#York Street offramp

[urbandrifter]

[feverinfeveroutfic]

chapter three: time is coming

Sam kept her hands on the wheel and her foot hovered above the gas pedal. Tall banks of snow lined the sides of the highway as they made their way over Donner Pass. Another few hours and they would be back in the Bay Area. They were allowed to go over just so long as they were able to keep it all together along the way.

Everything she had heard about driving on an icy wintry road was not to slow down. Not too fast, though, but do not, under any circumstances, slow down.

She couldn't hardly shake the fact that she was driving a two ton coffin made of metal which in turn towed a single ton projectile of cold metal and plywood.

Eric and Alex were silent the whole way over the mountain pass: at one point during a flat stretch of road, she peered over at the former there in the front seat next to her and the fact that he was hunkered down in the seat a little more than before they began the ascent into the mountains. She took a glimpse into her rear view mirror over her head at Alex hunkered down in the back seat there.

Either they were in fact nervous or she hadn't turned on the heater all the way.

She took a glimpse down to the dials: the heater was in fact on.

“Are you guys okay?” she asked them with a slight clearing of her throat.

“This is crazy,” Eric confessed.

“Yeah, this is something so bizarre,” Alex added.

“It’s okay—Alex, you and I have been on this road together before.” She took another glimpse into the mirror over her head at him.

“Yeah, but it wasn’t like this, though,” he pointed out.

“Push comes to shove, we’ll bunk in the trailer until the clouds clear out some more,” she assured them, “because you fellas look like you’re about to get beaned in the head with something hard and heavy.” She returned to the road and that time around she felt so much stronger and more powerful than before.

Two boys, both of whom she had her tongue wrapped around, right there in the car next to her. She had it right there as she walked the fine razor’s edge with the faint glimmers of obvious black ice upon the pavement all around them. The road wound up ahead of them.

Miles and miles of it all.

Something so intense about it. Intense, and rather erotic.

The possibility that the three of them could go off the road, or that the trailer could jackknife and pull the whole thing sideways, and they could die together. The three of them, dying together. Eric's words rang through her mind right then: death and desire go hand in hand.

As they rounded a bend in the road, she caught something out of the corner of her eye. She took a fleeting glimpse down to the center console and Eric’s hand there right next to his thigh, as if his hand was cold.

Another curve in the road, followed by a grand view of the mountains and the thick layer of pure white snow.

She swore he moved his hand a bit to the parking lever: meanwhile, in the back seat, Alex hunkered down inside of his jacket as if he was freezing. Sam peered into the rear view mirror once again, at the sight of the little gray plume atop his head and his sharp eyebrows.

“Warm enough back there, Alex?” she called to him.

“My feet are cold,” he confessed, “I've got my blanket over my legs, but my feet are absolutely freezing, though. I’m also feeling a draft back here, too.”

“Aw—you got the window rolled up?”

“It’s cracked a tiny little bit,” he said with a bit of a grunt. She peered back at him again, that time to watch him roll up the window a bit more.

But within time, the road sank down into the snowy hills, there on the other side on the way over to Sacramento and right in the face of the setting sun. If nothing else, they could stop there for the time being and hang out over the night in order to rest their minds and cold bodies. Eric shivered and shook in his seat right there next to her.

Sam took another glimpse at him once they reached another straight stretch of road, albeit a surprisingly dry one.

“You alright, Eric?” she asked him.

She returned to the road for another moment and then she came back to his hand, which he had put there right above the parking lever and he never moved for a second.

“I'm freezing,” he confessed.

“Are you getting any heat?”

“I am, but I'm still utterly freezing.”

“Okay—we're almost into the valley. We'll stop for the night and then we'll hitch up the trailer somewhere—”

“Um—Samantha?” Alex called to her.

“Uh huh?” She took a glimpse into the mirror and the reflection of Alex's grimace.

“What's the matter?”

In the reflection, he peered over the backs of the seats and into the rear window.

“Alex? What happened?”

A sinking sensation emerged in her chest.

“No,” she breathed out.

He pursed his lips together and his face turned the same color as fresh porridge.

“No, no, no, no, no, no—no—no—no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no—no, no, no, no, no—no—no—no—no—no—no—”

She paused for a second to find Alex's eyes wide like big marbles.

“No!”

Eric shuddered in the seat and brought the lapels of his coat up closer to his face.

Sam peered into the rear view mirror to ensure that no one was behind them. She then merged over to the right lane and she took the next exit into Colfax, there in the snowy hills of the Sierra Nevadas. She pulled over there right off of the offramp and she yanked on the parking lever and killed the engine. She buried her face in her hands and groaned in her throat.

“Oh my fucking god,” she blurted out in a muffled voice. She peered out the windshield at the buildings there on the sidewalk on the other side. The gray cloud cover on the sky began to turn an even darker shade of gray. At least they were out of the mountains.

“Where do you think we could've lost it?” Alex asked her in a small voice.

“God, I don't know,” she confessed as her heart hammered in her chest. “At least it wasn't over Sonora Pass or, god forbid, Tioga.”

“What do we say to Chuck, though? That's what I'm freaking out about.”

“Let's just tell him the truth,” Sam assured him. “We were going over Donner Pass and you just happened to look out the window and you saw that the trailer was gone. Hope he didn't have an attachment to that thing...” She fetched up a sigh in hopes to calm down her heartbeat. “Well, we've gotta do something, though, Alex. It's getting dark and Eric is a popsicle.”

Alex leaned forward and he looked over at Eric himself and the blank expression on his face.

“Hey—” He reached over and tapped on the side of Eric's face. He never moved. “Hey!”

Nothing. Eric sat there with a look on his face as if he had seen a ghost.

“Too bad I don't have my amp with me,” Alex told her. “I'd plug in my guitar and rip some Mercyful Fate for him. That always wakes him—”

He abruptly stopped and his eyes widened even more.

“Oh, no, don't tell me!” Sam exclaimed.

Alex bowed his head and rested his forehead on the top of Sam's seat.

“NO!”

“Mine was in there, too,” Eric finally said in a low voice.

Sam clasped her hands to her mouth. The three of them sat there in stunned and horrified silence. Wherever the trailer went, there was no way they were finding those little amps again.

“I've had that amp since I was taking lessons from Satch,” Alex groaned out as he lifted his head. “Fuck—”

Eric closed his eyes and sighed through his nose. Alex ran his fingers through his dark hair.

“But you know what I am glad about?” he told her in a low voice.

“What's that?” she asked him.

“That I wasn't in there.”

She gaped at him and her heart sank once again.

“Oh—right?”

She let out a low whistle and her breath appeared right before her in the form of light wisps. It was getting cold again.

“Okay—um,” she began again as she returned to the steering wheel, “well, we're in Colfax, almost to Auburn no less. We're almost home and it's not like when you and I—” She turned to Alex again. “—got stranded at Tahoe. We're actually near civilization this time, you know, not just a bar and a bunch of houses.”

“It's not snowing either,” he muttered as he peered out the windshield.

“Right, and it's not snowing. And we're almost home, too. Don't worry, I have some money. We'll stop and get dinner—I don't know about a room, though.”

She froze right in her tracks.

“What's the matter?” Alex asked her.

“Oh, no.”

“What?”

“My mom's tupperware was in there, too!”

“Oh, man!” Eric declared as he clapsed a hand to his head.

“Her tupperware and the pot she lent me, too,” Sam added. “But like I said before, though.”

“Just tell the truth,” Alex sputtered.

“Right.”

“Let's get moving again,” Eric advised her with a shiver.

“Yeah, now you're looking cold,” Sam told him.

“I feel like I'm gonna puke, too,” Alex groaned as he leaned back in the seat again.

“Don't blame you, dude,” Eric said.

“Just don't do it in here,” Sam advised him as she started up the car again. “Too bad neither of us have beepers 'cause I'd call up Chuck right now and tell him what happened.”

“Marla has one of those bricks, though, doesn't she?” Eric asked her as she turned the heat back up.

“But that's Marla, though,” Alex pointed out.

They rolled forward into the darkening street and towards the restaurant there at the end. All Sam could think about was how she lost her mother's containers and that one pot, but she need not stay wrapped up inside of it all as the three of them huddled into the far corner of the room.

Alex turned his head to the right side of the room.

“Samantha, do you see this over here?” he asked aloud, and he glanced over at Sam with a twinkle in his eye.

“What is it?”

He gestured over to the black and white photograph hung up on the wall right next to him. It was of a statue, which appeared to be a small cherubic angel that danced with a devil. The stone it had been crafted out of was smooth and polished to the point it resembled to soap.

“Wow,” Sam muttered. Eric looked up at the photograph as well. Alex stood to his feet for a better look at the label underneath the actual photograph.

“Taken from the Metropolitan—back in New York City—a marble statue of an angel and a demon, titled 'the Dance of Heaven and Hell'. Artist unknown, but supposedly from the Italian Renaissance.”

“It looks Italian,” Eric declared.

“Purchased by the museum for only a hundred dollars!” Alex chuckled as he returned to his spot right next to Sam.

“Imagine if you had something you made purchased by a big museum like that for a tiny price tag like that,” he said to her.

“What if it isn't worth much, though?” she asked him.

“Great art transcends price,” he told her as he took a sip from his water glass. “If you had it bought like that for a couple of bucks and gets valued, and the value is huge, that's where the bank comes in.”

“Really?”

“That's what I've heard, anyways—and just from reading about things like that, too,” he continued. “But when you're a great artist, though, that's when none of it matters.”

“You think I'm a great artist?” Sam asked him with a small smile on her face.

“You think she's a great artist?” Eric echoed her.

“From the pieces I've seen, anyway,” Alex said as he set his hand on the other side of his glass.

Within time, the waiter returned for them: she asked for a big bowl of clam chowder, complete with all the bread and crackers. The boys both asked for stroganoff, something to warm them both up as they sat there in that chilly restaurant together. The clouds outside the window collected some more and Sam knew more snow was upon them. At least they were headed the other way that time around; she yearned for the warmth and the safety of a trailer.

Eric adjusted the lapels of his jacket. It wasn't that cold in there, but she wondered if he had an extra chill that time around. Alex even shivered himself right there next to her: he shook his jet black helmet of hair and the little plume of gray wiggled a bit.

“What exactly quantifies a great artist, anyway?” Sam wondered aloud.

“A great artist not only makes you feel something but takes you out of the world a bit,” Alex replied, “I dunno, that's my definition of it, anyways. I would think it's something that's completely based on other people's interpretation of the phrase.”

“A great artist mops the floor with all the other run of the mill artists and the supposedly good artists,” Eric said in a single breath.

“Exactly!” Alex bowed his head forth and belted out with laughter.

Within time their food arrived and those two boys were quick to wolf down their stroganoff: Alex almost dropped his fork on the floor while Eric already down two bites of beef and egg noodles.

“My goodness, you fellas are hungry,” she noted as she set her napkin down on her lap and picked up her spoon.

“Hungry and cold,” Alex corrected her once he swallowed down a large bite of pasta. He drank down another gulp of ice water as if he was dying of thirst.

But then again, Sam didn't realize how hungry she was, either, as she took a bite of chowder, with all those cubed potatoes and fresh clams with a touch of herbs. The bread was soft and fresh right out of the oven. The three of them feasted on their dinner and all the while Sam wondered where they would go for the night.

Alex did have the blanket there in the back seat with him. At least that time around, they were in fact closer to civilization but there was no way Sam could pass up the chance to be nestled right in between those two boys, especially with their stomachs warm and full: Alex himself was enjoying his stroganoff a bit too much as every time he took a rather large bite, he closed his eyes and tilted his head back.

Joey burst into Sam's mind right then. It felt so long since she had seen him or even heard from him. She hoped that Anthrax were doing okay over there in New York and she wondered if they were in fact about to do their new album like Charlie had promised. It would in fact be nice if they made the new one with all five of them, and she knew they would come on strong just so long as Metallica kept it together there as well.

If nothing, she could search for a payphone there in Colfax and call him up to check in on him. She also needed to call both of her parents to tell them that they made it to the other side of the Sierras.

Sam ran her fingers through her dark hair as she took another bite of clam chowder, followed by another. Within time, she had finished her soup as well as the bread.

“So you boys wanna bunk out in the car or should I get us a room?” she asked them.

“I'm afraid that, by the time you get us a room,” Alex began as he took one last sip from his glass of water, “I'm gonna fall asleep standing up. I'm sure Eric is about ready to, too.”

“Yeah, I pretty much am,” Eric confessed as he fetched up a yawn.

“Okay, but I have to call my parents first, though,” she pointed out as she finished off her glass of water as well.

