Donald J. Trump: Pathological Liar 🤥 Or Misunderstood Replicant?

There is a scene in Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982), a remarkable adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” that I have always thought captures the challenges any psychologist or psychiatrist faces when attempting to suss out psychopaths, given one of the psychopath’s predominate traits is pathological lying. (See my last blog “Now You’ve Gone and Done It Whitey Put a Psychopath in the White House“).

The title of the movie refers to an elite regimen of police called “Blade Runners,” whose job it is to find rogue “replicants” and “retire” the bastards.

In this post-apocalyptic future, as imagined by Phil Dick in 1968, replicants are sophisticated androids that are virtually identical to humans.

Manufactured by the multi-national Tyrell Corporation, the new Nexus 6 model replicants are “more human than human” (the corporate slogan) and virtually indistinguishable from their human counterparts.

To certify that an individual is indeed a replicant Blade Runners are trained to use a special analytical test called a Voight-Kamoff (VK-A) that includes a carefully crafted ledger of questions meant to illicit certain specific responses that are then measured and compared to an historic catalogue of previous results. (Very similar to administering and scoring the Hare PCL-R)

After setting up “the skin job” (police slang for replicants) for the test the subject is asked a series of detailed questions aggregated and analyzed by the VK-A and interpreted by the Blade Runner and, voila, the pedigree of the subject is revealed. Are mistakes possible? Of course. Blade Runners (police) are human (like psychiatrists) and humans do make mistakes. Sometimes, humans get “retired” by mistake.

In the opening scene of “Blade Runner” a Runner named Holden (in my imagination played by famed forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz) is interviewing a suspected replicant named Leon (played by POTUS Trump).

Leon happens to be one of four fugitive replicants who have made it back to earth, led by the ruthless Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer). They escaped from a security detail on an “off-world” colony, stole a space craft, murdered the crew and returned to earth with the intention of meeting their “maker,” the eponymous Dr. Eldon Tyrell and “convincing” him to increase their life spans, which are, by design, an intolerably short, four years.

Because they are artistic creations at the edge of contemporary science replicants can be very handsome, or beautiful, as well as articulate, convincing and deceiving. At on point, Batty, explaining himself says to the man who “just make the eyes” what the eyes he made allowed Batty to see: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… “

It has been discovered that the Nexus 6’s quickly become self-aware, develop a sense of mortality, adapt and innovate and, among other dangerous tendencies, develop a deep resentment of that mortality and therefore, day by day, represent an incrementally lethal danger to real people, particularly their “Maker,” Eldon Tyrell.

A Blade Runner named Holden (played by Park Dietz) satisfied Leon (played by Don Trump) is properly set up for the V-K test (think Hare PCL-R) begins the questioning):

“You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down…
Leon: (Obviously nervous) What one?
Holden: What?
Leon: What desert?
Holden: It doesn’t make any difference what desert, it’s completely hypothetical.
Leon: How come I’d be there?
Holden: Maybe you’re fed up. Maybe you want to be by yourself. Who knows? You look down and see a tortoise. It’s crawling toward you…
Leon: Tortoise? What’s that?
Holden: [Becoming irritated by Leon’s interruptions] You know what a turtle is?
Leon: Of course!
Holden: Same thing.
Leon: I’ve never seen a turtle… But I understand what you mean.
Holden: You reach down, Leon, and you flip the tortoise over on its back.
Leon: Do you make up these questions, Mr. Holden? Or do they write ’em down for you?
Holden: The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping.
Leon: [angered by the suggestion] What do you mean, I’m not helping?
Holden: I mean: you’re not helping! Why is that, Leon?
[Leon has become visibly shaken]
Holden: (Leans back, smiling and lights a cigarette) They’re just questions, Leon. (Exhales) In answer to your query, they’re written down for me. It’s a test, designed to provoke an emotional response… Shall we continue?”
[Loud explosion. Leon shoots Holden under the table. Blows him back 12 feet into the far wall. Escapes] CUT

 

Now You’ve Gone and Done It Whitey Put a Psychopath in the White House

Since President Donald J. Trump first appeared on the Manhattan skyline like an orange-skinned Godzilla groping a woman’s crotch with one sausage-fingered hand and the soaring spiral of his failed dream of real-estate moguldom with the other (just like his Daddy but bigger, huge) those who believe Trump is bat-shit crazy have become legion.

The most erudite and detailed rumination on the subject is an article entitled “A Neuroscientist explains: Trump has a mental disorder that makes him a dangerous world leader” http://bit.ly/2kswc0j

It begins by mentioning “Vanity Fair’s” Henry Alford’s resonate query “What exactly is wrong with this strange individual” and states “While there is no official clinical diagnosis of psychopathy, the textbook traits of it and related to Anti-social Personality disorders like Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Sociopathy, are somewhat easy to spot once you know the signs.

“The failure for there to be an official way to diagnose these disorders is due more to the fact that individuals who have these traits are adept at masking them, or giving answers to questions that psychologist ‘want’ to hear.”

Graydon Carter is one of the longer standing questioners of Trump’s mental state going back to those halcyon days when he was a wide-eyed Canadian refugee in New York and the fledgling editor of Spy Magazine.

In a recent editorial Carter described how, in 1993, he took Trump, “the tabloid oddity of the moment,” as his guest to the White House Correspondent’s Dinner.

Since an acquaintance, Mike Kelly, who was then a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, took the first “oddity guest” in 1987 – Fawn Hall, Oliver North’s erstwhile secretary – it had become “a thing” to do, find that “oddity” and take them to that dinner.

Unlike the circus geek, Ms. Hill and Mr. Trump did not know they were the sideshow’s main attractions, which, of course, made the scenarios even funnier. Even then the “Correspondent’s Dinner” was becoming decadent.

In his editorial entitled “The Ugly American” Carter gave a succinct and disturbing portrait of what having a meal with, by then, the forerunner for the Republican Presidential nomination, was like.

He recounts being invited to dine with the Donald at his gauche Palm Springs retreat, the private, garish, outrageously expensive “golf and country club,” Mar-a-Lago.

“Dinner with Trump is generally a one-sided affair. He talks so much and with so much velocity that it can make your hair flutter… Whatever wife he has at the time tends to say nothing.”

Carter was forewarned by a Trump insider: “Family dinners at the Trumps are different. As a rule they are over in 45 minutes?”

Why?

“Because that’s how long it takes Donald to eat.”

“Mental illness touches everyone. Join the conversation”
– Bell Canada advertising slogan

Writing in “Vanity Fair’s” online blog spot “Hive”, Keith Olbermann, a long-time sports broadcaster and lately, pop culture pontificator, set out to prove that Trump was insane in a piece entitled “Could Donald Trump Pass a Sanity Test?”

In his eagerness, or ambivalence, Olbermann made a significant mistake. He put forth something called the Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R) as a test for insanity… which it most definitely is not.

Rather it is a controversial test for psychopathy, which is, by its very nature, the antithesis of insanity, albeit a far more dangerous condition.

Psychopathy could be described as a state of “hyper-sanity.

Marshall McLuhan called cliches social probes. “Crazy like a fox” would be an appropriate cliche the psychopath .

The PCL-R test was developed by a Canadian psychologist, Dr. Robert Hare, in the early 1980s and has subsequently become the standard instrument for researchers and clinicians in penal institutions in industrialized countries around the world as well as large corporations, government organizations and academic institutions who can afford to believe there is benefit in attempting to identify the psychopaths in their midst. (The test is a copyrighted package only obtainable by accredited personnel and it ain’t cheap)

What Dr. Hare has shown definitively, whether you believe psychopathy is a real condition or a convenient but compelling fiction, is that the majority of psychopaths are not criminals, rather far more often dangerous and destructive captains of industry, denizens of Wall Street, steel and shipping magnates, high-achievers at work in all sectors of society who share, in varying degrees, a panoply of extreme characteristics.

Sound familiar?

One thing that Olbermann is right about: Dr. Hare’s list of symptom and behavorial clusters unique to the psychopath puts President Donald J. Trump right up there in the Pantheon of Dangerous Psychopaths, and therefore by my reckoning, the first one in history to be President of the United States.

Something Dr. Hare brought to the fore is the fact that psychopaths are like chameleons and often difficult to spot and identify.

