Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that Staten Island Congressman Michael Grimm, a former F.B.I. agent, raised over $500,000 in campaign money with the help of a man now under investigation—by the F.B.I.—for embezzlement. The man, Ofer Biton, was a close associate of an Orthodox rabbi in New York City, outside of Mr. Grimm’s district. The story reports that Biton and Grimm went door to door, soliciting money from the rabbi’s congregants, often in cash and sometimes in amounts greater than allowed under campaign law:
One follower of the rabbi said in an interview that Mr. Grimm pressed him for $20,000. The follower said Mr. Grimm instructed him to meet him “near the F.B.I. building,” in Lower Manhattan, in summer 2010 to give the money. The follower said he handed over $5,000 in cash in an envelope to Mr. Grimm in Mr. Grimm’s car.
Within a week, the follower said, he gave Mr. Grimm a $5,000 check from a friend. Mr. Grimm then repeatedly called the follower and demanded another $10,000, the follower said.
“Every day, he used to call me, over and over,” the follower said.
The follower said he ignored the calls and did not give again.
A second follower recalled that Mr. Grimm came to his office in Manhattan to solicit a legal contribution. As he was handing over the check, the second follower said, Mr. Grimm confided in him that there were ways of working around the campaign rules.
The story is well-reported (and includes a strange link to Lebron James), and worth reading in full. But the part that rang most familiar to me was Grimm’s response:
“Any suggestion that I was involved in any activities that may run afoul of the campaign finance laws is categorically false and belied by my life of public service protecting and enforcing the laws of this country,” Mr. Grimm said in the statement on Friday.
In 2011, I reported on Grimm’s career “enforcing the laws of this country,” including allegations—substantiated by witnesses including a former N.Y.P.D. officer, but denied by Grimm—that Grimm had misused his authority at a nightclub. My story was largely about Grimm’s work with a dubious F.B.I. informant and con-man known as Josef von Habsburg. When I tried to question Grimm on both matters in his Washington office, he ended our interview by saying, “you don’t rate to come here and question me.” He declined to provide myself or the New Yorker’s fact-checking department any evidence to support his denials. When the story came out, he claimed the article was a Democratic Party plot.
In light of the most recent allegations against Grimm, I’m reposting my New Yorker piece.
Posted at 10:54 am | Comment | Filed under Recent stories |
Twenty-five days. That’s how long I lasted on the lam. Most people arriving at this site will already know the basics: Last month, after writing a story for Wired about people who faked their own deaths, disappearing from their lives to start again, I set out to do something similar myself. I would drop out of my own life for a month, and act like I was starting a new one. Wired, meanwhile, would offer a $5000 bounty for anyone who tracked me down. We set a few basic parameters and then, journalistically speaking, we turned out all the lights and plunged headlong into the darkness. You can read a summary of what happened here.
I’ll be describing those 25 days in great detail in the December issue. There were almost daily surprises, both in what I found myself doing, and what I saw (and, of course, failed to see) the “hunters” doing to find me.
But for now I wanted to offer an extended thanks. First, to my friends and family, some of whom were made unwitting participants in this privacy-obliterating endeavor, and all of whom—especially my wonderful girlfriend (whose name the dedicated hunters know already)—were incredibly understanding and played along. Also to Nick Thompson, who sacrificed an insane amount of hours from other work and from promoting his own book (“The Hawk and The Dove,” which is getting a fantastic response, and which everyone should check out), to serve as the lead investigator. Without Nick, the whole thing would have failed in a multitude of ways. As well everyone at Wired and Lone Shark Games (particularly Teeuwyn Woodruff and Mike Selinker), both for enabling it and putting in many of their own hours. And finally to all the folks who hunted me—and aided me—for contributing their obsession and ingenuity, and especially for (with a few pretty harmless exceptions) honoring the rules about harassing my family. Many have emailed—and I want to hear from anyone who followed it: eratliff@atavist.net—to let me know they were glad I was caught. I don’t blame them. And although I was disappointed, I’m pretty pleased that at least it was by a clever bunch like Jeff Reifman and the guys at Naked Pizza.
I’d also like to offer an apology, to people I encountered along the way and deceived about my identity. It was one of the worst parts of the whole experience. I’ve been contacting them individually to explain whenever possible (a strange journalistic endeavor, that), and they’ve so far been gracious and forgiving, taking the whole thing in the spirit of fun it was intended. But many I won’t be able to find, and to them I am sorry. I won’t write about anyone by name who hasn’t given me explicit approval to do so.
