The terrible plight of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates reminds me of the best newspaper crime story I ever read.
January, 1973, I had just moved to Metro news at the Times. The editors sent me out to deepest Brooklyn, where jewels had been stolen from the altar of an ornate church. I wrote a wordy lead about the caretaker of the church muttering “Che coraggio” – what gall, in Italian. And I did quote a store owner in the neighborhood, noting the influential persons who supported the church, as saying: “No fence is going to touch this stuff.” But the reporter from the Daily News wrote a classic. I cannot locate the exact words by Frank Faso that day, but his story began something like this: “Some nervy crooks stole the crown jewels from the altar of St. Rosalia Regina Pacis in Brooklyn the other day. “If they are lucky, the police will catch them.” Oh, yeah. How New York. How tabloid. How wonderful. (This was when two great tabloids, New York Newsday and the Daily News, were covering the city with zeal and skill.) I was chastened and respectful. The jewels were recovered 24 hours later. * * * This tale of criminality reminds me of our current administration, in that Manafort and Gates, now making front-page headlines for their stunning variety of indictments, seem to have owed a good deal of money to some other rather unpleasant people – Russians, Russians with a memory, Russians with poisoned umbrellas and lethal cups of tea. Paul Manafort. Is there anything on public record of him ever being or doing anything respectable, before he became an American shill for thuggish Ukrainians and Russians? What did he ever do to put him in the middle of a presidential campaign in a country whose income taxes he had apparently ducked? Who is this guy? He seems to have had money problems, with bad people looking for him, to try to recover millions and millions of dollars. And Gates was a hapless Robin to Manafort’s compulsive Batman. In this, they resemble a couple of pigeons with a gambling jones who bet too much on the third race at Aqueduct or 23 on the roulette table. Suckers. Suckers on the lam. They tried to get it back by aligning themselves with two real-estate hustlers from Noo Yawk and Noo Joisey. If this were a never-released season of “The Sopranos,” we would have new characters, Paulie Peanuts and Rusty Gates, trying to make it all right for themselves by serving in the family of Donnie Combs and his son-in-law Squeaky. But remember in “The Sopranos” -- I have not watched any series since -- how there were always investigators listening on tapped wires, or cooped in a windowless van, or waiting to scoop up a member of the clan for a friendly chat? Paulie Peanuts and Rusty Gates seem to have fallen into the right hands. Now they just have to watch out for lethal umbrellas or laced tea in their next abodes. But wait, there seem to be a few more episodes in the series: What about the money-laundering and real-estate nightmares of Donnie Combs and his son-in-law Squeaky? These guys seem to have Russian troubles and Chinese troubles, respectively. To paraphrase the great Frank Faso of the old New York Daily News: If they are lucky, Robert S. Mueller will get them. The first thing to note is that my wife has been studying a grandfather’s genealogy in recent years, producing notebooks packed with Grundys and Cleggs and Schofields from towns around Manchester – Bury, Oldham, Salford and Rochdale.
The second point is that my wife has more tolerance for soccer (the real football) than any other sport – partially because the lads are fit and usually get their work done on time. Through friends, she attended the best individual World Cup final ever – Zidane’s masterpiece over Brazil, in great position to see his two headers. On Sunday I said Rochdale was playing Tottenham in an FA Cup fifth-round match – on the tube, in our warm den. She had never heard of the Rochdale team but did know about Tottenham from Joe Scarborough’s lovely recent documentary about the North London darby – Tottenham vs. Arsenal: suspected hooligans, tattoo artists, rabid Tottenham owner, rabid Piers Morgan, Arsenal fan. As the match began, I chattered about the romance of the FA Cup – the open tournament from late summer to following spring which allows modest clubs to take on higher-ranked teams, with a glorious history of upsets and scares. In 2003 we were