The PCL-R test contains two parts: a semi-structured interview protocol and a thorough review of the subject’s biography and any other information accessible to the clinician that he or she deems relevant.

During an interview (a technique characterized by sequential questioning of the subject) the clinician “scores” 20 items that measure different elements of the psychopathic character in an ordered conjugation.

These items cover the nature of the individual’s interpersonal relationships, capacity for emotional involvement, responses to other people and situations, any evidence of social deviance and details to do with lifestyles.

The list of twenty “traits” include superficial charm near charisma, a significant capacity for glibness, grandiose self-estimation, insatiable need for stimulation, pathological lying, cunning and commitment to and acumen for manipulation, lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect, callousness and lack of empathy, parasitic lifestyle, poor behavioral controls, sexual promiscuity, early behavioral problems, lack of realistic long-term goals, impulsivity, irresponsibility, failure to accept responsibility for one’s own actions, many short term marital relationships, juvenile delinquency, and so on.

One behavioural description I particularly like is “criminal versatility”. (Given what I know of Trump’s biography his life has been a virtuosity of criminal or near-criminal versatility.)
Full-blown psychopaths score between 20 – 30 on this section of the PCL-R. A score of 5 or less rules out the diagnosis. Non-psychopathic criminals tend to score in the high teens and low 20s.

From what I know of psychopaths, and I know (and have written about) more than the average person, this test, if properly administered by a skilled clinician, and the President somehow answered all the questions honestly, (something most people doubt he could or would do) Trump would easily score over 30 points.

 

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

There are many serious flaws in our judicial system that lead immediately to despair. Not least among these faults is the naming of suspects and persons placed under arrest by police and their handmaidens in the daily news media.

We have been rigorously taught platitudes all of our lives and one of the most pernicious is the individual’s inalienable right to the presumption of innocence.

Tell that to Jian Ghomeshi ( Jian Ghomeshi trial’s not guilty decision triggers outrage ) or anyone else accused of a crime, serious or otherwise. Long before “due process”, as a consequence of “secret” investigation by so-called journalists, Ghomeshi lost his job and his livelihood, his reputation as a first-class radio host (which he was,) and his presumption of innocence. In the minds of many, many people, he was and to this day, in spite of his recent acquittal on all five charges that were before the courts, guilty.I paid attention to the case. His “day in court” (a euphemism to describe his two-month-long trial) was as sound and fair a process as I have ever seen. And the result unequivocally correct. Given the quality of the evidence against him and the character of the witnesses, the fact that they deliberately lied under oath and only supplied police and prosecutors with the information they decided prosecutors and police needed to hear, any other conclusion would have been a travesty.

The vast majority of citizens pay absolutely no attention to the machinations of our judicial system. Ignorance has never stopped anyone from forming strong opinions and forcible expressing them. Reminds me of a line out of Camus’ “The Plague” about what the citizens were busy doing while the city officials were busy closing the gates; busy forming uninformed views.

On the other hand, I know a great deal about how it works, or doesn’t, having been a life-long student of police behavior and practices as well as the court system. But what gives me an unique perspective is the fact for a ten-year period I was the object of intense police investigations on two continents and three countries, twice arrested and charged with over one hundred criminal offences, sued by Attorney General Michael Bryant as “an enemy of the State” and vigorously prosecuted to the “full extent of the law.” That is a school of hard knocks that no one attends voluntarily but it does bestow an esoteric knowledge.

Mine is not just another opinion.

The reality: the moment someone is accused of a crime they are considered by neighbors, friends and family (with the possible exception of mothers,) to be guilty and condemned to the criminal class for all time, their lives inexorably altered hitherto fore.

In the collective mind the narrative runs like this: Joe/Jane must be guilty or else how would they have attracted the attention of the police in the first place let alone “got themselves” arrested. They must have done something.

At this point whatever is good in their lives is tarnished, their reputations besmirched, and depending on the charge(s) their careers suddenly on life support or completely destroyed.

“Completely destroyed” is especially true when the charges are sex related particularly when they have to do with sex crimes involving children under the age of sixteen.
The ultimate atmosphere of Gene Pitney’s “Town without Pity” becomes the thin air an accused must breath.

There are many problems in this hornet’s nest of fact and fiction, the idea of presumptive innocence and the assumptive guilt.

For instance, most associations and collectives working on behalf of wrongfully accused and convicted persons believe, although seldom say so, that the police and the courts get it wrong at least fifty percent of the time. I believe it’s more like sixty.

Prior to the advent of J. Edgar Hoover in the 40s things were different. Hoover is the progenitor of modern policing and its modus operandi.

Hoover was the first data miner, a dark genius who well knew the illusory nature of the enterprise. He was z ring master of the machinations of public and media relations toward perpetual metastasized police budgets entirely derived from the public purse. To this day, police are schooled in something openly called “tricks and lies”. Hoover was the master trickster and a unrepentant liar. The conventional wisdom: Criminals lie so police must too.

I digress. Suffice it to say I am not naive. The naming of persons of suspicion, targets for arrest and arrestees is not going to change. But at least it should be recognized for the travesty it is and the first step on the road to perdition. And, perhaps, cause a few to think twice. Crown has big decision before Ghomeshi’s next trial

FINDING KARLA… AGAIN

Somehow Paula Todd (see “Finding Karla: Fact or Fiction or Both Pt. 1, 2,3) has been elevated by legacy media to a Level One expert on Karla Homolka (a.k.a. Emile Bordelais.)

Since I have now posted thrice critical remarks about Ms. Todd’s anemic effort why am I up on the high horse again?

Because, information, no matter how useless or irrelevant, is like a virus. It’s everywhere and tends to seep to the surface like rocks in a spring field. Like everyone else, I’m overloaded and bemused.

I receive Google Alerts whenever “Karla Homolka” appears anywhere in cyberspace or the press and, a week or two ago, I received a blazing notice from the hinterland that Ms. Todd was going to grace Midland with her presence and be quizzed on her groundbreaking book “Finding Karla.”

The “announcement” was in the Midland weekly newspaper.

Midland is a wealthy little town located on Georgian Bay in Simcoe County, Ontario, Canada. It sits on the south end of Georgian Bay’s 30,000 Islands and is the economic center of the region, meaning everyone for a hundred miles has $$.

Weeklies are delivered up here in the Great White North by an operation called Metro News. I mention this because this blog is about law and disorder (not just about Karla and Paula Todd) and when talking about law and disorder I would be remiss were I not to mention the multi-millionaire owner of Metro News, Alex Petraitis, and his arrest a few years back for conspiring with the ex-husband of his mistress to kill his wife so (according to the Attorney General) he could continue being spanked while wearing diapers by said mistress (who was also practising dominatrix,) in peace.

Mr. Petraitis, a rather gregarious and amiable fellow, in his late sixties at the time, wisely retained my good friend and lawyer Edward L. (Eddie) Greenspan to defend him.

His trial was not only an unbelievable, even hilarious parade of depravity, perversity and incredulity, it was also protracted and mysterious and not to be missed by anyone who’s a fan of that sort of thing and/or a true crime buff. (Here is a link to a relatively comprehensive summary of the case from the National Post.)

I digress. Back to the “Midland Mirror” and Ms. Todd. When I read the following I just lost it: “Paula Todd, the investigative reporter who found convicted killer Karla Homolka living in the Caribbean, will appear at the Midland Cultural Center on Sept. 23 as the next guest in the “A Day in the Life” conversation series.” Slightly naive and behind the curve but that’s life in glorious summer enclaves like Midland.

Again I digress: The blurb goes on: “Investigative reporter Paula Todd is used to asking the tough questions…”

What? Really?

If Ms. Todd is a purveyor of the “tough question,” why the hell didn’t she ask Karla just one when she was allegedly in Guadeloupe sitting right across from her in her living room for an hour?

Oh yeah, I remember now, she was too scared. Remember her pamphlet was suffused with silly sallies about how afraid she was of everything: flying all the way to Caribbean, the island of Guadeloupe because it is French speaking (in spite of the fact that Ms. Todd speaks fluent French), Karla herself, other islanders possibly in Karla’s thrall, like the police and prosecutors were way back when Karla’s was given this future where Ms. Todd finally “found” her.

Even if I did not know Ms. Todd, all this badly written nonsense would be unbelievable. I realize it’s petty but those who know anything about this story will understand why I couldn’t help myself.

