"The Daily Grind" - 1st Page for Sara

4:45 AM

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard… Ugh. And they’re like, “It’s better than yours…” Must… find…I could teach you, but I’d have to… snooze button. Clearly, setting my alarm clock to the radio was a mistake. In all fairness, though, this has to be at least ten times better than the techno I’m going to have to listen to in half an hour. Fucking Ted and his techno. He got upset yesterday because some “artist” had decided to put words to the music. As if the words were ruining the music, if you can even call that music.

God it’s dark. The first time I work up this early, I remember thinking how much easier it was to open my eyes, because, hell, you don’t have to adjust to the light when the sun hasn’t come up yet. Talk about a bright side… or whatever. Despite the overwhelming joy I feel at not having to strain my eyes, there seems to be a certain nauseous feeling that has escaped my stomach and is currently circulating in my arms and legs. I stumble out of bed. Three bruises and a head bump later I’m in my car, on my way to work.

Four years ago I would’ve laughed at someone like me—a thirty-six year old working some pansy-ass job at a coffee-house, complaining about the early hours and how much cream cheese I have to make. But I needed a change. Not quite the change that my friend had made in college—the high school valedictorian dropping out of UCLA to join the circus. But I needed out. Working fifteen years as a California Highway Patrol Officer, and eventually as a member of the Anti-Narcotics squadron, left me desiring a better patron-client relationship. It didn’t take long for me to realize that people don’t enjoy small talk when they’re being handed a $377 fine for speeding. And you sure as hell can guess how a meth dealer responds to a question about changes in the weather when at that exact moment the sky is crashing down on a business he worked ten years to build.

And there was the whole "ex-wife" thing.

First Page, Shannon

You know Charlie, I could have won the Olympics, the O-fucking-lympics," Monica swore. "God damn these useless legs." She took another gulp of her scotch. Charles shook his head at her. He was her chauffeur, assistant, and best friend. She was on her fifth scotch now and Charles deemed it to be enough.
"Midnight, madam, time for bed," he said in his crisp English accent. He began to steer her wheelchair into her bedroom.
"It's miss thank you. I'm only 32. I'm not a madam yet, Charlie," she snapped, slurring slightly.
"Yes, miss, and call me Charles," he responded. He helped her into bed and then left her small, one-person apartment, pausing a moment to look out the window at the rather picturesque view of yellow, pink, and blue apartments across her street that were so characteristic of San Francisco.
Monica was rudely awakened at eight in the morning by the telephone. As she floundered around in her sheets and blankets trying to disentangle herself, she could feel the hangover destroying her physical, mental, and emotional well-being. She finally got to the phone.
"What!" she snapped.
"Hangover?" a wry voice asked on the other side.
"Oh, what the hell do you want, Kevin?" She knew what the SFPD detective
wanted. He needed help on a case. That was the only time he ever called her, when the
incapable police force could not do its job and needed her expertise.

