#they came all the way from Charlotte and paid hundreds of dollars

[tomatoluvr69]

Also idk if ppl here have been following along with my little post-hurricane updates, but if you have you might remember that I’ve been doing a bit of occasional work at an ecoburial ground putting people in their graves, which of course is an experience I can’t even remotely do justice on this website & has been especially intense given the amount of death in our area due to the storm. However I do want to make it known that yesterday I went out there so that a married pair of goths could commit their bearded dragon to the earth lmao

[miafic]

Jawn: After (Part 1 of 2)

Jawn swallowed and pulled his puffy, black coat tighter around his body. The weather had long-since warmed (thankfully), but the jacket was too important to misplace, so Jawn wore it every day, no matter the temperature.

For nearly a full minute, he stared up at the brick house. It had been so long - nearly six years - since he’d laid eyes on it, and he wondered how much it had changed inside. The outside was mostly the same, which was a relief; he’d prepared himself on the walk over for the fact that he might travel all the way here just to find it abandoned, but the battered green car was still parked on the slab of concrete beside the kitchen. The whole house looked almost identical to the way it had on the day he’d last been here.

Well.

The house might have been the same, but Jawn certainly wasn’t.

He hitched his backpack higher on his back, cleared his throat, and muttered, “Come on,” to the little, black mutt at his heels. She obediently trotted up the driveway beside him.

Jawn had been working on convincing himself to knock on the door for several seconds when it quickly swung open and he was faced with a sharp jawed, dark haired man.

“You can’t be here,” the man stated before Jawn even had time to say hello.

“No, I know. I’m, um. I’m-”

“We can’t give you any money; we told you on the phone.”

“But I’m-”

“You need to go.” His tone changed. “Please. Before Lucas sees you. He’s hav-”

“Zakk, I’m clean,” Jawn interrupted.

“Okay,” he replied quietly, clearly not believing the words.

Jawn sighed and dug a hand into his pocket. Cautiously, Zakk stepped back, and Jawn felt a heavy sadness in his chest but didn’t comment. He pulled out what he was looking for and tossed it to the counselor, who caught reflexively.

Zakk stared down at the little red chip in his hand.

“I went to rehab,” Jawn began defensively, “and I-”

“This is real?” Zakk asked. He slowly looked up from the plastic.

“Yeah. I did forty-five days at Stepping Stones. Detoxed and then stayed for treatment. They told me I could leave after thirty, but I knew I wasn’t ready, so…”

“So you stayed?”

Jawn nodded.

Zakk closed his fingers around the chip and subconsciously moved his fist up and down a few times. “Good,” he said firmly. “That’s great, dude. I’m really happy to hear that.”

Jawn finally let a small smile show.

Zakk reached forward to lightly jostle his shoulder. “We got pretty worried when we stopped hearing from you.”

“I figured it was the right thing to do,” he shrugged.

“You look so grown up,” Zakk marveled now that he’d relaxed a little. “Look at you. You’re taller. All filled out.”

“Shut up,” Jawn told him with an awkward chuckle, but Zakk wasn’t deterred.

“You look great. So, what have you been up to since-”

“Zakk?” called a voice, and Jawn’s heart seized up. “Are the gentlemen back early?”

“Oh - um - uh,” Zakk stuttered.

Jawn looked at him pleadingly. He heard the sound of footsteps, so he looked past Zakk into the house and saw Lucas frozen halfway down the staircase.

“What’s going on here?” Lucas asked Zakk sharply, his hand tightening on the railing.

“I - I don’t know. He, uh-”

“I didn’t tell him I was coming,” Jawn admitted.

Lucas’ voice was even more authoritative than Jawn remembered it could be when he ordered, “You need to leave.”

“That’s what I told him,” Zakk said.

“The boys will be back soon, and you can’t be on the property when they get here. It’s against the law.”

Jawn hung his head. “Okay. Yeah.” He motioned to the dog, who had been cowering behind his leg, to follow him off of the porch. “Come on.”

“Jawn,” Zakk said with a raised voice, “you forgot your ninety day chip.”

“What?” Lucas asked softly from the stairs.

Jawn turned back and retrieved the plastic from the counselor, who gave him an apologetic smile.

“It’s really good to see you, man,” Zakk murmured, drawing him into a brief hug. “Be good, yeah?”

Jawn nodded as he pulled back.  

“Wait, Jawn-”

Jawn looked up to see Lucas rushing to stand beside Zakk in the doorway. He looked a little older than he had when Jawn left, but when his gaze met Jawn’s, it felt like coming home. Jawn’s eyes immediately welled with tears.

“You’re really sober?” Lucas confirmed.

“He said he was at Stepping Stones for forty-five days and he’s still clean,” Zakk answered.

Jawn held up the red chip for him to see.

Lucas nodded, slowly at first and then faster, unable to look away from the man in front of him. “I’m proud of you,” he whispered, and then he stepped forward to wrap his arms around Jawn’s shoulders.

Jawn hugged him back fiercely and buried his face in Lucas’ shoulder as he focused on not bursting into tears.

“We prayed for you every day,” Lucas said into Jawn’s ear, his voice wavering on the last word. “And you came back. After all these years.”

“I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t have; I just missed you,” Jawn confessed urgently as he tried to pull himself closer.

“We missed you, too.”

Jawn felt Zakk join the hug, and he sagged a little in their grip.

“I’m sorry I called so much,” he apologized, “and I’m sorry for what I said. I don’t remember most of it, I think, but I’m really sorry. I know how hard you guys work and how busy you are… I just didn’t know who else to talk to.”

“We know,” Zakk assured him. “It’s okay.”

“It was just as bad when the calls stopped coming,” Lucas added quietly, letting go of Jawn and therefore forcing the other two to disentangle themselves as well.

“No, but I was always asking for money, and I remember yelling at you once,” Jawn said, turning his attention to Zakk, who looked away.

“You were sick,” Lucas told him gently, “and we understood that.”

Sadly, he nodded. “It won’t happen again.”

“Good,” Lucas nodded.

Zakk gasped suddenly and then let out an amused laugh.

Jawn looked down just in time to see his little dog dart back behind his leg. He chuckled and leaned down to scoop her up. “Are you actually being social?” he asked her softly, bouncing her up and down a little. She shoved her head into his chest to hide from Lucas and Zakk.

Lucas’ phone vibrated, and he glanced down at it and then grimaced. “The kids are on the way back.”

“Shit,” Zakk whispered.

Jawn smiled in amusement - he’d never heard either of them swear before. “It’s okay,” he said with a shrug. And somehow, he honestly felt that it was. The reunion had unfolded better than he ever could have expected.

“No, you should stay,” Lucas told him. “Just for a little bit. We have to get you off the property, but there’s… something that I want you to see.”

Zakk nodded at Lucas in understanding. “You guys should go for a walk. I’ll tell the intern?”

Lucas’ mouth broke into a smile. “Okay. Sounds good.”

“Alright,” Zakk nodded. He turned to Jawn. “If I don’t see you before you leave-”

Jawn held out a hand for him to shake, but Zakk snorted and pulled him into a hug, careful not to squish the tiny dog under his left arm. Again, he said, “It’s really good to see you, Picasso.”

Jawn couldn’t help but smile at the old nickname. “It’s good to see you, too.”

“Hey, you still make art, right?”

Jawn nodded. “Never stopped.”

“That’s what I like to hear. Take care of yourself, okay? I mean it.”

“I will.”

They pulled apart. With a little wave, Jawn followed Lucas down the driveway.

“Zakk reminded me when he called you Picasso; we’ve still got the portrait you made for us hanging up in the office.”

Jawn groaned in embarrassment. “Oh, yeah?” He set the dog down beside him on the ground as they started walking down the asphalt leading away from town. “You should burn it.”

“What?” Lucas asked incredulously. “No! It’s amazing.”

“Yeah, right. Probably looks like shit.”

“It does not.”

Jawn chuckled to himself. He wished he had a drink. “Yeah, well. I’ve gotten a lot better since then. I was eighteen.”

“You were seventeen,” Lucas corrected, “and everyone who sees it tells us that it’s a masterpiece, asks how many hundreds of dollars we paid for it, and demands to know where they can get one.”

“Charlotte Park.”

“What?”

“They can get one in Charlotte Park,” he repeated. “Up by where they have the fair. That’s how I make money now. I sit in Charlotte Park and do portraits. No matter how bad any of it got, I drew every day whether or not I was making money off of it. Hated it sometimes, but… it’s what keeps me sane now.”

Lucas tucked his hands into his pockets as they turned a corner. “Do you remember what you told me about it when you lived here?”

“About drawing?”

“Yes.”

Jawn shook his head.

“You said, ‘It’s the only thing that makes me forget everything.’”

“It is.”

They fell quiet.

“Well, drawing and this damn dog.”

“Yeah, what’s with the dog?” Lucas chuckled.

“That’s Shadow,” Jawn explained, and the little mutt looked up at the sound of her name. “I was sleeping outside, and so was she. I felt bad for her, so I tossed her some crumbs, and she eventually came closer, but only to eat them. She’s skittish as hell. I don’t know what happened to her before she met me, but… it couldn’t have been good.”

Lucas nodded.

“I got up after a while - you know, can’t sit somewhere too long or you get in trouble - and the last thing I expected was for her to follow me. She was so scared of me when I first got to her spot, and then she wouldn’t leave me. I tried for days to sneak away from her, but…” He sighed loudly and looked up at the blue sky. “She kept following me - just for food at first, I think. But I got attached. Named her Shadow - partly cause of her color, and partly cause everywhere I went, she was right there. Even now, I sneak her into shelters, into the grocery store…” He smiled down at her. “She’s my best friend.”

Shadow wagged her tiny tail.

“I’m glad you two found each other,” Lucas mused.

“Me, too,” Jawn admitted.

“So, you said you’re doing art in the park, and you mentioned a shelter…”

“Uh-huh.” Jawn prepared himself for what he knew was coming.

“Have you found a stable place to live yet?”

He winced.

Lucas had never approved of him living with Calum; “you two are like gasoline and a match,” he’d told Jawn over the phone once, and he’d been right. But that was long over, and Lucas would probably think that his current situation was worse.

“Uh…” He had no idea what to say.

“The backpack tells me that you haven’t,” Lucas pointed out candidly.

Jawn shrugged. “Right now I’m just trying to stay fed.”

“I told you I have contacts-”

Jawn cut him off. “Yeah. I remember.”

“The people at Stepping Stones - they didn’t set you up with anything before you left?”

“I don’t make enough to stay where they put me. I was there a couple weeks, but…” He shrugged.

“Jawn,” Lucas frowned. “Why don’t you get a job?”

“A real job?” Jawn corrected with a scoff. “No. I don’t want a fucking real job.”

“You could do something with your art, Jawn. You really could. You already mentioned that you have paying customers-”

“It’s not the same! And I’ll just fail again!” he exploded, stopping abruptly. “Don’t try to make me believe in all your therapy bullshit! It’s not reality, Lucas!”

Shadow, who had paused beside Jawn when he stopped walking, rushed several feet away and huddled in on herself at the sound of him yelling.

Jawn’s entire demeanor changed.

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Jawn whispered, crouching down. He made soft clicking sounds with his tongue and held his hand out to her. She sniffed the air between them for a moment and then crept back over. He picked her up and kissed the top of her head. “I’m sorry, Shadow,” he whispered again, and then he set her back down and stood up.

To Lucas, he said, “Sorry. She hates when I get pissed off.” He laughed emptily and then said, “See? She makes me forget.” His shoulders dropped. “But then I remember.”

“Jawn-”

“I don’t want a real job,” he said again, going back to the conversation. "I like my setup. I’m in charge. Nobody tells me I’m doing anything wrong or that I need to work harder or more hours. I’m the boss. Besides, everything’s too goddamn expensive. Taxes. Housing. Food. I only have enough for food.”

“Okay.”

Jawn blinked. “Okay?”

Lucas shrugged. “It sounds like you’ve got your mind made up. You’re an adult now, Jawn. I’m not going to argue with you.”

He smiled in relief. “Thanks.” They were quiet for a moment, but then Jawn added, “I don’t mind it that much. Sucks sleeping outside and not having air conditioning or a place to shower, but other than that, it’s really not so bad. You get used to it. And you find good people, you know? Terrible, terrible people, yeah. But good people, too.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

They walked for a while longer and then sat down in an expanse of grass. Jawn shrugged off his backpack and watched Shadow happily chew on a decently sized stick while Lucas caught him up about Peace and Purpose and the new boys for a little while - only what he was legally allowed to say, of course. And then suddenly -

“Hey, Lucas?”

Jawn turned to see where the words had come from. Had one of the boys gotten out of the house? Jawn knew that that would have been a big fucking deal, though, and Lucas seemed completely calm.

“Hey,” Lucas called back.

“Zakk said you needed me to come down here?”

On second thought, that voice sounded familiar…

“There’s someone I want you to see.”

Lucas stood up, so Jawn followed suit.

The guy picked up his pace, breaking into a light jog to close the distance between them a little quicker. Before he even got there, though, Jawn’s mouth dropped open.

“Ashton?!” he half-yelled, not bothering to hide his shock in the slightest.

The curly-haired boy slowed a little, looking hard at Jawn’s face. “AHH!” he cried, starting to run.