To critics who griped that it wasn’t “real” enough; that it was either too easy to find me or (as people argued right up until I was caught) too difficult; that a “true” man-on-the-run would or wouldn’t have done this or that; I can only say: You nailed it! I wasn’t, in fact, a “real” fugitive. Very well observed, and I fully support your conviction that you would have done it better. But in our case, we were trying to remain, as much as possible, both authentic and engaging, two goals that were often in conflict. In compressing my time on the lam into 30 days, with the general public as the investigators, we didn’t exactly have a model to follow. You may also find that many of the things people found most “unreal,” like me using my ATM and credit cards at times, were not at all what they seemed.
Finally, to accusations of carrying out a “stunt,” I plead guilty to all but the pejorative assumption—given that category would include the journalistic “stunts” behind “Hell’s Angels,” “The Paper Lion” (and other Plimpton adventures), “Into Thin Air,” and “Nickled and Dimed,” among other pieces of narrative nonfiction that I greatly admire. We attempted what we thought was a unique, albeit self-indulgent and inevitably flawed, reporting venture. We’re hoping readers will find the results as fascinating as we did. But you can check out the December article and decide for yourselves.
Posted at 4:32 pm | 10 Comments | Filed under Articles, Crime, Disclosures, Recent stories, Vanish, Wired |
Somewhat belated in this round of story hyping, but my latest for Wired is out in the July issue. Headlined “Origin of Species: How a T. Rex Femur Sparked a Scientific Smackdown,” it concerns a research dispute that grew out of the discovery of T. Rex protein fragments, announced in Science in 2007. The takeaway from that claim, as it was elegantly put in one headline at the time, summed up as: “Study Tyrannosaurus Rex Basically a Big Chicken.” (Not to be confused with the Big Chicken). Several researchers, however, found fault in the initial study.
I won’t spoil the ending, but I daresay it’s the most exciting mass spectrometry protein detection story you’ll read this month….and maybe even all year. But it’s also about dinosaurs! And more than that, about how science operates and scientific disputes — even entertainingly acrimonious ones — get resolved.
For anyone who has already read it, here’s a response from U. Maryland professor Steven Salzberg–whom I interviewed for the piece–on the story and the latest T. Rex research.
Posted at 7:31 pm | 1 Comment | Filed under Recent stories |
My story from this week’s New York magazine, in which Mr. Lewis helms the squad in a tense late-inning affair, and I draw the ire of parents in the Berkeley-Albany Softball League for nine and ten-year-olds.
Posted at 12:36 pm | Comments Off | Filed under Recent stories |
[If you are a New Yorker subscriber, you can read it here. For a PDF copy, click here.]
THE NEW YORKER
February 23, 2009
Shoot!
An Appalachian gunsmith’s robot army.
BY EVAN RATLIFF
At the age of seventy-four, Jerry Baber has winnowed his primary interests in life to four subjects: shotguns, robots, women, and cars. When Baber is holding forth—his default mode of communication being the filibuster—his conversation tends to fall somewhere among these categories. Often his passions intersect, as in the question of whether or not a Corvette is an ideal car for picking up women. (It is.) Similarly, Baber might be discussing his love of robots and shotguns, and whether, by combining the two, he is helping to shape the future of warfare from his garage. (He is.)
Baber, an engineer by training, is an expert in investment casting—a method for making small pieces of finely shaped metal. He lives down the road from the Bristol Motor Speedway, in Piney Flats, Tennessee, a hilly town dotted with cattle farms, just south of the Virginia border. There he operates a small foundry, where he manufactures gun parts. Over the years, he has contributed triggers, barrels, hammers, and other components for half a million firearms. “I probably know as much, or more, as any one single person about manufacturing guns,” he told me one afternoon, while driving through the Appalachian foothills in his cherry-red Chevy Impala. (“The best buy on the road today, barring none.”) Post continued…
Posted at 6:01 pm | 7 Comments | Filed under Recent stories |
Just in time for the inauguration, my latest feature for Wired — on whether and how President Obama will carry out his promises to reboot the federal government — is available online. The glossy version should be out sometime later this week or early next.
I’ll have more to write shortly here about what has happened vis-à-vis Obama’s digital strategies since the piece closed in December. First, however, a note of disclosure. Originally the piece contained a description of my own minimal participation in the campaign, part of a longer section on how Obama utilized tech to win the presidency. Eventually we decided that the role of tech in the campaign had been covered well elsewhere (most expertly by Jose Antonio Vargas at The Washington Post). So we focused the piece more on how Obama might use the same digital techniques to govern. The longer first person bit shrunk to the somewhat cryptic:
Those efforts were combined with massive database-crunching to identify potential voters who could be approached door-to-door by last-minute canvassers, myself included.