“Think I better call mine, too,” Alex confessed; he rubbed his eyes and he slid out of his seat and onto the floor. He was so full that he almost lost his balance, but Sam was quick to capture him. Eric lingered back with his face propped up in the palm of his hand as the two of them made their way across the floor to the payphones by the bathrooms. She brushed hips with him and he almost staggered back a bit. Alex chuckled and he reached for the phone on the right.

“You got any change?” he asked her.

“I've got tons of change,” she told him as she reached into her purse for her wallet. She handed him a few quarters and he turned back to the phone on the wall. Sam turned to the one before her and she inserted a couple of quarters for herself. She dialed Ruben's number first: he wasn't home and thus she left a quick message for him. The same went for Esmé. Another pair of quarters into the phone and she dialed Joey's number: at that point, Alex had already hung up the phone and he turned to Sam, complete with his right hand up on the wall above him and his left hand on his hip.

She turned to him with the phone receiver up to her ear. His eyelids drooped a bit from the warm sensual feeling inside of him as well as something else. He nibbled on his bottom lip when Joey's voice crackled on the other end of the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Joey.”

Alex raised an eyebrow at her.

“Sam?”

“Yeah. Who else would it be?” She giggled at that.

“Oh, just kinda sorta playin' wit' ya.”

She giggled at him when Alex reached for her hip. She swerved back a bit when he cracked her a devilish smirk.

“What have you been up to lately?” she asked him.

“Oh, my god—about a month ago, I got a call early in the morning from Danny—Danny Spitz—tellin' me that the studio burned down.”

“Holy shit, really?”

“Yeah.”

Alex raised both eyebrows at her.

“Yeah, we lost like a hundred grand worth of stuff in the whole thing,” Joey continued. “So we've been going in and out of the whole thing just to make sure the master tapes are still intact when we take 'em into mastering. We've all been kinda freaking out because we're like, 'oh, fuck, what if it's rushed', you know?”

“Oh, absolutely,” she replied as Alex lingered closer to her. He showed her his tongue and he wiggled his fingers at her. She showed him a little grin.

“Squeeze me,” he begged her in a low voice: his chest lingered right there before her face.

“Our new album is going into mastering, though,” Joey continued with a clearing of his throat.

“Squeeze me like you’re squeezing a full ripe avocado.”

“What?” Joey demanded.

“Nothing—” She swatted at Alex, who snickered at her. “It's just—somebody behind me—getting all naughty and shit.”

Joey chuckled at that. Alex showed her his tongue again and that time he put both hands on his hips.

“Going into mastering already?” Sam asked Joey.

“Yes! No clue when it's supposed to come out, though. Thinking maybe this summer? But who knows, really?”

“It comes out when it's done,” she said.

“It comes out four weeks after it's done,” Alex corrected her in a low voice.

“What?” Joey laughed.

“Yeah!” she declared with a chuckle.

“I mean it is true,” he told her. “Anyways, sounds crowded in there. Go and rest in a place that's nice and quiet. I'm all wrapped up in my pajamas and a blanket and I'm ready to jack off to you being all naked and shit. You go to bed and have some sexy dreams later on.”

“You, too,” she retorted back.

“Sam?”

“Yes?”

“I love you.”

She nibbled on her bottom lip as she locked eyes with Alex, and then she turned her head in the opposite direction.

“I love you, too,” she mumbled right into the mouth piece.

Joey chuckled and then they hung up at the same time. Sam returned to Alex and the smug look plastered upon his face.

“You horny bastard,” she scoffed.

“It's gonna be even worse with you and me nestled up against each other again,” he told her with a little rub of his belly.

“Well, at least this time we've got Eric with us,” she pointed out as the two of them padded back to the table.

“Nah, that's why it's gonna be even worse,” he insisted with a chuckle.

At least he wasn't full of alcohol as she paid the bill and left a tip for the waiter. But they were going to be nestled up against each other in the back seat of the car with nothing more than the blanket and a few other things however.

Indeed, once she had pulled the car around the corner, and the three of them had lay down the back seat flat, and they snuggled up against one another to keep each other warm, Sam had a feeling that things were going to be rather intense right then and there. Just like that night in Tahoe, they had their makeshift pillows made of their jackets.

Alex snuggled closer to her with his hands right before his face: even with nothing more than a few inches of clearance between them, she could feel the soft silken warmth from his body. Eric lay on her right side: he, too, felt so soft and warm even with a bit of a gap between her and him. In the darkness, she made sight of the inky black hair spread across his round full face. Nestled in between two boys with their stomachs absolutely full of stroganoff. Quite the life she found herself wrapped in at the moment.

She thought about Scarlett and if and when she would hear back from her about her art.

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Alex licking his lips.

“The little man wants it,” Eric noted as he shifted his weight on the side of the seat.

“The little man can't have it,” Sam teased as she rolled her head over for a look into Alex's eyes, shrouded in shadow and yet they twinkled with mischief. She gazed at him right in the eye for a whole minute before she felt her eyelids growing heavy.

Within time, she fell asleep right in between them.

For a few moments, she swore she saw the mysterious man in her dreams once again, but he appeared to her as nothing more than a dark silhouette in a white pillar of light. He was slender and delicate in appearance, as if he had lost all of his extraneous weight and awaited her at the gates of dawn. He set his hands on either side of the doorway and his hair billowed all around his head even though there was no wind there in her dream.

Sam awoke the next morning with Eric's head upon her shoulder and Alex's body pressed up tight against her: that inky black hair spread over the former's face such that it hid his eyes and the bridge of his nose. Meanwhile, Alex had lay his head on her chest so that little plume of gray rested right on her collar bones. A part of her wanted to plant a soft kiss on the crown of his head, but for all she knew Eric could wake up right then and there.

Another part of her didn't want to get up, either: she was nestled in between two boys on a cold blustery winter's morning.

But then again, they had to head on back to the Bay Area, especially if the two of them were about to make an album themselves. It was still early but she knew that these two boys would want breakfast and coffee at some point. It took a bit of struggling but Sam managed to wake the both of them up: once the back seat was back upright, she and Eric returned to the front and Alex took his spot in the middle of the back, and they headed on out of Colfax.

Lucky for them, the snow had passed them over the night, but that wasn't to say more headed their way once they reached Auburn.

Alex never took off the blanket from his lap, even as they descended into the Central Valley, where the tule fog had collected all around in a thick heavy woolly blanket in its own rite. At least that time around, they had a bit of extra warmth in the car and so they could hunker down with the heat on part of the way up the dial. Eric finally put his hood onto his head once they reached the intricate web of an interchange in the heart of Sacramento, whereby Sam was careful to take the next exit, the next road which wound out further west to the Bay Area.

Sam felt the hunger creeping up inside of her once those hills emerged in the terrain once again.

A break in the clouds over their heads and she knew that it was about time for breakfast. Every time she took a glimpse into her rear view mirror, Alex's head was bowed a bit and his eyes drooped closed. Indeed, Eric had fallen asleep at some point right outside of Fairfield. They were within the home stretch, and she could see the high spires of the Golden Gate Bridge off in the distance, and yet the two of them were still drifting off to sleep all the while.

She knew a place where she could take them to that would wake them up, especially if Ruben didn't pick up at any given time the night before.

The dense cottonlike tule fog melded into the thick but wispy San Francisco fog as Sam wound her way through the northeastern rim of the Bay Area and all the way down to Castro Valley. They passed the place where James and Lars had scattered Cliff's ashes and she knew that they had to stop there when they had the chance, and when the fog had finally given way to the summer sun overhead.

They reached the cafe by her father's house but given it was still early, it wasn't open yet. The two of them were still sound asleep by the time they rolled up there to the curb.

She returned to the freeway and they continued onward to the studio down in Berkeley, where Sam recognized a familiar head of smooth black hair and a slightly heavier body even from a distance, but she didn't recognize the young guy right across from her with his head of long luxurious smooth black hair down to his back: he had that thoughtful look on his face that made her think of both Joey and Chuck.

Sam brought the car up to the curb right before her and that was when Eric and Alex both jarred awake at the same time.

“Aurora,” Eric blurted out in a broken voice.

“With some other guy,” Sam said as she climbed out first. The two of them followed suit right behind her, and Aurora and the guy both turned for a look back at him.

“You must be the cousin!” Alex declared.

“Yeah—I'm Stephen.”

“The cousin?” Sam wondered aloud.

“Yeah, I'm Chuck's cousin,” he replied.

“Stephen Carpenter, you said your name was?” Aurora asked him.

“Yeah—by the way,” he turned back to Eric and Alex, “I love you guys, and also Metallica and Anthrax. I pretty much the past two years playing guitar along to Master of Puppets, Among the Living, and also The Legacy.”

Sam turned to the two of them, the two still very young boys.

“Did you guys hear that?” she proclaimed to them. “You guys are now influential in a way.”

“I hope my band gets accepted,” Stephen confessed as Aurora held the door for the four of them. The whole front hallway of the studio smelled a bit musty, as if someone left a window in there.

“And Anthrax is working on a new one, too,” Sam remarked once they were in the main room. “Boys are busy as all hell.”

“Did you hear what happened to their studio last month?” Aurora said with a look of concern on her face.

“I did, yes!” Sam exclaimed. “I called Joey last night and he told me. Lost like a hundred grand worth of equipment.”

“Holy shit,” Eric blurted out.

“Yeah—Yeah, I was gonna tell you but this one over here—” She nodded at Alex and the twinkle in his eye. “—was so busy wanting to touch me and get close to me that I forgot about it.”

“There's also this,” Aurora declared as she picked up what appeared to be a blank cassette tape from the shelf on the side of the room. But Sam recognized that name on the side of the label.

“The return of the Cherry Suicides!” she exclaimed.

“Aw yeah!” Eric cheered with a pump of his fists.

“It's actually a single,” Aurora explained, “their very first one, no less. A brand new song called 'Girlfriend.' 'Cut me up and make me your girlfriend, baby!'”

“Morbid and lovely—just like the girls themselves,” Alex said with his eyes gleaming.

“Also—we have a friend here,” Aurora continued, and the door of the pool room swung open behind them. Yet another young guy with long hair down past his shoulders, but with the first sprigs of a beard around his chin and his upper lip.

“Hey! Gary!” Alex declared.

“Gary from—Exodus?” Sam asked from out of the blue.

“The same!” he said with a smirk and his hand extended to Alex. “Hey, little man. I was wondering where you ran off to after the tour.”

“Camping over in the eastern Sierra,” Alex replied, “with dear Samantha here and also Eric.”

“Cool! Well, I hope you guys saved up some juice because a little bird told me that you—” Gary gestured to Sam, albeit with a serious look on his face. “—wanna visit Cliff's burial site.”

“Where'd you hear that?” she asked him.

“I'll tell you later,” he said.

“Well, you guys better make it quick because Ruben's gonna be here any second now,” Aurora advised them, and without another moment's hesitation, Sam, Alex, Eric, and Gary returned to the car outside.

“What happened to the trailer?” Gary asked them.

“You—really don't wanna know,” Eric told him as they climbed back inside: that time, he took the spot behind the wheel while Sam took to the back seat next to Alex.

A little turn around and then a trek back up to Castro Valley, to those same rolling hills there. At that point, the clouds overhead broke and the gray morning sun shone down on them. Sam hoped they would get breakfast at some point: not that she wanted it, but she wanted Alex and Eric to have a bite to eat for themselves.

“I feel like I haven't been up here in ages,” Gary confessed. “Let's just say it's been a long time coming for all of us over in the Exodus camp.”

Alex ran his fingers through his inky black hair. Sam huddled closer to him just to feel his warmth.

They came to that familiar stretch of flat ground there in the hills, and that low building where they held the memorial.

“Samantha—look!” Alex declared with a point to the field.

Sam turned around and followed his gesture. On the field there, right in the exact same spot where James and Lars had scattered Cliff's ashes, stood a small complex of lush dark green shrubs. Even from the road, she could see those small flowers that lined the highways in the valley and down in the south land.

“Oleanders,” she breathed out; she thought about Louie and if he had seen those flowers himself at any given point. Even though it was still very early in the year, she could see they were in full bloom as if the springtime had bestowed upon them once again.

“Right where they spread his ashes, too,” he added.

Alex climbed out of the car first and Sam followed suit. Eric and Gary stayed behind there in the car; those shrubs were much larger than either of them had seen before, such that they looked as though they had been transferred from some place on the side of the road to there in the middle of the field. They rounded the edge of the building together only to be met with a heady gust of wind from the ocean, but neither of them let it slow them down. Alex kept on running to the shrubs, to which he skidded to a stop before them and he crouched down before the branches that faced him. Sam lingered behind him for a better look at the flowers, even though she stood several feet away from them.

Eric called out something from the car but she couldn't hear him over the winds at their back.

“Don't touch them, Alex,” she advised him. “They're poisonous.”

“I won't—I'm just seeing how white they are.”