Jawn rushed toward him, and they met in a happy hug.

“You’re so fucking big!” Jawn declared, laughing brightly. “Oh my god, you look so old!”

“I’m twenty-two.”

“No!” Jawn gasped.

“That makes you twenty… six?” Ashton asked.

“Yeah. Fuuuuck,” Jawn exhaled.

“You sound like Awsten,” Ashton grinned.

“Awsten,” Jawn echoed. God, he hadn’t thought about his old roommate in forever. He turned back to look at Lucas. “What, does he come around, too?! Are we all just stuck here?” He laughed.

“I keep up with everyone who was here while you were here,” Lucas said, sliding his hands back into his pockets. “But I see Ashton the most. By far.”

“I’m their intern!” he explained proudly.

“No shit!” Jawn said, clapping him on the shoulder. “That’s awesome, dude.”

“Thanks.”

“Are you doing psychology like them?”

“Social work.”

“Ah, very cool. Gonna help some kids like you and me, huh?”

He turned a little bashful. “Hopefully.”

“You’ve already helped plenty of gentlemen,” Lucas told him, and he blushed.

“Thanks,” he murmured, looking away in embarrassment. Then Shadow caught his eye, and he asked, “Hey, is that a dog?”

“Yeah. She’s mine.”

“She’s so cute!” Ashton started walking toward her. “Hey, puppy!”

“Oh - she’s really shy,” Jawn told him. “Let me go get her. Maybe she’ll let you pet her.”

“Okay! What are you doing out here?” Ashton asked while Jawn went to retrieve the dog.

“I never left,” he smiled.

“Oh!”

“So are you in school?” Jawn asked before Ashton could pry any further. He lifted Shadow off of the grass.

“Uh-huh. I’m at UH for my master’s.”

“Wow! Dude!”

Ashton chuckled and looked at the ground.

“That’s amazing. And I’m not surprised at all.”

Ashton laughed again. “Thank you.”

“Okay, she’s pretty shy,” Jawn repeated, “so let her smell your hand.”

They both stared at Shadow, who had smushed her entire face into Jawn’s armpit.

“Or not,” Jawn deadpanned. He stepped closer. “Here, just pet her back. Maybe she’ll relax.”

“My dog attacks everybody with kisses,” Ashton said as he ran his fingers over her dark fur. “Kind of the polar opposite, huh?”

“You have a dog?”

“Back home with my parents, yeah.”

Jawn blinked when the words hit him. “Wait - your parents!” he echoed excitedly. “Did you get adopted?!”

Ashton smiled sheepishly. “No, but - well, I basically did. It’s not official or anything, but they’re my family.”

“Good. You deserve it, man,” Jawn grinned. “All of it. God, I’m so happy for you. This is - this is so good!” He hugged Ashton again.

After a while, Lucas let the two younger men know that their time together was coming to a close since he and Ashton needed to get back to Peace and Purpose in time to start dinner prep. When Jawn lived in the house, quiet time always seemed to drag on for hours and hours, but that day, the time slot flew by.

Together, the three men and the little dog journeyed back toward the lone house. They hugged their goodbyes at the foot of the driveway, and then Ashton and Lucas disappeared inside for a hot meal.

Jawn, on the other hand, was in for several miles’ worth of walking to the park. Hopefully he could scribble a quick portrait before sundown and earn some money for dinner for Shadow and himself, but even if not, his good mood would be enough to carry him through the night.

[day0one]

Trump’s children brought Secret Service money to the family business with their visits, records show  13 hrs ago

Eric Trump took his Secret Service agents to Trump golf courses in Scotland, as he led transatlantic tours for paying customers. Donald Trump Jr. took his protectors to the Trump hotel in Vancouver, stopping over on hunting trips to Canada.

And Ivanka Trump took her Secret Service detail to the Trump golf club in Bedminster, N.J., again and again — even after she asked other Americans to “please, please” stay home during the coronavirus pandemic.

On trips like these, Secret Service agents were there to protect Trump’s children. But, for the Trump family business, their visits also brought a hidden side benefit.

Money.

That’s because when Trump’s adult children visited Trump properties, Trump’s company charged the Secret Service for agents to come along. The president’s company billed the U.S. government hundreds, or thousands, of dollars for rooms agents used on each trip, as the agency sometimes booked multiple rooms or a multiroom rental cottage on the property

In this way, Trump’s adult children and their families have caused the U.S. government to spend at least $238,000 at Trump properties so far, according to Secret Service records obtained by The Washington Post.

Government ethics experts say that nothing is wrong with Trump’s children seeking protection from the Secret Service.

But, they said, the Trump Organization’s decision to charge for the agents’ rooms created a situation in which — just by traveling — Trump’s children could bring taxpayer money to their family’s business.

That, ethics experts said, could create the appearance that Trump family members were exploiting their publicly funded protection for private financial gain.

“Morally speaking, do they want to profit [from the fact] that their father’s in the White House?” said Scott Amey of the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight. “They could very easily reimburse those expenses, so the federal government and the taxpayer are not on the hook for that tab.”

Many of Trump’s marquee properties, such as his Doral resort in Florida and his hotel in Washington, have struggled in recent years, weighed down by Trump’s divisive politics. Last week, the New York Times reported that Trump’s tax returns show that his businesses lost millions of dollars in recent years — even before the pandemic, which slammed the travel business and caused widespread closures and layoffs at Trump properties.

The Secret Service and the White House declined to comment for this article, as did Ivanka Trump — the president’s eldest daughter, who left the Trump Organization to work in government. The president’s other adult children — Eric, Donald Jr. and Tiffany — did not respond to requests for comment.

Eric and Donald Jr. are said to run the Trump Organization day to day, although their father still owns it.

In the past, Eric Trump has defended the company’s decision to charge the Secret Service for rooms at Trump properties, saying the law does not allow them to give rooms free. He has not said what law he is referring to. He has said, however, that the company charges the government very low rates — “We charge them cost, effectively housekeeping cost,” he said in a Fox News podcast earlier this year.

“I joke all the time that I would like nothing more than to never have another person from the government stay at one of our properties because it displaces a true paying guest,” Eric Trump said on the podcast.

Neither the White House nor the Trump Organization will say how much the government has paid to Trump’s business in total since he took office.

Instead, The Post has compiled its own accounting, one receipt at a time, using public-records requests and a lawsuit. After the release of records last month, that total now stands at $1.2 million — most of which is related to Trump’s own travel, which includes more than 270 visits to his properties, according to the Post tally.

Previously, records obtained by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington showed that agents had accompanied members of the Trump family on thousands of trips since the president took office.

But until now, it was not clear how much taxpayer revenue Trump’s children’s travel had brought back to their father’s company this way. The latest batch of Secret Service records obtained by The Post provides a clearer picture, by identifying Trump’s children as the drivers behind dozens of such transactions.

In most cases, the Secret Service redacted the room rates it had been charged by the Trump Organization, making it difficult to check Eric Trump’s assertion that the company charged only enough to recoup housekeeping costs.

Among the bills that did list a room rate, the cheapest rate was $175 per night, for a room at the Trump hotel in Washington. But the rates at times climbed much higher.

These payments stand in contrast to a philosophy that Eric Trump laid out in the early days of his father’s presidency, that the family would not use Trump’s power for financial gain.

“There are lines that we would never cross, and that’s mixing business with anything government,” Eric Trump told The Post in 2017.

Among Trump’s four adult children, the youngest — Tiffany Trump — appears just once in the Secret Service records obtained by The Post. She accompanied her older brothers to the grand opening of the Trump hotel in Vancouver in 2017. Their combined Secret Service details required 56 rooms, and the Trump hotel charged the government $14,900.

The records also show about $29,000 in federal payments to Trump properties that related to travel by Donald Trump Jr. He stayed repeatedly at the Trump hotel in Washington — just blocks from his father’s residence at the White House. His trips included two to testify to Senate committees investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.

He also made several returns trips to the Trump hotel in Vancouver. A former manager at that hotel said Trump Jr. sometimes visited on his way to or from fishing or hunting trips in Canada.

“We would at least seal off 15 rooms” for Trump and his Secret Service agents, the former manager said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships in the hotel business.

Trump does not own the Vancouver hotel, but his company is paid to manage the property and license Trump’s name. The Vancouver Trump hotel is now shuttered: The owner of its building declared bankruptcy in August, blaming a drop in business caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

In the records obtained by The Post, travel by Ivanka Trump and her family accounted for more than $42,000 in federal payments to Trump properties.

Much of that total came this spring after Ivanka Trump had urged other Americans not to travel.

“For those lucky enough to be in a position to stay at home, please, please, do so,” she said in a video posted to Instagram on March 29. “Each and every one of us plays a role in slowing the spread.”

Between mid-March and mid-June, the Secret Service records show 13 trips to Bedminster by Ivanka Trump or her husband, Jared Kushner, plus three others by Trump family members whose names were redacted. For most of that time, D.C. and New Jersey were asking residents to stay home if possible to avoid spreading the novel coronavirus. A spokesman for Kushner did not respond to a request for comment.

During this period, the Trump golf club charged the Secret Service even more than usual for rooms at Bedminster. The typical rate, during past visits by Trump family members, was $567 per night for agents to stay at a four-room cottage at the club.

This spring, records show, the average payment per night went up to about $630. The records don’t say why the charges increased.

Among some Secret Service agents working at the club, there was concern that Ivanka Trump’s decision to leave home had increased their risk of exposure to the coronavirus. There was no routine testing for the virus among agents assigned to the club, and agents said they were rebuffed by superiors when they asked for ultra-protective N95 masks, according to two people familiar with those discussions. The person relayed the conversations on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The records obtained by The Post show that Eric Trump and his wife, Lara, an official with Trump’s reelection campaign, were responsible for about $151,000 in government payments to Trump properties.

The records show that Eric Trump has repeatedly taken Secret Service agents on golf trips, where he leads members of U.S. Trump golf clubs on guided tours of Trump courses in Ireland and Scotland.

“Touchdown Scotland. @EricTrump and 32 of our members from @TrumpCharlotte have arrived at @TrumpScotland for the first day of the 2019 @TrumpGolf Ultimate Links Tour!” the Trump Organization posted on Instagram on May 16, 2019. The photo showed Eric Trump posing at Trump’s golf course in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, with visiting members from the Trump golf club outside Charlotte.

Trump’s company charged the Secret Service about $3,800 for rooms at Trump’s course that day. Then it charged $8,500 for rooms at Turnberry — Trump’s other Scottish club — days later, Secret Service records show. The records do not say what rate the service was charged per room.

In all, the records recently obtained by The Post show 87 payments in which one of Trump’s children had brought federal revenue to a Trump property.

At times, because Trump and his children were traveling separately, two Trump clubs charged the government on the same day. And there was one day — July 25, 2017 — when the Trump Organization did business with the government in three countries at once.

On that day, records show, the government paid a $6,500 bill from Trump Doonbeg in Ireland, where Secret Service agents had just accompanied Eric Trump on a visit. Across the world in Canada, agents were just arriving at Trump Vancouver for a stay with Donald Trump Jr. that would cost the government $5,800.

And in Bedminster, that day, Trump’s club charged the Secret Service its usual nightly rate: $567 for the rented cottage, records show. Because of Trump’s spur-of-the-moment travel habits, officials have said that the Secret Service rents the Bedminster cottage every day from May to November, just in case he visits.

In fact, on that day, Trump wasn’t at Bedminster.

He was headlining a political rally in Youngstown, Ohio.

[talhaghafoor2019-blog]

The Man Who Broke the Music Business

One Saturday in 1994, Bennie Lydell Glover, a temporary employee at the PolyGram compact-disk manufacturing plant in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, went to a party at the house of a co-worker. He was angling for a permanent position, and the party was a chance to network with his managers. Late in the evening, the host put on music to get people dancing. Glover, a fixture at clubs in Charlotte, an hour away, had never heard any of the songs before, even though many of them were by artists whose work he enjoyed.

Later, Glover realized that the host had been d.j.’ing with music that had been smuggled out of the plant. He was surprised. Plant policy required all permanent employees to sign a “No Theft Tolerated” agreement. He knew that the plant managers were concerned about leaking, and he’d heard of employees being arrested for embezzling inventory. But at the party, even in front of the supervisors, it seemed clear that the disks had been getting out. In time, Glover became aware of a far-reaching underground trade in pre-release disks. “We’d run them in the plant in the week, and they’d have them in the flea markets on the weekend,” he said. “It was a real leaky plant.”

The factory sat on a hundred acres of woodland and had more than three hundred thousand square feet of floor space. It ran shifts around the clock, every day of the year. New albums were released in record stores on Tuesdays, but they needed to be pressed, packaged, and shrink-wrapped weeks in advance. On a busy day, the plant produced a quarter of a million CDs. Its lineage was distinguished: PolyGram was a division of the Dutch consumer-electronics giant Philips, the co-inventor of the CD.

One of Glover’s co-workers was Tony Dockery, another temporary hire. The two worked opposite ends of the shrink-wrapping machine, twelve feet apart. Glover was a “dropper”: he fed the packaged disks into the machine. Dockery was a “boxer”: he took the shrink-wrapped jewel cases and stacked them in a cardboard box for shipping. The jobs paid about ten dollars an hour.

