of his punishment—a prison term longer than the number of years he had spent on earth at the time—was an artifact of its time and place.

For comparison, consider the case of Tony’s grandfather, O. D. Clay. In 1957, drunk after a card game, Clay shot and killed a man he suspected of fooling around with his wife. The charge was second-degree murder, the same as Tony’s. But although he was a grown man when he committed his crime, Tony’s grandfather would serve less than five years in prison before a parole board gave him his freedom.

By 1991, however, voters and politicians in California had all but given up on rehabilitation in favor of a hard-nosed law-and-order philosophy. The tough-on-crime movement peaked three years later, when the state’s voters approved a notorious three-strikes law that gave a judge no choice but to impose a life sentence on any defendant with two prior serious felony convictions, even if he was charged with shoplifting a dress shirt for a job interview or stealing a stack of wooden pallets as part of a prank (both real-life examples from the California docket). Even as a decades-long state budget crisis set in, California’s prison funding remained sacrosanct. Lawmakers cut deeply into spending on parks, public schools, and California’s vaunted university system, but the Department of Corrections continued to grow. At the start of the 1980s, the state was spending just under 3 percent of its general funds on corrections. By 2010, that figure had more than tripled, to over 10 percent.

But the pendulum has begun swinging back ever so slightly toward rehabilitation in California and elsewhere, for financial reasons, if nothing else. The United States now spends $200 billion or so on criminal justice each year, even as the causes of the boom in spending have largely receded. Crack use has fallen precipitously—in no small part because the drug so quickly devours its heaviest users—and the terror of drive-by shootings, if not completely gone, is greatly diminished. The national youth homicide rate is now half what it was in the early 1990s. In November, Californians voted to modify the state’s three-strikes law, giving judges the power to release offenders deemed to pose no threat to public safety. In 2005, the state quietly renamed the Department of Corrections. It’s now the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Yet, Tony sits moldering in a prison cell, trapped in a kind of purgatory where the year is permanently 1991. If his 2012 parole hearing was an opportunity to consider the fate of a single inmate, it was also in a small way a referendum on policies that the state’s voters tacitly admitted were no longer tenable.

At the end of Drive-By, I offered my own prescription for Tony. He should be locked away through his twenties, I wrote, and released sometime in his early to mid-thirties. That struck me as about right for a second chance. Incarceration into his forties seemed excessive for a mistake—even a fatal one—made when he was 18.

By the time he appeared before the parole board in March 2012, Tony would have served nearly as long a sentence as that handed down to Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian white supremacist who killed 77 people—most of them teenagers—in 2011. When I spoke with him last spring, even Brian Thiem, the arresting officer, thought enough was enough. Tony’s crime was “an unfortunate accident based on the impulses and action of kids,” said Thiem, who has since retired from police work. “Twenty years for what he did? God, I say let him out.”

Even politics, for once, were working in Tony’s favor. In the spring of 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that overcrowding inside the California prison system was so bad that it violated the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. To mitigate “needless suffering,” the Court, by a 5–4 majority, ordered California to release over 30,000 inmates by 2014—about one-fifth of its prison population. Tony, it appeared, had finally caught a break. He seemed precisely the kind of inmate the authorities should release, especially with the state billions of dollars in debt, yet spending $47,000 per inmate each year. For the first time since his incarceration, I felt excited about Tony’s prospects. It looked like 2012 could finally be his year.

Three

In 1916, the Chevrolet Motor Company built a factory in East Oakland, at the intersection of Foothill Boulevard and 73rd Avenue. It was the first major auto-manufacturing outpost on the West Coast, and it seemed to point the way to the city’s future as a prosperous industrial port. By 1971, when Tony was born in East Oakland, the neighborhood had become a solid enclave of the striving working class that grew up around the manufacturing industry. General Motors, Ford, Mack, Caterpillar, International Harvester, Del Monte, Carnation, and Gerber all had factories there. And then the factories left.

It was a West Coast variation of the story that played out across the Rust Belt in the 1970s and ’80s. Tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs, home prices started to plummet; those who could leave did, and those who couldn’t were left to deal with rising crime and deteriorating schools. The city was hollowing out: the banks fled on the heels of the factories, followed by chain stores and, ultimately, many small businesses. By the time Tony was a teenager, East Oakland felt like a community under siege. The final straw was the arrival of crack cocaine at the end of 1983.

Crack was a cheap high. For a “dove”—20 dollars—the novice crack user could buy enough rock to stay happy for a couple of hours. But it wasn’t the price so much as the way it was sold that made the crack trade so deadly. The sale of heroin, the city’s previous hard drug of choice, was dominated by a few kingpins, like Felix Mitchell, a legendary dealer who parlayed his East Oakland corners into a multimillion-dollar criminal empire in the 1970s and early ’80s. But crack was too new for organized crime. It was sold by bands of freelancing teenagers claiming corners scattered throughout East and West Oakland. “[It’s] like one day they just popped up through the cement,” said Sergeant Mike Beal, at the time the head of the Oakland Police Department’s drug task force. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Beal recalled, his officers would shut down one corner crew only to see another start selling a block or two away.

The crack trade’s competitive and disorganized nature brought predictable results. Between 1986 and 1989, the national homicide rate among black kids age 14 to 17 doubled and kept rising into the early 1990s. There was a similar spike in the number of minors going away for murder. In some inner-city neighborhoods, in Oakland and elsewhere, it could properly have been called an epidemic.

In the popular culture, the West Coast’s wave of youth violence was associated with Los Angeles; it was Straight Outta Compton and Boyz N the Hood. But Oakland, not L.A., had the higher murder rate at the time—a statistic made all the more surreal by the fact that only a bridge separated Oakland from San Francisco, which, along with Silicon Valley, was on the verge of a tech-driven economic renaissance. The boom that remade large stretches of the Bay Area largely passed Oakland by, dashing the dreams of city leaders, who for years had spent most of the city’s antipoverty dollars trying to revitalize Oakland’s central business district. Instead of becoming a slightly less expensive version of its shimmering neighbor across the bay, Oakland was saddled with the highest murder rate of any city west of the Mississippi. And a stunning number of the perpetrators—and the victims—were teenagers.

I wanted to write a book that would put a face on these grim facts, and I set out to find a single case to document, one that involved both a shooter and a victim who were 18 or younger. I started looking at all the homicides in Oakland between 1990 and 1992 that met these criteria. When my initial search elicited an overwhelming 75-plus cases, I narrowed my parameters to those 16 or under. That still meant working through two dozen files and talking with a dozen or so cops, defense attorneys, and other players in the criminal justice system before I finally settled on the murder of Kevin Reed.

Reed’s case was ideal for a number of reasons. Everyone involved, from the Reeds to the arresting officer to the perpetrators and their families, was willing to talk with me. The murder had taken place in a part of East Oakland that cops and locals alike dubbed the “killing zone.” I wanted readers to wonder how they would fare raising their kids in a place like this, where the schools were terrible, crack and guns were ubiquitous, and children were dying in the street.

There was also the senselessness of the crime itself. In the shorthand of the media, Kevin Reed was a kid murdered over a bike. Alternatively, it could be said that the 13-year-old died tragically in a double case of mistaken identity.

The deadly chain of events began on Sunday, July 8, 1990, when Reed’s brother Shannon and his friend London Willard, both 14, saw a 16-year-old boy named John “Junebug” Jones pedal up to a convenience store on a borrowed bicycle. A tall kid with broomstick-thin arms and delicate features, Junebug exuded a moody vulnerability. Mistaking Junebug for a boy in the neighborhood who had threatened to beat them up earlier that week, Shannon and London jumped him on his way out of the store. Shannon punched Junebug in the face; London swung for his head with a steel pipe, hitting him on the forearm. For good measure they stole the bike, riding off and leaving Junebug to nurse his injured body and wounded pride.

On the corner, the other teens teased Junebug mercilessly—here was a supposedly tough street kid punked by a pair of 14-year-olds. Junebug would just as soon have shrugged the whole thing off; it wasn’t even his bike. But the damage to his reputation would’ve been irreparable—and on the corner, your reputation was everything.

Later the next night, Junebug and his friend Aaron Estill set out across the neighborhood in a boat-sized 1967 Chrysler Newport—which Aaron, all of 15 years old, had bought for $200 a few weeks earlier—looking for the bicycle thieves. They had been driving around only a few minutes when Junebug spotted London and a boy that Junebug took to be Shannon—in fact, it was Kevin Reed—standing below a streetlight a few doors from the Reed home, talking with some other kids. It was a little after 9 p.m. As the Newport idled down the street, Aaron asked, “What if they got a gun?”

That was when the boys went to go find Junebug’s friend Tony.

Four

Tony was two days old when the first person in his life gave up on him. It was his mother, Carol Davis, a 17-year-old heroin addict, who handed her newborn baby off to her mother, Vera, then disappeared.

Carol would resurface 11 years later to demand custody of Tony and his 8-year-old sister, Angela. She moved them into an apartment in San Antonio Village, at that time Oakland’s most notorious housing project. (Vera believed it was a scheme to qualify for welfare.) Angela didn’t last a month there before moving back into Vera’s apartment. Her mother, she later told me, was constantly high. For Tony, it wasn’t the drug paraphernalia lying around or the empty refrigerator or the lack of clean clothes in his drawer. It was the sound of his mother pleading for mercy as her boyfriend beat her. Eventually, the stories she was hearing proved too much for Vera, who filed the papers she needed to take legal custody of Carol’s kids.

I met Vera before I met Tony. In 1993, two years after the police had hauled her grandson away, she was living in the same small public-housing building where she had raised Tony. The apartment was only a 15-minute drive from the two-bedroom A-frame in the Oakland hills that I called home, but we might as well have lived in different cities. Dealers sold outside the family’s first-floor three-bedroom apartment. Chunks of plaster were missing from the ceiling, cracks were visible in the walls, and the floors were covered with linoleum that wouldn’t come clean no matter how hard anyone scrubbed it.

The day I visited, the place was chaotic. A television blared in the background, though no one was watching it. The phone rang constantly, and in the two hours I was there, so many people walked in and out that I couldn’t keep their names straight. There was no doubt that Vera, a stout woman whose face sagged into a permanent frown, ruled the roost. She had only to yell for a fresh pack of cigarettes and it would show up. Several generations called the apartment home; Tony was just one of many children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews who had passed through over the decades.

“What was Tony like as a boy?” I asked.

“He was heavy,” Vera said.

I smiled. “No, I mean, what kind of child was he? Tell me about his personality.”

“I guess he just played, like other kids. I don’t know.” I asked about the impact on Tony of his mother’s and father’s absence. “He never said anything to me about it,” she said.

Vera was 21 and pregnant with her fourth child when her husband went away for murder. Even after he was out, he didn’t amount to much of a father. He and Vera would have another four kids before he walked away from the family. To make ends meet, Vera, who had dropped out of school at 15, worked a series of cleaning jobs—as a domestic in the homes of well-off white people, mopping up after-hours at a bar—before going to work as a custodian at a local nursing home. It was the last job she would ever have. By the time she was laid off in 1968, her blood pressure was so high that she qualified for a monthly disability check. The next year, she moved the family into the public-housing unit. She was not yet 40 years old.

When Carol gave birth to a third child, Vera thought about handing the kids over to the county. She went as far as setting up a home visit. But Vera’s youngest daughter, Paula, who was seven years older than Tony, threw a fit. After the caseworker left the apartment, Paula vowed to feed and bathe the kids and make sure they went to school, and Vera relented. Paula was still in high school, but more than once she took a call from a teacher looking to talk with Tony’s mother.

When he was in fifth grade, Tony was placed in a class for slow learners. He was barely 10 years old and the school system already seemed to be writing him off. Tony responded in kind. He was 13 when a woman next door set him and another kid up in the crack business. She supplied the rock, and they split the profits on whatever was sold. Paula caught wind of the scheme and shut it down a few weeks later, but she was not in a position to judge: She, too, had tried her hand at dealing, if only briefly. At least two of her brothers—Tony’s uncles, though they were more like siblings, since they shared a room and were only six and nine years older than he was—sold crack on the street, too. It had become the family business. By 16, Tony was Fat Tone, a corner boss running his own crew. Junebug was among its members.

The two boys had grown up in the same building, but they were near opposites. Where Tony struggled in the classroom, Junebug had always been a natural student. His mother, who worked nights on the clean-up crew at the local post office, had finagled a place for him at a top-tier middle school miles from his home, using a cousin’s address to enroll him. It seemed like the best way to keep him out of trouble. When they were caught in this scheme—it was Junebug, in fact, who confessed to it—Junebug was sent back to Castlemont High, a school with a dropout rate of about 50 percent.

Junebug had never gotten over his abandonment by the father he had been close to, and his obvious intelligence made him a target for the other boys. Tony—the embodiment of the bad influences Junebug’s mother wanted to shield her son from—had recruited Junebug into his crew and served as his protector and street guide. Junebug wasn’t nearly as tough or hard-shelled as his neighbor. “My little cousin”—that was the diminutive that Tony would use to describe him, though the boys weren’t related.

A few months before that night in July, however, Tony had betrayed Junebug. After the boys’ crew had roughed up an older man whose girlfriend caused them trouble, Tony told the police that Junebug had punched the man in the face—though in fact it was Tony who hit him. A cop played Junebug a tape of Tony’s statement, which would cost Junebug a month in juvenile hall.

The two were still on the outs when Junebug and Aaron came asking for Tony’s help. Tony had been drinking and smoking pot all day and was in no condition to help anyone. But he was eager to make amends. He put on his dark sunglasses—his “murder ones,” as they were known in the neighborhood—grabbed the .45 he kept under his bed, and slipped into the backseat of Aaron’s Newport.

Aaron and Junebug thought the gun was insurance in case the other kids were packing. Tony, however, was under the impression that he was supposed to fire off a few rounds and give the boys a scare. Aaron later swore that when he heard the gunshots, his first thought was that the kids on the corner were firing at them.

Kevin Reed and his friends were still hanging out under the streetlight where Aaron and Junebug had seen them. As Aaron drove past, Tony stuck the .45 out the window and squeezed off five shots. One of them bounced off the pavement and struck Kevin in the groin.

“I ain’t fit to kill nobody,” Tony remembers saying a couple blocks before they reached their destination. Maybe he wasn’t. But now he had.

Nine months passed before the police caught them. By that point, the three teenagers had driven themselves crazy with paranoia and recrimination. Tony was furious at Aaron for refusing to ditch the car. Aaron and Junebug couldn’t believe that Tony had been so clueless as to hide the gun rather than dumping it in the Oakland Estuary, a few miles from where they lived.

Tony was a wreck in the days after the murder, and his Aunt Paula had no trouble figuring out what he had done. Go to the police, she counseled him. Clear your conscience. “They’ll go easier on you,” she said. Instead, Tony promised God that if he got away with it, he’d never do another bad thing in his life.

Junebug, meanwhile, kept an article about Kevin’s murder in his dresser drawer. He had been devastated ever since he saw the photo on the front page of the Oakland Tribune, showing a boy who wasn’t even the kid they’d set out to scare, let alone intended to kill. He would be at a Bible study class the first time Brian Thiem came looking for him.

The cops tracked down Aaron because of the car. Aaron fingered Tony as the gunman and put Junebug in the car with him that night. Junebug corroborated Aaron’s story, and Tony ended up confessing. When he was allowed his one phone call, he called Vera’s house. For all his experience on the street, he was apparently unaware that the call was recorded and that Thiem was listening to everything he was saying.

Five

Twenty years later, I still remember the excitement of those first few months after I made contact with Tony and Junebug. My first wife and I couldn’t have children, and at the time I was throwing my paternal energies into serving as a kind of super-uncle to the children of my siblings and close friends. I didn’t need a shrink to tell me that I was regarding Tony and Junebug—both effectively fatherless—as surrogate kids. “The boys,” we sometimes called them, my wife and I. Each day, I found myself eagerly checking the mail.

There weren’t even surface similarities between my life and Tony’s and Junebug’s. I had grown up comfortably middle class on Long Island, in an intact and stable family. Diversity in my school district was the occasional Irish or Greek kid thrown in among the Jews and Italians. The worst trouble I got into as a teenager was getting busted outside the Nassau Coliseum for scalping Elton John tickets. And yet it was easy for me to put myself in the corner boys’ shoes—to see how, in similar circumstances, I might easily have made similarly disastrous choices.

In his 1995 memoir Fist Stick Knife Gun, the educator Geoffrey Canada makes the point that the preponderance of guns in inner-city neighborhoods transforms the dumb things that all teenage boys do into life-altering tragedies. Looking at the mundane series of decisions that had led to Kevin Reed’s murder, it was painfully clear to me how true this was—how their actions differed from those of countless more privileged teenagers only in their terrible stakes. I grew up in a striving suburb, not an inner-city community. My older brother and a friend took bets on pro football games in high school, and that friend’s younger brother, Vinnie, and I got into the business as well. The thousands of dollars we made each football season was nice, but the real payoff was walking the halls at school and feeling like someone. What if the cooler, older kids in my neighborhood had been selling crack instead?

If someone had told me at the time that I’d have a close relationship with a character I had written about in Drive-By, I would have assumed it would be Junebug. He was the reason I chose the case I did—him and his mother. I saw something of my younger self in Junebug: the sensitive kid, easily bruised, who hungered for nothing so much as to fit in. In his letters, Junebug revealed a real talent for words, and I made sure to let him know that he was a far better writer than I was at that age.

There was an intimacy to our correspondence, and his letters revealed a sharp and probing mind. “I feel compelled … to contribute to your work,” he wrote in the first of them, “for moral reasons and also for my sense of ‘guilt.’” He saw his story both as part of a tragedy that reached far beyond him and as a cautionary tale. “I have realized that no power on earth can bring that young man back,” he wrote, “but at least I can provide assistance for others to somehow curb what’s happening nationwide.” Sometimes his letters would run over a dozen pages, full of agonizing reflection.

Letters from Tony, by contrast, rarely exceeded a page of slanted, hurried handwriting. They were notes, really, and consisted mostly of complaints about his family. In the first one, he told me he’d be happy to help with my project—then hit me up for $40. A letter from Junebug was ripped open before I had reached the top of the driveway. One from Tony might sit for a few hours, if not a day or two, before I actually read it.

My impression of Tony changed when finally I got a chance to speak with him over the phone a couple of months after our correspondence began. He had a man’s voice by then, full but surprisingly gentle. He sounded more thoughtful than I expected. He also proved more forthcoming about his story than he had been in his letters. Like Junebug, he told me he was eager to talk, that maybe others could learn from his mistakes.

Back then it was hard for me to keep an open mind about Tony. I’d also been spending time with Annette Reed, Kevin’s mother, and others in her family. Annette’s marriage fell apart shortly after the murder. Soon she had also lost her job, and with it the family home. In 1993, her second-youngest son, Shannon—the boy who Junebug was looking for on the night Tony took Kevin’s life—died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound while playing Russian roulette. There was also Junebug and his family to consider, as well as Aaron and his: Both young men would be locked up for years because of what Tony had done.

But even those who had watched Tony pass through the system on his way to prison had detected something different about him. The perpetrators and victims of drive-by shootings were always brought together by a sadly random logic, but even by those standards, the 250-pound boy with the flat-top seemed out of place. Brian Thiem was struck by his docility at the time of the arrest. Shortly after his confession, Tony met with a county probation officer, who tacked this onto the end of the report she filed with the court: “We want to add that this case seems particularly tragic and that this defendant appears, by hindsight, to truly understand his mistakes and poor judgment.” It was doubtful, she continued, that it would take even 10 years to rehabilitate Tony.

The public defender assigned to Tony’s case, Al Hymer, told a similar tale. Hymer was a 30-year veteran of the department who had handled hundreds of murders by the time Tony’s file crossed his desk. But Tony stood out, Hymer told me, from their very first meeting in the county lockup. He only wanted to talk about the terrible thing he had done and not what Hymer could do to lessen his punishment.

Hymer wanted to challenge the admissibility of the confession based on two things Tony had told him. First, Thiem had ignored his request for a lawyer, which was an obvious violation of his Miranda rights. Second, Thiem had dangled the death penalty over Tony’s head during his initial questioning, which was also forbidden, since the case wouldn’t have qualified for capital punishment. (Thiem denied both claims at the time.) But Tony told Hymer not to bother. There would be no trial. Tony accepted the DA’s offer of 18 to life—15 for the murder and another three for using a gun in the commission of a crime—even though it meant that he might very well spend the rest of his life in jail.

Calipatria State Prison (Photo: California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation)

Six

Tony was officially received into the California Department of Corrections on June 22, 1992. His first stop was the reception center at San Quentin, where prison officials calculated the placement score that would determine where he would be housed. An inmate scoring between 18 and 27, for instance, is dispatched to a minimum-security prison with open dormitories; a score of 52 or higher lands you in a maximum security, Level IV prison. Scores are based on a variety of factors, including the nature of the crime committed, prior record, age, and history of gang involvement. Tony had no prior record and never belonged to a proper gang—his corner crew didn’t count. But he had pled guilty to second-degree murder. That alone pretty much guaranteed that he’d start serving his sentence in a Level IV facility. Two months after arriving at San Quentin, he was assigned a spot inside Folsom State Prison, a 19th-century stone penitentiary two hours from Oakland made famous years ago by a Johnny Cash song.

California was then in the midst of an unprecedented surge in prison construction. The boom reflected a national trend—the U.S. prison population has increased sevenfold since the 1970s, according to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts—but in California it took on an extraordinary scale. Starting in the mid-1980s, the state would build more than one new penitentiary a year for 20 years—the only way to keep up with the public appetite for ever harsher sentencing policies. As new prisons came on line, Folsom was downgraded to medium-security status, and Tony, 11 months after arriving there, was transferred, along with hundreds of other inmates, to Calipatria State Prison. The new facility, opened the previous year, seemed the very embodiment of the law-and-order era. It was hailed as the first prison in the United States to employ an electrified fence that kills on contact. Worse for Tony was the location, in the desert between Death Valley and the Mexican border. He was now a nine-hour drive from Oakland, practically guaranteeing that no one in his family would visit him there. The only thing he had to look forward to was the possibility of parole, right after his 30th birthday.

Visiting days were Saturday and Sunday. The visitor’s room at Calipatria opened at 8:45 a.m., but the prison’s public information officer suggested that I arrive much earlier. When I pulled up to the prison gates for the first time, at 4:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning in September 1993, I saw what he meant—45 people were already lined up ahead of me. I didn’t see Tony until nearly 11 a.m.; visiting hours ended promptly at 2:45 p.m. I would set the alarm even earlier for Sunday.

Tony had lost something like 50 pounds in the two and a half years since he had been locked up. His eyes looked forlorn behind his government-issue steel-framed glasses, and when he sat, his whole body slumped forward, as if it were caving in. Around us, couples and families ate microwaved meals and sugary treats from the vending machines that lined one wall of the room, but when I offered to buy him something, Tony refused.

Tony was miserable at Calipatria, and it was no wonder. The prison was built to house 2,000 inmates, but within a year of opening it was home to nearly twice that number. At least half of the prisoners were there for murder. Calipatria was new enough that hierarchies among the prisoners were still in flux and turf had yet to be claimed. Gangs warred incessantly, putting the facility into a constant state of lockdown. On a full lockdown, Tony and his cell mate were locked in their cell 24 hours a day. There was no yard time, and meals were served in the cell. An inmate would get a chance to bathe every few days, but he was escorted to and from the showers in handcuffs. And when Calipatria was off lockdown? Yard time was its own kind of hell in a region where daytime temperatures top 110 degrees. There was also the stench of the place. The area’s main industry was livestock, and the air was permanently redolent with the waste of thousands of cows cooking in the sun.