As white as the top layer of hair on the plume on his head.

He lingered right before the fledgling shrub for a better look at those little white flowers as they bloomed up from even the lowest branches, the ones closest to the ground. Their five petals were pristine, like that of a daisy or a hibiscus, but they were oleanders, the plants that grew everywhere there in California. The poison that ran within the roots of the earth and brought back poison for the most unsuspecting of souls. Sam crouched down closer to him as the cold moist breeze from the ocean fluttered the shrubs a bit.

She need not the gray morning sun to show her that the pedals had not a single speck or imperfection on them.

Alex peered back at her and the sunlight shone onto his face to wash out his skin and the gray hairs there over his brow: for a few seconds, he appeared far more ghostly than she had originally imagined before. Sam glanced over at the rest of the barren field. Cliff's spirit was among them, and he made something beautiful and morbid sprout from the depths of the earth in his wake.

“Like—perfect pearly white,” she noted. “White and clean.”

“They really are!” He turned to her with a bright twinkle in his eye, when a chill swept over her. “It's like Mother Nature knows.”

“She does,” Sam said with a nod of her head.

The two of them there back at the end of the world, caught in the midst of something humongous there on their horizons.

Little white flowers to follow them into the next round of spring, and that time was coming upon them. No more time left to dawdle: they all had to move with the poison sands of time.

[aion-rsa]

Heist Review: Netflix Doc Appreciates That Crime Pays

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You can watch, but you may not want to try these at home. Heist, Netflix’s new crime-docuseries, makes it look very tempting to go for the big money grab. Whether it comes in paper or bottles, bushels or barrels, cash is king, and it is fun to be a kingpin. Living large on illicit funds is a blast. Pursuit is inevitable. Capture is probable. Jail is doable. Especially if there is some money stashed away.

The interesting thing is, of all of the cases investigated in the show, the only criminal who might not have something saved for retirement is the one who got away with the crime and turned herself in. Told by the people who pulled them off, Heist is a cautionary tale that throws caution to the wind. The docuseries was produced by Dirty Robber, it chronicles the events of three famous modern heists. Each case gets two episodes, the build-up and the downfall. But underneath it all is a running romance with crime.

In the first episode, “Sex Magick Money Murder, a 21-year-old woman steals millions in Vegas casino cash. She does it for love, gives it up for love, and hopes her lover enjoyed his enriched life. That is, if he’s still alive. In “The Money Plane,” a man swipes $6 million from an airport warehouse in Miami to adopt a child for the woman he loves. “The Bourbon King” siphons off enough liquid gold to get a whole county drunk and the whole country watching, but the team captain gave up local softball fame for his wife.

The dramatic reenactments of the heists are as enthusiastic as the crimes. Heist sticks to robberies where no deaths occurred during the crime. This makes it easier to like the people who pulled off the jobs. We root for them. For the most part, they’re not career criminals. They are normal working stiffs who were lucky enough to be presented with an opportunity which was too good to pass up. Anyone watching might do it. That’s the hook. Remember, these people did time for it.

Director Derek Doneen had me at the title with “Sex Magick Money Murder.” When Heather Tallchief starts talking about tantric sex magic, you can feel how the very promise of crime pays off. Tallchief had a rough childhood, her mother dumped her on a father who scared crackheads because he smoked pot laced with formaldehyde. She finds the perfect man, a paroled murderer, with the greatest pickup line: “Do you believe in the devil?” Roberto Solis shot and killed an armored car guard during a robbery attempt in 1969. He wrote books while in prison, and had a way with words. A conversation begun in San Francisco ends in Las Vegas when they make off with over $3 million in a heist on a Loomis Armored truck.

Read more

TV

Money Heist: What to Know About the International TV Phenomenon

By Gene Ching

Heather, who had just gotten her driver’s license, gets a job as a driver just to pull off the crime. Her co-workers thought she was cute, but had such a bad sense of direction when she was late picking them up, they were afraid to call it in and get her in trouble. An actress playing Tallchief captures the wild ride with a wide range, from the whirlwind romance to the jealousies that broke it up.

All of the episodes are paced similarly to feature heist films like Ocean’s Eleven and Catch Me If You Can, but Cuban immigrant Karls Monzon hadn’t seen the film Goodfellas when he scored the biggest airport take since 1978 Lufthansa heist at New York’s JFK airport. It’s probably the only background cinema he didn’t study. Monzon schooled himself by watching crime shows on TV. He was a fast learner. The haul in the Martin Scorsese film was $5.875 million. Monzon nearly got away with stealing $7.4 million. He’s done his time, and swears none of his share of the money is left. But audiences would be well within their rights to hope he’s stashed some extra bundles in that PVC pipe.

“The Money Plane” was directed by Martin Desmond Roe, and he presents it with heart. The love story between Monzon and Cinnamon is told with wit, warmth and street wisdom. He wants the perfect American life: wife, house and baby, but even after several expensive treatments at fertility clinics, it looks impossible to hit the trifecta. When Monzon puts his mind to it, he can do anything, he says. He gets word of the cash transfer from Onelio Diaz, who works as a guard for Brink’s Security. Monzon’s mind works in mysterious ways, and he comes across as a natural talent.

“The Bourbon King,” directed by Nick Frew, takes a deep swig from Gilbert “Toby” Curtsinger’s personal stash of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon. “Pappygate” was a headline news darling in 2013, when more than 65 cases of Pappy Van Winkle and Wild Turkey bourbons and rye whiskeys were reported stolen by the Buffalo Trace Distillery. Curtsinger was a good ol’ boy, and wasn’t doing anything everyone else wasn’t doing. He was just doing it better. On the Kentucky softball team he plays on, he could drive a grounder into a pitcher’s nuts at whim.

Curtsinger worked at the distillery for 26 years, starting at the loading docks and working his way up. He cops display bottles, and takes and makes deliveries at the finest of gatherings. He gets popped for having five full barrels of stolen Wild Turkey 101 bourbon on his property. Even though they specifically say the scenario isn’t anything like Dukes of Hazzard, Curtsinger’s team peels out off the most unbeaten paths. A player named Dusty is the most fun of the crew. Once he finds out he’s being followed, he plays with the cops, seeing just how far they’ll go before he strands them in some backwoods area with no offramp. He sets a meeting with county deputies just across the line of their jurisdiction.

The high points are the details. Not only on how the crimes were committed, but why. The human stories that lead to legendary lawlessness. Also, most true crime documentaries, like Making a Murderer, still leave audiences with questions. Their function is to solve a case, and more often than not are cold cases. Heist presents closed cases. It is unique because people who committed the crimes get more airtime than the ones who solve it.

The stories are told from the perspective of people who know what it feels like to pull off an impossible crime. The criminals openly discuss the finer points, from a wise distance, but with fond memories. What does $7.4 million look like? It looks beautiful. We get how they select their targets, put together the crew, the meticulous planning, the emotional journey, the redemption, and the regret. But there is one more dividend. Each installment leaves some hint about unrecovered swag. Heist pays off, because the thrill of the theft is its own reward.

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Heist premieres July 14 on Netflix.

The post Heist Review: Netflix Doc Appreciates That Crime Pays appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[orbemnews]

The Costly Pursuit of Self-Driving Cars Continues On. And On. And On. It was seven years ago when Waymo discovered that spring blossoms made its self-driving cars get twitchy on the brakes. So did soap bubbles. And road flares. New tests, in years of tests, revealed more and more distractions for the driverless cars. Their road skills improved, but matching the competence of human drivers was elusive. The cluttered roads of America, it turned out, were a daunting place for a robot. The wizards of Silicon Valley said people would be commuting to work in self-driving cars by now. Instead, there have been court fights, injuries and deaths, and tens of billions of dollars spent on a frustratingly fickle technology that some researchers say is still years from becoming the industry’s next big thing. Now the pursuit of autonomous cars is undergoing a reset. Companies like Uber and Lyft, worried about blowing through their cash in pursuit of autonomous technology, have tapped out. Only the deepest-pocketed outfits like Waymo, which is a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet; auto giants; and a handful of start-ups are managing to stay in the game. The tech and auto giants could still toil for years on their driverless car projects. Each will spend an additional $6 billion to $10 billion before the technology becomes commonplace — sometime around the end of the decade, according to estimates from Pitchbook, a research firm that tracks financial activity. But even that prediction might be overly optimistic. “This is a transformation that is going to happen over 30 years and possibly longer,” said Chris Urmson, an early engineer on the Google self-driving car project before it became the Alphabet business unit called Waymo. He is now chief executive of Aurora, the company that acquired Uber’s autonomous vehicle unit. So what went wrong? Some researchers would say nothing — that’s how science works. You can’t entirely predict what will happen in an experiment. The self-driving car project just happened to be one of the most hyped technology experiments of this century, occurring on streets all over the country and run by some of its highest-profile companies. That hype drew billions of dollars of investments, but it set up unrealistic expectations. In 2015, the electric carmaker Tesla’s billionaire boss, Elon Musk, said fully functional self-driving cars were just two years away. More than five years later, Tesla cars offered simpler autonomy designed solely for highway driving. Even that has been tinged with controversy after several fatal crashes (which the company blamed on misuse of the technology). Perhaps no company experienced the turbulence of driverless car development more fitfully than Uber. After poaching 40 robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon University and acquiring a self-driving truck start-up for $680 million in stock, the ride-hailing company settled a lawsuit from Waymo, which was followed by a guilty plea from a former executive accused of stealing intellectual property. A pedestrian in Arizona was killed in a crash with one of its driverless cars. In the end, Uber essentially paid Aurora to acquire its self-driving unit. But for the deepest-pocketed companies, the science, they hope, continues to advance one improved ride at a time. In October, Waymo reached a notable milestone: It started the world’s first “fully autonomous” taxi service. In the suburbs of Phoenix, anyone can now ride in a minivan with no driver behind the wheel. But that does not mean the company will immediately deploy its technology in other parts of the country. Dmitri Dolgov, who recently took over as Waymo’s co-chief executive after the departure of John Krafcik, an automobile industry veteran, said the company considered its Arizona service a test case. Based on what it has learned in Arizona, he said, Waymo is building a new version of its self-driving technology that it will eventually deploy in other places and other kinds of vehicles, including long-haul trucks. The suburbs of Phoenix are particularly well suited to driverless cars. Streets are wide, pedestrians are few, and there is almost no rain or snow. Waymo supports its autonomous vehicles with remote technicians and roadside assistance crews who can help get cars out of a tight spot, either via the internet or in person. “Autonomous vehicles can be deployed today, in certain situations,” said Elliot Katz, a former lawyer who counseled many of the big autonomous vehicle companies before launching a start-up, Phantom Auto, that provides software for remotely assisting and operating self-driving vehicles when they get stuck in difficult positions. “But you still need a human in the loop.” Self-driving tech is not yet nimble enough to reliably handle the variety of situations human drivers encounter each day. It can usually handle suburban Phoenix, but it can’t duplicate the human chutzpah needed for merging into the Lincoln Tunnel in New York or dashing for an offramp on Highway 101 in Los Angeles. “You have to peel back every layer before you can see the next layer” of challenges for the technology, said Nathaniel Fairfield, a Waymo software engineer who has worked on the project since 2009, describing some of the distractions faced by the cars. “Your car has to be pretty good at driving before you can really get it into the situations where it handles the next most challenging thing.” Like Waymo, Aurora is now developing autonomous trucks as well as passenger vehicles. No company has deployed trucks without safety drivers behind the wheel, but Mr. Urmson and others argue that autonomous trucks will make it to market faster than anything designed to transport regular consumers. Long-haul trucking does not involve passengers who might not be forgiving of twitchy brakes. The routes are also simpler. Once you master one stretch of highway, Mr. Urmson said, it is easier to master another. But even driving down a long, relatively straight highway is extraordinarily difficult. Delivering dinner orders across a small neighborhood is an even greater challenge. “This is one of the biggest technical challenges of our generation,” said Dave Ferguson, another early engineer on the Google team who is now president of Nuro, a company focused on delivering groceries, pizzas and other goods. Mr. Ferguson said many thought self-driving technology would improve like an internet service or a smartphone app. But robotics is a lot more challenging. It was wrong to claim anything else. “If you look at almost every industry that is trying to solve really, really difficult technical challenges, the folks that tend to be involved are a little bit crazy and little bit optimistic,” he said. “You need to have that optimism to get up every day and bang your head against the wall to try to solve a problem that has never been solved, and it’s not guaranteed that it ever will be solved.” Uber and Lyft aren’t entirely giving up on driverless cars. Even though it may not help the bottom line for a long time, they still want to deploy autonomous vehicles by teaming up with the companies that are still working on the technology. Lyft now says autonomous rides could arrive by 2023. “These cars will be able to operate on a limited set of streets under a limited set of weather conditions at certain speeds,” said Jody Kelman, an executive at Lyft. “We will very safely be able to deploy these cars, but they won’t be able to go that many places.” Source link Orbem News #Cars #continues #Costly #Pursuit #selfdriving

[architectnews]

St. John’s Park, New York

St. John’s Park, New York masterplan, NY Landscape, American Architecture Images

St. John’s Park in New York

Oct 31, 2020

St. John’s Park

Architects: Ballman Khapalova

Location: New York, USA

St. John’s Park is the terminus of the Holland Tunnel and entry to Manhattan, passed through by 100,000 people per day. The rotary distributes traffic into five directions using five offramps. Because of this complex traffic pattern, the center of the site remains inaccessible, unbuilt, and unbuildable. St. John’s Park is permanently closed to the public.