Glover and Dockery soon became friends. They lived in the same town, Shelby, and Glover started giving Dockery a ride to work. They liked the same music. They made the same money. Most important, they were both fascinated by computers, an unusual interest for two working-class Carolinians in the early nineties—the average Shelbyite was more likely to own a hunting rifle than a PC. Glover’s father had been a mechanic, and his grandfather, a farmer, had moonlighted as a television repairman. In 1989, when Glover was fifteen, he went to Sears and bought his first computer: a twenty-three-hundred-dollar PC clone with a one-color monitor. His mother co-signed as the guarantor on the layaway plan. Tinkering with the machine, Glover developed an expertise in hardware assembly, and began to earn money fixing the computers of his friends and neighbors.

By the time of the party, he’d begun to experiment with the nascent culture of the Internet, exploring bulletin-board systems and America Online. Soon, Glover also purchased a CD burner, one of the first produced for home consumers. It cost around six hundred dollars. He began to make mixtapes of the music he already owned, and sold them to friends. “There was a lot of people down my way selling shoes, pocketbooks, CDs, movies, and fencing stolen stuff,” he told me. “I didn’t think they’d ever look at me for what I was doing.” But the burner took forty minutes to make a single copy, and business was slow.

Glover began to consider selling leaked CDs from the plant. He knew a couple of employees who were smuggling them out, and a pre-release album from a hot artist, copied to a blank disk, would be valuable. (Indeed, recording executives at the time saw this as a key business risk.) But PolyGram’s offerings just weren’t that good. The company had a dominant position in adult contemporary, but the kind of people who bought knockoff CDs from the trunk of a car didn’t want Bryan Adams and Sheryl Crow. They wanted Jay Z, and the plant didn’t have it.

By 1996, Glover, who went by Dell, had a permanent job at the plant, with higher pay, benefits, and the possibility of more overtime. He began working double shifts, volunteering for every available slot. “We wouldn’t allow him to work more than six consecutive days,” Robert Buchanan, one of his former managers, said. “But he would try.”

The overtime earnings funded new purchases. In the fall of 1996, Hughes Network Systems introduced the country’s first consumer-grade broadband satellite Internet access. Glover and Dockery signed up immediately. The service offered download speeds of up to four hundred kilobits per second, seven times that of even the best dial-up modem.

Glover left AOL behind. He soon found that the real action was in the chat rooms. Internet Relay Chat networks tended to be noncommercial, hosted by universities and private individuals and not answerable to corporate standards of online conduct. You created a username and joined a channel, indicated by a pound sign: #politics, #sex, #computers. Glover and Dockery became chat addicts; sometimes, even after spending the entire day together, they hung out in the same chat channel after work. On IRC, Dockery was St. James, or, sometimes, Jah Jah. And Glover was ADEG, or, less frequently, Darkman. Glover did not have a passport and hardly ever left the South, but IRC gave him the opportunity to interact with strangers from all over the world.

Also, he could share files. Online, pirated media files were known as “warez,” from “software,” and were distributed through a subculture dating back to at least 1980, which called itself the Warez Scene. The Scene was organized in loosely affiliated digital crews, which raced one another to be the first to put new material on the IRC channel. Software was often available on the same day that it was officially released. Sometimes it was even possible, by hacking company servers, or through an employee, to pirate a piece of software before it was available in stores. The ability to regularly source pre-release leaks earned one the ultimate accolade in digital piracy: to be among the “elite.”

By the mid-nineties, the Scene had moved beyond software piracy into magazines, pornography, pictures, and even fonts. In 1996, a Scene member with the screen name NetFraCk started a new crew, the world’s first MP3 piracy group: Compress ’Da Audio, or CDA, which used the newly available MP3 standard, a format that could shrink music files by more than ninety per cent. On August 10, 1996, CDA released to IRC the Scene’s first “officially” pirated MP3: “Until It Sleeps,” by Metallica. Within weeks, there were numerous rival crews and thousands of pirated songs.

Glover’s first visit to an MP3-trading chat channel came shortly afterward. He wasn’t sure what an MP3 was or who was making the files. He simply downloaded software for an MP3 player, and put in requests for the bots of the channel to serve him files. A few minutes later, he had a small library of songs on his hard drive.

One of the songs was Tupac Shakur’s “California Love,” the hit single that had become inescapable after Tupac’s death, several weeks earlier, in September, 1996. Glover loved Tupac, and when his album “All Eyez on Me” came through the PolyGram plant, in a special distribution deal with Interscope Records, he had even shrink-wrapped some of the disks. Now he played the MP3 of “California Love.” Roger Troutman’s talk-box intro came rattling through his computer speakers, followed by Dr. Dre’s looped reworking of the piano hook from Joe Cocker’s “Woman to Woman.” Then came Tupac’s voice, compressed and digitized from beyond the grave, sounding exactly as it did on the CD.

At work, Glover manufactured CDs for mass consumption. At home, he had spent more than two thousand dollars on burners and other hardware to produce them individually. His livelihood depended on continued demand for the product. But Glover had to wonder: if the MP3 could reproduce Tupac at one-eleventh the bandwidth, and if Tupac could then be distributed, free, on the Internet, what the hell was the point of a compact disk?

In 1998, Seagram Company announced that it was purchasing PolyGram from Philips and merging it with the Universal Music Group. The deal comprised the global pressing and distribution network, including the Kings Mountain plant. The employees were nervous, but management told them not to worry; the plant wasn’t shutting down—it was expanding. The music industry was enjoying a period of unmatched profitability, charging more than fourteen dollars for a CD that cost less than two dollars to manufacture. The executives at Universal thought that this state of affairs was likely to continue. In the prospectus that they filed for the PolyGram acquisition, they did not mention the MP3 among the anticipated threats to the business.

The production lines were upgraded to manufacture half a million CDs a day. There were more shifts, more overtime hours, and more music. Universal, it seemed, had cornered the market on rap. Jay Z, Eminem, Dr. Dre, Cash Money—Glover packaged the albums himself.

Six months after the merger, Shawn Fanning, an eighteen-year-old college dropout from Northeastern University, débuted a public file-sharing platform he had invented called Napster. Fanning had spent his adolescence in the same IRC underground as Glover and Dockery, and was struck by the inefficiency of its distribution methods. Napster replaced IRC bots with a centralized “peer-to-peer” server that allowed people to swap files directly. Within a year, the service had ten million users.

Before Napster, a leaked album had caused only localized damage. Now it was a catastrophe. Universal rolled out its albums with heavy promotion and expensive marketing blitzes: videos, radio spots, television campaigns, and appearances on late-night TV. The availability of pre-release music on the Internet interfered with this schedule, upsetting months of work by publicity teams and leaving the artists feeling betrayed.

Even before Napster’s launch, the plant had begun to implement a new anti-theft regimen. Steve Van Buren, who managed security at the plant, had been pushing for better safeguards since before the Universal merger, and he now instituted a system of randomized searches. Each employee was required to swipe a magnetized identification card upon leaving the plant. Most of the time, a green light appeared and the employee could leave. Occasionally, though, the card triggered a red light, and the employee was made to stand in place as a security guard ran a wand over his body, searching for the thin aluminum coating of a compact disk.

Van Buren succeeded in getting some of the flea-market bootleggers shut down. Plant management had heard of the technician who had been d.j.’ing parties with pre-release music, and Van Buren requested that he take a lie-detector test. The technician failed, and was fired. Even so, Glover’s contacts at the plant could still reliably get leaked albums. One had even sneaked out an entire manufacturing spindle of three hundred disks, and was selling them for five dollars each. But this was an exclusive trade, and only select employees knew who was engaged in it.

By this time, Glover had built a tower of seven CD burners, which stood next to his computer. He could produce about thirty copies an hour, which made bootlegging more profitable, so he scoured the other underground warez networks for material to sell: PlayStation games, PC applications, MP3 files—anything that could be burned to a disk and sold for a few dollars.

He focussed especially on movies, which fetched five dollars each. New compression technology could shrink a feature film to fit on a single CD. The video quality was poor, but business was brisk, and soon he was buying blank CDs in bulk. He bought a label printer to catalogue his product, and a color printer to make mockups of movie posters. He filled a black nylon binder with images of the posters, and used it as a sales catalogue. He kept his inventory in the trunk of his Jeep and sold the movies out of his car.

Glover still considered it too risky to sell leaked CDs from the plant. Nevertheless, he enjoyed keeping up with current music, and the smugglers welcomed him as a customer. He was a permanent employee with no rap sheet and an interest in technology, but outside the plant he had a reputation as a roughrider. He owned a Japanese street-racing motorcycle, which he took to Black Bike Week, in Myrtle Beach. He had owned several handguns, and on his forearm was a tattoo of the Grim Reaper, walking a pit bull on a chain.

His co-worker Dockery, by contrast, was a clean-cut churchgoer, and too square for the smugglers. But he had started bootlegging, too, and he pestered Glover to supply him with leaked CDs. In addition, Dockery kept finding files online that Glover couldn’t: movies that were still in theatres, PlayStation games that weren’t scheduled to be released for months.

For a while, Glover traded leaked disks for Dockery’s software and movies. But eventually he grew tired of acting as Dockery’s courier, and asked why the disks were so valuable. Dockery invited him to his house one night, where he outlined the basics of the warez underworld. For the past year or so, he’d been uploading the pre-release leaks Glover gave him to a shadowy network of online enthusiasts. This was the Scene, and Dockery, on IRC, had joined one of its most élite groups: Rabid Neurosis, or RNS. (Dockery declined to comment for this story.)

Instead of pirating individual songs, RNS was pirating entire albums, bringing the pre-release mentality from software to music. The goal was to beat the official release date whenever possible, and that meant a campaign of infiltration against the major labels.

The leader of RNS went by the handle Kali. He was a master of surveillance and infiltration, the Karla of music piracy. It seemed that he spent hours each week researching the confusing web of corporate acquisitions and pressing agreements that determined where and when CDs would be manufactured. With this information, he built a network of moles who, in the next eight years, managed to burrow into the supply chains of every major music label. “This stuff had to be his life, because he knew about all the release dates,” Glover said.

Dockery—known to Kali as St. James—was his first big break. According to court documents, Dockery encountered several members of RNS in a chat room, including Kali. Here he learned of the group’s desire for pre-release tracks. He soon joined RNS and became one of its best sources. But, when his family life began to interfere, he proposed that Glover take his place.

Glover hesitated: what was in it for him?

He learned that Kali was a gatekeeper to the secret “topsite” servers that formed the backbone of the Scene. The ultra-fast servers contained the best pirated media of every form. The Scene’s servers were well hidden, and log-ons were permitted only from pre-approved Internet addresses. The Scene controlled its inventory as tightly as Universal did—maybe tighter.

If Glover was willing to upload smuggled CDs from the plant to Kali, he’d be given access to these topsites, and he’d never have to pay for media again. He could hear the new Outkast album weeks before anyone else did. He could play Madden NFL on his PlayStation a month before it became available in stores. And he could get the same movies that had allowed Dockery to beat him as a bootlegger.

Dockery arranged a chat-room session for Glover and Kali, and the two exchanged cell-phone numbers. In their first call, Glover mostly just listened. Kali spoke animatedly, in a patois of geekspeak, California mellow, and slang borrowed from West Coast rap. He loved computers, but he also loved hip-hop, and he knew all the beefs, all the disses, and all the details of the feuds among artists on different labels. He also knew that, in the aftermath of the murders of Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G., those feuds were dying down. Def Jam, Cash Money, and Interscope had all signed distribution deals with Universal. Kali’s research kept taking him back to the Kings Mountain plant.

He and Glover hashed out the details of their partnership. Kali would track the release dates of upcoming albums and tell Glover which material he was interested in. Glover would acquire smuggled CDs from the plant. He would then rip the leaked CDs to the MP3 format and, using encrypted channels, send them to Kali’s home computer. Kali packaged the MP3s according to the Scene’s exacting technical standards and released them to its topsites.

The deal sounded good to Glover, but to fulfill Kali’s requests he’d have to get new albums from the plant much more frequently, three or four times a week. This would be difficult. In addition to the randomized search gantlet, a fence had been erected around the parking lot. Emergency exits set off alarms. Laptop computers were forbidden in the plant, as were stereos, portable players, boom boxes, and anything else that might accept and read a CD.

Every once in a while, a marquee release would come through—“The Eminem Show,” say, or Nelly’s “Country Grammar.” It arrived in a limousine with tinted windows, carried from the production studio in a briefcase by a courier who never let the master tape out of his sight. When one of these albums was pressed, Van Buren ordered wandings for every employee in the plant.

The CD-pressing machines were digitally controlled, and they generated error-proof records of their output. The shrink-wrapped disks were logged with an automated bar-code scanner. The plant’s management generated a report, tracking which CDs had been printed and which had actually shipped, and any discrepancy had to be accounted for. The plant might now press more than half a million copies of a popular album in a day, but the inventory could be tracked at the level of the individual disk.