in London partially for me to write a piece for the Times about a squad “with a tree surgeon (with chain-saw scars to prove it) along with truck drivers and teachers,” along with a couple of actual professionals, from lowly Farnborough, down south, somehow reaching a third-round FA Cup match at Arsenal’s beloved old stadium at Highbury, and how the visitors even managed a goal against Arsenal’s irregulars in a 5-1 loss on a lovely Saturday morning. My tutorial over, we settled in to watch a fit and eager squad from Rochdale play the Tottenham irregulars at a modest 10,000-place field, now carrying the name of an oil company, but known to fans as Spotland. Why Spotland? I wondered. “Some of the old miners in my family lived in the Spotland section,” my wife said. Later she produced copious period maps of Rochdale from her stacks of notebooks. (FYI: The name Spotland comes from the River Spodden, which flows from the Pennine Hills.) The British broadcasters gave enough FA Cup details to overseas viewers – how Rochdale is in the third level, below Premiership and Championship, how a few lads have had a taste of the top rank, and a few young ones are still prospects. (I later learned that Rochdale, in 1960, was the first FA squad to hire a manager of color, Tony Collins. Since then, there has been exactly one more: Ruud Gullit.) For the first half hour, the home team jostled with the visitors on a new and treacherous field. Then came a glorious sign of fear and trembling from the Champions League side: wavy-haired Harry Kane, surprise marksman of recent years, began stretching on the sidelines. Rochdale would always have this: making Harry Kane, due for a day off, break a sweat, just in case. Who are those guys? I looked up the Rochdale roster: one striker was Stephen Humphrys, a 20-year-old from nearby Oldham, on loan from Fulham. “We’ve got some Humphrys in our family,”Marianne said, reminding me that some of them ran ships to Cuba and on to the colonies, carrying Lord-knows-what. She claimed Humphrys as a relative. The visitors began to pack the offense – enough of this foolishness – and we rooted for the home team to just hold them until the half. But the home boys showed enough professional skill to launch a counter-attack and have Ian Henderson, 33-year-old striker, who once mulled dental school, score in the 45th minute. Much yelling in our den – and not by me. My wife has been tracking people from Lancashire who worked in the mines or farmed, some migrating to Australia or New England and Virginia and Kentucky, or stayed home, adjusting to the Industrial Revolution, and then saw the factories sputter, and Nazi bombs destroy, and time march on, and Manchester City eat Manchester United’s fish-and-chips more often than not. (Her genealogy includes the name Scholes, from Salford. I told her about Paul Scholes, red-headed stalwart for Man U, most caps by any English national, who is from Salford, owns the sixth-tier Salford City club. No further connection detected.) In the second half, Tottenham did what it needed to do: tossed in three regulars, including Harry Kane, and tied the score. Then, after a world-level dive by Dele Alli, who is known for that stuff, Harry Kane coolly poked in the penalty in the 88th minute and Tottenham went ahead, 2-1. Moral victory? Not yet. In the 93rd minute, with one minute left in injury time, the last Rochdale sub, Steve Davies, in a desperation swarm, found a seam and fired into the corner for a 2-2 draw. Davies, we quickly learned, is a 30-year-old striker from Liverpool, who has played for some decent clubs. My wife said the family tree included people from Liverpool, and people named Davies. She adopted them all, the 14 lads who played, the fans packed together in the modest stands, as her instant rellies. The replay's gate receipts will carry Rochdale’s budget for the next few years, according to their jubilant, gray-bearded manager, Keith Hill, beneath his workingman’s cap. The Tottenham manager, Mauricio Pochettino, was more than gracious as he patted Hill’s gray beard and headed toward the team coach back to London. The weary Tottenham players, who endure dog years for huge salaries in their tri-level competitions, must now gear up for one more match, albeit it at home. Feb. 28: 10 AM, Eastern Time. The romance of the FA Cup endures. The old lady had a look of merriment – not often seen in the subway.