This proposal is generated from the geometry of the existing offramps, so that tunnel traffic may continue unimpeded. A continuous loop travels from street level to one level below ground, excavating the center of the site to create a park and allow pedestrian passage below the existing roadway. Rather than being an obstacle, the rotary now becomes a center for the neighborhood, linking Hudson Square, SoHo, and TriBeCa. The loop structure defines and interconnects all of the elements and activities of the new St. John’s Park, from the roadways to interior and exterior program spaces.

At street level, the loop creates a series of small parks protected from traffic: intimate piazzas, wild gardens, dog parks, and playgrounds. For cars, the walls that protect the parks frame the moment of entry into the city, reminiscent of Richard Serra’s Arc sculpture installed on the site from 1983-1987. Staircases, ramps, and elevators from the street leading down to the central Lower Park and the interior program spaces that surround it.

Serving as a neighborhood square, the Lower Park is both a destination and a point of connection. It is 275 feet in diameter and open to the sky, planted with native vegetation. During downpours it acts as a bioswale, retaining water and integrating runoff through various water features in the site. The park can accommodate many functions: it can be a piazza for gathering, relaxation, and people-watching; playgrounds and playfields; an ice-skating rink in the winter; a downtown farmer’s market and an outdoor venue for film and performance.

Lit with skylights from the street level parks above, the interior spaces lining the perimeter of the Lower Park can accommodate a series of programs: movie theaters and auditoriums, restaurants and cafes, yoga studios, and bathhouses, education and children’s programs. Acting as a threshold between the Lower Park and the interior spaces, the columns that support the roadway above create an arcade that provides shelter from the rain, snow, or summer sun. Besides circulation, it can be used for outdoor restaurant and café seating, farmer’s markets during inclement weather, and covered outdoor playgrounds for children.

From providing places for family and play to forming a reprieve from urban life to becoming a cultural destination, the new St. John’s Park takes empty space in the heart of New York that has been inaccessible for almost a century and makes it into a unique and vital center for public life in the city.

St. John’s Park was awarded the 2019 Architect’s Newspaper Best of Design Award for Unbuilt—Urban Design, a Special Mention in the 2020 Architizer A+ Awards in the Transportation—Unbuilt category, and two Honorable Mentions in the 2020 Architecture MasterPrize for Architectural Design—Transportation and Landscape Architecture—Urban Design.

St. John’s Park in New York – Building Information

Architects: Ballman Khapalova Location: New York, New York Structural Engineer: Thornton Tomasetti Climate Engineering: Transsolar KilmaEngineering Naval Engineering: Persak & Wurmfeld Concrete Fabrication: BPDL Construction and Logistics: Sciame Construction Project Date: 2019, ongoing (Concept Proposal)

About Ballman Khapalova New York based Ballman Khapalova are architects who strive to merge the intimate and the urban through imaginative structures, forms, events, and activities that transform the way a city can see itself. Their urban work in neglected and desolate areas develops opportunities to introduce new spaces of play, art, performance, recreation, reflection, healing, and debate that can allow residents and visitors alike a chance to experience and envision a street, neighborhood, riverbank, or city in a new way. Drawing on extensive experience in design and construction, they select and manage a highly capable team of contributors from the early stages of the design process, ensuring an integrated and feasible design that is physically, environmentally, and logistically achievable without compromising its visionary promise.

St. John’s Park, New York images / information received 301020

Location: New York City, USA

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[tigerstrikesasteroidnetwork]

LA / Lost + Found

Lost + Found Clifford Eberly, Kyla Hansen, Gloria Sanchez and Erin Trefry February 9 - March 3, 2019 Opening Reception: Saturday, February 9,  7-10pm

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles is pleased to present Lost & Found, a group exhibition featuring work by Clifford Eberly, Kyla Hansen, Gloria Sanchez and Erin Trefry, curated by TSA LA member Stacy Wendt. This exhibition features artists who incorporate found objects into their practice. For some, these objects may come from family or other loved ones and are rich with personal history and meaning.  Others seek out their found materials in thrift stores, deserts, beaches or while walking the streets of Los Angeles. In these pieces, items such as shoes, textiles, hair, shells, sticks and driftwood are transformed, altered and reconstructed into something new. Through this transmutation, old meanings may be lost, honored or both simultaneously. Whether the original items are intimate relics or casual souvenirs of current environments, the artists are able to invigorate and infuse them with their own energy and point of view.

Clifford Eberly is a performing, visual artist currently based in Los Angeles.  Eberly constructs installations, paintings and performances from strings of experiences over time as the core subject. Interested in representations that influence quotidian process with personal relationships and thought patterns, Eberly composes artworks that jettison pre-conceived beliefs from historical facts portrayed in media, cultural and entertainment complexes. Eberly received his BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Soon after graduating from SCAD, Eberly completed the Apprenticeship Program at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. In 1995, Eberly moved to New York and enrolled at SVA for painting classes and the Empire State College for their Studio in the City program. From 2006-2010 Eberly directed parlor gallery in Lancaster, PA where he curated and produced monthly shows of under-represented and emerging artists. Yearning to focus on his own work, Eberly moved west and attended Claremont Graduate University from 2010-2012. Eberly has exhibited in galleries in Los Angeles and the U.S. including; PST, Lee Gallery at Clemson University, Coachella Valley Arts Center, Glendale Community College, Offramp Gallery, Fellows of Contemporary Art, PAM, East Side International, Sturt Haaga Gallery at Descanso Gardens, Coastline College Art Gallery, Art Catalogues at LACMA and Tiger Strikes Asteroid. In October, 2019, Eberly will present the group exhibition “Code Word Safe” at FOCA’s Curator’s LAB while curating 6 artists whose works address text in abstract, gaming and performative platforms.

Gloria Sanchez is a Xicana-Filipina American artist who works in painting, weaving, sculpture, mixed media, and sign making. Her work reflects her upbringing in a culturally blended environment, and incorporates ideas pertaining to decolonization, anti-capitalism, and transcending the effects of marginalization and intergenerational trauma. Sanchez received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing and Painting from California State University Long Beach in 2014. She works, teaches, and resides in the harbor area of Los Angeles, CA. She has worked within her local community to promote and generate grassroots art actions. She was part of WECAN (Wilmington Enrichment Community Artist Network) from 2009-2011, as well as Ell@s collective from 2011-2013. Both groups have been featured in videos produced by LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). In 2012, Ell@s collective were guests Art facilitators for STAC (Slanguage Teen Art Council) at LA><ART as part of Slanguage Studio’s participation in the first MADE IN LA.Since 2012, She has been an Alumni and Affiliate of Slanguage Studio, founded by Mario Ybarra Jr. and Karla Diaz.  Gloria has recently exhibited work at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Cerritos College Far Bazaar, Downtown Art Center Gallery, Pasadena City College, LA><ART, Museum of Latin American Art, Los Angeles Water School, Mini Art Museum, El Comalito Collective, Angel City Brewery, and Art Share LA. She aspires to continue as a practicing artist, attain her Masters in Fine Arts, and continue on as an educator.

Kyla Hansen is a Los Angeles‐based sculptor who combines found objects, handcrafts, and Hollywood prop-­‐house materials in a scrappy language from desert suburbia. She received her Masters of Fine Art from Claremont Graduate University in 2012 and her Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2009. Her work has been exhibited throughout the Greater Los Angeles Area, including  Five Car Garage, Western Project, Torrance Art Museum, WEEKEND Space, California State University, Long Beach, Raid Projects,  and UCLA New Wight Gallery. Her work has  been recognized in several publications including Modern Painters Magazine’s 24 Artists to Watch in 2013. Hansen lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Erin Trefry is a Los Angeles based artist who makes visceral, emotionally charged sculptural paintings. At an early age, she was awarded multiple scholarships that enabled her to study at the Maryland Institute, College of Art; Parsons, Paris; and The New York Studio Program (A.I.C.A.D.). Upon graduation, Trefry returned to teach at her alma-mater where she received a series of grants to design and implement innovative arts curriculum. Professional designation along with her active role in education allowed her to maintain her autonomy as a working artist. As a descendent of textile designers, cobblers, and educators, her work suggests personal archeology. The warp and weft of fabric acts as an inherent drawing and serves as a catalyst for her constructions. Shoes, handbags, shirts, belts, and pants once belonging to her mother are given new life in her sculptural assemblages. They echo the physicality of the body with "wounded symmetry".  Their association with Japanese armor, African masks, and the Commedia Dell'Arte attempts to evoke the depth of human behavior and to provoke a new lens into contemporary sculpture. Trefry exhibits, teaches, throws clay slabs, dances, and creates unusual spaces.

Lost & Found opens Saturday, February 9th, 7-10pm at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles and will be on view through March 3rd.

[al32richards]

Onni Adjusts Its Plan For 353 West Grand, But Is It Enough?

Some skyscrapers go from announcement to completion in a couple of years.  Others take longer.  353 West Grand, a proposal from Vancouver’s Onni, is one of the ones taking the more ponderous route.

Rendering of 353 West Grand (via Office of Alderman Brendan Reilly)

We’ve known since 2013 that something big was coming to the southwest corner of Grand and Orleans, the former location of the Clark and Barlow hardware store.  In 2015, Onni put forward a plan from River North’s Pappageorge Haymes for a 32-story residential tower with a podium that slruped up all the remaining available space.

That didn’t sit well with the neighbors.  Especially those at the Sexton Lofts who thought the project was encroaching not only on their views and their light, but on them, personally.

Diagram of 353 West Grand (via Office of Alderman Brendan Reilly)

The two properties are separated by an alley.  But the property lines aren’t at the alley edges.  The division runs down the length of the alley.  So while the balconies that the Sexton Lofts dwellers love so much hang over the alley, they are still within that building’s property boundary.  What Onni wanted to do last time around was build pretty much right up to those balconies.

Nobody likes to look out their window into a brick wall.  This isn’t New York.  So the new proposal is a little easier on the eyes.

The current plan from West Town’s Brininstool and Lynch for 353 has the two buildings separated by 28 feet — a significant improvement.  People with balconies on the first four floors of Sexton will still lose their views of the Ohio Street offramp, but at least they won’t be able to play handball from their balconies to the neighboring podium.

Those with a fifth or sixth-floor balcony will look into a line of trees that Onni plans to plant on top of 353’s podium.  It’s a good compromise because Onni gets to leaf out its pool deck with something more meaningful than the scrub grass commonly used by developers trying to landscape on a budget (short plants = shallow roots = money saved).  And it’s a win for two floors of Sexton residents who get to look out of their windows at the beauty of nature instead of an office supply store.

Previously, there would have been as little as eight feet, 10 inches between the brick wall of Sexton and 353.  That span was further reduced to about four feet by the Sexton balconies.  Now there’s about 28 feet between the two.

It’s not just people in the Sexton getting a little more space.  The eastern edge of the building has been pulled back to make room for a public pocket park.

The park will be about 26 feet wide, and run the length of the half-block site.  It’s not much, but every little bit helps in this area.  (Note to urban planners: A patch of grass surrounded by highway ramps is not a park.)

There will also be a “landscape buffer” in the western divide between the two buildings, past the Sexton’s loading dock.  Because of building shadows and other factors, we’re going to call this an “ecological challenge.”  Good luck with that, Onni.

Address: 353 West Grand Avenue

Developer: Onni Group

Architecture firm: Brininstool and Lynch

Site area: 37,260 square feet

Floor are ratio: 11.5 (7.0 base + 4.5 bonus)

Bonus payment: Neighborhood Opportunity Fund – $4,614,278.40

Bonus payment: Adopt-a-Landmark Fund – $576,784.80

Bonus payment: Local Impact Fund: $576,784.80

Maximum floors: 38

Maximum height: 452 feet

Podium height: 70 feet

Residences: 354

Affordable housing: TBD

Automobile parking: 284 spaces

Retail space: 11,000 square feet

Outdoor dog run on the west side of the 7th floor

Loading docks: 2 (off interior courtyard accessed from Grand Avenue)

from Chicago Architecture https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2018/06/25/onni-adjusts-its-plan-for-353-west-grand-but-is-it-enough/

[jesusvasser]

Quick Take: 2019 Volvo XC40 T5 AWD Momentum

Volvo’s second-generation XC90 is the future of sport/utility vehicles, especially among the big, three-row models. That was my conclusion when the latest Volvo XC90 made its debut for the 2016 model year.