Employees like Glover, who worked on the packaging line, had the upper hand when it came to smuggling CDs. Farther down the line and the disks would be bar-coded and logged in inventory; farther up and they wouldn’t have access to the final product. By this time, the packaging line was becoming increasingly complex. The chief advantage of the compact disk over the MP3 was the satisfaction of owning a physical object. Universal was really selling packaging. Album art had become ornate. The disks were gold or fluorescent, the jewel cases were opaque blue or purple, and the album sleeves were thick booklets printed on high-quality paper. Dozens, sometimes hundreds, of extra disks were now being printed for every run, to be used as replacements in case any were damaged during packaging.

At the end of each shift, employees put the overstock disks into scrap bins. These scrap bins were later taken to a plastics grinder, where the disks were destroyed. Over the years, Glover had dumped hundreds of perfectly good disks into the bins, and he knew that the grinder had no memory and generated no records. If there were twenty-four disks and only twenty-three made it into the grinder’s feed slot, no one in accounting would know.

So, on the way from the conveyor belt to the grinder, an employee could take off his surgical glove while holding a disk. He could wrap the glove around the disk and tie it off. He could then hide the disk, leaving everything else to be destroyed. At the end of his shift, he could return and grab the disk.

That still left the security guards. But here, too, there were options. One involved belt buckles. They were the signature fashion accessories of small-town North Carolina. Many people at the plant wore them—big oval medallions with the Stars and Bars on them. Gilt-leaf plates embroidered with fake diamonds that spelled out the word “boss.” Western-themed cowboy buckles with longhorn skulls and gold trim. The buckles always set off the wand, but the guards wouldn’t ask anyone to take them off.

Hide the disk inside the glove; hide the glove inside a machine; retrieve the glove and tuck it into your waistband; cinch your belt so tight it hurts your bladder; position your oversized belt buckle in front of the disk; cross your fingers as you shuffle toward the turnstile; and, if you get flagged, play it very cool when you set off the wand.

From 2001 on, Glover was the world’s leading leaker of pre-release music. He claims that he never smuggled the CDs himself. Instead, he tapped a network of low-paid temporary employees, offering cash or movies for leaked disks. The handoffs took place at gas stations and convenience stores far from the plant. Before long, Glover earned a promotion, which enabled him to schedule the shifts on the packaging line. If a prized release came through the plant, he had the power to ensure that his man was there.

The pattern of label consolidation had led to a stream of hits at Universal’s factory. Weeks before anyone else, Glover had the hottest albums of the year. He ripped the albums on his PC with software that Kali had sent, and then uploaded the files to him. The two made weekly phone calls to schedule the timing of the leaks.

Glover left the distribution to Kali. Unlike many Scene members, he didn’t participate in technical discussions about the relative merits of constant and variable bit rates. He listened to the CDs, but he often grew bored after only one or two plays. When he was done with a disk, he stashed it in a black duffelbag in his bedroom closet.

By 2002, the duffelbag held more than five hundred disks, including nearly every major release to have come through the Kings Mountain plant. Glover leaked Lil Wayne’s “500 Degreez” and Jay Z’s “The Blueprint.” He leaked Queens of the Stone Age’s “Rated R” and 3 Doors Down’s “Away from the Sun.” He leaked Björk. He leaked Ashanti. He leaked Ja Rule. He leaked Nelly. He leaked Blink-182’s “Take Off Your Pants and Jacket.”

Glover didn’t have access to big-tent mom-rock artists like Celine Dion and Cher. But his albums tended to be the most sought after in the demographic that mattered: generation Eminem. The typical Scene participant was a computer-obsessed male, between the ages of fifteen and thirty. Kali—whose favorite artists included Ludacris, Jay Z, and Dr. Dre—was the perfect example. For Glover, the high point of 2002 came in May, when he leaked “The Eminem Show” twenty-five days before its official release. The leak made its way from the Scene’s topsites to public peer-to-peer networks within hours, and, even though the album became the year’s best-seller, Eminem was forced to bump up its release date.

Every Scene release was accompanied by an NFO (from “info”), an ASCII-art text file that served as the releasing group’s signature tag. NFO files were a way for Scene crews to brag about their scores, shout out important associates, and advertise to potential recruits. Rabid Neurosis NFOs were framed by psychedelic smoke trails emanating from a marijuana leaf at the bottom:

The most important line was the rip date, which emphasized the timeliness of the leak. Kali drafted many of the release notes himself, in a sarcastic tone, often taunting rival releasing groups. “The Eminem Show” NFO ended with a question: “Who else did you think would get this?”

Who was Kali? Glover wasn’t sure, but as their relationship evolved he picked up some clues. Kali’s 818 area code was from the Los Angeles region. The voice in the background that Glover sometimes heard on the calls sounded as if it might be Kali’s mother. There was also the marijuana leaf that served as RNS’s official emblem: Glover thought he could tell when Kali was high. Most striking was the exaggerated hip-hop swagger that Kali affected. He only ever referred to Glover as “D.” No one else called him that.

“He would try to talk, like, with a slang,” Glover told me. “Kinda cool, kinda hard.” Glover suspected that Kali wasn’t black, though he sensed that he probably wasn’t white, either.

Glover was not permitted to interact with the other members of the group, not even the one who served as the “ripping coördinator.” His online handle was RST, and his name was Simon Tai. A second-generation Chinese immigrant, Tai was brought up in Southern California before arriving at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1997. As a freshman with a T1 Internet connection, he’d been in awe of RNS. After hanging around in the chat channel for nearly a year, he was asked to join.

He also applied for a slot as a d.j. at the school’s radio station. For two years, Kali cultivated Tai’s interest in rap music and told him to make connections with the promotional people at various labels. In 2000, Tai, now a senior at Penn, was promoted to music director at the station and given a key to the office, where he had access to the station’s promo disks. Every day, he checked the station’s mail; when something good came in, he raced back to his dorm room to upload it. Beating rival Scene crews was sometimes a matter of seconds.

Tai scored two major leaks that year, Ludacris’s “Back for the First Time” and Outkast’s “Stankonia.” With his Scene credentials established, for the next two years Tai managed RNS’s roster of leakers. Along with Kali, he tracked the major labels’ distribution schedules and directed his sources to keep an eye out for certain albums.

To find the albums, RNS had international contacts at every level, who went by anonymous online handles. According to court testimony and interviews with Scene members, there were the radio d.j.s: BiDi, in the South; DJ Rhino, in the Midwest. There was the British music journalist who went by KSD, whose greatest coup was 50 Cent’s “lost” début, “Power of the Dollar,” scheduled for release in 2000 by Columbia, but cancelled after the rapper was shot. There was DaLive1, a house-music aficionado who lived in New York City, and used his connections inside Viacom to source leaks from Black Entertainment Television and MTV. There were two Italian brothers sharing the handle Incuboy, who claimed to run a music-promotion business and had reliable access to releases from Sony and Bertelsmann. In Japan, albums sometimes launched a week or two ahead of the U.S. release date, often with bonus tracks, and Tai relied on kewl21 and x23 to source them. Finally, there were the Tuesday rippers, like Aflex and Ziggy, who spent their own money to buy music legally the day that it appeared in stores.

The only leaker Tai didn’t manage was Glover—Kali kept his existence a secret, even from the other members of the group. Glover resented the isolation, but being Kali’s private source was worth the trouble. At any given time, global Scene membership amounted to no more than a couple of thousand people. Kali was close to the top. A typical Scene pirate, bribing record-store employees and cracking software, might be granted access to three or four topsites. By 2002, Glover had access to two dozen.

His contacts made him an incomparable movie bootlegger. He built another tower to replace the first, with burners for DVDs instead of CDs. He upgraded his Internet connection from satellite to cable. He downloaded the past few years’ most popular movies from the topsites, then burned a couple of dozen copies of each. Expanding his customer base beyond his co-workers, he started meeting people in the parking lot of a nearby convenience store. Around Cleveland County, Glover became known as “the movie man.” For five dollars, he would sell you a DVD of “Spider-Man” weeks before it was available at Blockbuster, sometimes even while it was still in theatres.

Glover started selling between two hundred and three hundred DVDs a week, frequently making more than a thousand dollars in cash. He built a second PC and another burn tower to keep up with demand. He knew that this was illegal, but he felt certain that he had insulated himself from suspicion. All transactions were hand to hand, no records were kept, and he never deposited his earnings in the bank. He didn’t sell music, DVDs weren’t made at the Universal plant, and he was sure that his customers had never heard of the Scene.

Scene culture drew a distinction between online file-sharing and for-profit bootlegging. The topsites were seen as a morally permissible system of trade. Using them for the physical bootlegging of media, by contrast, was viewed as a serious breach of ethical principles. Worse, it was known to attract the attention of the law. Kali put the word out that anyone suspected of selling material from the topsites would be kicked out of the group. Thus, for most participants membership in RNS was a money-losing proposition. They spent hundreds of dollars a year on compact disks, and thousands on servers and broadband, and got only thrills in return.

Glover was an exception: he knew that he wouldn’t be kicked out of anything. With Universal’s rap acts ascending, Kali needed Glover.

Napster lasted barely two years, in its original incarnation, but at its peak the service claimed more than seventy million registered accounts, with users sharing more than two billion MP3 files a month. Music piracy became to the early two-thousands what drug experimentation had been to the late nineteen-sixties: a generation-wide flouting of both social norms and the existing body of law, with little thought for consequences. In late 1999, the Recording Industry Association of America, the music business’s trade and lobbying group, sued Napster, claiming that the company was facilitating copyright infringement on an unprecedented scale. Napster lost the lawsuit, appealed, and lost again. In July, 2001, facing a court order to stop enabling the trade of copyrighted files, Napster shut down its service.

That legal victory achieved little. Former users of Napster saw Internet file-sharing as an undeniable prerogative, and instead of returning to the record stores they embraced gray-market copycats of Napster, like Kazaa and Limewire. By 2003, global recording-industry revenues had fallen from their millennial peak by more than fifteen per cent. The losing streak continued for the next decade.

The R.I.A.A. tried to reassert the primacy of the industry’s copyrights. But civil suits against the peer-to-peer services took years to move through the appeals courts, and the R.I.A.A.’s policy of suing individual file-sharers was a public-relations disaster. To some at the music labels, Congress seemed disinclined to help. Harvey Geller, Universal’s chief litigator, spent years futilely petitioning legislators for better enforcement of copyright law. “Politicians pander to their constituents,” Geller said. “And there were more constituents stealing music than constituents selling it.”

Leaking was viewed differently. No one was advocating for the smuggler. So album leakers adhered to a rigid code of silence. Scene groups were the source for almost all of the new releases available on the peer-to-peer networks, but most file-sharers didn’t even suspect their existence. Civil litigation against such actors was impossible: unlike Kazaa, RNS did not have a business address to which a subpoena could be sent. Only criminal prosecutions would work.

In January, 2003, Glover leaked 50 Cent’s official début, “Get Rich or Die Tryin’,” to Kali. It became the bestselling U.S. album of the year. He followed that up with albums from Jay Z, G Unit, Mary J. Blige, Big Tymers, and Ludacris, and then began the following year with Kanye West’s début, “The College Dropout.” After a scare, in which Glover worried that a release might be traced to him, the timing of leaks became more and more a point of focus. Glover’s leaks began to hit the Internet about two weeks before the CDs were due in stores, neither so early that the leak could be traced to the plant nor so late that RNS risked being bested by other pirates.

The group’s ascendancy came during a period of heightened scrutiny by law enforcement. In April, 2004, the F.B.I. and foreign law-enforcement agencies conducted coördinated raids in eleven countries, identifying more than a hundred pirates. The R.I.A.A.’s anti-piracy unit was staffed with investigators, who hung around the chat rooms of the Scene and learned its language. They tried to infiltrate the Scene, and tracked the leaked material and its dissemination throughout the Internet. Their research began to point them to one increasingly powerful crew, RNS, and they shared their findings with the F.B.I.

Journalists poked around the fringes of the Scene, too. A December, 2004, article in Rolling Stone, by Bill Werde, introduced RNS to the general public. A photo caption in the piece read, “In a four-day period, one group leaked CDs by U2, Eminem and Destiny’s Child.” The article quoted a source close to Eminem: “The rapper’s camp believes Encore was leaked when it went to the distributors, who deliver albums from the pressing plants to chain stores such as Wal-Mart.”

The information was wrong. The CD hadn’t come from the distributor; it had come from Glover. Three days later, he leaked the U2 album “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.” (Destiny’s Child’s “Destiny Fulfilled” had come from elsewhere.) Facing increased attention, Kali decided to strip the group’s NFO files of potentially identifying information; from now on, they would consist only of the date that the album was ripped and the date that it was due in stores.

Kali ordered the RNS chat channel moved from the public IRC servers to a private computer in Hawaii. He instructed members to communicate only through this channel, which was encrypted, banning methods like AOL Instant Messenger. And he reasserted the prohibition against physical bootlegging. But Glover refused to follow the Scene’s rules. He used I.M. whenever he felt like it, and kept his duffelbag of leaked CDs in his closet. He wasn’t as interested in music anymore, or in earning Brownie points from some Internet group. All he cared about was topsites. The more he could join, the more leaked movies he could get, and the more DVDs he could sell.

