Why the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr., James Earl Ray returned to Toronto

 

 

After killing Martin Luther King Jr., the veteran thief planned to use the Big Smoke as his path to freedom, author explains

June 06, 2010, Geoff Pevere  

James Earl Ray was a veteran thief and accomplished jailboard who had previously obtained a false identity in Toronto. Now he was back in town.

It was early in the evening of April 6, 1968, that there was a knock on the door of 102 Ossington Ave. It was answered by Feliksa Szpakowski, who had a room on the second floor for $8 a week. 

According to author Hampton Sides, the man on the other side of the screen probably struck the middle-aged Polish woman like this: “He’s hard to read. He mumbles. He’s kind of hard to understand. He averts his gaze, but he looks fairly innocuous. He dresses well and he is usually wearing a suit. I think he was wearing a suit that day. Kind of average height, average weight, very difficult face to remember. He didn’t look like an assassin.” 

But he was. Two days earlier, in Memphis, Tenn., the man on Szapkowski’s doorstep — who was calling himself Paul Bridgman and claimed he worked in real estate — had fired a fatal bullet through the face and neck of Martin Luther King Jr. 

Although Szapkowski thought it odd that a real estate agent would be seeking a cheap room in one of Toronto’s more rundown ethnic neighbourhoods — 102 Ossington was just north of the Queen St. mental hospital and across from the gym where Cassius Clay, now know as Muhammad Ali, had trained for his bout against George Chuvalo — she took the money and left her new tenant be. 

James Earl Ray was back in Toronto. 

As Sides, Memphis-born author of Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King and the International Hunt for His Assassin, explains over the phone from his home in Santa Fe, N.M., Toronto was a city the killer knew. It was in Toronto that he’d acquired his false identity as Eric Galt, and it was largely for that purpose that he returned. 

A couple weeks shy of a year before, the man who would soon be calling himself Paul Bridgman — also known as Eric Galt, but born James Earl Ray Jr. — had escaped from the Jefferson City Penitentiary in Missouri. A veteran thief and experienced jailbird, he’d hidden himself in a large metal box beneath dozens of loaves of bread. He’d been on the run ever since, scheming how he might make his mark. He’d considered a career as a pornography director, had taken a course in bartending, and thought he might join a mercenary army in Rhodesia. At some point, he also decided he’d rid the world of the civil rights leader named Martin Luther King Jr. 

Only one of these plans worked out. 

It led him back to Toronto. 

Sides explains. “It was a city he knew. He had gotten his earlier identification from Toronto. Eric Galt was actually someone who lived in Toronto. So I think he had gone there expressly to get identification in a city that he knew. He probably had some criminal contacts there, and he was trying to get to London and ultimately to Rhodesia. I guess he figured with good reason that there’d be lots of flights and being part of the Commonwealth, it would be a fairly direct way to get there.” 

 

Ray was no stranger to cheap rooming houses. Indeed it was from the shared bathroom of one of them, which backed onto the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, that he fired the shot that killed King. After fleeing that building and that city in his white Mustang, he’d driven to Atlanta — King’s home — and hopped a Greyhound bound for Detroit. Mexico was an option, but he settled on Canada as an easier escape route to Rhodesia, where he anticipated both haven and a hero’s welcome for what he’d done. 

Says Sides: “He had taken a bus all the way up there from Atlanta and was desperately trying to find some new ID for himself, because he knew it was only a matter of time before they would figure out, they were looking for this guy Eric Galt. I don’t think he thought they would figure out they were looking for James Earl Ray for a while, but the name Eric Galt was bound to turn up pretty soon. So he had to scramble and get some more ID. Which he did pretty quickly.” 

And dedicatedly. Szapkowski barely saw her new tenant, who left the television on all the time and only seemed to emerge to buy cheap food supplies and newspapers. Dozens of newspapers. Once, she came upon him with a bundle of them under his arm. As she later told police investigators, “I noticed how worried he looked. I thought maybe he was worried about his family. I really thought he might be from the mental hospital down the street.” 

One of his local destinations was the office of The Telegram. From the newspaper’s microfilm archive, he acquired names of people born roughly when he was — the early 1930s. Following a procedure he’d once read was practised by Soviet spies in Canada, he wrote down about 10 names — one of which was Ramon George Sneyd — and headed back to Ossington Ave. If the names corresponded with a number in the Toronto telephone book, he’d write down the address and then surreptitiously hang around the person’s home until he was satisfied they looked enough like him to qualify as an alias. In Scarborough, he scoped out two candidates — Bridgman and Sneyd — then went back downtown and, brazenly, called them up. 

Posing as “a registrar with the Passport Office in Canada,” he’d ask if they’d recently filed for a passport. If they hadn’t, or if their old one had expired, James Earl Ray would attempt to seek one out in their names. It was easy and it worked. He eventually acquired one in the name of Ramon George Sneyd — in real life, of all things, a cop — and in the process bore out what was once the unofficial motto of the Canadian customs and immigration office, and the title of one of Sides’ chapters: “Canada Believes You.” 

Worrying, however, that his landlady or the police might not, Ray as Bridgman left the newpaper-strewn room at 102 Ossington and moved around the corner to 962 Dundas St. W. There he rented a room under the name Ramon Sneyd and awaited the processing of the new passport. It took longer than he liked. By now the world was focused on the manhunt for Martin Luther King’s killer, and it would only be a matter of time before the trail to Toronto was tracked. Although Ray didn’t know it at the time, apprehending King’s killer had been made a No. 1 priority by the FBI, in no small part because J. Edgar Hoover was worried his own agency, which had long stalked and harassed King as a potential enemy of the state, might be tagged with the murder. 

One day, a distracted Ray walked out into a busy Toronto street. A cop spotted him jaywalking and asked the man if he knew he’d broken the law. A ticket was in order, and the cop asked Ray for his name and address. 

From his past he pulled both: another phony name and the address of a brothel he’d once patronized at 6 Condor Ave. 

Ray took the ticket, paid the $3 fine, and headed back to 962 Dundas Ave. His time in Toronto was clearly coming to and end. 

By the time James Earl Ray boarded a plane bound for London, a month to the day after his arrival, Toronto had lost its dull sheen as a good place to hide. This newspaper had plastered his photograph on the front page (under the headline: “FBI SAYS THERE WAS CONSPIRACY — MYSTERIOUS SEAMAN SOUGHT IN KING DEATH”) and his ex-landlady attempted, unsuccessfully, to convince her husband that the man in the picture was her former tenant Paul Bridgman. “You’re crazy in the head,” Szpakowski’s husband apparently replied. 

After Ray was caught trying to board yet another plane in London, authorities would retrace his steps back to 102 Ossington, and they’d come knocking at the same door. Suddenly, Szpakowski didn’t seem so crazy. 