She was talking to herself and talking to strangers around her, trying to create a bit of community on the F train, creeping its way toward the City, as we people from Queens call Manhattan. I love my occasional rides into The City from near my old neighborhood – legal parking on Midland Parkway right in front of Trump’s old house, between 10 to 4, just right for lunch. I particularly love these day trips for the interplay between the young and the old, the mixture of ethnicities. Queens. Benign and hopeful and so very American. Never losing her smile, the old lady apologized, in Spanish, to the woman on her right for jostling her, thereby waking her from a quick nap. She smiled at a man standing up and pointed to an empty seat next to me. He declined. Then the old lady began to pay rapt attention to the woman on her left – a much younger woman of Asian ancestry, making up her face, no easy task on a train lurching noisily on mismatched rails. The younger woman was applying makeup to her cheeks and then she began to touch up her eyebrows, an intricate maneuver requiring a surgeon’s touch. The older lady followed every stroke as if she were watching an Olympic event – curling, maybe. She had a rapt smile, perhaps being reminded of her younger self. Her smile was still beautiful. The younger woman pretended not to notice. Upgraded, she put away her kit and stared straight ahead. The older lady had two shopping bags on the floor and a bag on her lap. Her tights, under her topcoat, had a couple of holes. She inspected a black man in a topcoat standing near me. “Muy bonitos,” she said, pointing to his well-shined shoes. Several times she made eye contact with me and I smiled back. She was making me happy with her merry but somewhat melancholy smile. She deserved a smile. She pointed to her imaginary watch, the universal sign. “Mediodia, menos unos minutes,” I said. Big smile. The young woman on her left got off at 63rd and Lexington. Another woman of Asian background took her place, also young, also pretty. The old lady said something to her in English. The young woman looked her in the eye and responded, sweetly. They chatted for a minute or two. Then the older lady resumed her soft, sweet, bilingual monologue more or less to herself. In Spanish she said she liked to cook but could not afford it. She rubbed thumb and forefinger, indicating no money. “Donde va hoy?” I asked her. “Wherever somebody will buy me a drink,” she said in Spanish, giggling. She made the universal sign of a glass being tipped to her lips. I was getting off at Herald Square. “Buen dia,” I said, getting a big smile. I hope she’s all right. * * * Something nice often happens on my rides. One day I saw an abuelita struggling upstairs with shopping bags at 179th St. “Pesadas,” I said. Heavy. And I lugged them to her bus stop for east Queens. * * * A year ago I saw a couple of young (white) innocents get on the E train at 23rd and Ely, from one of those expensive high rises looming up in Long Island City – two girls, maybe just out of college, probably staked by parents to an expensive new condo, one stop from the City. One innocent, clearly an out-of-towner, had a large wallet or maybe an iPad sticking out of the back pocket of her designer jeans – three or four inches of value, exposed, for the swiping. An older Chinese woman waved her index finger at the young woman, as if to say, “Put that thing in your bag.” The innocent smiled, clueless. The older Chinese woman persisted, as a granny would. The innocent’s friend got the point and the valuable was safely stowed. The granny smiled, grimly, and that was that. * * * A few months ago, I saw another elderly Chinese woman, also on the E train, pointing to a young African-American woman, standing up, holding an infant. The older lady was pointing to an empty seat. The young woman smiled and nodded to the door, to indicate she was getting off at the next stop. One New Yorker taking care of another. You see that a lot. My friends from out there in America tell me that New Yorkers are always offering help with street maps or the maze of a huge subway station. Then again, I remember salarymen and women offering me help – in English -- with the strange addresses of Tokyo. And people walking us a few blocks in Cairo or Mumbai. The old babushkas of Moscow making sure my wife got off at the right bus stop for the circus. It’s a city thing. The thought just came to me: did Channel 13 in New York show “Casablanca” as a prelude to Valentine’s Day?
For all the looming terror and professed cynicism, it is a film for romantics who believe in something, including always having Paris. My valentine, the girl I loved probably the first time I met her, and I decided to watch “Casablanca” last Saturday night on that sporadic but wonderful movie series, which for no good reason rotates with geezer entertainers from the past singing to geezer audiences. Who wants to watch geezers when one can watch young Bogart and young Bergman and young Henreid and a younger Peter Lorre in “Casablanca?” The movie has been around for 75 years. My wife thought she had seen it, and would enjoy seeing it again. I had seen many familiar scenes from the movie – “hill of beans” and “play it, Sam” and “shocked, shocked,” staples of any vocabulary – but I was not sure I had ever watched it straight through. So, yes, we both knew “Casablanca” but quickly discovered parts we had never seen -- the back story, beautiful and endangered Paris, plus the developing shaky rapport between Bogart and the opportunistic French officer, the many signs of Nazi intrusion into North Africa. I realized I had never seen the moment when Ingrid Bergman’s beautiful face returns to Bogart’s world. He says later: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” Of course, we knew the line, knew it was coming, but I never understood the depth of his bitterness. The man who didn’t care had once cared, immensely. The writers insisted they had created the lines as part of the Hollywood mill, to make money, to entertain themselves, despite the horrors spreading around the world. The Nazis were merely stock film villains; in the first months of the ‘40s, when the film was being written and made, few people really understood what was coming down in Europe. Here is a side issue to my watching “Casablanca:” More than a few times, I found myself thinking about making a call the next day to my friend, the writer Ray Robinson, who once had a stormy date of sorts with young Lauren Bacall and knew some Hollywood people and always talked about the 40’s and Bogart and Bacall. But my conversations would have to remain mental, inasmuch as Ray passed on Nov. 1, just shy of turning 97. It was fun to sit back last Saturday night to watch “Casablanca” unfold -- the jangled emotions and motives of the three main characters, the violence, the plot far more complicated than the snippets we all know -- toward the conclusion my wife and I knew was coming. Wait, that wily German officer makes a crucial mistake? How convenient for the plot. I hope I am not giving away what seems like a flaw in the script, but the movie has been out for 75 years, and the writers themselves did not think they were making an epic film, but they were. The movie is about caring – for some cause, for some person. Happy Valentine’s Day. It all comes back to me as my colleagues prepare to cover the 2018 Winter Olympics up near the border in South Korea.