In a good week, Glover on his own might sell three hundred disks, and make fifteen hundred dollars in cash. Now he began to branch out. At the beginning of each week, he dropped off four hundred disks at each of three trusted barbershops in Shelby. At the end of the week, he returned to collect his share of the profits—roughly six hundred dollars a week per shop. His best salesman made more selling bootleg movies than he did cutting hair. Seeing the profits Glover was earning, other bootleggers began moving into his territory. But Glover retained a pronounced edge. “I had access to so much stuff,” he said. “No one on the street could beat me.”

Many of Glover’s best customers worked at the plant, and for those he trusted most he devised an even better deal. Rather than paying five dollars per movie, for twenty dollars a month you could buy an unlimited subscription—and you didn’t even need the disks. Glover had set up his own topsite, and once you’d bought an account you could download anything you wanted. There were current DVDs, plus the latest copies of games, music, software, and more. At the time, video on demand was the technology of the future, but, if you knew Glover, it had already arrived. He was running a private Netflix out of his house.

Glover began to make extravagant purchases. He bought game consoles and presents for his friends and his family. He bought a new off-road quad bike, then a second. He bought a used Lincoln Navigator, and upgraded it with xenon headlights, a hood scoop, and an expensive stereo. For years, rappers had favored rims called “spinners”—metal hubcaps on independent bearings, which continued rotating even when the car had stopped. Looking to switch up the game, Glover bought “floaters”: the weighted rims stood still even when the wheels were moving.

In 2005, RNS leaked four of the five best-selling albums in the U.S. The No. 1 and No. 2 slots were occupied by Mariah Carey’s “The Emancipation of Mimi” and 50 Cent’s “The Massacre,” and Glover had leaked them both. RNS leaks quickly made their way onto public file-sharing networks, and, within forty-eight hours of appearing on the topsites, copies of the smuggled CDs could be found on iPods across the globe.

By the end of 2006, Glover had leaked nearly two thousand CDs. He was no longer afraid of getting caught. Universal had sold its compact-disk-manufacturing holdings, which allowed the company to watch the deterioration of physical media from a comfortable distance. Although still on contract to print music for Universal, the new ownership treated the plant like a wasting asset, and stopped investing in maintenance. The musicians signed to Universal complained constantly of album leaks, but the label’s supply chain was as insecure as ever.

Although RNS was still wildly successful, many of its members were tiring of its activities. When the group started, in 1996, most of the participants were teen-agers. Now they were approaching thirty, and the glamour was fading. They outgrew their jobs at college radio stations or found more lucrative fields than music journalism, and lost their access to advance albums.

Listening to hundreds of new releases a year could lead to a kind of cynicism. The musicians all used Auto-Tune to pitch-correct their voices; the songwriters all copied the last big hit; the same producers worked on every track. Glover didn’t connect with rap in the way that he used to. Tony Dockery had been born again, and listened primarily to gospel. Simon Tai still hung around the chat channel, but he hadn’t leaked an album in years. Even Kali seemed a little bored.

Glover had been thinking about retiring from the Scene. He started leaking when he was in his mid-twenties. He was now thirty-two. He had worn the same haircut for ten years, and dressed in the same screen-print T-shirts and bluejeans, but his perception of himself was changing. He didn’t remember why he had been so attracted to street bikes, or why he’d felt it necessary to own a handgun. He found his Grim Reaper tattoo impossibly stupid.

Glover’s DVD profits began to decline. Leaks from the Scene were now publicly available within seconds of being posted to the topsites, and even those who were technologically challenged could figure out how to download them. Within a couple of years, Glover’s income from bootlegging dropped to a few hundred dollars a week.

Glover began to make his feelings known to Kali. “We’ve been doing this shit for a long time,” he said in a phone call. “We never got caught. Maybe it’s time to stop.” Surprisingly, Kali agreed. Though the plant’s security was increasingly loose, the risks for leakers were greater. Between foreign law enforcement, the F.B.I., and the R.I.A.A.’s internal anti-piracy squads, there were multiple teams of investigators working to catch them. Kali understood the lengths to which law enforcement was willing to go. Some of the targets of the 2004 raids were his friends, and he had visited them in federal prison.

Then, in January of 2007, one of RNS’s topsites mysteriously vanished. The server, which was hosted in Hungary, began refusing all connections, and the company that owned it didn’t respond. Kali ordered the group shut down. RNS’s final leak, released on January 19, 2007, was Fall Out Boy’s “Infinity on High,” sourced from inside the plant by Glover.

Dozens of former members flooded into the chat channel to pay their respects. Dockery, logging in as St. James, started changing his handle, over and over, in tribute to former members. “Even if we quit now, I’ll think about it always,” Kali wrote. “I don’t know about you guys, but why keep taking a chance.” Soon afterward, the RNS channel was closed forever.

Within months, Glover was once again leaking CDs from the plant, to a guy he knew as RickOne, a leader in a Scene releasing group called OSC. Though this was no longer as profitable for Glover, his desire for free media was undiminished. “To know that I could be playing Madden two months before the stores even had it—to me, that was heaven,” Glover told me.

Kali wasn’t able to give up, either. After RNS was shut down, he had continued sourcing and leaking albums, attributing the leaks to nonsense three-letter acronyms that bewildered even Scene veterans. In the summer of 2007, he contacted Glover and told him that there were two more leaks they had to have: new albums by 50 Cent and Kanye West, both with the same release date. The rappers were competing over whose album would sell more copies, and the feud had made the cover of Rolling Stone. 50 Cent said that if he didn’t win he would retire.

But, as Kali probably knew better than anyone, both artists were distributed and promoted by Universal. What looked like an old-school hip-hop beef was actually a publicity stunt designed to boost sales, and Kali was determined to get involved. RNS had leaked every release the artists had ever put out, and going after 50’s “Curtis” and Kanye’s “Graduation” was a matter of tradition.

The official release date was September 11, 2007, but the albums were first pressed at the plant in mid-August. Glover obtained them through his smuggling network and listened to both. “Graduation” was an ambitious marriage of pop rap and high art, sampling widely from sources as diverse as krautrock and French house music, with cover art by Takashi Murakami. “Curtis” played it safer, favoring hard-thumping club music anchored by hits like “I Get Money” and “Ayo Technology.”

Glover enjoyed both albums, but he was in an unusual position: he had the power to influence the outcome of this feud. If he leaked “Graduation” and held on to “Curtis,” Kanye might sell fewer records. But if he leaked “Curtis” and held on to “Graduation”—well, he might make 50 Cent retire.

Glover decided that he would release one album through Kali and the other through RickOne. He offered RickOne the Kanye West album. On August 30, 2007, “Graduation” hit the topsites of the Scene, with OSC taking credit for the leak. Within hours, an anguished Kali called Glover, who told him that he wasn’t sure how it had happened. He said that he hadn’t seen the album at the plant yet. But, he said, “Curtis” had just arrived. On September 4, 2007, Kali released “Curtis” to the Scene.

Universal officially released the albums on Tuesday, September 11th. Despite the leaks, both sold well. “Curtis” sold almost seven hundred thousand copies in its first week, “Graduation” nearly a million. Kanye won the sales contest, even though Glover had leaked his album first. He’d just run a controlled experiment on the effects of leaking on music sales, an experiment that suggested that, at least in this case, the album that was leaked first actually did better. But Glover was happy with the outcome. “Graduation” had grown on him. He liked Kanye’s album, and felt that he deserved his victory. And 50 didn’t retire after all.

On Wednesday, September 12th, Glover went to work at 7 P.M. He had a double shift lined up, lasting through the night. He finished at 7 A.M. As he was preparing to leave, a co-worker pulled him aside. “There’s someone out there hanging around your truck,” he said.

In the dawn light, Glover saw three men in the parking lot. As he approached his truck, he pulled the key fob out of his pocket. The men stared at him but didn’t move. Then he pressed the remote, the truck chirped, and the men drew their guns and told him to put his hands in the air.

The men were from the Cleveland County sheriff’s office. They informed Glover that the F.B.I. was currently searching his house; they had been sent to retrieve him.

In his front yard, half a dozen F.B.I. agents in bulletproof vests were milling around. Glover’s door had been forced open, and agents were carting away the thousands of dollars’ worth of technology purchases he’d made over the years. He found an F.B.I. special agent named Peter Vu waiting for him inside.

Vu, a veteran of the bureau’s computer-crimes division, had spent years searching for the source of the leaks that were crippling the music industry. His efforts had finally led him to this unremarkable ranch house in small-town North Carolina. He introduced himself, then began pressing Glover for information. Vu was particularly interested in Kali, and Glover gave him the scattered details he had picked up over the years. But Vu wanted Kali’s real name, and, although Glover had talked on the phone with Kali hundreds of times, he didn’t know it.

The next day, Kali called Glover. His voice was agitated and nervous.

“It’s me,” Kali said. “Listen, I think the Feds might be onto us.”

Vu had anticipated the possibility of such a call and had instructed Glover to act as if nothing had happened. Glover now had a choice to make. He could play dumb, and further the investigation of Kali. Or he could warn him off.

“You’re too late,” Glover said. “They hit me yesterday. Shut it down.”

“O.K., I got you,” Kali said. Then he said, “I appreciate it,” and hung up.

In the next few months, the F.B.I. made numerous raids, picking up RickOne, of OSC, and several members of RNS. They also found the man they believed to be Kali, the man who had cost the music industry tens of millions of dollars and transformed RNS into the most sophisticated piracy operation in history: Adil R. Cassim, a twenty-nine-year-old Indian-American I.T. worker who smoked weed, listened to rap music, and lived at home in the suburbs of Los Angeles with his mother.

On September 9, 2009, Glover arrived at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, and was indicted on one count of felony conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. At his indictment, Glover saw Adil Cassim for the first time. Cassim was clean-shaven and wore his hair cropped short. He was stocky, with a noticeable paunch, and was dressed in a black suit.

A month later, Glover pleaded guilty to the charge. The decision to plead was a difficult one, but Glover thought that his chances of acquittal were poor. In exchange for sentencing leniency, he agreed to testify against Cassim. The F.B.I. needed the help; the agency had thoroughly searched Cassim’s residence, and a forensic team had inspected his laptop, but they had found no pre-release music. Cassim did not admit to being a member of RNS, though two pieces of physical evidence suggested a connection to the group. One was a burned compact disk taken from his bedroom, containing a copy of Cassim’s résumé, on which, in the “Properties” tab, Microsoft Word had automatically included the name of the document’s author: Kali. The second was Cassim’s mobile phone, which contained Glover’s cell number. The contact’s name was listed only as “D.”

Cassim’s trial began in March, 2010, and lasted for five days. Glover testified, as did several other confessed members of RNS, along with a number of F.B.I. agents and technical experts. In the previous ten years, the federal government had prosecuted hundreds of Scene participants, and had won nearly every case it had brought. But on March 19, 2010, after a short period of deliberation, a jury found Cassim not guilty.

After the trial, Glover began to regret his decision to testify and to plead guilty. He wondered if, with a better legal defense, he, too, might have been acquitted. He’d never been sure exactly what damage leaking music actually caused the musicians, and at times he seemed to regard it as something less than a crime.

“Look at 50 Cent,” he said. “He’s still living in Mike Tyson’s house. Ain’t nobody in the world that can hurt them.” He continued, “It’s a loss, but it’s also a form of advertising.” He paused. “But they probably lost more than they gained.” In the end, Glover served three months in prison. (Tony Dockery also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, and spent three months in prison. Simon Tai was never charged with any wrongdoing.)

In their sentencing guidelines, the attorneys for the Department of Justice wrote, “RNS was the most pervasive and infamous Internet piracy group in history.” In eleven years, RNS leaked more than twenty thousand albums. For much of this time, the group’s best asset was Glover—there was scarcely a person younger than thirty who couldn’t trace music in his or her collection to him.

On the day that Glover’s home was raided, F.B.I. agents confiscated his computers, his duplicating towers, his hard drives, and his PlayStation. They took a few pictures of the albums he’d collected over the years, but they left the duffelbag full of compact disks behind—even as evidence, they were worthless. ♦

This content was originally published here.

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/health/hospital-charges-thousands-to-man-who-fainted/

Hospital charges thousands to man who fainted

This story is from Kaiser Health News

Matt Gleason had skipped getting a flu shot for more than a decade.

But after suffering a nasty bout of the virus last winter, he decided to get vaccinated at his Charlotte, N.C., workplace in October. “It was super easy and free,” said Gleason, 39, a sales operations analyst.

That is, until Gleason fainted five minutes after getting the shot. Though he came to quickly and had a history of fainting, his colleague called 911. And when the paramedics sat him up, he began vomiting. That symptom worried him enough to agree to go to the hospital in an ambulance.

He spent the next eight hours at a nearby hospital — mostly in the emergency room waiting area. He had one consult with a doctor via teleconference as he was getting an electrocardiogram. He was feeling much better by the time he saw an in-person doctor, who ordered blood and urine tests and a chest-X-ray.

All the tests to rule out a heart attack or other serious condition were negative, and he was sent home at 10:30 p.m.

And then the bill came.

The Patient: Matt Gleason, who works for Flexential, an information technology firm in Charlotte. He is married with two children.