Karla, who has lost considerable weight since I last talked to her in prison circa 2002, is a wisp of a girl (a phrase her lawyer George Walker frequently used to describe her when Karla was 20 – 30 lb. heavier, before she went to jail.

She is short, attractive, curvaceous, blonde and petit. On the other hand Ms. Todd is much taller and how shall I say, robust? Ms. Todd takes care of herself. Remember, I have actually spent time in close proximity with both women: Karla while she was in jail and much heavier but still curvaceous and Ms. Todd when she interviewed me (some say attacked – see some of the reader reviews of her e-essay online) a couple of times for the show she co-hosted for a decade on TVO, “Studio Two”. (Full disclosure here: I know Karla much better than I know Paula Todd.)

Karla is about as physically intimidating as a cashmere coat. She is also mild mannered and quite pleasant for the most part. On the other hand, Ms. Todd is much bigger, very self-assured to the point of deliberate intimidation, her perpetual posture particularly when dealing with topics and/or persons she disapproves of.

The newspaper’s squib goes on: “Todd is perhaps best known for tracking convicted killer Karla Homolka, the former wife of multiple murderer Paul Bernardo, to her new home in the Caribbean. The scoop was outlined in her book “Finding Karla…”

I guess the “best known” part is probably true now that everyone has forgotten Paula Todd was on TV virtually every night for two hours for a decade. As I said, I’ve been interviewed on a couple of occasions by Ms. Todd during the years I was writing the definitive books on the case and at least once that I remember while under indictment and I’m 6’4″ and at that time weighed in about 300 lb. Some say I’m intimidating. Paula Todd was not the slightest bit afraid of me. In fact, if I recall, I felt a bit concerned for my well-being.

Now for a few facts for those of us who still care about them: There was no scoop, it wasn’t a book (it was more like a bad essay – today they call it “long form journalism”) and Karla was not pulling a Whitey Bulger – she wasn’t hiding – ergo she could hardly have been “found.”

Anyone who cared to know already knew Karla had been wintering on the island of Guadeloupe, a French protectorate in the Caribbean, since approximately 2007 and spending the summers in Montreal. This was not news. No newspaper editors I spoke to and proposed a little “what’s she doing now?” squib prior to 2012 were the slightest bit interested – in fact, the very opposite. I was told on numerous occasions nobody cared. Karla was yesterday’s news.

Not to suggest that legacy media daily news editors know what they’re doing.

The Americans have never heard of Karla Homolka. Or the French. Or Japanese. Not even the Germans. And those few Canadians who have seem to not be particularly interested in the one thing I find mildly interesting – the fact that Karla moves freely back and forth, wherever she pleases, in the world, across the continent, across the seas, hither and yon.

It would have been interesting to know where else Karla has been or was planning to go but alas Ms. Todd thought that her quest sufficient in and of itself (whether actual or virtual) for such a small pamphlet which appears (since she did not ask any questions at all, let alone tough ones) to have aspired only to lining her and her “editor’s” (the peripatetic Derek Finkle’s) pockets and defraud the reading public.

And contrary to the repeated statements by our (i.e. Canadian) traditional media to the contrary, Ms. Todd is far from the first one, either in digital or physical form, to pull such a stunt and have some modest success with it.

Frankly, if Paula Todd really did go to Guadeloupe (See my earlier posts “Finding Karla: Fraud, Fiction or Both, 1,2,3″) and sat across from Karla for even a few minutes the end product is a bigger indictment of her weaknesses as a writer and an “investigative journalist” than if she made it all up.

Furthermore, contrary to the Midland Mirror squib, an e-essay (it’s even a bit of a stretch to call it a pamphlet) does not a book make. I know that legacy media is very much still engaged in manufacturing consent but this is taking it a bit far, methinks, calling “Finding Karla” a book.

I reiterate because I can: Karla was not lost or on the lamb. She was over 18 and free and she wasn’t under any indictments, or legal restrictions and there were no warrants out for her arrest. The system was finished with her a long time ago. 2015 is the 10th Anniversary of her release from jail (where she resided for 12 long years.) She did the crimes and the time. Hello! She isn’t hiding. She doesn’t have to.

Since the day she was released from prison virtually everyone I know has been mostly aware of exactly where she was at any given moment on any given day because I was. And I was getting my information from other sources. “Finding Karla” was a yawn not a revelation.

Given that Ms. Todd’s short effort at fictional non-fiction was woefully short on real feeling, artifice, opinion and fact I would think she would be too embarrassed to keep up the ruse for so long but apparently not.

While I’m on the subject – for the very last time – I should mention that I’ve seen Ms. Todd pontificating effusively from the medium she loves the most, television, as if she knew everything their was to know about the case in general and Karla Homolka in particular. She was highly visible in two of the recently very poorly conceived and produced hour-long segments made respectively by a British production house called Two-Four for one or another of the many American cable channels surfeit with tales of law and disorder.

The latest (in which I played a very small part but was happy to do so because I was handsomely reimbursed for my time – participating in projects like these can be very time consuming) was made by an operation out of Knoxville, Tennessee called Jupiter Entertainment for “The Oxygen Network” (not available in Canada, mercifully) series “Snapped.” It aired in late August or early September.

Disasters of the fast cut and amateurish awkward reenactments interspersed with a plethora of talking heads (many of whom never knew very much of anything about the case to begin with let alone the only important question it raised – why and how did Karla get away with murder) the programs are misguided, confused, fact-challenged and tedious.

Final words on Ms. Todd and her e-essay: In something so short the least one expects is accuracy – a basic, fundamental familiarity with the facts particularly given that all the facts and the full back story have been out there and easily accessible since 2003. But no. Given what I read the facts do not appear to be relevant to Ms. Todd’s work which means that on it’s face it is without merit and a rip off, even at $2.99. I have seen many reader reviews lamenting that unlike higher priced downloads, there are no refunds at $2.99. Caveat emptor always. Downloaded essays and stories at this price point are more “you pays your money and takes your chances.”

Ms. Todd has just been nominated for a “prestigious nonfiction award” according to a bulletin from the community college where she works: “Independent journalist, lawyer and part-time Seneca professor Paula Todd’s “Extreme Mean” has been nominated for the 2014 Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize for Nonfiction.”

“Extreme Mean,” is a shrill, morally outraged, typical of Todd over-the-ton examination of the growing trend of cyber-bullying and the psychological damage it inflicts on its victims.

Hopefully, this effort contains more facts than fiction. Regardless, it is part of the ongoing onslaught elevating the poisonous culture of victimology in which we live.

Todd has written a blog on her publisher’s website to help promote “Extreme Mean” that in my opinion goes way over the top.

It is in the form of an “open letter” to Robin Williams’ distraught daughter, Zelda (who Todd doesn’t know from Adam) entitled “Why the Internet Needs Zelda Williams.”

Apparently, in the course of “blaming” Ms. Williams for her father’s suicide some extremely mean cyberabusers known as “RIP trolls” posted pictures of a corpse (alleged to be her father’s) with strangulation marks on the neck.

This was understandably unendurable for Zelda Williams and she reasonably stopped tweeting and quit social media altogether.

Todd references the picture of the corps twice in the relatively short blog in which she proclaims solidarity with Ms. Williams, telling her she knows how she feels and pleads with her to reconsider and come back to social media because we “need” reasonable and sensitive people like her?

It seems to me that this kind of posturing has become a trope in Ms. Todd’s oeuvre where by she adopts the mantle of everywoman and then goes on catalogue her empathy and understanding and sympathy while graphically descibing the the bad behaviors she decries.

Here’s an excerpt from the blog: “But how does sending a close up of a strangled corpse (2nd mention of the corpse in the “open letter” to Zelda) to the deceased’s family register protest against public mourning, or “grief tourism,” as it’s called? Are you, Zelda, being blamed for using social media to reach out to shocked family, friends, and fans? Surely, we all have a right—a psychological need, actually—to express our emotions. Your father was a candid veteran of the drug and alcohol wars of celebrity, an intellectual fighting depression and oncoming Parkinson’s, and a man who endured his demons to bring us entertainment. Nothing gives cyberabusers the right to censor any of our reactions to his passing.”

