*He's still alive and still Barrett Brown.
https://theintercept.com/2016/02/02/barrett-brown-the-rule-of-law-enforcement/
The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison
The Rule of Law Enforcement
Barrett Brown
2016-02-02T15:02:11+00:00
"AFTER HAVING SPENT the prior six months in a fruitless cycle of
retaliation and counter-retaliation and counter-counter-retaliation
with the administration of the Federal Correctional Institution at Fort
Worth, where I managed to do about half of my time in the hole before
finally getting kicked out altogether, I was delighted to arrive here
at FCI Three Rivers, a medium security prison subject to occasional
outbreaks of gang warfare that also happens to be quite a lot of fun.
And though one's first few days at a new prison are always given over
largely to errands and social obligations, I did manage to get in some
much-needed reading time when someone lent me a copy of Five Families,
a history of the American mafia by the veteran New York Times crime
reporter Selwyn Raab.
"I've never had much interest in organized
crime of the non-governmental sort, but ever since 2009 when I read
through the bulk of Thomas Friedman's past columns in the course of
researching a book on the subject of incompetence, I've been fascinated
by the extent to which a fellow can be a bit of a dummy, with
questionable writing abilities and a penchant for making demonstrably
erroneous attacks on others, and still find regular employment with the
nation's most prestigious newspaper (though in fairness to the Times,
they did eventually get rid of William Kristol).
"I'm afraid I gave up on reading Five Families straight through after
about the halfway mark, by which point it had become clear that Raab,
contrary to all decency, was going to continue using the phrase
"law-enforcement" thusly, with the unwarranted hyphen, something
that would have been more tolerable did the term not necessarily appear
every few pages due to the nature of the subject matter, often in the
company of such other improprieties as "civil-rights,"
"public-relations," "stolen-car rings," or "loan-shark," and to such an
extent that one could be forgiven for suspecting that Raab himself, for
all his tough talk on crime, is in fact some sort of illicit hyphen
smuggler.
"Luckily, this is the sort of book from which one can extract the most
telling instances of Gray Lady-caliber foolishness just by skimming
around. At some point Raab seems to decide that the writers of The
Sopranos must be punished for humanizing the mafia in the course of
writing a drama about human beings who are in the mafia. And so, more
in sadness than in anger, but more in confusion than either, he set out
to debunk the show's fictional plotline by way of his own fictional
journalistic expertise: "Genuine capos and wiseguys would never emulate
Tony's behavior. ... No top-tier mobster would last long if he behaved
like Tony Soprano, who defies basic Mafioso caution by exposing himself
as a ripe target, to be easily mowed down by rivals. He drives without
a bodyguard; sips espresso in daylight at a sidewalk café." This comes
just a few chapters after we're told the following about a real-life
top-tier mobster: "Shunning bodyguards and bullet-proof limousines, the
sixty-six-year-old godfather met with his Mafia associates in
restaurants and travelled about Manhattan in taxis like any ordinary
businessman."
"To his credit, Raab did manage to refrain from rendering this last bit
as "ordinary-businessman," which is just extraordinary, so we'll give
him another try: "Sex and psychiatry are prominent in The Sopranos'
story line. Confiding in a psychiatrist, however, would be a
radioactive mistake for a boss or capo, who can never display symptoms
of weakness or mental instability." Naturally Raab has already
forgotten having written the following about mafia boss Frank Costello:
"Striving for inner peace while hovering between criminal affiliates
and respected society, Costello tried psychoanalysis."
"Even had the author not been so sporting as to provide us with
comically perfect counterexamples by which to disprove his various
inane objections, one could have also pointed out that Tony Soprano's
decision to see a psychiatrist does in fact prove to be a "mistake"
insomuch as that it directly leads to a rupture in his organization
culminating in a botched assassination attempt in the very first
season, so this objection wouldn't have made any sense even had it
gotten past that crucial directly-contradicted-by-your-own-fucking-book
hurdle that seems to be giving Raab so much trouble. Now take a moment
to reflect on the fact that this is the guy the New York Times assigned
to report on one of the nation's most complex and insidious criminal
conspiracies – this plodding hyphen addict who cannot seem to follow a
television show or even his own manuscript. One supposes that there is
some alternate universe in which this might be considered a problem and
where Ross Douthat manages a furniture store and everyone knows his
place.
" BUT THERE'S MORE to prison life than just sitting around despising the
New York Times. A week after arrival at Three Rivers, we new inmates
were summoned to an "Admissions and Orientation" seminar in which the
various department heads each speak for a few minutes about
institutional policy. I'd attended one of these back at Fort Worth;
usually the highlight is a short video clip of Bureau of Prisons
Director Charles Samuels, who gives a little talk. No one knows what
the talk is about, as whoever's nephew was put in charge of producing
the video has talked Samuels into pausing every couple of sentences to
shift position and look into the other camera, just like the
newscasters, something that the fellow can manage only with the most
hilarious awkwardness, and so it proves impossible to follow what he's
actually saying – which is a shame, as it's almost certainly something
very non-formulaic and true.
" Today, however, the chief attraction was to be our warden, Norbal
Vazquez, a longtime BOP functionary from Puerto Rico who is proverbial
for his deranged monologues as well as for being regarded with great
contempt by staff and inmates alike. Here are some actual quotes from
his exquisitely demented half-hour orientation talk, during which he
waddled back and forth, wagging his finger in admonishment when
appropriate and sometimes when not…"