Total Bill: $4,692 for all the hospital care, including $2,961 for the ER admission fee, $400 for an EKG, $348 for a chest X-ray, $83 for a urinalysis and nearly $1,000 for various blood tests. Gleason’s insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, negotiated discounts for the in-network hospital and reduced those costs to $3,711. Gleason is responsible for that entire amount because he had a $4,000 annual deductible. (The ambulance company and the ER doctor billed Gleason separately for their services, each about $1,300, but his out-of-pocket charge for each was $250 under his insurance.)

Service Provider: Atrium Health Pineville (formerly called Carolinas HealthCare System-Pineville), a 235-bed nonprofit hospital in Charlotte and one of more than 40 hospitals owned by Atrium.

Medical Service: On Oct. 4, Gleason was taken by ambulance to Atrium Health Pineville emergency room to be evaluated after briefly passing out and vomiting following a flu shot. He was given several tests, mostly to check for a heart attack. 

What Gives: Fainting after getting the flu vaccine or other shots is a well-described phenomenon in the medical literature. But once 911 is summoned, you could be facing an ER work-up. And, in the U.S., that usually means big money.

The biggest part of Gleason’s bill — $2,961 — was the general ER fee. Atrium coded Gleason’s ER visit as a Level 5 — the second-highest and second-most expensive — on a 6-point scale. It is one step below the code for someone who has a gunshot wound or major injuries from a car accident. Gleason was told by the hospital that his admission was a Level 5 because he received at least three medical tests.

Gleason argued he should have paid a lower-level ER fee, considering his relatively mild symptoms and how he spent most of the eight hours in the ER waiting area.

The American Hospital Association, the American College of Emergency Physicians and other health groups devised criteria in 2000 to bring some uniformity to emergency room billing. The different levels reflect the varying amount of resources (equipment and supplies) the hospital uses for the particular ER level. Level 1 represents the lowest level of ER facility fees, while ER Level 6, or critical care, is the highest. Many hospitals have adopted the voluntary guidelines.

David McKenzie, reimbursement director at the American College of Emergency Physicians, said the guidelines were set up to help hospitals charge appropriately. Asked if hospitals have an incentive to perform extra tests to get patients to a higher-cost billing code, McKenzie said: “It’s not a perfect system. Hospitals have an incentive to do a CT exam, and taxi drivers have an incentive to take the long way home.”

The guidelines don’t determine the prices hospitals set for each ER level. Hospitals are free to set whatever prices they want as long as their system is consistent among patients, he said.

He said the multiple tests on Gleason suggest the hospital was worried he could be seriously ill. But he questioned why Gleason was told to stay in the ER waiting area for several hours if that was the case. It’s also not clear if Gleason’s history of fainting and overall good health were considered.

Logan Cyrus for KHN

Matt Gleason compares charges on his medical bill with the chargemaster he received from Atrium Health.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina said in a statement that the hospital “appears to have billed Gleason appropriately.” It noted the hospital reduced its costs by about $980 because of the insurer’s negotiated rates. But the insurer said it has no way to reduce the general ER admission fee.

“We work hard to negotiate discounts that reduce costs for our members, but costs are still far too high,” the insurer said. “This forces consumers to pay more out of pocket and drives up premiums.”

Gleason, in fighting his bill, actually got the hospital to send him its entire “chargemaster” price list for every code – a 250-page, double-sided document on paper. He was charged several hundred dollars more than the listed price for his Level 5 ER visit.

“In this specific example, the price of admission to the ER was more than $2,960. That was on top of more than $1,000 for the medical procedures actually performed. We won’t significantly bring down health care costs until we address the high prices like these,” BCBS-NC said in the statement.

John Hennessy, chief business development officer for WellRithms, a consulting firm that reviews bills for large employers, said the hospital charges are significantly higher than what Medicare pays in the Charlotte area, but those are the prices Gleason’s insurer has negotiated. “Seeing billed charges well in excess of what Medicare pays is nothing unusual,” Hennessy said.

He said the insurer likely agreed to the higher charges to make sure it had the large hospital system in its network. Atrium is the biggest health system in North Carolina.

He said the coding “makes sense” because it meets the guidelines — even if that meant a nearly $4,000 bill for Gleason.

“The hospital has every right to collect it, regardless if you or I think it’s a fair price,” he said.

Resolution: After Gleason appealed, Atrium Health reviewed the bill but didn’t make any changes. “I understand you may be frustrated with the cost of your visit; however, based on these findings, we are not able to make any adjustments to your account,” Josh Crawford, nurse manager for the hospital’s emergency department, wrote to Gleason on Nov. 15.

Atrium Health, in a statement to KHN and NPR, defended its care and charges as “appropriate.”

“The symptoms Mr. Gleason presented with could have been any number of things — some of them fatal,” the hospital said.

“Atrium Health has set criteria which determines at what level an [emergency department] visit is charged. In Mr. Gleason’s case, there were several variables that made this a Level 5 visit, including arriving by ambulance and three or more different departmental diagnostic tests.”

Gleason said the $3,700 hospital bill won’t bankrupt his family. “What it does is wipe out our savings,” he added.

The Takeaway: Gleason, understandably, said he’s reluctant to get a flu shot in the future. But that’s not the best response. It’s important to know that fainting is a known reaction to shots and some people seem particularly prone. It’s best to sit or lie down when you get the vaccine, and wait five to 10 minutes before jumping up and returning to business.

Be aware: If you — or someone else — calls 911 for a health emergency, you are very likely to be taken to the hospital. You probably won’t have a choice of which one. And a hospital trip may not even be needed, so think before you call: “How do I feel?”

The medical professional who administered the shot might have suggested that calling 911 wasn’t a smart or needed response for a known side effect of a vaccine injection in a young person.

The emergency room is the most expensive place to seek care.

In hindsight, Gleason might have gone to an urgent care facility or called his primary care doctor, who could have evaluated him and run some tests at much lower prices, if needed.

But employers, hospitals and doctors regularly tell patients if they need immediate care to go to the ER, and hospitals often tout short waiting times in their ERs.

With high deductibles becoming more common, consumers need to be aware that a single trip to the hospital, especially an ER, could cost them thousands of dollars — even for symptoms that turn out to be nothing serious.

Alex Olgin of WFAE and Elisabeth Rosenthal of Kaiser Health News contributed to the audio version of this story.

Do you have an exorbitant or baffling medical bill? Join the KHN and NPR Bill-of-the-Month Club and tell us about your experience.

Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

[2213-tv]

“The Yellow Face” Preview

Read under the cut.

INT. BELL STREET - NIGHT

“Dreamer’s Ball” plays on an old vinyl player.

The intro plays in blackness.

The shot comes in abruptly with the first line of the song.

“Oh, I used to be your baby. I used to be your pride and joy…”

CHARLOTTE is lounging on the sofa, smoking a cigarette and staring at the ceiling. The evening news is playing on the television. There’s a candle burning on the end table near CHARLOTTE’s head.

“But now you’ve found another partner… you’ve left me like a broken toy…”

MR. HUDSON is bustling around in the kitchen and humming. He brings in a plate of food, sets it on the coffee table grabs the cigarette out of CHARLOTTE’s hand, and stumps it out in an ashtray. Exits, still humming.

“Honey though I’m aching, know just what I have to do…”

As soon as he’s gone, CHARLOTTE reaches towards the coffee table without looking, bypasses the food, and extracts the extinguished cigarette. Still not looking at it, she holds it above her head where the candle is burning, lights the cigarette, and brings it back towards her mouth.

“I’ll be right on time. And I’ll dress so fine.”

Sound of footsteps on the stairs. A moment later, JOHANNA enters. She’s dressed professionally, in nice slacks, a floral blouse, and a blazer.

JOHANNA goes to the vinyl player and shuts it off. She’s had a bad day.

CHARLOTTE:

How’s the job search going?

JOHANNA

I thought we agreed -- no smoking until in the apartment.

CHARLOTTE

When did I agree to that?

She raises the cigarette to her lips and takes a long drag; exhales slowly. JOHANNA watches.

JOHANNA

Nine this morning. Right before I left.

She crosses to CHARLOTTE, plucks the cigarette from her hand, and stumps it out in the ashtray. CHARLOTTE freezes, a look of frustration on her face, and then crosses her arms, still looking at the ceiling.

JOHANNA

Funny thing happened today.

CHARLOTTE

Hmm?

JOHANNA

I went to the ATM to deposit my pension check from the army --

CHARLOTTE

Yeah --

JOHANNA

-- and I found six hundred dollars in my account.

CHARLOTTE

Strange.

JOHANNA

You wouldn’t happen to know where that money came from?

CHARLOTTE

Secret sponsor.

JOHANNA

I guess.

CHARLOTTE glances over at the coffee table and rolls her eyes.

CHARLOTTE

He brought the chocolate ones again. He knows I hate chocolate.

JOHANNA

It just seems like a coincidence -- last night I was telling you I’d be short on rent, and this morning there’s six hundred dollars in my account --

CHARLOTTE

Vanilla, raspberry -- literally any other flavor --

JOHANNA

Charlotte --

CHARLOTTE

Yes, okay, I transferred money into your account.

JOHANNA

Look, I appreciate it --

CHARLOTTE

It’s not charity, I was paying you.

JOHANNA

Paying me? For what?

CHARLOTTE

For helping me with the Hope case.

JOHANNA

You didn’t get paid for that -- Where did you get the money?

CHARLOTTE

Doesn’t matter.

CHARLOTTE sits upright, reaches under the sofa cushion, and withdraws a pack of cigarettes. She tosses the pack at JOHANNA.

CHARLOTTE

I stole those from a client earlier. What do you see?

JOHANNA

That your nicotine habit is really getting out of control.

CHARLOTTE

What does that object tell you about its owner?

JOHANNA turns the pack over and over in her hand, looking for clues.

JOHANNA

I’ve got nothing.

CHARLOTTE

Come on, the information’s all there; what do you see?

JOHANNA looks the pack over again.

JOHANNA

Um… well, a few of the cigarettes are in the wrong way…

CHARLOTTE

Good.

JOHANNA

The edges of the lid are torn… and the package is a bit smushed -- but that’s probably from you lying on it.

CHARLOTTE

Yes.

JOHANNA

And… that’s it.

CHARLOTTE

Oh, come on. You haven’t told me what any of it means.

JOHANNA

What’s the point?

CHARLOTTE

Seeing information is useless if you’ve no idea what to infer from it.Give it.

CHARLOTTE extends her hand. JOHANNA tosses the cigarette pack to her.

CHARLOTTE

You already noticed the cigarettes put in the wrong way -- this man’s been trying to quit -- was doing well for a while, in fact. This pack’s new -- bought within the last week, going by the expiration date. He habitually pulls out one cig every couple of hours, catches himself, then shoves it back in -- often the wrong way. He’s left-handed, too -- notice the tearing on the lid present on the right side and not the left -- he takes it out of his pocket with his right hand and opens the lid then removes a cigarette with his left. Now -- we know he bought this pack within the past week, but he’s only smoked two before today. Tobacco residue at the bottom of the carton tells us that. There are six cigarettes missing, however. I’ve smoked one, which means he’s had three today. Something happened -- something that made him anxious -- made him itch for a drag. One cigarette’s a craving, two -- work troubles, but three -- three is personal. He’s worried his lover is having an affair.

JOHANNA

Oh come on! There’s no way you can know that!

CHARLOTTE

Yes, there is.

JOHANNA

How?

CHARLOTTE

Because this man came to me earlier today and handed me a three thousand dollar check to tell him that his boyfriend has been sleeping with his ex-wife.

CHARLOTTE points to an envelope on the coffee table. Aghast, JOHANNA opens it. Inside is said three thousand dollar check.

JOHANNA

You’ve been taking cases.

CHARLOTTE

Funny -- the trivial ones always pay more.

CHARLOTTE and JOHANNA look at one another and laugh, sharing in a moment of companionable humor.

CHARLOTTE

That should cover rent for the next two months. It’s yours, too. I could use your help.

[screenporch4-blog]

The Lost Kleinberger Galleries - 12 East 54th Street

Before its two substantial remodelings, the house looked much like the old rowhouse to the left.  from the collection of the New York Public Library

Charles Price Britton's 25-foot wide rowhouse at No. 12 East 54th Street was not typical of those around it.  Unlike the ubiquitous brownstone cladding which Edith Wharton would later describe as "deadly uniformity of mean ugliness," Britton's home was faced in brick.

Like most of its neighbors, the house was erected shortly after the end of the Civil War.   The Britton family were residents at least by 1882 when their address appeared on the membership list of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church.

Britton was the head of the stock brokerage firm of Charles P. Britton & Company.   He traced his American lineage to William Britton, a sea captain who came from Bristol, England and settled in Newport in the 18th century.  (Oddly enough, his name was originally William Summerill, but he took his mother's maiden name before leaving England.)

Britton had married Caroline Berry in September 1866. The couple suffered more than their share of heartbreak.  Their second child, Mary Marsh, died in 1875 at just two years old.  Their eldest son, William Adams died at the age of 20 on September 29, 1888.  Only Henry Berry Britton, born on September 5, 1878, would survive to marry and become a member of his father's firm.

Although Britton was a member of the socially elite Union League Club, his other memberships reflected his familial history.  He held memberships in the Sons of the Revolution, the Society of Colonial Wars, and the New England Society of New York.

In April 1893 the Brittons commissioned architect John Sexton to remodel the interiors.  The filed plans are vague at best, but at about $13,000 in today's money they most likely involved cosmetic updating.

