Up to his elbows in alligators

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, mini-biographies, law enforcement, alligators, environmentalism, everglades

Decades ago during the misnamed "sexual revolution", protests against many laws were made and we often heard the slogan, "You can't legislate morality." Though I was pretty young then, still in college, I thought, "Nonsense! We legislate nothing but morality." What is lawmaking? It is the process of defining what moral laws we care enough about to sanction (punish people for). As I watched the process unfold, as certain formerly illegal matters were legalized, and other matters were made illegal (often improperly), I came to this conclusion:

Not all that is ethical is legal.
Not all that is legal is ethical.

Fast-forward a generation or so: It has become illegal in some states or cities to call someone "him" or "her" if they prefer to be called "them" or "zhe" or "go away". It has become legal to destroy a city if your reason is "I am offended/oppressed/outraged". These are just the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg. It has become illegal to practice common sense, and what was formerly criminal insanity is the "most legal".

Jeff's career was law enforcement. He was working in Florida for the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and for a good many years, he primarily caught poachers and brought them to prosecution. As chronicled in Gator County: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades by Rebecca Renner, near the end of his career he was asked to embark on an extended sting operation, going undercover. To provide only a mild spoiler (because of course he succeeded, or there'd be no book): his sting caught a ringleader, and a number of lesser figures were caught in the net. But Jeff had seen what it really means to be a poacher, and he was able to weave the net more loosely so as to avoid catching absolutely everyone who'd been involved. He had more than a minimal conscience, and he cared for being ethical more than strict legality. He also knew the conclusions I stated above.

What happens when the enforcer comes to identify with his "prey"? This is the conundrum Jeff faced as he morphed himself into a seedy-looking trying-to-do-better ne'er-do-well, someone who could pass as a newly minted alligator farmer in a countryside filled with a mix of mostly honest alligator farmers and alligator hunters, and some less than honest, and a few downright scoundrels.

A similar process transformed the author as she dug deeper and deeper into Jeff's story, and the stories of others such as Peg Brown, the most legendary of the poachers of the prior generation (she befriended his son). The book's chapters bounce around between her life growing up in Florida, being a Floridian among Floridians who had been on the land for generations. She could internalize their struggles to cope with seeing their day-to-day survival methods becoming illegalized, until in many cases their choices were to poach for a living, to move somewhere else, or to starve. She asks, several times, "How does a family live when they were barely making it and their breadwinner is now incarcerated?"

The allied question that bedeviled Jeff as his operation drew to a close was, "What becomes of children if both parents are imprisoned?" Because many of the men who worked for the ringleader would bring their wives into some of the work, such as gathering alligator eggs in "illegal" quantities. The wives knew what was going on, so they were technically complicit.

Parts of some chapters outline the stages the Everglades went through as Florida became a popular destination. The Army Corps of Engineers, in their efforts to "tame" the 'glades, actually set in motion dramatic environmental changes that led to a reduction by 95% or more of the alligator population, not only in Florida but throughout gator country. But who got blamed? People like Peg Brown. Even after the alligator population rebounded—due more to their adaptability than to the efforts of environmentalists—the poaching laws were kept or even strengthened.

The poaching, at least of alligators, doesn't seem to be wiping them out. Their numbers in every state of the deep south continue to increase. There are millions, dozens to hundreds of times as many as there were 60 years ago.

This book isn't about "the corruption of Goody Two-shoes". When the operation ended, including the deliberate overlooking of some, including the wives, Jeff appeared in court when the chief perpetrators, the ones who weren't just flouting the law but smashing it to bits, were tried. It is about how we relate to others, and the struggle it can be to understand someone with whom we fundamentally disagree. I am reminded of the most remembered line of Cool Hand Luke, "What we have here is a failure to communicate."

The darkness follows

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, fbi, law enforcement, criminals, criminal behavior, memoirs

This is not a scene you want to see through your peephole. The SWAT Team members in this image could be FBI or any other (It's a generated image, so it's generic). When an apparent threat rises to the right level, these guys show up to make an arrest…at the very least.

I say "guys" advisedly. While there are female tactical officers, they are rare, in part because of the physical strength and stamina required. Some policewomen are big and strong enough to meet the requirements. Years ago, I had a good friend of mine whose wife was a policewoman. Karen was about an inch shorter than my six feet, we weighed the same, and she was probably stronger than I. We took judo and jujitsu at the same dojo, and she was definitely better than I was at both skills. A formidable sparring partner!

Jana Monroe is, by her own admission, petite. She still might be able to whup me; my mother could. Mom taught at the same dojo, and weighed almost 100 pounds less than I did. So she was also petite. Slow practice between Mom and me was hard on her because she couldn't hold me up during a "slow throw". But let her move fast, and watch out! In the case of Mrs. Monroe, she excelled at both enforcement and detection/profiling.