Finally face-to-face with Tony, I tried to be all business. We didn’t have much time, and there was a lot to cover, from his family to his life as a crack dealer to the murder and his life behind bars. But as he talked about prison life, I found myself distracted, imagining the primal fear that I would have—that anyone I knew would have—if I were locked away inside a maximum-security penitentiary thick with psychopaths, sociopaths, and sexual predators. “I’d be eaten alive in here,” I told him.

Tony took it in stride; he told me he feared the guards more than his fellow inmates. He coached me on surviving Calipatria. “See, you’s cool like that guy over there,” he said, cocking his chin toward a white man a few tables over who looked to be about my age and more or less my size. He didn’t run with a gang, Tony explained. He minded his own business. The key was that he didn’t look or act scared. My fast mouth would help me, Tony offered, but when words failed, you needed to be willing to use your fists—and risk a beat down to avoid a worse fate. “You have to carry yourself in a way that you know you’ll get respect and demand respect,” he said. If you don’t forcefully confront a problem right away, he explained, you’ve revealed yourself to be weak.

By way of example, Tony told me about a fight he had gotten into in the showers shortly after he had arrived at Calipatria. Another inmate cut in front of Tony while he was waiting in line. He could have shrugged it off—it wasn’t like he was pressed for time—but he confronted him. “And what’s a broke-ass n***** like you going to do ’bout it?” the man replied.

Tony didn’t hesitate. “I hauled off and hit that dude as hard I could, right in the face,” he told me. He did it even though he knew it would mean time in the hole—the Special Housing Unit, or prison within prison—and would single him out as a potential troublemaker. But after listening to Tony talk about prison all weekend, I didn’t doubt that it was the right thing to do. Tony offered the story as a kind of survival tip for my hypothetical incarceration, but I eventually took it to heart as a lesson for getting by on the outside, too, one that I dubbed the Fat Tone Rule of Life: Better to confront a small bit of unpleasantness before it escalates into something trickier.

Tony and I kept talking after I returned from Calipatria. He’d call collect, I’d turn on the recorder, and he’d tell me about himself and his life. By the end of 1994, we had exchanged a dozen letters and hundreds of dollars’ worth of collect calls, and I had finished researching and writing Drive-By. My official business with Tony was nearly over. But I’ll confess, I wasn’t surprised by the letter I received months before our working relationship came to an end. “Gary,” he had written, “i hope that when you get done writing the Book we can still be friends, thats if you want to.”

Seven

Our friendship advanced one phone conversation at a time. Listening back to the early tapes, I hear myself still playing reporter. Tony tells me he’s started a journal. Use your journal to chronicle prison life, I suggest. It’s an idea aimed more at helping me with the prison-related book I was thinking about writing at the time than at helping a young man struggling to process his feelings.

I hadn’t sanitized Tony in Drive-By. He had been a violent thug and betrayed those close to him on more than one occasion, snitching on Junebug to the police for a crime he himself had committed and robbing the older kid who had taught him the ropes of the crack trade. While fact-checking Drive-By prior to publication, I shared with Tony—as I did with the book’s other principals—the parts of the manuscript dealing with his life, so my depiction of him was not a shock when he read the completed book. But I was surprised by how deeply the rest of the story affected him.

For Tony, reading about the impact of the shooting on the Reed family meant taking a fuller responsibility for the murder. He dropped the “yes, but” attitude that allowed him to share blame with others. (Hadn’t Junebug also messed up? Why had the ambulance taken so long to arrive on the scene?) Once, after referring to the “incident” that landed him in jail, Tony immediately corrected himself. “The night I killed that young man,” he said more carefully. “It wasn’t an incident. I killed a boy. I know that. Kevin Reed. I’m not going to try and hide it by calling it an ‘incident,’ because it was a murder, and someone—Kevin—lost his life.”

I didn’t stay on the youth-violence beat long after the publication of Drive-By. When people asked me why, I told them that I had said all that I had to say on the topic. But truth be told, money played a big role as well. It was the dawn of the Internet era, and I was living in the Bay Area. I hadn’t done a stitch of business or technology writing in my life, but I had done some computer programming in college, and I figured that someone with my background should be able to understand what was going on in Silicon Valley. At 36, I could no longer afford to write about subjects simply because I cared deeply about them. And I had to face the fact that I could no longer justify the time spent on the phone with Tony as research. I was doing it for myself.

I was also doing it, I suppose, for Tony. By this point, his connections to the world beyond Calipatria had been winnowed away to little more than our regular phone calls. He had always felt close to his sister Angela, but she was struggling financially, enough that she could no longer afford the $15 or $30 charge that showed up on the phone bill when she received one of his calls. Soon she put a block on her phone, as did other members of his family. Even Paula seemed to fade from his life after she married and moved to Hawaii.

Aside from me, his only visitor at Calipatria was a volunteer tutor who Tony had met in the county lockup while he was awaiting disposition of his case. But within a few years, Tony was complaining to me that she, too, was giving up on him. “I barely hear from her anymore,” he wrote in one letter. “No matter what I go through in this place or my life,” he went on, “no one seems to understand or cares about my pain.” Around this time, he was diagnosed with depression by a prison doctor after complaining about anxiety attacks and insomnia.

There was an element of voyeurism to my side of our relationship. Prison gangs, race relations behind bars, the routine of life inside a Level IV prison: It was endlessly fascinating to me. At the same time, I was well aware of the possibility that I was a patsy being played by the con who knew the right buttons to push. It was true, after all, that I was not the only one who had profited from our relationship. Once, Tony told me he was in a bind because he had borrowed another inmate’s television to watch a basketball game, and his cellmate had stepped on the cord, sending the TV crashing to the ground. I bought a replacement. On another occasion, I bought him a pair of basketball shoes so he could compete in the tournaments they held in his cellblock.

But that was it for big-ticket items. In truth, I was shocked Tony didn’t ask me for more. I got in the habit of sending him an annual care package, and I’d send him the occasional book I thought he’d like, but those were rituals I began without being asked. He would hit me up for $18 here and $40 there—for postage stamps, paper and pens, the latest 2Pac tape —but never more than once or twice a year.

On one occasion, in 1997, he wrote me asking for money to buy a few toiletries. (The authorities issued soap and tooth powder to the inmates but no deodorant or shampoo.) The only thing I resented about writing that check was the 22 percent tax the authorities skimmed off the top for a statewide victims’ fund, which seemed to be more about expanding the prison bureaucracy than helping the families of people like Kevin Reed. Reading Tony’s letter again now, I immediately recognize a plaintive repetition that was common in his correspondence:

Gary I’m almost all out of cosmetics soap, deodorant, toothpast and if you can please can you send me a money order please so I can go to the store and get some more cosmetics Im relly out just enough to last about a week Gary whatever you can send I would be greatful I relly need to get some more cosmetics Please let me know if you can do that for me. Please I’m just trying to get some deodorant, soap and toothpast Gary pleae if you can do that for me. Let me know. Also tell your wife I said Happy New Year.

In 1996, after nearly four years at Calipatria, Tony was transferred to Salinas Valley State Prison—better known as Soledad, after the city on the Monterey Peninsula where it is located. At first it seemed to be a big improvement: He was only two hours from home, and the climate was far less brutal. But his family still didn’t visit, and Soledad was still a maximum-security facility, populated by some of the state’s most violent offenders. It was also another prison in the midst of a turf war between the sureños and the norteños. There’d be a stabbing, the entire facility would go on lockdown, and the other side would retaliate as soon as the lockdown was lifted. The gangs left the noncombatants alone, but the feud meant that the entire inmate population was confined to their cells for months at a stretch. In time, Tony would come to hate Soledad more than Calipatria.

Tony told me that he wasn’t worried about his physical safety, and I believed him. He had always been big, and in prison he had replaced fat with muscle, using free weights until they were banned by the authorities and thereafter maintaining a regimen of push-ups, chin-ups, and the like. What worried me more was the possibility that he might simply give up. He was surrounded by lifers who had abandoned all hope of winning parole in law-and-order California.

Winning parole meant proving to the board that you were working hard and committed to improving yourself. The commissioners want an inmate to have earned his GED and picked up at least a couple of trades. They want to see a work history. But given how rarely the board was granting parole at the time to those with a life tail on their sentences, plenty of Tony’s fellow inmates asked why he bothered. You might as well do nothing with your days, his cellmate—an Oakland man doing 25 to life—would say, because filling them to impress a parole board was futile.

“He was always playing with my head ’bout none of us there on a murder beef ever getting paroled,” Tony complained to me at the time. He requested a switch and moved in with another inmate who was also serving time for murder. His new cellmate worked a job and faithfully attended church services. Less than six months later, the man ended up in a prison infirmary after slitting his wrists.

At times, Tony’s first cellmate seemed to have a point: Why bother? The odds of his actually getting paroled were woefully slim. Of the roughly 6,000 lifers appearing before the parole board in California each year, just 6 percent are granted parole. Since 1988, the state has had the power to overturn the parole board’s decisions, which has shrunk that figure to less than 1 percent; there is no political upside in freeing a convicted murderer. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger reversed about 75 percent of the paroles granted during his two terms. Gray Davis, his predecessor, reversed 99 percent.

The realities of prison, meanwhile, made it all but impossible for Tony to pursue the self-improvements the parole board wanted to see. Between lockdowns and teacher turnover, his GED classes were canceled for eight of the first twelve months he was at Calipatria. Soledad was more of the same: classes suspended due to warring between rival gangs, teachers who would resign and not be replaced for months. “My soul is dead,” Tony wrote to me in 1998, after one long stretch of lockdowns. What was the use of trying, he wanted to know, when no one cared about him anyway? “I been curse since birth … I’m in hell Gary I relly am.”

Still, Tony stuck with his GED classes. He started reading more, asking me to send him a dictionary and a book by Will Durant called The Pleasures of Philosophy. He learned to play chess. Approaching 30, Tony was growing interested in a world beyond his cellblock and his disappointments with his family. He was also sounding like someone gaining some perspective on life. Locked inside a cell, sometimes for weeks at a time, he was having insights that reminded me of the late-night debates my friends and I had in college. He realized, for instance, that even when he was on the streets, he wasn’t really free; he was imprisoned by the low expectations of his family and culture. “My mission in life is to get out of prison,” he wrote to me shortly after his 30th birthday. “I will say this over and over again. This place is not for me.”

Eight

In 1999, my first marriage ended. It was the child we couldn’t have, it was money, it was the festering resentments born of our two-career household, it was who knows what. Moving out began a nomadic period in my life. The Internet magazine where I was working went out of business in 2001, and after bouncing around the country for a few months I ended up back on the East Coast. Then it was off to Silicon Valley, followed by New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and finally, in 2006, New York again. It would have been easy to lose touch with Tony while I was pinballing around the country, and at one point I went several months before letting him know where I’d landed. But I missed hearing his voice, I missed our talks. I kept updating him on my new coordinates, and he kept calling.

There wasn’t a single moment when the sad-sack Fat Tone was replaced by the upbeat new Tony, only a series of steps forward and backward. A letter from March 2003 starts with a self-directed pep talk: “Staying positive, keeping hope alive, reading and doing some writing and just trying to keep my mind stress free in a stressful place.” It’s midnight, he tells me; his cellmate is sleeping, and the cellblock is blessedly quiet. “I like it like this,” he writes. “I can relly think about my life.”

But then there were letters like the one he wrote to me two years later, in the summer 2005. “Basicly, I’m just waiting to”—he blotted out the next word and then added, “I relly don’t even look forward to going to the [parole] board.” Tony declared 2005—the year he turned 34—to be the worst of his life, and 2006 wasn’t looking much better. “To relly be honest,” he wrote that April, “I wish at times they would have kill me instead of leting me go through this misery.”

Fate—or at least some midlevel Department of Corrections bureaucrat—intervened in the nick of time. Every year, the California Department of Corrections recalculates an inmate’s classification score to see if he or she can be moved to a lower-security—and therefore less-costly—facility. An inmate’s record of prison rule violations, employment, classroom attendance, and age are among the factors the authorities take into account. One month after Tony penned that last letter, his classification score was recalculated, and the number fell enough that he was qualified to be transferred to Solano, a medium-security prison just outside San Francisco in Vacaville, California.

Solano proved a welcome respite from the gladiator schools that had previously housed him. Yard time lasted most of the day rather than three hours of it, and inmates had to report to their cells for a headcount just once between 7:45 a.m. (when the cellblock was unlocked) and 9 p.m. (when it was locked down again for the night), rather than regularly throughout the day. And the differences extended beyond small freedoms.

At the state’s maximum-security facilities, itchy-fingered guards armed with assault rifles stand on parapets above the prison yard, ready to shoot at the first hint of trouble. It’s amazing to watch, an official at Calipatria once told me during a tour of the facility. “A warning shot is fired and like that, boom, every inmate hits the dirt,” he said. “I mean, 500 inmates one second are standing, and then the next moment every one of them is lying face down on the ground.” (Tony’s greatest fear, he used to tell me, was getting struck by a guard’s errant bullet—a grimly poetic concern given the circumstances of Kevin Reed’s murder.) Correctional officers armed with rifles still stood guard at Solano, but only around the perimeter of the facility. They were there to prevent escapes, not maintain order. Now Tony’s greatest complaint was the gossipy nature of the yard. It was “like one big fish bowl,” he told me, where “everybody knows everybody[’s] business.”

But a prison, of course, is still a prison. A day served inside Solano might be less awful than one spent locked away inside Calipatria or Soledad, but there was still the abyss of time stretching into the future. Friends were still a relative concept, the meals still bad and hurried enough that Tony felt full, he told me, only on the big holidays, when treats were served: roast turkey and stuffing on Thanksgiving and Christmas, apple pie on the Fourth of July. And then there were the guards, who Tony always referred to as the police, as if there is no distinction to be drawn between those who busted him on the outside and those watching over him on the inside. “The po-lease here, there’s no other way to put it: they’re bullies,” he told me. “They bully you every day. They treat you like an animal.”

Tony’s new cell measured nine feet by twelve feet—the same as at Soledad and Calipatria. He and his cellmate shared a toilet and small steel sink, though each had his own small steel desk, with a fixed metal stool, and a few cubbyholes to stow their scant belongings. Lockdowns, if not as relentless as they had been at the maximum-security prisons, were still regular occurrences—so much so that they would thwart my last several attempts to see him when I was in the Bay Area.

Still, the move to a medium-security prison was undeniably a step in the right direction. Tony enrolled in an intensive psychotherapy regimen and a 12-step program. He grew more serious about religion and started sharing his epiphanies with me, like the realization that his childhood had been almost completely devoid of positive role models. “All my life, I was patted on the back for doing the wrong thing,” he told me. He finally earned his GED in August 2008, at the age of 36; several years later, he was only a few credits shy of an associate’s degree.

But even in Solano, a facility where most inmates would eventually be released, rehabilitation could seem like a peripheral concern. And if Tony needed a reminder of how precarious the path back to society was, he got one in 2007. He broke the bad news to me that September: Junebug was behind bars again.

Unlike Tony, Junebug didn’t need to impress a parole board to win his freedom. A 16-year-old at the time of his conviction, he was a ward of the California Youth Authority and sure to be released before he turned 25. But he managed to impress just the same. He and I also kept in touch during his eight-year sentence, primarily through letters, and he kept me posted on his progress. A paper he wrote about Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court decision upholding the doctrine of separate but equal, earned him an A-plus in his English literature course, as did an essay he wrote on the meaning of Hamlet. Always smart, he was now taking his studies seriously. I made sure to call him John when I dropped him a letter and on those rare occasions we spoke, as a way of distinguishing between the immature kid he had once been and the man he was growing into.

After Junebug was released in 1999, Tony periodically passed along updates about how he was doing. At first the news was all good: Junebug enrolled in an aviation repair school, earned his mechanic’s license, and got a job in Seattle in 2005. He was making good money, he had a girlfriend, he was the father of first one son and then another. But then in 2007, Junebug was found guilty of second-degree assault for hitting his girlfriend. Because of his prior murder conviction, and because the domestic assault had taken place in front of a minor, he was hit with a 10-year sentence. A lawyer with the Washington Appellate Project, a Seattle nonprofit representing indigent defendants, would later challenge the sentence as unduly harsh. But as it was, Junebug stood to spend a good chunk of his thirties, and perhaps some of his forties, in a Washington state prison.

Nine

Do you talk about your love life when the person on the other end of the phone is trapped indefinitely in prison? Was it cruel even to broach the subject? I knew Tony, in spite of his circumstances, was looking for a girlfriend—he had even enlisted my help once. Two weeks after he was transferred from Calipatria to Soledad, in the summer 1996, he began a letter by noting that it was good to be breathing Northern California air again, and then he got right to the point. He was interested in finding a female pen pal, how would I feel about putting an ad in the paper on his behalf? “I’m a good person and I have a good heart,” he wrote. “I’m sincere and I have a lot of confidence in myself and on top of that I’m lonely.”

Still, the subject came up rarely—I avoided talking about it if Tony didn’t bring it up himself—and I was shocked when he told me in 2011 that he had gotten engaged. “The greatest love story ever told,” he called it, jokingly.

Tony had been at Solano only a couple of years when a fellow inmate named Thomas told him about Candace Mitchell. You’d really like her, said Thomas, who had known Candace since both of them were kids. She had been a real party girl back in the day, he told Tony, but she had found God and settled down, and now lived just a few miles from the prison. Thomas was so convinced that she and Tony would like one another that one day in 2008, when he was on the phone with Candace and Tony happened by, he handed him the receiver.

Candace was three years younger than Tony. She had three daughters and ran a day care center out of her home. The two immediately hit it off. Tony made Candace laugh, but more importantly, she later told me, “I sensed right away that he had a good heart.”

But for Candace, at least, at first their conversations were more about Christian fellowship than courtship. Candace was seeing another inmate at Solano at the time, and another woman named Kim was coming to see Tony regularly in the prison visitor’s room. Still, Candace was always happy to take one of his calls. “I have a passion for the ones locked up,” she told me. “To let them know they’re not forgotten.” But the relationship was hardly one-way, Candace stressed. “He always gave good advice,” she said. “He stayed on my mind.”

One day, Candace told Tony that she had been praying over him the night before and had a vision of him crying in his cell. The comment stopped Tony cold. “He says to me, ‘How did you know?’” Candace recalled. The sense of the bond they shared would help Tony survive the next couple of years, which proved to be difficult ones.

In 2010, a prison guard caught Tony talking on a cell phone inside his cell. “I was brazen,” Tony later told me. “I wasn’t being smart.” There are good and obvious reasons why inmates aren’t allowed to have phones inside prison. But for Tony, the logic for having a phone was just as inexorable. Collect calls from prison—the only allowed means he had of reaching the outside world—ran upwards of $10 for 15 minutes, more than most of his family members were able or willing to pay. The cell phone allowed him access to his family in a way he had not experienced since he was a teenager. It helped him get back in touch with his mother, his Aunt Paula, and even his father, with whom he had not spoken since he was around 15. Tony spoke to him only a few times from prison before he passed away later that year. But in those conversations, his father apologized for not being in his life, and Tony forgave him for everything. As Tony told him, “How can I not forgive you when I want forgiveness myself?”

But Tony had gotten careless, and now he had another serious violation on his record. When he told me about his write-up for the cell phone, my heart sank. I was, in a small way, complicit in this crime. I knew about the phone. It had made our conversations much easier. When he was caught, I had to admit that I had turned off the critical part of my brain that would have asked the obvious question: How in the world was Tony able to pay for a cell phone all those months when he had no money?

The answer was more bad news. Tony, it emerged, was busted not only for the cell phone, but also for drug possession. It was a fact he kept from me at the time; I only discovered that it had happened several years later. He wasn’t using, he insisted, or even selling. He was renting out his cell as a kind of safe house, stashing extra product for a dealer he knew. His punishment was 12 months in the hole. More critically, he would now need to explain two fresh violations—one for involvement in the prison’s drug underground—to the parole board.

In the California prison system, a write-up for a serious rule violation is known as a “115,” after the number of the form used to document infractions. 115s influence an inmate’s placement score more than any other factor—and, of course, the total number of 115s on an inmate’s record looms large when appearing in front of a parole board. Although they are considered universally serious in the eyes of the authorities, practically speaking, 115s span a spectrum from genuinely serious to the prison equivalent of a speeding ticket.

Among the latter was the 115 Tony received less than a year after arriving in prison, when he was caught with a jar of pruno—prison wine made from anything that can be fermented, from apples to bread to canned fruit cocktail—in his cell. It was a clear-cut, if relatively minor, transgression. Other 115s, however, suggested the impossible bind confronting inmates trying to follow both the official prison rules and the unofficial code that determines survival in the brutal gauntlet of a correctional facility.

The 115 that Tony received for punching the inmate in the shower shortly after arriving at Calipatria was a case in point. At first glance, it seemed like a stupid and reckless act, a write-up incurred for no good reason. But Tony knew that if he didn’t respond to the challenge, the next one would be more serious than an argument in the shower line—even if he knew that the parole board would be less than sympathetic to that logic.

Tony had told me about other 115s in his file. The one he said he had received in June of 2000, also for fighting, seemed the most serious. Tony claimed that the day after trying to break up a fight between a friend and several others inmates, he was jumped by three men who blamed him for the incident. One of them ended up in the hospital with a fractured back, earning Tony a write-up for battery. That meant a fresh 115 for a serious crime, only a couple years before his first parole board hearing in October 2002, in anticipation of a possible release in 2003.

That hearing had not gone well. In his own estimation, Tony came off sounding defensive, argumentative, and confused. Waiting 12 years to finally have his say, it seemed, had left him unable to say much of anything at all. Later, he’d downplay the importance of the hearing, saying he never stood a chance the first time anyway.

Tony’s second appearance before the parole board was scheduled for 2005, during the bad stretch near the end of his time at Soledad, when he seemed on the verge of suicide. I later learned that Tony himself chose to delay that hearing until early 2007, and then, according to a spokesman for the Department of Corrections, took what was known as a three-year stipulation: He basically conceded that he wasn’t ready for parole, agreeing that he should spend at least another three years behind bars.

He would do the same in 2010, when he took a two-year stipulation. From our phone calls—and maybe a little bit of hopeful thinking—I had the distinct impression that each appearance before the parole board represented another step in a steady climb toward release. But the truth was that, technically, Tony hadn’t appeared in front of the parole board in 10 years. “The thing is,” he would eventually tell me, “when I went to the board all those other times, I knew I was doing wrong. I was doing dirty.” The difference in 2012, he said, was that now he had Candace.

Tony and Candace started getting more serious once Tony was released back into the general population after his time in the hole. She saw something good in him, she told me, “but I knew I was going to have to pull it out.” Tony started attending chapel services inside the prison, and, maybe more important to Candace, he cut out people from his life whom she was able to convince him were bad influences. “I told him he had to learn certain people he was with were doing him no good,” she said. “They kept him doing the same patterns.”

They would talk whenever Tony could get to a phone, praying and reading the Bible together. She would start visiting, she told him, only once she felt certain that there’d be no more backsliding. “I asked him, ‘Tony, where are you at with God?’ Because I needed to know. I needed to know he was planted.” There were her three daughters to consider and also her job. Break rules on the inside, she counseled Tony, and it’s easy to get in the habit of breaking them on the outside. There would be no more cell phones, no more hiding drugs, no more small infractions, even, as long as she was in the picture.

Candace started visiting Tony in 2010. Tony’s punishment for the drugs and cell phone included a three-year ban on contact visits, so that meant that while he and Candace could spend a few hours talking, they couldn’t touch each other. They sat on either side of a thick sheet of plexiglass, connected only by a set of phone handsets. Tony was still forbidden from contact visits when the two were married in November 2011—“married behind the glass,” as Candace described it. The couple exchanged vows with the bride and minister standing together talking on one phone and Tony talking on another.

