American Junkies and the Mexican Revolution

SEPTEMBER 3, 1976 $1.00 Hb PEATURE MEWS MAGAZINI

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Mainlining the revolution

For some time it has been known that Mexican smugglers have been swapping narcotics for U.S. guns, which in turn have been sold to Mexican revolutionaries. While tracing this reckless trade, our reporter finds signs of an even more bizarre connection, in which the middlemen have been eliminated and American dope dealers have become the traffickers of revolt.

By Lawrence Wright Page 20

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY GERRY GERSTEN

We will consider unsolicited manuscripts, art/photos only when accompanied by return postage; the magazine will not be held responsible for loss or damage

Copyright “ 1976 by New Times «7 Communications Corp. All rights (a): reserved wae

Member of Audit Bureau of Circulations

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SEPTEMBER 3, 1976 VOLUME 7, NUMBER 5

Mexico’s war on poppies—and peasants

Mexican officials have turned a U.S.-sponsored “war against drugs” into an anti-guerrilla campaign.

By Mary Jo McConahay Page 33

The Capricorn Connection

In May 1975, it seemed everything Phil Walden touched turned to gold: Jimmy Carter called him a “one-man campaign organization” and his record company, Capricorn, was one of the hottest in the business. This June, however, members of his most successful band, the Allman Brothers, were caught up in a drug bust that rocked all of Macon, Georgia. Now even the unflappable Walden is troubled: “I’m afraid to get a parking ticket. They'll put me away for 4,000 years.” By Robert Sam Anson Page 40

The running tale of Christo’s “Running Fence”

The California Coast Commission was not pleased, nor were some local farmers. But the artist Christo, armed with equal amounts of patience and money, ran the gauntlet of their objections. Soon his “Running Fence” will traverse the hills of Sonoma to the shores of the Pacific, leaving awe and confusion in its white nylon wake.

By Stephen Singular Page 48

Letters Page 4

Slow Down

It's almost all fun and games at the Urban Olympics.

By James S. Kunen Page 6

The Ruling Class When Israel speaks, Jimmy listens.

By Robert Scheer Page 8

Fulminations

Fie on the false prophets in the Jesus Business.

By Larry L. King

Page 11

The Insider Page 12

REVIEWS

Movies: Kitsch kitsch bang bang

Wayne, Eastwood, Harris and Norton are back on the trail again.

By Richard Corliss

Page 60

Jazz: Electrischlock

Pull the plug on electrified music—please!

By Frank Conroy

Page 61

Books: Boom widdy-widdy

Paul Theroux has armed The Family Arsenal with flukes and strained effects. By Geoffrey Wolff

Page 63

Food

Shark, the fin-icky foodstuff.

By Arthur Lubow Page 67

Final Tribute

Pity the political pundit. By Paul Slansky Page 68

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Letters

Southern sojourn

It's going to take more people like Robert Sam Anson (‘Looking for Jimmy,” August 6) if the South is ever going to be thought of as anything but the country’s poor relative

Tell Robert Sam any time he’s down this way he can stop by for a mint julep on my veranda.

E. Joseph Hall, Jr. Bennettsville, South Carolina

Maybe it’s not that the South is being returned to the nation, but we are all becoming a little more southern.

Patti O'Dwyer Washington, D.C.

| suffered through your so-called Special Issue wherein the South is treated with the clinical observation of a National Geographic reporter who has stumbled across a lost nation. It was a very dangerous article. There is no Mystery of Dixie. The only mystery is the fact that in this day and age there are still people who choose to live according to the dictates of the past, and are somewhat primitive in their speech, their amusements and especially their religion and their politics. No mystery this, only a glimpse into the way life has been here, unchanged for years. | refuse to believe that you would want a federal government run like Georgia has been run. | don't believe you at all, Bob Sam.

Alton Cooley Atlanta, Georgia

Thank you for one of the most serious and sensitive pieces of journalism | have ever read. The reporting of New Times on the South by Robert Sam Anson is a classic of positive investigative reporting.

Andrew Young House of Representatives Washington, D.C.

As a Maryland southerner who matured in New York, I've always contended that Georgia peanuts and New York martinis are a perfect combination.

George Garrott Sun City, Arizona

| have only one question to ask Robert Anson regarding his portrayal of Jimmy Carter. “Does he walk on water, too?”

Dale Curnutte Columbus, Ohio

Anson's piece is first rate.

Julian Bond The State Senate Atlanta, Georgia

Bob Anson did a first rate job in his article about Jimmy in the South. It seems he really understands Jimmy, his sense of selfand place .. . an understanding that can only come from learning the South.

Jerry Rafshoon Atlanta, Georgia

| have always found the snide, myth-supporting remarks of New Times’ northern writers toward the South amusing. Sometimes, they have been irritating. But a whole issue of one northern reporter's quest for the source of southerner Jimmy Carter's mystique! Is the idea of a southern journalist telling a northern magazine how it really is in the South too bodacious for the bravest magazine of them all?

Wade Mcintyre New Orleans, Louisiana

Robert Sam Anson effectively illustrated that when describing the people and lifestyles of the North the citizens of the South know less about what they're talking about than when the tables are turned. The image continually conjured up of life in the North by our southern neighbors somehow always ends up resembling the settings and characterizations found on All in the Family. After a while, it simply gets tedious being thought of as a cold-blooded, neighbor-hating racist. On top of listening to Jerry Jeff Walker, some of us even go to church on Sunday and like pecan pie. And what’s more, a great many of us live in places besides Boston and New York that-are-as friendly and peaceful as, say, Plains, Georgia.

Dennis Burke Madison, Wisconsin

Congratulations on a very enlightening, candid and down-to-earth portrayal of the “Down Home South.” Charles Evers, Mayor Fayette, Mississippi

Wright on Kingman

| would like to congratulate Lawrence Wright for his fine reporting on baseball star Dave Kingman (“The loneliness of the long- distance hitter,” July 9). | really got a kick reading the article; | thought

when | saw the title it would be somewhat like an excerpt from Sports Illustrated—shame on me for expecting that from New Times.

Paul Abele Harrington, Delaware

Letthemeat...

lam horrified after reading Browning's article (“The Nuclear Wasteland,” July 9) on Maxey Flats.

The deceitful, senseless, crack-brained people responsible for this nuclear holocaust seem to need an actual “taste” of the defilement. Rather than dump the waste, maybe they should eat it!

Margaret Rulli Browns Mills, New Jersey

Meyered down

Come on, New Times. | love you, and all that, but the article about Mary Meyer (“The curious aftermath of JFK’s best and brightest affair,” July 9) was ridiculous! It read like a True Confessions article: after the lurid headlines, it said absolutely nothing.

You've done some interesting and important reporting in the past. Let’s not stoop to this.

Fred N. Breukelman Dover, Delaware

Bicentennial convulsion

Congratulations! Andrew Kopkind’s “Boston's bitter Bicentennial” (July 23) is the most serious indictment of our all-pervasive national malady—racial violence—to surface since the sixties. From the individual horror of the brutalization of Robert Poleet to the national disgrace of the Boston School Committee acting as though it is beyond the auspices of the law, Kopkind has captured the irony of hatred in a country still in the throes of a self-congratulatory Bicentennial convulsion. Though it carries the unsettling rumble of Armageddon’s approaching thunder, Kopkind’s piece is the first fresh breeze to blow from an otherwise stale sea of journalism on this important subject.

R. Thurmond Louisville, Kentucky

The people at New Times would like to hear from you. Please write to Letters, New Times, One Park Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Letters are edited for space and clarity.

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Slow Down

The Urban Olympics/By James S. Kunen

You probably didn't hear about the XXI Urban Olympiad, but while the other Games were going on in Montreal, the world’s greatest copers converged on Manhattan for a week of friendly competition in city life skills.

In the Horn-Blowing Reflex Test, each competitor sat in the second car in line at a red light and blew his horn as close to instantaneously as possible when the light turned green. Toyota Corona, the daughter of the Spanish ambassador to Japan, turned in the fastest average time of .03 seconds for six lights, but was disqualified for professionalism when it was found she had been a cabdriver. The gold went to runner-up Piscateway Belpaese, a pinball expert from the country of Jersey City.

After Ammeter Ram-Air of Iran won the Tow and Repair event by giving a fake Triple “A” number and getting his car, stalled with wet spark plug wires, out of the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel and back on the road for under $250, Italy's Fasola Pianoforte edged out Tae Kwon Do of Korea in Getting a Cab in the Rain, and Forza del Destino won the gold in Parking Your Car and Not Having It Broken Into. ;

There were no winners in the Public Transportation events.

The Day at the Beach Race was a severe test of endurance. A 95 degree sun beat down through a blanket of humid smog as abu-Yusuf Ya'qub ibn-Ishak al-Kindi of Staten Island drove triumphantly back into the‘ city, having logged a record-setting 3:21::00.0 actually on the beach, 14::53.7 longer than silver medalist Palisade Park of Korea, who didn't have exact change for the first toll on the way out.

The most exciting street event was the Dog Shit Marathon. Entrants walked, at night, 20 blocks or until finding an operative pay phone. When their ripple-soled shoes were checked, Kujawiak Mazurka of Poland edged out Rondeno Fandango of Spain by three-fifths of a centigram. Fandango accused the Pole of scraping his feet as he walked, but the Eastern bloc judges disallowed the protest.

The final street event was the Human Misery Hurdles. Entrants had to walk down a designated stretch of Broadway without batting an eyelash at the examples of suffering and degradation that dotted their path. SkiQueen Gjetost of Norway was a step

away from victory when she tripped over a derelict. “i thought he was a pile of newspapers,” she explained tearfully. Ou Est LaGare of France brought home the gold.

Humongo Garganzof boosted the Soviet Union to an early lead in the apartment events with a gold in the Grocery Handicap Phone Climb. As his phone rang, Garganzof bolted up five flights of stairs carrying two grocery bags filled with six-packs of beer and ginger ale, a week's supply of Chef Boy- Ar- Dee ravioli and tuna fish, unlocked three locks on his apartment door and got to the phone before the man calling to offer him a free month of cable TV hung up.

In the Not Going Crazy event, each finalist was locked into a studio apartment while in the apartment below a Barry White album was played loud enough to render unintelligible the possibly homicidal argument raging between the couple living there. Outside, dogs were yelping at the garbage truck, which continued to compress trash as the fire engine caught behind it blasted its horn. Even the men with the jackhammers who had shut off the building's water to replace the main complained loudly about the noise and threw bottles at both trucks. Only the opera student practicing scales next door seemed unfazed by the racket.

Odovaker Ostrogoth of Russia did not go crazy for an incredible 7:06::14.5, but was disqualified when traces of Valium turned up in his urine

sample. The gold was awarded to Atlas Plycron of Greece.

Samedi Aprés-midi of France won the Accomplishments event, checking off 100 percent of the items on his long list of errands. Todd Velveeta of the United States protested that Aprés-midi had padded his list by writing down tasks after he had done them and by breaking up single errands into many. For example, where Velveeta’s list said “take out laundry,” Aprés-midi’s read “gather laundry; go to laundry; leave off laundry; return home.” Velveeta, who bogged down at the post office, also contended that Aprés-midi did not really “buy stamps,” but had merely bought one stamp ina stamp machine while picking up a prescription.

The most dramatic, and hotly contested, finish of the Olympics was the come-from-behind victory of Italy's Efficiente Amoroso in the Getting a Complete Stranger to Go Home With You Party Race. Amoroso’s chances looked bleak as he sipped a drink from a paper cup and felt a cigarette butt hit his teeth. The hostess had put “Visions of Johanna” on the stereo, and guests were leaving in groups of 30, when Amoroso suddenly noticed that the guy he'd thought was with that woman had left alone. In one motion, Amoroso spilled her drink and convinced her that he knew of another terrific party that would just then be getting started. The gold medal was taken away from Amoroso when Eastern bloc judges ruled that the woman was nota complete stranger, because she and Amoroso had once been enrolled in the same lecture series at the New School—Mass Transit in the Novel of Adventure. An embittered Amoroso maintained that he had stopped going after the first lecture, as had everyone else, but the medal was given to runner- up Orfeo Nachtmusik of East Germany.

Finally, in the Moving Competition, Delany Flushboy of Luxembourg copped the gold when he scored a perfect 9.0 on a 3.0 degree of difficulty move, by subletting a $300 basement studio with bars on the windows, signing alease ona two-bedroom rent-controlled apartment with river view and working fireplace for under $250, and moving with the help of six friends whom he had never helped move, all within a week. The medal has been held up while an investigation continues into the death of the previous tenant.®

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The Ruling Class

Taking his cues from the embassy/By Robert Scheer

The exact role of the Israeli embassy in influencing American presidential politics has always been something of a mystery. It has been widely rumored, for instance, that the position of any presidential candidate on the Mideast is “cleared” with the embassy, but the charge has been difficult to document. However, | recently came across an internal memo from the Carter campaign that gives some insight into this process. The memo undermines the charge that Carter has been cool toward Israel, for it reveals him to be very conscientious in checking out his position with the embassy. It also establishes a closer working relationship than Carter was willing to admit to when | questioned him about this.

Carter's major Mideast speech was delivered in New Jersey during that state’s primary on June 6. The speech was drafted by Henry Owens of ihe Brookings Institute and then checked with Carter’s top foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. | was on the campaign charter plane at the time doing a long interview for Playboy, and! asked Carter about the derivation of his speech.

Q: Was the Israeli ambassador or any other Israeli official consulted in this process?

Carter: No, although | have known the Israeli ambassador for a good while and also met with him and Mrs. Meir shortly before | made this speech.

Q: Yes, but wasn't it a matter of any specific directive or ideas coming from the Israeli ambassador about what would be the sound foreign policy position on Israel?

Carter: No, it wasn't.

But Henry Owens had sent along amemo to Carter attached to his draft of the speech that contradicts Carter's claim of no input from Israeli Officials. Quoting that memo which Carter received from Owens: “At lunch on Monday at Brookings the new Israeli Minister mentioned two concerns which he and his colleagues had regarding your views: a. That you leaned toward what he called ‘the George Ball view’—involving the Soviets in settling the Middle East;

b. That you had spoken of a Palestinian state on the West Bank.”

Carter, earlier in the campaign, had said, “| do not think that any Palestinian state can be recognized by the United States or Israel until the Palestinians are willing to recognize

Israel, although the shape of an ultimate solution will probably involve the recognition of the Palestinian people as a nation.”

Perhaps in response to the minister's concerns, there was no such reference to a Palestinian state in the New Jersey speech (although it may have been dropped even earlier). The speech made only vague references to the rights of Palestinians, but made it Clear that those were only the rights currently acknowledged by Israel.

As to the minister's fear that Carter was ledning to the George Ball view of involving the Soviets in a settlement, Carter waffled: “! do not believe that the road to peace can be found by a U.S.-Soviet imposition of a settlement. It would, however, be desirable to obtain Soviet agreement and support for any settlement. . . .” It is again perhaps a coincidence, but Goerge Ball’s prominence among the Carter advisers has declined in the months since that speech.

Another portion of the Owens memo went on to recount a second meeting with an Israeli official: “A few days later the Israeli political counselor happened to be at Brookings and | had coffee with him. He said that what worried him and those who felt like him most was your ‘unclarity’—notably unclarity as to the Arab concessions that would be required in any settlement: recognition of Israel, diplomatic relations, peace treaty, end of embargo, end of official hostile propaganda, open borders, economic interdependence between the West Bank and Israel, demilitarization of the West Bank—in short, all the steps required to make clear that the war was really ended, once and for all. He hoped you would remove this unclarity.”

Carter’s June 6 speech did, in fact, remove this unclarity. It listed the first Six points mentioned with the same wording as used in the memo by Owen, and in almost the exact same order. The other points were covered elsewhere in the text.

None of the above is intended to suggest that Carter or any other candidate ought not to benefit from the knowledge of foreign officials, but it would be naive to think that the impact of the Israelis was not disproportionate. When McGovern, who was by then no longer a candidate, dared to meet with the Palestinians to listen to their viewpoint, he was roundly blasted. It is politically understandable that Carter was not willing to take that chance. But

Carter has made the claim that he is committed above all else to conducting an open foreign policy in full view of the American people. It would be good, then, to start by revealing frankly the sources of ideas for his foreign policy speeches. Yet he has assembled a staff of traditional foreign policy types who are, by training, incapable of operating in the open. They are currently going about the work of preparing his position papers with the same stealth as do members of Kissinger’s staff. If Carter’s goal in the Mideast is to have a policy that is in all respects compatible with that of the Israeli Embassy, then why doesn’t he say so and campaign on that basis? And if he is considering other views—such as George Ball's or those advocating a Palestinian state—then why doesn't he reveal some of these

options to us? At the end of his memo, Henry

Owens made some suggestions for the handling of press questions so as not to indicate a departure from the position of the Israeli ambassador. He basically advocated hiding behind support of U.N. Resolution 242, which has been accepted by the Israelis but yet contains references to a return to the 1967 borders under appropriate conditions. Just what those conditions are is of course the rub, and on that point Owens cautioned Carter into “refusing to be drawn into detail on just where the boundary would be drawn or how the West Bank would be governed (separate entity or Jordan).” Which is really a call for fudging a key issue of concern to at least a minority of voters. The intent here is to pacify the Israeli position without becoming committed against a Palestinian mini-state as favored by the U.S. government and most of her allies. As it turned out, this concern about handling tough press questions proved to be unwarranted, since no one seemed seriously interested in asking Carter about U.N. Resolution 242 or anything else of substance. Later | found out why. | was unable to find a member of the national press corps in attendance who had ever heard of U.N. Resolution 242. When | checked back two weeks later, | still hadn’t found anyone who had bothered to determine its contents. The journalists knew that Carter was doing what all other presidential candidates before him had done—he was garnering pro-Israeli votes rather than discussing foreign policy.@

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Fulminations

The Jesus dodge/By Larry L. King

I’m not real big on the Jesus movement, a peculiarity which apparently puts me out of the cultural mainstream these days.