When, 40 years later, Hampton Sides came to Toronto to research Ray’s month here, he was astounded by the discrepancy between the Dundas-Ossington neighbourhood he’d read about in his research and the shiny, bustling, cafe-strewn strip he encountered. 

 

“It didn’t seem down at the heels at all,” he told me. 

And so it isn’t. Forty-two years after Martin Luther King’s assassin quietly stalked these streets in search of newspapers and new identities, they have been transformed into a model of upscale urban renewal, sprinkled with shops, boutiques and restaurants largely patronized by people not even born when the killer came to town. Even the old “mental hospital” has experienced a multimillion-dollar facelift. 

The effect was jarring, but it amused Hampton Sides. After all, the same thing had happened to two other “down at the heels” neighbourhoods where Ray had hid out: the once-grotty Memphis neighbourhood that housed the Lorraine Motel, and the part of London “Ramon Sneyd” had tucked himself into after fleeing Toronto. Both are hipster havens. 

“It makes you wonder,” Sides speculates, “if he had some kind of strange radar for urban renewal. Maybe he really should have been a real estate agent.”

Toronto house that hid James Earl Ray up for sale

April 08, 2010,  Rob Roberts

 

By Steve Darley, National Post

For sale: Two-bedroom detached home in Riverdale, with upstairs office, parking, and a notorious history.

The house, a former brothel at 6 Condor Ave. near Pape and Danforth, briefly housed a fugitive James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King. The American civil rights leader was gunned down on April 4, 1968.

According to a CBC report, Ray used the house for at least one night shortly after he arrived in Toronto, on either April 6 or April 8, 1968, and gave it as his address after Toronto police stopped him for jaywalking.

The house goes on the market today at $550,000. The listing agent, Gary Sylvester, didn’t appear yesterday to see the house’s history as a selling point.

“My understanding is there is nothing factual to prove those allegations at this address,” Mr. Sylvester said.

“I would say that properties at different times have different stigmas associated with them, for different reasons, where something factually has transpired in the property, maybe someone was murdered. Things like that are going to affect the value of the property. There is nothing on this property that we feel is a stigma, per se.”

According to the CBC, Ray stayed in a number of rooming houses around the city until May 6, when he flew to London, England.

The report said Ray travelled under a number of aliases as he tried to evade a worldwide manhunt. Toronto police stopped Ray for jaywalking on Monday, April 8; he told them his name was Eric S. Galt and his address was 6 Condor St. There is no Condor Street in Toronto, only a Condor Avenue.

The CBC said the Condor Avenue address was known to police at the time as a brothel, owned by George Kapakos and Jeannine Roberts, who was also the madam. During testimony in 1977, Ray said he got the address from a Lonely Hearts Club advertisement in an adult magazine. According to the CBC report, neighbours said Mr. Kapakos was always armed and that the “place got shot up one night,” which led to undercover police surveillance becoming a regular occurrence.

Police also found a Toronto map, belonging to Ray with 6 Condor Ave. circled, along with two other rooming houses. Ray was finally arrested on June 8, 1968, at Heathrow Airport in London. In March, 1969, he pleaded guilty to murdering Mr. King.

Kim Denyer, a daughter-in-law of the current owners, said they had been there for more than 20 years and were unaware of the property’s colourful history when they bought the house.

Afghan Child Brides Escape Marriage, but Not Lashes

Sakhina, 15, was sold into marriage to pay off her father’s debts when she was 12 or 13. She is one of four fugitive child brides at a shelter in a secret Kabul location.

By ROD NORDLAND and ALISSA J. RUBIN

May 30, 2010

KABUL, Afghanistan — The two Afghan girls had every reason to expect the law would be on their side when a policeman at a checkpoint stopped the bus they were in. Disguised in boys’ clothes, the girls, ages 13 and 14, had been fleeing for two days along rutted roads and over mountain passes to escape their illegal, forced marriages to much older men, and now they had made it to relatively liberal Herat Province.

Instead, the police officer spotted them as girls, ignored their pleas and promptly sent them back to their remote village in Ghor Province. There they were publicly and viciously flogged for daring to run away from their husbands.

Their tormentors, who videotaped the abuse, were not the Taliban, but local mullahs and the former warlord, now a pro-government figure who largely rules the district where the girls live.

Neither girl flinched visibly at the beatings, and afterward both walked away with their heads unbowed. Sympathizers of the victims smuggled out two video recordings of the floggings to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, which released them on Saturday after unsuccessfully lobbying for government action.

The ordeal of Afghanistan’s child brides illustrates an uncomfortable truth. What in most countries would be considered a criminal offense is in many parts of Afghanistan a cultural norm, one which the government has been either unable or unwilling to challenge effectively.

According to a Unicef study, from 2000 to 2008, the brides in 43 percent of Afghan marriages were under 18. Although the Afghan Constitution forbids the marriage of girls under the age of 16, tribal customs often condone marriage once puberty is reached, or even earlier.

Flogging is also illegal.

The case of Khadija Rasoul, 13, and Basgol Sakhi, 14, from the village of Gardan-i-Top, in the Dulina district of Ghor Province, central Afghanistan, was notable for the failure of the authorities to do anything to protect the girls, despite opportunities to do so.

Forced into a so-called marriage exchange, where each girl was given to an elderly man in the other’s family, Khadija and Basgol later complained that their husbands beat them when they tried to resist consummating the unions. Dressed as boys, they escaped and got as far as western Herat Province, where their bus was stopped at a checkpoint and they were arrested.

Although Herat has shelters for battered and runaway women and girls, the police instead contacted the former warlord, Fazil Ahad Khan, whom Human Rights Commission workers describe as the self-appointed commander and morals enforcer in his district in Ghor Province, and returned the girls to his custody.

After a kangaroo trial by Mr. Khan and local religious leaders, according to the commission’s report on the episode, the girls were sentenced to 40 lashes each and flogged on Jan. 12.

In the video, the mullah, under Mr. Khan’s approving eye, administers the punishment with a leather strap, which he appears to wield with as much force as possible, striking each girl in turn on her legs and buttocks with a loud crack each time. Their heavy red winter chadors are pulled over their heads so only their skirts protect them from the blows.

The spectators are mostly armed men wearing camouflage uniforms, and at least three of them openly videotape the floggings. No women are present.

The mullah, whose name is not known, strikes the girls so hard that at one point he appears to have hurt his wrist and hands the strap to another man.

“Hold still,” the mullah admonishes the victims, who stand straight throughout. One of them can be seen in tears when her face is briefly exposed to view, but they remain silent.

When the second girl is flogged, an elderly man fills in for the mullah, but his blows appear less forceful and the mullah soon takes the strap back.

The spectators count the lashes out loud but several times seem to lose count and have to start over, or possibly they cannot count very high.