At the time John Daly and his wife Ida lived at No. 208 West 59th Street.   Daly could not have been more different from Charles P. Britton and yet their paths would cross before very long.

Daly ran gambling houses, one of which was very near his home.  The Sun, on August 6, 1893, described his two city operations as "the famous house in Twenty-ninth street near Broadway, and another in Fifty-ninth street opposite the Park."   Reportedly he paid the police as much as $100,000 per week to prevent raids.

But he was best known for his lavish gambling house in Long Branch, New Jersey.   The Sun disapprovingly called Long Branch "America's Monte Carlo," and reported "Gambling is unquestionably a craze in Long Branch,  The average man is overcome by it."  The newspaper was astonished that there a patron could gamble "with impunity and without fear of molestation unless he happens to be a native of the town."

"John Daly's place at the Branch is the house where the biggest games are played and where a man can get just about as big a limit as he cares to make.  It is the house most frequented by gamblers, because it has the reputation of running the squarest games of any at the Branch," said The Sun.

In stark contrast to the seedy gambling dens of Manhattan's Tenderloin District, this was a palace--a forerunner of the Atlantic City and Las Vegas resorts.  "The main gaming room...is a great rotunda with a beautiful stained glass top, and the bright lights glaring through the colored glass are a big advertisement of the vice inside...There is a great wide seaside piazza in front, with big armchairs that invite the passer by, and a yawning doorway that reaches out to take in all."

Like today's casinos, patrons were treated to the best in food.  "John Daly's chef is a banner man in his line.  He is said to be the best chef at the Branch.  The viands he serves for the breakfast of the guests, and the midnight lunch, are even more tempting than the meals at the Ocean Club."

But the purpose of the article was not to compliment Daly's gambling house.  The writer warned "Of course, ninety-nine men in every hundred get the worst of the game," and said of Daly's, "It was there that Senator Wolcott dropped his $24,000 in a few hours, and it was there that Banker Woerishoffer used to go and play to win or lose thousands every night."

John Daly's Long Branch gambling house was built around a central rotunda.  The New-York Tribune, August 3, 1902 (copyright expired)

And so the announcement on March 16, 1895 that the Brittons had sold No. 12 to John and Ida Daly must have sent shock waves through the neighborhood.  The selling price, $67,500, would be equal to more than $1.8 million today.

But before they moved in, the Dalys modernized the out-of-date house.  They hired architect Joseph Wolf to remodel the facade.  Wolf removed the stoop and created an American basement home.  While the entertainment rooms would still be on what had been the parlor floor, the entrance was now located a few steps below street level.

The New York Herald, July 24, 1921 (copyright expired)

The city of Long Branch dealt a severe blow to Daly six years later when it outlawed gambling.   In July 1903 The Evening World commented that the once-lavish gambling houses were "barred and desolate" and the "abode of cobwebs and dust."   John and his brother, Phil Daly (who ran another operation in the town), told the reporter that "the present state of Long Branch is worse than the old."  Gambling never went away, they asserted, but had simply been forced underground.  "Public gambling, according to their argument has a tendency to make men more careful," explained the article.

Nevertheless, Daly was out of the gambling business and turned his full attention to the more socially acceptable line of horse breeding.   He established a summer residence in Saratoga, home of the nation's oldest race track (opened in 1863).  The town lured not only racing and horse enthusiasts, but celebrities like Sarah Bernhardt, Enrico Caruso and Oscar Wilde.

It was at their Saratoga cottage on Union Avenue that Ida Daly died on July 6, 1905.   Less than a year later Daly died at the age of 68 in the 54th Street mansion.  In reporting his death, the New-York Tribune called him the "well known turfman and gambler" and said "he was regarded as one of the squarest men in the gambling business"  The article noted "He frequently said that gambling, properly conducted, was as legitimate as any other business."

The Daly mansion was acquired by real estate operators Michael J. and John O'Connor.   Although still home to many wealthy families, the neighborhood around St. Patrick's Cathedral was increasingly seeing the encroachment of commerce.

Finally, on June 1, 1910 the O'Connors sold the house.  The following day the New-York Tribune reported "The buyer is Mrs. Charlotte E. Van Smith, who will use it for her dressmaking business."

Charlotte did some renovations of her own.  Within two weeks her architect, William Anagnost, filed plans to add an elevator, new doors and fire-escapes.   The transformation of house-to-business cost her around a quarter of a million in today's dollars and included living quarters for her on the upper floors.

Dressmakers like Charlotte E. Van Smith catered to the carriage trade and often used the term modiste to describe themselves.  The cost of their services and glamorous costumes earned them small fortunes, affording Charlotte to live in luxurious accommodations with a still-fashionable address.

Charlotte employed a small staff of experienced seamstresses as well as a boy whose tasks included running packages of completed gowns to her customers' homes, the steamship docks, or shipping firms if the patron were out of town.  Such was the case on December 14, 1911 when three gowns had to be completed and shipped off to Philadelphia, Baltimore and Parkinburg, Pennsylvania.  The New York Times reported that "Miss Smith kept her employees working until after dark last night" on the three dresses.  Each of the dresses were valued at about $300--nearly $7,500 today.

With the garments boxed and labeled and sent off with 15-year old Nathan Friedman, Charlotte felt she could relax.  But disaster was about to strike.

Nathan was headed to the Adams Express Company depot at 48th Street and Madison Avenue.  At around 52nd Street he was approached by a man who said he needed a messenger boy.  Nathan directed him to the telegraph office; but the man said he had been there and simply could not find one.

He offered Nathan $1 to take a message to "F. Marshall" at 838 Fifth Avenue (which was, in fact, the mansion of William Watts Sherman).  The boy refused and started on his way.

Insistent, the stranger said he lived at the Hotel Buckingham and that if Nathan would come with him to get the message, he would guard the packages until he returned.   The boy was finally convinced and went off on the phony task.  The New York Times reported "When he returned the bundles were gone" and surmised a "young man is richer by some $900 worth of evening gowns which he purloined by trickery from the boy."

Apparently now retired, in January 1919 Charlotte E. Van Smith leased her shop (in what the Real Estate Record & Guide now termed "the Van Smith Building") to another high-end dressmaker, "Miss Jean, designer of gowns." 

Exactly one year later, on January 27, 1920, the business was looking for a new model.  The advertisement in The New York Herald not only reflected the caliber of the clientele, but a change in the dress sizes today.  "Model.  Attractive, size, 36, preferably brunette.  High class dressmaking establishment.  House of Jean, Inc."

Significant change would come to No. 12 when Charlotte E. Van Smith next leased the building to the interior decorating firm of Leed, Inc.   On July 24, 1921 The New York Herald opined "One of the latest and perhaps one of the most interesting examples of remaking an old Gotham dwelling into an appropriate home for business has just been accomplished by Leed, Inc...who recently moved from 631 Fifth avenue into the four story and basement house at 12 East Fifth-fourth street, once the home of 'Phil' [sic] Daly, the gambler."

Surprisingly, the firm's president, L. R. Kaufman, did not seek the help of a professional architect.  Instead, he personally remodeled the facade with striking results.  What had been a modified Victorian rowhouse was now what pretended to be a glorious French Gothic mansion; its yawning, deep-set entrance recalling a 15th century gatehouse.

Carved crockets adorned the entrance arch, a faux balcony introduced the second floor with grouped, stained glass windows, and a series of pointed Gothic arches--including two blind arches at their end--finished the top floor.   Inside Kaufman attempted to retain a domestic environment in which to display the firm's furniture, artwork and bric-a-brac.  The New York Herald said he had finished the walls in "rough old terra cotta plaster with marble terrazzo floors in black and white squares.  The general effect is the production of old Italian walls in warm colors."

A new staircase lead to the main showroom on the second floor.  Leaded windows similar to those in the front opened onto the rear garden, "which is to be finished with a terrace and loggia with playing  fountains,"

The New York Herald, July 24, 1921 (copyright expired)

Leeds, Inc. operated from the lower two floors.  The third floor was leased to Louise & Annette, Inc., a millinery shop; and the upper apartment where Charlotte E. Van Smith had lived was sublet to  Mrs. Wendell Phillips.    

Mrs. Phillips would be forced to perform an unpleasant task later that year.  She was the president of the Carry-On Association which operated the Carry-On Club for disabled soldiers on Madison Avenue.   Clubs for military men who had returned from the war were common and rarely prompted anything but favorable press.

But in September 1921 seven men complained to the courts that they had been ousted from the club and asked to be reinstated.  A journalist from The New York Herald visited No. 12 East 54th Street, but on October 1 reported "Mrs. Phillips refused to discuss the matter other than to say the men ejected were considered 'disturbing elements.'"

In the fall of 1927 the esteemed Kleinberger Galleries moved from 725 Fifth Avenue to the former Leeds, Inc. showrooms.  Kleinberger routinely dealt in Old Masters and catered to the country's wealthiest and best informed collectors.  Just before leaving its former location, the gallery exhibited a modern piece--an oil portrait of American hero Charles A. Lindbergh.

The New York Times reported "The portrait is the work of M. A. Rasko, a New York artist who went to Mitchel Field and sketched Lindbergh on the day before his take-off.  The aviator was shy at first, thinking Mr. Rasko had gone there to photograph him.  Finally he relented and allowed the artist 'five minutes.'  Mr. Rasko stayed forty-five minutes and completed his sketch."

Now at No. 12, Francis Kleinberger returned to more familiar territory.   In January 1928, for instance, he was asked to settle a dispute when London art critics declared that "The Lute Player" by Vermeer in the collection of Philadelphia attorney John G. Johnson was a forgery.   The controversy arose when an identical picture appeared in the Royal Academy's Winter Show in London, on loan from the collection of the late Lord Iveagh.

Kleinberger emphatically defended Johnson's as the original.  "I am positive that the painting is a genuine work by Vermeer," he said.  As for Lord Iveagh's painting, he withheld an opinion until he had the opportunity to examine it.

Later that year, in November, the gallery held an exhibition of paintings by early German masters, including Hans Holbein's portrait of King Edward VI of England as a boy.  The show was to benefit the American Red Cross.

Kleinberger Galleries remained in the building at least through 1935.  By the early 1940s it had been converted to a Swedish restaurant, the Three Crowns.  It was operated by John Perrson and Bror Munson who had run the Sweish Pavilion at the World's Fair.  Robert W. Dana in his 1948 Where to Eat in New York said "It has a beautiful dining room and bar, not too large, but nicely proportioned."  The successful eatery operated into the early 1960s.

postcard from the collection of  the Columbia University Libraries

In 1970, about a century after it was erected as a brick-faced Victorian rowhouse, the unique structure was demolished.  The 43-story office building known as 520 Madison Avenue now occupies the site.

photo via The Skyscraper Center

Source: http://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-lost-kleinberger-galleries-12-east.html

[somethingthatyousaid-blog1]

Love lost (part one).

For five and a half years of my life, I was in a relationship. When we first met, I was twenty, and they were nineteen. We met in a college class, a class that I almost didn’t take. A class that was for my minor degree. 

It started off as innocent as any relationship could. We were both slightly socially awkward, and once we had convinced each other that we weren’t a threat, we started hanging out regularly. At first I wasn’t convinced that they liked me. I’m particularly bad at picking up hints of that sort, and extra attentive to hints in the opposite direction (so much so that I often find those where there aren’t any). 

I had just gotten out of a typical college relationship prior to meeting this person, who was a breath of fresh air compared to what I had experienced before that. 

Our first two years were spent dating around our college area. I would frequently stay at their dorm (more nights than what was allowed by the university, too, I might add), and they would occasionally stay at mine. I was working two jobs in addition to being a full time student at the time. I was always highly driven towards making some kind of money. I was terrified of not having enough. They were one of the best students that I’ve ever known, and weren’t focused on having money outside of what their parents gave them. Definitely my polar opposite in that regard. 

We ended up graduating at the same time, despite the fact that I had started a year earlier. I had originally gone down one career path/Major trajectory, but decided that I would find more enjoyment in another so I ultimately burned a year of time, and all of that money on courses and books. 

After college was over, we were searching for the next steps in our relationship. Their extended family was quite religious, and didn’t particularly agree with us moving in together. Naturally, we did it anyways. We moved to a small but nice apartment in the southern part of Mecklenburg County, near Ballantyne. We weren’t here for too long before we decided to get a kitten. She was gray and white, with a cute pink nose. We named her Rose. We ended up coming up with about a million and a half nicknames for her, most of which I’ve forgotten, but my favorite was probably “rosenbabe.” I loved picking her up after work was over and cradling her like an infant, rubbing her unbelievably soft belly and tickling her rabbit feet. She always hated it. It never stopped us from doing it, though. 

We stayed in this apartment for two years, I believe. It was a two bedroom apartment, with a modestly sized living room and kitchen. Thinking about it still feels like home to me now. During the second year we lived here, the apartment company that owned that complex was purchased, and rent was to go up about three or four hundred dollars. At the time I was working at a very small company, pulling all-nighters trying to help them get something off of the ground and make a name for myself. I wasn’t, however, paid handsomely for this. Being a new company with very limited funding, they didn’t have the capital to pay me at market rates. This basically forced us to move to a different, more affordable apartment. 