When Candace sent me photos of the two sitting happily together in the visitors’ room shortly after the contact-visit ban was lifted, I realized that it was the first time I’d ever seen Tony smiling in a picture. When I mentioned it to him, he explained, “I don’t want no little kid seeing my picture, my niece or my nephew, and think it’s cool to be in prison.”

Ten

Five months after his wedding, Tony was finally ready to face the parole board. His hearing took place on the morning of March 16, 2012, in an administrative building on the prison grounds. The board consisted of two officials chosen from a stable of roving commissioners who bounce from prison to prison across California. The people of Alameda County, which includes Oakland, had their representative, a deputy district attorney named Jill Klinge. Tony had his representative as well, a state-provided defense lawyer. And then there was Tony himself, his head shaved, dressed in his prison blues and wearing his prison-issue steel-framed glasses. This time he didn’t feel that fluttery feeling in his stomach like in the past, he later told me. It had been over a year since his last 115. He was a reformed sinner with a clean conscience.

Though I wasn’t physically present for the hearing, I did make a brief appearance. I had written a letter on Tony’s behalf—the first time I had chosen to do so. For me the letter represented my final transition from journalistic observer to friend. I was no longer just a sympathetic ear for someone who had committed a horrible act and felt deeply repentant about it. I was now telling the California parole board that Tony was a kind and decent man and deserved a second chance.

“I’ve observed him work hard to improve and grow over the years—through books, through the church, through the various courses and programs offered within the penitentiary system, all driven by a strong sense of determination that a single terrible act would not define the remainder of his life,” I wrote. “I’m confident declaring him a good man, wise and kind—a man with a good head on his shoulders who very much would strive to become a productive member of society if ever he were given a second chance.”

There’s a this-is-your-life aspect to a parole hearing. Aside from Tony’s crime and what the presiding commissioner—a former rural county sheriff—called Tony’s “institutional behavior,” much of the early part of the hearing focused on Tony’s childhood. The commissioners asked him about his father and mother. Tony told them the story of his mother, how she was a junkie who would disappear from his life for years at a time when he was young. She was still using, he said. But Tony knew these questions were a test. “I always say that even though I came from the background I came from,” he told the commissioners, “I’m not a victim of all that.”

“No,” the former sheriff, Mike Prizmich, said.

“I’m a victim of just the bad choices that I always made,” Tony went on. “There’s a lot of people that was in worst situations than me that worked and worked hard and got out and did productive things.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“So I can’t use that as an excuse.”

“No. And I’m glad you can’t,” Prizmich replied, “Because it’s a flimsy one.”

The interview shifted to Tony’s life behind bars. Prizmich asked what he learned about himself participating in a 26-week psychotherapy program inside Vacaville. Tony’s answer was crisp. “What I gained from that is that my mental map was faulty, that I had self-esteem issues,” he said. “I also took shortcuts in life.” Prizmich’s deputy commissioner, Kenneth Cater, upbraided Tony for his “erratic” involvement in Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings and said he was disappointed to see so little vocational training on Tony’s record. What about a plumbing course or one in welding?

I knew that neither of these was Tony’s fault. Solano boasts of its substance-abuse program on its website but doesn’t mention that it discontinued its AA and NA programs years ago due to lack of staffing; Tony had enrolled in both, but they shut down two years later. (The sessions have since been partially restored, but Tony’s name still sits on the waiting list.) The same website touts the prison’s wide offering of vocational programs, from carpentry to plumbing to fiber optics, but Tony’s name was on waiting lists for those as well. Tony explained to the commissioners about NA and AA but said nothing about the vocational work.

But what the commissioners really wanted to talk about were the 115s. Tony had racked up 10 of them during his 20 years behind bars. This struck me as a modest number, given the length of his incarceration and the realities of prison life, but I seemed to be the only one who thought so. “Mr. Davis has a noteworthy disciplinary history,” Cater remarked. Even Tony’s defense attorney would say that her client has “struggled during his incarceration period” to avoid “disciplinary infractions.”

“Every 115 that I received,” Tony said, “I earned.” He wouldn’t waste the board’s time making excuses, he said. Then Cater, the deputy commissioner, pressed him about another incident, one that Tony had never mentioned to me: “an institutional offense of distribution of a controlled substance,” Cater called it, which was barely a year old at the time of the hearing. According to the write-up, Tony had been caught holding methamphetamine.

In fact, I later learned, Tony had not. It was his cellmate who had been busted—Tony had had nothing to do with the drugs, but the write-up was improperly placed in Tony’s file. It would later be expunged from his record. All the board knew, however, was that Tony had a “technical” issue with the charge. Rather than tell the board it was all a mistake, Tony remained the good prisoner who embraced responsibility. “I was not a participant in it but I knew about it,” Tony confessed.

Once the entirety of Tony’s record had been scrutinized, Jill Klinge, the district attorney, was invited to give a closing statement. “I commend him for his honesty with the panel today,” Klinge said of Tony. But it was impossible to endorse parole for a man who seemed to have been clean only since 2011, she went on, referring to the cellmate’s meth bust. “He’s going to need a substantial period of time for those gains to be solidified and to make sure that it is really going to settle in,” she said.

Tony’s own prison-appointed lawyer might as well have been a potted plant; over the course of the hearing, her only substantive contribution to his defense had been to correct a single date that one of the commissioners had gotten wrong. She seemed similarly unaware of the extent of the mistake on Tony’s record, noting how “significant” the meth charge was. “There’s no doubt that [Tony] has a very long way to go to dig himself out of the hole he has been in for most of his incarceration,” she told the board.

Finally, Tony was called upon to offer his own closing statement. He opened by apologizing to the families of all those he harmed in the shooting. He apologized to the commissioners for making them listen to him talk about all the mistakes he’s made in his life. “The only thing I can do is be honest,” he said, “and say I’m sorry and just use each day to become a better person.”

Eleven

The hearing lasted nearly two hours, but a verdict was rendered after only 11 minutes of deliberation. Tony had clearly impressed the commissioners with his closing remarks, and they went out of their way to compliment him. “Your appearance here today was truly a stand-up performance,” Cater, the deputy commissioner, told Tony. “You did show courage today. You took ownership, and there was honesty.”

Then Prizmich, the presiding commissioner, announced the board’s decision: Tony, he said, would not be paroled. He would need to wait seven more years until his next hearing. “You did a good job today,” Prizmich said. “Prove to us that that’s the real you now.”

The news was devastating but, I suppose, not wholly surprising. Even discounting the meth charge, the previous drug violation and cell phone were both relatively recent offenses. Parole boards are in the business of saying no, and by disrespecting their rules, Tony had given them a reason to conclude that he would break the law on the outside.

But seven years? That seemed cruel, a verdict that would discourage rather than encourage someone who had obviously been working hard to make something of his life. The boy who was so repentant after his arrest that a county probation officer thought it wouldn’t take 10 years to rehabilitate him had already spent twice that long behind bars—and now he would be staying in prison at least until 2019, when he would be nearly 50. Tony had fought so hard to ignore those who had urged him to give up, but maybe they were right: Why even bother trying to impress the parole board when it amounted to so little?

“It’s good that he has all these support letters,” Jill Klinge, the district attorney, had said near the end of the hearing, “but all of them state that he’s ready for release. So it makes me question if he has informed them of what’s truly going on.” She was referring, in part, to me, of course, and implying that I had been manipulated by Tony, that he had fed me a sanitized version of his life behind bars. It was true that Tony had not told me about his 2009 drug conviction; I found the revelation jarring when I read it in the parole hearing transcript. But Tony had told me about all of his other transgressions, and it was understandable to me that he had felt ashamed that he messed up so monumentally and chose not to share the news with me. It seemed the equivalent of learning only after a divorce that a good friend—one who did a lot of complaining about relationship woes—had been carrying on a prolonged affair. It was disappointing, of course, but it took nothing away from how impressed I was with the man Tony had become. Given the opportunity, I would write the same letter again without hesitation.

I was far more taken aback by how little the commissioners and the district attorney appeared to know about the system over which they presided. During the hearing, Klinge referred to the 15 years it took Tony to earn a GED as proof that he wasn’t serious about turning his life around—apparently unaware of how difficult the on-again, off-again nature of classes in maximum-security prisons made it to earn one at all. And what about the 2011 meth charge that played so central a role in the hearing’s outcome? The commissioners live a crazy, peripatetic life, a spokesman for the Department of Corrections later told me by way of explanation. They were part of a justice system charged with tracking several hundred thousand inmates and parolees. It was inevitable that the occasional file would fail to catch up to a parole board in time, that the occasional wire would get crossed.

But there is also an appeals process. Shortly after the hearing, Tony enlisted the aid of a fellow convict who had already secured a new parole hearing for one inmate and helped another win his release. (I picked up part of the tab for the services of this jailhouse lawyer in the form of a package of items he had requested. As far as legal bills go, it was a steal: two plastic jars of Folgers coffee, a pound of cashews, one package of Red Vines and another of taffy, a Schick Quattro Titanium razor, and a few other odds and ends.) He has managed to get the 115 for methamphetamine possession expunged from Tony’s record and may have won him a new hearing well before 2019. That, at least, is what he tells Tony when he’s hitting him up for more money. As of this writing, the Department of Corrections does not have a new hearing officially scheduled for him for the next seven years.

But Tony seems determined to remain optimistic. It took a while for us to talk after the hearing —his facility was on extended lockdown, naturally—but when we did, he sounded lighthearted, almost giddy with optimism about life. I seemed more devastated by the news than he was. “Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Be happy. Be joyous.” Life for Tony seemed finally to be moving in the right direction, parole or no. He had found a woman to love and, maybe more importantly, he had forgiven himself for what he had done. Somehow, in the crucible of the California prison system, he had found redemption. He exuded not self-pity but a determination to fight on. “This is not the end,” he vowed to me. “There’s no way seven years will be seven years.”

I wanted to believe it, and believe that Tony believed it. But I worried about him. In the first letter he wrote to me after getting the bad news, he told me about his plans to fight on. But then his confidence gave way to another familiar tone. “P-L-E-A-S-E don’t give up on me,” he wrote.

In case I missed the point, he repeated the plea in a postscript: “P-L-E-A-S-E don’t give up on me my life is so much more than this.”

The Last Clinic

An Emmy-nominated portrait of the last abortion clinic in Mississippi.

By Maisie Crow and Alissa Quart

The Atavist Magazine, No. 21

Maisie Crow is a photographer and multimedia producer based in Brooklyn. She has done work for The Boston Globe, Bread for the World, MediaStorm, The New York Times, the Robin Hood Foundation, Save the Children, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Maisie has taught as an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and as a multimedia instructor at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies.

Alissa Quart is the author of two nonfiction books, Branded and Hothouse Kids. Her next book is forthcoming in 2013. She has written longform pieces for Mother Jones, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. She was a 2010 Nieman Fellow at Harvard, is a contributing editor and author of the Reality Check column for the Columbia Journalism Review, and teaches in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Editor: Evan Ratliff
Producers: Olivia Koski, Gray Beltran
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Thomas Stackpole
Research and Production: Nadia Wilson

Published in January 2013. Design updated in February 2021.

Watch the full documentary above.

It was the week before Thanksgiving, 2012, and Dr. Willie Parker was making small talk with a group of patients in one of the back rooms of an abortion clinic in Jackson, Mississippi. What are your plans for the holidays? What’s your mother cooking? They laughed as they discussed turkey and dressing. After a bit more chatter, Parker got serious. “I hope this will get done what you want to get done,” he said as an assistant went around the room, dispensing a single pill per person, along with a small plastic cup of water.

Some of the half-dozen young women in the room were awkward, others assured. They were skinny, overweight; some were still in braces. Some were in high school and had mothers waiting for them in the next room. Some had children at home. They laughed, in some combination of nervousness and, perhaps, surprise at their own ease with the situation.

“If you feel nauseated, eat some Jolly Ranchers,” Parker continued. “Which flavor do you like?” Parker was usually learned in his speech, but he was going “colloquial” today, as he put it. Like most of his patients, he is black and from the South. In his fifties, he reminded some of them of their fathers and uncles—or of how they wished their fathers and uncles were in their moment of crisis. All the girls were receiving mifepristone, the so-called abortion pill. Within the next few hours, they would start to cramp, and their pregnancies would terminate. The girls had all had one-on-one counseling. The group setting was for general information, required by the state.

Parker is an abortion provider. But he is also the plaintiff in a case that has become a highly theatrical political maelstrom, one with potentially extreme consequences for the clinic where he works, and perhaps for abortion clinics around the nation.

This clinic, Jackson Women’s Health Organization, is a bleak white concrete building surrounded by fencing. A security guard stands watch outside. Inside, it’s a warm place painted pink, yellow, and red, and alive with the volubility and vivaciousness of its workers. From within its walls, you can be lulled into forgetting that you are inside Mississippi’s Alamo of reproductive rights.

This is the last abortion clinic in the state. In April 2012, the Mississippi legislature passed House Bill 1390, requiring that abortion providers obtain “admitting privileges,” an official status that grants providers the ability to admit patients at one or more local hospitals. Any clinic without admitting privileges would be shut down. It’s a maneuver intended to eliminate abortion here—Republican governor Phil Bryant has called the law “the first step in a movement, I believe, to do what we campaigned on: to say that we’re going to try to end abortion in Mississippi.”

The clinic and its advocates challenged the law, and in July 2012, a federal court offered a reprieve, blocking its implementation and giving the facility until January to comply. The next, and potentially decisive, hearing arrives at the end of January. If the state wins, young women like the ones sitting in the clinic’s red leatherette chairs will be forced to travel across Mississippi state lines to terminate their pregnancies. Most of them had already traveled to get to Jackson, from places like Hattiesburg and Yazoo City and smaller towns scattered across the state, and they had been required by law to wait 24 hours for the procedure once they got there.

But the effort to close down the clinic would also represent an “enormous victory” for the pro-life movement overall, said Carole Joffe, a longtime scholar of abortion rights at the University of California at Davis. “There’s a competition within the red states to see if they can be the first to close all the clinics.” As Joffe put it, channeling Tolstoy, “Each red-state attack on each abortion clinic is unhappy in its own way.” What she means is that state legislatures have many different approaches to trying to close clinics, from insisting that providers have admitting privileges to creating new rules for clinics’ medical supplies, the amount of staff required, the length of patients’ waiting periods, and even a clinic’s architecture. In Virginia, for instance, the state legislature recently adopted regulations stipulating the location of bathrooms and the size of the hallways within clinics.

Roe v. Wade became the law of the land 40 years ago, making abortion a constitutional right in all 50 states. Thus, the end of Mississippi’s clinics would also be historic: a single state successfully flouting the Constitution, hoping by its action to force America back in time.

The bill’s supporters have argued that requiring hospital admitting privileges are an attempt to protect women from incompetent or even exploitative abortions. And outside the clinic, protesters were eager to talk about the procedure’s medical risks. I passed them as they sat on foldable lawn chairs, handing out leaflets and little squishy models of fetuses.

Ester Mann, 64, was one of those protesters. She had been picketing the Jackson clinic for many years and had been arrested twice. As the choice war flares up again in Mississippi, but also in Michigan, Kansas, and Tennessee, the battle lines remain the same, but the strategies and positions of both sides, legal and otherwise, have evolved. Mann, who offered a tearful tirade against the doctors at the clinic, didn’t use the same old pro-life rhetoric. In fact, she eagerly called herself a “Jesus feminist.” What did she mean by this? Mann, a large woman dressed in a royal blue outfit, smiled at me. “Jesus loved women,” she said. “And I believe in equal pay for equal work.”

Mann spoke of the women who came to the clinic as “disdaining God” and the “precious gift” of pregnancy. Mann herself was only able to have a single child. “Here I was, unable to have babies,” she recalled of her early years protesting. She was eager for January and the judge’s decision, praying for the clinic’s closure.

Beyond the rhetoric outside, however, the real threat to the clinic was contained in Bill 1390. As of January, Dr. Parker and the other physicians at the clinic have been rejected by all seven of the area’s local hospitals, making compliance with the law impossible. Ironically, the chaos of the protesters is one reason the hospitals have denied those privileges. One hospital replied to the clinic’s request that granting admitting privileges to abortion doctors “would lead to both an internal and external disruption of the Hospital’s function and business within this community.” Five rejected the clinic outright because they were opposed to being associated with an abortion provider, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Twenty-five years ago, the factor limiting abortion care was a shortage of doctors capable of performing the procedure. But now, after the development of training programs like the one at University of Michigan, where Parker attended, the limitation on abortion care is geographical accessibility. There are plenty of providers in Seattle and New York City but not many working in rural areas. As a result, doctors like Parker—who typically flies down from his home in Washington, D.C., once a month and stays in Mississippi for a few days—may travel hundreds of miles to provide abortions. The expense of those trips multiplies the substantial cost of abortion services. Already, clinics are forced to fund mandatory security guards, legal expenses, and 24-hour video surveillance.

For the patients in Mississippi, abortion could become more expensive still. If the clinic is closed, reaching an out-of-state facility will require at least a three-day trip. Beyond the travel time, there are mandatory 24-hour waiting periods in several nearby states, including Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Georgia. Many of these women are among the poorest in the country, and the end of an in-state clinic could well mean the end of choice for some of them. First there are the hundreds of dollars for bus fare or gas and a hotel room. Then there are the lost wages and, perhaps, childcare for their other children. The procedure itself typically runs $450, although the cost can be higher for pregnancies that are further along. (Several of the women I spoke to said they had requested and received money from an organization called the National Abortion Federation.)

Mississippi isn’t the only state which risks losing abortion care entirely. It’s one of five states with only one clinic remaining, along with Arkansas and the sparsely-populated North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. The spokesperson of the pro-life group 40 Days for Life has said that likeminded activists have targeted these states, too, hoping to bring about the “the first abortion-free state where abortion is legal but it’s simply not available.” The organization Missionaries for the Preborn has also announced that they have focused on states with one clinic, calling them “states of refuge.” According to a statement from the group, “Pro-lifers will wage an ongoing campaign in these five states” until January 22, 2013, the anniversary of Roe. Closing the Jackson clinic is a key part of the pro-life movement’s pursuit to outlaw abortion for good.

It was business as usual as the January decision settling the clinic’s fate approached. In late November, the clinic’s waiting room was full, an old Jamie Foxx show filling it with canned laughter. A depressed-looking girl in Ugg-style boots sat staring at her phone, next to someone else’s boyfriend, young and plump, with a beard, who stared at his. A sign on the door read “No Purses, No Bags, No Children.”

The clinic’s director, 40-year-old Shannon Brewer-Anderson, mother of six, walked around the facility, making sure that what she referred to as the state’s “severe regulations” were being followed. “If we have a lightbulb busted or a stain in the carpet, we get written up,” she said. The Department of Health would visit often, sometimes as much as eight times a year, spurred by “complaints from people outside,” said Brewer. “Everything having to do with an abortion,” she says, “is political.”

On each day I observed him in Mississippi, Parker—one of two doctors who alternate at the clinic—shifted between counseling future patients and performing abortion procedures. In counseling, patients receive general information about both medical and surgical abortion, including certain statements required by law. Counselors must underline the dangers of the procedures, although in truth abortions are less dangerous than giving birth—something Parker pointed out after running through the state-mandated boilerplate. They must inform patients that having an abortion raises a woman’s chance of breast cancer, although there is “not a shred of scientific evidence to support that,” as Parker told his patients.

As I roamed through the rooms, the contrast was stark with the quieter, more anonymous clinics I had visited in New York City. There, staffers were unlikely to know any of the patients personally, let alone assure them that their secret was safe, as Mississippi staffers told me they had done. There were many clinics where patients might never learn their doctors’ names. But not here.

I spoke to some of the patients as they waited for counseling or abortions. I met Hillary from Yazoo City, who worked in an auto shop. She was 22 and had two children: One had been born at two pounds and the other at four pounds. Why had both her babies been born so small? “Bad prenatal care,” she said. “I was wishing it away.” Hillary was tall and thin, with a cloth flower in her hair. “I want to provide. I don’t have enough money to provide for my kids now,” she said. She was unmarried and barely earned minimum wage. She said she hoped to get her “tubes tied,” permanently preventing her from having children, even though she was young. I sat with her and other young women as they were instructed in where a woman’s vagina is, where the cervix is, and breathing techniques for the procedure—breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth.

When a clinic counselor explained to Hillary that she would have to stay off her feet for several days following her abortion, she shook her head. “I lift in my job,” she said. “Well, try and stay off your feet, hide in the closet, take a long lunch,” the counselor said. Hillary was afraid to lose her job, she said.

So was 21-year-old police trainee Sara, who said she’d have to leave the police academy if she remained pregnant. “It’s against the law to be out on the road pregnant as a police officer,” she explained. She wasn’t telling her “very religious Baptist family” about it and had to come up with excuses for the two and a half hours she drove each way to get here. “I had to cover it up, as I live with my family,” Sara said. “I had the pill because I want to be on my own, in a room with the door closed, and able to hide it from my family.”

I spoke to Aarimis, who worked at the clinic as an assistant but had first visited as a patient. She had had a total of four pregnancies and terminations, starting when she was 14. One pregnancy had come along when she was with a boyfriend who physically abused her. She said she still struggled to afford the monthly $80 out of pocket for birth control.

There was also a teenager, sitting next to her mom, who everyone in the waiting room thought was a basketball player because of her height and athletic clothes. That a teen was there to terminate her pregnancy wasn’t surprising: Mississippi has the highest birthrate among teens in the nation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2010, there were 55 births per 1,000 teens aged 15 to 19 in the state, compared with a national average of 34.2. Even more troubling is the data showing the likelihood that the infants born to teenagers may not survive. In Mississippi, babies are at far greater risk of dying before their first birthday than in any other state in the nation. In 2011, 9.4 babies out of every 1,000 died. That’s similar to infant mortality in Botswana last year—10 out of 1,000. Mississippi is also one of only two states to demand that a minor receive consent from both parents to have an abortion.

In addition to poverty, religion was a powerful presence in the clinic’s bright back rooms, where batches of young women sat clad in their day clothes or pale hospital gowns. A few girls who were about to get the procedure told me that they thought it was wrong, that they worried about standing before God. One white woman told me she was having an abortion because the father was black (“a football player”) and her parents wouldn’t accept the child were she to carry it to term. “There’s no way I can go through this pregnancy, my family being as racist as they are,” she said.

Of the young women I encountered, the most charismatic was Adriana (her middle name), from Hattiesburg. “This is my second time,” she told me. She was 23 and worked at a bingo hall, and her boyfriend wanted her to have the baby, “but I’m the only one working: He doesn’t work.”

“I’ve been love-drunk all my life, you know,” she said. “I want to join the Air Force. That would help me get myself together.”

Adriana’s belief that terminating her pregnancy might help her gain greater solvency and ultimately achieve more professionally is supported by some compelling new data. A research study called the Turnaway Project, begun in 2008 at the University of California at San Francisco, examined three sample groups of poor women, recruited at abortion clinics around the country. One group had been turned away from a clinic, another group had carried their pregnancies to term, and a third had had abortions. One year later, 76 percent of the women in the study who were denied abortions were on welfare, compared with 44 percent overall. The women who had sought abortions but hadn’t received them were also less likely to be working and far more likely to be living below the poverty line.

With its inaccessibility looming, abortion in Mississippi could become something of a new social-class marker if opponents have their way. A middle-class woman with an unintended pregnancy will be able to drive to Texas; many others won’t be able to leave work long enough to make the trip. And the women I met at the clinic were among the poorest in the country—according to the census bureau. In 2011, Mississippi had a poverty rate of 22.6 percent—nearly one in four. Its median household income was $36,919.