“Good job, mullah sir,” one of the men says as Mr. Khan leads them in prayer afterward.

“I was shocked when I watched the video,” said Mohammed Munir Khashi, an investigator with the commission. “I thought in the 21st century such a criminal incident could not happen in our country. It’s inhuman, anti-Islam and illegal.”

Fawzia Kofi, a prominent female member of Parliament, said the case may be shocking but is far from the only one. “I’m sure there are worse cases we don’t even know about,” she said. “Early marriage and forced marriage are the two most common forms of violent behavior against women and girls.”

The Human Rights Commission took the videotapes and the results of its investigation to the governor of Ghor Province, Sayed Iqbal Munib, who formed a commission to investigate it but took no action, saying the district was too insecure to send police there. A coalition of civic groups in the province called for his dismissal over the matter.

Nor has Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry replied to demands from the commission to take action in the case, according to the commission’s chairwoman, Sima Samar. A spokesman for the ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

Forced marriage of Afghan girls is not limited to remote rural areas. In Herat city, a Unicef-financed women’s shelter run by an Afghan group, the Voice of Women Organization, shelters as many as 60 girls who have fled child marriages.

A group called Women for Afghan Women runs shelters in the capital, Kabul, as well as in nearby Kapisa Province and in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, all relatively liberal areas as Afghanistan goes, which have taken in 108 escaped child brides just since January, according to Executive Director Manizha Naderi.

Poverty is the motivation for many child marriages, either because a wealthy husband pays a large bride-price, or just because the father of the bride then has one less child to support. “Most of the time they are sold,” Ms. Naderi said. “And most of the time it’s a case where the husband is much, much older.”

She said it was also common practice among police officers who apprehend runaway child brides to return them to their families. “Most police don’t understand what’s in the law, or they’re just against it,” she said.

On Saturday, at the Women for Afghan Women shelter, at a secret location in Kabul, there were four fugitive child brides. All had been beaten, and most wept as they recounted their experiences.

Sakhina, a 15-year-old Hazara girl from Bamian, was sold into marriage to pay off her father’s debts when she was 12 or 13.

Her husband’s family used her as a domestic servant. “Every time they could, they found an excuse to beat me,” she said. “My brother-in-law, my sister-in-law, my husband, all of them beat me.”

Sumbol, 17, a Pashtun girl, said she was kidnapped and taken to Jalalabad, then given a choice: marry her tormentor, or become a suicide bomber. “He said, ‘If you don’t marry me I will put a bomb on your body and send you to the police station,’ ” Sumbol said.

Roshana, a Tajik who is now 18, does not even know why her family gave her in marriage to an older man in Parwan when she was 14. The beatings were bad enough, but finally, she said, her husband tried to feed her rat poison.

In some ways, the two girls from Ghor were among the luckier child brides. After the floggings, the mullah declared them divorced and returned them to their own families.

Two years earlier, in nearby Murhab district, two girls who had been sold into marriage to the same family fled after being abused, according to a report by the Human Rights Commission. But they lost their way, were captured and forcibly returned. Their fathers — one the village mullah — took them up the mountain and killed them.

Justice Served, in the Michael Bryant case

Michael Bryant should be judged on his merits 

National Post editorial board

May 25, 2010

The details of Darcy Allen Sheppard’s death have lost none of their shock value in the nine months since his fatal altercation with former Ontario Cabinet minister Michael Bryant on Bloor Street in midtown Toronto. A fairly standard cyclist-vs.-motorist road rage incident quickly degenerated to the point that Mr. Sheppard was reaching into Mr. Bryant’s convertible, then clutching onto it as it accelerated into an oncoming lane, eventually dislodging him on a fire hydrant.

At the time, militant cyclists took to the streets declaring Mr. Sheppard’s death a “hate crime”; less militant cyclists insisted the altercation proved the need for more and better bike lanes, as if urban planning can anticipate and prevent outbursts of primal madness; and class warriors sneeringly predicted the interests of an anonymous, hardworking 33-year-old bicycle courier would be no match for those of the dapper and well-connected Mr. Bryant. We’re sure the latter will feel vindicated by yesterday’s announcement that all charges against Mr. Bryant have been withdrawn.

They were withdrawn for a very good reason, however: There was no reasonable prospect of Mr. Bryant being convicted of criminal negligence causing death or dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing death. As became clear during the investigation, Mr. Sheppard instigated the altercation. He was extremely drunk, with a blood alcohol level of 0.183. And had the charges against Mr. Bryant proceeded, the court would have heard that Mr. Sheppard had exhibited “an escalating cycle of aggressiveness toward motorists.”

Yes, Mr. Bryant panicked. We’re sure he’d handle the situation very differently if only he had the chance. But for people to suggest that his reaction is worthy of serious criminal sanctions is to assume that they would behave differently in the same circumstances. Alas, nobody knows just how their fight-or-flight response is wired until it’s put to the test.

This newspaper has little in common with Mr. Bryant’s or his Liberal party’s oppressively nannyish brand of governance. It was particularly ironic to see a former attorney-general at the mercy of a justice system that he and Premier Dalton McGuinty had shamelessly abused for political gain — for example, with their nonsensical pit-bull ban and street-racing law. But no one’s career should be derailed forever by an incident such as this — there but for the grace of God go we all.

Mr. Bryant should be judged in future — politically or otherwise — according to his merits, or lack thereof.

National Post

DiManno: The 28 seconds that changed Michael Bryant’s life

‘What I will never forget is the unnecessary tragedy of that night,’ said the former attorney general

Wed May 26 2010

Live by rage, die from rage.

Darcy Allan Sheppard was a quixotic hothead consumed by demons from his awful past. But it was the devil inside him on the night of Aug. 31, 2009, that caused his death — and not the man who was once Ontario’s attorney general.

Michael Bryant was merely the hapless vehicle of fate unfolding on a hot summer’s night when all the stars aligned so tragically.

Deranged cyclist meets car. Car bumps infuriated cyclist. The cyclist was the provocateur. The driver was the terrified and disoriented wheelman.

While no conclusive videotape exists of what happened in that confrontation, the déjà vu of it, of Sheppard’s documented fury towards cars and motorists, was captured by an office worker with a camera in a nearby building during a previous and eerily similar altercation: Sheppard, enraged, assaulting a driver only three weeks earlier, spitting on the car, jumping onto the vehicle, and hanging onto the window.

“The photographs clearly show Mr. Sheppard angrily confronting the driver of the vehicle and at one point, hanging onto the car with his hands inside the driver’s window and his feet on the car’s running board,” special prosecutor Richard Peck, a Vancouver lawyer brought in to handle the case, told court Tuesday as he entered the photographs (see below) as exhibits in a packed courtroom at Old City Hall.