We've got a Democratic nominee for President, a sitting Republican President and a would-be Republican President, each of whom has indicated that his personal relationship with Jesus is such that his precinct captains are consulted only on secondary matters.

We've got hosts of young reformed dopers—the “Jesus freaks’’—getting high on Jesus. We've got such felons as Chuck Colson, who, before being smitten by the light as with Paul on the road to Damascus, proudly announced he would walk over his grandmother in the service of Richard Nixon. We've got that Korean would-be Messiah, the Rev. Who Dat Moon or some such, getting rich off Jesus while beguiling an astonishing number of young people, known as “Moonies,” into becoming his street-begging serfs. We've even got (God help us) a growing movement called Jews for Jesus.

The Jesus Business no longer is confined to the fruit jar-whiskey backwoods. You cannot walk through Washington Square Park, in Greenwich Village, without trembling, bug-eyed prophets laying a lot of smarmy Sweet Jesus rhetoric on you.

These cause my curmudgeon qualities to surface. First, because they are invading my privacy the same as hawkers of sidewalk gems; second, because most of them have no foggy notion of what they’re talking about. I’m an old Biblical student, having been raised among foot-washing Baptists, and I’m simply appalled at how few of the Jesus folk who solicit me are conversant with the Holy Scriptures. Nor are they informed as to the history of religions, Christian or otherwise. Mention the holy wars, or beg information on how the King James version of the Bible won out over its rivals, and all you get is a blank look and the blanket assurance that Jesus loves you.

Especially when political candidates indicate their close personal ties with Jesus do | identify with the nervous observation made of yon Cassius of the lean and hungry look: such men are dangerous. They might be prone to hear mystic voices urging them to bomb the Godless Communists or bring plagues of locust

upon the Hottentots. | would prefer for my President to make his decisions on more reliable information.

Not that | bear any grudge against Jesus personally. As | read him historically, he was a far better man than most and obviously of good intentions. A shade egomaniacal, perhaps; a bit self-righteous and self-winding. Say for Jesus, however, that he worked hard at his gig and went the last mile in living up to family obligations and expectations.

No, my complaint is not against Jesus but against those who misuse the notion of him. | have had my fill of high school football coaches praying in his name for victory, of Lion’s Clubs soliciting him to bless their annual broom sale, of John Birchers

ERIC KROLL

A street corner revival meeting, New York 1975.

beseeching him to keep a wary eye on the North Koreans and of white-collar criminals who claim their conversions when prison gates appear to loom in their futures. It would be my modest suggestion that perhaps a working Jesus, as well as his supervising Daddy, might be better occupied in sorting out larger injustices and really do not need the babble of selfish prayers.

Dr. Samuel Johnson told us that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel, but sometimes | think the good doctor might better have made that observation of religion. Certainly there are good and sincere people who are True Believers, and they are entitled to their faith. Experience has taught me to be extremely wary, however, of the exceedingly pious. A

Texan | once knew permitted no profanity or alcohol in his presence, forbade “mixed bathing” between the sexes in his large private swimming pool and invoked the Diety about every tenth word. It turned out that for all his celebrated piety Billie Sol Estes was not above bilking many individuals, corporations and the government of millions of dollars

Estes was the most notable example of what | think of as “the robber-baron Christians.” It was these—businessmen who exploited their workers, cheated their customers and dodged their just debts while pretending a public piety—who taught me early in life that it’s more important to watch what people do than what they say. My father, who in his youth was a self-ordained preacher of the Gospel in a series of country churches, came to believe that more people attempted to use the church than to serve it. In this | am the son of my father.

Periodically, strains of Elmer Gantryism surface among our prophets. One should not laugh, | know, even if the laughter’s strangled, at the misfortunes of a fellow man. | couldn't help it, however, when the Rev. Billy James Hargis—one of the louder crusaders against pornography and a general Godlessness—was charged with making love to young students of his Bible college. And of both sexes. Hargis represents what | find most distasteful among meddling iundamentalists who try to tell the rest of us how to lead our lives. They have the right, of course, to believe as they will. What | object to is their demand that the rest of us believe with them.

Until the “smoking-gun” tape surfaced, leaving no doubt that Tricky Dick was up to his pious ass in Watergate deceptions, the celebrated Rev. Billy Graham continued to advertise him as “a man of great faith.” Billy was the official moralist of the Nixon Administration, which role, I’m convinced, he might happily have played for such variables as John F Kennedy, Genghis Khan or Alexander Throttlebom. Billy was so blinded by the glitter of the White House that it was no trouble for him to conveniently misread Nixon’s soul in order to perpetuate his lofty ministry. | don't pretend to know whether Jesus might have wished it so, but personally | think he’s got more class than many of his agents.@

NEWTIMES 11

The Insider

Benign neglect: round If/America likes violence

Ba Politics A house of cards

On her flight to the Republican Convention in Kansas City, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Carla Hills carried with her a confidential and revealing July 29,

1976, memorandum from HUD Deputy Ck ee

Hills: playing politics

Assistant for Policy Development Bernard Carl. The content of the 23-page document not only raises questions about the degree to which HUD is currently involved in partisan politics but also evokes the unsettling memory of Daniel Moynihan’s controversial “benign neglect” memo to Richard Nixon in 1970.

The memo outlines an approach to urban issues and includes a number of options. “The issue papers, after being expanded and reviewed, would not be specific legislative proposals,” it explains, “but rather broadly described policy initiatives.” The memo goes on to make clear that the intent of the HUD proposals would be more political than policy related. “The issue papers could serve, if their release were timed

recognition and concern about the urban predicament. Just this demonstrated sensitivity and commitment to the solution of these problems without specific legislative recommendations [our italics], would be amore affirmative step than the Carter campaign has yet produced.” The mere fact that HUD officials are so directly involved in the Ford campaign is of questionable propriety. But equally disturbing is the memo’s

appropriately, as a demonstration of. . .

open admission of HUD’s cosmetic approach to crucial housing issues. That very problem—benign neglect — is one the memo addresses:

“It [the strategy] does have the down side of potentially placing the president in the position of recognizing problems for which he later offers no solutions.” And lest Secretary Hills try to palm the memo off on her underling, Carl scrawled this telling note at the bottom, in his own handwriting: “You have asked me to put in writing our discussion.”

Blood on the tracks

The convention floor wasn’t the only place where blood was spilled during the just completed Republican fracas in Kansas City. In the early morning hours of August 11, a senior operative for the Republican Convention decided to engage a prostitute. He met the young lady on a downtown street, agreed to a $20 fee and returned with her to his hotel room. Once there, the man fixed drinks, chattered with the hooker casually and took a shower. On the events up to that point, both parties—and a subsequent police report—are agreed.

Then, however, the stories diverge. The convention official says that the 20-year-old woman decided to take her own shower, sneaked up behind him afterward and whacked him on the back of the head with a rum bottle. By his account, a struggle ensued.

The prostitute, on the other hand, says that the man demanded that they perform a sexual act for which they had not contracted. She claims to tiave refused, and offered to leave without taking payment. Then she says the man struck her in the mouth, and she retaliated by thumping him with the rum bottle.

In either event, the struggle that followed was overheard by a hotel employee, and a security guard was dispatched to the room. The guard opened the door to discover the woman on the floor, pinned against a radiator and beneath the convention official. Both of them were nude and splattered with blood.

The aftermath just goes to show that position pays. The police, who, according to a reliable source, were inclined to believe the prostitute’s story, did not file charges. Both the prostitute and the official were treated at local hospitals for minor injuries.

PHOTO RESEARCHERS, INC

Then, as the police report noted with ironic understatement: “After due consideration, they decided they did not wish to prosecute or pursue the matter any further... .”

It’s a crime

Now that the Watergate toll seems complete, here’s a wrap-up statistic of considerable interest: no fewer than 1,000 public officials on the federal, state and local levels have been convicted of felonies since 1970. That's the figure advanced by Richard L. Thornburgh, an assistant attorney general, at a recent Chicago Better Government Association meeting. In addition to a vice-president, Thornburgh noted that the group included several members of Congress, numerous congressional aides, a Court of Appeals judge, several high-ranking officials of both the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Small Business Administration—and a slew of local politicians nationwide. Comforting, huh?

Forcing the issue

Back in the sixties, when H. Rap Brown boldly noted that violence is as American as apple pie, the standard reaction was outrage. Now it seems that many Americans not only accepted Brown's declaration but continue to believe it.

Two nationwide studies—done in 1969 and in 1974 by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social

he

a

out of control

12 NEWTIMES

Research—recently released reveal that violence is widely viewed by Americans as a legitimate tool of both social order and social change.

Both studies elicited similar responses.

When asked how police should control ghetto disturbances and hoodlum gangs, about 80 percent of the male respondents in both surveys thought the police should “almost always” or “sometimes” use clubs. About two-thirds believed the police should use guns, though not to kill. In questions about effecting social change, approximately 20 percent of the males in both studies thought that some property damage and personal injuries were necessary to bring about change “fast enough.” About 10 percent believed extensive property damage and some deaths were necessary in the service of social change.

“These findings imply that violence is not a temporary aberration of peculiar people,” concluded study director Monica Blumenthal, “but that positive attitudes toward violence lie deeply rooted in our culture.”

Keeping up with Carter

George Meany may have enthusiastically endorsed Jimmy Carter, but that doesn’t mean organized labor is doing cartwheels over the Georgia Democrat. AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Lane Kirkland, heir apparent to Meany, had this to say about Carter in private remarks to a Democratic official recently: “We're realists. It doesn’t make much difference between Ford and Carter. Carter is your typical, smiling, brilliant, backstabbing, bullshitting, southern nut-cutter.”

eAs part of his effort to negotiate a settlement with the Washington establishment, Carter met recently with chairmen of Senate committees. He assured the senators of his desire to cooperate with them. “As president,” Carter said, “| expect to clear proposals with you as | develop them.” The catch was the quid pro quo that the Georgian went on to explain. “I'll also expect you,” he told the senators, “to clear major legislation with me in the formative stages.” Several senators were stunned by the suggestion; as one of them put it, “Carter doesn't understand anything about the separation of powers. That’s not the way it works.”

eThe nearly inevitable rift between presidential candidates and running mates may be occurring in the Carter-Mondale alliance. One obvious falling-out point would be ideology, and already there is some

Carter: along the route

staffers. A contingent of them visited Plains recently for strategy talks and

left—as one staffer put it—‘‘stunned”

by how little the Carter people knew about the issues.

eCarter solidarity notwithstanding, Gene McCarthy is stepping up his independent candidacy for the presidency.

DENNIS BRACK/BLACK STAR

McCarthy was in Washington, D.C., recently, courting financial support among leading Democratic liberals. The former Minnesota senator even approached a well-known liberal senator for suggestions about possible contributors. McCarthy said he thought Carter had the “potential and proclivity to be a despot.” The senator was sympathetic to McCarthy’s sentiments, gave him some names, but declined to get directly involved.

eWhen a group of wealthy Jewish business leaders met with Jimmy Carter in Atlanta recently, they expected a strong pro-Israel stance from the Democratic nominee. Instead, they got some general talk about “brave little Israel” and a specific statement from Carter that Israel would probably ultimately have to return to the pre-1967 war borders. One participant in the meeting reports that the leaders were as stunned as they were upset.

eFar from giving up his controversial polling contract with the Saudi Arabians, Carter pollster Pat Caddell is exploring the possibility of adding on still more foreign clients. He’s already had talks with representatives from several foreign governments about selling them his polling data.

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disgruntlement among Mondale

NEWTIMES 13

Seventies

One if by land, two if by sea

Back in 1969, when the New Hampshire Public Service Commission

first unveiled its plans for a twin nuclear

ees Seabrook: the fight begins

- *

power plant in a small local town, utility officials enjoyed the support of the state’s major officials and expected little opposition. The town of Seabrook was described as a “perfect” spot for the state’s first nuclear reactor. The major advantage was its proximity to the Atlantic Ocean, and the 750,000 gallons of water needed each minute to cool the nuke’s radioactively hot reactor core. Utility officials were also counting on a certain degree of apathy among the town’s population of 7,500.

They underestimated the strength of the anti-nuke movement, as two recent rallies in Seabrook aptly demonstrated. On both occasions—August 1 and August 22—hundreds of people gathered to protest the construction of the twin nuke. During the first rally, a contingent of 18 activists were arrested after symbolically occupying the site of the proposed $2.5 billion nukes. A similar demonstration was planned for the second protest, which took place just after our press time.

The protesters have been focusing their concern on the likelihood that ocean water cycled through the nukes and back out at high temperatures would kill aquatic life. Their case was assisted by a recent 768-632 vote among Seabrook residents opposing the PSC’s plans to build the nukes. According to Guy

Chichester, coordinator of the local anti-nuke Clamshell Alliance, “The fight has now begun in earnest. Only by direct, nonviolent, but active civil disobedience will this enormous threat to our planetary survival be overcome.”

Bite the bullet

Does gun control work? University of Wisconsin psychologist Douglas Murray recently did a simple but revealing study: he examined the gun control laws in all 50 states and rated them against each state's crime statistics. He found no correlation between the existence or nonexistence of gun control laws and the rates of homicide, assault and robbery. Nor did gun control have any demonstrable effect on suicide rates or on the number of accidental shootings.

In a report in Human Behavior, Murray wrote that the problem with gun control laws is simply enforcing them. They do little to keep the weapons away from those most disposed to misuse them, says Murray. Moreover, existing laws are so erratically enforced, and violators so disparately punished, that Murray is convinced it’s all but impossible to legislate control of firearms.

The gamblers

One of the most persistent myths about Nevada is that its natives are immune to the sweet allure of easy money at the slot machines and the gambling tables. Well it ain't so, according to a survey done for the joint congressional commission on gambling. The report shows that Nevadans actually gamble more frequently and spend more on gambling than do citizens from other states. The survey also revealed that Nevada has three times as many compulsive gamblers as any other

BARBARA PFEFFER/BLACK STAR

state. Conducted among 2,032 persons nationally, the study will be sent to the White House this fall. “These findings suggest that accessibility is a significant—indeed perhaps the most important—factor in influencing gambling... .”

Specifically, 27 percent of Nevada residents went to casinos in 1974, compared to only 9 percent of the general adult population. The average annual wager at casinos was $665 for Nevadans, or about twice the national average of $273. About the only good thing to be said for living near casinos, in fact, is that such people are less likely to gamble illegally—4 percent in Nevada, compared to 11 percent nationwide.

Not by bread alone

Another blow to the forces of dehumanization: in Japan, a highly touted, fully automated supermarket-of-the-future has closed down after just a year in business.

The lida Supermarket, in the Tokyo suburb of Kokubunji, offered a choice of more than 3,000 items stored in 67 huge vending machines. Entering customers received a plastic card and made purchases by inserting the card into amachine and removing desired items from behind glass doors.

After an early run of excellent business from the curious throngs, business dropped rapidly. By the time the store closed, business was down to $700 a day. Customers who were polled said that they missed not only the chance to look at and feel items before they chose them but also the simple human contact with employees. The most common complaint was voiced by a woman who told researchers, “I have the very uncomfortable feeling that |’m being controlled by a machine.”

Gambling: who's hookec’?

14 NEWTIMES

Down and in

A mini-fashion preview for those of you less taken than the New York Times with the ornamental! qualities of Yves St. Laurent’s winter line. The tie pictured below is for the pragmatically sartorial: elegant and useful—great attire for entertaining on mountaintops after long backpacking hikes; will

Down tie: pragmatic chic

double as an ear band, in a crunch. Available from DOWN TIE, P.O. Box 95, Telluride, Colo. 81435. $10.95 each.

Mind & Body

Southern comfort

Jimmy Carter isn’t the only cause for high spirits in the South these days: some young people have discovered

the hallucinogenic effects of eating the flower of Angel Trumpet, a tree native | to the region. Two blossoms, or a broth | brewed from the plant’s leaves, provide an hallucinogenic experience nearly equal to that of LSD. The problem is that the plant and its flower are poison. No Angel Trumpet deaths have been reported yet,.5ut a doctor at the recent American Psychiatric Association meeting in Miami Beach described some harrowing tales of near misses. A Miami psychiatrist reported seeing 80 cases of Angel’s Trumpet toxification over the past six months. Depending on dosage and individual susceptibility, users

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progress from mild hallucinations to agitated delirium and finally to paralysis and convulsions. In one bizarre case, a Florida teenager was found masturbating in the nude on a shocked homeowner's lawn miles away from his home. Just like old times

Zapped

Two years ago, research studies began showing a direct correlation between radiation treatments administered to children and incidences of thyroid cancer. The Michael Reese Medical Center in Chicago, one of the nation’s leaders in radiation therapy, immediately undertook a program to track down the 5,000 patients to whom it had given the treatment between 1920 and the mid- 1950s, when it was replaced by a simpler and apparently safer radiation treatment

Two years into the search, the preliminary statistics are devastating. According to search chief, Dr. Martin Colman, one in four of the former radiation patients has developed or will develop atumor, and one-third of the tumors will be malignant.

