James Verini

Show Him the Money

james — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:17:56 +0000

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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The Real Deal

james — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:39:41 +0000

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. See Full Story

The Vatican Loves a Good Story

james — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:32:53 +0000

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.” See Full Story

Lost Exile: The unlikely life and sudden death of The Exile, Russia’s angriest newspaper.

james — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 04:26:02 +0000

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. See Full Story

Stopping The Next McVeigh

james — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 04:18:13 +0000

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. See Full Story

D’Escoto Inferno: Meet the Sandinista who runs the U.N.

james — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 04:10:26 +0000

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. See Full Story

Meth Mouth: Tom Siebel’s Crusade

james — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 04:07:53 +0000

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. See Full Story

What Will Liberal Bloggers Do If Obama Wins?

james — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 04:05:26 +0000

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. See Full Story

Arming the Drug Wars

james — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 03:59:33 +0000

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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Putin’s Power Grab

james — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 03:56:58 +0000

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. See Full Story