Sheppard, a 33-year-old bike courier, may have been a sweet guy, as described by friends, with a humorous disposition. Yet he was also a profoundly violent alcoholic with a criminal record that included two assaults and threatening to kill a cab driver while armed with imitation firearms. Most germane to this case, Sheppard had been involved in six earlier duplicate incidents — four occurring last August — including one in which an elderly woman described him as a “mad man” and another earlier that night.

A night that began with Sheppard in the back of a police cruiser which had responded to a domestic call; a night that ended, an hour later, with Bryant in the back of a police cruiser, about to be charged with criminal negligence causing death and dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing death.

Both charges were formally withdrawn in court on Tuesday.

Just 28 seconds was the span of time that has forever linked Bryant and Sheppard, the former flung into a vortex of notoriety and the latter sprawled lifeless on the road.

“In 28 seconds, everything can change,” said Bryant.

What had never changed, regrettably, was the pattern of confrontations that Sheppard not only instigated but seemed hell-bent on ratcheting into crises — his “escalating cycle of aggressiveness toward motorists,” said Peck.

While such previous conduct, entered in court, was not meant to “demonize” Sheppard — nor would aggressive conduct on other occasions have justified committing a criminal offence against him — Peck insisted that a propensity for violence, substantiated by credible witnesses, was relevant in determining whether Bryant had been attacked, essentially making the victim the aggressor and Bryant legitimately entitled to self-defence.

This argument found little traction with Sheppard’s friends and defenders, with one declaring afterward that “it’s open season on cyclists.” But the prosecution’s methodical analysis of events found there was no reasonable prospect of conviction on either charge. Bryant might have conducted himself differently, changing the sad outcome, but under the stress and chaos of circumstances that Sheppard had orchestrated that night — his incendiary actions, his assault on the car, his apparent attempt to take control of the Saab convertible’s steering wheel — the alarmed driver’s response was understandable rather than criminal.

“Mr. Bryant was confronted by a man who, unfortunately, was in a rage,” Peck told reporters outside court. “In such circumstances, he was legally justified in trying to get away. The case could not be proved.”

That case was this:

Bryant and his wife, Susan Abramovitch, had been out for dinner at a Lebanese restaurant to celebrate their 12th wedding anniversary. They had not consumed any alcohol, unlike Sheppard who had fallen off the wagon after eight days of sobriety, his blood alcohol level measured after death at 0.183 — more than twice the legal limit for driving a car.

But he didn’t have a car, of course. He had a bicycle and Bryant first spotted him while driving homeward around 9.30 p.m., near the intersection of Bloor and Yonge Sts., noticing a cyclist impeding another motorist by doing figure 8s in front of the car. Other witnesses would later tell police that Sheppard had been throwing garbage onto the road and yelling at drivers.

For reasons of his own, Sheppard clearly did this a lot — menacing motorists and provoking altercations.

Bryant came to a red light between Bay St. and Avenue Rd., where traffic had narrowed to a single lane both ways because of construction. Sheppard, Bryant told investigators, cycled past his car on the driver’s side and then cut in front of the vehicle, stopping directly in front of the Saab.

Bryant hit the brakes and the car stalled. Attempts to get the car started again caused it to lurch forward. There appeared to be no contact between the car and Sheppard’s bike but the cyclist was livid and he was already yelling at Bryant.

He told police afterward he was in a state of panic when, restarting the vehicle, it accelerated unintentionally, shockingly, causing Sheppard to land on the hood. Bryant hit the brakes. Only 2.5 seconds elapsed from the time the vehicle started its forward motion and when it came to a halt, having travelled a total of about 30 feet. At this point, Sheppard was not seriously injured, said Peck.

As Bryant tried to reverse the car and go around the bicycle, Sheppard tossed a backpack that contained a heavy U-shaped lock at either the hood or windshield, and then jumped on the car as Bryant — fearing that he and his wife would be attacked — tried driving away. Sheppard hung on.

Defence lawyer Marie Henein described the scenario in court: “Darcy Allen would not let him go. . . . He ran at the car and jumped onto the driver’s side. Michael believed that he was trying to climb into the car. . . . Michael tried to stop the vehicle and push Darcy Sheppard off. Darcy Sheppard would not let go. Michael wasn’t strong enough to push the 6-foot-1 Darcy Sheppard off. During this attempt, Darcy Sheppard said, ‘You are not going to get away that easy.’

“Darcy Sheppard was deep into the vehicle with his entire upper torso leaning into the vehicle. At some point, Darcy Sheppard was laughing. Michael was desperately trying to control the steering wheel but was having difficulty doing so.”

In Peck’s words, Sheppard was “latched on” to the car.

Finally regaining some control of the steering wheel, Bryant drove into oncoming traffic to get away.

Henein: “Michael was in a complete state of panic and fear. Throughout this brief but frightening attack, Susan thought they were both going to die.”

While some witnesses claimed the car climbed the curb, forensic examination determined this had not happened. But with Sheppard still clinging to the vehicle, the Saab brushed within a foot of a sidewalk fire hydrant. That jostle caused Sheppard to be dislodged from his handhold, striking his head fatally on either the curb or a raised portion of the street.

Bryant drove on around the corner, stopped at the Hotel Hyatt and called 911, waiting for police to arrive.

Peck told court the point from where Sheppard jumped onto the Saab and the spot he fell off was about 100 metres. The fact Bryant drove away — though not far — did not support allegations of errors in judgment to establish criminal liability. The fear of an accused is relevant, Peck noted; Bryant and his wife were in a convertible, vulnerable, and fearful of Sheppard.

While police acted properly in laying the charges, Peck concluded, the couple’s explanation of events and evidence collected afterward demanded that those charges be withdrawn. There was never any special treatment for Bryant because the accused was a former attorney general, he added.

Sheppard — who’d knocked around some 30 foster homes in his childhood — may have had some justification for his chronic distemper. At least, that might help explain it. But his pitiable past was not relevant to what happened last Aug. 31, though the defence — and Bryant — was careful to reference the wretchedness of Sheppard’s difficult life.

“Twenty-eight seconds and you are in the criminal justice system,” said Henein. “Twenty-eight seconds and you’re in the back of a police car. Twenty-eight seconds and you don’t go home to your children.”

Twenty-eight seconds that Bryant wishes he could take back.

“I certainly have gone back and thought about events,” he said later. “Could I have done something differently? I never would have left the house that night. I might have lingered longer on the Danforth. I might have turned right on Bay. . . ”

There is plenty of . . . if only.

The man who once appointed judges said he has been humbled’ by a different and intimate experience of the justice system.

“I now have a unique perspective, from its highest pedestal as attorney general, to its pillory, as a defendant cuffed in the back of a squad car, accused of two very serious offences involving the tragic death of a man.”

The system, he emphasized, had bent over backward to avoid any hint of impropriety. “It can bend in no other direction. It cannot and did not.”