As she tells us in her memoir Hearts of Darkness: Serial Killers, the Behavioral Science Unit, and My Life as a Woman in the FBI, after several years in city policing, her 22 year career in the FBI culminated in a term as an SAC (Special Agent in Charge) of the Phoenix office. Along the way she broke through more glass ceilings than I could keep track of. It took a huge amount of grit. She describes the barriers the "old boy networks" and institutional suspicion of women put in her way, and the determination and self-proving she had to undergo over and over again.

It seems she is proudest of the five years she spent with the Behavioral Science Unit, the "profiling" group that tries to get inside the minds of the most serious offenders: serial killers being first in line. In a chapter that switches back and forth between a couple of real cases and the film Silence of the Lambs (for which she was a consultant, training Jodie Foster), we learn that the worst serial killers are fully the equal, or more, of the characters portrayed by Anthony Hopkins and Ted Levine.

More than this I decline to say. Mrs Monroe tells of the growing unease in her, that she was partaking of the darkness in the hearts of the country's worst criminals. I am reminded of the proverb, "You can't rassle with a skunk and come out smelling like a rose." Given a stunning opportunity, she took it, retiring from the FBI a bit earlier than the mandatory age of 57. She and her husband, Dale, also an FBI agent, are happier "on the other side". I found myself quite happy to finish this fascinating book. It is all too easy to be drawn into the darkness.

A bit of advice. The book will get into you. Some parts you wouldn't want to read while eating (I read when I eat alone).

Music distribution - no more "buggy whips"

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, music, digital music, copyright, law enforcement, paradigm shifts

Nearly twenty years ago I was introduced to Limewire by a friend. While he was rabidly downloading all the songs of his favorite bands—and thus committing "music piracy"—I had no interest in anything contemporary. I have little interest in music composed after about 1910. I felt lucky to find digitizations with pretty good quality of very early recordings of Western, Country and Western Swing music, and downloaded a pretty good collection of that. Whatever wasn't already in the public domain at the time, probably is by now.

After a safety lecture I attended a police detective was asked how the police decide which laws to enforce. A major point in the following discussion was that a law cannot be enforced unless the rate of voluntary compliance is at least 85%. In the realm of traffic control, we find that stop signs and stop lights are obeyed at levels exceeding 95%, in most places, anyway; but speed laws are so routinely flouted by so many drivers that the "effective speed limit" is between five and twenty miles above the posted speed. I know that on those sections of I-95 north of Baltimore that are posted 55 MPH, to drive slower than 70 is to risk being rear-ended. I have been driving along there at about 70, and been passed by traffic, including state police vehicles, that must have been going over 80!

What do you do when the majority of folks flout a law? Eventually it is either changed or becomes ignored. This can take time—the "noble experiment" of alcohol Prohibition lasted 13 years—but the result is inevitable. Society will pass through a painful period during which many "pioneers" wind up with figurative arrows stuck in them. Then a shift occurs, and soon enough the law enforcement establishment finds itself with something more pressing to do. Whether the now outdated laws remain on the books becomes moot (Prohibition was an exception: having been enacted by Constitutional Amendment, it had to be similarly repealed).

Prior to about 1960, duplication of musical media was difficult and expensive, so people bought "records": 78's, 45's and 33's. The invention of the cassette tape recorder initiated a low level of "music piracy", and as the machines got better and cheaper, the practice became more widespread. But then 1982 happened. Music went digital, and the first commercial CD was pressed. That same year a friend of mine bought one of the first (and rather costly!) portable CD players, and let me listen to a classical selection with his ear buds (also a rather new product). It was astounding! Compelling audio, completely free of hiss, pops and other artifacts of even the best 33-1/3 RPM platters.

Once anything is in digital form it can be reproduced exactly. Many tape cassette recorders of 1982 were very good, but a copy of a copy of a copy was clearly inferior, and the music industry had very expensive machinery to play master tapes into platter-making machinery that did not degrade the precious master, even after it was used many times. Think about it; how do you make a million copies of an analog (LP) album?

No need to go further. Using analog media degrades the media. Using digital media may also degrade the media, but before it is too far gone, you can make a perfect copy and just keep going. Once audio and then video went digital, it became apparent that the physical medium, the CD and later the DVD, was just the "camel" to carry the musical "cargo". If your cargo is so light you don't need camels any more, then what?

"Then What" is ably and aptly described in How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy by Stephen Witt. He chronicles the shift in music distribution over the period from about 1985 to 2005, twenty years that produced a generation that thinks of music as "free", but who revere musical performances and will spend as much to see a concert as football buffs spend to attend a Superbowl.

The invention of digital music recording and playback made the "record" industry obsolete, but the CD industry that replaced it lasted only about as long as Prohibition. While CD's continue to be made, they are a tiny market compared to the distribution of music and video without the "camel". And most of that distribution is free, or nearly so. Stephen Witt's book shows how it happened, following the lives of three significant people, and their associates.

They are like the three jaws of a lathe chuck. Seemingly independent, they worked together, unknowingly, to clamp down on music-as-it-was and replace it with something entirely new.