Given the financial straits of these women, no one is quite sure what will happen to those who rely on the place if Jackson’s clinic closes. As a woman in the waiting room put it, “Thank God this is still an option for my daughter. She is only 17.”

Dr. Parker riffed with his patients about their eating habits, dating, even their constipation. To one of the counselors at the clinic, “Miss Betty,” he offered an adage about dating in middle age: “Old enough to know what to do but young enough to still want to.” His jabs at earthy humor were meant to put both his colleagues and his daily allotment of patients—around a dozen or two—at greater ease. He called this palaver “verbocaine.” He used it all day long, especially as he could offer only a local anesthetic before surgeries. General anesthesia was not available; administering it would require hiring a nurse anesthetist, and the clinic already struggled to find nursing support. Nor does the clinic provide prescription painkillers, as tracking them on-site would be too labor intensive.

When Parker was not talking or performing procedures, he sat serenely in his office. On one break, he ate what he called a “cardiac” breakfast of bacon and eggs, loading up for the dozens of operations in front of him. He spoke of Martin Luther King, and likened the battle for reproductive rights to King’s civil rights campaign. He spoke about Dr. King’s understanding of the Good Samaritan and explained how his notion of medical care was more about the person needing help than the person giving it. He had been forced to stop worrying about his own safety, he said, and the Christian component of Parker’s drive was underlined by the “Pro-faith, Pro-family, Pro-Christian” sign affixed to a clinic wall.

Parker, who is unmarried and has no children, grew up poor in Birmingham. He never knew his father and was “raised by committee,” as he put it. He had a “fundamentalist” upbringing, he said, and even proselytized to others. He was educated at a small Southern Christian school, Berea College in Kentucky, and then attended the University of Iowa Medical School. He came to abortion care in midlife, after many years as a gynecologist. Making the shift went against the values of his upbringing. “I grew up in the black church, and I was conflicted about what it would mean to help women with their unplanned pregnancies,” he said. But then he had an epiphany. He realized that “a safe and early abortion was the Christian thing. After that, I became less worried about myself.” His revelation came, he explained, when he re-envisioned Christianity as “a love ethic, especially around the doctrine of compassion.” Part of that compassion, he concluded, involved helping these young women with nowhere else to turn. His own grandmother, he told me, had died in childbirth.

Parker began performing abortions about 10 years ago, after he graduated from the University of Michigan program, working at clinics in Philadelphia and D.C. It was a struggle even up north, due to what Parker described as “the stigma” around having and providing abortions. This ostensible disgrace prompted many providers to be less candid about what they did, to couch their work in euphemism and hide their identities for their own safety. The stigma manifested itself in small ways for Dr. Parker, as well—few patients came back and thanked him, for instance. An abortion is usually something women would rather forget, and the poorer patients at the clinics Parker worked at were usually “putting out lots of other fires” in their lives, as he put it. The one patient who had kept up a friendship with him was a woman who learned of rare genetic abnormalities late in her first and second pregnancies. Parker did the procedures after she and her husband chose to abort. Just this summer, the woman had a healthy baby and invited him to the newborn’s bris.

It was the taint of the procedure, he thought, that led his patients to ask him, as they sat on the examining table, whether they would be punished. “They fear divine will and divine intervention. They’ll ask, ‘Do you think God will kill me for killing my baby?’”

Stigma or no, abortion was Parker’s avocation as well as his vocation—that was why he started working in Jackson in May. He was contacted about the job half a year before he began traveling down, and he felt an immediate pull. He had read about the impending law and had a strong sense that he was needed. Nevertheless, the decision to go down a few days each month was not an easy one. He recalled the film Mississippi Burning when he thought of Jackson and initially told himself, “I am not going there, where men say ‘Hey, boy!’ White guys with skinny ties, glasses, and shotguns.”

When he arrived, he found Jackson both better and worse than he imagined. The area around the clinic was “avant-garde,” he told me, replete with vintage stores and a coffee house. But Jackson as represented by the protesters was also more challenging than Parker had anticipated. A small group of anti-abortion activists were camped out around the clinic at all times during the day. One of them took a picture of him at Lenny’s, a local sub shop, and a passer-by had recently shouted out his full name, including his middle name—an unsubtle reminder that Parker was being watched. Parker said that his girlfriend, while she supports his work, also “fears harm will befall me” from “the threats,” which he refers to only obliquely, as if discussing them more fully would make them more real.

“I don’t want to falsely reassure myself,” Parker said. “Slepian died in the kitchen, Tiller at church,” he continued, referring to two abortion providers, Bernard Slepian and George Tiller, who had been killed by pro-life extremists.

Yet Parker remained more fixated on the future of the clinic’s patients than on his own. “Which women deserve or don’t deserve care?” Parker asked. “I want for other people what I want for myself. These women should have what I have. And that’s dignity and making peace with an uncertain God.”

Half-Safe

A story of love, obsession, and history’s most insane around-the-world adventure.

The Atavist Magazine, No. 20

James Nestor has written for Outside, Dwell, Men’s Journal, National Public Radio, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, San Francisco Magazine, and more. He is currently working on a narrative nonfiction science and adventure book tentatively titled Deep: A Sea Odyssey.

Editor: Charles Homans

Producers: Olivia Koski, Gray Beltran

Research and Production: Nadia Wilson

Cover Illustration: Chris Gall

Photos: Courtesy of Guildford Grammar School Archives

Video and Music: From “It’s A Small World,” El-Von Productions, Courtesy Guildford Grammar School Archives

Special Thanks: Alex Heard, for invaluable editing assistance; Rosemary Waller, Guildford Grammar School; and Deirdre Carlin, without whom this story could not have been told.

Fact-Checker: Thomas Stackpole

Copy Editor: Sean Cooper

Published in November 2012. Design updated in 2021.

One

The Atlantic Ocean

December 1950

They had spent 14 days in darkness.

Late on the morning of the 15th day, December 2, 1950, light finally peeked through a crack in the curtain that hung over the passenger-side window. Ben lifted the curtain and looked outside. The sky was blue, and the sun, as big as a dinner plate, shone brightly. The storm clouds had retreated to the horizon. Ben took a dirty tissue from his shirt pocket, swabbed his eyes, and lifted himself from behind the steering wheel.

It had been four full months since Ben and his wife, Elinore, steered the tiny amphibious jeep they called Half-Safe into the frigid waters of Halifax Harbor and headed east toward Africa. It was the first time anyone had tried to circumnavigate the world by land and sea in a single vehicle, let alone one that was eight times smaller than any motorized boat that had ever crossed the Atlantic. It was a harebrained scheme, and the Carlins knew it. That was the point.

Adventure for its own sake had first attracted Ben, an engineer from rural Western Australia, to Elinore, an American Red Cross nurse, when the two met in India at the end of World War II. And there could be no more outlandish adventure than an attempt to “drive” across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans—and actually drive across the continents in between—in an automobile. Especially this automobile—a converted 1942 GPW (General Purpose Willys) amphibious jeep built by Ford for the U.S. Army. It looked like a cross between a 4×4 and a rowboat, with a stubby pointed front, a square rear end, and a five-by-ten steel box on top. It was half car, half boat, and entirely ridiculous. The GPW amphibious jeeps were designed to putter through shallow streams for a few minutes at a time and usually failed even at that; they had proved so useless in the field that the Army canceled production. They were never intended to be used on the ocean.

Helpless and lost in the middle of 41 million square miles of open water, Ben and Elinore realized that their comic little adventure was quickly becoming a suicide mission. Both were in their thirties but looked as though they had aged decades in just a few weeks. Elinore, famished and vomiting anchovies into a tin mug, had gone from voluptuous to skeletal. Ben looked worse. His skin was pale, a delta of stress lines spread across his forehead, and his eyes were baggy and bloodshot. His face was caked with exhaust soot, engine grease, and sweat.

But now, weeks into their Atlantic crossing, the Carlins had no choice but to suck it up and keep following the compass east, toward the coast of the Spanish colony of Western Sahara, toward solid ground and safety.

Ben squinted out Half-Safe’s back hatch and looked at the deck. The jeep was sitting dangerously low in the water. Waves washed over the windshield and side windows, threatening to swamp the cabin. The cloth sea anchor, designed to drag in the water to stabilize the vehicle, floated behind Half-Safe in tatters, shredded by the storm.

At least the fuel supply—a 10-foot-long floating steel container carrying 280 gallons of gasoline—was intact. As long as the weather stayed calm, Ben figured they had just enough gas to make it to Madeira, a speck of an island 400 miles off the coast of Africa. The only information Ben could get from the radio was that the worst of the storm was still ahead. But the antenna was broken, and he had trouble making voice contact with the world beyond the jeep’s cabin.

Ben returned to the driver’s seat, grabbed his sextant, and hoisted himself onto the roof. He paused to gulp the fresh air, a respite from the funk of mold, sweat, exhaust, and human sewage in the cabin below. He noted the angle of the sun on the horizon and checked his watch.

Above him something caught his eye. A whirlpool of wispy clouds, in the shape of a miniature hurricane, floated calmly above Half-Safe. Ben watched as they passed over him, then floated off. He crawled back into the jeep and steered east. The next half-hour was calm.

Then the rain came, followed by wind and waves. By afternoon, the swells had risen to 30, 40, even 50 feet. There was nothing miniature about the storm, Ben realized. This was a full-on hurricane—and the Carlins were in the middle of it.

The ocean looked as if it were smoldering. The jeep was flung up over the crests of the waves and down the other side so violently that Ben and Elinore were shot from their seats into midair. The fuel tank broke loose; Ben watched as it bobbed in the spindrift and then disappeared into the darkness. He had no other option but to gun the engine and try to run before the storm.

By evening the swells had gotten bigger. It was only a matter of time before the roof collapsed and the cabin flooded. Ben turned to Elinore and made her scream the escape procedure in his ear.

“You shout, ‘Out,’” she yelled, her voice straining above the rain and waves beating on the steel walls of the cabin. “I get out and wait. You follow and grab the gear. I follow you. Keep in contact!”

Ben steadied himself in the driver’s seat, lit a cigarette, and gripped the steering wheel. Too weak to move, too nervous to speak, Elinore sat silently on the back cot. They felt the sea below their feet inflate like a giant lung. They sat and waited and braced themselves for the next hit.

Around 3 a.m. the following day, the motor sputtered, then stopped. Gas vapor entered the engine compartment. Ben watched as an explosion of orange and red flame appeared through the windshield. He was sure it had blown a hole in the side of the jeep. That meant the next wave that hit would swamp the cabin and drown them. “This is it—out!” he shouted to Elinore.

Another wave hit, knocking Ben to the floor. He stumbled through the rear hatch. The jeep was somehow still afloat; there was no hole. He stood there on the roof, blasted by the wind and rain, dumbfounded. Had the days of sleeplessness finally caught up with him? Was he hallucinating? Elinore stuck her head through the hatch, but Ben shoved her back into the cabin. He returned to the driver’s seat and turned the engine over. It started. He drove blind for the next 24 hours.

The storm worsened. At first the big swells exploded against the jeep every half-hour. Soon they came every 15 minutes. Then every five. Ben turned on the radio above Elinore’s cot and tapped out a message in Morse code: XXX. It meant Important, please listen. The antenna was broken, he knew, but maybe by some miracle the signal would get through. He typed it again. And again.

Another wave hit, then another. Ben pulled the lighter from his shirt pocket and lit another cigarette. Elinore watched the cherry dance in the darkness, wondering which of the waves detonating against Half-Safe’s windshield would be the one to finally burst in. Through the passenger-side curtain, they watched the sky darken. They felt the ocean below them lift the jeep stories high, then launch it into the air. Ben tumbled, his cigarette arcing across the dashboard like a rescue flare shot into a moonless night. The window went black. Half-Safe climbed another wave.

Ben and Elinore Carlin inside Half-Safe, 1950. Photo: Guildford Grammar School Archives

Two

Perth

November 2011

A patchwork of sun-bleached stucco walls, wandering roads, and corrugated-steel roofs flashed past the passenger-car windows along the TransPerth rail line. Soon the train came to a stop and the conductor called out East Guildford Station. I grabbed my bag and followed a group of boys in navy jackets, shorts, and red ties across the pedestrian overpass that led to the back gate of Guildford Grammar School. Behind a white picket fence stood a small brick cottage that housed the school’s archives.

The archive librarian, Rosemary Waller, welcomed me in. Along the back wall of the main reading room were shelves overflowing with antique books, bottles of wine, and a few framed photographs. A hat rack held old pith helmets, cricket jerseys, and army hats festooned with medals. The opposite wall was covered with century-old newspaper clippings, handwritten letters, and photos. One clipping caught my eye. It showed a black-and-white photograph of Ben and Elinore’s amphibious jeep.

“Could you imagine living in that thing?” Waller said. “It must have been just horrible.” She directed me to a wooden desk piled with four stacks of photo albums, manila folders, and white envelopes. Numbering perhaps a thousand pages in all, these were the complete surviving records of Ben Carlin, who died in 1981. Carlin had kept careful notes and scrapbook materials about his circumnavigation attempt, convinced it would make him famous and wealthy. But outside of Guildford, Ben, Elinore, and their jeep were mostly forgotten. Few people had ever seen the photographs, letters, and clippings collected here. There was a stack of sealed envelopes at the edge of the pile that looked untouched.

I had first heard about Carlin and Half-Safe about a decade ago, after my own, less extraordinary misadventure at sea. I was sailing the Golden Gate, the strait spanned by the famous bridge, outside San Francisco with an old friend named Steve, a novice sailor who had just bought a 36-foot boat. We were barely out of the harbor before it became obvious that neither of us knew what we were doing. We had trouble tacking, steering, basically moving. Then the motor broke. Then raw sewage started gurgling up from the toilet belowdecks. “You don’t have to use it, do you?” Steve asked. (I did, but I didn’t say anything.) Then the backup engine went out. Soon we were drifting slowly west, toward the open ocean.

It was my first real taste of being adrift at sea, lost. For six hours, Steve and I felt alternately terrified and oddly bored. By nightfall, Steve had given up and called emergency rescue. As we waited to be towed back into the harbor, he told me about a story he had heard from an Australian traveler he met backpacking in Southeast Asia. It was about a guy named Ben Carlin who spent years in this kind of predicament—years stuck in the five-by-ten cabin of a tricked-out military jeep that was somehow also a boat, trying to make it around the world.

When I got home, I went online and read what I could. The Ben Carlin story seemed too ridiculous to be true—but if it was true, it was the most bizarre adventure tale I’d ever heard. Either way, I had to find out more. There wasn’t much to find, however: a one-line mention on a GeoCities page, a picture of the jeep on a site maintained by Army-vehicle enthusiasts. There was a photo of Carlin on the Guildford website. Undated, it showed him with a smug smile on his face and a cigarette in his mouth, leaning against Half-Safe’s prow, Elinore grinning at his side.

I soon discovered that Carlin had written a book, published in 1955, titled Half-Safe: Across the Atlantic by Jeep, but it had long since gone out of print. The publisher canceled plans for a sequel, but Carlin wrote a manuscript for it anyway, and he later bequeathed it to Guildford along with his life savings and all the records from his expedition. In 1989, Guildford published the book under the title The Other Half of Half-Safe but never bothered to sell it except at the school.

When the copy I requested arrived two months later, I found it almost unreadable: Carlin’s rambling technical descriptions went on for pages, his jokes were odd and forced, and his descriptions of himself were a laborious mash of muscle, misanthropy, and one-upmanship.

And yet, what Carlin had accomplished was undeniably extraordinary. Although his trip lacked the easy shorthand of Amelia Earhart’s attempted around-the-world flight or Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic survival saga, the Half-Safe voyage was in its own way a more remarkable feat: Carlin had pushed a rejected hunk of military surplus where no machine had ever gone before or would go again. Why had history ignored him? What happened to him?

All that seemed to be left of Carlin’s adventure was a few pictures, a few stories, and perhaps whatever remained of the thousand-odd empty soup cans he had tossed out the driver’s side window of the jeep, on the floors of three oceans and beneath the sand of half a dozen deserts. The more I thought about it, the more I had to know the answer. Which is why I had traveled 9,000 miles from San Francisco to Perth. If there were answers to my questions, they had to be in the Guildford archives. I wiped the dust from the photo album on top of the stack and turned the first page.

Even today, Perth is an isolated place. The nearest major city, Adelaide, is more than 1,600 miles to the southeast, making Perth one of the most remote metropolitan areas on earth. In the early 1900s, it had a population of 276,000, about a sixth of what it is today, much of it dispersed across 100 miles of surrounding desert. Ben was born near there in 1912, 60 miles northeast of the city, in a small town called Northam.

Nothing is known about Ben’s father; his mother died when he was 4, and her absence haunted him his entire life. From age 10 through 17, Ben attended Guildford. He went on to the University of Western Australia and the Kalgoorlie School of Mines, where he trained as a mining engineer. He spent much of his twenties eking out a living in the dust and dirt of Kalgoorlie, a tiny mining outpost some 300 miles east of Perth. Photographs from Kalgoorlie at the time show a desolate landscape of dry shrubs and gaunt men living in white tents.

In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Ben moved to China and took a job as a mining engineer for a British coal company operating in Beijing. A year later, he managed to enlist in the Indian army—then under British command—and served in the Middle East and Italy as a field engineer before being sent to India, where he was stationed at the Kalaikunda Air Force Station in West Bengal. It was there that Ben’s quest began.

One day in March 1946, Ben and his friend Mac Bunting, a squadron leader in the Royal Australian Air Force, were sweating off hangovers in a former U.S. Army Air Forces surplus yard at the base when a small vehicle caught Ben’s eye. It was a 1942 GPW Model Ford that had been converted so that its body looked like a boat hull: an amphibious jeep. Neither Ben nor Mac had seen anything like it.

At the start of the war, the Army had ordered the Ford Motor Company to build jeeps capable of negotiating short expanses of water—streams, lakes, and small bays. Ford engineers worked quickly, using parts from existing vehicles and improvising the rest. The result was one of the strangest-looking automobiles ever built.

It was a quarter-ton jeep, water sealed and wrapped in a thin sheet of metal for buoyancy. At the rear was a second driveshaft attached to a marine propeller and a nailed-on rudder that hung off the back bumper. It looked like a smaller and much sketchier version of the amphibious duck boats used by the Army and, in later years, by novelty-tour operators.

On land, the GPW amphibian worked fine, more or less like a regular jeep, but its performance in water was abysmal. It ran aground easily, was almost impossible to maneuver, and averaged a laughable 2.5 miles per hour at four miles per gallon. Within a year of production, the Army cancelled the line. By war’s end, only a fraction of the 12,978 GPW amphibians remained in service.

None of this deterred Ben. “You know, Mac,” he said. “With a bit of titivation you could go around the world in one of these things.”

Mac scoffed, but Ben persisted. “The more I thought about the idea—and within a few days I was thinking of little else—the more I liked it,” he later wrote. “Quite reasonably possible, it would be difficult enough to be interesting, a nice exercise in technology, masochism, and chance—a form of sport—and it might earn me a few bob.”

Ben thought he could complete the trip in a year, seeing the adventure as “a last flutter before the inevitable relapse into domesticity.” In 1947, when the army finally cut him loose, he went to the United States. He had to find a jeep, and he figured his best chances would be in a U.S.–based Army surplus yard.

During a layover in Hong Kong, Ben dropped in on a friend, Elinore Arone. They had met several months earlier in India, where Elinore, like Ben, had gone in search of a more interesting life. A 27-year-old brunette from Watertown, Massachusetts, she had been working as a bank teller in her hometown when the war broke out, and she joined the American Red Cross. She and Ben had had an on-again, off-again romantic relationship in India, and he was eager to see her.

Ben was more reluctant to explain why he was heading to America. Given Elinore’s appetite for adventure, it was likely she would jump at something as absurd as the amphibious jeep journey, and Ben was convinced that the trip “was no job for a woman.” But during the layover, he couldn’t resist telling her his plans, and Elinore insisted on joining. Ben relented, and the two agreed to meet on the East Coast.

On January 30, 1947, Ben handed $901 to the clerk at the Army surplus auction yard in Aberdeen, Maryland, and the next day drove his 1942 GPW amphibious jeep right off the lot. It was dented, dilapidated, and barely running, and it took Ben more than two days to make it 70 miles north to the Annapolis Yacht Yard, where he’d rented a slip. By the time he pulled in, the jeep was stalling from clogged fuel lines, the gas tank had fallen out, and the exhaust pipe was coughing noxious smoke. This was the craft Ben hoped would take him and Elinore around the world.

Three

Annapolis

October 1947

Ben spent nearly a year retooling the jeep, reinforcing the superstructure, replacing glass with plexiglass, installing a new hull to carry extra fuel, and coating the metal with neoprene, a synthetic rubber developed by DuPont that would later be used in everything from wetsuits to fan belts.

He also built a proper cabin, which made the jeep look like a miniature houseboat on wheels. The interior was a claustrophobic five by ten feet, with the jeep’s driver and passenger seats placed side-by-side in the front and a small cot wedged a few feet behind in the back. Above the cot were a pair of radios and a hatch, the only means of climbing in and out of the vehicle.

By October 1947, in spite of all Ben’s work, the jeep really wasn’t seaworthy—for one thing, he could hardly steer it. But time was running out, and Ben was down to his last $300. Elinore, who had arrived from China five months earlier, was working odd jobs and living with her parents in Boston to save money. Ben decided it was time for a test run from Annapolis to New York City.

A few days before Halloween, Ben climbed into the jeep, started the engine, and set out northeast across Chesapeake Bay. His plan was to drive up to the top of the bay, head east overland until he reached Delaware Bay, follow the bay southeast to the Atlantic, and then travel up the New Jersey coastline to New York. By the third day, Ben was about 50 miles into Delaware Bay when he was stopped cold by howling winds. He spent two nights and a day bouncing against the steel walls of the cabin, trying to keep the jeep from crashing into the rocks. So far, the vehicle was barely managing two miles per hour on the water. At that rate, it would be faster for him to walk to New York.

The morning of the fourth day, the winds died down just enough to proceed. As Ben drove out across the bay, he saw that he was aimed straight at an outcropping of rocks. He tried to steer right, toward open water, but the wheel wouldn’t move. His hands wouldn’t move, either—in fact, he couldn’t even feel them. Soon his arms, feet, and face were numb. Blinding white flashes appeared in front of his eyes. He felt nauseous, as if he was about to pass out.

Ben had felt this way before, 10 years earlier while working in the mine in China. Carbon monoxide was filling the cabin. It was killing him. He dragged himself out the rear hatch and threw himself onto the roof. He flopped onto his back, gasping for air. The jeep rumbled on beneath him; the steering wheel was pinned starboard, and the craft was making sweeping circles around the bay. Ben watched helplessly as each circuit took him closer and closer to the rocks.

Then, with a crash, the jeep jolted to a stop. Ben looked over and saw that he was rammed into a metal piling. The jeep’s hull was punctured, but the engine hadn’t stopped. Still paralyzed, he lay there wondering how big the hole was. If it was too large, the vehicle would sink before he could regain control of his limbs. If it was small, he might survive. He watched, helpless, and waited.

After half an hour, Ben felt tingling in his fingers and toes, then in his hands, feet, and limbs. He sat up, took a deep breath, shook his head clear, and hurried into the cabin to kill the engine. He looked over the side. A bolt from the piling had ripped a foot-long hole just below the waterline on the port side of the jeep’s main gas tank. If the bolt had hit just 18 inches away from where it did, it would have torn open the hull and sent the jeep to the bottom.