He has no axe to grind against police or the meticulous investigation. “What I will never forget is the unnecessary tragedy of that night. A young man is dead and for his family and friends that remains the searing memory. To them I express my sympathies and sincere condolences. I have grieved that loss and I always will.”

Bryant will return now to his job with a law firm.

“This has turned out to be a tale about addiction, mental health, an independent justice system, a tragic death and a couple out on their wedding anniversary with the top down. It is not a morality play about bikes versus cars, couriers versus drivers, or about class, privilege and politics.

“It’s just about how, in 28 seconds, everything can change. And thereafter time marches on. And so will I.”

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

 

Darcy Allan Sheppard taunted other drivers before Michael Bryant: photos

 

Shannon Kari  May 25, 2010

Darcy Allan Sheppard, the bike courier who died after an encounter with Michael Bryant on Bloor Street, had a documented history of clashes with drivers.

On Aug. 11, 2009 — a few short weeks before his death — Mr. Sheppard had an altercation with the driver of a BMW. Photographs of the incident were taken by an onlooker in a nearby office.

Handout

The man pictured, later identified as Darcy Sheppard, yells at him “just because you drive a fancy car you think you can drive along the wrong side of the road.”

The driver was in the oncoming lane to avoid parked delivery vehicles on a small street in Toronto’s financial district where couriers gather. At one point, Mr. Sheppard allegedly tried to reach in and grab the keys, hit the driver and grab his earpiece.

Handout

The man shoved Sheppard out of the car. That led to Sheppard allegedly making threats, spitting on the car, banging on it and jumping up on to it, before the motorist was able to drive away.

Handout

Conrad Black’s appeal may change U.S. law

Conrad Black arrives for his sentencing hearing in Chicago December 10, 2007

Theresa Tedesco Chief Business Correspondent,  National Post

May 21, 2010

When Conrad Black entered the U.S. justice system, he was a little-known Canadian-born press baron snared by America’s renowned white-collar crime dragnet. Three years later, however, the noted historian could be on the verge of leaving an indelible mark on the way that country prosecutes white-collar criminals in the future.

The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to release its highly anticipated decision on the honest services statute by the end of June and many legal observers, including those who prosecuted Lord Black under the controversial law, predict the top court will strike down the 28-word act as unconstitutionally vague. “I really do believe that the

convictions on honest services violations for Conrad Black are going to be vacated,” says Bennett L. Gershman, a law professor at Pace University in New York. “I think the

entire [Supreme] Court does not like this law.”

Added Eric Sussman, the former U.S. assistant attorney who led the trial against Lord Black in Chicago: “It seems unlikely they’ll reject the appeal [by Black] out of hand.”

Indeed, an appeal that was once widely dismissed is increasingly the subject of legal speculation it may succeed.

The stakes are high not only for Lord Black, who could see his fraud convictions overturned and his 6.5-year prison sentenced reduced, if not eliminated entirely. If he prevails, the repercussions could be far reaching, as countless honest-services convictions may be overturned and hundreds more thrown into question.

“There is certainly the possibility that plenty of cell doors can and will open as a result of the Supreme Court’s ruling because it has become obvious to all following these cases, that the Supreme Court believes that the government has grossly misapplied the statute,” says Jacob S. Frenkel, a former federal criminal prosecutor and former SEC enforcement lawyer.

“It is certainly a much less lonely battle than it was for the first few years, and I am cautiously optimistic that justice will prevail, but take nothing for granted and am ready for anything that comes,” Lord Black said in an email to the Post. Although he founded the National Post, and continues to be a columnist, he has no official connection to the paper.

He declined to comment further until the release of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Lord Black is appealing his three convictions on mail and wire fraud, which also include separate counts of honest services.

The former chief executive of Hollinger International Inc. was also convicted on one count of obstruction of justice in relation to his removal of 13 boxes from Hollinger’s downtown Toronto office during the criminal investigation.

The former chief executive of Hollinger International Inc., a Chicago-based publishing company that owned the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post, the Daily Telegraph of London and hundreds of community papers in North America, was convicted by a jury in 2007, along with three former senior Hollinger executives Jack Boultbee, Peter Atkinson and Mark Kipnis, of depriving the company’s shareholders of their faithful services as corporate officers.

The 65-year-old, currently serving a 78-month sentence in a Florida penitentiary, began mobilizing a legal fight to overturn his guilty verdicts soon after entering the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in March 2008.

After a lower appeals court upheld his convictions, he was granted the rare privilege to be heard by the nine judges on the Supreme Court in 2009 – one of only about 100 of the 75,000 petitions received annually by the high court.

Soon after, similar appeals by Jeffrey Skilling, former CEO of Enron Corp., and Alaska state legislator Bruce Weyhauser followed.

Generally, the honest services law requires that public and corporate officials act in the best interests of their stakeholders. Originally designed to prevent government officials from using their positions for personal gain, it has also become an essential tool for U.S. prosecutors to combat corporate fraud.

The law makes it illegal for public officials and corporate executives to engage in activities that deprive those they serve of the “intangible right to honest services.”

U.S. law enforcement officials have increasingly relied on the statute’s lower burden of proof to convince juries that a defendant has deprived others of their honest services, rather than using other more specific anti-corruption laws with higher evidentiary thresholds.

Among them, Mr. Skilling, who was convicted in 2006 of a bevy of frauds, including honest services, after the spectacular collapse of the energy company in 2001. Mr. Weyrauch, a former member of the Alaska House of Representatives, was charged with honest services and mail fraud after the U.S. government accused him of failing to disclose his attempts to procure future employment from an oil company before voting for legislation that would benefit the company. Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich has been indicted under the controversial statute, while former New York state senator Joseph Bruno was convicted on two felony counts of theft of honest services last December. He is awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling before starting his two-year jail sentence.

“It’s safe to assume that the Court considers extending honest services fraud into the corporate boardroom was an overbroad and misapplication of the statute,” said Mr. Frenkel, now a securities lawyer based in Potomac, Md. “The lesson here is prosecutors should not be getting cute and look to over extend the laws on the books.”

As a result, U.S. law enforcement authorities are concerned that a potent weapon in their anti-corruption arsenal is in jeopardy, as are possibly scores of convictions secured with it.

Critics argue the honest services statute is too vague and open to interpretation, and that it has been used to criminalize minor transgressions and ethical violations.

Lord Black argued this point when he appealed his case to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago in 2008. But the 11 appellate judges upheld his convictions.

To the surprise of most legal experts, his last-ditch appeal to the Supreme Court had greater currency with some of the jurists who are highly skeptical of the honest services law.

Earlier this year, Justice Antonin Scalia described it as “mush” and said it “invites abuse by headline-grabbing prosecutors in pursuit of local officials, state legislators and corporate CEOs who engage in any manner of unappealing or ethically questionable conduct.”