Jaw 1: MP3 encoding of sound. Protagonist: Karlheinz Brandenburg. Impact: Digital sound files around 1/12 the size of the "source", CD-encoded audio, making audio files practically free, if not legally free.

Jaw 2: The destruction of the "camel". Patsy-then-Protagonist: Doug Morris. Impact: As the richest music promoter, cornered the market on Rap (more than once), led portions of the legal battle against "music piracy", then flopped the entire industry from disc-supported to ad-supported (the YouTube model).

Jaw 3: The mega-pirates who became more capable distributors than "the industry". Protagonist: Dell Glover, one of the few pirates who actually profited from illegal distribution. Impact: His insider position enabled him to release the music from Doug Morris's stable of artists one to three weeks ahead of the official schedule, via an organization called the Scene, partly helmed by "Kali".

The first "cutting tool" of the lathe was the legal establishment, from the Justice Department and FBI in the US to similar agencies worldwide (mainly in the West). Once the well-heeled music industry began to cry foul, they worked for years to pierce the veils shrouding the established pirates. Publicly targeting musical consumers, the "downloaders" backfired, but they eventually caught up with the leaders of the various major pirate networks. Their efforts amounted to nailing the barn door firmly shut after all the horses had fled…and had built new and better barns! The second "cutting tool" was the public, including juries that in a few cases declined to render a guilty verdict, but even more the millions who found it unreasonable to spend as much as a dollar per song to record music. Soon enough, they found a new place to spend the money thus freed up: Mega-concerts, the more extreme the better.

Though the book reads as smoothly as a novel, it is a work of crack journalism. You might either love or hate any of these three men, or their associates. Each played his part (yes, "his"; the number of women involved can be counted on the thumbs of both your feet). The protagonists of Jaw 1 and Jaw 2 got rich; Jaw 3 did well enough until being passed through the meat grinder himself; he escaped with his life, and made peace with life in a new kind of world.

FYI: Under current law in the US, copyrighted work is protected for fifty years after the death of the performer or creator, if a person, or 75 years after the death of the person (or the last person, if a group such as the Beatles) when the copyright is assigned to a corporation. So if your favorite composer or performer died before 1921, no matter who held the copyright, it is now voided, in the US. In some other countries, the term is quite a bit longer.

The inexplicable attractiveness of bad men

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, law enforcement, undercover, organized crime

In Redneck territory, there is the phenomenon of "good old boys", men who never really grow up, who mainly hold blue-collar jobs, drink away all of their earnings, and relentlessly seek women in bars whether they are married or not. A sadly funny old country song states, "There wouldn't be one single good 0ld boy if it wasn't for the good old girls." Point one.

A girl we got to know well, from the age of thirteen was drawn to "bad boys". She had no interest in boys who didn't take serious risks with the laws (including the law of gravity). She isn't someone "from the wrong side of the tracks." The oldest daughter of professional people, very smart (in some ways), very pretty, she could not make a healthy choice for a boyfriend to save her life. She almost lost it. Point two.

I can think of a few other points, but they sum up to this: Human society doesn't just tolerate the existence of a certain number of criminals, it positively fosters them while fawning all over them. Organized criminals get the best treatment, and not just because of fear, but largely of adulation.

Jack Garcia lived in all parts of the underworld as an undercover FBI agent for 26 years. He details one segment of this in his book Making Jack Falcone: An Undercover FBI Agent Takes Down a Mafia Family, written with Michael Levin. While he tells us of his work with the Mafia—and gives us side lights of a few other cases he worked on—he carries on a secondary dialogue with the reader, on the subject, Why are so many people drawn to these evil guys?

Organized criminals, whether the Mafia or another group (there are many), demonstrate the epitome of the Biblical statement, "The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil." For the mafiosi, money is everything. You gain status by making money that you "kick up" to the organization over you. Make no mistake, "making money" is quite the opposite of "earning money". A few mobsters may run legitimate businesses, but even there, they find ways to squeeze extra money out of the system.

It is a fascinating story, how Garcia went to "mob school" to learn how to behave like a Wiseguy and earn the confidence of certain Made Men and their Capos and Underbosses. But I find it more fascinating, sadly, how many people were falling all over themselves to curry Mob favor. It really is true, "Power is the best aphrodisiac", and that attracting power is more general than just getting pretty women to spent one's time with. Garcia comments on this time and again.

Jack Garcia, as Jack Falcone, was on the verge of "being Made", inducted into the Mafia as a power in his own right, when the FBI management pulled the plug, shut down the undercover case, and began indicting more than thirty major players in the Gambino "family". A worthy haul, true, but one wonders what the FBI could have accomplished with one of their members as a Mafia Made Man, with the power to vouch for others…a much greater "hit" against the whole Mafia organization would have become possible. Can it be that both organized crime and organized law enforcement need one another, and feed off one another?

I could have stated as point three, the unusual popularity of "The Sopranos." I find it sad, this evidence of how far the human race has to go, to become an ethically mature species.