I have always been highly anxious about making any kind of important decisions. Finding a place to live was no exception. There are always an abundance of choices and options when it comes to finding an apartment. So many floor plans to compare, traffic patterns to consider, local restaurants and grocery store options to keep in mind. 

I ultimately left the decision entirely up to them. They had made a list, and I made an attempt to try my best to contribute, but I still fell far short of contributing what I wanted to the search. They, being a stronger and more willed individual did all of the work. Everything from contacting leasing companies, touring various apartments, and when it came down to it, getting the lease documents for me to sign and returning them to the leasing office. 

The apartment they chose wasn’t an apartment at all. It was a town home. Two floors, and slightly more space that what we were previously paying, all for less than what were paying at the previous place. The one difference here was that we needed to provide our own washer and dryer. Their parents graciously bought a set for us. They were so helpful, and I felt guilty accepting it. Guilty that I wasn’t able to provide that for us. 

We stayed at that townhouse for a year without any issues. It was near South Park Mall, one of Charlotte’s biggest and nicest. They did fantastic job of finding this place for us. It was central to my work and theirs, food and groceries were nearby, and traffic was mostly fine except for the very early hours, as an elementary school shared our neighborhood’s drive way. 

Towards the middle of our second year in this townhouse, the company that I was working at was starting to take a turn for the worse, and I started to become extremely anxious about making and having money. I started looking for a new job. Eventually I found one, at a company that I probably should have been working at all along. 

[sending-the-message]

About Two Psychopaths by skyebluescars

You might think it’s silly, but I knew in third grade that Amanda was going to be my best friend for life. We were inseparable. I was standing in line waiting to play a game at Showbiz Pizza and Amanda let me cut in front of her. Afterward, we spent the rest of the afternoon laughing and playing in the ball pit. I was excited to find out that we went to the same school. Every day we’d eat lunch together and she seemed content to talk about whatever I wanted to talk about. You know, as I sit here and write this out, I can’t help but miss those days.

For almost seven years we had never had so much as a single argument. That all changed when I asked a boy in my math class if he’d like to join me for coffee after school. I don’t know if it was jealousy or maybe just that she didn’t like the guy, but from that day on it was all but impossible to go longer than a few days at a time without Amanda criticizing me for being with Kevin. In retrospect, I wish I had never talked to the guy, but hindsight is 20/20 ya know?

One thing was clear to me from the beginning; Kevin hated Amanda and Amanda hated Kevin. I felt like I was this object on a pedestal that each of them seemed to be fighting for. This all came to a head when Kevin thought it was be a good idea to prank Amanda and it resulted in a trip to the hospital. The final tally left me with a fractured skull, a rather disfiguring scar that stretched from my brow to my hairline, and minor brain damage. Also, I have to take seizure meds for the rest of my life. Mistake or not, that basically killed any feelings I might have had for Kevin.

I was more than just angry, I was devastated. I was going to be a model and an actress. All of that crushed by a boy who had seen one too many movies and thought school pranks were a good idea. Amanda was ready to kill him. Every day she’d offer some new and exciting way in which she’d destroy him. At first I told her to drop it, but as the wounds healed and the scar became more prominent, I finally told her to do whatever she wanted as long as she stopped talking about it. That was a mistake.

Not going to lie, when Kevin paid some kid to bring me a note, I almost thought it was sweet. I might have read two sentences before Amanda ripped it out of my hands and said, “Does that little shit think he’s gonna get away with this?” I should have spoken up but honestly I was conflicted about how to proceed and honestly the thought of Amanda going off on him made me smile. I suppose that’s why I said yes when she invited me to the Fall Formal. I knew something was going to go down, but I wasn’t sure what.

I’ve read both of their accounts of what happened. If you haven’t guess by now, both of them are full of it. Kevin sold Ketamine, pot, and pills. When we were dating, it wasn’t uncommon for him to gift me a joint every now and then. I watched Kevin put the powder in the punch bowl. That’s why I told Amanda to go get the school security officer. I even opted to dance with him while she waited. I could tell it upset Amanda that I sent her away while dancing with Kevin, but someone needed to keep him busy. I don’t know who he was going to try and leave with that night, but there’s only one reason you’d put that much Ketamine in someone else’s drink.

Amanda came back with drinks and I watched Kevin nervously drink from the cup. He was guilty and he knew it. Amanda had brought me water, I don’t wanna think about what might have happened if I hadn’t seen him dose the punch bowl. I took Amanda’s hand and led her out of the gym just as the school security officer came to grab Kevin. A chaperone was already emptying the punch bowl. Three kids ended up in the hospital. That wasn’t a prank, Kevin was going to end up hurting someone. I suppose that’s when it first clicked in my head that there was something very wrong with Kevin. On the surface he was very articulate and charismatic, but underneath that was a darkness than scared me.

The next three years were a dream. Amanda went back to being happy and cheerful all the time. We got into the same college and she even snagged us jobs at a local used book store. There’s something to be said for spending four to five hours a day with your best friend and getting paid for it. Each night I’d empty the register and tally up sales before putting all but a hundred dollars in the deposit bag and running it to the bank two blocks away.

One night I headed out to drop off the deposit bag when Kevin came out from behind me. He was drunk or high or something. I don’t know. What I do know is that he was shouting at me and he said something about me setting him up with the cops. I tried to hand him the deposit bag hoping he’d go away and the creep tried to hold my hand. I had never been happier to see Amanda than when she ran up and kicked him in the junk before emptying a can of pepper spray into his eyes. She led me by my hand back into the store and we let the cops deal with him. I would have been content never to see Kevin again, but Amanda had other plans.

I don’t like social media. I mean, I had a Myspace but it was all drama all the time. With the exception of Twitter, I don’t do the whole social networking thing. Apparently, Amanda had made a Facebook account in my name and even added most of our friends from high school. She had even set her main account and my account as being in a relationship. I thought it was weird, but in almost fifteen years of being friend she’d never so much as made a pass at me so I figured it was probably harmless.

Little did I know that she was catfishing Kevin using my pictures and pretending to be me via instant message. One day I was feeling particularly down and she invited me to join her for a walk through the city park. I wasn’t in the mood for it, but she assured me that it was just what I needed to feel great again. Turns out Amanda had set it up so that Kevin would be there waiting for me. It wasn’t enough that I never wanted to see the guy again. Amanda made it to where I never wanted to see her again. Kevin was convinced that he had been in an online relationship with me. Instead, I started having a panic attack and he got into a shouting match with Amanda that ended with a bystander jumping in and tackling him to the ground.

Amanda stood there laughing and I said, “Did you have anything to do with this.”

She got that same sheepish look on her face she’d get when I caught her stealing my shoes or dresses and I just knew. I knew she had set this whole thing up to punish Kevin and that she didn’t really care how I felt about it. I had a long time to think about our friendship after that and over the next few days I came to realize that there really wasn’t much of a difference between Kevin and Amanda. Both were obsessed with me. Both seemed intent on hurting the other. Neither of them seemed to actually care about my feelings. For Kevin I was some prize to be attained at the end of some quest. For Amanda I was at best a love interest and at worst an emotional dumping ground. I grew tired of all of the manipulation and lies. I packed my bags and moved in with my friend Aunt Susan.

The next few years were nice. I made friends at work. I even helped a girl named Charlotte work up the nerve to talk to this guy in her math class she kept gushing about. I regret that. Charlotte and I became fast friends, and then I met her new boyfriend, Kevin. I didn’t have many friends and frankly I didn’t want to be alone. Kevin sold me a good line and I bought it. He told me about his mental issues and his medication. He told me about how he’d been going to college and working. He even apologized for the things he had done while delusional. Like I’ve said before, he’s incredibly charming when he wants to be.

I started dating a guy from work and Kevin didn’t even bat an eye. James was a great guy, but when I told him about my past with Kevin, he instantly hated the guy. Still, he made it a point to pull Kevin off to the side and hang out with him when we went over to see Charlotte. Again, for almost six months Kevin never so much as said anything cross to me and never so much as flirted with me. By all outward appearances, he seemed completely and totally absorbed with Charlotte. I let my guard down. That was a mistake.

It all comes down to that fateful night. James went out of town for a military thing and I opted to stay with Charlotte and Kevin. I was sitting on their couch watching Netflix when someone used a key on the front door and walked in like they owned the place. It was Amanda. She was wearing a gun on her hip and dressed in all black. I looked up and said, “Amanda, what are you doing here?” There was a look of contempt in her eyes that I had never seen before. She reached for her gun and I screamed.

Charlotte came running out and Amanda shot her point blank in the head. Amanda turned to me and said, “What, you won’t be my friend anymore but you’re besties with the skank that’s fucking Kevin?” That’s when Kevin ran out holding a knife I stood up and said, “I’m just gonna go in the back room and let you two sort it out. That’s when Kevin grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me into a headlock with the knife at my throat. He said to Amanda, “You took mine, it’s only right that I take yours.” Deep searing pain that burned white hot became all I could think about as he plunged the knife in and let me fall to the floor. I watched as he darted out the back door. I tried frantically to keep pressure on the wound my blood escaped onto the floor.

Amanda didn’t even stay behind to check on me. She ran after Kevin and left me bleeding on the floor next to my dead friend. Those paramedics saved my life, but those cops are idiots. I heard they let Kevin go and kept Amanda. Even now I have James sitting by my bed as I try to rest up. This is the second disfiguring scar that psychopath has given me. I won’t let him close enough to leave a third.

[pressography-blog1]

Probe: No crook wrongdoing in Brevard colleges software deal

New Post has been published on https://pressography.org/probe-no-crook-wrongdoing-in-brevard-colleges-software-deal/

Probe: No crook wrongdoing in Brevard colleges software deal

“Very horrific business practices” seem like the wrongdoer at the back of a botched college software program deal that has cost the Brevard County taxpayers nearly $6 million.

                                        Brevard Colleges 

Brevard Florida

After an almost -year-long investigation into the debatable EDR deal, the Brevard County Sheriff’s Workplace observed no criminal wrongdoing, Sheriff Wayne Ivey stated at a news conference Wednesday afternoon.

Brevard faculties considers leaving behind afflicted software program deal “Findings do now not help any allegation that the purchase of the software was a scheme to defraud or protected any type of crook behavior,” stated Ivey. “I assume whilst you look at the case, a great way to sum it up is a few very terrible business practices that came about lengthy before the current administration became in the area.”

In view that then, Brevard Public faculties has taken steps to restoration any “weaknesses” that caused the defective deal. Going forward, the district will problem major purchases to the scrutiny of a couple of managers earlier than taking them to the college board and send extra proposed contracts to be reviewed by means of a lawyer.

before shopping for the software program from Winter Park-based Instructional Data Sources in 2013, the faculty district did not put the acquisition out to bid or have the EDR contract reviewed by way of its legal professional, Harold Bistline.

“We here at BPS have been possibly in 2013 a little too trusting, a little too hasty in agreeing to spend millions of dollars on an unproven product from a dealer, which has Seeing that been acquired through Harris faculty Answers,” Superintendent Desmond Blackburn stated at the information convention. The organization isn’t always affiliated with the Brevard-based Harris Corp Extra Update.

District legal professionals are presently in talks with Harris faculty Solutions, which purchased EDR in 2015, to attain a settlement, which could be a combination of money and protection to the district’s modern machine, which remains functioning.

Blackburn: changed into EDR software program even needed? What happened?

Returned in 2013, underneath the management of Superintendent Brian Binggeli, who has In view that taken a process in Texas, district officers advised college board individuals their software became beneath settlement to receive protection best for the subsequent couple months. So, just a month before the contract became set to expire, the 5-member board authorized spending $8 million on a new software program device, with out putting the project out to bid or having their felony counsel evaluation the agreement. Judy Preston turned into the leader economic officer at the time.

4 years deep into the deal, Brevard Public schools has spent $5.9 million and in no way received a completed device. And what the district has acquired hasn’t impressed personnel.

Blackburn has Because stated he’s now not convinced the district even wanted a brand new software device and the present day one is still working just excellent.

“Returned in 2013, I wasn’t right here, but I’m instructed, and my locating, is that supposedly there was a hassle that would most effective be constant via this answer. Nicely, that trouble surely hasn’t manifested itself,” said Blackburn.

Former board member Amy Kneessy says the board turned into pressured by way of district officials to buy the software program and purchase it fast. Records display little research went into making the deal.

“We were led to agree with that we needed to do some thing, that our modern product was on constrained use,” stated Kneessy, who served alongside Barbara Murray, Michael Krupp, Karen Henderson and Andy Ziegler, who nevertheless sits at the board.

How Brevard colleges blew an $8 million software program deal What now?

As district legal professionals paintings to attain an agreement with Harris faculty Answers, the district is preparing to do a full-scale assessment of its modern-day system, a long time-antique green display screen software program.

Russell Cheatham, the district’s new chief information officer, will lead the evaluation. And if he determines the district needs new software, the board will put the venture out to bid.

but if the assessment reveals the antique software is good enough, part of the agreement the district is in search of with Harris could consist of preservation to the modern gadget.

“The legacy system — it’s nevertheless here,” stated Blackburn. “Is it archaic? Sincerely. however our employees are still getting paid, our procurement nevertheless occurs and we’re correct.”

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