So Paula Todd is qualified to “explain” the world to Zelda Williams and clearly thinks that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

There is something troubling about this. To me, it’s self-serving and opportunistic. But I don’t think I’m expressing myself particularly well. Everyone one is to one degree or another self-serving and opportunistic. Read Ms. Todd’s blog and tell me what you think?

LAW AND DISORDER BONA FIDES – PT. II

It happens more often than not.

Two days after Michael Brown was shot dead by a white cop in a predominately black neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri, 25-year-old Ezell Ford was shot and killed by police in South Los Angeles. That’s Rodney King territory. But I’ll wager dollars to donuts you know absolutely nothing about Mr. Ford’s untimely passing, probably haven’t even heard about it.

Like Brown, Ford was young, black and unarmed. Like police in Missouri, the LA cops did not immediately released the cops’ names that shot Ford or release the autopsy report. But there is no rioting or looting in South LA.

Why is one shooting covered relentlessly for a week and the other completely ignored?

It’s taken 20 years but in the wake of the acquittal of the thug cops who beat Rodney King senseless and the subsequent destructive rioting, police and black community organizers in South LA have learned something about detente.

Immediately after Ford’s shooting local police maintained a relatively low profile – no tanks or armored personal carriers or cops in full army combat gear; rather a handful of bicycle-riding cops in polo shirts patrolled the streets.

As you might expect the whole community was just as pissed as the one in St. Louis but in L.A. the Police Chief and other top-ranking officials showed up for a community meeting at the local church and did more listening than talking. When a private audience was demanded by one of the most prominent community leaders it was granted.

In many precincts in LA, cops stay in regular touch with major community organizers. Likewise, organizers and local church leaders have various cops’ phone numbers memorized. When protests are planned, seasoned organizers let police know, even when they’re the targets.

It doesn’t mean that policing is necessarily any better or different in LA than it is here in my stomping ground or St. Louis.

In fact, it happens way more in Los Angeles the most other places. LAPD police have shot and killed 12 people like Brown and Ford so far this year. Since 2007, 300 people have been shot dead during conflicts with the LAPD.

This time there was nothing for the media to shoot in LA. And there was probably some discussion about the unwillingness to put the Justice system in disrepute if two very similar incidents were sensationalized within a span of 48 hours.

Back to my bona fides:

I have so successfully infiltrated, investigated and written about police and prosecutors, their manipulations and motivations, their ineptitude and malfeasance the powers-that-be decided to make me the subject of an eight-year long investigation.

I was twice arrested and twice put on trial, first in early 1998 for three years and again in 2003 for another three. (On the first occasion I was charged with two or three counts of breach court order/ publication ban.

After a six-month investigation the police concluded that 18 pages in my book “Invisible Darkness: The Horrifying Case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka” could not have been written unless I had seen the visual portion of the videotape evidence restricted by court order during the Bernardo trial in the summer of 1995.

I was acquitted of those charges in late 2000.

In 2003, I was criminally charged with 104 counts, disobey court order/publication ban, 5 counts of improper storage of firearms and the Attorney General of Ontario sued me in civil court as an “Enemy of the State.”

Years later, when they were blatantly shown (i.e. we had the goods on them) that they had committed gross “abuses of processs,” I agreed to plead guilty to one count, misdemeanor, breach of publication ban.

In return the firearms charges were dismissed along with the other one hundred and three court order breach charges, half of which were felonies each one of which carried a penalty of two-years plus a day i.e. hard time in the Big House. Also, the Attorney General withdrew the civil lawsuit.

And so it ended.

As a consequence, I have had more direct experience with police and ministries of the attorneys general than 99.9 % of the population in North America and that is quite remarkable, given my disposition: aging, middle-class, well-educated, law-abiding, white male.

Many of the larger writing assignments I’ve accepted over the years brought me into the ambit of authority. Then again, what is true for the majority of the population is also true for writers.

The majority of writers and journalists in North America do not have any direct experience or exposure to the courts, the offices of the district attorneys or their handmaidens, the police. Certainly not both sides. Certainly not as a thorough researcher and writer on the one hand and a criminally accused and prosecuted on the other.

I am also unique among the legion of talking heads and pontificators with their blogs, books, pedigrees and degrees, in law and criminology and what-have-you; I am not on one side or the other: Got no dog in the fight, no reputation to maintain.

Crime beat reporters might be thought an exception, except theirs is a symbiotic not a critical or even investigative relationship to police and prosecutors. And none that I know of have ever been arrested, criminally charged and prosecuted for almost a decade.

Most appear to be beards or apologists for police. Even so, even were Noam Chomsky and I wrong about how the media functions – or dysfunctions – in the world of daily reportage, crime beat reporters are a small minority of which I am definitely not one. I have never worked for any news media organizations. And I am at this time not aware of any who have ever been arrested and criminally charged with felony crimes.

As described, my expertise is rooted in a couple of the more difficult topics I chose to write about – the sexual homicide of a Toronto shoeshine boy, Emmanuel Jacques by four pedophiles in the late 70s and published in a magazine entitled “Sympathy for the Devil.”

More recently, the crimes, trials and incarcerations of Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo, a large, complicated case I wrote about exhaustively and definitively in two books, “Invisible Darkness” and “Karla: A Pact with the Devil,” both initially published in North America by the Random House Group.

As a consequence of getting the back story right and bringing facts into the public domain that the authorities spent enormous time and money, I was taken down like a drug dealer in the kitchen of my old farmhouse at 6 AM Sunday morning by a dozen heavily armed cops, spent a weekend in jail, was subsequently raided and put out of my house for a 24-hour period while the goon squad ransacked the place.

Both my wife’s and my computers, backup and voluminous files were seized, and in spite of the eventual favorable outcome, never returned, I was relentlessly prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Both criminally and civilly, although there was nothing civil about it.

This sort of thing brings back ugly memories and I’ve never been at all convinced that writing is a cathartic excercise. For me, it’s just hard. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop. There’s one more section on this topic to come.

LAW AND DISORDER BONA FIDES – PT. I

Here we go again: Another unarmed black man in an amazingly racist America shot dead in the afternoon by another white cop, buried in Missouri in August, amid rhetorical old-timey black gossip preacher ellipticisms “calls for yet more action and civilized behavior”.

Reminds me of David Wiffen’s great, wholly unappreciated song “More Often Than Not”:

“Well, have I not been quite far enough
How many times do you have to die now
How many sets has it been
Not another one, oh no
And would you believe
That it happens more often than not…”

What about all those other (legion) calls for action in Los Angeles after a posse of cops beat the living shit out of a defenseless Rodney King and, in spite of the fact it was all caught on video, (then highly unusual unequivocal evidence of mindless racist authoritarian violence) a white jury acquitted the whole bloody lot, inciting the most extended, nightmarish race riot in the City of Angel’s history.

What about Montgomery and Mobile and Mississippi? One thing history tells us: It happens more often than not, and will continue to do so.

There are the mourners and celebrities and community activists, not necessarily the same ones or as many “A” listers for Michael Brown, but reasonable facsimiles.

I met Rubin Carter once. I heard Bob Dylan’s anthem. Carter died a bitter man, estranged from the Canadian “family” who “saved” him and betrayed (at least in his eyes) by James Lockyer and the organization for the wrongly convicted Carter endorsed and worked tirelessly for up here in the Great White North, land of hewers of wood, drawers of water where the rallying cry is not “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” rather “law, order and good government”. A nation shaped by an anomaly, Rubin should have known he would never be entirely at home in a Hypocracy.

Another black man (or boy), unarmed, shot dead in the street by a white cop in broad daylight. At Kent State it was white children shot dead by white National Guardsmen. At Sandy Hook the child killer was indiscriminate. He didn’t care what color the children were.

Yesterday it was Michael Brown they eulogized in St. Louis at the Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church.

“There is a cry being made from the ground, not just for Michael Brown, but for the Trayvon Martins, for those children in Sandy Hook Elementary School, the Columbine massacre, for black on black crime,” is how the Rev. Charles Ewing, Brown’s uncle, put it at his nephew’s funeral last Monday afternoon, August 25th.

“Something is rotten in the State of Denmark,” is the way Shakespeare put it. And indeed there is something rotten at the heart of our democracy.

It is by no means immediately evident. If it were that short litany of recent outrages would not have been available to Rev. Ewing.