Though the disease is treatable and curable in virtually all of the diagnosed cases, failure to diagnose it can be fatal. Estimates of the number of patients to whom it was administered over 35 years range between several hundred thousand and 2 million. Using Michael Reese’s current statistics, that would mean as many as 160,000 Americans will ultimately develop tumors. Only those who received the treatment after reaching puberty are considered safe, and thus the medical center is helping to conduct a low-key educational campaign aimed at bringing in any potential victim for a checkup.

Post Scripts

Bell’s rising toll (NT: Oct. 3, 1975)

A year ago, investigators had uncovered political slush funds and other instances of Bell Telephone corruption and conflict of interest in six states where the company operates. Now it is clear that the practices were even more widespread; secret political funds have so far been discovered in 16 states, nearly all in the South and Southwest. In addition, Bell executives apparently used funds to woo the favor of key officials in several states—practices at the least ethically questionable and at the worst illegal. Former Lieutenant Governor of South

4

Ryan: ringing the Bell

Dakota Bill Douherty was paid a consultant fee by Bell while still in office; Maryland Governor Marvin Mandel was taken on an annual deep-sea fishing trip; Georgia politicians were treated to a $2,500 dove-hunting expedition in Mexico; and other state officials got similar VIP treatment from Bell executives.

Despite all the revelations, which were collected from more than 35 Bell officials scattered around the country, indictments had been few and far between. However, last month in North Carolina, 11 of Bell's top officials were arrested and charged with falsifying expense vouchers. The former head of Bell’s North Carolina operation had already confessed to the Charlotte Observer—and later to the state attorney general's office—that the falsified vouchers were used to fuel a political slush fund, aimed at buying favor from both political parties.

As the nation’s largest monopoly, the Bell system has viewed such favors as a key to a favorable rate-setting climate. But whatever success the practices may have had, the company apparently wasn't satisfied. According to a four-year study by the Federal Communications Commission, completed early this year but given scant attention outside the telephone industry, the Bell system overcharged its customers by a staggering $1.6 billion on long distance interstate telephone calls between 1971 and 1975. Since interstate calls represent less than one-third of the company’s income, it’s anybody's guess how much other overcharging went on.

Investigations are continuing into the operations of Southern Bell and Southwestern Bell.

Newlimes

Publisher George A. Hirsch

Editor Jonathan Z. Larsen

General Manager Louis B. Dotti Jr

Art Director

Steve Phillips Managing Editor David Holiander West Coast Editor Robert Scheer Associate Editor Tony Schwartz

Contributing Editors Arthur Lubow Suzanne Charlé Susan Lyne (West Coast) Robert Shrum

Assistant Editors Associate Art Director Ellen Rosenbush Patrick Calkins

Karen L. Sacks Editorial Assistant Patricia Bradbury

Political Editor Robert Sam Anson Senior Editor Joanna Krotz

Photo Editor Marsha Zabarsky

Controller Norman J. Finegold Administrative Assistants Joanne Cohen Miriam S. Ko Claudette Langer

Circulation Director Richard LaMonica

Circulation Assistants Meredith Lesly Kathi Marks

Single Copy Sales Director Peter A. Armour

Production Manager Gertrud Borchardt

Production Assistant Publicity Mary Carfagno Ruth Hedrick

Contributors:

Stephen Diamond, Larry Frederick, Frye Gaillard, Phil Jordan, Ernest Lendler, Rick Lyman, Bill Norton, Todd Strasser, Roger N. Williams.

16 NEWTIMES

Advertising Director Nicholas H. Niles Advertising Representatives Liz Browne Mendel Peter W. Eldredge John Abbott William S. David Stuart Krane

Advertising Assistants Jeanne Joyce Anna Wasilewska Chicago Los Angeles The Pattis Group The Sheppard Company

Detroit Richard Hartle Associates

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Robert Ward, Geoffrey Wolff, Larry Wright

Correspondents Washington, D.C.: Kitty Kelley, Arthur Hadley, Nina To- tenberg; Arizona: Ron Ridenhour (Tempe); California: Phil Jordan (Sacramento), Bill Ritter (San Diego); Colo- rado: |van Goldman (Aspen), Connecticut: Peter Lord (Noank), Florida: Pete Gallagher (St. Petersburg), Geor- gia: Gregory Jaynes (Atlanta); Illinois: Joe! Weisman (Chicago); Indiana: Rick Lyman (Gary), Tom Cochrun (Indianapolis); Kentucky: Laer Pearce (Middletown), Ja- son Petosa (Pippa Passes), Massachusetts: Pat McGil- ligan (Boston), Eric Breindel (Cambridge), Michigan: Laura Berman (Ann Arbor); New York: Charles Stein, Larry Frederick (New York City); North Carolina: Mike Edelhart (Hendersonville), Frye Gaillard (Charlotte); Ohio: John Brady (Cincinnati), Jonathan Miller (Dayton); Pennsylvania: Joe Sharkey (Philadelphia); Utah: David Proctor (Salt Lake City); Virginia: Joe! Brinkley (Rich-

mond), Washington: Bruce Johansen (Seattle); Cana- da: Robert Ramsay (Toronto)

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY VINCE TOPAZIO

In the famed “Triangle Trade’ of the 18th century, Yankee traders profited by exchanging molasses for rum for slaves. In the modern “triangle;’ Mexican smugglers swap narcotics for U.S. guns, which in turn are sold to Mexican revolutionaries. The risks, however, are high, as one smuggler explains: “You can score grass for years in Mexico, but as soon as By Lawrence Wright

you mix in guns, it gets sticky”

Tucson, Arizona

Wealth becomes them, these gorgeous lads Marc and Mike, the fabulous Norman twins. Surrounded by their co- terie in Tucson’s finest restaurant, their table groaning under silver platters of escargots, lobster, lamb, artichoke hearts and scampi, they shine like Castor and Pollux, a constellation unto themselves. It is that familiar look of celebrity that makes you think you’ve seen them somewhere before. They could be twin rock stars or professional athletes—tennis play- ers, probably, they have that leanness—or Broadway headlin- ers. Only if you notice the pistols in their belts do you figure they are something else entirely. If this is Tucson, they must be smugglers.

Like Miami, Tucson enjoys the three critical advan- tages that make for a really first-class smuggling center: prox- imity to the source of supply, various and almost unenforce- able routes of entry and, largely thanks to the first two, the Mafia in abundance. Drugs are the staple import. Marijuana, which once came by the kilo, now travels by the ton, and her- oin is again in full flood. Since the disruption of poppy farm- ing in Turkey, 90 percent of the heroin coming into this coun- try is the distinctively brown variety known as Mexican Mud. The drugs ride up from Mexico by automobile or vegetable truck on the Pan-American Highway, which runs through Tucson south to Culiacan, the Marseilles of Mexico; they come through the cactus desert by jeep or in the pickups with the oversized tires one sees all over town; they even plod across the Papago Indian Reservation by mule train. But for the most part they sneak through a network of ravines in pri- vate planes, which can fly undetected the 50 air miles sepa- rating Tucson and the Mexican border.

Narcotics agents say that the Norman twins, who are 20 years old, run a smuggling ring involving 5 airplanes and 26 pickups that transports about $100,000 worth of marijuana into this country a month. When I mention this figure to Mike, he laughs.

‘‘Hey, man, at our peak? Six to $7 million a month gross. We got millions stashed away. You were asking about the trade of guns for dope. I think it’s a hype, man. You-can score grass for years in Mexico and no one will ever give you any trouble, but as soon as you go mixing in guns it starts get-

q is

ting sticky. Because they’ve gota real revolutionary problem.”’

‘I give them two, maybe three years,’” says Marc.

‘“‘Oh, there’s definitely gonna be a revolution.’ This from a pilot sitting at the table.

Many American agents agree that something is going on in Mexico. The flow of drugs north balances a long history of American goods being smuggled into Mexico to avoid the stiff tariffs. For years the Mexican government has winked at the smuggling in either direction; after all, the channels that bring contraband into their country are usually the same ones that carry narcotics out, and narcotics constitute a major in- dustry in Mexico, one that occupies an unofficial but consider- able place in the scheme of development. However, after in- creasing amounts of American arms were found in the hands of terrorists, Mexican authorities began to take a firmer stance against drug traffickers. Weapons other than pellet guns are forbidden to ordinary citizens in Mexico; consequently, a gun of any caliber multiplies in value below the border, and auto- matic weapons are downright precious. An AR-15, for in- stance, may be purchased in most sporting goods stores in this country for about $300. The U.S. Treasury Department esti- mates that in Mexico the same weapon is worth an ounce of heroin, which in turn brings as much as $1,600 in Arizona. Af- ter a shootout north of Guadalajara, Mexican Federales dis- covered in the hands of revolutionaries M-16 rifles that had been missing from a U.S. armory in Fresno, California. How do they come by such weapons? U.S. agents suppose that the stolen guns are swapped for narcotics, then carried by the traffickers into the Sierras, where they are sold to the revolu- tionary groups. There is, however, another school of thought: that the revolutionaries are wising up to the possibility of elim- inating the middleman.

‘‘Do you find that revolutionaries are cutting in on the dope trade?’’ I ask Mike.

‘I don’t think there’s any doubt about it,’’ he says. ‘‘They’re trying to finance a revolution and they'll do it any way they can.”’

‘*And using the money to buy guns?”

‘‘Okay, maybe there is the sort of indirect trade of dope for money and money for guns, but I don’t think that you can say it’s one for one,”’ says Mike. ““You gotta understand. Down there practically the whole economy is based on dope.

NEWTIMES 21

It’s a business, man, and everybody’s in it. I mean the police, the government, everybody. If you’re planning to go down there and snoop around, you bet- ter watch your ass.”’

‘Listen, he’s not lying,’’ says Marc. “‘If the authorities get hold of you, forget it. One of our pilots got caught down there with an empty plane and they beat the shit out of him anyway. The whole left side of his face was para- lyzed.”’

The waiter, a pit-faced French- man from Marseilles, interrupts the con- versation with fruits flambeaux. Every- one stares grimly at the extravagant flames springing from the skillet and at the waiter’s red face behind the fire—an augury, it seems to my excited imagina- tion, of my impending journey down the narcotics trail into Mexico, and of what I expect to find at the end of that trail: the face of revolution.

Nogales, Sonora, Mexico

Flies buzz in and out of the open office window, barely heard over the crash of traffic in the street, and merge into the semidarkness. The lights are off to keep out the noonday heat. In the shadows sits Jorge Villalobos, the feder- al prosecutor for the state of Sonora, al- most invisible in his grey suit behind his big grey desk. On a file cabinet behind him a transistor radio moans in Mexican rhythms; beside the radio in a jarring still life stands a semiautomatic rifle. Villalobos is a slight man, short and deli- cate, hardly the vision of a legend. ‘‘He is their Eliot Ness,’’ one U.S. Treasury agent told me, ‘‘the only honest cop on the whole Mexican border.”’

Villalobos is distinguished for re- fusing the mordida, ‘‘the bite,’’ which is the graft Mexican officials take to sup- plement their meager incomes, a practice so common and accepted that, for in- stance, lucrative border assignments are routinely rotated among Mexican cus- toms officers to better spread the wealth. Criminals pay the mordida to the officials as a regular business expense, which gives both parties an operating interest in the status quo. Another man who posed a threat to this alliance was Antonio Coppola, the federal prosecutor for the state of Sinaloa, but he was dispatched recently by machine-gun fire. It is known that there is an assassin in Nogales with a contract on Villalobos, who none- theless continues to walk to work each day with one hand gripping a revolver in his coat pocket.

On the edge of town, meanwhile, the principal heroin dealer in Nogales, Johnny Grant, lounges in the bright pris-

22 NEW TIMES

on yard with an air of freedom about him as commanding as the close feel of dan- ger in the prosecutor’s office. The son of a Mexican woman and an American black of Cuban extraction, ‘‘E] Negro Johnny”’ fought his way through the mob of hustlers to become king of the hill ina town predicated almost entirely on ser- vicing American vices. There is between Grant and Villalobos the obsessive bind of professional enemies, so balanced that the fortune of one determines the rise or fall of the other, like men on a seesaw. In 1974 Villalobos performed the almost unthinkable act of putting Grant in prison, which dried up much of the mordida in Nogales but did not stop Grant. According to U.S. agents, Johnny Grant continues to run his operation from the prison.

The radio is snapped off when Vil- lalobos rises to greet me. His hand is limp and soft when I take it; it is like holding a peach. Almost immediately the telephone rings, and Villalobos excuses himself. ‘‘Yes, in one moment,’’ he says

“We used to pack whiskey in front of the U.S. Customs,” Buddy recalled. “We would land anywhere: dry lake

beds, dirt roads, race tracks. Now smugglers take off at the airport”

into the phone. ‘‘Don’t move without me. I will want men surrounding the en- tire area.’’ He hangs up and turns to the question of trading guns for drugs in Mexico.

‘‘Of course,’’ he says from the gloom behind his desk, ‘‘it is simply the law of supply and demand. Mexico has drugs and the U.S. has guns. In Mexico we have very strict gun laws—it is prac- tically impossible for private citizens to purchase weapons legally. I wouldn’t say that this trade of guns for drugs is an everyday occurrence, but we have intel- ligence that it is happening. The arms go into the hands of people who use them for their own protection or else to others who will sell them to anyone.”’

‘*Possibly to revolutionary groups?’ I ask.

‘In Mexico we do not have revo- lutionary groups the way you mean,”’ he replies.

This is the sort of answer I had been warned to expect of government Officials in Mexico. Until 1968 it was true that the revolutionary movement here

was limited to a few scattered factions; there was discontent, however, which manifested itself during the Olympic Games in Mexico City in the form of anti-goverament protests. President Luis Echeverria disgraced himself by sending the army to crush the protests. No one knows how many were killed on October 2, 1968, the day the army fired on the helpless demonstrators who were packed into a plaza in Mexico City (the New York Times estimated 300 casual- ties). The effect of this slaughter resem- bled the smashing of a ball of mercury with a hammer; suddenly there were dozens of groups scattered all over the country. In 1973 the various groups again began to coalesce under the banner of the 23rd of September Communist League, a date commemorating a fruit- less attack in 1965 on a military barracks in the state of Chihuahua by peasants.

‘‘What about the hundreds of young men said to be detained in the army camps?’’ I ask Villalobos. ‘‘And all the policemen who’ve been killed by ter- rorists?”’

“Still, it is not a revolutionary problem,”’ says Villalobos. ‘*A large ma- jority of delinquents state that they are members of the 23rd of September group when they come up for sentencing so that the judge might feel that it is a politi- cal situation; in other words, he studies the sentencing of these individuals and decides that they are not outright crimi- nals.”’

‘It is rumored that revolutionar- ies—or whatever you call them—are be- coming involved in the narcotics trade in order to secure arms.”’

Villalobos smiles weakly. “‘We cannot say this is happening.”’

The telephone rings again. ‘“‘Is everyone in position?’’ the prosecutor asks. ‘‘I want all guns drawn. Wait until I arrive.””

He hangs up the phone. “I’m afraid I must apologize,’’ he says courte- ously. “‘I have another appointment.”

Johnny Grant conducts me to the prison lunchroom, past a dozen young women in halter tops and short shorts who are clearly here on business. ‘‘What are all the women doing here?’’ I ask anyway. ‘Oh, it’s lunchtime,’’? Johnny laughs. ‘‘They always let them in for lunch.’’ Johnny is wearing a white shirt, dark slacks and a grey fedora; his eyes are hidden behind bulbous wraparound sunglasses, and when he laughs I notice a small diamond in the middle of his up- per left incisor. ‘‘Buenas dias, Johnny,”’ calls a respectful guard as we pass. “*6Que tal?’’ Johnny responds, and when

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The screen door of the lunchroom slaps shut behind us and the prisoners at the other tables fall mum. Johnny slides into a chair at an empty table.

“You gotta understand, I been out of circulation awhile,’’ says Johnny, his voice salted with the who-me pious- ness of prison speech.

‘*Really? I hear you’re still the biggest heroin dealer on the Arizona bor- der.”

‘‘That’s what they say. There are a hundred bigger than me.”’

‘‘Where did you learn to speak English?”’

“Oh man, I spent a couple of years in Uncle Sam’s army, from 1954 to °56, after I got deported the first time from Los Angeles. I began pushing in or- der to make a profit for my wife and chil- dren.”

“Is it a profitable business?’’ I ask.

“It is,’ he agrees, ‘‘but you got to spend a lot of money, too.”’

The thought of spending money casts a momentary pall over the conver- sation. When Johnny speaks again, he has been swept away on a wave of self- pity. “‘Life is kinda hard,’’ he says. “‘Sometimes I wish I was back hustling

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on the street, ‘cause even if you only make two dollars you don’t have the trouble I had.”’