Between fits of vomiting—a side effect of carbon monoxide poisoning—Ben held his head in his hands. If he couldn’t make it 300 miles along a sheltered coast, how could he possibly make it across 3,000 miles of open ocean? How could he make it around the world?

The next month, he drove over land to New York. That winter, Ben lived alone in near poverty in a fleabag hotel in Manhattan, while Elinore took a temporary job in Mexico. Broke and without prospects for employment, Ben hounded the British Consul for back pay that he said the Indian army owed him. He had a glass of milk and a buttered roll for breakfast and skipped lunch. Dinner was canned spaghetti warmed in the bedroom washbasin and eaten with two toothbrush handles. He lived this way for four months.

In mid-April, a payment of $1,800 finally arrived from the Indian army, and Ben began prepping the jeep for a trans-Atlantic crossing. When Elinore returned to New York in May, she and Ben made their years-long affair official, marrying at City Hall over lunch. It was a formality that the press agent they’d hired to promote their forthcoming journey had suggested. In the late 1940s, a pair of adventurous newlyweds setting out on a honeymoon across the Atlantic in a jeep would be an easy story to sell.

There were many false starts in the years that followed. During their fourth launch attempt, in August 1948, the Carlins managed to make it roughly 300 miles out to sea from New York before a shaft bearing came loose and the engine died. Ben tried to jury-rig a quick fix while dangling upside down in the ocean. Nothing worked. As the jeep drifted helplessly in the Atlantic, Ben passed the time by stuffing notes inside empty beer bottles that read, “No beer!”

A week and a half later, they were rescued by an oil tanker headed to Montreal. They arrived three days later. Back on land, Ben prepared the jeep for the road while Elinore went out drinking with the ship’s crew. Soon they were on the road heading east to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Ben was determined to give the Atlantic crossing another go that summer, but renovating the jeep was taking too long—winter storms were fast approaching. The Carlins had no choice but to delay another year. Elinore went back to New York while Ben took a job in a machine shop.

In his spare time, and using all of his spare money, Ben took the jeep apart again. He also gave it a name: Half-Safe, taken from a popular radio commercial for Arrid deodorant. Don’t be half-safe—use Arrid to be sure. One year became two, and then, in June 1950, Elinore returned. Ben quit his job. It was time to give their harebrained scheme one last try.

Four

Halifax

July 1950

Ben pushed the hair out of his eyes with a greasy hand and climbed from the dock in Halifax Harbor onto the back of the jeep for a final look-over. Everything was ready. Even the weather had improved in the past 12 hours—a large high-pressure system was approaching from the west. Ben reckoned that if he and Elinore left immediately, they could ride into the Gulf Stream and make passage across 1,800 miles of the Atlantic to the Azores, a sparsely populated chain of islands 1,000 miles west of the Portuguese coast, in less than three weeks.

The final step before leaving was to clear customs. Waiting on the dock above the jeep were two corporals from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Because the jeep was amphibious, it existed in a legal gray area. There were no laws permitting such a craft to set out across Canadian waters—but then, there were no laws prohibiting it, either. The Mounties filled out the customs forms as best they could.

A small group of onlookers and friends cheered as Half-Safe motored out to sea. Among them was Richard Battey, an old friend and one of the few dedicated backers of Ben’s quest. Richard had loaned $1,200 for the jeep’s renovations, which Ben promised to repay once he and Elinore made it England. By that point, Ben and Elinore figured, they would be rich and famous. It seemed inevitable—their quest had already attracted the attention of the editors of Life magazine and Hollywood producers. They just needed to drive across 3,000 miles of ocean first.

As Ben pulled away from the dock, Elinore sat on the back cot and lit a cigarette, looking out the open rear hatch across the water. Behind her, Half-Safe was towing a tank filled with 280 gallons of fuel. Onboard, they carried 30 gallons of water, eight gallons of oil, and enough food for six weeks. A few feet in front of Elinore, Ben sat hunched behind the steering wheel, watching the spherical compass bobbing on the dashboard.

Half-Safe’s windshield and side windows were covered with black canvas to keep out seawater and rain. The canvas also blocked out most natural light. Inside, day was hardly distinguishable from night; Ben and Elinore lived a shadowy twilight of flickering electric bulbs and the occasional phosphorous flame of a struck match.

For Ben, looking at a window at an unending ocean would have done little good anyway—there were no landmarks to follow. Every few days, when the weather permitted, he would confirm his position with a sextant reading. On overcast days, he had no choice but to drive on blind faith.

Half-Safe was a rough ride. When the engine was running—which was most of the time—the cabin rattled with teeth-chattering violence. The air was spiked with the noxious perfume of exhaust, gasoline, and, occasionally, raw sewage from the marine commode located beneath a cushion on the passenger seat. This was where Ben and Elinore had to relieve themselves, in plain sight of one another, two feet from the driver’s seat. Ben had installed electric fans on each side of the dashboard to combat the smell, but they mostly just distributed it around the cabin.

Then there was the endless back-and-forth roll over the ocean’s swells, the tiny jeep frame bouncing over waves and slamming through wind slop. Through the cracks in the black canvas, occasional flickers and flashes would show the water just below waist level, sometimes above shoulder level.

In some ways, riding in Half-Safe was like traveling in a motorboat or sailboat, but without any of the benefits—the gusts of wind, the panoramic horizons, the liberating feeling of fast motion. In other ways, it was similar to riding in a car, but one that the driver could never pull over, never stop. It was a claustrophobic and abusive environment, an experience wholly other: at best difficult, at worst miserable. Most of the time, it was somewhere in between.

Half-Safe crept along at its usual four miles per hour. Nevertheless, closing in on the second week at sea, Ben and Elinore had somehow traveled nearly 400 miles, almost a quarter of the way to the Azores. That distance put Half-Safe beyond reach of the thunderstorms that often raked the Atlantic seaboard in late summer. What Ben didn’t take into account, however, were the hurricanes heading into the Gulf Stream from the south. The summer of 1950 was particularly warm, and by July a number of storms were already gestating off the Caribbean. The Carlins, inching toward the Azores, were headed right into their path.

Five

The Atlantic Ocean

August 1950

Ben and Elinore landed on Flores Island in the Azores on August 19, 1950. What Ben had thought would be a two-week journey from Halifax had taken 32 miserable days. Still, the Carlins had managed to avoid hitting any major storms during the crossing, and they were happy to have most of the Atlantic behind them.

They spent the week in Flores, refueled, and, on August 27, set off again on a 160-mile run to the island of Horta. Approaching the breakwater outside the harbor there, they were surprised to see a small armada of local boats coming out to greet them. In her diary that day, Elinore would claim that half the island’s population of 10,000 turned out to celebrate them in town. “Long apprised of our coming,” she wrote, “Horta had simply closed down for the day, proclaiming a ‘Festa do Jeep.’”

For the next three months, Ben and Elinore island-hopped, exhibiting Half-Safe to earn money for repairs and the fuel they would need for the last 1,200-mile leg of the Atlantic crossing. A Life article that appeared in November called their Atlantic crossing “certainly the most foolhardy and possibly the most difficult transatlantic voyage ever made.”

The plan now was to head to Madeira, an island halfway between the Azores and the African coast, where they would refuel before continuing on to Western Sahara. Ben thought the 600-mile trip from the Azores’ São Miguel Island to Madeira would be a “downhill run,” taking a week and a half at most. But by the time they left port, the weather had already gone sour. Northwest winds battered the jeep; Ben continued pushing east, trying to outrun the storm. But after six days, the conditions had become dire. Eleanor became violently seasick. Ben had trouble steering the jeep in the rising swells. Most nights he’d cut the motor and watch as Half-Safe drifted anchorless, deeper into the storm.

Nine days later, things had gone from bad to worse. Everything inside the cabin was wet — the bedroll, blankets, clothes, and pillows — and had been for days. By Saturday, December 2, the seas had risen to 40, even 50 feet. Elinore described their grim daily routine in her journal:

0900: Watched a most beautiful sky at sunrise—seemingly a good omen but has brought nothing but rain & wind.

1000: This is serious. Pitching very badly. Rain beats down. Hope it stops at 1100 when I go topside for a radio transmission…. It’s rather cold in the jeep—getting colder all the time…. Moreover, the bed-roll is so wet that the blanket is too—& my head—& it’s coming thru all my sweaters. Constant headaches.

…

1530: I’m freezing now so what shall I be tonight? We go up, up, up &—smack, down, down, down.

…

1700: Used to think it was a exaggeration when people talked of seas 30, 40 & 50 ft. high. I’ve now seen them—when I went topside for [Ben’s] 1600 transmission to Madeira. Bloody huge waves—& the wind she blew like hell.

It seemed impossible that the storm could go on like this, but there was no sign of it letting up.

The next morning, Ben heard a sound that startled him: the engine. For the first time in days, he could actually hear it running. Barely conscious after 67 straight sleepless hours, he peeked outside. The wind had abated to about 50 miles per hour, though the waves were still enormous. He fumbled with the radio—it had been useless during the storm, but perhaps now it would be working again. He tapped out the distress call: XXX.

To his astonishment, an operator from Madeira replied. The man was shocked to get Ben’s signal. The Portuguese navy had given up Ben and Elinore for dead days earlier—nobody, they thought, could survive at sea in a hurricane of that magnitude, especially in a floating jeep. Ben took coordinates for the spot where a Portuguese naval vessel, the Flores, would drop off two tanks of fuel, enough to get Half-Safe to Madeira.

The Flores arrived at 8 a.m. the next morning. Ben hitched Half-Safe to the stern, and he and Elinore were whisked aboard and welcomed by the crew. They ate, drank wine, and took much-needed showers. The Carlins made land in Madeira on December 12. What should have been a 10-day hop ended up an insufferable three-week slog.

Back on land, the Carlins licked their wounds and sold the movie camera Ben had brought along for the money they needed for food and repairs. They hung around Madeira for the next two months before deciding to give the crossing another go. This time the sea was more forgiving, and on February 21—seven months after setting off from Canada—Half-Safe reached Western Sahara. The Carlins had finally crossed the Atlantic.

Half-Safe crossing the Sahara Desert, March 1951. Photo: Guildford Grammar School Archives

Six

Cape Juby

February 1951

The roads were a challenge from the beginning. Ragged in the best of circumstances, they had a tendency to vanish into 50-foot sand dunes. Half-Safe had lost its only spare wheel on the transatlantic crossing, and there were no replacement parts for Ford jeeps in Morocco. To be cautious, Ben drove at a snail’s pace. Elinore sat on the back cot, watching through the port-side window as nomadic shepherds drove their sheep toward the storm clouds to the north. Shepherds in the Sahara were known to chase the rain for hundreds of miles in search of grass. The Carlins followed them.

A week earlier, Ben and Elinore had made landfall in the small Western Sahara port town of Cape Juby. They were elated. After three years of toil, they had done the impossible: They had beaten the Atlantic. But now there was much more to think about, and on their first night back on land, Ben lay awake and pondered the challenges ahead. If Half-Safe broke down in the Sahara, the trip would be over.

Three days later, on March 4, after some quick repairs to make Half-Safe road ready, Ben and Elinore were finally granted papers and sent on their way, creeping along at less than two miles per hour towards Casablanca, 700 miles to the north. Days were spent driving and occasionally stopping at villages for peppermint tea; nights were spent beneath the stars of the Saharan sky.

Ten days later, they hit Casablanca in a blaze of publicity. Ticket sales from exhibitions of the jeep, plus a $100 advance for Life’s second article on the Half-Safe journey, gave Ben enough money to once again refit the jeep. With few spare parts or materials, he replaced the neoprene seals around the steering wheel with goatskin. But the attention around the Carlins, enormous at first, died as quickly as it started. Ben and Elinore and their journey across the Atlantic proved a fleeting curiosity to the few French colons who paid to see the jeep and meet the Crazy Carlins. Their feat seemed to inspire as much confusion as wonderment: They had made the journey, but why? What was the point?

On April 21, 1951, Ben backed Half-Safe into the Strait of Gibraltar. The jeep, chugging against the incoming tide, took six hours to make the 15-mile crossing to Europa Point, on the southern tip of Gibraltar. Nine months and 4,500 miles after they’d left Montreal, Ben and Elinore had landed on their third continent.

The Carlins’ four-month tour of Western Europe proved a welcome rest from the grueling journey so far. Ben and Elinore motored across Portugal, up through central Spain, and across southern France. Paris, still recovering from the war, turned out to be an unprofitable city for exhibitions, but the English were more interested. While staying in Paris in June, Ben and Elinore were flown to London to meet with editors at The Clarion newspaper, who agreed to pay them a hefty 500 pounds for a monthlong promotional tour in August. Ben and Elinore enthusiastically agreed, and for the first time in nearly a year they rested, soaking in the Parisian sights.

By mid-August, Ben and Elinore were ready for their triumphant sail to England, but The Clarion was not. At the last minute, the newspaper canceled their contract for no apparent reason. The Carlins’ holiday in Paris now looked like a waste of precious time. Their money spent, they would have to get to England on their own to find a new sponsor.

Ben and Elinore Carlin with Half-Safe in Casablanca, March 1951. Photo: Guildford Grammar School Archives

Seven

Kent

August 1951

The summer night sky exploded with flashbulbs and cheers as Half-Safe lunged up Goodwin Sands on the east coast of Kent the same landing that Julius Caesar had stormed 2,000 years earlier. Ben and Elinore climbed from the back hatch in front of the crowd of hundreds, who had been awaiting the Carlins for the past few hours. At the corner pub, they were met with a deafening round of applause.

A few days later, Ben called Mac Bunting, the Army buddy who had first helped conceive of the circumnavigation in India in 1947. They hadn’t seen each other in five years and in the past two years hadn’t even exchanged letters. When Mac arrived in Kent and saw the jeep, he was flabbergasted. “By Jove, old boy,” he exclaimed, “you were right!”

Half-Safe: Across the Atlantic by Jeep, which Ben wrote shortly after arriving in England, ends on that triumphant note. Back at the Guildford archives, I closed the cover of the second photo album and reshelved it. There were dozens of photographs Ben had taken during the journey, copies of letters he’d sent from the Azores and throughout Africa, a few receipts. But nothing I found shed light on what kept pushing Ben and Elinore to continue on through failure after failure, year after year—and I couldn’t find anything about what had happened to them after the journey was over.

One possible source of new information was Ben’s only daughter, Deirdre Carlin. I’d heard about her from Rosemary Waller months earlier, when I was arranging my visit to Perth. I knew nothing about her, except that she lived in Perth. I had been trying to reach her for months and finally heard back from her a week and a half before I arrived. Certainly she would know what had happened to Ben, but it would be a few days before I could ask her.

Ben and Elinore believed they’d have it made once they reached England, but by the second day in Kent, reporters stopped calling. There were no new offers to exhibit the jeep and no word from Hollywood. After a few days, the Carlins left for London. Within a week, their savings had dwindled to 50 pounds. They retired to a run-down hostel in the West End and reviewed their options.

After five years, they were just one-fifth of the way around the world, and the worst of the journey was ahead of them: war-ravaged Eastern Europe, roadless expanses of Middle Eastern desert, bandit-ridden Asia, and then the Pacific, the world’s largest ocean. Their plan of making money through exhibitions, magazine articles, and books had failed, and what little funds did trickle in went right back into keeping the jeep running.

Ben was starting to resent the exhibitions in particular and the people who attended them. Nobody really seemed to understand the journey. Many people simply thought the whole thing was a hoax. Meanwhile, Half-Safe had sentenced Ben and Elinore to a life of poverty, and they were growing weary of it.

“Now aged 39,” Ben wrote in August 1951, “I had lived from suitcase or kit-bag for 13 years; the travel urge was long satisfied and I yearned for a permanent hat-peg; a lawnmower, the pit-a-pat of footsies. If beforehand I had been persuaded that the trip would take longer than a year, I would have dropped it; now 5 years later I had barely started.”

If the Carlins were to continue, Ben would have to overhaul Half-Safe yet again—the jeep was literally falling to pieces. The metal superstructure had corroded from months of saltwater exposure, the frame was buckling, and the engine needed to be completely rebuilt.

Ben and Elinore’s marriage wasn’t in much better shape. Two weeks after landing in England, they separated. Whether they were drifting apart for personal or financial reasons isn’t clear. Elinore took a secretarial job with the U.S. Air Force in London, while Ben left for Birmingham to try to raise money. He moved into a boardinghouse room and took a job as a garage mechanic. He made plans to sell Half-Safe. The joke wasn’t funny anymore; the impossible journey seemed to be over.

But it wasn’t.

Ben tried but simply could not quit. In his time off from the garage, he continued plotting, thinking, tinkering. In the garage, he added larger fuel tanks to the jeep, refitted its brakes, and replaced the windshield with tougher tempered glass. The overhaul took two years.

In his letters and The Other Half, Ben gave plenty of reasons not to continue: debt, exhaustion, the near certainty that the jeep would give out entirely before journey’s end. He offered only one justification for trudging on, writing in typically overwrought prose:

Although a sweet-enough aria, Half-Safe’s Atlantic feat was no opera. There’s something peculiarly complete and satisfying about a circumnavigation; a magnum of champagne is manifestly more acceptable than glasses.
It was a psycho-facto that counter-tipped the imbalance: Of my past imbecilities the omissions rankled longer and stronger than the commissions: “If only I had grabbed that opportunity … taken a chance that time in … given that parboiled redhead one more break! Those are the pangs that gnaw in the night. Such an opportunity could never recur, and I’d kick holes in my coffin if I passed it up.

And so on the afternoon of April 20, 1955, Ben and Elinore climbed through Half-Safe’s back hatch once again. Elinore took her place on the cot, and with Ben behind the wheel they set off across the English Channel, past the White Cliffs of Dover toward France, back to the open sea and the open road.

Eight

Calcutta

August 1955

It had been four years since Ben and Elinore were last cooped up inside Half-Safe’s tiny cabin. By the time they landed on the beach at Calais, France, they both knew that four years probably wasn’t long enough. Richard Kaplan, a young documentary filmmaker from California, and John Simmons, a photographer for a London weekly newspaper, had joined them on the trip across the English Channel. Kaplan, who went on to become an Oscar-winning documentarian, told me that even that short trip with the couple was absolute hell. “It was miserable,” he said. “They were arguing the whole time, just yelling at each other. It was so bad, we sat on the roof to get away from them.” The next day, Kaplan and Simmons jumped ship.

Half-Safe rolled through Switzerland, then down to Verona, Italy, and on to Venice, where Ben and Elinore met with a throng of reporters. One asked if the Atlantic crossing had really happened and asked Ben to prove it. Others simply didn’t believe them. The journey was just too long, arduous, and insane to fathom. Half-Safe chugged on through Yugoslavia, and by mid-May the Carlins were in Turkey. This put them on track to cross the deserts of Syria, Iraq, and Iran at the start of summer—another miscalculation by Ben. Soon temperatures inside the cabin were reaching a sauna-like 150 degrees.

Ben pushed on, hoping somehow to outrun the heat, but it only got worse. Cabin temperatures reached 170 and 180 degrees, hot enough that the plastic boxes that held tools and spare parts softened and buckled. Nevertheless, by mid-August the Carlins had traveled 8,550 miles in 86 days. They had made it to India—though at a debilitating cost.

Elinore had lost 30 pounds, her hair was falling out, and she was constantly bedridden with stomach infections. As Half-Safe rolled through Jalandhar in India’s Punjab state, en route to Calcutta, she wrote in her journal, “Everything completely wet from humidity. … Yesterday’s wasp bite has swollen right arm … skin all round lips completely burned away—now peeling—mouth still ugly sight.”

In Calcutta, they settled into a friend of a friend’s apartment. In The Other Half, Ben describes this period of the trip as relatively enjoyable, but the correspondence in the Guildford archives suggests otherwise. Ben had contracted dengue fever and was bedridden for weeks. Elinore had a stomach flu that lasted a month. Broke again, Ben tried to sell the same Half-Safe story to two different magazines. The plan backfired when both editors realized what he had done and voided their contracts with him. In desperation, Ben sold the rights to Half-Safe to an American publisher, in violation of his contract with his English publisher, Andre Deutsch. Deutsch found out and threatened to kill their deal; Ben countered by accusing Deutsch of holding back advance payments for the book.

The Guildford archives contain a number of carbon-copied letters between Ben and a London lawyer named L. A. Morrow that suggest that Ben’s eccentricity was now turning into something darker. Perhaps the stress of the journey was wearing on him; perhaps it was the financial duress or simply the fever. Or perhaps it was a side of him that had been there all along.

Although Ben’s letters began professionally enough, within days they turned delirious and strange. He wrote that Deutsch was “an ambitious, unbridled egotist” with “little or no taste” and threatened him with numerous lawsuits. And this was all two months before Deutsch was to release Ben’s book. Meanwhile, Ben was spending his days obsessively taking apart Half-Safe’s engine and rebuilding it, though he knew it was in fine condition.

It was Deutsch, in fact, who bailed out the Carlins, suggesting that they ship Half-Safe to Australia for a book tour. Ten thousand copies of Half-Safe—a print run that suggested Deutsch’s hopes for a bestseller—were scheduled to hit Australian bookstores in October 1955, with 5,000 more to follow. A promotional tour, in addition to being good for sales, might be just the break that Ben and Elinore needed. Ben agreed, Deutsch sent expense money, and on September 19, Half-Safe set sail for Perth aboard the MS Carpentaria. For the first time in 16 years, Ben was going home.

The Australia tour was a disaster. Ben, Elinore, and Half-Safe made it to Perth in October, but the book did not—as it turned out, most of the bookstores where Ben and Elinore had planned to exhibit the jeep and sign copies never received their shipments. The few reviews that appeared were not favorable.

Ben accused Deutsch of plotting against him. In retaliation, he began charging exorbitant prices for viewings of the jeep and refused to cooperate with booksellers. In an effort to spite his publisher, Ben was sabotaging his own book, in the process throwing away his only real chance at profiting from the Half-Safe trip. His relationship with Elinore, meanwhile, was disintegrating again. By the end of the tour, she announced that she was leaving him. And this time she meant it.

On December 13, 1955, Ben rolled Half-Safe onto the MS Chakdina, a ship headed back to Calcutta. He would never see Elinore again.

Nine

Rangoon

February 1956

According to the British district commissioner in Rangoon, the road between the Burmese capital and the border of Thailand was impassable. “Your famous vehicle has not the slightest chance of covering the road successfully,” the commissioner, a young man in immaculate uniform, told Ben as he sat before his desk in the consulate office. “In plain fact, there is no longer a road. What there was has been destroyed by four monsoons. When I myself covered it last November, I saw two-foot-high boulders in the track. The army does not permit its ordinary jeeps to make the run.… Please turn back.”

Ben stifled a yawn, stood, and thanked the commissioner for his time, then left the office to prepare Half-Safe for the journey. He had no intention of heeding the commissioner’s advice.

The alternate route would involve traversing hundreds of miles of open water across the mouth of the Irrawaddy River, at the southern end of Burma. From there, Half-Safe would have to travel up an uncharted river and cross the Kra Isthmus into Thailand, where Ben would find well-paved roads for the next 300 miles of coastline. But this itinerary would add 500 miles and three months to the trip, an extension Ben couldn’t afford.

Instead, he borrowed maps and began charting his own straight-line path to Thailand. He would sail up the Gyaing River to Kyondo, a British army post west of the border. He would then take a 40-mile military road—the route the commissioner had advised against—from Kyondo over Victoria Point, the southernmost tip of Burma, to the border.