Like Henry James “figure in the carpet” or an Escher drawing, it takes proximity and close scrutiny to discern. But when the configuration of seemingly discordant shapes and patterns yields a picture, as it invariably does, it paints a nightmarish panorama and tells a story both disturbing and revelatory.

Perhaps because it points to something that is fundamentally wrong in how we recruit, teach, instruct and configure the minions who man those institutions responsible for seeing Justice done, the “figure” that reverses out has never been closely examined, at least not in a sustained, accessible way. Thus its recognition brings out ennui not revolution.

Or perhaps the deep, structural fissures and systemic anomalies in our institutions of law and order have been, by virtue of the very impenetrability of their thick, institutional carapaces, impervious to investigation.

These are institutions and individuals sworn to “serve and protect” but they are among the least devout and most secretive in the world. They have been allowed to evolve that way. And it seems that our collective willpower and attention span are even shorter than news cycles. We are a society of social amnesiacs.

Whatever, I decided to try and configure the patterns in an intelligible way in this blog called “Law and Disorder: Analyzing Disorderly Conduct” as much to corral my own disparate thoughts and ideas about the topic as for whatever readership it may garner.

You may well ask, as Penny Wharvey McGill did in Oh Brother! Where Art Thou about Everett, (played by George Clooney) when she says to him “Vernon here’s got a job. Vernon’s got prospects. He’s bona fide. What are you?”

Indeed. What qualifies me to add my voice to the cacophony of all the other stutterers and pontificators out there? What are my bona fides?

Simple. The melodious lyric of Joni Mitchell‘s “Both Sides Now” – I’ve seen them, I’ve been up close and personal on both sides of the law for decades now and therefore uniquely qualified to analyze and criticize. And until you’ve walked a mile in my shoes don’t doubt it.

If you do doubt it stay tuned. Part 2 in the next day or two.

WHERE PAUL BERNARDO USED TO LIVE – PT III

My friend, the great photographer Geoffrey James, was able to get an all-access pass to Kingston Penitentiary, including the Segregation Unit and those cells only moments before occupied by such murderous sexual deviates as Saul David Betesh, Paul Bernardo and Russell Williams.

As with all great art there is precedent and tradition. Prisons are not a common subject in the societal lexicon or dialogue – they should be but they’re not; in photography or in life. But the formidable American shooter Danny Lyon has done it before, in the 1960s.

In Lyon’s case, he somehow talked his way into a number of operating prisons in Texas and got loose on the ranges and among the work crews. The results are quite remarkable. Not so easy getting access here. As Geoffrey is quick to point out, “Americans are different, they have no shame.”

Years ago, shortly before it was scheduled to close, Geoffrey tried to talk Eastern State Penitentiary officials in Philadelphia into a similar project but the vagaries of bureaucratic thinking denied him the necessary timely permissions and, as Geoffrey also said to me “once they say no, it’s forever.”

“So the trick this time was to never let anyone say no.”

Ironically, Eastern State, transformed into a successful tourist attraction, now encourages everyone to bring a camera. Bringing his camera, a digital Leica Rangefinder and taking pictures inside Eastern State now would be completely pointless for James. The part Geoffrey needed to capture is gone. Very soon after an institution like a prison or an asylum closes, it irrevocably changes and thereafter, “it too is gone forever.”

In a process that is somewhat magical what was once a Gothic house of horror becomes a tourist trap and just as they arrive in droves at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater so to do tourists attend prisons like Eastern State and the Ohio State Reformatory (the 250,000 square-foot facility where “The Shawshank Redemption was shot in 1994) by the tens of thousands. Snapping pictures is what tourists do; it is not what Geoffrey James does.

Geoffrey has well learned over the years what all good investigative journalists know: “Never rush in and get a no.”

Chains of command must be learned. There are far more people in a bureaucracy that can say “no” than “yes. You have to know, literarily and figuratively, from whom you are seeking permission and what they may require to say “yes”.

In Geoffrey’s case he found his way to the right Regional Commissioner of Corrections, who he understood to have been the warden of the Kingston Prison For Women (K4W) where Karla Homolka was housed for the first 4 years of her sentence. It was similarly closed by the correctional authority for good when the last prisoner was transferred out in May 2008. The walls have been demolished and the property now belongs to Queen’s University.

The Commissioner understood implicitly what Geoffrey meant when he said the work had to be done immediately before the renovators moved in, while the laundry is still undone, because once closed and tampered with, the prison part of the facility evaporates.

She was predisposed to Geoffrey’s project because she knew exactly what he meant when he talked about evanescence and immediacy, to get in and start shooting right away even before all the prisoners had been relocated.

A prison is evacuated according to the incarcerated individual’s assessed risk level – the most dangerous first the least last. There are other considerations but that is the main criteria.

Some of the portraits of the inmates that were still there waiting to be moved (to where God and the prison authority only knows) are among the most haunting in the book.

Change is very difficult for the institutionalized – think about Brooks (James Whitmore) the old con in The Shawshank Redemption and the most gentle, wise and kind character in the movie.

When released after 50 years, Brooks hangs himself.

Shortly after they learn of Brooks’ fate, contraband smuggling con Red (Morgan Freeman) explains what it means to be “institutionalized” to Brooks’ best friends, fellow con Heywood (William Sadler) and convicted murderer Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), the protagonist of this thoroughly compelling picture: “The man’s been in here fifty years. Fifty years! This is all he knows. In here, he’s an important man. He’s an educated man. Outside, he’s nothin’! Just a used up con with arthritis in both hands….These walls are funny. First you hate ’em, then you get used to ’em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them.”

The thirty-foot high, 10 foot thick limestone walls of the historic Kingston Penitentiary are those walls

The Shawshank Redemption was filmed on location in the famed Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio. As did Eastern State Penitentiary, the Ohio State Reformatory has been transmuted into a tourist magnet that has helped boost the economy of Manifield and the surrounding counties. Last year, the O.S.R. had 80,000 visitors. The 250,000-square-foot fortress, first opened in 1896, a number of years after the Kingston Penitentiary, has become a state landmark. Today it is as important to the local economies of the three or four surrounding counties as it was when it was a functioning prison.

Geoffrey James new book “Inside” about the historical Kingston Penitentiary has achieved his goal. All kinds of institutional cruelty as well as accomplishment, the troubling ambiguity that characterizes North American penal history, is palpable in many of the un-peopled photographs that otherwise appear to be, on the surface, explorations of architectural accents and angles.

It is thoroughly evocative collection that fully captures the spirit of place.

In many of the photographs the claustrophobic cells look like their occupants have just gone out to the canteen. Much of the prisoner’s artwork (some of it truly remarkable,) old-timey pin-ups and newspaper clippings still cling to the walls. Bunks appear just slept in with unlaundered blankets askew. The resulting collection of photographs, captions and short revealing endnote written by James is a disturbing, thought-provoking, completely original narrative that elegizes at the same time as it eulogizes… and indicts.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian novelist said, “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” That has been my direct experience and its truth is manifest in Geoffrey James “Inside.”

This book of photographs, captions and short essay is exactly what Geoffrey James is all about: Composing narratives with magnificently rendered still photographs that capture both the past and the future.

He did this with his first published collection in 1989. la campagna Romana which appears to be a fine suite of beautifully framed landscape photographs taken with his “primitive, shoe-box panoramic camera.” It is, in fact, about the same thing “Inside” is about: the photographer’s search for something ineffable, in the case of la campagna Romana, the famed Roman countryside and whether it actually still exists.

In the preface to la campagna Romana Geoffrey James says “my journey, rather than leading to any kind of understanding of this landscape, brought only a dawning sense of the labyrinthine complexity of Italian life, of the manner in which the political permeates everything… at Castel di Leva, just south of Rome (Plate 17), I talked with a shepherd’s wife while staring across the GRA at a vast Eurosprawl of radio towers and supermarkets and military barracks – a vision, if ever there was one, of the future of campagna.”

Change a few nouns and verbs the same could be said about “Inside”. It’s about his search for the truth about prison, about it’s soul, no matter how dark, and what it says about our civilization.

Because he sees in this world – as it is immediate and inexorably captured by the lens – another world, perhaps one more real, with some vestige of truth, the one jagged piece of the jigsaw puzzle that allows for a multi-diminsional, integrated apperception. He thinks this might be it and that’s why he bothered.