Johnny walks me to the gate past the mesmerized guards. He sighs. ‘‘When I get out of here I’m gonna re- tire,’ he says. ‘Buy a little ranch.”’

Magdalena de Kino, Sonora, Mexico ‘*It certainly is a clean town,”’ I find myself agreeing with my host, as we cruise through immaculate streets. A shower has just passed by, shining the summer leaves of the olive trees. Buddy looks pleased. He beholds the bright whitewashed houses with renewed admiration, as if I had complimented in his child the very qualities he admires in himself. Buddy is 46, a member of the first generation of airplane smugglers who started operating between Mag- dalena and Tucson in the early 1950s. Back then, most of the cargo was whis- key and appliances bound for Mexico. It was a legendary time, and when Buddy speaks of the old days he is prone to use what at first hearing sounds like a royal ‘‘we’’—rocking back, it seems, a bit pompously on his fame as one of the most daring pilots of them all. ‘““Yes, we used to pack a load of whiskey right in front of U.S. Customs and fly the can- yons into Mexico,’’ Buddy recalls. ‘‘It

was a different time. Sometimes we would cater parties and weddings for high government officials in Mexico City. We would land anywhere: dry lake beds, dirt roads, race tracks. Now they take off here at the municipal airport.”’ Since the old days, the balance of trade has been evened, if not reversed. Magdalena de Kino (as the town is called since the discovery of the remains of Fa- ther Kino, a venerated Jesuit mission- ary, under an old church that was razed for a new town square) has become a major port of embarkation for narcotics going into the United States. Several years ago, the Mexican army surrounded Magdalena and struck the narcotics or- ganization just before dawn. There was intelligence that the head of the organi- zation, José Luis ‘‘Perico’’ (The Parrot) Teran, operated 26 warehouses of nar- cotics and had recently converted the basement of his home into a heroin fac- tory; by the time the army descended, however, they uncovered a single ton of marijuana, an ounce of heroin, $160,000 worth of contraband appliances, several cars and a large cache of pornographic magazines. The documents in Teran’s office were still smoking in an oil drum. Perico Teran and his lieutenants escaped by way of the only road out of town the army failed to close off. Buddy says Pe-

NEWTIMES 25

ricO now manages his affairs from Gua- dalajara, the Magdalena organization having passed intact to the young lions who stayed behind.

Buddy conveys me to the office in the front of his house. It is dim, but Bud- dy does not turn on a light—a Mexican habit, certainly, but one cannot pigeon- hole Buddy. He is a resident of Mexico but a citizen of the United States, adopt- ing the habits and prejudices of either culture as the situation requires, while sounding vaguely foreign in both English and Spanish. He claims to be a simple rancher, no longer a smuggler, but the Arizona policeman who referred me to Buddy told of-an occasion when Buddy offered to show him the marijuana fields high in the Sierras: ‘‘Buddy took me for this incredible flight over the whole state of Sonora. While we’re up there he says, ‘Sure, I do a little smuggling. Appli- ances, just appliances.’ And I look back in the rear of the plane and there were seeds all over the place. Hell, the plane reeked of marijuana.’’ When I heard this remark about Buddy, I first thought it significant-in terms of the mutual admira- tion society between cops and criminals in Tucson, the two being famous for hav- ing Over-much in common; later, how- ever, I would remember the statement as being typical of the range of Buddy’s

26 NEWTIMES

ambivalence.

‘*The reason the drug traffic per- sists in Mexico is that everyone supports it, from the president on down,” says Buddy, the concerned citizen. ‘*Did the other traffickers you talked to deny they were dealing in guns?”’

‘*Toaman,’’ I say, surprised.

Buddy nods. ‘*That’s because the drug trade is protected in Mexico and they’re not afraid to talk about it, but guns are another matter. Oh, they’re dealing in guns, all right. Hell, we got so many guns coming in here you wouldn’t believe it. Listen, if you’re willing to print the truth, we’ll blow the lid off this damn thing.”’

I straighten up. Buddy is playing my tune. ‘‘Where do the guns go?’’ I ask.

‘*Some go into the hands of delin- quents, but mostly they stay in the possession of the Mafia—we call the traffickers here the Mafia,’’ he explains. ‘*They run this town. They control ev- erything. Even the phones are tapped. You should see them; they have all this money. They can’t put it in banks, so they buy property. Now they own practi- cally everything in town. When you come into town, do you see any indus- try? No! There’s only one industry and that’s narcotics.”

Buddy’s voice has been drifting along fairly peacefully, philosophically, but abruptly it becomes urgent and horrified. ‘‘Wait till you see them,’’ he says, appalled. ‘“You won’t believe how young they are—kids, really, 19 and 20 years old. They have absolutely no re- spect for life. They have killed six peo- ple in this town already this year, and no One is arrested. You saw the billboard across the street?’’ he asks, referring to an advertisement for Corona beer direct- ly in front of Buddy’s house. ‘‘Recently, they hung a man from it with barbed wire. Yesterday I heard in Santa Ana they caught a state policeman. They beat him up, they cut out his guts, then they ran over him by car. These things I’m telling you happened in the last ten days. Tomorrow Ill show you. We’ll go out early and see them loading narcotics at the airport. Then I’ll take you to the ring- leaders and you can ask them what you want.”

In the morning Buddy arrives ear- ly as promised. On the way to breakfast, 4e points out the many civic improve- ments, which he ascribes to the foresight and dynamism of the mayor, Alicia Arel- lano Tapia de Pavlovitch, a woman he regards very highly. As we enter the cafe, however, Buddy shuts up; his car keys start to dance in his hand. ‘‘See

those two men at the table?’’ he says un- der his breath. ‘‘There! Sitting with the chief of police. Strangers. Probably state police. Maybe it’s about that business in Santa Ana.”’

Buddy does not eat breakfast. His stomach is too light, he explains; he can- not burden it before midday. He watches the consumption of eggs and bacon with mild revulsion, turning aside when the yolk is burst. Over coffee he abruptly an- nounces a change in plans. ‘“‘I feel I must present you to the mayor,’’ he says, to my dismay. ‘“‘It is the proper way to do things in Mexico. That way, if anything happens, the authorities will know who you are and treat you accordingly. It is only a courtesy.”

City hall is a two-story palacio that is being entirely renovated. The mayor receives us in her modest office on the ground floor. She is an attractive woman, petite, dressed rather like a schoolmarm, but her eyes are busy and suspicious. Buddy makes the introduc- tion into a ceremony, expounding on an article I am writing about ‘‘the progress of contemporary Mexico.’’ The mayor doesn’t buy that; I can hear her tapping her foot while Buddy’s speech founders against her cold stare. When Buddy is finally quiet, the mayor makes a formal statement. ‘‘We live in a stabilized politi-

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cal town,”’ she says sternly. ‘‘We have no specific problems. We live socially, tranquilly, peacefully.’’ She goes on to speak about the pride of the citizens and their responsiveness to community events, and I have lost track of what she is saying when Buddy nudges me. “‘Ah!”’ he says, “‘she’s going to show you around!”’

We walk upstairs past painters laying out rolls of splattered canvas over the carpet. ‘‘She wants you to have a good impression of the town,’’ Buddy confides. At the end of the hall the may- or flourishes a large key that opens a big wooden door. Inside is what appears to be the only completed room in the pa- lacio, already carpeted and draped and baroquely furnished. On the wall above the couch is a giant portrait of Benito Juarez. The room is musty and a bit of a mess. ‘“‘Perhaps you should take a pic- ture,’” Buddy advises. ‘‘Everything is just as it was.”’

I do not quite understand.

‘‘This is where President Ford and President: Echeverria held their his- toric press conference on October 21, 1974,” the mayor clarifies.

It comes to me that I am standing in a shrine. Rays of sunlight slanting through the eastern window disclose smudged presidential fingerprints on an

empty quart bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label. The bottle is attended on the coffee table by a congregation of clear plastic glasses, one of which con- tains a half-inch culture of pea-green mold, the conclusion of many months’ intercourse between good whiskey and a cigarette butt. I am careful not to touch anything. The mayor explains that when the renovation of the palacio is complete this room will be opened as a museum, lust so, for the edification of generations of Mexican schoolchildren.

Buddy is impressed. ‘‘You know, she doesn’t show this to many people,”’ he says. “Certainly you are the first American.’

As we depart, the mayor dictates a list of people I should see. *‘Oh, yes,”’ Buddy affirms after each name, ‘‘l hadn’t thought of him. Yes, he could cer- tainly help. Yes, yes.”

Outside, Buddy steers me toward the corner. ““This will only take a min- ute,’’ he says. *“The mayor strongly rec- ommends that you see the president of the bank, then we'll see the justice of the peace and one of the town’s leading mer- chants, a member of the chamber of commerce, the president of the Lion’s CHa:

**Buddy!”’

He shrugs. “‘It is only a courte-

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sy,’’ he says, holding open the glass door of the principal bank in Magdalena.

The bank president rises when we come in as if we are expected. We smile at each other, then subside into awaiting chairs and expectant silence. Buddy be- gins to squirm.

‘‘Well!’’ he hisses, ‘‘aren’t you going to ask him something?”

‘‘What am I supposed to ask?”’

‘‘Ask him where the town gets its money,’ Buddy instructs.

I ask.

The banker explains that Mag- dalena is fortunate to have many sources of income. Buddy snorts. ‘‘Ask him to name one industry,”’ he says.

‘‘Well, for example, Magdalena is « center of the saddle-making industry,” says the banker.

‘*‘That’s true,’’ Buddy agrees. ‘*‘Ask him how many saddlemakers there are.”’

‘*Five,’’ answers the banker.

‘‘What else?’’ Buddy demands.

‘*Think of the many teachers we have here,”’ the banker says. ““They are well paid. They bring in federal money.”’

‘*In other words,”’ I sum up, “‘you have a prosperous town of 14,000 peo- ple, living for the most part off the reve- nue of five saddlemakers and a number

of schoolteachers?”

‘Well,’ the banker admits, ‘“‘there are the others . . . the outsid- ers. Speaking as a banker, I feel they have a disruptive effect on our economy. They drive up real estate prices, they do not employ the’ services of a DANK. sts

“It is not his fault,’? Buddy says to me. ‘‘You should not be so hard on him.”’

When Buddy finally deposits me at my hotel for lunch and siesta, I am dizzy with bewilderment. Buddy has danced me like a debutante through the smiling corps of city fathers, all of them sharing their thoughts on the progress of contemporary Mexico. Is there a design behind this charade? ‘‘Where are the ringleaders you promised?”’ I demand of Buddy. ‘‘I will pick you up at four o’clock,’’ Buddy replies. ‘‘This after- noon will be different. No problems. Four on the dot.”’

Buddy reappears at 6:30. He does not look at me when I get in the cab of his new Ford pickup. Suddenly he growls, “‘You staying in town?”’

“Why .. . of course! Why?”

‘*No reason,””’ he snaps.

“Is anything wrong, Buddy?” I ask.

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‘Is anything wrong!’ he ex- claims. ‘‘You remember the strangers at breakfast? They were as I thought: state policemen. And now there is a truckload of soldiers in town. They have been seen. So naturally everyone is gone. See! Here is the house of one of the ringlead- ers. As you can see, no one is at home.” Buddy points out a vacant house.

‘Surely there is someone who will see me!”’

“Believe me, ” ‘*they have seen you.”’

I consider this.

It is approaching twilight. Buddy parks his pickup beside the new town square. ‘““There is something I must show you,”’ he declares. We get out and walk into an open-sided concrete struc- ture on the corner of the square; inside there is a table-high rectangular wall topped with a thick sheet of glass. I ap- proach and look down. Below the glass in a deep pit are the broken remains of a dusty skeleton lying on the floor of his grave.

‘‘Father Kino,” ments, matter-of-factly.

I observe the final embarrassment of Father Kino. The expressiveness of this death’s-head grin makes me realize how badly I’ve misjudged Buddy. I don’t understand anything anymore. The dis- tinctions and logical conclusions I drew before coming to Magdalena have be- come smeared, as if a child’s hand muddied a still-wet canvas and in the process changed the focus of the picture from its object to the temper of its artist. Humorless, treacherous, infantile, it is the hand of Mexico.

We step out of the pavillion into the square. The new church looms in deep black shadow against a crimson sunset. In the middle of the square, two policemen stand chatting, unaware of the bats that rush toward their heads and dodge away at the last moment. I can see the bats but they cannot; it is a trick of the light.

‘‘No, my friend, you’ve run intoa dead end,’’ Buddy says. We sit on a bench. ‘‘This is a quiet town. Do you really think that any of the big operators would come to Magdalena? We don’t even have a TV station! There is nothing going on here; we live socially, tranquil- ly, peacefully. . . . I suggest that you return to the border.”’

We are quiet a moment.

**So, what will you do?’’? Buddy inquires.

“I don’t know. I guess I’ll go to Culiacdn.”’

Buddy lights a cigarette. ‘“‘I strongly urge you not to go to Culiacan.”’

says Buddy,

Buddy com-

I do not reply.

‘But if you go, I’m telling you not to ask the same questions as you did here. Those people, they are not like us; they are animals, really. They will take you out in the country and shoot you. They think nothing of doing this. Take my advice and go to the border.”’

‘**Well, thanks for your advice.’

‘*Ah, well. I’ve got to see a man about a plane,’’ Buddy says, studying his watch. ‘‘It will only take half an hour.

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Maybe I'll stop by later and we'll talk.”’ Buddy stands up and shakes the creases from his trousers.

**Goodbye, Buddy.”’

For an instant Buddy _ looks caught and surprised; then, for the first time, a smile breaks through. It is a transformation; it is like the sun re- vealed. Itis sly! sly! sly!

My God! Is Buddy really .

Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico

In late August, Culiacan, the cen- ter of the narcotics industry in Mexico, turns into a stewpot. The lush Sierras en- circling the city are capped by dense, iron-grey clouds; the air, rich with the smell of diesel exhaust and rotting vege- tation, thickens and swells, and elicits a fruity odor from the populace. At the office of the Federales, a dozen police re- porters have been waiting three hours for a press conference to begin. The sto- ry is big, but when they file their pieces their by-lines will not be on them. “‘In Culiacdn the names of police reporters are never printed because they [the Mafia] may send someone to kill us,”’ ex- plains a reporter for El Sol de Culiacan. ‘‘There is an atmosphere of fear—real fear—in this city.’ Another reporter laughs unhappily. ‘‘Now he will say in print that the reporters in Culiacdn are afraid,’ he complains. ‘‘But it is true!”’ the first reporter replies. ‘‘We are afraid. I am. You cannot know what it is like

here. Every time the river overflows,

many, many bodies come up. It is ordi- nary here.”’

The chief of the Federales finally arrives in a black sedan. Several days be- fore, he and his men made the biggest heroin bust in history. The raid took place on a mountain ranch called ‘‘EI Li- m6én,’’ which had been under observa- tion for several months. Inside the ranch was a heroin laboratory containing 127.3 kilos of ‘‘pure heroin’’ (which in Mexico means about 85 percent purity), 28.9 ki- los of morphine base, 60 kilos of opium and 170 liters of opium ‘‘in process.” The agents discovered evidence that dur- ing the time the lab was under observa- tion at least 160 kilos (353 pounds)of her-

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oin was manufactured and sold, and presumably delivered to the United States. Seven employees were captured; the two owners and another man man- aged to escape.

When the polite questions are concluded, the chief conducts the re- porters to another office, where there is a door behind a secretary’s desk firmly sealed with masking tape. The chief pops open the door and the acrid smell of a half-cord of Mexican brown heroin bak- ing in an unventilated room bursts into the faces of the reporters. The heroin oc- cupies half the room and is worth $41 million in Mexico. Outside, the seven men arrested in the raid are lined up in front of apparatus taken from the labora- tory. They blink helplessly into the storm of flashbulbs. One can already imagine the photographs: the same sunk- en expressions one sees in pictures of captured troops. It is difficult not to feel sorry for them; they are so pathetic, and so easily replaced.

As the conference breaks up, I approach one of the Mexican agents who has been observing the promenade of re- porters. I ask him when they will elimi- nate the narcotics traffic in Culiacdn. ‘*Never,”’ he states flatly. ‘‘Half the pop- ulation is involved. It is an impossible problem.”’

‘‘Do you have any indication that guns are being traded for drugs?”’ I ask.

‘‘Of course, it happens. On what scale, I don’t know.”’

‘‘What about the revolutionar- ies—are they involved in the drug trade?”’

‘*They may be,”’ he says, “‘but for the most part I think the revolutionary groups like 23rd of September have nothing to do with the traffickers. They get their money from robbing banks. Who knows where they get their guns?”’

‘*Trading guns for drugs? Yeah, I can tell you about that, ’cause I done it myself, man.’’ Behind the iron mesh in the visiting lobby of the federal prison in Culiacfén, Victor Gonzalez Gaxiola cocks his head to one side and squints, the better to estimate how much the in- formation is worth. He is wearing an un- buttoned shirt with a floral print, beige prison shorts and a lavender scarf at the neck. When he raises his right arm to scratch behind his ear, his shirt flaps open and the tattooed face of a woman peeks out; she extends from the right armpit to the center of the chest, from the collarbone to the diaphragm. She has a promising look in her eye. Over Vic- tor’s heart are the words: Susan forever.

‘‘Where’s Susan?”’ I inquire.