1st page for Claire

"Esconced in the broken-down bean bag as she was, with the smoke from the bong she held embraced in her lap like a baby enclosing her in its own warm embrace of indifference, the pixielated images on the television seemed to move of their own volition, and she roused her eyelids with difficulty--"
Mentally groaning, she put the book down. Five pages in, she thought, and I'm still hearing about the drinking and weed addictions. Two sentences would have sufficed, maybe even one: "Hi, my name is idiot and I'm an alcoholic AND a dope fiend." Why did publishers think people read detective novels? To read endless pages about being drunk or high and unable to get up out of the beanbag chair? Noooo, for a crime. The only thing criminal so far was the writing. Like a stoner even thinks in words like "pixillated" (hell, even the editor couldn't spell it right) or "volition" or "roused." The author was probably a goddamn English major, using all her fancy words just to show her extensive vocabulary. She rolled her eyes at her thoughts and picked the book back up. "You're cranky," she told herself. She'd give it five more pages: ten pages were enough to know whether a book was about criminal activity or if it would drive you to it.
Thumbing to the right spot again, she heard the coffee percolator in the Kirby's apartment start. No one nowadays knows what a percolator is, but she remembered her grandfather using one. She'd wake up on the couch during summer vacations, smelling the coffee and hearing the bubbly-sounding "perk....perk..." but actually, it sounded more like "pur.......pur.......pur.....pur...puuurrrrrcc..." as the water was forced up around and through the grounds to seep back down again. Evaporated milk and honey in coffee still caused olfactory flashbacks for her. The Kirby's had probably bought theirs new.
Well, if the Kirby's were up, so was she. One of the disadvantages to old apartments was thin walls. And odd as it was, she was even more of a morning lark than the Kirby's. Being a rather clumsy lark, she tried to stay considerately in bed reading for the hour until they woke up at 5 a.m. With something very much like relief, she closed the book and put it aside. Maybe she wouldn't give it five more pages after all.
She wondered as she showered how bad the day was going to be today. Understaffed, underfunded, and overworked, every employee in the department was suffering from bad morale and the resultant bad
attitudes, herself included. Watching her new boss try to cope with it all, she was less resentful every day that management had decided that despite their "desire for honest feedback and constructive suggestions," she was
not what they were looking for as a "team leader." Besides, "team leader" sounded like head migrant of the McDonald's day team...not a loss to her resume.
She gave herself a mental shake: knock it off or you'll create your very own bad day. She didn't know it, but it was going to be a very bad day regardless of her attitude. She should have known it when the hot water ran out much quicker than normal and left her scrambling to turn off the water and shivering in her towel.

Mexico Drug Wars Coverage

The LA Times offers a little background on the military operations the Mexican government and the Sinaloa drug cartel are conducting against each other. The recent action follows the assassination of Mexico's No. 3 law enforcement official, Edgar Millan Gomez in Mexico City by a petty thief who was waiting for him in one of his supposed safe houses. The Mexican government is portraying the violence as the act of a cartel desperate over its weakening by an effective government crackdown.

The newspaper columnist Jorge Fernandez Menendez has a better explanation, one involving money. He compares the current Sinaloa problem to the decline of Medellin godfather Pablo Escobar in the late 1980s: "The weaker Escobar became, the more enemies he made . . . and the less money he had, the more he resorted to violence to take revenge on his enemies and strike fear in them."

It's not clear why the Sinaloa cartel would be running out of money, given their apparent ongoing control of the Pacific coast cocaine transhipment routes. But at least this story about the international drug trade provides a better context for the shoot-outs in Glassell Park than the dumb recent LA Times story about the mother from Guerrero with thirteen gang children.

One of the best pieces on the overall context suggests that the cartels are turning Mexico into a "failed state." This may seem far-fetched. But when Mexico's defense secretary said "Organized crime is not, and can never be, stronger than Mexico," he raised exactly that possibility.

Hollywood Fall Guy

Late last week the Hollywood wiretap case involving Anthony Pellicano came to an end with guilty verdicts for wiretapping, racketeering, and other charges. The good New York Times piece points out that all the potential big fish got away. Maybe this is a script with "third-act problems," but more likely it's a good version of an even more familiar noir script. Possible top targets were never indicted, including Michael S. Ovtiz, the entertainment lawyer Bert Fields, Brad Grey, current studio chief at Paramount, as well as Pellicano customers Chris Rock, Courtney Love, Alec Gores (billionaire acquisitions specialist, Freddy De Mann, Madonna's former manager, Adam D. Sender, a hedge fund manager. In the noir script, folks like this have enough clout to pressure top law enforcement folks to show quick, definitive evidence against them or lay off. In the noir framework, it's not a huge shock that the government failed "to deal any crushing blows to people in power." One legal academic is quoted as saying “If the government has no plans to go higher than Pellicano, this is a depressingly pedestrian effort that shows a lack of ambition." But with all that money getting deposed and put in the witness box, all the ambition in the world doesn't amount to much.