Greater than the sum of its parts, “Inside” will be published on September 18 by Black Dog Publishing, London, England with support from the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, On.

WHERE PAUL BERNARDO USED TO LIVE – PART II

Taking a sip of white wine, Geoffrey James told me about meeting the prison librarian while in the prison shooting photographs for his new book “Inside”. A very pleasant woman close to retirement, the topic of Paul Bernardo came up.

I asked why? “Because,” Geoffrey said, “the media somehow got a hold of the idea that Bernardo was working in the library and created a mild regional and institutional disturbance. She was astonished because nothing could have been further from the truth.”

She explained that Bernardo spent a good deal of his time writing “grievances,” not a particularly unusual activity for longer-term residents.

Those incarcerated in Canadian prisons have rights (so to speak) and one of those rights is to formally complain about anything that may be amiss or awry (in the prisoner’s judgment) to do with their treatment by the prison. “It’s a Canadian thing.”

For instance, if a prisoner is well-behaved and orderly it is that prisoner’s “right” to have a job. Prison jobs pay a pittance – the Harper government recently changed the daily wage from $7 to $5 – but, of course, it’s not about the money.

On the inside, having something to do, anything, is better than nothing. Inside or out, idle hands do the Devil’s work. Bernardo had not been assigned a job in the long years since he was incarcerated – for life – in 1995. And he wanted one. It was his right.

Prisoners’ grievances can, and occasionally do end up in a federal court if the correctional bureaucracy is particularly recalcitrant and unreceptive. Grievances get lost.

As is often the case in bureaucracies that set up systems for communication and petition, his first two or three attempts were rebuffed. He appealed.

Just before the matter was going to be elevated to an outside court, the prison gave him a job. The gate keepers had no appetite for airing such dirty laundry and bring Bernardo’s name back into the press which it would have done had some intrepid ink-stained wretch found Bernardo’s name on some federal court’s docket.

Regardless, the fact that Bernardo was given a job got out. There are gremlins everywhere; completely skewed, it got out.

On August 13, 2013, CHCH-TV a local Hamilton-based station, finally gave Paul Bernardo what he’s always wanted: a taste of the kind of hysterical attention that has followed his ex-wife Karla. Since Karla left Paul nothing has gone right and now he’s doing life in the big house in a 6′ x 8′ closet-sized cell 24/7 365 per, on the seg row in whatever federal prison he’s put in.

The 2:51 second CHCH-TV item went like this:

Nick the News anchor: “Sadistic killer Paul Bernardo may be staying in a maximum security prison. But according to what Donna French has been told, the man who tortured and killed her daughter Kristen, is living a cushy life behind bars.”

Then, over a series of fast cuts of the killer and his then wife Karla in the back of police cars, being escorted by police hither and yon, stills of the young victims, a clip or two from Paul and Karla’s voluminous home videos, the usual visual accoutrement and bric-a-brac of the psychopathic sex killer programming unfolds for 15 – 20 seconds to reporter Lauran Sobouran’s breathless voice-over:

“Bernardo is one of the most despicable criminals in Canada he drugged and sexually assaulted his sister-in-law Tammy Lyn Homolka and with the help of his wife Karla he tortured and strangled Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. The heinous crime spree would have continued if Karla hadn’t started talking when he nearly beat her to death. Bernardo was declared a dangerous offender the public led to believe he would be locked up for life.”

Cut to (CT) a close up (CU) of Donna French, Kristen French’s mother with a police car (inexplicably) in the shot:

“I was sure that he would be in solitary confinement forever. They wrote us a few months ago… it hadn’t just happened it had been a couple of years I believe… ”

(While Mrs. French speaks the camera closes in first on her right profile and then switches to the left. An old television technique to maximize the viewer’s sympathy and accentuate empathy.)

V.O. (Voice Over)

“Donna French was shocked to learn that Bernardo is now out of solitary confinement working in the prison library… Donna French is upset, people in St. Catharines infuriated”

CT medium shot of a person in a St. Catharines mall identified as “Catherine Pickenuck” “infuriated”:

“He should be locked up for 23 hours a day, what he did to those girls (her voice-breaking…)”

CT a younger, attractive, animated woman with sunglasses probably in the same mall identified as “Jody Curry” “Bernardo should be locked up”:

“What he did to those girls was horrendous… There’s no way he should be sitting in a library or restocking shelves. It’s awful I even get choked up (fanning herself with her right hand like an actress who has just received an cherished award,) I grew up in Scarborough so I remember, it’s awful” (breaks down in tears).

Because she is attractive and animated and cries on cue Jody gets the lion’s share of the airtime in this two minute and fifty-one second piece.)

VO: “20 years after the Bernardo/Homolka crime spree people react like it happened yesterday…”

Cuts to a couple of other woman in the mall parking lot who have very similar opinions to Catherine and Jody.

CT medium shot of reporter Lauran Sobouran standing in the Grace Lutheran Church parking lot. The church sign behind here says “May Jesus Bless Richly Lyne and Craig.”

Lauran Sobouran holding the microphone: “Now, the anger and raw emotion is still so intense for many in this community that they can’t even drive by the Grace Lutheran Church parking lot where Kristen was abducted without all those nightmarish memories coming back to them.”

CT a still visibly upset Jody Curry: “If you remember (pause) it was an absolutely horrific thing, (pause) you know we weren’t even allowed to walk in the street…Why should he get anything?”

In direct contrast to this remarkable bit of fetishistic television, Paul Bernardo’s status as a completely isolated segregated prisoner had not changed and it never will.

Unlike many prisons in the United States, no prison in Canada has ever lost a “skin beefer” (con-speak for convicted child rapists and killers. Cons don’t make the fine distinction between teens and children the FBI Behavioral Unit does.) Since the 1972 riots in Kingston Penitentiary, described so graphically by ex-con Roger (Mad Dog) Caron’s influential 1978 memoir Go Boy! Memories of a Life Behind Bars no one has been killed while incarcerated in a federal penitentiary.

Because their mandate is to isolate these offenders and keep them alive, in the true British tradition to bureaucratic fidelity, our Correctional Service has been exceptionally good at keeping prisoners such as Paul Bernardo, The Shoeshine Boy killer Saul David Betesh and most recently the cross-dressing murderer, ex-Colonel Russell Williams alive.

Bernardo, like the rest of his sort, spends at least 23 hours a day locked in a 6′ x 8′ closet, isolated in a special unit Mrs. French called “solitary confinement” with the few other segregated or isolated prisoners they have in the system.

After all these sorts of criminal are the rarest of the rare and Canada only has a total of around 10,000 people held in federal penitentiaries at any given time so there might be ten to a dozen lifers such as these. They were not all housed at the Kingston facility but probably the majority was.

Just to clarify another media myth while I’m at it, no prisoner in Canada has access to email or the Internet and especially those held in a Segregation Unit. A television, sure. Of course the toilet is en suite as is the mounted steel slab that functions as both couch and bed, a table and a chest of drawers, all firmly fixed to the floor. But that’s it. If the individual can afford a computer then they will have one. There’s no wireless in the Big House, at least not in Canada. But be assured with the bare necessities of life in that cell there is barely room for the prisoner, let alone one 6 feet tall with a computer.

I reiterate, Paul Bernardo and the few others held in segregation are completely isolated at all times from all other inmates; they see no one except the correctional service officers assigned to the segregation unit.

If anyone at CHCH-TV had bothered to check they would have discovered the “job” Paul Bernardo was given was that of prison “book reviewer.”-The task of “evaluating all of the books in the prison library fell to him. Hence the librarian’s detailed knowledge of situation.

But Mr. Bernardo did not get to go the library to do his job. The library is accessible to the general population so it is completely inaccessible to any “seg” prisoners. It took them a while to come up with but in the end the correctional services bureaucrats were quite pleased with themselves. They had devised a job for Paul Bernardo for which he did not have to leave his chair let alone his cell.

The books, a few at a time, were brought to Bernardo by a guard. When he finished reviewing those, a few more were delivered. And so began another lonely enterprise in absolute futility that ostensibly would go on forever, like his incarceration in virtually total isolation, until he died.

Except it didn’t.