30 NEWTIMES

“Oh, we lost contact some time ago, man.”’

Victor is_ irresistible. What’s more, he has terrific command of Los Angeles street-English.

‘‘What are you in for, Victor?”’

“It’s a long story, man. Because I’m quite a character. Say, you plan to talk to some of the other prisoners about this? Probably you need an interpreter.”’

‘“*Probably.”’

“You understand . . . bread’sa little hard to come by in here.”’

‘Don’t worry. I understand.”’

Victor smiles at my understand- ing. Now I ask him about the trade of guns for drugs.

‘Oh, it’s the only way to go now- adays, man. Really, everybody’s doing it. I didn’t do much, though: helped some guys trade a Thompson _ sub- machine gun for half an ounce of co- caine. But you’re right: there’s a lot of guns coming down, and they trade them for drugs. But most of the time they bring dollars. Crispy fucking dollars, man.””

‘Listen, Victor, are there any members of the 23rd of September Com-

“Trading guns for dope is the only way to go,”

says Victor. “Everybody is doing it ”

munist League in here?”’

‘‘Well, maybe I know one, man. But you gotta understand what it’s like for them in here. They won’t talk. The government is after them, man.”’

‘‘Come on, Victor. Let’s give ita try.”

Victor shrugs. ‘“‘Okay. But he won't talk, you know.”’ Victor gives a name to the guard. Soon a boy of 20 ap- pears; he is girlishly pretty and he smiles when he sees Victor. That makes Victor feel bad. ‘“You don’t have to say any- thing,’’ Victor advises.

“I don’t mind,”’ says the boy.

Victor reluctantly begins the in- terpretation. ‘‘He says they picked him up in the fields. He was out destroying the crops in the fields, trying to fuck with the owners—you know, the rich peo- ple,’ Victor relates. ‘‘He says but the main reason he’s here is that he was try- ing to bring the conscience alive to the government, and all that shit, man. He says he joined the League in high school, like a lot of his friends. As far as this business of the League being involved in the drug traffic, that’s just bullshit, he thinks, but he doesn’t really know any-

thing about that. He talks about financ- ing the revolution through some kind of process . . . through the people, he says, because of this new kind of con- science the people will have. And it will have to happen sooner or later, you dig?”’

Victor winces. ‘He really shouldn’t be in here, man. He’s just a kid. I don’t think he better say any more.”’

We both watch the boy return to the yard. ‘‘Listen,’’ says Victor, grave- ly, ‘“‘about that bread. . . . 1don’t mean to hurry you, man, but it’s almost six and I only got 10 minutes to make the buy and tie up and shoot ”’

“*Oh.’’ I reach for my wallet. Vic- tor cranes to look at the contents.

‘*A paper here is 30 pesos, man.”’

I roll a 50 peso note and stick it through the mesh. ‘‘Have a good time,”’ I blurt out.

Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico

For some reason—perhaps it is merely my perception—my journey has been dogged by odd dualities: first, the Norman twins; then the Janus-faced op- position of Villalobos and Johnny Grant; and, of course, Buddy, who appears to be what he is not and is what he appears not to be. All through Mexico the Mafia and the 23rd of September Communist League have seemed to move in and out of oneness and opposition to each other. The tendency of some people to bisect the Mexican political system into terror- ists in the left wing and the Méxican Mafia in the right is more than offset by the government’s attempt to yoke the two parties together, thereby showing up the revolutionaries as nothing more than common criminals. Members of the 23rd of September Communist League are re- ferred to by the government and the press as ‘‘delinquents’’ or even ‘‘gang- sters,’’ despite the fact that the constitu- ency of the League is drawn almost en- tirely from the Mexican university sys- tem. The extent to which the govern- ment, or elements of the government, will go to blend the two in the public’s mind was shown by the rise of Carlos Morales. Morales, who first gained influ- ence in official circles by intimidating student activists at the University of Guadalajara, used his influence to be- come a narcotics trafficker with one of the largest syndicates in the country, which included a gun-running operation based in Tucson. He and his troops were supplied with cards, identifying them- selves as ‘‘confidential agents’’ of the army, and drove about in limousines sporting diplomatic license plates. In ex-

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32 NEWTIMES

change, Morales made certain that every assassination or bombing carried out by his men was done in the name of the 23rd of September Communist League. When the Federales finally arrested Morales, the chiefs of police for the city and the state resigned.

I came to Guadalajara to make contact with active members of the League, and perhaps to talk to Perico Teran, the exiled boss of the Magdalena organization. For three days there has been a stream of evasion and gentle lies from the authorities and the press.

By the fourth day in Guadalajara my patience is worn to the nub, my money has run out, I’m ready to go home. By now the questions that drew me here—the trade of guns for dope, the involvement of revolutionaries in the narcotics traffic—have begun to stagger and trip in a field of contradictions. And when I am given information that seems to resolve my dilemma, I almost don’t understand.

‘‘Well, there is one man, I sup- pose, who might be able to help you,”’ says a young lawyer who has been rec- ommended to me by a group of students. ‘*He’s already been in jail, so maybe he doesn’t have as much to lose as the oth- ers. He is a professional, a medical man, but he also smuggles narcotics. I happen to know he is a member of the 23rd of September. Whether he will talk to you, I don’t know.”’

Talk to me? The fact that he ex- ists vindicates everything! But he is not at all—no, not at all!—what I expected or could ever have imagined: a tiny, white-haired man, the size of a jockey, with pearly pink skin smelling strongly of medicine and soap. He looks Mon- goloid—is this a hoax? We go to an emp- ty cafe nearby; he climbs in a seat and orders a soft drink. There is something dimly hilarious in the thought that this little person could be the union of nar- cotics trafficker and revolutionary, the face behind the fire. But perhaps it is, af- ter all, the appropriate conclusion to an exploration that was ever freakish, unex- pected, enigmatic.

“There is no such thing as the 23rd of September Communist League,”’ says the little man, grinning at my per- plexity. ‘‘It is an invention of the police. It is a word the police use when they sell protection. They know we are bigger than that—much! We are bigger than the army, we have more arms than the AMY. sac.”

‘*How many arms?”’

‘It is impossible to say, because there are many cells of guerrillas and they do not communicate with each oth-

er. I myself have seen a room stacked full of machine guns here in Guadalaja- ra.”’ He sips his soft drink through a straw. He now looks no more than nine years of age, like a child who has dyed his hair white ona bet.

‘Il read today in the paper that ycu killed two more policemen,”’ I say. ‘*That makes 20 already.”’

“Is that all they say? Let me tell you, we have killed many more than that! For every one of us they kill, we kill 20 of them.’’ He hits the table with his tiny fist. ‘‘The killings, the hang- ings—they will go on! This is war!’’ His voice drops and he leans back in his chair. ‘‘We must fight force with force,” he says simply.

‘*But why kill the police? If you want to fight corruption, why not start with the Mafia?’’

‘‘Because the police and _ the Mafia are the same thing!”’ he says in ex- asperation. ‘‘It is the same way in the United States, of course. It is just like Watergate.”’

SSO CR TEA “There is no such thing as the 23rd of September Communist League,” states the little man. “It is an invention of the police. They know we are much bigger than

that—much!”

One question remained, though I already guessed the answer. ‘“‘Do you trade drugs for guns?”’

“On, “NO,.22ne iSays. course not.”’

“No, Of

‘‘The young men in the Mafia and the ones in the 23rd of September—they are the same,’’ says the taxi driver speeding toward the airport. ‘‘One sells drugs, the other assaults banks. I have friends in both. The revolutionaries, they are in jail. There are at least 400 in jail here; in Mexico City there are thou- sands. But my friend in the Mafia, his name is Perico, he lives on a fine ranch outside of town. He lives well, with grand cars and lovely arms; he is a nice fellow, really.

‘‘Here in Mexico we have many problems. Life is changing so fast, so many new people in the city every day. The young men, they go into the League or the Mafia because they want a better life. They want the same thing, I think. One sells drugs and the other assaults banks. They are the same.’’ @

By Mary JoMcConahay

Drugs have become Latin Amer- ica’s number one export to the United States, and Mexico alone now supplies 90 percent of the heroin fix to America’s more than | million users. In an attempt to stop the flow of the deadly brown powder across its southern borders, the U.S. is spending $12 million and Mexico $24 million this year in the ongoing ‘“‘war against drugs.’’ Since November 15, the beginning of the latest phase, 2,700 peo- ple (about 200 of them Americans) were made prisoners in this bilateral ‘‘war.”’

Listen to the joint government declarations and you'll hear that the massive effort against the cultivation and transportation of opium poppies, heroin and marijuana (considered a hard drug under Mexican law) is a bright and shiny affair employing ultramodern detection equipment developed for use in Viet- nam, multispectral airborne cameras, 30 agent-advisers of the U.S. Drug En- forcement Administration, the Mexican army, specially trained Mexican federal agents and a fleet of 40 helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft supplied by the Unit- ed States. It’s called a campaign, and the jargon is military. A report on the DEA’s progress in dealing with ‘‘the Mexican narcotics problem’’ speaks of interdic- tion areas, command zones and opera- tional aerial reconnaissance units.

But, as in any war, there’s a hid- den face to this one: less honorable moti- vations, injury to noncombatants, dan- ger to food crops and the people who eat them, and corruption and sabotage among the allies. This face of the U.S.- backed drug war in Mexico is as ugly as that of a starving junkie.

Along with the states of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua to the north, the southern state of Guerrero is a prime tar- get of the present campaign. Its great rugged folds of land, which reach to the Pacific, are the home of Acapulco Gold and hidden fields of the new treasure of the Sierra Madre, the bright red heroin poppy. The farmers who live here are among the poorest in Mexico. They live on the corn and beans they can scratch

During a drug raid, a Mexican lieutenant inspects an opium poppy.

from the unfriendly soil in a medieval re- lationship to their caciques, powerful lo- cal bosses and landowners whose heredi- tary economic and political power allows them to rule with an iron hand over the peasant population. For generations they have lived in mortal fear of government soldiers, whom they see as the enemy, and of the judicial police, whom they consider “‘bandits with permission.”’

From these roots of poverty and official neglect, two responses have sprung up among the mountain people of Guerrero: on the one hand, 15 years of guerrilla war under Genaro Vasquez and the People’s Party of Lucio Cabanas (both leaders are now dead); and, on the other hand, an attempt among individual farmers to rise above the subsistence level by planting seeds brought to them by ‘“‘people from outside’’—by Mexi- cans from the north, an isolated gringo or, aS some peasants claim, the soldiers and police themselves.

Less than two years ago, the Mexican government undertook a mas- sive mountain dragnet of air and land forces, including about half its national army, and killed Cabafias, a guerrilla

leader with an enormous popular follow- ing in the mountains. The government released a grisly photo of the corpse with the announcement that the guerfrilia movement in Mexico was Officially dead. But Guerrero today remains a state of military occupation, and many of its peo- ple view the current campaign against drugs, carried out by Mexican soldiers and judicial police who march in from their own encampments or drop froin he- licopters, as a veneer of legitimacy for an ongoing campaign to terrorize the populace and keep down an incipient anti-government movement.

Student leaders in Chilpancingo, the state capital, estimate that 800 people have been killed or have disappeared in the mountains in the last three or four years at the hands of the military, and have published lists of names of people whose families have declared them still missing. ‘‘Right now there are some 200 political prisoners in jails throughout the state, in Acapulco, Chilpancingo, Tec- pan,”’ says an orchid farmer from the sierra. *‘At the same time the govern- ment accuses them of being guerrillas they accuse them of being drug traffick-

NEWTIMES 33

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ers.”’ Peasants claim it is common prac- tice for police or soldiers to arrest people and then frame them by planting mari- juana in a pocket. The peasants I spoke with, from a town about two days by bus and trail from Chilpancingo, claim that in their municipal area about 25 persons have disappeared or been killed by the military in the last six months. ‘‘The army goes up into the sierra and says they are going to protect the cam- pesino,’’? one man said. ‘‘They say that everywhere there are a lot of drugs, but it isn’t that way. They kill the cam- pesinos.”’

What reason do they give for kill- ing the campesinos?

‘‘They say they have some drugs. But it isn’t always true. If some people in the mountains helped the guerrillas, then the caciques or anyone, even another campesino, can accuse the people of drugs and they get arrested without investigation. If people are surprised working in a field of amapola [poppies], even if they are not the owners but have been hired by the day to work, they must run away or they are shot. The govern- ment sees in every peasant in these parts a possible guerrilla, and they will use any excuse to sow terror in the mountains.”’

The drug war breeds violence on many fronts. The Mexican press reports almost daily on bloody ambushes of po- lice in the middle of Culiacan, heroin capital of the state of Sinaloa, or shoot- outs in small towns where there are clandestine processing laboratories, or movie-script prison escapes of narco- traficantes. Soldiers are shot at and some have been killed on drug-destroying mis- sions, although snipers may be vengeful peasants as well as drug traffickers and growers. Two American DEA agents, Ralph N. Shaw and James Lunn, were killed on May 14 of this year when their DeHavilland Beaver crashed in the mountains of Atoyac, Guerrero, on a ‘‘routine liaison flight.’’ The cause of the crash has not been determined. And as we stood in front of some glass cage toll booths a few feet from a military station where soldiers checked cars for guns and dope on the Mexico City-Acapulco high- way, a Mexican highway police com- mander told me his own men were ‘‘not even safe on the public roads. Last week a woman drove through here late at night. When soldiers tried to flag her down, she pulled out a machine gun and began firing. She got away and this time no one was hurt. But I have lost men on other occasions.”’

Mary Jo McConahay is a free lance who recently left Mexico after several years.

If an individual is caught with drugs in the sierra, quick cash may pre- vent arrest or even summary execution, according to peasants and other resi- dents of the mountain. One hears de- tailed word-of-mouth accounts of entire villages being extorted to protect a com- munal or individual drug crop. Thus the peasants feel the big dealers are not be- ing prosecuted while farmers who plant the fields or peons who work them or transport the goma (resin) are arrested or worse. Corruption of public officials in- volved in the current campaign is alleged by American politicians and acknowl- edged by the Mexican in the street. Sometimes the officials are brought to justice: the Mexican press reports that three Supreme Court judges in the north of Mexico were dismissed recently for receiving $600,000 U.S. in bribes to pro- tect a band of heroin runners, and three agents and a radio operator of the judi- cial police in Sonora have been arrested on charges of trafficking in narcotics. But ‘‘the bite’’ is a national pastime in Mexico, oiling the mechanics of daily life from traffic tickets to business con- tracts to national politics, and few ex- pect an overnight change in the system of bribery and extortion. One police official who did not know me to be a re- porter bragged quite openly about the day in March when he and the army officer he worked with surprised a couple of men and burros with 30 kilos of mari- juana, took 20 for themselves and let the men go with 10 kilos and a promise not to use the same trail again.

One late afternoon in June, on an isolated stretch of highway near the road to Filo de Caballo, Guerrero, a friend and I accepted a lift from two well- dressed men in a Ford LTD and found a loaded M-1 on the floor of the back seat. They took us for Acapulco tourists and I was too tired and disinterested to correct the impression; shortly it became appar- ent that to identify myself as a reporter would be less than prudent.

The driver turned out to be Cap- tain Maximo Monteagudo, chief of the northern sector of Guerrero for the State Judicial Police with headquarters in the mountain town of Teloloapan. As the af- ternoon turned into evening, Captain Monteagudo would point in the direction of ‘‘6 hectares of the finest marijuana you ever saw’’ or toward the road to a laboratory for processing the goma into heroin, a laboratory he couldn’t possibly bust because ‘‘they are friends of mine.” The captain said he himself gave mari- juana and poppy seeds to some farmers to plant because ‘“‘they are poor and I sympathize with them,”’ although I re-

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NEWTIMES 37

called that some farmers in that area complained of being forced to plant drugs under threat of extortion, physical harm or having their land taken away. For hours I played along with an ironic case of mistaken identity, and ultimately Monteagudo offered to pay me to con- tact an imaginary friend in the States who might be interested in several kilos of heroin the captain had for sale.

Two days later, Joseph Rizzo, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration assistant regional director in Mexico City, informed me that his office was ready to go ahead with an undercover Operation in which I would encourage Captain Monteagudo to come to an area near Taxco or Mexico City ‘‘where his friends won’t back him up,’’ where a deal would be made by a DEA agent act- ing as the buyer for the heroin and an ar- rest made by Mexican authorities.

Day after tense day I waited while Rizzo said the DEA could not go ahead with the operation without permission from Mexican officials, which they were not getiing. ‘‘We’re under a microscope here,’ he said. ‘‘We have no authority to act onour own. . . no police powers.”’ By the next week, Rizzo had gone on va- cation, another agent warned me that if Monteagudo knew my identity by now I was, at the least, in trouble, my house was broken into twice within seven days and nothing was found missing, and still another agent advised me to call into the DEA office every four hours on the weekend. Finally, Mexican authorities said ‘‘no thanks”’ to that particular oper- ation, they would carry out their own investigation in the future—and I left Mexico.