After six years in Half-Safe, Ben had grown numb to the warnings of officials. Elinore might have made him listen to reason, but she’d been gone four months. Just a month earlier, Ben had set out on his first trip alone, from India across the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. The route required him to spend as many as 20 hours a day, for five days, behind the wheel. “Having done something the hard way (with a crewman), one looks for a still harder way,” he wrote in The Other Half. To stay awake, he took methedrine tablets—first one, then another, then another.

One afternoon during the trip, Ben was staring at the lubber lines on the compass when he saw them twisting, apparently melting in the stifling heat. The compass itself flattened, then formed a sphere again. At its center appeared an image of Saint George, the dragon-slaying Roman soldier of legend. Now the compass lines were twisting and turning into the shapes of animals. Ben saw the face of a Hindu holy man glaring fiercely into his eyes. The man’s face kept expanding until it filled the dashboard. Ben swatted at the air to fend him off. “Damn!” he yelled.

Saint George, the animals, and the holy man disappeared. The compass was once again just a compass. It was the methedrine, Ben realized—he’d taken five tablets the day before and was finishing his 17th straight hour at the wheel. In the thrall of his hallucinations, he’d steered Half-Safe wildly off course. He cut the engine, dropped anchor, and collapsed onto the cot, shivering and sweating.

The Andaman crossing marked an ominous change in Ben’s habits. So far, most of Half-Safe’s travels, however dangerous, had been well planned. But since Elinore left, his judgment had grown erratic and, at times, suicidal.

His financial prospects, meanwhile, had collapsed further. When he reached Rangoon, a letter from Deutsch’s office was waiting for him, informing him that Half-Safe was not selling. Deutsch had ordered an initial print run of 20,000 copies for the English market, but now the publisher projected that no more than 3,000 or 4,000 would be sold. The rest were being dumped to a book club. Ben would see no more royalties.

A few days after Half-Safe reached Rangoon, officials in the southeastern outpost town of Kawkareik invited Ben and his new shipmate, a fellow Australian named Barry Hanley, to a farewell party before they attempted the military road over Victoria Point. The atmosphere was that “of a joyous wake,” Ben later wrote. “[T]he officers’ feeling seemed to be, ‘These boys are real triers. They are about to die on the road tomorrow. We must give them a good send-off.’”

The next morning, 15 Burmese officers escorted Half-Safe to the road in a military truck and watched Ben and Barry head into the jungle. As the road ascended into the foothills, the pavement turned to dirt. Further up the mountain the dirt disappeared, leaving only potholed bedrock. Boulders measuring 30 inches across appeared in the middle of the trail. To get past them, Ben had to balance Half-Safe’s tires on the least-eroded sections of the road for fear of getting permanently stuck between them. In a half-hour he covered only 100 yards. “The going was far worse than anything I had ever seen,” he later wrote. Then it got worse. “[A]ll sense of comparison was gone: beyond hellish and superhellish one’s power of description breaks down.”

Fatigue took over. Ben felt nauseous and drunk; the road began to taunt him. The jungle on both sides was a sheer, impenetrable wall of bamboo, brush, and vines. By afternoon, the temperature inside the cabin had reached 145 degrees. This went on for 10 hours.

The next day, Ben and Barry finally made passage over Victoria Point. Half-Safe had left Burma, and with it the most grueling overland segment of its route. Ahead of them were miles of relatively good roads through Thailand and Vietnam, then an easy crossing of the South China Sea to Hong Kong and on to the southern shore of Japan. They made the 2,500-mile trip to Japan in under five months.

On July 25, Half-Safe pulled into Kagoshima harbor, on the southern tip of the Japanese island of Kyushu. The water was as still as glass, reflecting a sky full of stars and the smoking crater of the Shinmoedake volcano. For Ben, Japan meant he was one step closer to completion; for Barry, it meant he could escape. He jumped ship and went back to Australia. Alone again, Ben was now looking at what he knew was his most serious obstacle: the Pacific Ocean.

Ten

Tokyo

July 1956

For the next nine months, Ben holed up in various cheap accommodations around Tokyo. Journalists would occasionally make pilgrimages to meet him there; among them were reporters from Time and Life, whose magazines had enthusiastically covered Half-Safe’s progress before. But the man they found barely resembled the swashbuckling adventurer who had thrilled their readers half a decade earlier. Ben had been drinking too much, and he seemed not just depressed and embittered but deeply broken.

Elinore was long gone, and she had taken much of the project’s appeal and innocence with her. Ben now seemed too eccentric, too crazy, too dangerously obsessed. Months later, Life canceled its article. The journey was taking too long, and the public, it seemed, had lost interest.

Ben, as always, was trying to scrape together the money for the next leg of the trip and refitting Half-Safe for its final sea voyage. He was back at it with Andre Deutsch, this time suing him for breach of contract over the dismal Australian book tour, during which only 6,149 copies of Half-Safe—barely a third of the 15,000 printed for the tour—had been sold. When Ben wasn’t writing angry letters, he was tinkering with the jeep, ripping its engine apart, rebuilding it over and over, and waiting.

Finally, in April 1957, he got a break: the Standard-Vacuum Oil Company agreed to fuel Half-Safe for the North Pacific crossing to Alaska in exchange for an 18-day promotional tour of Japan. Ben prepared to start his final overseas journey the following month, and he took on a new shipmate by the name of Boyé De Mente, an American magazine editor who had been living in Tokyo for several years.

De Mente later published his own book about his time aboard Half-Safe, called Once a Fool! From Japan to Alaska by Amphibious Jeep! His account, though not confirmed elsewhere, presents the most disturbing picture on record of Ben’s behavior. According to De Mente, Ben resented taking orders from his new oil-company sponsor. He started acting crazy, getting blind drunk and going on all-night rampages in the Japanese towns they visited.

De Mente recalled being awakened one night in a hotel room he shared with Ben. Someone was falling over him. The lights came on, and De Mente saw Ben, drunk, standing in the middle of the room wearing nothing but a kimono. Beside him was a woman in her late teens or early twenties, also in a kimono. Ben had thrown her on top of De Mente.

“It’s your turn now, mate!” Ben yelled, according to De Mente. De Mente begged off, saying the girl didn’t look like she was in the mood. Ben said that it didn’t matter, then opened the kimono to show off his bruised knees. The woman tried to run, but Ben pushed her back on the bed. Finally, hotel maids arrived and rescued her. De Mente looked over at Ben, who was passed out, dead to the world. Scenes like this played out every night for weeks.

Finally, on June 12, 1957, there were no more women, no more bars, no more hotel rooms—just Half-Safe’s little cabin, with Ben at the wheel, De Mente on the back cot, and the cold, gray Sea of Okhotsk ahead of them. They launched off the dock in Wakkanai, the northernmost city in Japan, and headed northeast. Half-Safe was at last underway across the Pacific.

It took only five days for the problems to begin. Half-Safe’s fuel supply was now kept in a large steel tank towed behind the jeep, and the rope connecting the two had become hopelessly knotted, pulling them close together. When the wind came up, the jeep and the tank began crashing into each other. Ben feared that if he didn’t unravel the rope, the tank might puncture Half-Safe’s belly and possibly sink the vehicle. The only way to clear the rope was to swim under the tank and remove it. So Ben dove overboard.

Even in summer, the water in the Sea of Okhotsk was about 30 degrees. Pawing at the rope, Ben quickly lost all sensation in his extremities. One of his fingernails caught on the rope, split, then peeled back entirely; he bit down on it and ripped it off at the quick. When he pulled himself onto the deck, his entire body was covered with red and blue splotches. He got back in the cabin, started the engine, and headed east.

Ten days later, in the middle of the North Pacific heading toward the Aleutian Islands, Half-Safe again stalled. Ben had driven the vehicle over a Japanese fishing boat’s net and knotted it around the propeller. The only way to free it was to once again jump in and do it by hand. Ben stripped and dove overboard, a knife clenched between his teeth. His hands went numb instantly, and he slashed wildly at the net, unable to feel whether he was connecting with his target. The fishing boat was about 100 yards away, hauling in a net full of salmon. Ben swam toward the vessel and climbed up the net. The crew lifted him out of the water with the day’s catch and deposited him on the deck, slick with fish blood.

Ben was naked and paralyzed by the cold. The fishermen tried to slap him back to life. They dumped more coal into the galley stove and poured diesel fuel over the embers, then pushed Ben toward the flames, wrapping him in a fur coat and urging him to warm himself with an enormous bottle of sake. Ben shivered and shook and slowly came to. Lifting his eyes, he saw Half-Safe in the distance, drifting away from him. The propeller was still not clear; to free it, Ben would have to swim back out and try again. He drank a liter of sake, grabbed one of the crewmen’s knives, and dove in. When he reached Half-Safe, he sawed everything in sight, finally cutting the propeller loose.

Ben pulled himself aboard and into the cabin. He sat on the cot, shaking as though he were electrified. He was unable to speak or move. Once he warmed up, he pulled his clothes on, urinated in a can beside the driver’s seat, shut his bloodshot eyes, and went to sleep. He woke up four hours later, yelled at De Mente for urinating in the can, kicked him out of the driver’s seat, and drove onward into the night toward Alaska.

Half-Safe crossing the North Pacific Ocean, 1957. Photo: Guildford Grammar School Archives

Ben Carlin aboard Half-Safe in the North Pacific Ocean, 1957. Photo: Guildford Grammar School Archives

Eleven

Anchorage

September 1957

As far-fetched as the fishing-boat incident seems, it appears in both The Other Half and De Mente’s book. By this point, De Mente wrote, Ben had lost his hold on the world outside of Half-Safe, outside of the journey. He was imagining arguments that never took place, demanding that De Mente follow his orders and then chastising him when he did.

Half-Safe reached Anchorage on September 3. De Mente quit as soon as he was on dry land. Alone again, Ben set off across Alaska. At long last, he was conquering the fifth and final continent of his journey. Having waited years for this moment, he expected elation. Instead, he became terribly depressed. “With no more oceans to cross,” he later wrote, “my life was ended.”

The little world contained within Half-Safe’s steel walls had become a refuge from relationships, responsibilities, jobs, other people—and now it was on the verge of disappearing. If Ben made it back to Montreal, he’d have to start playing by other people’s rules again. “I faced return to the jungle of life as a civilian—servilisation; I would have to learn to be polite to painful numbies and to either rhapsodize or lament over the ever tiny thing,” he wrote. For years he had worried that he would never complete his odyssey; now he worried that he would.

For eight months, Ben traveled alone around the U.S., though there is little record of where he went. From his correspondence in the Guildford archives, I learned that he spent a month in Hollywood working on a film deal that never materialized, then crashed Half-Safe in a ditch after a night drinking at a friend’s house in San Francisco. He zigzagged from California to Texas to Missouri. One afternoon in Detroit, he stopped by the Ford Motor Company’s headquarters to show off what he called “the most extraordinary automobile (judged on performance) that Ford or any other manufacturer had ever produced.” The company’s public relations chief didn’t even bother to step outside and look at Half-Safe.

Ben wandered on, driving through Ohio and upstate New York. In Buffalo, an attendant at a service station became engrossed in the map of Half-Safe’s travels that Ben had painted on the jeep’s exterior. Had Ben actually been to any of those places? he wanted to know. Still, nobody seemed to believe him. He drove on, up to Canada, as if he couldn’t bring himself to finish the journey.

Finally, on May 13, 1958—seven years and 10 months after he set out across the Atlantic—Ben drove west toward Montreal, where he and Elinore had stopped in 1948. He was older now, 45, gray in the beard, and heavier. Over the past decade, Ben had traveled 39,000 miles over land and 11,000 miles over water. He had crossed four oceans and five continents to become the only person in history to circumnavigate the globe by both land and sea in the same vehicle—a distinction he still holds.

It had been a decade of planning, rebuilding, marriage, divorce, dysentery, dementia, abject poverty. Eight years of driving, breaking down, and driving some more, across sun-scorched deserts and hurricane-ripped seas, through bouts of insanity and back again. But Ben had somehow made it. He had lodged himself in one of the wilder corners of history.

As the jeep rumbled into town, there was no parade, no press, no applause to greet him. Not even the Batteys, Mac, or Elinore had shown up to welcome him. Ben was totally alone. He turned off the engine and started walking, with no particular place to go.

Ben Carlin in the1960s. Photo: Guildford Grammar School Archives

Twelve

Perth

November 2011

Although there were hundreds of photos from Ben’s circumnavigation in the Guildford archives, there were only a few of his life during the years that followed. It was as if he had simply stopped existing after he arrived back in Montreal. The picture on the last page of the last photo album showed a much older man, overweight, sitting in a chair with a pipe in his mouth, a forced smile on his face. It took me a moment to realize it was Ben.

Ben died in 1981, Elinore in 1996. The correspondence between them after the circumnavigation was nasty. In July 1961, Ben tried to convince her to give up all the rights to the Half-Safe story; her remaining share of them, he believed, was preventing him from selling his second book. In one letter to her lawyer, he rehashed romantic arguments from their earliest days in India, and he insisted that “never did I as much as tell her that I loved her.”

Elinore returned fire, writing in a letter later that month: “I don’t propose to have any correspondence with you. What little is necessary I trust you can take part in a sane and more polite manner. I do regret that you seem to have lost all sense of proportion and humor.” She would later marry an airline pilot she and Ben had met during their stopover in Madeira.

The only living link to the Carlins that I’d found was Deirdre, Ben’s daughter, who had agreed to meet on my last day in town. She was living in Perth, working downtown as an administrative assistant at an investment firm. If I stopped by her office, she said, she would be happy to talk.

When she stepped out of the elevator and into the lobby, I had no trouble recognizing her. She was tall, with Ben’s strong chin, brown eyes, and sardonic smile. I was full of questions. In particular, I was curious about Ben’s whereabouts from the end of his trip to his death. Deirdre smiled. “Oh, so am I,” she said. “The book is basically all I knew about my father.”

Deirdre was born in 1964, when Ben was 52 and her mother, a woman named Cynthia Henderson—Carlin’s third wife—was 21. The family was living in Arlington, Virginia, but Cynthia left Ben before Deirdre was born. As far as Deirdre could remember, he never visited. The first time Deirdre heard from him was in 1978, when she was 14 and studying at a boarding school in England, and received a letter from Perth. “Dear Deirdre,” it began:

This is a strange way for us to meet after so many years.
Five years ago I retired to Western Australia. A little under three years ago, when I was about to return to the States, I was hit by a stroke which paralyzed my left side. When I was in hospital a second stroke knocked out my ability to write with my right hand.
By Christmas 1976 I had just about recovered when a third stroke paralyzed my right side; this time there was to be no nearly complete recovery. In July 1967 [sic] I went to the States expecting to recover largely. But there was no more major recovery; nor will there ever be. I cannot talk intelligibly except to those who know me. I cannot walk without crutches. I cannot write or direct my hands properly. I cannot cook.

Ben tried moving into a nursing home, but “after two days there I decided it was no place for me; I returned to my still unsold flat.” He rarely left the apartment, living off of Meals on Wheels deliveries and food donations from a neighbor. The previous August, in 1977, he suffered a fourth stroke. “I am pretty useless,” he wrote.

Sweetheart, There is a great deal to tell you but I want to be sure that what I have to tell you reaches you; I SHALL NOT EMPLOY ANY TRICKS TO REACH YOU. Everything will be quite above board, and nobody can call me a liar. There is no way of your ever seeing me unless you come here or to the States. If your mother doubts my abilities or intentions she should write to me. Have the Social Security cheques been reaching you? I have two things connected with the registration of your birth that you should have and I have for you some photographs, the manuscript of a second book, and the names and addresses of two relatives.
And I shall not die penniless.
Your loving father,
Ben

Deirdre put the letter in a drawer. Every few months, she would unfold it, read it, and put it away again. In January 1981, when she was 17, she decided to write Ben back. She was about to leave boarding school; it was time to meet her father.

Three months later, she got a response from Perth. “Oh God, I was just so excited,” she told me, smiling at the memory. “Can you just imagine? I was going to meet him, I was finally going to see my father! I just had so many plans.”

The letter was written on Ben’s typewriter and stationery, but it wasn’t from him. It was from his neighbor, writing to inform her that Ben had died of a stroke a month earlier. He died alone, without any knowledge that his daughter knew he existed. After a decade of waiting to hear from her, Deirdre’s letter to him had arrived two weeks too late.

In 1987, David Malcolm, the president of Guildford, called to invite Deirdre, who was then living in London, to come to Perth. Guildford had decided to publish Ben’s manuscript for The Other Half of Half-Safe, and Malcolm wanted Deirdre’s help editing it.

On the Guildford campus, the headmaster led Deirdre to a curious machine—it appeared to be half jeep and half boat. In hand-painted script on the port side was a name: Half-Safe.

The vehicle had been rusting away in a barn in Ohio, where Ben had abandoned it 20 years earlier after reaching Montreal. Guildford had located the jeep in 1984 and had it brought back to the school, where it would be kept on permanent display.

This was the first that Deirdre had heard about her father’s extraordinary journey, and she was dumbfounded. Her mother had never mentioned it. Now she was surrounded by artifacts of a family history she’d never known.

Ben’s friends around Perth took Deirdre in. They told her stories of Ben’s wild sense of humor and his wilder sense of adventure. And they gave her one of his battered briefcases. In it she found a collection of visas he had gathered on the Half-Safe voyage. “Just gorgeous things,” she told me, “the way they used to do them back in those days, handwritten and elegant.”

Beneath the visas was a carbon copy of a letter that she recognized immediately: It was the letter he’d sent when she was 14. There were several others, too, all addressed to Deirdre, that she had never received. Ben had been sending her letters her entire life, since she was a baby. They’d never gotten to her, apparently intercepted by her mother until she left home for boarding school.

At the bottom of the briefcase was a photographer’s contact sheet, a grid of tiny portraits. Deirdre was shocked: They were photographs of herself, at age 4, posed in a green velvet party dress, holding a beach ball, with a broken front tooth. They had been taken at the request of a man whom she was told was her uncle Fred. They had spent a single day together in London, visiting the zoo and Selfridges department store. Though she didn’t know it, it was the only day she would ever spend with her father. Ben had carried the pictures with him for the rest of his life.

It seemed as if the two halves of Ben’s adult life were, in a way, sad reflections of each other: a failed quest for the world’s affection followed by a failed quest for his daughter’s. Although Deirdre had read Ben’s books and seen the jeep, she had never actually looked through the archives, never seen the photographs and letters I had just spent a week poring over. It was a strange feeling to be sitting there, telling her the details of his forgotten life. After an hour, we said good-bye. I walked out in the pouring rain back to my hotel room and mulled over what I had learned in the past week.

Ben never made it into the canon of the 20th century’s great adventurers; it wasn’t where he belonged anyway. His quest was a send-up of the earnest heroes of his age—the peak baggers, the continent explorers, the gender-barrier busters. “By nature I am an ornery SOB in that I cannot bear to follow the mob.” he wrote. “So, when men go to sea in ships, I take a vehicle; when they tackle continents in automobiles, I prefer a boat.”

Ben was weird, and his quest was weird, which is perhaps why it didn’t resonate in the 1950s and exactly why it resonated so strongly with me. He was a deeply flawed, obsessive contrarian—and a postmodern hero ahead of his time. He took a well-worn category of adventure—a circumnavigation—and subverted it so completely that it seemed new again. In this he was perhaps a grandfather to those of us who were born too late to discover the Arctic but might be the first to try surfing it.

Of all the discoveries I made in Guildford, none baffled me more than a letter I found from 1968, sent to Ben by a woman in Perth named Gwen Hall. In it Hall related that her husband had been on a fishing trip with a friend along the north coast of Perth when they found “half a cuttlefish with some printing on it” on the beach. On the shell was written “1948 Ben Carlin Half-Safe.”

Ben, then living in Washington, D.C., wrote back almost immediately. He recalled drifting helplessly 300 miles off the coast of New York in the summer of 1948, during Half-Safe’s fourth failed attempt to cross the Atlantic. He admitted having no recollection of writing his name on a cuttlefish shell, but if it happened, he recalled, it would have happened at this time. That would mean the shell had traveled some 20,000 miles across two oceans, in defiance of their currents, over two decades, to land 200 miles from Ben’s birthplace of Northam. A totally implausible journey—but, then again, so was driving a jeep around the world.

Ben never shied away from his own mythmaking; he relished it. Despite his jokes and self-mockery, there was little doubt that he, too, wanted to matter the way the great explorers mattered—to make his mark on history. Digging through the archives, it was clear that he took this dream to his deathbed. He had scrupulously catalogued his letters, photographs, even receipts from his years aboard the jeep. It was as if he was stuffing his whole story into a bottle and casting it out to sea, hoping that it might reach someone someday who would care.

Agent Zapata

Agent Zapata

A reporter unravels the sequence of events that led to the death of a U.S. federal agent in Mexico.

By Mary Cuddehe

The Atavist Magazine, No. 19

Mary Cuddehe is a writer in New York. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Monocle, Poder, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The New Republic, among other publications. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Editor: Charles Homans

Producers: Olivia Koski, Gray Beltran

Research and Production: Nadia Wilson

Cover and Interior Illustrations: Daniel Hertzberg

Music: Morricone Youth

Fact Checker: Thomas Stackpole

Copy Editor: Sean Cooper

Published in October 2012. Design updated in 2021.

One

Early in the afternoon on February 15, 2011, two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents drove south on Federal Highway 57, through the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental in central Mexico, in an armored Chevrolet Suburban. The day was perfectly clear, and the agents could see for miles.

Jaime Zapata was behind the wheel. Thirty-two years old, reedy and loose limbed, he was known for his wide grin and practical jokes around the ICE offices in Laredo, Texas, where he was based. Victor Avila, riding shotgun, was his near opposite: a serious, even intimidating veteran agent with a wife and two children. The men had similar backgrounds. Both were Mexican-American, were bilingual, and had been raised in Texas border towns, where, it is sometimes said, a kid growing up has two career choices: become a cop or become a criminal.

At dawn that morning, they had set out from Avila’s apartment in Mexico City, winding north through the rambling outskirts of the city toward San Luis Potosí state. At a meeting point along the highway, two agents from the U.S. consulate in Monterrey were waiting for them, and together the four men loaded the SUV with equipment that Zapata and Avila were supposed to bring back to the American embassy. There were about a dozen boxes in all, enough to fill the entire length of the Suburban except the front seats. The men said their good-byes, and Zapata and Avila turned back toward the capital.

Avila had been working in the ICE attaché office in the American embassy for a year and a half. Zapata was new, on temporary assignment, only nine days removed from his post in Loredo. At around one in the afternoon, he called Stacye Joyner, his girlfriend back in Texas, on his cell phone. They were still hours from Mexico City then; he surveyed the road ahead, the yellowed grass and big sky. “What does it look like?” she asked him.

“It looks like Texas,” he told her. “I’ll send you a picture.”

Two

The building that houses ICE’s Laredo headquarters, one of the tallest in the city of 240,000, has all the architectural verve of a regional bank office—a desert-hued box with a few decorative urns and a patch of grass out front. That drab exterior conceals one of the U.S. government’s busiest hubs on the country’s southern border. Not only ICE but also the Drug Enforcement Administration, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Customs and Border Protection each occupy a floor. ICE alone has about 100 men and women working out of Laredo. By early 2011, the agency—which is the main investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security—had gotten so big that Laredo was sending agents like Zapata to the U.S. embassy in Mexico City to shore up its investigations.

As Zapata was barreling down Highway 57, his colleagues in Laredo were gathering in a brightly lit conference room for an all-hands meeting. At the front of the room was Jerry Robinette, the special agent in charge of the swath of south Texas from San Antonio to the border. Robinette, a short, bald man with a white moustache, was infamous among his subordinates for extending the standard tenure in Laredo from three to five years. It was an out-of-the-way place with crummy food and little entertainment to speak of, a far cry from their colleagues’ posts in Southern California and Miami. But what Laredo lacked in amenities, it made up for in action. The bridges that connect the city with its Mexican sister, Nuevo Laredo, and Interstate 35, the highway that runs north from Laredo to Texas’s major cities, are crucial infrastructure for the outlaw industries that ICE is charged with combating: human trafficking, drug running, money laundering.