When they closed the prison, Bernardo lost his job. And there is no guarantee that his new stewards will be as innovative as the former. Or, perhaps they have already given that job to one of the other seg boys moved to the maximum facility at Millhaven with Bernardo. I don’t know. Nor do I care.

The librarian pointed out the almost inconceivable tedium of Bernardo’s claustrophobic existence to Geoffrey.

She explained that sometimes the guards forgot, or were too “busy”, to facilitate the hour-a-day that Bernardo, and his confreres, were each supposed to get, alone in the exercise yard.

It’s hard to contemplate, she said; living in a closet-sized cell. Seeing only the same few guards day-in and day-out. Reviewing stacks of old used books for a few dollars a day. If you asked her, a person would be better off dead.

Bernardo probably agrees. Betesh did, way back when and yet he’s still around lost somewhere in the catacombs of dim institutional memory and bureaucratic efficiency.
Bernardo and his plight really have absolutely nothing to do with Geoffrey’s project and had the media not made such a ridiculous spectacle of itself Bernardo’s name might never have come up. But the librarian was clearly struck by the strange incongruity of it all and what seemed an infinite capacity on the part of the media to get it wrong, damn the consequences or cost.

In spite of the fact that my biography of Paul Bernardo in Invisible Darkness is the most comprehensive and complete in existence, Geoffrey well knows I have never had any interest in Bernardo. To me he was never more than the Ken on Barbie’s arm. Geoffrey told this anecdote because it illustrated an increasingly dysfunctional legacy media that he knows is something in which I have an abiding interest.

My pitch to the publishers for a contract and advance to write Invisible Darkness ” was very short.

In one paragraph it posed only two questions: “What was the pretty young wife doing all the while her husband was out raping and pillaging? That and how they eluded discovery for such an extended period of time.

When I sent the my “pitch” out on a quiet Sunday afternoon to half-a-dozen publishers – by fax – in early 1993, email was the purview of academia and the military. There was no Facebook, no Twitter, and no texting.

After reading a long front-page story of Bernardo’s arrest in a newspaper in which the fact that he had a young wife who was from St. Catharines was buried deep in the copy, I had absolutely no idea how far-ranging and truly bizarre the answer would be. (To be continued)

WHERE PAUL BERNARDO USED TO LIVE – PART I

I had not heard from Geoffrey James for years. His is a hand-made, civilized life. He’s a man of the world with refined tastes so he got my immediate attention with his opening gambit: An invitation to come up to his studio and see a picture he recently took of Paul Bernardo’s prison cell literally hours after it was vacated.

“Got my attention” is a gross understatement. I was gob smacked. Geoffrey is one of the world’s great photographers. And not one I would ever imagine having any interest in taking a picture of such a feckless sex killer’s cell. I really had no interest in Bernardo, I couldn’t imagine that Geoffrey did. And I was right.

Over a light lunch of crusty fresh bread, cheese, pate and chilled white wine he explained that he couldn’t resist because he knew such a invitation would cause me considerable psychic dissonance.

He knows that I was one of the very few journalists in history ever allowed singular entry to Kingston Penitentiary for the specific purpose of interviewing an incarcerated sex killer.

It was a long time ago.

Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister. And the degree of difficultly was such that I had to ultimately get a ministerial directive from then Attorney General Jean-Jacques Blais because there was no way the warden or the Regional Commissioner of Corrections was going to let a journalist cause as much discord and tension inside the institution that such a visit would precipitate. Because the prisoner in question was high-profile and isolated in the Segregation Unit – he would not have lasted a day in general population – they had to lock down all the other inmates to safely facilitate the interview for as long as it took. It was the rare exception to an unwritten bureaucratic rule where a “no” meant “no” forever. It was an institutional nightmare and no one was happy about it.

My interview subject was the Shoeshine Boy Killer Saul David Betesh.

Circa 1977 – 79 I was assigned to write a long piece for “Toronto Life Magazine” called “Sympathy for the Devil” which, among much else, documented exactly how Betesh and three of his cohorts kidnapped, raped and murdered a twelve-year-old Portuguese immigrant named Emmanuel Jacques.

The warden and the prison staff were not the only ones who saw me as a duplicitous pirrahea. It was a controversial case in part because the killers had taken a series of over three hundred Polaroids documenting virtually every moment of the rape and murder.

In those days, homicide detectives often liked journalists and were inclined to cooperate and talk. I managed to get a hold of all those Polaroids without much difficultly. When flipped like a deck of cards, what the photographs depicted came magically alive like Helios‘ racehorse-in-motion. It was without exception the most horrifying spectacle in my life and indelibly imprinted on my psyche.

Geoffrey understood something about that article, it’s motivation and all my subsequent work that most people (including many so-called learned men and women in the fields of criminology let alone the myriad hacks on this continent that call themselves journalists) do not. While that article and others I’ve written and my books may have been read, few have really read them.

He knows that I am not particularly interested in crime per say rather the effect unusual and bizarre criminal behavior has on our institutions of law and order and their purveyors and practitioners such as police, prosecutors, including attorneys general, court clerks, expert witnesses, defense lawyers, the correctional service and its minions: All bureaucracies that are secretive and otherwise imprevious to scrutiny.

High profile over the top crime tends to create cracks in their otherwise impenetrable carapace of power, privilege and paranoia.”

As Leonard Cohen wrote “cracks are where the light gets in.”

Mr. James’ interest was not in Paul Bernardo about whom he could give a rat’s ass, it was the penitentiary.

Geoffrey James also knew that since those days and that experience I maintained an abiding interested in that particular institution and its history.

He well knew that I did not consider Bernardo an “important” or “interesting” figure any more than I did Betesh – perhaps even less than Betesh who was, like Bernardo, a monster and a most disagreeable interlocutor because, like most monsters, he is mundane and infantile.

The boundaries between fiction and non-fiction have become blurred by our unfettered interest in serial offenders of all descriptions. It is why “Criminal Minds” is one of the longest running shows in television history. And wildly popular. Has anyone noticed that it’s not very good, repetitive and boring?

Remember people, Hannibal Lecter is a fictional character. Silence of the Lambs is a great movie, even better book but Thomas Harris made it all up. Neither is there anyone in the Behaviorial Science Unit of the FBI that even remotely resembles Clarice Starling.

So is my other favorite. John Doe (played by Kevin Spacey)in the chilling 1995 “Seven“. Even a little bit of study will tell you how far these serial fiends are from real serial fiends.

The telephone call was Geoffrey’s opening gambit to set me up for a full preview of his latest project called Inside which documents, at some length and compelling detail, the recently closed Kingston Penitentiary, the most famous prison in the country.

A few years after it was opened Charles Dickens toured the facility in 1842 and pronounced it “an admirable gaol.”

In the tradition of transforming historic correctional institutions into tourists’ traps, as Pennsylvia did with Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, the government decided it was high time that Kingston’s doors be closed to its original purpose which it was on September 30, 2013.

And the moment those massive doors were closed they opened for Geoffrey James and he became the first photographer in history ever allowed inside – at least the first with his camera and equipment and a full mandate to document what it had become since Dickens’ had his look about. (To be continued).

PRISON GROUPIES

This past Thursday, (July 3, 2014) I awoke to what can only be described as a squall, a minor atmospheric disturbance. In a world consistently assaulted by media frenzies – days-long torrential blah blah, blah blah fests, talking heads and hurricane-force chattering clashes, tsunamis of crazy opinions offered by individuals with questionable intellectual pedigree, this was nothing. A momentarily, strictly regional thunderstorm. 

A few examples:

 Yahoo News
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/dailybrew/notorious-killer-paul-bernardo-reportedly-set-marry-ontario-152004508.html

 National Post
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/07/03/christie-blatchford-there-are-reasons-beyond-salaciousness-to-revive-the-story-of-paul-bernardo/

London Free Press
http://www.lfpress.com/2014/07/03/paul-bernardo-plans-to-marry-ontario-woman

 Toronto Star
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014/07/04/paul_bernardos_wouldbe_wife_not_alone_in_weird_attraction_dimanno.html

 According to the tabloid press, from which all other outlets culled their information, a 30-year old, well-educated woman from a caring family in London, Ontario had become infatuated with convicted sex killer Paul Bernardo, currently in residence in an 8′ x 10′ cell at the Millhaven Institution near Kingston, On. She has told friends they intend to marry and someone leaked the information.