Now comes along the 2019 Volvo XC40, the Swedish brand’s entry into the hottest segment in the auto industry: premium compact SUVs. Does it deserve such praise?

No. But that’s not an issue. What makes the XC90, built on Volvo’s large-car SPA platform, such a breakout is that it moves along nicely with a 2.0-liter turbo-four, sometimes combined with a supercharger or plug-in hybrid assistance, and that it doesn’t try to pass itself off as a tall sport sedan, but rather as a subtly luxurious, comfortable and thoroughly competent road wagon.

The new Volvo XC40, on the smaller CMA platform to be shared with Geely-brand models from the Chinese parent company, and the upcoming Lynk & Co. models, is less remarkable with the same, basic 2.0-liter gas direct-injection turbo four. In fact, the 2.0-liter turbo’s initial lag and peakiness actually feels less forgivable in an SUV of its size.

Or rather, CUV. I was surprised when parking the XC40 in my driveway right behind my new Subaru Crosstrek. The Volvo is 1.6-inch shorter and 1.4-inch taller than the Crosstrek, making its space the New York City way, by movin’ on up instead of out. It’s the XC40’s boxy design that makes it look more like a fancy Forester than a classier Crosstrek.

And the upscale works. The interior is a delight—it’s a rolling Manhattan apartment full of sleek, modern Swedish furniture, although a couple of bits, notably the small, odd cubby apparently meant for your smartphone at the driver’s right elbow, as well as the black plastic lower door pockets (though not the richly flocked and color-coordinated inner door panels) are more Bronx-flat furnished from Ikea. The overall effect is Serenity Now, though, especially when navigating Metro Detroit’s crumbling streets and its cratered-out freeways.

The Volvo XC40’s chassis is soft, but well controlled and mannered when negotiating curves and on-/offramps. It will not encourage you to find canyon or mountain esses, nor will it discourage you from passing lesser traffic when you do. It’s a smooth, comfortable crossover/sport-utility that drives and parks easily in the urbs and suburbs, and will carry a lot of your stuff when you venture out to a national park. It’s likely to do anything a German or premium American competitor will do, though with a slightly quirky, yet elegant Swedish design that sets it apart from any of the others.

When Volvo unveiled a prototype only to auto journalists a few years ago, design chief Thomas Ingenlath described the Compact Modular Architecture (small) models, including the XC40, as aiming for a much younger—say, thirty-something—audience rather than traditional customers of the brand, who are old enough to have watched the television show “Thirtysomething” when it was on broadcast TV (!) in the 1980s (hand raised). To my eyes, the XC40 has none of the elegant proportions of the Scalable Product Architecture models like the XC90, though especially the V90.

It looks good in Amazon blue, though glancing at volvocars.com’s configurator, I think this paint color looks better without the Ice White panoramic top, Ice White sideview mirrors and especially, the five white spokes on the 18-inch wheels. I like two-tone paint just fine, but I’m just not a seersucker suit sort of guy.

This comes down to personal taste, though, and who knows? Today, collectors prefer the tallish, boxy Volvo Amazon to its longer, lower, better-proportioned though still boxy successor, the 142. Post-Ford Volvo has another hit on its hands, as its sublime design, comfort and Swedishness is bound to entice plenty of well-heeled buyers with good post graduate-degree jobs.

2019 Volvo XC40 T5 AWD Momentum Specifications

ON SALE Late Summer 2018 PRICE $36,195/$44,315 (base/as tested) ENGINE 2.0L turbocharged DOHC 16-valve I-4/248 hp @ 5,500 rpm, 258 lb-ft @ 1,800-4,800 rpm TRANSMISSION 8-speed automatic LAYOUT 4-door, 5-passenger, front-engine, AWD SUV EPA MILEAGE 23/31 mpg (city/hwy) L x W x H 174.2 x 73.3 x 65.0 in WHEELBASE 106.4 in WEIGHT 3,690 lb 0-60 MPH 6.2 sec TOP SPEED 140 mph

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El Chapo: Inside the Hunt for Mexico's Most Notorious Kingpin

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El Chapo: Inside the Hunt for Mexico's Most Notorious Kingpin

Illustration by Mike McQuade

Rush hour starts early on Heroin Highway, generally by 6 a.m. Hockey dads in sport-utes; high school teens in car pools; commodities brokers and pensioners making their early-morning runs into Chicago on I-290. The Eisenhower Expressway – the Ike, as locals call it – is a straight shot in from the western suburbs to the mob-deep blocks of West Chicago. So Gangster Disciples and Vice Lords are up with the sun to pitch their work to the early birds, hugging the corners under the Ike’s offramps to do much of their day’s business by 8 a.m. Since cheap, potent heroin flooded Chicago 10 years ago and addicted a bell-cow demographic – middle-class whites – those corners off the Ike have become bull markets for gangs strong enough to hold them down. “They serve you in your car, quick-out in under a minute, and you’re back home in Hinsdale before the kids wake,” says Jack Riley, the ex-special agent in charge of the Chicago office of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “That’s why gangsters kill for those corners. They’re the Park Place and Boardwalk of the drug game.”

Riley, the town’s most famous federal agent since the days of the Untouchables, put together a strike force that jailed the major kingpins and left the gangs rudderless and scrambling. “We knocked down the big guys – the suppliers and OGs – but the young ones started killing their way up. That���s what happens when you get your targets: The gangsters don’t know who they work for.” Actually, even before his strike force rolled up the leaders, no one here knew who they really worked for. Riley estimates that Mob City has 150,000 gangsters in residence – and though most are in endless wars with one another, they’ve all blindly served the same master for 10 years: Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo. The king of all kings has likely never set foot here, though he made this city his American office, trucking heroin (and coke) from Mexico by the metric ton and taking billions of dollars out in small bills. Chicago has been a most congenial hub for Chapo. Centrally located and braided by interstates, it is a day’s drive, or less, from most of America – and from the Mexican border.

For 15 years, Chapo has been Riley’s white whale, the object of an obsession that teetered on derangement and sidelined everything else, including his family. “I love my wife and kid, but I was never home for dinner,” says Riley, who fought Chapo’s proxies in five different cities while rising through the chain of command at the DEA. Seven years ago, when he returned to Chicago for a third (and final) tour of duty, his charge was to quash Chapo’s deadliest gambit: a species of heroin spiked with fentanyl that killed seasoned addicts by the hundreds. Riley stormed in, knocked a bunch of heads together and brought everyone – the DEA, FBI, state troopers and Chicago PD – under one roof to chase the “choke-point guys”: brokers who were buying in bulk from Chapo and selling wholesale weight to the gangs.

By most measures, Operation Strike Force was a smash success; arrests and seizures soared, the local drug lords fell and the busts netted many millions in cash forfeitures, enough to pay the salaries of strike-force adjuncts. But by the only metric that mattered – the price of heroin on the street – Riley’s mission was a wash. “It was 50K a kilo when we started this, and 50K a kilo” three years later, he says.

For the past year and a half, El Chapo has been in solitary confinement in a Manhattan facility. He faces life without parole.

And so, in 2013, Riley summoned his stagecraft and pronounced Chapo public-enemy number one. At a press conference carried by hundreds of outlets, Riley and members of the Chicago Crime Commission proclaimed Chapo the greatest threat since Al Capone, a mass poisoner of the city and its suburbs. The fallout from Riley’s broadside surprised everyone, Riley included. “At most, I hoped they’d find some corrupt colonel to go after him down there,” says Riley. Instead, the Mexican government was barraged with phone calls from infuriated business leaders. “They screamed that Chapo was disgracing their country” and demanded his arrest, says Riley. Authorities in Mexico changed their tack, offering new levels of cooperation. That included a firm commitment to use SEMAR, Mexico’s tactical corps, to hunt down Chapo in the hills. Working hand in glove, the DEA and SEMAR closed the net on Chapo. A year after Riley’s announcement, they chased him to Mazatlán and arrested him, without resistance, in his hotel room. His escape from prison in 2015 merely prolonged the ending: He was busted by SEMAR (using DEA leads) five months after he’d fled. Thus fell the dragon: After a 30-year reign of murder and terror, Chapo was caught fleeing a sewer tunnel in a shit-stained tank top and chinos.

Last spring, I flew out to sit with Riley, who retired after Chapo’s arrest. At 59, he’d moved with his long-suffering wife, Monica, to a resort town whose name I can’t divulge. (For 10 years, Chapo has had a price on Riley’s head, a threat confirmed in recent interviews with captured traffickers.) A ruddy, white-haired bruiser who holds court from a bar stool, Riley seemed dispatched from the days of fedoras and cops lighting Luckies at crime scenes. Born and raised in Chicago, he joined the DEA out of college and moved his family 12 times as he climbed the ladder. By the time he had quit last fall, he was the nation’s number-two drug cop, having been at or near the center of nearly every major mission to catch foreign kingpins since the early Nineties. (It was his squad in Washington that built the intel platform to bring down Pablo Escobar in Medellín, Colombia; that helped catch the leaders of the Cali cartel and, later, the overlords in the Mexican mobs.) Riley recites their names, but they mean nothing to him now. Only Chapo endures, though he’s being held at the Manhattan Correctional Center, where he awaits his trial of the century in New York.

“Part of me understands it – he’s done, he’ll die in jail,” said Riley. “But the other part says, ‘No, he’s still out there.’ All those routes he opened, all that fentanyl he shipped – he’s gonna kill our kids for years to come. This monster he built, this Sinaloa thing: It’s too big to fail now, thanks to him.”

“Explain it to me,” says one retired DEA agent. “How did this mope become El Chapo?”

In the months we talked, either in person or on the phone, Riley spoke of Chapo in the present tense, as though he were still at large at his mountain retreat, running the world’s largest supplier of illicit drugs from a town without power or plumbing. Twice, Chapo had famously escaped maximum-security prisons, traveling Mexico in bulletproof cars to dine and frolic with call girls in seaside towns. Since 2001, when he launched a crusade to corner Mexico’s $30-billion-a-year drug trade, he’d been everywhere and nowhere, growing the parameters of his empire and leaving defiled corpses as deed of ownership. He waged war by atrocity in Juárez and Tijuana, bribed generals and governors to feed him intelligence, and sent his lieutenants to the DEA, ratting on both his enemies and his allies. “Other bosses you waited out ’cause they always make mistakes,” said Riley. “But this guy? Invisible. You couldn’t find him.”

He grunted and drained the last of his beer. We’d been at this bar for hours and hadn’t looked at menus; Riley flagged the bartender and ordered lunch. Since retiring, he had spent his time knocking tee shots into tree lines and starting early on the day’s first cold one. Maybe it was just his nervous system resetting, but six months after he left, he still mooned over Chapo, the enigma he never fully worked out: “He’s on top for 30 years, has billions of dollars hidden – and he’s a second-grade dropout who can barely read and write and has to dictate love letters in prison. So explain it to me, ’cause I don’t get it: How did this fucking mope become El Chapo?”

Jack Riley, former head of the DEA in Chicago, spent 15 years searching for Chapo.

If you wanted to create a nursery for narco princelings, you’d probably build your greenhouse in the mountains of Sinaloa, where the conditions for pathology are peak harvest. A dirt-poor ribbon of rivers and farmland on the southwest shank of Mexico’s coastline, Sinaloa was largely ignored by the central government from the moment it became a state, in 1830. Roads went unpaved, villages did without schools, and no self-respecting official would visit the plazas of those remote, no-horse towns in the Sierra Madre. And so the peasants, left to their own devices, developed a shadow economy. In the 1920s and Thirties, they ran booze to Tijuana, where Hollywood’s darlings blew in for the weekend to flee the dry torpor of Prohibition. Marijuana grew wild in the pastures; farmers trucked their bales five hours down the road to market in Badiraguato. In time, some harvested the poppy fields that Chinese tradesmen planted in the 1860s. Sons were taught by fathers how to bleed the bulbs for their vile-smelling opium gum. You couldn’t make a killing, but you could make a sort of living if your kids didn’t waste their days learning how to read.

That was Chapo’s boyhood, and the boyhood, by degrees, of most of Mexico’s drug lords of the past half-century. He grew up with, or close to, kids who became his partners and, eventually, his mortal foes: the Beltrán Leyva brothers, five cutthroat charmers who would one day be his enforcers and political fixers; the Arellano-Félix brothers, seven legendary sadists who roasted their victims alive in vacant fields. Even Chapo’s mentors were from Sinaloa, first-gen capos like Don Neto and El Padrino, who turned a backwoods sideline into a multinational machine that stretched from Cancún to San Diego. To this day, Sinaloa’s hills are to gangsters what western Pennsylvania is to frac pads and NFL quarterbacks.