Justice Stephen Breyer criticized the statute as one “that picks up 80 to 100 million people” and observed that a “citizen is supposed to be able to understand the criminal law.”

Chief Justice John Roberts noted that if a person is not able to understand what is legal and what is not, the law is invalid. The broad wording of the statute makes it difficult to know with certainty what conduct runs afoul of the law.

That failing, according to Mr. Gershman, violates due process and makes the act unconstitutional. As a result, the convictions “would be vacated because you can’t be convicted under a law that is unconstitutional,” he argued.

While it was widely recognized that Justice Scalia had issues with the anti-corruption law, many are surprised the criticism “went deeper,” according to Mr. Sussman.

“I don’t think that any of the people who were dealing with it and arguing it [the Black case] felt that the legal issues we were dealing with were the issues that would one day be addressed by the Supreme Court,” he said.

Mr. Frenkel concurs.

“Everyone’s collective analysis previously was that it would fail on appeal,” he said. “No one could have suspected the Supreme Court collectively would have viewed the application of the statute as misapplied and overbroad.”

Even so, John Coffee, a law professor at Columbia University in New York City, predicts “it won’t be unanimous, I think it’ll be a split decision.”

Mr. Black and two of his co-defendents want the honest services convictions overturned arguing they intended no economic harm to the company when they received US$5.5-million in management fees. The money was collected as non-compete payments and crafted to receive favorable tax treatment in Canada. (Mr. Atkinson did not participate in the appeal to avoid delaying his transfer to a Canadian prison.)

However, Mr. Sussman and his fellow U.S. prosecutors successfully argued at the Chicago trial that the millions were stolen because they belonged to the company and its shareholders.

During the oral appeal at the Supreme Court last December, Lord Black’s lawyer argued the Chicago jury was given flawed instructions when it was told the former Hollinger executives could be found guilty if they merely failed to provide honest services to the company’s shareholders.

Miguel Estrada, Lord Black’s Washington-based lawyer, argued there was no evidence that Hollinger had suffered economic loss because of the non-compete and management fees received by Lord Black and his co-defendants.

Mr. Estrada urged the top court to strike down the honest services law because it was “vague, amorphous and open ended.”

While Lord Black’s appeal challenged only the fraud convictions, his legal team served notice in court filings that a victory on that issue would also require a reversal of the obstruction of justice judgment.

Some legal observers predict that may be a long shot.

“The majority of white collar prosecutions are ones in which people go to prison not for the original crime, but for what they did after the criminal investigation began,” observes Mr. Coffee.

Mr. Frenkel suggests that “Conrad Black’s case could be Martha Stewart revisited in that obstruction becomes the real reason he goes to jail, not the underlying conduct.”

For his part, Mr. Sussman isn’t betting that Lord Black’s criminal slate will be wiped clean.

The former prosecutor turned criminal defence lawyer anticipates the Supreme Court will remand Lord Black’s case to the lower appellate court for a “harmless error” review to determine how the top court’s ruling affects the rest of Lord Black’s convictions.

“I would be very surprised if the Supreme Court makes the final decision in terms of vacating the convictions in Mr. Black’s case. Even if they vacate the honest services convictions, the question still remains what happens to the mail and wire fraud? They are separate even though the same count,” he says.

Even if Lord Black prevails at the Seventh Circuit, he could still find himself before federal Judge Amy St. Eve, who presided over his trial, for re-sentencing on the obstruction charge. At that time, the U.S. government can decide to retry him strictly on the mail and wire fraud.

Mr. Frenkel says that’s unlikely to happen as long as the obstruction conviction remains. “As long as one conviction survives the ultimate appeal [Supreme Court], it’s not good use of government resources to retry an entire case,” he explains.

Mr. Gershman agreed, citing a legal doctrine that discourages vindictive prosecution as retaliation against defendants after they’ve raised legitimate claims on appeal and won.

“It strikes me if their convictions are vacated because this law is invalid, I don’t know that there’s any basis for further prosecution legitimately,” he said.

Those future machinations will begin to take shape once the Supreme Court has rendered its verdict.

“There’s a great deal of uncertainty right now,” said Daniel Petrocelli, the high-profile lawyer who argued the Supreme Court appeal for Mr. Skilling. “And all we can do is wait patiently, or even impatiently.”

Explaining the honest services law Conrad Black is appealing against

Conrad Black leaves the Derksen Federal Courthouse after being sentenced to 6-1/2 years in prison.

By Jim Middlemiss

Not just Conrad Black is waiting for the United States Supreme Court to rule on the validity of his honest-services conviction.

U.S. defence lawyers, prosecutors, judges and perhaps hundreds of white-collar criminals will all be watching their country’s top court rule on a trilogy of cases that attack Chapter 18, section 1346 of the U.S. Code, which makes it a crime to use the mail or wire services in a scheme that deprives another of the “intangible right of honest services.”

Some judges have put off sentencing those convicted of charges under section 1346 until the top court rules. “There are a whole bunch of cases that are in limbo waiting for this decision,” said Eric Breslin, a partner at Duane Morris in Philadelphia, who defends white-collar criminals.

“This is a very, very hot area in federal criminal practice in the United States. This is the opinion from the [U.S.] Supreme Court that, on a substantive criminal law basis, everyone is waiting for.”

Lord Black, along with former Hollinger executives Jack Boultbee and Mark Kipnis, have appealed their convictions under section 1346 to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court is considering similar challenges from Jeffrey Skilling, the former president of Enron Corporation, and former Alaska state politician, Bruce Weyhrauch, who faces charges of soliciting legal work from a company that sought lower oil taxes from the state legislature. In the Weyhrauch case, a district court judge ordered evidence excluded from his trial related to an honest-services charge, and an appeals court ruled it was admissible, setting up the Supreme Court showdown.

Honest services is a quirky law originally conceived to keep public officials honest. But it has been used as a catchall to put white-collar criminals behind bars for various deceits. Lawyers and judges have grown increasingly critical of the law, calling it broad and vague. Just this week, federal prosecutors were reportedly looking at the law as a way of going after top Catholic church officials in Los Angeles, for covering up abuse of minors by priests.

In a 2003 case, federal appellate Judge Barrington Parker Jr. wrote: “It is quite clear that the statute imposes insufficient constraint on prosecutors, gives insufficient guidance to judges, and affords insufficient notice to defendants.”

The Supreme Court could choose to strike down the law, which could lead to those currently in jail for honest-services charges being able to seek release. The court could also uphold the law or it could seek to limit its reach by putting in restrictions on how it is applied or interpreted.

In the Black case, the charge centres on non-compete payments executives received in the sale of publications. Under Canadian law, such payments were tax-free at the time of the sale.