Having visited the DMZ with the U.S. soccer team in 2002, I think about hordes of crazies streaming across the border with axes in their hands. At the moment, I read there is a norovirus loose in the Olympic complex. How’d you like to get frisked by a security guard, looking a little green? There is always something. That’s why the New York Times always sends journalists who know Olympics sports but can handle anything. They have a dream team going this time – many of them colleagues from when I was covering Summer Games from Los Angeles in 1984 to Beijing in 2010, with four Winter Games included. Fear and trembling. A rebellion in South Korea brought down the government in 1987 and sportswriters were urging that the Olympics be called off. The Games were fine and I fell in love with the country. Fear and trembling. Atlanta was going to be a disaster, payback for over-reaching. There was indeed a bomb in the park one night, killing two people and injuring others – the work of one of our home-grown anti-government nutters, not foreign terrorists. It was awful. Our reporters were roused from our rooms and the editor Kathleen McElroy dispatched The Three Todds from Georgia Tech to drive us downtown in the NYT vans. Dave Anderson and Frank Litsky and others walked the street in the darkness, collecting details. And Atlanta came through the tragedy. Fear and trembling. Athens in 2004 was the first set of Games since 9/11. The fear was that terrorists were going to infiltrate Piraeus Harbor and blow up cruise ships. The worst violence was a domestic demonstration; our photo editor Brad Smith took a rock in the head and lived to tell the tale; (saw him the other day.) Juliet Macur was on the front lines and whiffed some tear gas. She’s in Pyeongchang, a columnist now. These are tough people. They don’t just keep score at games. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/28/world/the-reach-of-war-olympics-3-hurt-in-athens-protest-of-powell-s-visit.html (May I digress to mention the San Francisco earthquake during the 1989 World Series? We all did some instant reporting; the dogged Murray Chass reported from the pancaked Bay Bridge. http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/19/us/california-quake-highway-collapse-desperate-struggle-for-lives-along-880.html A day later the NYT sent out a great news reporter who arrived with his boots and a helmet with a flashlight. Dude, we said, The City is making the cappuccino by candlelight.) I don’t remember any fear and trembling heading to Almost Heaven, West Nagano, for the 1998 Winter Games. Soba noodles in downtown booths. Peaceful Games. But one night I went to sleep feeling fine and came down with a raging flu. I went downstairs to the press-center infirmary to see a long line of similarly stricken colleagues. The medics put some vile-tasting grainy medicine on my tongue and said I might sleep for a day. Wonder drug. I was back on the job a day later. The Japanese took care of us. Back to the daily dose of soba noodles. So now I am retired, back home. I tend not to watch Olympics on TV because I had my fun covering them, being there. But I will be reading what Jeré Longman and John Branch and Juliet Macur and all the rest will write in the New York Times. The other day, Andrew Keh arrived (from his post in Berlin) and wrote about discovering familiar Korean comfort food in that northern outpost: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/sports/what-is-pyeongchang.html I’d like to think I would have written a story like that. The beat goes on. While some Americans were preparing for the Super Bowl (see below) in icy Minneapolis on Sunday, the Silva family of Rio went to Ipanema. Altenir, Neo and Celia posed at the statue of Tom Jobim, who wrote "Garota de Ipanema." On the beach, hundreds of people are usually performing tricks, maneuvering a large round ball with their feet and chests and knees and foreheads. The soul of that sport is in Brazil. Senhoras e senhores, Antonio Carlos Jobim: If one is going to see only one American football game per season -- and I did -- this was the game to see.
Super Bowl LII was full of twists and athleticism and trick plays. The brain damage will be assessed in a few years. I've got some friends who are Iggles fans, and they had never won the Super Bowl. It isn't hard to root against the Patriots, except that Tom Brady is still admirable, on the field, after all these years. He had the ball in the closing seconds. Great game. Our daughter Laura made gumbo that warmed me up, maybe just as much as I might have been on the beach at Ipanema. Boa noite a todos. |
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