“He came of age in the Eighties, when everyone got rich moving coke,” explains one former Mexican operative. 

Chapo was one of seven kids born to Emilio, a rancher, and Maria, a devout Catholic, in La Tuna, population 200. The family raised cows and grew sustenance crops behind a two-room house with dirt floors. What money they laid their hands on was earned uphill, where Emilio tended his poppies and marijuana. Once a month, he took the yield to Badiraguato. There he’d be paid for his contraband, then drink and whore all weekend and go home broke. A mean little man, he beat Chapo and his brothers; Chapo fled, for good, in his early teens. He stayed at his grandma’s, grew his own weed and sent some of the proceeds home to feed his siblings.

Chapo (Spanish for “Shorty”) was a small, squat teen who burned to spit his nickname in people’s faces. He wore hats with tall crowns that lent him an inch or two, rocked on his tiptoes when talking to friends and later, as a boss, only posed for photos while standing on a custom-built stool. His will to power sprang from being the picked-on runt despised and driven off by his father. That’s not junk science; it’s the finding of the psychiatrist who assessed him as an adult in prison. While jailed for eight years in the 1990s, Chapo sat for therapy sessions. The psychiatrist filed a report on the man he treated. Chapo’s “tenacity” and “disproportionate ambition” were wound to a sense of inferiority. To compensate, he craved “power, success and [beautiful women],” orienting his “behavior toward their obtention.”

No farm was going to hold a kid like that, and at 15 or 16 (early details are murky) he won an introduction to the don of Badiraguato, Pedro Avilés Pérez. Avilés, the first of the air smugglers in Mexico, hired him to do odd jobs for his lieutenants. Chapo rode along on their runs to the U.S. border, soaking up knowledge of roads and checkpoints and befriending dispatchers and truckers. Though he couldn’t read or write, he had a head for numbers and a steel-trap memory for detail. Best of all, he didn’t have an ounce of mercy in him. Ordered to kill a man, he’d calmly walk up to him and put a bullet in his head.

Avilés’ lieutenants were a dream team of smugglers. After Avilés was killed in a shootout with cops, they moved the operation to Guadalajara and named it the Federation. Chapo learned logistics from Amado Carrillo Fuentes, an avid flier who bought a fleet of planes and was nicknamed “Lord of the Skies.” From Ismael Zambada, the silent assassin called El Mayo, Chapo learned to leverage violence just so, using only enough to send a message. And from Arturo Beltrán Leyva, he learned bribes were the grease that kept the wheels of power turning. “He was around smart guys and paid attention,” says Alejandro Hope, a former senior operative with CISEN, Mexico’s version of the CIA. “And his timing was perfect: He came of age in the Eighties, when everyone got rich moving coke.”

Chapo’s first big break was a quirk of history: the U.S. war on Colombia’s cartels. In the 1970s, when Escobar and his counterparts in the Cali mob swamped Miami with coke, they put themselves in the crosshairs of the DEA. “They got rich, then they got lazy – they talked on their phones, which was how we finally took them down,” says Riley. By the middle of the 1980s, U.S. Coast Guard cutters had sealed off the cartels’ sea lanes in the Caribbean. The Colombians had no choice but to transship over land, sending their coke through Mexico to America. This arrangement wasn’t new – they’d used Mexicans for years and paid them flat fees to serve as mules. But now all the leverage was with the Federation, and Chapo was the first to see it. “He said, ‘Screw you, Pablo, I’ve got the smuggling routes. From now on, pay me in coke,’ ” says Carl Pike, a former special agent in the Special Operations Division, an elite unit created by the DEA that brings together the resources of a couple of dozen agencies to attack the cartels from all sides. “The Colombians took Chapo’s terms because he was the best at what he did: getting their drugs off the plane and up to L.A. in 48 hours or less.”

“Chapo was creating a new kind of cartel,” says one expert. 

Then a second piece of luck fell into Chapo’s lap. El Padrino, his cartel leader, ordered the kidnapping and killing of a DEA agent named Kiki Camarena. It was a blunder that brought the hammer of God down: a tenacious offensive by the Mexican army, at the behest of the U.S. government. Padrino was arrested and sentenced to 40 years, handing off his kingdom to his capos. In 1989, Chapo’s peer group divvied up the country: Amado Carrillo Fuentes took the routes through Juárez; the Arellano-Félixes got Tijuana and the coast, and Chapo took the run straight north to Arizona, sharing Sonora with El Mayo and the Beltrán Leyvas. He had recently turned 30 and was still wrapping his head around the burdens of excessive wealth. But he was already investing in creative fronts: “He bought a fleet of jets for ‘executive travel,’ and a grocery business to can cases of peppers that actually contained cocaine,” says professor Bruce Bagley of the University of Miami, a cartel expert who’s written six books on the narco-economy. “He was so sure of his supply lines that he guaranteed shipment. If any of his loads got seized by the cops, he paid the Colombians in full.”

Chapo learned to use just enough violence from the assassin Ismael Zambada.

While the other capos got drunk on plunder, building villas with waterfalls and private zoos, Chapo lived like a handyman, sequestering himself on a dusty ranch 20 miles clear of Culiacán. (He was by then twice married, with at least seven kids; he’d go on to have 11 more by five women.) But it was his vision that firmly set him apart. “Chapo was creating the new cartel, a decentralized, hub-and-spoke model,” says Bagley. “He saw what was happening to the top-down version: If you chopped the head of the snake off – Pablo being an example – the rest of his operation fell apart.” Chapo formed alliances with local gangs and cut them in on his profits. He planted cells in new cities and left his staff alone to run them, and happily shared power with his closest partners, El Mayo and El Azul, a former cop. They were men like him: discreet and coolheaded, occupied only by business. The other lords’ loud lifestyles were an affront to them. The only fit response was to take their routes from them – and Chapo knew whose turf to grab first.

The other capos got drunk on plunder – Chapo lived like a handyman on a dusty ranch. 

There are roughly two kinds of agents who go to work at the DEA. The Type A’s – Jack Riley, for one – are moral avengers who wage their war on drugs in a fissile rage. Then there’s the second type: the behind-the-scenes mechanic who patiently builds a case for weeks or months, and goes home to his wife and kids at a decent hour.

Miguel Q. is a Type-B plugger who chased Chapo almost as long as Riley did. (Still on the job, he asked that I change his name; active agents risk their safety going public.) He’s done multiple missions, on war-zone footing, in cities south of the border. He was on the scene for Chapo’s arrest in 2014 – and his escape from prison a year later. “Most ridiculous engineering I ever saw,” he says of the trench dug under Chapo’s cell from a half-built house a mile away. “I mean, a dead-plumb line” from end to end, and “a hole just big enough for him to ride that cycle” and be out and on a plane back to the hills. “Who even thinks that, let alone does it?”

Well, Miguel, for one: He’d seen it up close as a young agent in the early Nineties. At the time, he was focused on truckloads of coke coming through major checkpoints out west. “It was Arellano-Félix dope, or so we thought,” Miguel says – the cartel owned these particular checkpoints. Then his team started hearing chatter about a tunnel underneath the fence. A tip led them to a warehouse on the Mexican side, where miners were digging a quarter-mile tube, with rail cars, strong rooms and ventilation piping. It was a stroke of audacity and technical smarts far beyond the prowess of the Arellano-Félix Organization, who were brutal cocaine cowboys with a penchant for boiling rivals in acid and pouring their remains down a drain. “We’re like, ‘Who is this guy, and how many tunnels has he got?’ ” says Miguel. Hundreds more have been discovered in the decades since.

Chapo while he was incarcerated in Juarez, Mezico, in July 1993. Gerardo Magallon/Getty

What vexed Miguel wasn’t that he knew so little of Chapo; it was that no one in Mexico seemed to know him either. Since co-founding the Sinaloa cartel in 1989, Chapo had run it, yet there wasn’t a single recent photo of him on file. It wasn’t till his arrest, in June 1993, that the public got a glimpse of him. He’d been caught in Guatemala after fleeing the country in connection with a gunfight at an airport. The shootout had left several bystanders dead, including Juan Jesús Posadas, the cardinal of Guadalajara. Posadas’ murder was an inflection point: the day that Mexico was forced to come to terms with the narco-state growing under its feet.

Chapo was convicted in a closed-door trial and given 20 years, hard time, for narco-trafficking. He treated this as a senseless inconvenience. At Puente Grande, a supermax facility 50 miles west of Guadalajara, he bought off everyone from wardens to washerwomen and settled down to do his business. He received his lieutenants in a sumptuous parlor and sent them away with detailed orders on where to ship his tonnage. He brainstormed markets with his older brothers, whom he’d deputized to manage his affairs. They were easy enough to reach; he had cellphones smuggled in. He was partial to BlackBerry, a Canadian company whose hardware was hellish to crack, says Pike.

But Chapo wasn’t all work. He paid guards to round up hookers in town for orgies he threw in the mess hall. He kept up his spirits with fiestas and concerts: Chapo loved to dance with pretty chicas. The first feminist drug lord, he ordered the prison’s integration with a select group of female convicts; one of them, Zulema Hernández, became his muse and in-house lover. He sent her schoolboy mash notes in hothouse prose that he dictated to his steno, a fellow convict. All the while, he juggled conjugal visits from his girlfriends, wife and ex-wife. The wear and tear of a multivalent love life took its toll on Chapo. Cocaine had previously been his drug of choice, but in jail he renounced it for Viagra. His people brought it in big batches, along with steak, lobster, booze and tacos – Chapo’s weakness, besides women, was food. Eventually, the overindulgence levied its toll: At the time of his rearrest, in 2014, he’d been scheduled to meet with a specialist – “the penis-pump doctor to the stars,” says Riley. “The vitamin V didn’t cut it anymore.”

“We knew he was moving tons while he was still in jail, ” says one agent. “Turned out he had hired the warden”

In the end, though, he mostly used his time in jail to learn from the errors of other bosses. “Rule one: Don’t talk on phones or send texts,” says Miguel, who walks me through Chapo’s communications methods. A densely complex system of encrypted squibs and Wi-Fi pings between lieutenants, it was built around a network of offshore servers that bounced the posts off mirrors in other countries. “We found 60 iPhones and hundreds of SIM cards when we raided his house in Guadalajara – and still we couldn’t track where his calls came from,” says Miguel. Chapo hired experts to constantly revise his tactics, and always made sure to toss his phones after a couple of days of use. He was an early adopter of social media, deploying hackers to mask his instructions to staffers on Snapchat and Insta-gram. “After years of trying to track him, we moved on in 2012 and got up on his tier-two guys – the bodyguards and cooks,” says Miguel. Still, it took two years to divine his “pattern of life” – the small corps of people who served Chapo closely and could point to his general location.

Rule number two: Be a nimble supplier. He fitted tractor-trailers with elaborate traps – fake walls and subfloors that hid hundreds of kilos of product (and millions in shrink-wrapped cash on the trip back). He bought jumbo jets and filled them with “humanitarian” goods for drops in Latin America, then flew the planes back, bearing tons of cocaine, to bribed baggage handlers in Guadalajara. There were fishing vessels and go-fast boats and small submarines that could lurk underwater till the Coast Guard passed above. “We knew he was moving tons while he was still in jail, but we didn’t find out how till later on,” says Miguel. “Turned out he had literally hired the warden” to work as his logistics guy. That warden, Dámaso López, would vanish from sight shortly before Chapo escaped. Over the next 15 years, López rose through the cartel ranks, overseeing much of the daily churn while el jefe traveled the country dodging cops. Though Chapo trusted no one but family members and the men he came up with in Sinaloa, he made two exceptions to that rule. The first one was for López; the second, a pair of brothers who became his distributors in the States. In both cases, he’d have cause to deeply regret it.