The jury dismissed the bulk of charges against the men which were grounded in fraud involving theft of money, but found them guilty on three counts of wire fraud for failing to provide the intangible right of honest services.

The problem with the law, said Jonathan Marcus, one of the lawyers who intervened in the Black appeal on behalf of the U.S. Criminal Defence Lawyers Association, is that it “gives prosecutors too much leeway and too much latitude. It’s vague and doesn’t provide clear guidance to the average citizen about what’s prohibited and what’s not. It’s very vulnerable to being invalidated.”

Lord Black’s lawyers have argued that “the government has stretched this malleable phrase, unknown in the common law, far beyond the public corruption context that gave rise to its enactment, treating the statute as ‘nothing more than an invitation for federal courts to develop a common-law crime of unethical conduct.’”

The main thrust of the appeal is that the prosecutors had to show some sort of harm flowed to Hollinger, which the defence said the prosecutors failed to do and the jury instructions omitted. The government takes the position that it does not have to show economic harm to get a conviction.

The law was enacted in 1988 essentially to undo a Supreme Court ruling that the government could not use the fraud laws as they were worded at the time to prosecute schemes that deprived citizens of the intangible right to honest services.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has attacked the law, noting in its legal brief that it “imposes an unwarranted burden on American companies and executives who are entitled to fair notice of what conduct is and is not prohibited.”

The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has joined the government’s side, arguing that imposing a harm test on the law would “deprive prosecutors of this critical tool,” which the group says is used to “indict public officials on the basis of their intentional non-disclosure of a material conflict of interest.”

The court must rule on the matter before its term recesses in June.

National Post

[VIDEO] Private Investigator Derrick Snowdy testifies before a House of Commons committee

Private investigator Derrick Snowdy arrives at a Commons government operations committee in Ottawa on Wednesday.

Daniel Leblanc

Ottawa — Globe and Mail Wednesday, May. 13, 2010

The man whose warnings to Prime Minister Stephen Harper led to the political downfall of Helena Guergis acknowledged on Wednesday that he never had evidence of wrongdoing against her.

Private investigator Derrick Snowdy said he was worried about the possibility of blackmail if pictures ever emerged showing Ms. Guergis in the company of Nazim Gillani, a controversial businessman facing fraud charges who had dealings with her husband, Rahim Jaffer.

However, he told a parliamentary committee he never saw any evidence linking Ms. Guergis to drugs or prostitutes, or ever had any concerns about her behaviour.

“The concern here is optics,” Mr. Snowdy said.

Mr. Snowdy raised his concerns with Conservative Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton late in the day on April 8. Government officials confirmed that Mr. Harper reacted to the warning the following day by forcing Ms. Guergis’s resignation as minister of state for the status of women and expelling her from the Conservative caucus.

A few days later, Mr. Harper said he acted after receiving “serious allegations about the former minister’s comportment.”

Mr. Snowdy, however, said he was surprised when he was contacted by the Office of the Ethics Commissioner and heard how his allegations had been represented in a letter written by Mr. Harper’s chief of staff, Guy Giorno.

“I said [to the Office of the Ethics Commissioner], no, I did not say that,” Mr. Snowdy recounted.

He said he then had an angry exchange with Mr. Hamilton, which included “a number of profanities.”

“I was not very happy with the characterization of that conversation in that context, and Mr. Hamilton was sympathetic to my call,” Mr. Snowdy said.

After the hearing, opposition MPs expressed concerns over Mr. Harper’s treatment of Ms. Guergis, with NDP MP Pat Martin saying her career was ruined based on “flimsy allegations.”

The government reacted by insisting that it had information from more than one source. In particular, the Prime Minister’s Office justified Mr. Harper’s actions by pointing to evidence that subsequently emerged suggesting that Mr. Jaffer sought government funds on behalf of other companies in Ms. Guergis’s office, or using one of her office’s e-mail accounts.

“All revelations have made it clear that was the right decision to make,” PMO spokesman Dimitri Soudas said about Ms. Guergis’s ouster.

Mr. Snowdy called himself an “unwilling” player in the month-long controversy, but he drove up to Ottawa in a red Ferrari and gladly showcased it for television cameras. His focus during the testimony was Mr. Gillani, whom he had been hired to investigate last year on behalf of frustrated investors.

Mr. Snowdy accused Mr. Gillani of running a “shell game” involving companies, making money on “pump and dump” stock manipulations. He said that Mr. Gillani was using his contacts with Mr. Jaffer, a former Conservative MP, to create the impression with potential clients that they could get “special considerations” in getting federal funds.

The Conservative MPs on the committee sought on numerous occasions during Wednesday’s hearings to point out the fact that Mr. Gillani once hired lawyer Alfred Apps, the president of the Liberal Party of Canada.

Mr. Apps quickly issued a statement saying that the dealings with Mr. Gillani were short-lived, lasting less than two weeks, and that a retainer cheque was returned.

Mr. Gillani also fought back, issuing a statement and taking to the airwaves to defend his reputation.

“Mr. Snowdy has taken full advantage of immunity afforded by the House of Commons committee hearing to offer a mix of innuendo, political attacks against the Liberal Party, misinformation, insults to the committee and to me, and only a few facts that add a veneer of credibility,” Mr. Gillani said in a statement.

[VIDEO] Helena Guergis interviewed by Peter Mansbridge

Five and a Half Things about the Guergis interview

Scott Feschuk Tuesday, May 11, 2010

1. It probably doesn’t help Helena Guergis’s case that whenever I hear her voice I think of the littlePoltergeist lady. Now clear your minds. It knows what scares you. IT HAS FROM THE VERY BEGINNING!!

(This isn’t a joke. I am deeply unnerved by her Soft Voice. At points during last night’s interview, it was as though she was trying to tuck Peter Mansbridge into bed. “I guess I could be naïve, Peter. Yeah. <softer>Yeah. <softer> And then the baby unicorn and the fairy princess were bestest friends for all time. The end.”)

1.5 When Guergis made reference to watching her career implode on “the news hour at 11 o’clock,” I admired Peter Mansbridge’s restraint in not tearing off his microphone and hollering, “Why don’t you go cry to your best friend Lloyd Robertson then?”

2. Allowing Mansbridge to view the videotape of her alleged meltdown at the Charlottetown airport was smart – no boot throwing? WHAAA?? –because it allowed her to begin the interview with a demonstration of credibility. Two obvious questions: Why didn’t she do this sooner? And more important, can we all go to CATSA head office and watch videotapes of ourselves going through airport security? Because I’m pretty sure that tape of one of the screeners at Toronto island airport “accidentally” knocking me in the nuts with his handheld wand would be a hoot.

3. The credibility that Guergis built up eroded when she talked about her husband, Rahim Jaffer. She came off here as overly coached, relying on wounded sentences that (I’d wager) were crafted for her by an advisor. “I have no reason to believe my husband would lie to me, my husband would not want to hurt me or harm me in any way.”