 This I learned in an email from London, On. talk show radio host Craig Needles inviting me to add my two cents to the cacophony. It would be impolite not to respond so I did. You can review my comments in the last half of an article posted on the radio station’s web page entitled “Government Unable to Prohibit Paul Bernardo From Communicating With London Bride-to-Be” (and possibly hear) at this link: http://www.am980.ca/2014/07/04/21952/

 I also concurrently received an email from Chris, a blind reader of one of my two books on the case, that began with the expressive acronym “WTF?”

 “Quite simply … WTF??
Will the Bernardo/Humolka case just never go away?
Is Bernardo actually capable of manipulating this woman in London, or is she just sick in the head, or perhaps both?
I’m sure you hear this a lot but ..
I came of age during the whole sordiTd affair in the early 90’s. I’ve since listened to your second book, a Pact with the Devil, thanks to CNIB having recorded it for us blind folks.”

To answer Chris’s second question, probably not. Not as long as there is a tabloid press that believes they are our eyes and ears on the vanguard and it is our right “to know”, whether we want to or not.

Certainly not as long as the tabloid-tempered are not jailed like one of their most fierce and fearless was for his part in the infamous British phone hackinig scandal.

Andy Coulson was the editor of Rupert Murdoch’s then 168-year-old sleaze fest “News of the World” and the former media chief for British Prime Minister David Cameron who sagely said upon learning of his friend’s conviction: “What this says is that it’s right that justice should be done and that no one is above the law” blah blah… http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/07/04/britain-hacking-idINKBN0F90S420140704

Not as long as there are misogynistic ministers of Justice who are completely ignorant of the internal machinations of those hopelessly conflicted institutions of punishment and rehabilitation in his purview such as our own Peter MacKay.

In the article in which I am quoted on AM980’s web page they also quote him: “We can’t stop the person from communicating through letters and emails unless there is something that is seen as harassing or criminal in it’s intent.”

The fact is no prisoner in Canada is allowed to communicate through email. Here is the government rule: http://www.csc-scc.gc.ca/text/plcy/cdshtm/085-cde-eng.shtml. All MacKay had to do was google it.

In fact, it is so difficult to communicate with anyone on the “inside” that friends and family of the incarcerated have developed a very active and well subscribed list-serve to share their experiences, frustrations and best practices for staying in touch with loved ones in prison: http://www.prisontalk.com/forums/archive/index.php/f-1403.html

If Peter MacKay does not know such stuff, what, I ask, could he possibly do about anything except   (like every politician who has ever lived), gratuitously pander to memories of innocence once again: Right after he demonstrates he knows nothing about the subject at hand “the minister says whenever he hears Bernardo’s name, he thinks about his victims”! Blah blah blah. 

When criticized the media always say it only covers stories that it knows its readers/listeners/views want. It never says how it knows. 

It’s hard to imagine that anyone wants this much coverage of something that is simultaneously irrelevant, rude, absurd, sad and yesterday’s news. 

If no one could do anything about Karla Homolka’s criminally light sentence, her release from jail in 2005 – absolutely free and clear – (including that disgraced former Attorney General for Ontario, Michael Bryant who spent millions of the taxpayers hard earned dollars aggrandizing himself in what the media portrayed as a valiant effort to impose Section 810 restrictions on her release – an order that, being an allegedly “brilliant” lawyer himself, he well knew would never be granted) 

What’s to be done about this young woman who wants to be Bernardo’s 2nd wife? Reading the media that’s apparently what everyone wants to know. 

The media reports are all veiled interrogatories about her sanity and ascribe to her what the prosecutors used as a subterfuge for the real reason they made such an unconscionable deal with Bernardo’s first wife oh so long ago; to wit, Karla was under the hypnotic spell of a Svengali-like sadistic sex killer and “forced” to do what she did much like this “fragile” young woman, “seduced” as she had been, by this pasty unattractive man who is kept locked up in a closet virtually 24/7 and with whom it is very difficult to communicate. 

No matter. One “journalist” describes Bernardo as “a singular type of character. Notorious for his cunning and charisma… ” Once again, by whom? 

This characterization of Bernardo is one put forward by the authorities after Bernardo’s arrest and during his trial in an attempt to excuse their inability to catch him and at the very least prevent the deaths of three young women and the rapes of a dozen more. It is not how anyone in possession of his biographical details or any of the actual facts of the case see the man. That portrait is one of a callow, feckless, clumsy, surprisingly stupid, cruel sexual deviate who also happens to be, literally and figuratively, a bastard. 

Regardless of the prisoner’s character flaws, they do not speak to the young woman’s character or motives. There are all kinds of prison groupies and by no means are most sad or mad.

 As that old warhorse of the True Crime genre Clifford L. Linedecker wrote in the introduction to his 1993 mass market paperback Prison Groupies:

“Even though many of the jailhouse Lotharios are drawn from a devil’s roster of some of the most ruthless and sadistic sex thrill killers in America, the women they attract are as likely to be alluring, desirable beauties with intelligence and exciting careers… “

 Linedecker goes on to back up this statement with detailed stories that include the exploits of Danielle Steele, the fabulously wealthy, multi-million-copy selling author of potboiler romances and her coupling with cons, the female lead in Stanley Kubrick’s Hollywood blockbuster “Lolita,” Sue Lyon, and the incarcerated object of her affections, and Mary Evans who was “the beautiful, bright, and educated daughter of a socially prominent and loving well-to-do family.”

 Remember Mary Evans?

 In the early ’80s Mary was a promising young criminal lawyer practicing in Knoxville, Tennessee. She was set to defend a harden criminal named William Timothy Kirk against multiple murder charges. Rather than do that she helped him escape – at gunpoint – and then went with him – four days before his trial. This stunt triggered one of the most highly publicized and substantial manhunts in the history of the South.

 Linedecker’s book documents 20 real-life cases to reinforce and illustrate his point. There are a surprising number of Paul Bernardo types, i.e. “the most ruthless and sadistic sex thrill killers” alive. After all, if they are alive (some aren’t they lived in Texas and got the needle) they can get married, go to the tuck shop once a week, sit in the cells, occasionally make a phone call, read whatever they can get their hands on – not much. That’s about it.

 But one hardly need go back to the early ’90s for such documentation and insight. Oprah did an hour-long television exploration on the subject circa 2010. http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Prison-Weddings

 It occured to me that I should offer Bernardo’s new paramour a copy of Invisible Darkness: The Horrifying Case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. It is the definitive work on the case. And exhaustive. Don’t take my word for it. Check the court records. Over the almost ten years I was unsuccessfully prosecuted for breaching court oders and publication bans, it was “proven beyond a shadow of a doubt” to be the most comprehensive and well-documented account of Paul and Karla’s lives, pre- and post-marriage and their crimes. (All kinds of readers who have posted reviews on various web pages have warned that it’s not for “the faint of heart” or the “squimish”.) Surely, it would turn this young woman off Paul Bernardo?

 Or would it?

 She might misread it, as so many have.

 Even though the prosecutor forcefully pointed out during the Bernardo trial in ’95 that regardless of who actually “took their breath” (referring to Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French) both Paul and Karla were equally guilty of first degree murder. Full stop.

 Although the official story is the one that has held the most sway, i.e. Karla was suffering from Battered Spouse Syndrome and was the “compliant victim of a sexual sadist” suffering from PTSD and one still hears “if only they had discovered the videotape evidence sooner…” Invisible Darkness portrays Karla as the managing and motivating partner and documents the fact that no one died before they moved in together. And videotape had nothing to do with her deals.

 (Also, I have actually had the temerity to point out that no one got raped until after they met in 1987, a fact that some people, particularly police people, vehemently disagree.)

 Further, there is very compelling evidence that Karla was the one that actually took their victims’ breaths, indisputably in the case of her younger sister, a murder for which no one has ever been tried. (I explained why not in both books but most people, even the few who have actually read the books, can’t seem to grasp.)

 What if this… what should I call it – “confusion”- or “interpretation” – is sufficient to drive her into matrimony, thinking. “if Karla made him do it then I can make him into a good God-fearing Christian.” Rather than firmly and unequivocally dissuade her from going through with it? what if it has the exact opposite effect? Everyone knows the road to Perdition is paved with the best of intentions. I would feel badly. I think I’ll just keep my mouth shut.