Chapo used an intricate network of tunnels to ship drugs to the U.S. Mexico Police

Given his honeycomb of routes and the tonnage he pushed through, there wasn’t much point in warring for turf. But something happened to Chapo during those eight years in prison, some fundamental shift in his sense of self. Once happy being the wizard behind the curtain, he now seemed intent on announcing to the world who the real boss had been all along. “He broke out of Puente Grande with an S on his chest, thinking, ‘I’m the baddest motherfucker on the planet,’ ” says Dave Lorino, a retired DEA cop who helped mastermind the case against Chapo in Chicago. “He’d learned he could buy anyone, get out of any jail – and there was nothing that us gringos could do about it.” “Prison made him hard, at least in his own mind, and all the other bosses were soft,” says Riley. “He thought, ‘Why should I settle for a chunk of the pie when I can have the whole thing?’ ”

After escaping Puente Grande in 2001, either crouched in a laundry cart or strolling out the door – “official” versions vary; none are confirmed – Chapo lost no time planting his flag. He paid Tejano pop bands to spread the news, crafting narcocorrida ditties that sang his praises and warned rival capos to leave town. Stories began running in the Mexican papers about Chapo’s generosity to the poor. “He was building roads here and sewage plants there and schools in the pueblos and all that crap,” says Riley. “But the hell of it is, we never found those schools – and if he ever built a road, it was for his trucks.” The thesis of these ploys was always the same: Chapo was the great exception. He was the honorable capo who would swell peasants’ hearts with his derring-do defiance of los Yanquis. “Please,” says Riley. “This is a guy who chops heads off and leaves ’em in coolers.”

In 2002, Chapo launched a war on the Gulf Cartel; he sent his death squad, Los Negros, into Nuevo Laredo to bang it out in the streets. The Gulf returned fire with its own band of crazies, a U.S.-trained group of army deserters who called themselves the Zetas. The Zetas were (and are) a special slice of hell, terrorists who happen to deal drugs for a living and are as happy killing citizens as narcos. To defeat them, Chapo upped his cruelty quotient. His assassins stormed a nightclub and rolled severed heads across the dance floor. Body parts were stuffed in the mouths of dead Zetas as dumb-show warnings to his foes: “A hand in the mouth meant you’d stolen from him; a foot meant you’d jumped to the other team,” says Riley.

By 2006, Chapo’s violence was general in Mexico. He pushed his fight with the Zetas into Juárez, where the gutters ran red for years. Tens of thousands of people were slaughtered in Murder City, as Juárez came to be known. Riley was the agent in charge of El Paso, Texas, when the worst of the carnage erupted. “We’d intercept calls from the other side of the fence” – Chapo’s hit squads checking in with their bosses. “They’d say, ‘We took care of that thing on Calle so-and-so; what else you got for us tonight?’ ”

The violence of the Sinaloa spreads into the streets, like this shooting in August 2009. Reuters

Being two miles from bedlam – with no jurisdiction – drove Riley to desperate measures. He broke with protocol and phoned the local papers, calling Chapo a “coward” and a “butcher.” Chapo took the bait: He put a hit out on Riley. One night, Riley was at a gas station refueling when two men in a pickup pulled in. They got out of the truck and came at him in the dark. He drew his pistol first. They turned and fled. “Maybe that was a warning: ‘Back off and shut up,’ ” he says. “I hope he knew better than to have me whacked. He’d seen what happens when you shoot DEA.”

History bears this out: Chapo has never killed a fed or declared war on the U.S. government. But it’s clear now that he entertained the option. According to multiple witnesses who’ll testify at trial, Chapo went looking for heavy ordnance in 2008 to attack the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. He was furious at extraditions of cartel leaders, who were getting long sentences in U.S. courts and dispatched to spend their days in federal pens. Many of them were sent to Supermax, a facility in Colorado where inmates live in near-total isolation. It was one thing to do time at Puente Grande, where a man of Chapo’s means could live like a pimp while waiting for his crew to dig him out. It was another to go to Supermax, where anyone wishing to pay him a call would be subject to extreme vetting by U.S. Marshals.

In 2007, Chapo tipped the DEA off to a coke shipment coming from a man he’d grown up with. “Chapo was basically saying, ‘No more friends,’ ” says one agent. 

Still, that Chapo would consider buying a bomb suggests that he’d lost his bearings. In 2007, Miguel was stationed in Guadalajara when he got a hot tip from Chapo’s camp. A ship from Colombia was bound for Manzanillo with an enormous cache of coke onboard. Of even greater interest was the name of the cocaine’s owner: Arturo Beltrán Leyva, or ABL. Chapo and ABL had been like brothers since their teens in Badiraguato. They’d made each other rich with their complementary gifts: Chapo the genius at blazing new routes – ABL the master of pervasive bribes. To be sure, there’d been tensions building between them – but what made Sinaloa the world’s biggest drug gang was its settling of internal disputes. Its bosses had stuck together while Chapo was away, then welcomed him back, without a squawk, when he returned to his seat of power in 2001.

“For Chapo to reach out about ABL’s dope – yeah, I was shocked,” says Miguel. “All those years together and all the money they made? Chapo was basically saying, ‘No more friends.’ ” One morning in the fall of 2007, Miguel and 120 heavily armed troops descended on the freighter. Unsealing the shipping pods, they found double what was promised, almost 25 tons of cocaine. Gathered end to end, it ran four basketball courts in length. Street value: $2 billion. “When we loaded it out to burn on the Army base, it was the biggest fire you ever saw,” says Miguel. “And I had to stick around for every minute, make sure no kilos went out the door.” With the exception of El Mayo, Chapo had burned all his bridges; he was now, like Macbeth, so steeped in blood that there was no going back, only forward.

Authorities distributed this photo of Chapo in 2011, when he was on the run from authorities. Reuters

Somewhere in America, in the witness-security wing of an undisclosed federal prison, sit the two men whose testimony will seal Chapo’s fate. Margarito and Pedro Flores, identical twins in their thirties, are two of the least fearsome thugs on the planet, nerds who somehow noodled their way to the center of Chapo’s circle. “They’re, like, five-foot-five and a buck-40,” says Lorino, who spent months debriefing them when they surrendered, in 2008. “I laugh when I read that they’re Latin Kings. Real Kings would eat ’em for lunch and still be hungry.”

In 2005, while launching his quest to monopolize Mexico’s drug trade, Chapo was told about a pair of Chicago natives with the best broker network in the country. For years, the Flores brothers had been buying in bulk from one of Chapo’s lieutenants near the border. They were smart and street-avoidant, faithfully paid on time and looked like they worked at a Wendy’s in La Villita, the barrio on Chicago’s West Side. Chapo was intrigued. Set a meeting, he told his guy. The twins were brought to Mexico for the rarest of honors: a face-to-face with Chapo at his compound.

Chapo was impressed when he sat with them: They were all about business, not bravado. He and his principal partners, El Mayo and ABL, came to an agreement on a deal. They would front as much dope as the twins could handle and give them a break on the price. They would also allow them to buy on terms instead of cash on delivery for each load. For the twins, it was like cashing a Powerball ticket. In the summer of 2005, they swamped Chicago with Chapo’s H. Almost immediately, the city’s hospitals were packed with ODs: Newbies and junkies abruptly stopped breathing after snorting or spiking the product. The Chicago DEA went to wartime footing, scrambling to interdict the lethal batch that would kill a thousand people in less than a year. Agents traced the dope to a lab near Mexico City. “Chapo had brought in chemists to make it extra-super-duper,” says Riley. How? By adding fentanyl, a synthetic narcotic that looks (and cooks) like heroin. “It’s 30 to 50 times stronger than heroin, and you can’t tell which from which when you cut ’em up.” In May 2006, authorities raided the lab and arrested five employees. One of them had been busted in California for manufacturing fentanyl.

But Chapo shrugged off the takedown. He had a vise grip on Chicago – and Milwaukee, Detroit, Cincinnati, Columbus, Ohio, and cities farther east that the twins supplied. From 2005 to 2008, they moved $2 billion of Sinaloa’s product. The arrangement worked smashingly for the cartel. It was supplying half the coke and heroin in America, according to reports by the Justice Department. It had partners in West Coast cities, was moving heavily into Europe and planting new cells in South America. With cash pouring in from every port, it was paying hundreds of millions a year in bribes to Mexican officials, and getting white-glove service in return. Attempts by the DEA to catch Chapo and his partners were subverted time and again by intel leaks. “Outside of SEMAR, there was no one we could trust,” says a frustrated DEA hand. “We’d feed them information and our informant would turn up dead.” Often, Chapo would saunter away minutes before a raid, as if to thumb his nose at the pinche gringos.

He’d become, in short, the man he dreamed up as a pudgy teen in La Tuna. No one could touch him, and everyone feared him. He even had the requisite beauty-queen wife: In the summer of 2007, he married Emma Coronel, Miss Coffee and Guava. Their wedding was virtually an affair of state. Drug lords and ladies flocked to the event, dancing to Tejano combos playing songs of praise for the groom. For added amusement, the Mexican army swooped down to finally corner Chapo. This time, he didn’t even make it exciting. He skipped out a full day early, having fed the generals a phony wedding date.

Chapo trusted the Flores twins (Margarito, left, and Pedro) from Chicago, but he would come to regret it. U.S. Marshals Service

In May 2008, Chapo called the Flores twins to a summit at his compound in La Tuna. Pedro couldn’t make it, but Margarito went, taking the five-hour car ride up the mountain. He’d done this once before, but something was different this time: As he glanced out the window, he saw bodies chained to trees, their flesh being eaten by coyotes. He’d been in the game long enough to know what that meant – there was a tree along that road reserved for him.

At the meeting in La Tuna, Flores was given an ultimatum: Stop buying ABL’s dope now, or else. “Chapo told him to pick a team – and he only warned people once,” says Lorino, the retired DEA agent. “He liked the twins personally – they’d made him a lot of money,” but he was prepared to kill them and forfeit billions to settle his accounts with the Beltrán Leyvas. This put the Flores twins in a desperate fix: Soon after, ABL called and told them not to buy from Chapo. Caught between two killers, the twins weighed out the options, then phoned their lawyer in Chicago. Reach out to the DEA, they told him – “We’ll give them Chapo and ABL if they protect us.”

In June 2008, DEA agents flew to Mexico to sit with the Flores twins. “We needed a lot of convincing; we’d been promised Chapo before,” says Lorino, who was at the meeting. “But the twins, man, they had the bona fides.” There were stacks and stacks of logbooks listing every drug shipment, four dozen cellphones with texts and voicemails saved from Chapo’s lieutenants, and flowcharts of brokers back in the States who were buying hundreds of kilos apiece. It was one of the greatest caches of court-admissible evidence in the history of the War on Drugs, but the DEA wanted more: It wanted Chapo himself on tape. In exchange for reduced sentences in a witness-protection wing, the twins agreed to stay in Mexico for several months and record their every phone call with the cartel. They also promised to tip the DEA to each major shipment going north. Lorino returned to Chicago and assembled a team of agents to obtain warrants, tap phones and stage raids. Then he sat and waited, holding his breath.

“In two weeks, we got the first call,” says Lorino: a quarter-ton of coke in a produce truck. He alerted state troopers, who pulled over the semi a half-hour south of Chicago. Major takedowns followed for the next four months. Stash houses, count houses, tractor-trailer loads – three tons of cocaine and heroin were seized, $22 million in cash was recovered, and 68 people were arrested in Chicago, many of them brokers and gang chiefs. By November, the feds had their sweepstakes ticket: two crystal-clear audio recordings of Chapo and Pedro Flores discussing a 20-kilo order of heroin on the telephone. “I was putting my daughter to bed when my cellphone rang: ‘Dave, we got the big guy on tape,’ ” says Lorino. “I said, ‘Dude, if you’re fucking with me, I’ll end your career.’ But he said, ‘Nope, it’s over. We got him cold.’ ”

Marines of the Mexican Navy took Chapo into custody. David De La Paz/Redux

In the following years, Mexican soldiers and marines killed or caught dozens of the 37 tier-one drug lords on the country’s kingpin list. Chapo was the 33rd to be nailed. He was first busted in February 2014 in Mazatlán. But the following summer, he was gone again, vanishing down the wormhole below his cell. Riley, who’d left Chicago for Washington, D.C., to take the number-two job at the DEA, let himself seethe for 10 minutes. Then he made calls to Mexican officials, demanding they dedicate a SEMAR unit to a third, and final, arrest. SEMAR is the unicorn of Mexican law enforcement: a bribe-proof corps of tactical fighters trained by U.S. soldiers in Colorado. Small in relative numbers (there are just 16,000 marines), they rarely stay in one place long, racing from fire to fire. But the government, mortified by Chapo’s escape, agreed to Riley’s terms. It dispatched 100 marines to track down Chapo, using leads from the special-ops group in D.C.

“We went back to what we knew – get up on his people,” says Riley, meaning the cooks and drivers who serve him. Pings from their phones suggested Chapo was in the hills, moving nightly between a cluster of farms in and around La Tuna. SEMAR rallied for an all-out raid, then got orders from the top to stand down. “I was furious,” says Riley. “What’s the fuck-up this time?” He learned after the fact that the actor Sean Penn, on assignment from Rolling Stone, had gone up the mountain to see Chapo. SEMAR was instructed to wait till Penn and his associates left, then go in hot and heavy. This it certainly did, storming La Tuna in a shoot-’em-up, weeklong siege. Eight people perished, none of them Chapo. Reportedly, a SEMAR marksman had him in his sights as he ran from one of his ranches. But Chapo was carrying a small child, and the marine declined to fire. Chapo slipped into the bush and disappeared.