Another phase of the drug war that troubles many Mexicans is the use of the herbicides Gramoxone and 2,4-D to kill fields of marijuana and opium plants spotted from the air. Gramoxone is the commercial name for paraquat, a non-selective contact poison harmful to any broad-leaf plant. 2,4-D and its cous- in 2,4,8-T combined to make the infa- mous Agent Orange, the defoliant that was finally banned in Vietnam after its use by American forces was proven to cause birth defects among Vietnamese children. 2,4-D has never been banned in the U.S., a fact Mexican authorities of- ten cite in its defense, although the chem- ical has been shown to be teratogenic (causing fetal malformations). As of June, Mexican authorities report 2,4-D had been sprayed over an area of about 7,788,000 square meters and Gramoxone over 1,653,000 square meters of land area. The 100 Mexican pilots who drop these herbicides were trained by flight in-

38 NEWTIMES

structors from a private American com- pany named—unaccountably—Ever- green.

Arquimedes Morales Carranza, rector of the Autonomous University of Guerrero, has denounced the use of de- foliants because ‘‘spraying with Gram- oxone is making the leaves fall off the coffee trees. People here are losing their year’s subsistence. The peasants come to us to complain because they are afraid of the government. They have nowhere else to go.’’ According to Morales, chemists from the university are trying to study the effects of herbicides used against drugs on food crops in the sierra, but have been stymied in their attempt to collect samples. ‘‘The army doesn’t let us get into the areas we need to reach. They block our vehicles,’’ he says. The richest coffee-growing area in Guerrero is located in the sierra of Atoyac, also the homeland of Lucio Cabanas and heartland of the guerrilla movement in Guerrero. ‘‘There are more soldiers per

“The government sees in every peasant in these parts

a possible guerrilla,” one man in Guerrero told me, “and they will use any excuse to sow terror

in the mountains”

square kilometer in the region of Atoyac today then anyplace else in Mexico,”’ said one government official in Mexico City. And in Chilpancingo, a young spe- cialist in the state Office of Economic Development said guardedly that it was ‘‘very possible’ the army was using the war against drugs to clear out the Atoyac area of suspected guerrilla activity, al- though such charges were flatly denied by Alejandro Gertz Manero, the oficial mayor in charge of the Heroin Eradica- tion Program in Mexico. Arquimedes Morales is not so sure. ‘“‘The army, dope, guerrillas,’’ he says. ‘““You must understand that in Guerrero all of these are related.”’

The Instituto Mexicano del Café, the government coffee institute, denies that coffee plants have been harmed, and an expert with the Mexican Department of Agriculture says that Gramoxone and 2,4-D will not pose a risk to other broad- leaf plants ‘‘except where the wind is very strong.’’ As a rule, however, these chemicals are sprayed from the air or by

back-packing soldiers in mountainous areas where high winds are not uncom- mon. Basic food crops are often planted close to fields with poppies or marijuana. Neither Gramoxone nor 2,4-D has been used massively against drugs anywhere in the world before the Mexican cam- paign, and the Mexican Department of Agriculture is doing no field studies in areas where the army has sprayed to see if plants or people are being contaminat- ed. One Mexican organization, the Academy for Ecological Law, made headlines when it objected to the wide- spread use of the herbicides without full ° investigation of effects on soils and wa- ters in high mountains where rivers are born. However, several weeks later, when I visited the president of that or- ganization, attorney Ramon Ojeda Mes- tre told me that the academy had met with the Mexican attorney general’s office and ‘‘we were convinced by the authorities that the threat from drugs was much greater than the possible threat to ecology. When people here go to the market, there is no tag that says, ‘This lettuce was grown in Sinaloa on land that has been contaminated.’ Most of the people of my country have never seen defoliated land, but ask about LSD, marijuana, and they know all about it.”’

The farmers in the sierra may plaster marijuana leaves on rheumatic knees, and cocaine is nothing new to well-heeled executives and entertainers from Tijuana and the capital, but Mex- ico’s major drug problem remains the abuse of inhalants such as model air- plane glue. Thus the costiy drug cam- paign, insofar as it’s not disguised anti- guerrilla warfare, is being waged for the neighbor to the north. The pressure is great: most of Mexico’s foreign trade is with the U.S.; she is looking for a just solution to the problem of millions of her people who work legally or illegally with- in U.S. territory; she would be crippled by a border shutdown of even a few days. In immediate return for the present effort, Mexico would like less complain- ing about the 600 Americans in Mexican jails and some sign that America is elimi- nating the market for heroin in its own cities. José Lopez Portillo, president- elect of Mexico, has publicly recognized the fact that farmers grow poppies and marijuana because they lack employ- ment and need help in growing produc- tive agricultural crops. Meanwhile, cam- pesinos will plant new fields of poppies and replant the old ‘“‘destroyed’’ fields until there is no one on the other side of the border to buy heroin. This was a war that was supposed to last a year. Mexi- can Officials call it permanente. @

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Music impresario Phil Walden’s fund-raising efforts boosted Carter’s candidacy at a key stage. But now he’s singing the blues: the Allman Brothers Band, keystone of his empire, has broken up after Gregg Allman sent a friend to jail for procuring him cocaine

“Yall getting drunk?”’

‘*Yeah,”’ the boys in their cowboy hats and T-shirts roar back, hooting, whistling, clapping one another on the back. From back in the darkened hall there is a shrill cry of a rebel yell.

‘*That’s why we’re here,”’ the gui- tar player shouts back from the stage. ‘Getting high, making music and raising hell.’’ More hoots and whistles, but it is impossible to hear what anyone is say- ing. With.a deafening howl, the band has begun to play.

Night has come to Macon, Geor- gia, and at Uncle Sam’s, the club Phil Walden owns out on Gray Highway, the good ole boys are beginning to unwind the way they do every day when the sun goes down. Getting high. Making music. Raising hell. Maybe even more than usu- al, because tonight is a special occasion: the surviving members of the now- defunct Allman Brothers Band, reorgan- ized and rechristened as Sea Level, have returned to play in the town that gave them their start. Spotted around the room, you can see a number of studio musicians from Capricorn, Walden’s record company, come to pay their re-

40 NEWTIMES

By Robert Sam Anson

THE AP RIGOR oe eS TION

spects. Some of the Brothers’ roadies are here, too, and a lot of friends from the good old days, when the Brothers, as they are respectfully known in Mac- on, were one of the biggest bands in the country, and had made Phil Walden, the Allmans’ manager, a power to be reck- oned with. Unaccountably, however, the big white Rolls in which Walden tools around Macon is missing from the park- ing lot. Time was in Macon when Phil would never miss an occasion like this one. But then, times have changed. You wouldn’t know that tonight, though. Even the slender, bearded figure a cou- ple of tables away is smiling, embracing the people who come up to him. His name is John Herring, but everyone calls him ‘‘Scooter.”’ To look at him, you wouldn’t guess that less than a month ago, thanks to the testimony of a friend whose life he once saved, Scooter was sentenced to spend the next 75 years ina federal prison.

““C’mon, y’all,”’ the guitar player is saying again. ‘‘Everyone get high.”’

That is the credo of Macon. ‘‘A little champagne, a little cocaine, and we'll make music,’’ as someone else

once put it. That someone else was Gregg Allman, rock star, husband of Cher, principal money-making asset of Phil Walden Associates and, in his latest incarnation witness for the prosecution in case No. 76-80-Mac: United States of America vs. John C. Herring.

The story of how Gregg Allman’ came to send his friend to prison is, in the end, the story of the rise and fall of rock and roll, a tale filled with power, drugs, sex, violence, death and betrayal, a drama whose cast includes dreamers and hustlers, artists and con men, and, along the way, the probable next presi- dent of the United States. If you are wondering what presidential politics has to do with rock and ro/l music, the an- swer, in the case of Jimmy Carter, is ev- erything. Had it not been for rock and roll, especially the unique, hard-driving sound of Gregg Allman, Jimmy Carter might well be down in Plains today, wor- rying about nothing so much as this fall’s peanut crop. To understand how this happened—how it all happened—you have to go to Macon, Georgia, and meet Phil Walden,the man Jimmy Carter called ‘*my one-man campaign organization.”’

i ; | J

4

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They call Macon (population 124,000) ‘‘the biggest country town in the world,’’ and the name fits. It has nev- er been so much of a place, no more than a market for farmers to bring their cotton and their peanuts. During the Civil War. Sherman thought so little of Macon that he didn’t bother to burn it, but contented himself by lobbing a single cannon ball into the center of town. Of course, Sher- man couldn’t have known that one day, for reasons no one still understands, Ma- con would be home for the likes of James Brown and Little Richard, and va- rious lesser rhythm and blues artists. Their presence, however, did not escape the notice of a young man with curly flowing hair, a ready smile and intense blue eyes. His name was Phil Walden.

A poor boy, possessed of little more than charm, street smarts and re- lentless ambition, Walden had been in- troduced to ‘‘race’’ music through a col- lection of old 78s his brother brought home one day. He fell instantly in love with the sound. The interest soon be- came a business. By the time Walden was a sophomore at Macon’s Mercer University, he had opened a one-room booking agency. One of his acts was a then-unknown singer named Otis Red- ding, destined to become one of the big- gest black musicians in the industry. Redding died in a plane crash in 1967, but by then Walden had established him- self as the manager of some of the most popular black performers in the country, a distinction that made him none too popular with Macon’s conservative es- tablishment. As he puts it today, ‘‘I was one of your early nigger-lovers.”’

Walden, typically, didn’t care what people thought of him. Rhythm and blues music was on the rise, and his ca- reer was going with it. Walden groomed his talent, booked them into clubs, pub- lished their music, recorded their rec- ords, hustled their souvenirs and, through an investment company, in- creased the money that kept rolling in. Through it all, he never lost his instinct for spotting talent. Sensing that rhythm and blues was beginning to play itself out, Walden started looking for a differ- ent kind of act, something new, some- thing southern, something white.

There are various versions of what happened next, but the story Wal- den tells is that one day in 1969, while lis- tening to a Wilson Pickett record, his at- tention was riveted by the sound of an accompanying guitarist. After making several inquiries, Walden learned the identity of the guitarist, flew off to Mus- cle Shoals, Alabama, and there met and signed a studio guitarist named Duane

Allman. Intense, quiet ar ° deeply com- mitted to his music, Allniaa had spent more than a decade knocking around the periphery of the industry, forming a few bands, serving as a -ideman to big acts, developing an impressive reputation among serious musicians, but, until he met Walden, showing no signs of going anywhere. Walden changed all that. Duane was ordered to go back to his home town of Daytona, Florida, get together a band and call Walden when he was ready. Phil would do the rest. Six months later, the Allman Brothers Band—with Gregg brought in from Cali- fornia as songwriter/lead singer and or- ganist/keyboard man—was in business. Things started off slowly. Audi- ences were unaccustomed to the ‘‘south- ernness’’ of the Allman Brothers sound: a blend of rock, blues and boogie, witha bit of bluegrass thrown in. As Walden later explained it: ‘‘A lot of performers were doing splits and turning over back- wards and throwing guitars through amplifiers and wearing gold suits, and

In an expansive moment four years ago, Walden reportedly told a woman friend that he had two ultimate ambitions: “become the governor of Georgia or control the president”

the Allmans just stood there and played.’’ The band lived together in a tiny house Walden had rented for them in Macon, sleeping on mattresses Wal- den had bought. He borrowed heavily to get the act off the ground. But soon his investment began to pay off. Within two years, what started as a southern cult be- came a _ nationwide sensation, pro- claimed by the Playboy Music Poll as the ‘“‘best band in the country,’’ playing to audiences of 10,000 a night, then 20,000, then 50,000 and, at Watkins Glen, 600,000, racking up a string of five gold and three platinum albums, becoming, finally, one of the biggest money-making bands in the land.

In the process, the Allman Broth- ers made Capricorn Records the largest independent recording company in the world and Phil Walden an exceedingly rich man. The poor boy who started out to be an artist and then decided ‘‘it would be better to have the money to buy the art I wanted,”’ built a mansion on nine acres of Macon land and proceeded to fill it up with Picassos, Degases, Ma-

tisses, Wyeths, Hurds and expensive eighteenth-century antiques. There was another ‘‘country house’’ outside Macon similarly outfitted, and another at Hilton Head, where he entertained the stars and bosses of the music industry, not to men- tion an occasional opinion-maker such as Jann Wenner. Walden traveled around town in a white Rolls Royce once owned by Debbie Reynolds, or, when the mood moved him, a six-door limousine outfit- ted with bar, television, video-tape re- corder and stereo tape deck, or, when he was feeling especially sporty, in one of the brace of $24,000 Mercedes 450 SELs he maintained. Even his working quarters were outfitted to suit his tastes: delft porcelain toilet, cockateels in the lobby, antiques and Wyeths filling up the walls, a fire crackling in the Napole- onic fireplace, one of two in the world, the other reposing in the Green Room of the White House. From here, Walden controlled a varied empire with a com- bined yearly gross approaching $20 mil- lion. There was the Walden shopping center, the Walden amusement park, the Walden apartment complex, the Walden rock and roll club, even the Walden liq- uor store, which came in handy, since he began most business meetings with pro- digious amounts of J&B Scotch. Taken altogether, they gave him a net worth es- timated at $5 million. Fortune magazine could write, with only slight exaggera- tion, that ‘‘Phil Walden Turns Rock into Gold,’’ and quote the ‘‘hip southern im- presario’’ (after all, he wore blue jeans to the office) as saying: “‘If you can make money and have fun and power, that’s what it’s all about.””

Politics became a means to pro- tect the investment. As Walden knew well, Macon took none too kindly to the hip lifestyle of his stars and hangers-on who were moving into town in droves. Rather than ignoring Macon, Walden set out to woo it. He became the town booster, the contributor to Macon’s worthy causes. He arranged for the All- man Brothers to perform a series of benefits that raised $100,000 for various civic projects. He hired Macon cops and stationed them, in uniform, at Uncle Sam’s to keep away troublemakers. He even courted the town’s mayor, a gun- toting right-winger named ‘Machine Gun’’ Ronnie Thompson. One thing Walden did was become the largest sin- gle financial contributor to Thompson’s campaign. Another was to indulge Ron- nie’s love of music (he had been a gospel singer before becoming mayor) by letting him cut demo tapes at the Capricorn stu- dios. In gratitude, Ronnie named one of the city’s bridges after Otis Redding.

Walden himself was named to the plan- ning commission, which approved zon- ing changes for houses one of Walden’s companies was restoring downtown. There were other, less noticeable perks. Walden’s executives could park, for in- stance, all day in the no parking zone in front of Capricorn and directly across the street from city hall and be confident that their cars would never be ticketed. And whenever one of Capricorn’s stars got into a scrape—such as exposing him- self at the town’s best restaurant, getting drunk or into a fight—the police had a way of looking the other way. Nor did it seem to matter that the various head- quarters of the Allman Brothers were veritable storehouses for drugs (one visi- tor to the Allmans’ farm reports that the kitchen equipment included a large-sized Hellmann’s mayonnaise jar filled with co- caine). For some reason, they were nev-

An eye for talent: Walden spotted Carter early, just as he did the Allman band.

Records, among whose credits is an alienation of affections suit filed by the husband of his personal secretary. But, as one of Walden’s former executives puts it, “‘In a way, rock stars and politi- cians have a lot in common. They can learn a lot from each other. That’s why they are so fascinated by each other.”’ The resemblance goes deeper than that. In many ways, Walden and Carter are remarkably alike. Both are poor boys who like to stress the humble- ness of their origins (Carter’s father was a farmer, while Walden’s worked in a clothing goods store). Both went on to make tidy fortunes. Both were racial moderates long before tolerance became fashionable. Both are risk-takers and high-rollers. Both are outsiders to their establishments and both are quietly re- sentful of them. Both are Georgia boys, defensive about their origins and yet

er raided. Everything, as the saying goes, was cool in Macon, so cool that a visitor to Walden’s office was not overly surprised to see Phil casually sharing a joint with one of the town fathers.

Walden, however, was aiming for bigger things. In an expansive moment four years ago, he reportedly told a woman friend that he had two ultimate ambitions: ‘‘become the governor of Georgia, or control the president.’’ That was shortly before he met a man with even bigger ambitions, the governor of Georgia himself, Jimmy Carter.

At first blush, it is difficult to imagine a more unlikely relationship than that between the non-drinking, born-again Christian candidate for presi- dent and the hard-drinking, non-believ- ing, drug-taking proprietor of Capricorn

fiercely proud of their Southernness. And both, of course, lust after power. ‘*It bothers me a little when I think about it,"’ says one of their mutual friends, ‘*but there’s a lot of Jimmy in Phil and a lot of Phil in Jimmy.”’

They met in 1973, when Carter, in the midst of one of his ‘‘stop and listen tours’’ through Georgia, stopped by the Macon offices of Capricorn Records. The visit had been arranged by Maconite Cloyd Hall, then serving as Carter’s spe- cial assistant’ and later to be hired—and fired—as Walden’s vice-president of cor- porate affairs. During their first meeting, they chatted for half an hour. Walden was frankly impressed. ‘‘I was fairly ap- prehensive,”’ he later said to a reporter, **because I thought it was just window dressing. But then I was surprised by his

knowledge of our industry and his per- ceptive questions. There wasn’t any- thing patronizing about him.’’ Instead of asking about what it took to make a gold record, as Walden had expected him to, Carter was curious about the music in- dustry’s economic impact on the com- munity, what its problems were and how it was combating them, especially drugs.

