August 4th, 2010
WASHINGTON MONTHLY
July 2010
By James Verini
Thomas J. Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has a well-developed talent for self-promotion. He makes a point of being the last person on any stage, and he leaves no detail to chance. The Chamber’s event staff is famously fastidious: one of Donohue’s parties involved corralling a Clydesdale horse into the Chamber’s lobby. Such grandiosity is of a piece with how Donohue treats his station. He travels in a chauffeured Lincoln and a leased jet, and his salary, $3.7 million last year, makes him the sixth highest paid lobbyist in the country.
This requires funding, which Donohue secures with exceptional skill. Among his office decorations is a desk plaque that reads, “SHOW ME THE MONEY.” “He used to pound his fist on the desk and say, ‘Show me the money!’” a former Chamber lobbyist recalls. “He got his rocks off on it.”
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June 15th, 2010
SLATE
June 15, 2010
By James Verini
Michael Winterbottom’s new film The Killer Inside Me, which comes out on Friday, has attracted comment for its graphic violence—Jessica Alba reportedly walked out of a screening, so put off was she by the unlikely sight of herself being beaten by Casey Affleck. You, too, can skip this adaptation of Jim Thompson’s probably un-adaptable cult novel because, for all the blood, it’s a bloodless and cursory affair. Here’s a better use of your movie time: Log onto Netflix, find every previous movie of Winterbottom’s you can (start the clock at 1997’s Welcome to Sarajevo), and then banish the rest of your queue belowdecks. As off-target as his latest effort is, Winterbottom may be the most consistently absorbing and challenging director working in English-language cinema today. Certainly he’s among the bravest.
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June 3rd, 2010
SLATE
June 3, 2010
By James Verini
It’s been an unpleasant year for Pope Benedict XVI, so much so, one feels moved to ask: Are there any papal practices he takes refuge in that are more fun than, say, celibacy? We know of at least one: saint-making. In his going-on-five-year-old reign, the pontiff has canonized at least 29 souls, according to the Holy See’s Web site—10 in 2009 alone. The newly sainted didn’t include Mother Teresa, everyone’s top seed, but they did include one friar, Bernardo Tolomei, born in the 13th century, whose crowning achievement, according to the Vatican biography, was to leave his fellow “monks an example of a holy life, the practice of the virtues to a heroic level, an existence dedicated to the service of others, and to contemplation.”
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March 6th, 2010
VANITY FAIR
February 2010
By James Verini
The demise of The Exile began, as so many demises have in Russia, with an official letter. Faxed to the offices of the newspaper late on a Friday afternoon the spring before last from somewhere within the bowels of Rossvyazokhrankultura, the Russian Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications, and Cultural Heritage Protection, it announced the imminent “conducting of an unscheduled action to check the observance of the legislation of the Russian Federation on mass media.” The Exile, a Moscow-based, English-language biweekly, stood accused of violating Article Four of that legislation by encouraging extremism, spreading pornography, or promoting drug use. The letter scheduled the unscheduled action to take place between May 13 and June 11. This being Russia, it wasn’t faxed until May 22.
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March 6th, 2010
THE DAILY BEAST
Nov 7, 2009
By James Verini
A year after President Obama’s election, hate groups are feeling bolder than they have in over a decade, and their usually insular anger is beginning to spill into the public realm. This weekend, the National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi organization, held rallies in Arizona and Minnesota. Those demonstrations came on the heels of similar actions in Southern California, where epithet-spewing white supremacists were forced to disband by rock-throwing counter-protesters. The upsurge in visibility is more than anecdotal—law-enforcement officials are monitoring levels of agitation among extremist groups that they say are the highest since Timothy McVeigh’s deadly attack in Oklahoma City nearly 15 years ago.
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March 6th, 2010
THE NEW REPUBLIC
June 2009
By James Verini
At the United Nations, there are, as you’d expect, flagrantly pointless press briefings going on in some wing or another, concerning some topic or another, at any given hour of the day. The diplomats and reporters accept the custom with knowing smirks and lazily upraised hands. It’s the standard kabuki. Except, that is, when Reverend Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann is speaking. The president of the U.N. General Assembly, d’Escoto has apparently decided, at age 76, that he has no time left for politesse, and his briefings are another animal entirely–the kind of invective-laced bravura jags perfected by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, who, as it happens, are two of d’Escoto’s heroes.
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March 6th, 2010
FAST COMPANY
May 2009
By James Verini
Brash and obsessive, tech tycoon Tom Siebel believes that keeping teens off crystal meth is largely a matter of educating and scaring them. Could he be right?
As you might expect of a self-made billionaire, Tom Siebel exudes inexhaustibility. It’s tiring just being around him. One afternoon last fall, Siebel bounds into the kitchen of his sprawling ranch house in central Montana, and after he takes very firm hold of my hand — “Tom! Good to see you,” he announces, shaking away, as if I might not have learned the name of the man whose 72,000-acre property I am visiting — he asks, “Want to see some elk?” Siebel is wearing jeans, a plaid work shirt, and nerdy wire-rim glasses. He is out of breath because, in the hour since he stepped off a private jet from California, he has destroyed a round of clay pigeons on his shooting range.
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March 6th, 2010
VANITY FAIR
July 2008
By James Verini
In an interview with The New Yorker, Pat Buchanan recently described the life cycle of American conservatism this way: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” If we accept Buchanan’s logic, then it took about 40 years, beginning with the Goldwater campaign in 1964, for the Right’s roots to be forged into planks and those planks reduced to wooden nickels.