That afternoon, Robinette and the other managers were outlining their plans for the year. As the gathered agents shifted listlessly in their chairs, Robinette’s BlackBerry pinged. So did the manager’s next to him, and the others on down the line. One by one they glanced at their phones, then filed out of the room. The agents waited uneasily. “It was like, cricket-cricket—what’s going on?” one of them later recalled. When the bosses returned after a few minutes, they were stone-faced.

Minutes earlier, Zapata and Avila had been driving outside Santa María del Río, a small town in southern San Luis Potosí, when two SUVs sped past them down the highway. There were at least eight people inside the vehicles, and as they passed Avila saw that they were holding their guns in plain view. He had a good idea of who they were. Monterrey, 350 miles to the north, was a base of operations for the Zetas, a rogue paramilitary force that had split off from the Gulf drug cartel the year before and had since become the most feared criminal organization in Mexico. The Zetas had set themselves apart from the competition with their uncommon brutality, massacring migrants, detonating car bombs, and hurling grenades into crowds. Lately, they had moved into San Luis Potosí.

The SUVs disappeared down the road. But soon they reappeared on the horizon, still traveling in the same direction but now moving very slowly and occupying both of the southbound lanes, as if one were overtaking the other. The agents’ car got closer. Suddenly, one of the mysterious SUVs dropped back and tucked in behind Zapata. The other swerved in front. Instinctively, Zapata stepped on the gas and rammed the vehicle ahead of theirs, but it was too late. They were trapped.

Forced to a stop on the shoulder of the highway, Zapata put the Suburban in park. The gunmen poured out of their vehicles and fanned around the agents, screaming at them in Spanish to open the doors. The agents were nervous but assumed they were safe: The Suburban, they knew, was a veritable tank, armored by the British defense contractor BAE Systems to withstand automatic gunfire and fragmentation grenades. They hunkered down to wait out the attack. Then one of the assailants tried the handle on the driver-side door. It was hard to say who was more surprised, the men inside or the men outside, when it opened.

Placing the vehicle in park had automatically unlocked the doors. It was a handy feature found in the best new American cars—and one that no one had bothered to disable in the bulletproofed SUV. For a moment everyone froze, then Zapata lunged to close the door. By the time he got it shut, however, the agents realized that, in the commotion, one of them had inadvertently lowered the passenger-side window—just a crack, but enough for the men outside to jam the barrels of what looked to be a 9-millimeter pistol and an assault rifle into the gap. Avila yelled that they worked for the U.S. embassy, that they were Americans, as if the words were a shield.

The SUV erupted with gunfire, and a bullet tore through Avila’s left leg. The noise was deafening, and he singed his hands as he tried to push the gun barrels out of the vehicle. But the assassins must have decided that they couldn’t quite reach him from where they stood. They withdrew, and Avila was finally able to roll up the window. The men fanned out around the SUV once more, firing at least 80 more rounds. The Suburban shook, the back panel began to splinter, but the bulletproofing held. And then, as fast as they approached, the hit men drove away.

Zapata put his foot on the gas, lurching the car forward, but quickly slumped over in the driver’s seat. He had been hit several times at close range, and his femoral artery was severed. Avila pressed his hands over Zapata’s heart. He searched in vain for a place on his body to apply pressure, anywhere he could stanch the bleeding. Almost nothing was left of Zapata’s right side.

“I’m going to die,” Zapata told him.

“No, you’re not,” Avila said. “I’m calling for help. You’re going to be fine.” There was a distress signal hooked up to the Suburban’s GPS, he thought, but it didn’t seem to be working. On a cell phone, he started calling every number he could think of for backup. Finally, someone picked up one of the phones on his desk at the embassy, and the chief of the federal police dispatched a helicopter.

Cars hurtled past on the highway, none of them stopping—no one was about to get involved in a shoot-out. At one point, Avila later said, an ambulance pulled over and a man got out and approached the car, walking through the bullet casings surrounding the Suburban. He said he had come to help, but Avila, terrified that the man was another assailant in disguise, refused to get out of the vehicle. The ambulance drove off, and Avila and Zapata were alone again.

In the conference room back in Laredo, the bosses delivered the news. There had been an ambush in central Mexico, the assembled ICE agents were told, and it appeared that one of their own, Jaime Zapata, had been involved. The room went quiet. Not knowing what else to do, the agents clasped hands and began to pray.

After 40 minutes, Avila was still waiting along the highway. His ears were ringing, his left leg swelling up like a balloon filling with air. The nice young agent he had just met sat beside him, folded over in his seat. Jaime Zapata was dead.

Three

A few hours later, Mary Zapata was in her bedroom scratching a lottery ticket when her husband, Amador, burst in. Outside, government-issue SUVs were lining up in the driveway of the small white house with olive trim where the couple lived in Brownsville, Texas.

Later, she would recall what happened next in fragments. There were the agents from her son Jaime’s ICE office in Laredo coming through the doorway; “He’s been injured,” she remembered one of them saying. There were the family members and friends filtering into the living room, the agents writing down names and numbers, talking on their phones, closing off the street outside. And there was the knock on the door to the bathroom, where she had barricaded herself to make a phone call. It was her eldest son. “Jaime’s dead,” he told her.

Over the next week, the Zapatas proceeded numbly through the kind of rituals that follow a public death. President Barack Obama called the house to offer condolences. When Jaime’s body finally arrived at the Brownsville airport, in a coffin draped with an American flag, a long motorcade accompanied it to the funeral home. On the morning of February 22, more than 1,000 mourners crowded into the city’s event center for the funeral Mass. Attorney General Eric Holder, Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano, and ICE director John Morton all offered eulogies. Zapata had served “the cause of justice and the rule of law,” Napolitano told the crowd. “We must and will eradicate this scourge that took his life,” Holder said. Together they watched as Victor Avila, his wounds hidden beneath a dark suit, was rolled in a wheelchair to the side of Zapata’s coffin, where he laid a single flower.

The following day, the Mexican army raided four Zeta safe houses in San Luis Potosí and emerged with six men they claimed had taken part in the attack. They were presented that afternoon at a press conference in Mexico City, handcuffed and dressed in the kind of reflective orange vests that highway construction workers wear, led before the cameras by grim-eyed soldiers whose faces were concealed behind balaclavas. In the center of the group was the alleged ringleader, a lantern-jawed San Luis Potosí native named Julian Zapata, known among the Zetas as El Piolín (Tweety Bird). In custody, the authorities said, he had already confessed to participating in the attack on the ICE agent of the same name.

In Mexico, the announcement was something of a disappointment: Rumors had been circulating that the army had arrested a Zeta leader of far greater significance, perhaps Jesus “El Mamito” Rejón, the regional boss and the highest-ranked narcotraficante on the DEA’s most-wanted list, or Miguel “Z-40” Treviño, one of the gang’s two leaders. El Piolín was not much more than a local thug. At the press conference, facing a barrage of camera flashes, he appeared at times to be smirking.

Four

I visited Jaime Zapata’s parents’ home for the first time a little more than a year after their son’s funeral. Mary, a tall and poised woman with a round face and short brown hair, answered the door and invited me into the living room. After a few minutes, Amador, her shy, avuncular husband, shuffled in quietly and sat on the couch beside her. The inside of the house was all white, even the floors. Sun flooded through a skylight overhead, illuminating the rustic Spanish-style furniture.

Their son’s death had been an anomaly. In the past six years, the drug war has claimed at least 60,000 lives in Mexico, including those of plenty of U.S. citizens: a Texas missionary shot in her pickup truck on a Tamaulipas highway, an American consulate employee and her husband gunned down in the street in Ciudad Juárez. Until last year, however, not one of them was a U.S. federal agent. A retired DEA agent told me that, of the 500 Mexican traffickers he had interviewed over the course of his career, not a single one had ever admitted to targeting Americans. “It’s simply not done,” he said. “It’s bad for business.” A high-level cartel informant offered a similar assessment. “In Mexico,” he told me, “the word is, you fuck with an American agent, you’re through.”

Still, it seemed like a straightforward enough case of gangland murder—and I had come to Brownsville to find out why it hadn’t turned out that way at all. Within days of Zapata’s funeral, the circumstances of his death had become the subject of government stonewalling and political controversy, thoroughly webbed over with conspiracy theories and rumors. Zapata’s parents were as confounded as anyone. By the time I arrived at their home, they had become frequent guests on television news programs in the United States and Mexico, plaintively asking that the U.S. government provide them with the still-disputed details of the events that had led to their son’s death.

Sitting on the couch, the Zapatas seemed at once exhausted by and seasoned in the interview process. Mary was the family narrator, and Amador struggled to get in a word. At one point, he leaned back and let out a loud sigh. “This has turned our lives upside down,” he said.

Mary is 62 and Amador is 65; both are retired from jobs in the public sector, Mary as a secretary for child-protective services and Amador as a livestock inspector for the Department of Agriculture. They married in 1972, following a yearlong courtship that began when Amador was in the Army and Mary, at the urging of Amador’s aunt, a family friend, began writing to him while he was stationed in Vietnam. Like many Tejano families, the Zapatas had deep ties in Mexico and crossed the border often. After their first son, Amador III, was born, in 1973, the family moved to the Gulf state of Veracruz, where Amador took a job eradicating screwworm from local cattle. But the Zapatas found that they missed Texas. By August 1977, Mary was pregnant again, and they moved back to Brownsville. The following spring, Jaime Jorge Zapata was born, a beautiful blond boy with velvet eyebrows.

The Zapata children—ultimately five boys in all—grew up roaming the lush lowlands of the Rio Grande delta, learning to hunt and fish and earning Boy Scout badges. The family was tightly knit; Jaime in particular grew close to his mother and in time developed an almost parental concern for his younger brothers. By middle school, he was dark haired and tall, approaching six foot four, a physically imposing but still ungainly teen whose friends called him Dick Arms and Goofy.

After high school, Zapata went to San Antonio State University, where he majored in criminal justice, though he spent most of his time drinking beer and playing PlayStation. Back in Brownsville, he had taken a breezy approach to his studies—his friends remember him as the kid who could drink anybody under the table, who loved taking weekend trips to the nearby spring-break mecca of South Padre Island—and was smart enough to get decent grades without trying too hard. College was different, though, and four years later he returned to Brownsville, degreeless and adrift. “I think it’s time that you settled,” his mother told him. “You’ve already partied enough.” By then his elder brother Amador was working as a special agent with Customs and Border Protection. Jaime took stock of his own life and reenrolled in school, this time at the University of Texas at Brownsville, graduating four years later with a criminal justice degree.

His first job in law enforcement was as a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Yuma, Arizona, prowling the desert for coyotes. Less than a year later, in the fall of 2006, a position with ICE in Laredo came open. In the frontier-security hierarchy, patrolmen are the grunts. Working for ICE was a step up. Zapata had to go to Georgia for six months of training, but he figured it was worth it. He would be an investigator now—using his brains, not his flashlight.

Five

Zapata arrived in Laredo in October 2006. His first assignment was investigating human-trafficking networks. After a year in the Arizona desert, it felt good to be back in south Texas, and the new job offered an appealing mix of competition, adventure, and adrenaline. Zapata was well liked by his colleagues, even if they grumbled about his enthusiasm, which sometimes looked a little too much like brown-nosing. (“He was always volunteering for shit,” one ICE agent recalled.) As a teenager, he had always been the first kid to jump into the cold swimming pool; now he was the first agent to rush through the door on a raid. He became known for his soothing bedside manner—he was the guy to whom frightened targets, particularly women, warmed first. One of Zapata’s coworkers recalled an ICE raid on a house in Laredo used by a criminal ring that bused illegal immigrants across the bridge into Texas using counterfeit immigration papers. When the agents barged through the door, the woman inside was so terrified that she urinated on herself and refused to speak with anyone—until Zapata arrived. “She was like, ‘I don’t want to talk to you. I want to talk to him,’” the agent said. The woman’s statements “sealed everyone up, absolutely sealed the deal on everyone.”

At the time, agents in Laredo were working on the periphery of a war that had yet to be declared. Two months after Zapata arrived in the office, Mexican president Felipe Calderón, limping from a tough election, would send 4,000 soldiers and police to his home state of Michoacán to fight the drug cartels that had taken control of the region—the first major government strike against the country’s narcotraficantes and the official beginning of the conflict that has since consumed whole regions of the country. But in Nuevo Laredo, the city just across the Mexican border from Zapata’s new post, normal life had begun to erode several years earlier. As recently as 2002, it was common for residents on both sides of the border to move freely between the cities, the Americans taking advantage of Nuevo Laredo’s bargain dentists and booming discos. By 2006, however, many residents from the U.S. side hadn’t “gone across” in years; the sister city had become a forbidding and sinister place.

On a map, Laredo and Nuevo Laredo look like a single sprawling metropolis, shaped like a cowboy boot. Nuevo Laredo is the westward-pointing toe, separated from its American sibling by the sluggish brown expanse of the Rio Grande. Nuevo Laredo contains more than half of the cities’ population, packed into a quarter of their total area.

The cities are connected by five bridges, over which some 1.5 million trucks and 5 million cars pass each year, comprising the country’s busiest commercial land crossing—and an important node in the global black market. Customs agents in Laredo inspect vehicles traversing the river but can’t thoroughly check them all. When I visited the city last spring, a retired DEA agent drove me to a long-haul crossing and parked his car. “You see that?” he said, pointing at the line of rigs queued up at the bridge. “There’s definitely a load. There is always a load.”

In one form or another, illicit substances have been smuggled across the border as long as the United States has deemed them illicit. Opium and marijuana cultivation in Mexico dates back a century. During Prohibition, Mexicans set up borderland bars to cater to wayward gringos. Mexico was, in fact, the first of the two countries to ban marijuana, but by the 1970s the U.S. had surpassed its neighbor in passing and enforcing antidrug laws, and the modern trafficking system was born.

In the 1980s, the trade in heroin, marijuana, and cocaine was controlled largely by the Guadalajara cartel and its legendary leader, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, known in Mexico as El Padrino, the Godfather. By then the U.S. was closing off the Caribbean routes that smugglers had used to move cocaine from Colombia into south Florida, shifting them overland across Mexico. Colombia’s crackdown on Pablo Escobar and other kingpins helped shape the transition. Opportunities to ferry contraband into the U.S. grew exponentially after 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement dramatically increased the flow of goods across the border, and in the wake of Mexico’s 2000 election, when seven decades of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party came to a close. As political power was decentralized, drug-trafficking organizations began to flourish like never before.

Today, the majority of the marijuana and methamphetamine produced in Mexico is sold in the U.S., and most of the cocaine from Andean countries like Colombia and Peru moves through Mexico on its way north. The more than $1 trillion the U.S. government has spent on the drug war since the early 1970s has proven no match for the market effects of its citizens’ appetite for narcotics. Estimates of the total value of the industry vary wildly, starting under $10 billion, but they range as high as $40 billion—about what Americans spend on wine each year.

Up until the 1990s, the drug trade at the Laredo crossing was the province of freelancers. Then, as the decade drew to a close, a trafficker named Osiel Cárdenas took the helm of the Gulf cartel, which controlled the regional drug trade from its base in Matamoros. A 32-year-old former mechanic who rose quickly through the Gulf ranks, Cárdenas earned the nickname the Friend Killer after he assassinated his associate and rival Salvador Gómez to secure the leadership of the cartel.

If Cárdenas was ruthless, he was also an innovative businessman. The future of the Gulf cartel, he saw, lay in controlling access to the lucrative I-35 corridor, which runs north from Laredo and would enable his organization to reach major distribution hubs like Dallas and Houston. But Cárdenas was also facing territorial incursions from the west by the Sinaloa cartel, the largest player in the Mexican drug trade. To counter the threat, he built an elite security detail, hiring away deserters from the Mexican army’s special forces. (At least one of the twenty-odd soldiers had likely been trained by the U.S. Army, according to a State Department cable later released by WikiLeaks.) The new enforcers called themselves the Zetas.

Wherever Cárdenas went, his soldier protégés went, too. The Friend Killer felt that a little extra protection was never a bad thing. Not only was he fighting to keep his territory, but he had also been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list since a 1999 confrontation with a pair of federal agents in Matamoros, in which Cárdenas’s gunmen had surrounded the Americans’ car; Cárdenas himself had screamed obscenities at them, waving a gold-plated Kalashnikov. He was arrested and extradited to the United States four years later, following a gun battle with Mexican special forces soldiers. His bust fed into a myth of exceptionalism: U.S. agents, virtually alone among the players in the increasingly chaotic drug war, were off-limits.

After Cárdenas’s arrest, the Zetas—who by then had come to rival the Gulf leadership in power and allegiance—had no boss to guard anymore and dispersed to various towns and cities, extending their influence. “Each one became a leader,” says a high-level informant who worked for the Gulf cartel under Cárdenas. “If they had stayed bodyguards of the new boss of the cartel, this whole wave of violence in the country wouldn’t be happening.” In 2010, the Zetas finally split from the Gulf and quickly wrestled control of Nuevo Laredo away from their old employers.

Today, the Zetas run the city’s downtown from a red adobe building with arched doorways a few blocks from the pedestrian bridge to Texas. No longer content merely to traffic drugs, they have diversified into kidnapping (though they rarely return the kidnapped), extortion, and human trafficking, among other pursuits. Nuevo Laredo shopkeepers wishing to stay in business must pay the Zetas a tax to do so or risk mortal consequences. Zeta lookouts in T-shirts and jeans are ubiquitous, posted opposite the bridge and eyeing everyone who spills off.

The morning I crossed over myself, in May, I was the only gringa in sight. The man I was with, a local dentist I’ll call Luis, was nervous about the attention I might attract, and he grabbed my hand as we stepped off the bridge. In Zeta-occupied Nuevo Laredo, the rhythms of normal life and flashes of barbarism exist alongside each other with jarring incongruity. In one of the town’s central plazas, children were performing a Oaxacan dance. They wore burlap sacks over their heads, with big eyes and lips painted on them, and their parents laughed and snapped pictures as the giant faces spun and hopped around. Then Luis and I turned a corner and passed the husk of a building still smoldering from a fire. “What was that place?” I asked. Luis just shrugged, guiding me to the other side of the street. He estimated that Nuevo Laredo’s population had dropped 70 percent in recent years. I balked at the number. “It’s true,” he said. “Everyone who can leave has left.”

That afternoon, a car bomb exploded in front of a police station, wounding 10, and I learned that someone had set fire to a disco the night before. Curious if it was the building I had walked by, I tried searching for images online but found none. For Mexican journalists, reporting on the drug war has become nearly as hazardous as fighting it, and much of the country’s once dogged local coverage has been replaced by a frightened silence. A few days after my visit, Zane Plemmons, a Texas photojournalist on assignment in Nuevo Laredo for the Mexican newspaper El Debate, disappeared; a receptionist at the hotel where he was staying told his family that armed men wearing masks had cleared his belongings out of his room.

Six

After a few years, Zapata’s hard work paid off, and he was invited to join ICE’s elite Border Enforcement Security Task Force. The job pulled him deeper into the workings of the vast criminal economy spanning the river. Now he was probing gun-trafficking rings, drug smugglers, and money launderers—virtually anyone and anything that could be considered a threat to American interests. That summer, Zapata’s team intercepted 80 firearms en route from Phoenix, by way of San Antonio, to the Sinaloa cartel. On another occasion, he led ICE agents in a raid on a ranch off a dirt road south of Laredo, where a large stash of cocaine had been hidden in a cement bunker. A photograph from that day shows Zapata, who had jumped into the hole ahead of his colleagues, holding up a bundle of white powder and grinning.

Zapata’s cases could last months; at the height of a probe, it wasn’t unusual for him to pull an 80-hour week. The pressure could be overwhelming, and he tried to keep the mood light around the office. “If you’re stressed out, just do a little picture, man,” he would say. Photoshopping the faces of colleagues onto the bodies of models and movie stars, he taped up the results over their desks. To unwind he bought a boat, which he took out fishing on Laguna Madre Bay whenever he could. He formed a competitive barbecue team with a few guys from the office, inviting a couple of agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to join and christening the squad Fire and Ice. He maintained his college affinity for video games, playing epic sessions of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare; they helped him with his work, he swore to Joyner, his girlfriend.

Still, by late 2010 the pace was beginning to wear him out. Sometimes he fantasized about leaving it all behind, retiring to a big ranch and raising a brood as a stay-at-home dad. Then the job in Mexico came up. Zapata was ready for a break. He signed up right away.

As his transfer date approached, Zapata started going for long runs on the looping, windswept roads by his condo and eating salad, eventually shedding 25 pounds. He told Joyner and his parents that he wanted to be strong and fit just in case but assured them that his life wouldn’t be in danger. He would be riding a desk at the embassy: American agents there provided intelligence, training, and equipment but were not supposed to participate in field operations. And although the drug war had ravaged much of the country, Mexico City had remained remarkably untouched. The U.S. embassy sat on Reforma Avenue, a treelined boulevard full of public art and ritzy hotels. Barricades surrounded the perimeter, and visitors had to pass through two levels of security to get in. “I’ll be working out of the embassy,” he told his mother. “I’ll be driving an armored vehicle. My friends have gone and they’ve come back.”

The night before Zapata left, the Pittsburgh Steelers were playing the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl, and he and Joyner went to a party at another agent’s house. As usual, he beelined for the kitchen and spent most of the night there. There was nothing he loved more than this. Looking back, friends remembered him as relaxed and cheerful that night, as if the stress of the grind in Laredo were falling away.

The next morning, Joyner drove him to the airport, and they sat down for one last meal together at an airport restaurant. Joyner picked at her eggs. She was less enthusiastic about his assignment than he was. There was the vague sense of danger, but mostly she wasn’t looking forward to their being apart for three months. Finally, Zapata stood up, wrapped his long arms around her one last time, and disappeared through the security gate.

Seven

Zapata spent the next few days meeting new colleagues at the embassy, going shopping, and checking out the bars in the capital city. On Sunday, February 13, he toured Teotihuacan, the ancient holy city of the Aztecs, climbing one of the pyramids and lingering at the top, stretching his arms toward the sky. Back at the hotel the following evening, he called Joyner. He hadn’t had much to do yet, he told her, and he was anxious to get started. But things were picking up—he was going on a mission in the morning.

That afternoon, Ricky Gonzalez, the agent from Laredo whom Zapata was replacing in Mexico City, had said that he wasn’t able to go to San Luis Potosí for a scheduled meeting with agents from the consulate in Monterrey. Zapata, as usual, volunteered. (Although ICE has refused to comment on the nature of Zapata’s assignment, several government sources familiar with the case told me they heard it was “some kind of wiretap”—a possible explanation for the equipment, widely rumored to be surveillance gear, that Zapata and Avila were dispatched to collect. One source believed that the target of the wiretap was the Zetas.) The next day, he and Avila set out early from Mexico City, hoping to beat the morning rush hour.

It was unclear how the agents first caught the attention of the cell that attacked them. Julian Zapata, the Zeta whom the Mexican police eventually apprehended, would later claim the ambush was a mistake. He and his men, he said, mistook Zapata and Avila for rivals in an armored SUV. Although landlocked San Luis Potosí was of little obvious import to the cartels, it had recently become a flashpoint as the struggle between the Gulf cartel and the Zetas had intensified and moved south. From 2009 to 2010, the number of recorded homicides in the state jumped 55 percent to 752.