Whatever Walden told Carter must have impressed him, because the friendship took. In the succeeding months, the two men kept in touch by letter and occasional phone call. A year later, Walden invited Carter to be the guest of honor at the Allman Brothers concert in Atlanta. Carter accepted. Carter, for his part, made a tough law against tape piracy, one of the plagues of the recording industry, a part of his legis- lative package. All of which benefited Phil Walden.

In 1974, Carter, who professed an interest in rock music, invited Bob Dy- lan, then on tour in Atlanta, to the Gov- ernor’s Mansion for a post-concert re- ception, and Dylan, to Walden’s great surprise, accepted. The party broke up about two, without the appear- ance of one of the scheduled guests of honor, Gregg Allman. Gregg showed up at four in the morning, apparently a bit stoned, but Carter, who had long since gone to bed, didn’t seem to mind. He greeted Gregg in jeans, an old sweat shirt and bare feet, and the two of them stayed up talking, alone, until nearly dawn. As Allman later summed up the evening, the governor of Georgia was “‘really far-out.”’

Walden and Carter’s association became closer after that. Whenever he was in the area, Carter would drop by Capricorn’s offices, usually to talk, but sometimes simply to listen to the music, as he did for an hour one afternoon dur- ing a recording session with the band’s lead guitarist, Dickie Betts. It was during that visit that Carter first informed Wal- den that he intended to run for the presi- dency. Walden offered to do whatever he could.

Walden’s chance to help came late in the fall of 1975, when a worried Jimmy Carter called him to say that un- less the campaign could quickly raise $50,000, he would probably have to stop running. The result was a concert in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 25, 1975, featuring the Allman Brothers and Grinderswitch, both Walden groups. With federal matching funds, the concert raised nearly $100,000 and put the Carter campaign back into operation. More Walden-arranged concerts, and one

NEWTIMES 43

enormously successful telethon (it raised nearly $250,000), followed, bringing an estimated $400,000 ($800,000 after the federal matching funds were added) into the Carter coffers at the moment when it was needed most. “‘If it hadn’t been for Phil, Jimmy would have been dead,”’ says a former key Carter staffer. ‘‘We were just about through when Phil came along. Phil made everything possible. Iowa, New Hampshire. That was con- cert money, a lot of it. Jimmy owes Phil an enormous debt.”’

Some of Carter’s aides, especially campaign manager Hamilton Jordan, were wary of the Capricorn Connection, sensing potential embarrassment in as- sociation with the music industry. Their fears were heightened when Walden be- gan offering political advice—such as dumping Hamilton Jordan and replacing him with Frank Mankiewicz—to the can- didate. There was even talk that Walden himself would take over the campaign. Carter, however, seemed unconcerned and, at Walden’s urging, flew to Miami Beach last winter to address a conven- tion of music industry officials.

But that was before the trials of Gregg Allman.

When the Allman Brothers burst on the scene seven years ago, recalls one Atlanta musician, ‘“‘I thought, wow, these are my kind of people. These bad dudes standing up there, looking mean, kinda scraggly, with tattoos and all. It was like you went out and found a bunch of good ole boys, gave ’em instruments and they played the most incredible kind of music.’’ That was the Allman image: a sort of Dixie version of the Rolling Stones, only in the Allmans’ case the re- ality lived up to the image. Trouble and tragedy dogged the band from the start. In October 1971, just as the band was winning national acceptance, Duane All- man, the group’s leader and Gregg’s idol, was killed on a motorcycle in Ma- con. A year and 13 days after Duane’s fatal accident, Berry Oakley, the band’s bass guitarist, was killed in another mo- torcycle accident only blocks from the spot where Duane died.

There were other incidents. One night in Buffalo, ‘‘Twigs,’’ one of the Allmans’ roadies, went round to pick up the band’s pay from a club manager. The manager refused to hand it over and a fight ensued, during the course of which Twigs produced a knife and stabbed the manager to death. Then, in Louisiana, three band employees were picked up for possession of marijuana. It happened again in Alabama, only this time ten band members were involved, Gregg among them, and the drugs inciuded her-

44 NEWTIMES

oin. Eventually, they pleaded guilty to a lesser offense.

‘*Brothers and sisters,’’ the All- mans calied themselves, and, to prove it, they lived in a big house in Macon together, band members, roadies, wives, girlfriends, relatives, cats, dogs, kids and hangers-on. Only after a while, there was very little that was brotherly or sis- terly about them. There was continual jealousy and back-biting. The brothers and sisters kept moving away. One band member, seemingly perpetually high, was just as perpetually in fights, and some of the people he picked on were cops. Another band member once forced his wife to run 4 miles to the store to pick up groceries, trailing her in a pickup truck and urging her on by peppering the ground behind her with rifle fire.

Walden himself had his share of trouble. The man who collected antiques and called himself ‘‘a Jefferson freak’’ was also possessed of a mean, violent temper. He sometimes cursed his em- ployees in public for wrongdoings, real

“If it hadn’t been for Phil,” says a former Carter staffer, “Jimmy would have been dead. lowa. New Hampshire. That was concert money, a lot of it. Jimmy owes Phil an enormous debt”

and imagined. Once, in a restaurant, he began making disparaging remarks about a former employee seated a couple of ta- bles away. One thing led to another, and the men eventually decided to settle the matter in the parking lot. A suit followed that fight and was finally settled, one day before a scheduled court appearance, when Walden forked over $25,000 to his victim. Walden and Cloyd Hall, his old friend from Macon, parted company a few months ago, when Walden dis- patched an emissary to Hall’s office late one Friday afternoon to tell him he was through, that the company had decided that it didn’t like the image the suit- and tie-wearing Hall portrayed.

Everything seemed minor, how- ever, compared to the troubles that beset Gregg Allman. Quiet, withdrawn, almost painfully shy, Gregg, according to his friends, looked to his older brother for guidance in just about everything. He was never a great musician and his voice was outstanding only in comparison to the other members of the band. Gregg’s

talents were two: he could write music, and write it very well, and he had what is known in the business as ‘‘chick ap- peal.’’ After Duane’s death, leadership of the band fell to Gregg, and, despite the band’s continued and growing suc- cess, Gregg was unable to handle it. By his own account, he suffered a ‘‘com- plete mental and nervous breakdown’”’ in the two years following Duane’s acci- dent. His first marriage fell apart, and, for a time, he began living with Jenny Arness, the daughter of Gunsmoke’s James Arness. That arrangement fell apart, too, and not long after Gregg moved out, Jenny committed suicide with an overdose of pills, leaving behind a note requesting Gregg to play “‘their song’’ at her wake. He married again, but that didn’t cure his loneliness. ‘‘He’d sometimes call people up at three o’clock in the morning to tell them he needed them because there were prowl- ers outside his house,’’ says one friend. ‘*There weren’t any prowlers. Gregg just needed someone to talk to. You couldn’t help but feel sorry for the dude. He was always giving expensive presents to strangers—if a girl said she was interest- ed in music, he’d give her a guitar—just so they’d be his friend.’’ Many of Gregg’s friends were girls. Throughout his marriage, he maintained a suite at Macon’s Hilton Hotel, to which he brought a succession of willing young ladies. One girlfriend, brought home to Allman’s house, noticed several used sy- ringes in the living room. Embarrassed, Allman explained he was a diabetic, then nervously excused himself and went into another room. When he returned ten minutes later, the girl told a friend, ‘‘he seemed a completely changed man.”’

Drugs, of course, will do inat, and Gregg, as his testimony at Scooter’s trial revealed, was into them heavily. Under oath, he admitted having used half a gram of cocaine a day for nearly two years beginning in 1973. But the coke, or ‘gold dust,’’ as Allman called it—‘‘it makes you feel very, very high,”’ he told the court—was only for starters. He was, at the same time, also doing a varie- ty of downs, including morphine, Dem- erol, Leritine (an injectible substitute for heroin) and, by most accounts, smack it- self. The explanation he provided under cross-examination by Scooter’s counsel is revealing:

Q: How much did you shoot at a time?

A: I don’t really remember.

Q: Were you in pain when you shot it?

A: Yes sir.

Q: Where was your pain?

PHOTOGRAPH BY TOM HILL

PHOTOGRAPH BY TOM HILL/CAPRICORN RECORDS

Best of friends: the former governor makes light in turn with (clockwise from top left);

a

PHOTOGRAPH BY RICK DIAMOND

PHOTOGRAPH BY CAPRICORN RECORDS

8 5 w a g fe} ie) & B} Z ¢ 3 a & 3 fe)

ay o,*

the Waldens; Allman; Mayor

Ford of Tuskegee; Leavell and Betts of the Allman Brothers; and Caldwell and McCorkle of the Marshall Tucker Band

A: All over.

As Allman moved more heavily into drugs, it began to affect his music. From 1973 onward, the band played less, recorded infrequently and rehearsed only sporadically. Chuck Leavell, the band’s brilliant young keyboard man, and now the leader of Sea Level, recalls one tour in 1975 when ‘‘some nights we were plain awful, I mean embarrassingly bad.’’ One night on stage, Leavell re- members, Gregg was so far gone “‘it took him 20 minutes to tune his guitar.’’ All- man’s condition, and the anger it pro-

duced among other band members, gave rise to a spate of stories that the band would break up. Somehow, though, it held together. The real worry was not the band’s survival, but Gregg Allman’s.

It was in such a state that Gregg Allman encountered Scooter Herring one fateful day in 1973. As Allman re- counted their meeting to the court:

A: . . . One day at the Sunshine Club [a Macon hangout] I was in there with some friends of mine and we were having a few beers and I saw Scooter and he looked to be rather high, and I

asked him what was wrong, what he had taken. He said that he had—that he had either some Demerol or morphine. | can’t remember exactly which one. And at that time I inquired if I could get some.

Q: Who did you make that inquiry to?

A: To Scooter.

Q: What happened after that?

A: Then later on I got in touch with him by phone and we made the deal.

Scooter Herring was one of life’s

NEWTIMES 45

losers, the perfect victim. Married four times, in and out of petty trouble, never able to hold a good job, he was, at the time he met Allman, working as a body man/mechanic at the Macon sports car dealership. One of his customers had been a Macon pharmacist named Joe Fuchs. Scooter and Fuchs struck up an acquaintance, and eventually Fuchs told Scooter that, because of his pharmacy, he had easy access to illegal drugs. From the court testimony, it appears that Scooter began dealing on a small scale with Fuchs a year before he met Allman. Once Scooter became friends with All- man, however, the enterprise mush- reomed. Allman’s craving for drugs was such that to cover the growing inventory shortage from Fuchs’ drugstore, the two men staged a fake burglary and stashed a large quantity of pharmaceutical co- caine, Demerol and Leritine. Soon there- after, Scooter was hired as one of the band’s roadies. His official duties con- sisted of keeping track of Gregg’s clothes and getting him to concerts on time and in reasonable shape. His main function, however, was procuring drugs on order from Allman.

Scooter’s assignment was no mystery to the band. Leavell was espe- cially suspicious of Scooter, until Scoot- er explained to him that, by providing Gregg with coke and downs, he was try- ing to keep him out of even greater trou- ble, namely addiction. The explanation seemed to satisfy Leavell and the rest of the members of the band, who were frankly worried that, because of smack, Gregg, as Leavell put it, ‘‘would wake up one morning dead.’’ Allman nearly did die, in fact, one night in 1974, from an overdose on the way to a concert in Jersey City, New Jersey. It was Scooter Herring who revived him in time. All- man’s only memory of the affair was ‘‘waking up in an ambulance’’ with Scooter leaning over him. After that, Scooter, according to Allman’s court testimony, pleaded with him to stop us- ing drugs, that they were ruining his health and his music, and depleting his fortune. Allman, however, refused. In- stead, he started dealing directly with Fuchs, who began showing up at the Brothers concerts, and, on one occasion, even flying Allman home from a resort in his private plane, which he had thought- fully supplied with a stash of cocaine.

Everything began to change after Gregg met Cher Bono in Los Angeles in 1975. The teetotaling Cher, a straight by Capricorn standards, would have no part of drugs. She later said that Allman had told her of his drug problem, but insisted

46 NEWTIMES

that he had conquered it. Cher took All- man at his word, and the couple were married at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas on June 30, 1975. Nine days later, Cher filed for divorce, explaining that she and Gregg had made ‘“‘a terrible mistake,” that he had lied to her about his drug use, that he was, in fact, still an addict. A rec- onciliation followed, when Gregg checked into a Buffalo, N.Y., clinic in an attempt to kick his habit. But by then, drugs had already caught up to Allman in a different way. Early this year, with considerable fanfare, a federal grand jury in Macon began looking into what investigators called ‘‘a major drug opera- tion’’ involving prominent local pharma- cists, doctors and entertainers, with con- nections stretching all the way to South America. Around Macon, people began to panic.

What had happened was that state drug inspectors had uncovered inexpli- cable shortages in Fuchs’ drug invento- ry. Under pressure, Fuchs confessed his

One visitor to

the Allmans’ farm reports that the kitchen equipment included a large-sized Hellmann’s mayonnaise jar. filled with

cocaine

SET part in the scheme and started naming names. The name at the top of Fuchs’ list was Gregg Allman.

In May, Allman returned to Ma- con to appear before the grand jury. His testimony lasted eight hours, and by All- man’s own account, “‘I was very, very nervous.”’ As one of his friends later put it: ‘‘No wonder he was nervous. Lock Gregg up in a room for eight hours with no dope or booze and he would tell them anything.’’ When Allman emerged from the grand jury room, he looked dazed and frightened. To one friend he mum- bled, ‘‘Man, they’re threatening to throw my ass in jail for ten years.’’ That was enough to start people packing. That night, two of Allman’s friends left Ma- con for parts unknown.

Scooter, however, remained, ap- parently confident that since, as Walden puts it, ‘‘he saved Gregg’s life is what he really did,’’ Gregg would never turn on him. He was fatally mistaken. Allman was granted immunity from prosecution (prosecution for what has never been es-

tablished, since the government never produced any actual drugs at the trial) in return for his testimony. A coke dealer whom Scooter had once used had charges against him reduced to dealing marijuana in return for his testimony. Fuchs, the real villain in the plot, plead- ed guilty to one count of conspiracy to sell drugs and got off with the compara- tively light sentence of ten years, with five years special probation. In the end, the man left holding the bag was the hap- less Scooter Herring.

When Allman returned to Macon to testify, he was accompanied by a tight bodyguard of federal marshals. Specta- tors were frisked before they were allowed to enter the courtroom. The pre- cautions were merited. There were sev- eral death threats and, given the indus- try, Officials took them seriously. ‘‘All- man is finished,’’ one prominent Ma- conite close to Capricorn told me.

“You mean with music?” I asked.

‘‘No,”’ he answered, looking at me evenly, ‘‘with breathing.”’

The trial itself was a pathetic cha- rade, over and done with in barely three days, the defense calling only one wit- ness, Scooter himself, who wound up taking the Fifth. Even the Macon Tele- graph, the town’s leading and conserva- tive newspaper, condemned the pro- ceedings, especially the government’s decision to, as an editorial put it, ‘‘let the real culprit go scot-free.’’ The culprit, as far as the Telegraph and most people in Macon were concerned, was Gregg All- man. There was, in fact, something stom- ach-churning about his testimony, such as the following exchange with the prosecutor:

Q: You testified, the last question at the end of cross examination, that Scooter was your friend during this peri- od of time. Right?

A: That’s right.

Q: And he’s still your friend?

A: Yes sir.

Q: Why are you here testifying, Mr. Allman!

The Court: He’s here because the Government brought him. You don’t have to ask that question.

In passing sentence—I5 years, the maximum, on each of five counts—federal judge Wilbur D. Owens, a Nixon appointee, pointedly noted that the investigation into the Macon Con- nection was still continuing, and ex- pressed the hope that other informers would come forward so there could be more arrests.

Owen’s message was not lost on Phil Walden and Capricorn. During the

PHOTOGRAPH BY SIDNEY SMITH

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Capricorn’s scapegoat: At the trial’s end, Scooter Herring, valet and friend of Gregg Allman, was sentenced to life, thanks largely to the star’s testimony.

trial, Walden issued a ‘‘code of con- duct’’ for all his employees, banning drugs from the premises. The day All- man testified, Walden invited in a team of federal drug enforcement officials to lecture his employees on the dangers of drugs. He is more conservative and sub- dued since the trail. He has even begun wearing suits to the office. ‘‘I’m afraid to get a parking ticket,’’ he says ruefully. ‘**They’ll put me away for 4,000 years.”’ There is worry in his voice when he talks, and there is cause for it. Not only has he seen his biggest money-maker pulled out from under him (‘‘Gregg will get a new band together,”’ he says brave- ly. ‘‘One good record will turn this whole thing around’’), but there are intimations that the target the feds are really after is none other than Phil Walden. “‘I hear the rumors, just like everybody,”’ he says. ‘I know there are a lot of people in this town who would like to pull me down, who would like to embarrass Jimmy

Carter, but let them. There is nothing I have to hide.”’