In the resulting vacuum, another movement is already threatening to graduate from inspiring to oppressive: the Netroots putsch and its sounding board, the liberal blogosphere. Together, these forces bear a striking resemblance to the enemy. Just as Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich, and Bush depended on developments in new media—direct-mail campaigning, talk radio, cable news—so the new wired Left, with its disheveled assortment of journalist-activists and activist-journalists, has mastered the Internet.
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March 6th, 2010
CONDE NAST PORTFOLIO
July 2008
By James Verini
The U.S. has pledged more than $1 billion to help Mexico win its war on drugs. But even as the body count rises above 10,000, most of the guns that do the killing—Colt .38 Supers and big-bore Barrett rifles among them—keep pouring in from the U.S.
Alfredo Beltrán Leyva was arrested on January 21 in Culiacán, capital of the Mexican state of Sinaloa. The circumstances of his arrest lived up to his high standing in Mexico’s criminal underground, caught, as he was, driving a BMW S.U.V. in which federal police found eight pistols, an AK-47 assault rifle, and two suitcases containing about $900,000 in cash. Until his arrest, Beltrán Leyva was a top lieutenant in what may be the most profitable and far-reaching drug-trafficking organization in the world: the Sinaloa cartel, presided over by Joaquín Guzmán, often referred to as Mexico’s Pablo Escobar. Beltrán Leyva—known as El Mochomo after a vicious night-crawling ant—is thought by police to have been a Guzmán favorite, carrying out multiple murders while moving tons of drugs and millions of dollars for him.
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March 6th, 2010
CONDE NAST PORTFOLIO
December 2007
by James Verini
The Russian president’s global ambitions—and his drift toward totalitarianism—hinge on the staggering energy reserves of the onetime Siberian gulag of Sakhalin Island. Royal Dutch Shell knows the drill.
Even in August, a visitor to Sakhalin Island, off the eastern shores of Russia, can detect a chill in the air. The pine and birch forests are still a brilliant green, the sky azure and cloudless, but intimations of the island’s savage Siberian winter are already here. Katerina Lekomtseva, a veteran of 28 such winters, shivers as she stands on a hill above Aniva Bay, on Sakhalin’s southern coast. When Lekomtseva was a child, during the death throes of the Soviet Union, there were constant electricity shortages, and she and her father would sit in the candlelight playing a game called In Town. He would name a city, and she would name another beginning with the last letter of the city he mentioned. After her father, who hadn’t yet given up on the U.S.S.R., would say “Moscow,” Lekomtseva, who had accepted her country’s eventual demise, would counter with “Washington.” Then she would imagine how wonderful Washington must be: no electricity shortages, no candles. “I hated that game,” she tells me.
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March 6th, 2010
VANITY FAIR
December 2007
by James Verini
Knowing your business is big business for Aristotle Inc., whose Orwellian database of voter records has been an essential campaign tool for every president since Ronald Reagan.
In Washington, D.C., power often resides in faceless corners. Consider Aristotle Inc., whose offices occupy a nondescript town house on Pennsylvania Avenue, just out of view of the Capitol Building. On a warm fall morning during the last congressional-campaign season, I find myself in a conference room there as Aristotle’s founder and C.E.O., John Aristotle Phillips, shows off his latest innovation. Phillips is in the business of political data mining—he finds out everything he can about individual voters and then sells that information to politicians—and the tool he’s demonstrating for me could be seen as a breakthrough in electoral politics, or a new low in privacy invasion, depending on your perspective. The culmination of nearly a quarter-century of digging up information on tens of millions of Americans, it’s called Aristotle 360. The best way to think of it is as a hal2000 for running campaigns.
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March 6th, 2010
THE NEW REPUBLIC
September 2007
By James Verini
On a hot spring evening in early May–the kind that elicits nervous global-warming jokes–a crowd of powerful and wealthy people are gathered at a cocktail party, in the banquet hall in the Hart Senate Office building on Capitol Hill, sipping wine and talking carbon.
The advocacy group Environmental Defense is throwing the party, but mixed among its staff and the requisite Democratic lawmakers are attendees who normally wouldn’t be caught dead in the company of career tree-huggers: bankers, energy company executives, suits from General Motors, Chevron, nascar–yes, nascar–and a bunch of right-leaning multimillionaires. Virginia Senator John Warner is here, with his lupine frown. Warner, of course, is a Republican, as is Indiana’s Richard Lugar, who spoke earlier in the day at E.D.’s board meeting. Both men rated a whopping 20 percent from the League of Conservation Voters last year.
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March 6th, 2010
MEN’S VOGUE
March 2007
By James Verini
The Shasta-Trinity National Forest in Northern California covers over two million acres, stretching roughly from the former lumber town of Redding north to near the Oregon border, and from close to the Pacific Ocean east toward Nevada. Like most of the public land in this part of the country, Shasta is beloved of campers and hunters, a seemingly endless expanse of pine, fir, and oak trees, glistening lakes, and snowy mountaintops. It is the kind of place where a visitor resolves to write a check to the Sierra Club immediately upon returning home. It is also a new front in something else seemingly endless—the drug wars. Which is why I found myself, last August, knee-deep in Shasta’s undergrowth, bushwhacking my way up a hillside with a group of Forest Service agents. Clad in dark camouflage and Kevlar vests, they carried M-16 rifles and hip-holstered pistols.
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Thomas J. Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has a well-developed talent for self-promotion. He makes a point of being the last person on any stage, and he leaves no detail to chance. The Chamber’s event staff is famously fastidious: one of Donohue’s parties involved corralling a Clydesdale horse into the Chamber’s lobby. Such grandiosity is of a piece with how Donohue treats his station. He travels in a chauffeured Lincoln and a leased jet, and his salary, $3.7 million last year, makes him the sixth highest paid lobbyist in the country.