When Chapo was caught, one agent couldn’t believe it. “I wanted pictures of that prick in cuffs,” he says. 

For weeks, he and his henchmen went zero-dark silent: No calls or BlackBerry messages hit the wire. Then someone saw Ivan, Chapo’s son and security chief, scouting neighborhoods in salty Los Mochis. A sweatbox of a city on the Sinaloan coast, it had everything Chapo lacked while he hid out in the hills: fiery taquerias, underage hookers and an easy in-and-out by land and sea. SEMAR sent spies in civilian clothes to check out the report. They fixed on a bloc of condos getting aggressive renovations – loads of steel and concrete were arriving daily. For weeks, the spies lunched at a corner bodega and heard chatter among the workmen that “Grandpa” was coming. Late one January night, sitting vigil across the street, they saw a white van leave the complex. There were three men inside it; one of them looked like Chapo. “They were going out for burritos and porn – who else would need both at that hour?” says Riley.

Before dawn on the morning of January 8th, marines stormed the condo. Inside was a maze of reinforced doors designed to blunt and confuse them. By the time they crashed the right one and killed Chapo’s gunmen, he’d bolted down an escape hatch under a closet. Accompanied by El Condor, his lieutenant and chief assassin, he slogged through thigh-deep water in the sewers. Emerging a mile later, he was barefoot and filthy; none of his men were there to scoop him up. Chapo jacked a car, ordered its occupants out at gunpoint, then raced through town, heading south. He made it a couple of miles before police cut him off; the prolific killer went meekly. For the third and last time, he’d surrendered without a shot after his men fought and died to protect him.

Riley was at a ceremony in Quantico, Virginia, presenting badges to a class of new agents. His cellphone, on vibrate, kept growling in his pocket; it all but killed him not to answer for an hour. When at last he ducked out, he got the word from his team: Chapo was being held by the cops. “I refused to believe it till they sent me proof. I wanted pictures of that prick in cuffs.” An hour or so later, a photo came through: Chapo sitting disheveled, in a dirty wife-beater, his hands bound tightly behind him.

Riley informed his chief, thanked his counterparts at SEMAR, then rounded up the boys to celebrate. They all piled out to a bar in Crystal City – a dozen senior DEA agents roared like pledges at the final keg party of rush week. News of Chapo’s capture flashed across the television. From then on, none of them could pay for drinks; fellow patrons bought toast after toast. “We were badly overserved,” Riley recalls, still basking in the glow of that night. Alas, he was so excited that he did it again the next day, and the day after, and the day after that. Finally, his wife said enough. “Chapo never managed to kill you,” she said. “But keep this up and you sure will.”

A year and a half later, Chapo sits in his cell, quietly losing his mind in solitary. He is denied human contact, except with his lawyers; his wife and kids are barred from seeing him. One hour each weekday, he leaves his cage for a slightly bigger enclosure. There, he can either ride an exercise bike or watch a nature program; the TV isn’t viewable from the bike. His hair is falling out and his “mental health” declining: He suffers “auditory hallucinations,” per his lawyers. “We run a real risk of him going crazy,” says Michael Schneider, a senior public defender on Chapo’s team.

In early 2017, Chapo was extradited to the U.S. on multiple charges under the kingpin statute. AP

Chapo faces 17 counts in Brooklyn’s federal district, including charges of narco-trafficking. A conviction for narco-trafficking would get him life without parole under federal kingpin sanctions. In no known universe does he stand to beat those charges. Among dozens of witnesses on the government’s list are fellow narcos who’ve pleaded out for shorter terms. The most crucial, of course, are the Flores twins, whose encyclopedic records are damning to the point of overkill. “His lawyers can attack them till the cows come home – there’s nothing they can do about those tapes,” says a U.S. attorney. Adds Riley, with a sprig of Gaelic glee, “How great that the rap he can’t get out of is for 20 lousy keys of smack. He wipes out Chicago and kills tens of thousands of people – and his smallest deal is the one that does him in.”

Then there are the indictments in five other cities, though no one thinks those trials will happen. The likeliest outcome, say those close to the case, is that Chapo pleads guilty to an omnibus proffer that settles all counts, Brooklyn’s included. Says the U.S. attorney, “He can’t win at trial, but he has assets he could trade” for better conditions in prison. It’s presumed that Chapo’s hiding billions of dollars in cash and business holdings. If the feds want that money, they will need his help to find and claw it back. A second bargaining chip is his years-long log of bribes paid to Mexican officials. Under the Obama administration, that log would be worthless – but in the age of Trump, it’s priceless. Vicente Fox, the ex-president who compared Trump to Hitler, has long been accused of taking money from Chapo in exchange for going easy on Sinaloa. President Enrique Peña-Nieto, who vowed never to fund Trump’s wall, lost close colleagues to bribery charges after Chapo fled in 2015. If Chapo has any proof that he paid those people, he’ll be holding a set of aces when the dealing starts.

Finally, there’s the question of his legacy. For years, experts thought that the syndicate he built would stand long after he fell. “If you kill the CEO of General Motors, General Motors will not go out of business,” said a Mexican official to The New Yorker. But 20 months after Chapo’s final arrest, his monolith is falling apart. His sons – the “Chapitos” – are at war with Dámaso López, the ex-prison warden who helped Chapo flee and became his key lieutenant for 15 years. In February, López lured the sons to a narco summit in Sinaloa. Gunmen broke in and tried to kill the Chapitos, who fled, on foot, into the brush. “This was weeks after Chapo was extradited – the war to replace him was on,” says Alejandro Hope, the ex-intelligence officer for the Mexican CIA. It was a bold betrayal and a sign of the chaos to come.

Ten years ago, five cartels ran Mexico. Now there are 80 splinter sets, all of them vicious and unstable. Beheadings are banal, civilians are being slaughtered and the government hasn’t the faintest clue how to stem the havoc. Mad as it sounds, we may mourn the passing of Chapo. He was the Assad of cartel bosses, but he kept the carnage bottled, stopping at his side of the fence. What replaces him – chaos – respects no borders. We could wake one day and find we’re next door to Aleppo, with flames overleaping our beautiful wall.

Watch our exclusive interview with El Chapo from 2016.

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[urbandrifter]

[thebulletintoronto-blog]

Gardiner's eastbound York/Bay/Yonge offramp closes as of April 17

—Paul B. Martin, City of Toronto The ramp from the eastbound Gardiner Expressway to York, Bay and Yonge Streets will be closed permanently as of Monday, April 17 at 5 a.m. The ramp will be replaced with a shorter ramp from the eastbound Gardiner Expressway to Lower Simcoe St. that will open in January 2018.…

Gardiner’s eastbound York/Bay/Yonge offramp closes as of April 17 was originally published on The Bulletin

[orbemnews]

The Costly Pursuit of Self-Driving Cars Continues On. And On. And On. It was seven years ago when Waymo discovered that spring blossoms made its self-driving cars get twitchy on the brakes. So did soap bubbles. And road flares. New tests, in years of tests, revealed more and more distractions for the driverless cars. Their road skills improved, but matching the competence of human drivers was elusive. The cluttered roads of America, it turned out, were a daunting place for a robot. The wizards of Silicon Valley said people would be commuting to work in self-driving cars by now. Instead, there have been court fights, injuries and deaths, and tens of billions of dollars spent on a frustratingly fickle technology that some researchers say is still years from becoming the industry’s next big thing. Now the pursuit of autonomous cars is undergoing a reset. Companies like Uber and Lyft, worried about blowing through their cash in pursuit of autonomous technology, have tapped out. Only the most deep pocketed outfits like Waymo, which is a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, auto industry giants, and a handful of start-ups are managing to stay in the game. The tech and auto giants could still toil for years on their driverless car projects. Each will spend an additional $6 billion to $10 billion before the technology becomes commonplace — sometime around the end of the decade, according to estimates from Pitchbook, a research firm that tracks financial activity. But even that prediction might be overly optimistic. “This is a transformation that is going to happen over 30 years and possibly longer,” said Chris Urmson, an early engineer on the Google self-driving car project before it became the Alphabet business unit called Waymo. He is now chief executive of Aurora, the company that acquired Uber’s autonomous vehicle unit. So what went wrong? Some researchers would say nothing — that’s how science works. You can’t entirely predict what will happen in an experiment. The self-driving car project just happened to be one of the most hyped technology experiments of this century, occurring on streets all over the country and run by some of its most high-profile companies. That hype drew billions of dollars of investments, but it set up unrealistic expectations. In 2015, the electric carmaker Tesla’s billionaire boss, Elon Musk, said that fully functional self-driving cars were just two years away. More than five years later, Tesla cars offered simpler autonomy designed solely for highway driving. Even that has been tinged with controversy after several fatal crashes (which the company blamed on misuse of the technology). Perhaps no company experienced the turbulence of driverless car development more fitfully than Uber. After poaching 40 robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon University and acquiring a self-driving truck start-up for $680 million in stock, the ride-hailing company settled a lawsuit from Waymo, which was followed by a guilty plea from a former executive accused of stealing intellectual property. A pedestrian in Arizona was also killed in a crash with one of its driverless cars. In the end, Uber essentially paid Aurora to acquire its self-driving unit. But for the most deep-pocketed companies, the science, they hope, continues to advance one improved ride at a time. In October, Waymo reached a notable milestone: It launched the world’s first “fully autonomous” taxi service. In the suburbs of Phoenix, Ariz., anyone can now ride in a minivan with no driver behind the wheel. But that does not mean the company will immediately deploy its technology in other parts of the country. Dmitri Dolgov, who recently took over as Waymo’s co-chief executive after the departure of John Krafcik, an automobile industry veteran, said the company considers its Arizona service a test case. Based on what it has learned in Arizona, he said, Waymo is building a new version of its self-driving technology that it will eventually deploy in other geographies and other kinds of vehicles, including long-haul trucks. The suburbs of Phoenix are particularly well suited to driverless cars. Streets are wide, pedestrians are few and there is almost no rain or snow. Waymo supports its autonomous vehicles with remote technicians and roadside assistance crews who can help get cars out of a tight spot, either via the internet or in person. “Autonomous vehicles can be deployed today, in certain situations,” said Elliot Katz, a former lawyer who counseled many of the big autonomous vehicle companies before launching a start-up, Phantom Auto, that provides software for remotely assisting and operating self-driving vehicles when they get stuck in difficult positions. “But you still need a human in the loop.” Self-driving tech is not yet nimble enough to reliably handle the variety of situations human drivers encounter each day. They can usually handle suburban Phoenix, but they can’t duplicate the human chutzpah needed for merging into the Lincoln Tunnel in New York or dashing for an offramp on Highway 101 in Los Angeles. “You have to peel back every layer before you can see the next layer” of challenges for the technology, said Nathaniel Fairfield, a Waymo software engineer who has worked on the project since 2009, in describing some of the distractions faced by the cars. “Your car has to be pretty good at driving before you can really get it into the situations where it handles the next most challenging thing.” Like Waymo, Aurora is now developing autonomous trucks as well as passenger vehicles. No company has deployed trucks without safety drivers behind the wheel, but Mr. Urmson and others argue that autonomous trucks will make it to market faster than anything designed to transport regular consumers. Long-haul trucking does not involve passengers who might not be forgiving of twitchy brakes. The routes are also simpler. Once you master one stretch of highway, Mr. Urmson said, it is easier to master another. But even driving down a long, relatively straight highway is extraordinarily difficult. Delivering dinner orders across a small neighborhood is an even greater challenge. “This is one of the biggest technical challenges of our generation,” said Dave Ferguson, another early engineer on the Google team who is now president of Nuro, a company focused on delivering groceries, pizzas and other goods. Mr. Ferguson said that many thought self-driving technology would improve like an internet service or a smartphone app. But robotics is a lot more challenging. It was wrong to claim anything else. “If you look at almost every industry that is trying to solve really really difficult technical challenges, the folks that tend to be involved are a little bit crazy and little bit optimistic,” he said. “You need to have that optimism to get up everyday and bang your head against the wall to try to solve a problem that has never been solved, and it’s not guaranteed that it ever will be solved.” Uber and Lyft aren’t entirely giving up on driverless cars. Even though it may not help the bottom line for a long time, they still want to deploy autonomous vehicles by partnering with the companies that are still working on the technology. Lyft now says autonomous rides could arrive by 2023. “These cars will be able to operate on a limited set of streets under a limited set of weather conditions at certain speeds,” said Jody Kelman, the executive of Lyft. “We will very safely be able to deploy these cars, but they won’t be able to go that many places.” Source link Orbem News #Cars #continues #Costly #Pursuit #selfdriving