May 18 Update: Queens Evidence Nightmare, GPS Spoofing Gone Wild; Narco-Simps; NYC's Zionist Billionaires Play Hardball; LAPD Gang Scandals Redux
Each profession has a particular rhythm to the year. Journalism's own patterns are not as easy discernible as the academic calendar or quarterly earnings reports, but Spring tends to be a moment when substantial, ambitious long-term projects see the light of day. There are a number of stories and projects that published this past week which really stand out in the long view. Furthermore, most of them are off the traditional news cycle, meaning they are a true representation of enterprise reporting and are proactive projects, rather than reactive.
On my end, some delays to larger reported pieces that should see the light of day in the coming seven days. I spoke with KPFA's Brian Edwards-Tiekert this week about the Zionist violence at UCLA on April 30 (20 minute mark here for those interested). There's been a lot of follow-up on that story by other outlets since, and still no arrests. On Friday, I finally got around to writing up the April proscription of the Terrorgram Collective by British authorities as a banned terrorist organization. Until very recently, this propaganda group was the most prolific source of extreme right accelerationist material out there, and inspired at least one mass shooting. More to come next week on this front
Let's get to it.
BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM
-Staten Island gets all the headlines as New York City's most reactionary borough, but Queens has long stood on business. The current District Attorney, Melinda Katz, took office a few years back after her predecessor Richard Brown died in office, ending a thirty-year reign as a draconian, all-problems-are-nails-and-I'm-a-hammer prosecutor. There were already major issues with wrongful convictions from the 1990s and prosecutorial conduct stemming from Brown's time in office. While Katz had made cursory gestures at reform, including the establishment of a post-conviction review unit (which should be standard, if we are being honest), she is now dealing with a massive problem regarding more than one thousand pieces of evidence that were improperly vouchered by her office and the NYPD. Evidentiary chain of custody is essential to the foundation of any criminal case, and this developing matter will wreak havoc down the road, even on legit convictions.
Rocco Parascandola
-There have been myriad knock-on effects from the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza that broke out over the past two years: wheat shortages, oil price spikes, and huge refugee flows. Add one more disruption to the tally: a proliferation of GPS jamming and signal spoofing that is wreaking havoc on airplane travel, smartphone apps, and maritime navigation. Hotspots for this sort of activity are, as expected, Ukraine, Russia and Israel, but also surprisingly Ankara, Turkey's capital. Respect once again to the Financial Times for getting beneath the surface of military conflict and airing out what a friend likes to label 'the niche and geeky details of modern warfare.'
-Narcocorridos? Gold and jewel-encrusted pistols? Reality shows based on cartel wives? Lavish streaming dramas? If you're down with all that, chances are you're wandering into some ethically questionable territory about how you get your entertainment, the same way that folks who use hard drugs casually are also underwriting the bloodshed in Central and South America. Don't take my word for it though: Ioan Grillo, a longtime chronicler of the drug trade and its attendant violence, went into depth on all this on his own Substack earlier this week. Pitch-perfect, cold-eyed, and with just the right amount of outrage.
Ioan Grillo
-It's no secret that New York City's power elite are heavy involved in Zionist politics. The donor lists for AIPAC, the ADL and other components of the Israel lobby are rife with the Dursts, Tisches, Kushners and Steinmetzes. However, the role of these same people in directing the NYPD's violent crackdowns on Gaza solidarity encampments at Columbia University, City College, the New School, New York University and elsewhere in the city as well as coordinating propaganda with the Israeli government itself came to light in a Washington Post bombshell this week that relies on archives of a Whatsapp group chat comprised of dozens of these folks. In the chats, they discuss how to steer American public opinion towards Israel in the aftermath of Hamas' October 7th attacks, coordinate campaign donations to Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for his police department's wildly violent crackdown on Pro-Palestine demonstrations over the past seven months, and exchange accounts of meetings with Israeli government ministers and defense officials. Someone please give the local United States Attorneys a refresher course on the Foreign Agents Registration Act, please?
-Gang policing is as Californian as two-hour traffic jams, surfing and year-round baseball. And the mano duro tactics and strategies implemented by sheriffs and cops up and down the state in the 1980s and 1990s, including massive gang databases, civil injunctions, and specialized gang enforcement units, reshaped American law enforcement writ large over the next few decades. I've spent a lot of my professional career working on this topic up and down the state, and always take note of emergent problems within those units, which are largely composed of 'proactive' (read: hyper-aggressive) officers who often adopt an ends-justify-the-means attitude to justify breaking the law in order to enforce it. The LAPD's gang units were so out of control in the 1990s that it landed the department under federal oversight for almost fifteen years (more on that below). Despite the 'completion' of that consent decree in 2013 over the protests of local civil rights groups, LAPD's gang enforcement teams have consistently gotten into hot water with the local district attorney and the feds over illegal stops, falsified gang identification cards, beatings and theft. Two divisions in the San Fernando Valley are now under FBI investigation, and at least three hundred criminal cases are at risk of being tossed. The Los Angeles Times has a comprehensible look at this tangled web. There have been no charges yet despite more than a year of federal investigation: let's see where this goes, particularly since District Attorney George Gascon is in a dogfight over his deputy's alleged illegal access to police personnel files.
Libor Jany
BOOK OF THE WEEK - As discussed above, wealth decides American elections now in an unprecedented manner, thanks in large part to a series of Supreme Court decisions that have given corporations personhood and treat campaign contributions as protected 'free speech.'
Much ink has been spilled on this topic, but no account comes close to rivaling Jane Mayer's Dark Money (2016), which traces the decades-long campaign by a set of conservative billionaires - the Scaifes, the Bradleys, the Kochs, the Olins - to seed a network of think tanks, judges, media outlets, academics and politicians who would bring about this sea change in American society.
FILM - On Friday, the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart Division decided it would be a good use of time to promote the job as the sort of career that people 'make movies about.' Yes, that division is precisely the one that had cops involved in bank robberies, shootings, providing off-book security for street gangs and beat, framed and falsely imprisoned hundreds of Angelenos in the late 1990s, in one of the worst examples of cops going 'native' that the country has ever seen.
And of course, Hollywood made an absolute classic off it: 2001's Training Day, with Denzel Washington in his 'why Denzel have to be crooked before he took it', Oscar-winning role and Ethan Hawke as the rookie cop who ends up turning on his field training officer. It's over the top, it's graphic, it's the only good film director Antoine Fuqua ever made, but god damn does it hold up. King Kong ain't got shit on Denzel.
MUSIC - Some weeks I do not pay much attention to music and zone in on an audio narrative. The British Broadcasting Corporation produces really good long-form projects. Their reporting on Europe's migrant crisis has been humane, cold-eyed and granular, and the eight-part 'To Catch A Scorpion' series about a major Kurdish human trafficker cuts to the heart of the brutal reality of how undocumented migrants make their way to the United Kingdom, which for some reason is the promised land on that side of the Atlantic. Not to be missed.