The Problem With Prison

Growing doubts about the value of prison as the country's main mode of crime reduction have hit the Wall Street Journal. A good piece by Gary Fields on Tuesday, May 6th, points out that violent crime is growing again, but that a surprising explanation has cropped up. April 2008 was about 20 percent deadlier than April 2007, and that "the usual reasons - the economy, poverty, gangs and crews, and the availability of firearms" have something to do with it, but can't by themselves explain this sharp a rise.

The explanation that has been "little explore" is "the migration of the prison culture back to the streets. As nearly 700,000 convicts a year return home, some of them may be bringing prison culture with them. 'This is part of the price we're paying for 20 years of mass incarceration,' said David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at New York City's John Jay College of Criminal Justice" (A 16).

What Kennedy means by "prison culture" is the centrality of "respect." "Disrespect can lead to lethal responses at the slightest provocation. . . . There are now many people on the streets who live by a prison code, as the prison population has ballooned to 2.2 million from 330,000 in 1980."

This too is not a total explanation, but mass incarceration has its own noir "blowback" that is finally getting some public attention.

Drug Sting Nabs 75 Students at San Diego State U.

The LA Times coverage of this bust suggested an EME connection, and it's interesting to think of possible connections between specific college frats and the hardcore drug syndicates in Mexico, who some observers believe control the country's federal government, not to mention large swathes of territory, e.g. much of Tijuana. See also Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah, which explains how the Napoli-area "System" and its leading clans have allowed semi-autonomous dealers to access nice middle-class clients like college students without visible mob strings attached.


***

Story by SARA LIPKA, Chronicle of Higher Education
Wednesday, May 7, 2008

A yearlong undercover drug investigation has resulted in the arrests of 75 students at San Diego State University and 21 other people accused of being involved in illegal drug sales there, university and law-enforcement officials announced on Tuesday.

Eighteen students were arrested on Tuesday, and 15 others were arrested in recent weeks, the student newspaper, The Daily Aztec, reported. The other arrests were made over the past 12 months.

During the investigation, officers have seized $100,000 worth of marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy pills, hallucinogenic mushrooms, methamphetamine, and illicit prescription drugs, according to the district attorney's office for San Diego County. The officers also seized four guns, brass knuckles, and $60,000 in cash.

The university's police department started the investigation after a student died of a cocaine overdose in May 2007, the district attorney's office said in a written statement. Federal drug agents joined the investigation about five months ago. During the investigation, another student, from San Diego Mesa College, died of a drug overdose in a San Diego State fraternity house near the campus.

The officers in the investigation infiltrated seven San Diego State fraternities and made more than 130 undercover drug buys, both on and off the campus, officials quoted in news accounts and in the district attorney's statement said.

The officials said that students had coordinated the deals mainly by text messages. In one case, a member of the Theta Chi fraternity sent a mass text message to his "faithful customers," informing them of a "sale" on cocaine after a brief waiting period while he and his "associates" traveled to Las Vegas.

The university's president, Stephen L. Weber, told The San Diego Union-Tribune that faculty and staff members were not informed that the undercover investigation was being conducted on and near the campus.

"This was not a difficult decision," he said. "We needed to do something about it. We're talking about drug trafficking. That's the thing we were not prepared to turn our backs on. We had to deal with this."

San Diego State has suspended all the students who were arrested, pending due-process reviews, Mr. Weber said in a written statement on the university's Web site.

The university is also looking into whether any fraternities were involved organizationally, beyond the actions of individual members. If it finds that they were, Mr. Weber told reporters, those fraternities will be kicked out as campus organizations.

In a statement issued later in the day, the university announced that six fraternities had been placed on "interim suspension," pending hearings.

Among the students arrested were an undergraduate majoring in criminal justice and a master's candidate who was a month away from a degree in homeland security and who worked as a community-service officer under the supervision of the campus police.

In his own statement regarding the arrests, Mr. Weber called the investigation "a big step forward towards a safer environment for our students, faculty, staff, and neighbors."

"Illegal substances are inconsistent with our values and with the pursuit of our mission," he said. "Certainly today's arrests underscore the scope of the challenges universities face as we fight this major societal problem."

Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/05/2757n.htm