Posted at 2:09 pm | Comments Off | Filed under Disclosures, Politics, Recent stories, Technology, Wired |
For the August issue of Men’s Journal, I volunteered as an early guinea pig for a genome scanning service offered by the California-based company Navigenics. My genetic proclivity towards any of a couple dozen diseases was less than depressing but mildly alarming — and perhaps also completely unreliable. Here’s a .pdf of the story.
Navigenics and another genetic testing company, 23andMe, both just obtained their official licenses to operate in California.
Posted at 12:44 pm | Comments Off | Filed under Men's Journal, Recent stories, Science |
My latest feature for Wired, “Law of the Jungle,” is out in the June issue. Seven months in the making, it’s the story of how an internationally renowned primatologist named Marc van Roosmalen went from being hailed as an environmental hero to being labeled Brazil’s foremost environmental criminal — sentenced to more than a dozen years in a dank prison in Manaus. Roosmalen, a Dutch-born researcher and naturalized Brazilian citizen, worked for a Brazilian government institute studying both the plants and primates of Amazon, and made a name for himself over the past two decades by discovering a half-dozen or more new species of large primates and other mammals. In an effort to link his science to conservation, he ran primate rehabilitation operations (including out of his backyard, in downtown Manaus), and set up non-governmental organization to raise money to buy and protect the habitats of his discoveries.
Along the way, however, he engendered a variety of enemies, some of them with the power to collapse his life’s work. The environmental authorities spent half a dozen years pursuing him for a shifting collection of environmental crimes that coalesced under one label: biopiracy. Released temporarily from prison, Roosmalen lives on the run in fear for his life. His final appeal is still to be decided.
Posted at 11:37 am | Comments Off | Filed under Environment/Energy, Recent stories, Wired |
In the latest May issue of Outside, I have a feature-length profile of Garrett Lisi, a physicist who came up with a potential unifying theory of physics while living in a van on Maui. (The piece is out on newsstands but not yet online.) The very bare bones of his theory, which he first published last November, involve fitting together the four forces of physics — the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and gravity — into an incredibly intricate shape called E8. Lisi was a challenging guy to capture, mostly because the ideas behind his theory are largely unintelligible to the almost anyone who (like me) lacks some — if not extensive — higher-level study of physics. It was clear as soon as I started delving into it that the stories hyping Lisi as “the next Einstein,” or what have you, were doing so with only the flimsiest of notions of whether he is, or even could be, right.
Interestingly, Lisi himself pretty much seemed to feel the same way. He was ambitious in his aims but modest about his chances of succeeding. As he told me — and several extremely accomplished academic physicists agreed — his theory had at best maybe a 5% chance of being at least partly right. So I ended up trying to play around with this notion of “the next Einstein” (as you can see in the cover line) and use it to focus in on what I found most fascinating about Lisi: that despite his ambitions, he refuses to compromise his lifestyle.
It was also interesting to see the divide among physicists when Lisi started showing up in the media last fall. On the one hand, the surprisingly caustic world of physics blogs made quite a show over having to waste precious time debunking such a crank. On the other, I talked to quite a few physicists (including a Nobel Prize winner) who said some version of, “hey, he’s probably not right, but he’s got some good ideas and does proper math, so who cares if he gets a bit too much press? New ideas are always for the good.” Which struck me — at least as an outsider to the community — as a healthier approach. In any case, no physicist who had actually bothered to talk to Lisi actually thought he even remotely approached being a crank. In fact, they all seemed to kind of admire his outsider approach. He certainly wouldn’t be the first physicist to make contributions working outside of academia.
Posted at 11:47 am | 2 Comments | Filed under Outside, Recent stories, Science |
It’s official: no more excuses for cellulosic ethanol. President Bush signed the new energy bill today, which contains the incredibly overdue provision raising CAFE (federal fuel) standards to 35mpg. That was probably the single most important action the federal government could have taken to push along new energy technologies. But the bill also raises the amount of mandated alternate fuels — “mandated” being used somewhat loosely since there is not a clear enforcement mechanism for the mandate — to 36 billion gallons by 2020. Of that, 16 billion gallons is required to come from cellulosic ethanol. There seems to be a good chance that next year’s Farm Bill will contain biofuel subsidies to go with those standards. The presidential candidates on the whole seem to be enamored with biofuels.
All of which means that the cellulosic researchers and entrepreneurs I wrote about two months ago — all of whom were arguing for a stronger federal mandate and more money to get cellulosic ethanol out of the lab — have gotten their wish: a chance to prove that a cellulosic-ethanol driven transportation system is viable. Now they’ve got to actually make it.
Posted at 2:34 pm | Comments Off | Filed under Environment/Energy, Recent stories |