The Zeta’s answer was a convenient one—better to call the first murder of an American agent in decades an accident. But there were reasons to believe he might have been telling the truth. An organized hit seemed unlikely; Jaime Zapata had newly arrived in Mexico and had volunteered for the mission on short notice. The Suburban had diplomatic plates, but the cartel informant I spoke to laughed off the possibility that the Zetas allegedly involved in the hit—unsophisticated recent recruits—would have known what to make of them. “These guys are hicks who didn’t go to school,” he said. “They’re from the hills, from the countryside. They don’t know what a diplomatic plate is.”

Accidentally or otherwise, the Zetas had kicked a hornet’s nest. Presidents Obama and Calderón both expressed outrage and promised that justice would be done. Mexico put up a $1 million reward for information and quickly began an investigation. Eight days later, they rounded up Julian Zapata and his five alleged accomplices. Zapata was quickly extradited to the United States.

There were officers on the American side who believed the arrest to be one of political expedience. “I don’t even know if he’s the triggerman,” one retired law-enforcement officer familiar with the case said of Julian Zapata. “But hey, we got somebody! Who cares! We can check that box.” At the press conference in Mexico City, local reporters were quick to note that one of the six men paraded before them had bruises on his face and seemed to have trouble walking, though El Piolín himself appeared to be unscathed. But authorities on both sides insisted they had the right men. The story might well have ended there but for one thing: The raids in Mexico had also yielded weapons. And at least two of them had come from Texas.

Eight

Hours after Jaime Zapata’s funeral on February 22, agents from every federal law-enforcement agency in the United States began knocking on doors across the country. Earlier dragnets in the drug war had been narrowly targeted, with the aim of rolling up a single cartel’s operations north of the border. Operation Fallen Hero was different. Feds and local police in all 50 states were instructed to pull every warrant they had for anyone with a connection to any cartel—the government was after not just the Zetas but the entire drug-trafficking industry. There was a “schoolyard mentality” to the raids, Carl Pike, the head of the DEA’s special operations division, told CBS News. “A bully comes up and pushes you, and if you don’t push back, you’re a victim. We’re pushing back.”

In the space of a week, 676 arrests were made across the country. In New Jersey, agents seized $1 million in cash. In Houston, authorities hauled in $750,000, 322 pounds of marijuana, and 28 pounds of cocaine. And in the Dallas suburb of Lancaster, ATF agents paid a visit to the home of a man by the name of Otilio Osorio.

A stocky 22-year-old, Otilio was living with his elder brother Ranferi, a former Marine who had been discharged honorably in 2009 after tours in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa. Shortly after leaving the service, Ranferi Osorio’s estranged wife later testified, he had gone into the business of buying and selling guns as a means of supporting his family.

From there it was a short path to lucrative dealings with Mexican criminals willing to pay top dollar for American guns. The practice of straw purchasing, in which a U.S. citizen with no criminal background makes the buy, is one of the principal means—if not the principal means—by which gangs like the Zetas arm themselves. No one knows how many guns cross the border illegally, but a 2009 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that over 87 percent of the firearms linked to violent crimes in Mexico and traced over the previous five years originated with U.S. dealers. A straw purchaser could be anyone. They are, by definition, the kind of people no one would be watching.

The Dallas office of the ATF first received reports that the Osorio brothers were buying weapons late in the summer of 2010, according to reporting by Hearst Newspapers, but that fact alone wasn’t enough to cause alarm or warrant a special investigation. The Osorio name turned up a second time on September 17, 2010, when a WASR rifle and a Draco pistol that had been seized in La Pryor, Texas, en route to the border, had been traced back to Ranferi. An ATF office in New Mexico had requested the trace, but the results were never sent to Dallas.

Otilio Osorio seemed unalarmed when the ATF showed up on his doorstep on February 24, and he invited the agents inside, according to later court testimony. Guns in various stages of disassembly were lying around the house in plain view. Osorio told the agents that he was a Draco specialist, a man who bought and fixed up weapons. After a brief conversation, the agents left Osorio to his work. Whatever the brothers were up to, it didn’t appear to be enough to justify an arrest.

That same day, the ATF requested trace results on three weapons that had been recovered in San Luis Potosí during Julian Zapata’s arrest. Mexican authorities had matched them to the attack on the Suburban through ballistics testing, but the serial numbers had been effaced, and the weapons were sent to a special ATF lab with the technology to recover the numbers. On February 25, the trace results came in: One of the weapons was a Draco, a Romanian AK-47 pistol that had been sold in October 2010 at a gun show in Fort Worth, Texas. The buyer’s name, according to the gun dealer’s records, was Otilio Osorio.

Three months earlier, on the morning of November 9, 2010, Otilio, Ranferi, and a next-door neighbor named Kelvin Morrison had stuffed a cache of semiautomatic assault rifles into duffel bags and driven to a Walmart off the interstate in Lancaster. It was early enough that the parking lot was nearly empty, save for a red truck—a battered old commercial wrecker, its cab held together with baling wire. The driver who emerged from the cab was a courier who had spent the previous day exchanging phone calls with the Osorios and buyers for the Zetas in Nuevo Laredo.

The brothers pulled up next to the truck and popped the hood on their red Ford Explorer. They connected jumper cables to the truck’s battery to make the exchange look innocuous. As they loaded the bags, the courier told them that the drive to Laredo would take about eight hours. “Let them know what time I left,” he said. “They’re expecting these things down there in a certain amount of time.”

“You be careful,” Ranferi told him. “I’ll see you in the next one.” The three Americans got back in the Explorer and drove away.

Unbeknownst to the dealers, federal agents had been watching the handoff. Once the Explorer had gone, agents from Dallas tailed the Osorio brothers while a team from Laredo followed the truck. Safely out of view of the Osorios, the truck pulled to the side of the road, and the agents jumped in back. The courier was actually an ATF informant, who had been wired with a pen camera throughout the transaction. His ruse yielded 40 weapons in total—each with a bright silver strip where the serial number used to be.

The Dallas team stayed with the Explorer for a couple of hours, waiting until the vehicle made a routine traffic violation to pull it over. Instead of arresting the Osorios and Morrison, however, the ATF agents simply took down their information and let them go. The agency declined to comment for this story, but Thomas Crowley, an ATF spokesman, told reporters in May that the stop was part of another criminal probe. “Taking them down and arresting them at that time,” he said, “would have possibly jeopardized that investigation.” An ATF agent named Hector Tarango would later testify that his office had merely been assisting the DEA that morning. Another DEA source told me that the sting was part of a DEA operation in Laredo; the ATF had agreed not to interfere. “This was not their case,” he said. “This was our case.”

In any event, the ATF agents initially failed to fill out the paperwork for the handoff at the Walmart. After the Draco used to kill Zapata was traced back to the Osorios, however, they finally did. Three days later, authorities returned to the Osorios’ house with an arrest warrant. There they seized rifles, grinders, a vice, and a can of black spray-paint—the makings of a smuggler’s workshop.

Nine

Zapata’s murder, as it happened, was not the only killing of a federal agent that would be tied to a botched gun bust. Two months before his death, a U.S. Border Patrol agent named Brian Terry had been killed in a shootout with gunmen—believed to be Mexican bandits—in Peck Canyon, Arizona, near the Mexican border. The two semiautomatic rifles found at the crime scene were later traced to firearms dealers in Phoenix, and it emerged that the straw buyers who’d purchased them had been under surveillance by the ATF. They were targets of an operation called Fast and Furious—reportedly because the suspects liked to drag-race cars in the desert—and were known to be smuggling weapons across the border.

Several weeks after Terry’s death, a Phoenix ATF agent named John Dodson contacted Senator Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, with an explosive allegation. Dodson claimed that his superiors had deliberately allowed the Fast and Furious guns to “walk” across the border as part of an attempt to map out the smuggling network that armed the Sinaloa cartel. Instead, the weapons had simply gone missing in Mexico, eventually turning up in the hands of Terry’s killers.

The notion that the U.S. might have willingly armed Mexican cartels was obviously alarming, and as Dodson became more outspoken and the Justice Department refused to provide a satisfying explanation, Fast and Furious mushroomed into a full-blown scandal. Conservative media outlets covered it obsessively—and for the Republican lawmakers who had taken the reins of Congress’s investigative committees in January after four years out of power, it offered a golden opportunity to hold the Obama administration’s feet to the fire. Two weeks before Zapata’s murder, Grassley had written to Kenneth Melson, the acting director of the ATF, first demanding information about Fast and Furious, and then, in a follow-up letter, accusing the ATF of “retaliation against whistleblowers.” On February 28, 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder finally asked Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz to investigate Fast and Furious.

It was in this politically charged atmosphere that the Justice Department announced the arrest of the Osorio brothers and Kelvin Morrison on March 1. As in the investigation of Terry’s murder, the central question was whether weapons that could have been intercepted by federal agents had ended up in Mexico rather than an evidence locker in Texas. Otilio Osorio had bought the pistol used to kill Zapata less than a month before handing off a shipment of guns to an emissary for the gang that had killed him. Had the Draco been in the next shipment he sent to Mexico?

The Justice Department’s official announcement of the arrest was vague on this score. It detailed the November sting operation in the Walmart parking lot, and acknowledged that one of the guns used in the assault on the ICE agents’ vehicle had been purchased in October by Otilio Osorio, but carefully avoided drawing any connection between the two. “We saw the press release, and the press release was very curious,” one of Grassley’s committee staffers told me. Three days later, the senator’s office sent the first of another series of letters to Melson—this time about the Zapata case. “How can we know that [the gun Osorio bought] did not make its way down to Mexico after the November investigation,” it read, “when the arrest of these three criminals might have prevented the gun from being trafficked and later used to murder Agent Zapata?”

In May, ICE invited the Zapata family to fly to Washington, D.C., to attend National Police Week, the annual ceremony for the families of fallen law-enforcement officers. At ICE headquarters, John Morton, the director, showed them around. A three-dimensional plaque honoring their son had been installed near the entrance to the building. Further inside was a second Zapata plaque made of crystal, and they stopped to place red roses at its base. On the third floor, they were met by the agency’s top brass, gathered in the newly dedicated Jaime Zapata conference room.

Beneath the formalities, however, was an unspoken tension. Back in Texas, the Zapatas had hired a pair of attorneys, Benigno Martinez and Raymond Thomas, who had traveled with them to Washington. At first the family had simply wanted help closing their son’s estate as they struggled to put their lives back together. Amid “the hype,” as Mary described it, of the funeral, it seemed as if the entire federal government were there to help them. Then the agents left their living room, the SUVs with their tinted windows pulled out of the driveway, and the Zapatas were alone. Mary felt like she was sinking into the ground. She wasn’t really sleeping anymore, only two or three hours a night at most. One night after another she would sit up in bed, turn on her laptop, and type “Jaime Zapata ICE agent” into the search engine.

It was during one of her midnight searches that Mary first came across the Osorio brothers and the details that had gradually emerged about their story. In March 2011, Grassley’s investigators turned up mentions of Ranferi Osorio and Kelvin Morrison in ATF records from September 2010—suggesting that, contrary to the language of the Justice Department press release about their arrest, the agency had reason to suspect the Osorios were trafficking weapons long before the gun that killed Zapata was purchased. On March 3, an editorial appeared in the Dallas Morning News demanding that the ATF “provide a full accounting” of gun walking “that may well have contributed to two American law enforcement deaths.” Mary wanted answers, too. She had seen the coverage of the Fast and Furious saga on TV and wondered, What about my son? Did something like that happen to my son?

Before the Zapatas left for Washington, Martinez and Thomas had set up meetings with Grassley and Representative Darrel Issa, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Congress’s main investigative panel. “By May,” Thomas told me, “we had questions.” The Zapatas had not been allowed to view the report on their son’s autopsy or even been told the number of times he was shot. They still did not know why he had been sent to San Luis Potosí in the first place. In fact, they knew virtually nothing about the final moments of his life—not officially, anyway. The FBI was investigating the murder but had not shared its findings. With few facts to grab onto amid the swirl of rumor and conjecture, the Zapatas found themselves entertaining even the most absurd speculations. “Did Victor kill him? I just don’t know,” Mary later told me. There was no evidence to suggest he had, but still, “Your mind goes crazy.”

When the family and their attorneys met Issa in his office, the California Republican vowed to find out if there was any connection between Zapata’s death and a gun-walking program like Fast and Furious, and suggested that the attorneys file requests for the government records of the case through the Freedom of Information Act. A few weeks later, Martinez and Thomas mailed a letter to the FBI, the U.S. attorney in south Texas, and three ICE officials. “There are so many different stories regarding what happened that day as well as the different factors that may have contributed to Jaime’s death,” it read. The Zapatas “need your help to find closure.” A few weeks later, the first responses began to arrive. One after another, the requests were denied.

There was, of course, a witness. Victor Avila and his family had also been invited to Washington for National Police Week. The Zapatas had not seen him since he had placed the flower on their son’s coffin in Brownsville, and their attorneys had been trying to contact him without success. “There was no communication,” says Thomas. Though he was with the Zapatas during the tour of the memorials at ICE headquarters, within earshot of all the agency higher-ups there was never a chance for them to talk candidly.

Then, one afternoon in late November, the phone rang at Thomas’s desk in McAllen, Texas. “I nearly fell off my chair,” he told me. The caller was Magdalena Villalobos, a personal-injury lawyer in Fort Worth. She was also Avila’s twin sister, and she wanted to talk.

Ten

From the moment the helicopter whisked him away from the scene of the attack, with Zapata’s body laid out beside him, Avila had been a wreck. At the hospital in San Luis Potosí, surrounded by medical personnel and officers he had never met, he was petrified, certain that at any moment the killers would find him there. He had no idea why they had come for him and Zapata on the highway. But the cartels had eyes and ears in so many government institutions that surely tracking him to the local hospital would be easy.

He had been wary of the mission from the start. Zapata had jumped eagerly at the assignment, but Avila, with his greater depth of experience on the embassy detail, wondered why they were being sent. According to his account of events later related in court filings, Avila confronted his and Zapata’s supervisor in Mexico City, Juan Gelista, with his concerns. The U.S. embassy had a courier service for exactly this kind of work, he pointed out—why couldn’t the equipment simply be flown via diplomatic pouch?

The planned ground route, which crossed the disputed border between Zeta and Gulf cartel territory, struck Avila as too dangerous to be worth the unnecessary risk. Less than a month before, embassy employees had received a memo detailing the hazards posed by the cartels in the area. An advisory from the consulate in Monterrey seven months earlier had warned that the “location and timing of future armed engagements cannot be predicted” throughout northern Mexico and specifically advised against traveling in SUVs, the type of vehicles favored by carjackers. Even San Luis Potosí, six hours to the south, seemed to be getting worse; the day before, authorities there had responded to reports of a firefight on Highway 57 and arrived on the scene to find a still-burning car. An ICE official in Monterrey had warned Avila about an uptick in cartel activity along the exact stretch of highway he and Zapata would be traveling.

According to Avila’s account, Gelista took his concerns seriously enough to break into a meeting between ICE’s attaché in Mexico City and his deputy, Anthony Salisbury, to discuss them. Salisbury seemed irritated at the interruption. “I am not aware of any security issue,” he told Gelista, according to Avila. “This is the first I hear of it.” The mission went ahead as planned.

After the attack, Avila was sent to Houston for medical treatment. From there his family was moved from place to place, never returning to Mexico City. By the fall of 2011, he had begun to recover from his physical injuries, but the trauma of the attack had left him unable to return to work. Finally, he asked Villalobos if she would represent him. “Things began to simmer down a little bit, and he began to digest what happened,” she told me. He thought the mission had been reckless; the memory of it “was eating at him and eating at him.” After Thanksgiving, Villalobos invited Thomas and Martinez to meet her at her office in Fort Worth, and they started planning their strategy.

If anything, the thicket of questions surrounding the incident was growing denser. On January 30, 2012, federal prosecutors in Houston sentenced a man named Manuel Barba, who, like the Osorios, had been caught trafficking guns to the Zetas, including a Century Arms 7.62 semiautomatic rifle that had been in the possession of Zapata’s alleged killers when they were captured in San Luis Potosí. Barba, a pudgy meth dealer, had been running a weapons-smuggling operation out of his mother’s kitchen in Houston; the rifle in question had been bought by an Iraq War veteran named Robert Riendfliesh at a pawn shop in nearby Beaumont and stripped of its serial number by Barba, then shipped along with nine other guns to the Zetas. Like the Osorios, Barba had been a fixture in recent ATF gunrunning probes: Witnesses kept identifying him as a source of weapons. Yet several months had passed before Barba, already awaiting trial on drug-distribution charges, was finally indicted for trafficking firearms. A warrant had been issued for his arrest the day before Zapata’s murder.

Barba’s guilty plea was never publicly announced, and it was weeks before reporters found out about it. Mary Zapata had only learned of it by happenstance, one night while she was awake in bed with her laptop, searching online for information about her son. That the family had not been informed through official channels felt like an affront. The Zapatas’ attorneys requested that the family have the opportunity to testify during sentencing hearings for Barba but were denied on the grounds that the link between the case and Zapata’s death was too distant. This perceived exclusion was the final straw. Not long after, the family agreed that Martinez, Thomas, and Villalobos should begin drafting a lawsuit.

Eleven

On a warm afternoon in April, I drove to Beaumont to visit the pawn shop where one of Barba’s smuggled guns had been bought nearly two years earlier. JJ’s was a windowless box in a seedy strip on the edge of town. The interior was dark, with a line of rifles on the back wall. Behind the register was a man who looked to be in his sixties, wearing a blue JJ’s shirt, a pair of shorts, and white socks pulled up to his calves. It was clear I didn’t belong there, and there wasn’t much point in being coy, so I introduced myself and asked if I could ask him a few questions about the rifle from JJ’s that had been found in the possession of a federal agent’s alleged killers.

The man looked me up and down without moving his head, then put his feet up on the counter. “No, thanks,” he said. Another employee, a dark-eyed giant, placed his hands on a glass case filled with weapons. Noticing some faded Donna Summer and Wham! cassettes by the register, I made an awkward stab at small talk: “Don’t sell a lot of those, huh?” The seconds ticked excruciatingly by. Finally, the man in shorts stood up. He wore an enormous brass belt buckle and, on his left hand, a diamond-encrusted ring. “There’s nothing that beats an intelligent conversation between two knowledgeable people on a subject,” he said. And with that, he showed me the door.

I wasn’t sure what even a less hostile gun dealer in JJ’s position would have said. On the first anniversary of Zapata’s death, a local TV station in Dallas had interviewed Jim Terrell, the dealer who had sold Otilio Osorio the Draco used in the murder. “That breaks my heart,” Terrell—a former law-enforcement officer himself—said. But he was quick to point out that “we always strive to go above and beyond in our screening process” and that he scrupulously documented his gun sales.

Which, in a way, was the point. The longer I looked into the case, the more it seemed like even the most damning of the scenarios that might have led to Zapata’s death—in which the ATF willingly let guns end up in the hands of the Zetas—was overshadowed by the sense that Zapata’s death, or one like it, was simply waiting to happen. The larger failures of the governments on both sides of the border—of the U.S. to curtail the easy access to high-powered weapons, of Mexico to stamp out the corruption that had allowed the cartels to rule much of the country with impunity—were the culprits that no one wanted to blame. The gun dealers surely knew this much: If it hadn’t been their weapons, it would’ve been one of the thousands of others that slip across the border every year. If it hadn’t been Jaime Zapata, it almost certainly would have been someone else.

The following month, I visited the ICE headquarters in Laredo. In the hallway on the second floor, I passed a bronze bust of Zapata, paid for by the Friends of Jaime Zapata, a local charity. It had been unveiled in a ceremony the day before, on what would have been Zapata’s 34th birthday. Mary and Amador Zapata had dutifully attended, even though they had recently appeared on CNN questioning the government’s silence. They looked tired and left quickly after the ceremony. The next day they were returning to Washington for another set of memorials; it was National Police Week again.

Jerry Robinette, the special agent in charge of the office, had given me clearance to talk to a handful of Zapata’s colleagues, though the attack itself would be off-limits. In any case, he told me, there was only “a small circle” who really knew what happened. I was directed to a tiny room with a two-way mirror, where I waited for the 11 people who had signed up to talk to me. A barrel-chested ex-Marine with an anchor tattooed on his biceps walked in and sat down. Javier—like most of the agents—asked me to use his first name only. Between sips from an energy drink, he told me about his time working with Zapata, expounding enthusiastically on Zapata’s prankster reputation and barbecuing skills. But when I asked why he thought Zapata’s family had had to struggle to get answers, he just shrugged.

Another agent walked in, the man who had hosted the Super Bowl party that Zapata had attended the night before he left for Mexico. The two had been very close, Rick said. They had taken trips to the beach; they went fishing together all the time. Rick had even gone to Mexico after Zapata’s death to work at the embassy. But before I could get to the obvious question, he cut me off. “I didn’t learn anything,” he insisted.

That seemed unlikely, and I said so. “You’re a professional investigator,” I said.

“I really don’t know what happened,” he said, getting up to leave.

I was beginning to feel like a visiting therapist, someone the cops were ordered to talk to whether they wanted to or not. The clipped, closely circumscribed answers I was getting were surely, at least in part, a matter of self-interest—the agents’ boss, after all, had instructed them not to tell me much. But there was a genuinely speculative edge to their responses. It occurred to me that Zapata’s own colleagues might not have been part of the small circle, either.

In June, Zapata’s parents’ lawyers held a press conference in Brownsville to announce that they were suing the federal government for $60 million over the wrongful death of their son. Avila had joined them in the suit and filed a separate claim for $12 million. “Jaime was murdered by narco-traffickers,” the claim read. “But the reckless acts and omissions by ICE, ATF and FBI created the opportunity for his death to occur.” A government operation, the lawsuit alleged, was “responsible for allowing … weapons to walk into the hands of known killers.”

In the weeks I spent talking to them, the Zapatas seemed bewildered by what had happened to them, paralyzed by their grief and ill-equipped to navigate the suddenly complex world they inhabited. “I’m just a nobody,” Mary said at one point, telling me that she worried she wasn’t “even educated enough to demand or question or get to the bottom of this.” At the same time, I could see their story becoming more polished, their delivery more poised. They were surrounded by advocates now: the attorneys trying to extract a small fortune from the government, the congressional investigators looking for ammunition for their battles with the Obama administration, even a public relations firm hired by their attorneys to drum up interest in the lawsuit in the media. It was hard to say whether it was getting them any closer to the one thing they cared about. “I don’t know,” Mary told me in September, “if I will ever know what really happened.”

I thought back to the afternoon I had spent with the Zapatas in their sunlight-flooded living room. As they were talking, I began to notice the photographs on the walls. Above the couch was a picture of Jaime, in a suit and tie, standing beside an American flag—the official portrait that had appeared in the stories about his death. Then I noticed a second copy of the same picture, then another and another. I counted seven in all. Mary plucked a photo album from the table and started thumbing through it. “That’s Jaimito. That’s Jaime. This is Jaime in the tractor. That’s Jaime. Jaime and Santa Claus. That’s him. He was very tall, long legs,” she said. She lingered on a photograph of him on his new boat, holding up a big catch and smiling. “There’s a lot of pictures of Jaime and fish.”

She showed me a china cabinet filled with Jaime Zapata commemorative coins and buttons, the cowboy boots he’d had engraved with his initials. Finally, she pointed to a cast-iron plaque above the dining room table that was engraved with Jaime’s name and badge number and a biblical verse, Matthew 5:9: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” The plaque was so heavy, Mary told me, that it required four men to lift. “It’s beautiful,” she said, gazing up at it. “It’s perfect.”