It doesn’t really matter anymore. Whether or not the grand jury comes up with new accusations, the gold has lost much of its glitter at Capricorn. The good times and fellowship, the days when Walden and his artists truly were ‘‘brothers and sisters,’’ have, like so many other totems of the sixties, be- come a victim of the seventies. Now, the people in Macon are laughing at Walden behind his back. ‘‘A lot of folks are glad this happened,”’ says a former friend of Walden’s. ‘‘They thought Phil had it coming. They never liked the kind of fel- la he was. the sort of longhairs he brought to town. But mostly, it was Phil himself. He always wanted Macon to ac- cept him. And he thought he could buy it. Live in the biggest house, drive the biggest car, throw the biggest parties. Well, they came to his parties, and they ate his caviar, but when they went home,

they laughed at him. They’d turn on him like a pack of dogs. That’s what hap- pened. They turned on him like dogs.”’ So far, Walden’s troubles have not affected his relationship with Carter, who claimed, when he was asked a few weeks ago whether his association with Allman would hurt his prospects, to be unaware that there even was a drug investigation. At press time, Carter was still planning to attend ‘‘the Capricorn Picnic and Summer Games,”’ an all-day barbecue Walden annually throws for a thousand of his closest friends and busi- ness associates, as if to reaffirm his sup- port for Walden. Walden himself is busi- ly organizing a series of ‘‘special events’’ concerts that are supposed to raise $2 million for voter registration for the fall campaign. During one recent ten- minute stretch in Walden’s office, a visi- tor eavesdropped while Walden took two phone calls—one to urge Gillian Soren- sen,wife of Carter adviser Ted Sorensen, to ‘‘come down for a visit’’; the other to advise a campaign aide to “‘tell Shirley

EUAN RESET There’s worry in Walden’s voice now and he’s even begun wearing suits to the

Office. “I’m afraid to get a parking ticket,” he says. “They'll put me away for 4,000 years”

MacLaine to put up or shut up. She keeps saying she wants to help. Well, give her four cities—Atlanta, Los An- geles, Chicago and Houston—and have her do four shows.”’

There are isolated rumblings in the Carter campaign about Walden and some of the more questionable Carter loyalists—‘‘we ought to have someone check out these birds before the FBI does it for us,”’ one senior adviser griped recently—but no sign that anything will disturb Walden’s special relationship with the candidate. Walden himself says he wants no special favors from Jimmy, and that a job in Washington interests him not at all—though he insinuates that one day it might be nice to live in the Governor’s Mansion in Atlanta. Right now, though, his eyes are on the more immediate future. The Allman unpleas- antness is something to be forgotten. There is an election to win. Confident? Walden booked his suite for the inaugu- ral weekend months ago. “‘I’ll be there,”’ he promises. And you know Phil Walden means it. @

NEWTIMES 47

TRIE TUNNING TALE Of

Snaking like a psychic San Andreas Fault through northern California, a 24- mile fence has raised the blood pressure of every- one from local ranchers to Environmental Pro- tection Agency officials —which is just what art- ist Christo had in mind

By Stephen Singular

In October of 1969, the modern artist Christo wrapped a mile of Austral- ian coast in | million square feet of opaque plastic fabric fastened with 35 miles of polypropylene rope, at a cost of $120,000. Ten weeks later, both fabric and rope were removed. Years before ‘‘Wrapped Coast,’’ Christo had created for himself a reputation as a packager. He had wrapped up bottles, furniture, telephones, painted portraits of his wife, live nude women and the entire Museum of Contemporary Art in Chica- go. In 1972 Christo hung a curtain of lu- minescent orange nylon across a 1,200- foot-wide canyon in the Grand Hogback region of the Rocky Mountains, at a cost of $850,000. For 26 hours ‘‘Valley Cur- tain” Colorado till the wind blew it down forever. Christo’s plans to wrap the Ecole Militaire in Paris, the Na- tional Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and the Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York never mate- rialized.

Since work on a

trees,

dangled in

1972, Christo has been at project called ‘‘Running a 24-mile-long, 18-foot-high, nylon wall, beginning north of San Fran-

Fence,”’

48 NEW TIMES

cisco and wending westward over hills and down valleys to the ocean’s edge. The fence will consist of 165,000 yards of heavy white woven fabric, 2,200 steel poles driven 3 feet into the soil and se- cured by guy wires, 80 miles of steel ca- ble and 12,000 steel anchors. A factory in West Virginia spent almost a year sewing the nylon panels. Christo has created a Running Fence Corporation and hired engineers, ecologists, bota- nists, aerodynamic experts and art mu- seum directors. A team of eight lawyers has so far cost him $200,000. He has al- ready spent more than $2 million.

To prove that the fence will not harm the hills of Sonoma and Marin counties, Christo has financed an $87,000 Environmental Impact Report. In its 266 pages, ‘‘Running Fence”’ has been defended and attacked by artists, critics, historians and museum curators. His works have been exhibited in presti- gious museums and galleries, nationwide and worldwide; books and movies have been made about them, art critics and scholars have written in the Environ- mental Impact Report that Christo’s ‘‘considerable contribution to a new vi- sion in contemporary and avant-garde art is undeniable,’’ and that ‘‘Running Fence’’ will be ‘‘a great cultural contri- bution to the citizens of California.” In the report Christo himself has stated his aesthetic objectives: ‘‘The ‘Running Fence’ will bring out the con- tours of the Sonoma hills and the sea- shore, the changing of the weather. The ‘Running Fence’ is a celebration of the landscape. The physical reality of the ‘Running Fence’ will be a beautiful one. The fabric is a fragile material, like clothing or skin. And, like the structures the nomads built in the desert, it will

have the special beauties of imperma- nence. The fabric is a light-conductor for the sunlight, and it will give shape to the wind. It wi!l go over the hills and into the sea, like a ribbon of light.’’ Also in this report, Friends of Wildlife in California have written: ‘‘When this fence is put up, deer will not be able to move around in their natural habitat. If does with their fawns are caught on the wrong side of the fence from their water source, it could be very rough on them, because they may not find any water. Birds will fly into a white curtain, especially small birds, like quail, which fly lower than eighteen feet. There will be broken necks and wings so there will be wound- ed and dead birds just like there were in the Santa Barbara oil goo.”’

Active opposition to the fence, from local artists, environmentalists, government agencies and residents, has generated 17 public hearings and three sessions of Superior Court in California. Initially, ‘“‘Running Fence’’ was de- signed to extend 300 feet out into the Pacific Ocean. But the California Coastal Zone Conservation Commission, which has jurisdiction over the shoreline, changed Christo’s plans. ‘‘Our staff rec- ommendation,’’ says Phil Kern, permit analyst for the commission, ‘‘was against the fence on the grounds that the attracted crowds would represent too great a danger to the environment. The incoming people would be a threat to ma- rine life and to the grasslands of the area because that land is easily eroded by bunches of people walking on it. Also, this is the driest summer in California in 40 years and the fire risk is immense. There was. recently a fire near where the fence would be. One person drop- ped a cigarette.

10

‘Besides us, Christo’s fence has involved many other offices—Boards of Adjustment, County Planning Commis- sions (of two counties) and Boards of Supervisors. Since last July [1975], just this office has had three hearings on the fence. The amount of work we’ve poured into this thing is astronomical. All 12 people here have worked on it and it has taken us several hundreds of

hours. And this is one very small office. Our workload is so heavy anyway that we never have enough time for all of it. More important things have been slight- ed because of ‘Running Fence.’ See, this office also works on permanent projects concerning the environment.”’

Despite all opposition, it appears that the fence will be built. Sonoma and Marin county officials, satisfied with the

U3 RUNNING FNGE”

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Environmental Impact Report, and ranchers, whose land the fence crosses, have given Christo the go-ahead. Con- struction has been in progress for the past five months. Most of the poles, an- chors and guy wires are in the ground. The nylon panels are to be installed by nearly 300 college students during a 12- hour period on September 7 and 8. ‘*Running Fence’’ will be visible from

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IT SOUNDS AS GOOD AS IT LOOKS!

50 NEW TIMES

Highways | and 101 and from a dozen other roads, which make lacunae in the fence. The first few days it is up, the Cal- ifornia Highway Patrol will monitor traffic. If viewers cause no severe traffic jams—if no one is killed—‘*Running Fence’’ will stand for two weeks. Then it will be permanently dismantled.

Christo Javacheff (he uses only his first name, “‘like Michelangelo’’) was born in Bulgaria on June 13, 1935, toa family of intelligentsia—his father, a prosperous manufacturer of chemical products; his mother, an executive secretary at the Sofia Fine Arts Acade- my. Before age ten, Christo was study- ing drawing and pictorial composition and, in his teens, received the mandatory Marxist education (today he claims that his work is heavily influenced by dialec- tical materialism). By age 20, living in Prague, he was, in his own words, a ‘‘very gifted socialist-realist painter.” When the Hungarian revolt began in 1956, he escaped from Prague, he says, in a sealed train bound for Vienna. By 1958, he was in Paris. There, he began wrapping objects and ‘‘experimenting.”’ One completed work he called ‘‘Iron Curtain’’: he blocked off the Rue Vis- conti by stacking oil drums into a 14- foot-high solid wall. It was up two hours.

Christo moved to New York in 1964. Now he lives in Manhattan, in SoHo, in a five-story loft, with Jeanne- Claude, his Parisian wife, and their son, Cyril, 16. Christo is a small, spare, in- tense man, energetic and tireless. His face is gaunt, intelligent, hard—Slavic. He has slit eyes and a narrow, thin- lipped mouth. His greying black hair, while not long, is long enough not to be neat. His hands rest mostly in the pock- ets of his jeans. He resembles an even more serious-looking Woody Allen. Jeanne-Claude—who was born in the same hour on the same day of the same year as her husband—is an effusive woman with black hair. Generally, she wears red lipstick and a smile.

The fourth floor of their loft is the Christos’ living quarters, mainly a large, high-ceilinged, sparsely furnished room with the walls, couches and carpet all variations of white. Current and back is- sues of Time and Newsweek cover their coffee table. Several of Christo’s works are in this room: near one wall, ‘‘Brown Paper Package,’ a smail, shapeless package, wrapped in brown paper and secured by tape, sits on a_ pedestal; ‘*Packed Bottles and Cans,”’ a collection

Stephen Singular is a free-lance writer who lives in New York.

of bottles of pigment and cans of paint, partly concealed under canvas and twine, rests on a mantle; ‘‘Packed Por- trait of Jeanne-Claude,’’ a_ portrait wrapped in plastic and a_ tarpaulin (Jeanne-Claude can be distinguished peeking through the plastic), is standing onarack on the floor.

Jeanne-Claude is president and treasurer of Running Fence, Inc. (Chris- to is assistant secretary.) All day, she moves around the loft carrying a cord- less telephone, waiting for it to ring. Buyers of Christo’s works call often. ‘‘It takes a miracle,’ she says, ‘‘to keep more money coming in than goes out. I must have the telephone with me all the time so I won’t miss a call. And if they don’t call me, I call them.”’

I first met the Christos in their loft one afternoon late in July. That evening Christo, his private photographer, Gian- franco Gorgoni, another journalist cov- ering Christo for a national magazine and I were to fly to California. During the next two days, Christo would oversee some of the construction of his fence. Then he would return to New York. Christo flies profusely. His schedule from July 15 to August | included a flight from New York to California and back, a flight from New York to Europe and back, another flight from New York to California and back and yet another flight from New York to California and back—all in two weeks.

Christo has been bruited about— usually favorably—in publications rang- ing from The Village Voice and The New Yorker to The Wall Street Journal, and when the journalist arrived at the loft, Christo received him with hugs and kisses. Three times, on the way to Ken- nedy edhe. Christo asked the journal- ist, who is British and was returning to London soon, to contact the ‘‘Times, Telegraph and magazines, some maga- zines’’ about doing articles on Christo. Three times the Englishman nodded as- sent. When Gorgoni arrived at the loft, Christo greeted him with a handshake.

In the cab, Gorgoni asked Chris- to, ‘‘Will you be in Newsweek next week?”’

“T’m not sure,’’ said Christo. ‘*Maybe. Or maybe following week.”’

‘‘What about Time?”’

‘*Time does not like me,’’ Christo answered with a grin. ‘‘They are very elitist, you know.”’

“Will we be on California TV?”’

‘*‘No. I can’t,’’ Christo shrugged in resignation. ‘‘It is part of rules letting me build fence: TV might create too much publicity and crowd highways.”’

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Two earlier Christo works: Colorado's “Valley Curtain” (top) and Australia’s “Wrapped Coast.” Christo hopes next to wrap Berlin's Reichstag in woven opaque synthetic fabric, and then to build a pyramid of oil drums in the Netherlands.

54 NEWTIMES

In the 747, Christo began explain- ing his work to me. He has a hammering voice, resonant and commanding. His spoken language differs markedly from that of the comparatively polished prose of his written statement in the Environ- mental Impact Report. He talks in a French accent combined with Slavic syntax. ‘‘ ‘Running Fence’ is art of peo- ple,”’ he said. ‘‘It is only work of twenti- eth century that is art of people. And is subversive. I could go build my beautiful fence in Africa with no trouble, no prob- lems, but I would be cheating. Challenge to structure of society is exciting, is subversive. In abstract painting, col- ors—red and orange—each play part; in ‘Running Fence,’ men and women argu- ing about it play part—are a part of work of art. I tease social structure: I say, “You really want public hearings? Okay.’ And we get 17 public hearings! This we want. This creates context for ‘Running Fence.’ This makes importance. I know we have problems, sure. But I don’t know we have so many problems.

“Tt am no 8-hour-day artist, but 24-hour-day artist. I do everything for art. I do no harm with art. Is most enjoy- able way to spend life. Each project is lifetime experience and cannot be re- peated. I could not do all this unless Iam 40 and have all this experience and am able to cope with all these problems. All this fits into my dialectical approach. Is time for everything, and everything fits together. In eleventh, twelfth centuries, you would not be artist unless you be deeply religious person. In twentieth century, this has not been negated, real- ly, but now we are socially aware. Any twentieth century work of art not social and political is no good.”’

When he started speaking, his hands came out of his pockets and began cutting wide arcs in the air. The longer he talked, the louder his voice grew. When | interrupted and, for the sake of clarification or expansion, asked a why, he did not hear me but kept on talking. ‘**Running Fence’ is beautiful, a visual experience. What is happening in Cali- fornia is revitalization of people’s think- ing about their land. In nineteenth centu- ry, Van Gogh and Cézanne paint land- scapes of provincial France. Make peo- ple see Cézanne’s Mont-Sainte-Victoire in different way. Now, I make people see California hills different. Whole revolu- tion in contemporary art is only formalis- tic. Artist always same—always su- preme master.

‘*You will be able to buy pictures of my ‘Running Fence,’ but no one will ever own it, and it will be gone forever. That is subversive to values of society. I

am accused of using system, and is true. And I almost laugh at system. System in America is to make money, and I don’t make money. I pour all money back into work. People who oppose my work are very conservative, very reactionary. By using system, it is humorous. And art should have humor—and irony. I consid- e. myself everything: serious, mockery, everything. Take Shakespeare. He had everything. Except his art is make be- lieve. Like all other art is make believe. But my art is real. This is my power— everything is real. I work with sun and wind and congressmen and senators.”’ Christo’s efforts to win approval for his fence from public officials have been both in front of and behind the scenes. The magazine California Living quotes Bill Davoren, a former consultant for the California Coastal Commission, as saying: ‘‘It [Christo’s] was the kind of lobbying campaign where a lot was known about the personal lives and backgrounds of several of the Commis- sioners. No overt blackmail—but one

When Christo’s wife, Jeanne-Claude, heard of the bomb threats, she is. gab pti renting a

herd of cattle and running them along the fence site. “They wouldn't miss a thing,” she said

Commissioner got a phone call from an old girl friend several wives removed urging him to vote.’’ Davoren no longer works for the commission and is not available for comment. Phil Kern, how- ever, corroborates Davoren’s descrip- tion of Christo’s campaign tactics. On ‘‘Running Fence,’’ Governor Jerry Brown has no comment at all.

We landed in San Francisco late at night and began the 40-mile drive in Christo’s rented Ford to the Petaluma Inn, in Petaluma, near ‘‘Running Fence.’’ Just outside Petaluma, we de- cided to stop for a light meal at Denny’s. Before entering the restaurant, Christo bought a copy of the Press Democrat, the Sonoma County newspaper pub- lished in Santa Rosa. He rustled through the pages, reading rapidly as he went. On the back page of the first section, a head- line stopped him. ‘‘Look! Look!’’ he groaned, and showed an article. It told how, the previous night, two trucks working on ‘‘Running Fence’’ had had their tires slashed, windows shattered

and engines jammed and burned up. Christo’s face had dropped. He looked shaken, grave and hardened.

His Italian photographer said, ‘‘I am so sorry.”’

“It will be all right,’’ said the Brit- ish journalist, as he put a hand on Chris- to’s shoulder.

Christo said almost nothing for the rest of the night.

At dawn, a blue gauze of fog con- ceals the rolling hills of Sonoma. The landscape only hints at its beauty. Through the haze, stately stands of euca- lyptus, imported long ago from Aus- tralia, seem to climb the hillsides. Grow- ing in long thin rows, they conjure Macduff’s army marching toward Dunsi- nane. Other stands, of young redwoods, huddle in the valleys. By noon, the fog burns off and dusky lavender clouds lin- ger on the hilltops. The hills themselves have seemed, for centuries, held in place by long ribbons of brown and white wood fencing. Herefords and Holsteins graze on the knolls, and, as the day lengthens, the cattle gradually grow vis- ible through the