Little of what she said about Jaffer was convincing. In one breath, she stated that she knew with absolute certainty that Jaffer never used her office or resources to exploit his Conservative connections to try and score government grants and financing. In the next, she said she has little clue what her husband’s job actually entails. “I know he works in green technologies. I know he knows a lot of people.” I know he’s a biped. I have a strong hunch he owns several pairs of pants.

And then this: According to Guergis, Jaffer has “no idea” how the cocaine ended up in his pocket on the night he was arrested. Permit me to help you with that one, Helena: He put it there. Did I just blow your mind?

4. Guergis was pretty adamant that she’s never done cocaine or any other drug. Ever. Don’t we have to believe her? I think we do unless someone comes forward with something other than rumour and hearsay. Like maybe an HD video of her with coke and strippers – but you know, classy-like.

5. The part where she cried made me uncomfortable. I briefly switched the channel to CSI: Miami. A murdered soccer Mom? I guess the killer got a <removes sunglasses> real kick out of this.

After Religion Fizzles, We’re Stuck With Nietzsche — By Chris Hedges

May 9, 2010
By Chris Hedges

It is hard to muster much sympathy over the implosion of the Catholic Church, traditional Protestant denominations or Jewish synagogues. These institutions were passive as the Christian right, which peddles magical thinking and a Jesus-as-warrior philosophy, hijacked the language and iconography of traditional Christianity.

They have busied themselves with the boutique activism of the culture wars. They have failed to unequivocally denounce unfettered capitalism, globalization and pre-emptive war. The obsession with personal piety and “How-is-it-with-me?” spirituality that permeates most congregations is narcissism.

And while the Protestant church and reformed Judaism have not replicated the perfidiousness of the Catholic bishops, who protect child-molesting priests, they have little to say in an age when we desperately need moral guidance.

I grew up in the church and graduated from a seminary. It is an institution whose cruelty, inflicted on my father, who was a Presbyterian minister, I know intimately. I do not attend church. The cloying, feel-your-pain language of the average clergy member makes me run for the door. The debates in most churches—whether revolving around homosexuality or biblical interpretation—are a waste of energy.

I have no desire to belong to any organization, religious or otherwise, which discriminates, nor will I spend my time trying to convince someone that the raw anti-Semitism in the Gospel of John might not be the word of God. It makes no difference to me if Jesus existed or not. There is no historical evidence that he did.

Fairy tales about heaven and hell, angels, miracles, saints, divine intervention and God’s beneficent plan for us are repeatedly mocked in the brutality and indiscriminate killing in war zones, where I witnessed children murdered for sport and psychopathic gangsters elevated to demigods. The Bible works only as metaphor.

 

The institutional church, when it does speak, mutters pious non-statements that mean nothing. “Given the complexity of factors involved, many of which understandably remain confidential, it is altogether appropriate for members of our armed forces to presume the integrity of our leadership and its judgments, and therefore to carry out their military duties in good conscience,” Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, head of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, wrote about the Iraq war. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, on the eve of the invasion, told believers that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was a menace, and that reasonable people could disagree about the necessity of using force to overthrow him.

It assured those who supported the war that God would not object. B’nai B’rith supported a congressional resolution to authorize the 2003 attack on Iraq. The Union of American Hebrew Congregations, which represents Reform Judaism, agreed it would back unilateral action, as long as Congress approved and the president sought support from other nations.

The National Council of Churches, which represents 36 different faith groups, in a typical bromide, urged President George W. Bush to “do all possible” to avoid war with Iraq and to stop “demonizing adversaries or enemies” with good-versus-evil rhetoric, but, like the other liberal religious institutions, did not condemn the war.

A Gallup poll in 2006 found that “the more frequently an American attends church, the less likely he or she is to say the war was a mistake.” Given that Jesus was a pacifist, and given that all of us who graduated from seminary rigorously studied Just War doctrine, which was flagrantly violated by the invasion of Iraq, this is a rather startling statistic.

But I cannot rejoice in the collapse of these institutions. We are not going to be saved by faith in reason, science and technology, which the dead zone of oil forming in the Gulf of Mexico and our production of costly and redundant weapons systems illustrate. Frederick Nietzsche’s Übermensch, or “Superman”—our secular religion—is as fantasy-driven as religious magical thinking.

There remain, in spite of the leaders of these institutions, religiously motivated people toiling in the inner city and the slums of the developing world. They remain true to the core religious and moral values ignored by these institutions. The essential teachings of the monotheistic traditions are now lost in the muck of church dogma, hollow creeds and the banal bureaucracy of institutional religion.

These teachings helped create the concept of the individual. The belief that we can exist as distinct beings from the tribe, or the crowd, and that we are called on as individuals to make moral decisions that can defy the clamor of the nation is one of the gifts of religious thought. This call for individual responsibility is coupled with the constant injunctions in Islam, Judaism and Christianity for compassion, especially for the weak, the impoverished, the sick and the outcast.

We are rapidly losing the capacity for the moral life. We reject the anxiety of individual responsibility that laid the foundations for the open society. We are enjoined, after all, to love our neighbor, not our tribe. This empowerment of individual conscience was the starting point of the great ethical systems of all civilizations.

Those who championed this radical individualism, from Confucius to Socrates to Jesus, fostered not obedience and conformity, but dissent and self-criticism. They initiated the separation of individual responsibility from the demands of the state. They taught that culture and society were not the sole prerogative of the powerful, that freedom and indeed the religious and moral life required us to often oppose and challenge those in authority, even at great personal cost.

         

Immanuel Kant built his ethics upon this radical individualism. And Kant’s injunction to “always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as mere means” runs in a direct line from the Socratic ideal and the Christian Gospels.

The great religions set free the critical powers of humankind. They broke with the older Greek and Roman traditions that gods and Destiny ruled human fate—a belief that, when challenged by Socrates, saw him condemned to death. They challenged the power of the tribe, the closed society.

They offered up the possibility that human beings, although limited by circumstance and human weakness, could shape and give direction to society and their own lives. These religious thinkers were our first ethicists. And it is perhaps not accidental that the current pope, as well as the last one, drove out of the Catholic Church thousands of clergy and religious leaders who embodied these qualities, elevating the dregs to positions of leadership and leaving the pedophiles to run the Sunday schools.

These religious institutions are in irreversible decline. They are ruled by moral and intellectual trolls. They have become arrogant and self-absorbed. Their sins are many. They protected criminals. They pandered to the lowest common denominator and illusions of personal fulfillment and surrendered their moral authority. They did not fight the corporate tyrants who have impoverished us.

They refused to denounce a caste of Christian heretics embodied by the Christian right and have, for their cowardice, been usurped by bizarre proto-fascists clutching the Christian cross. They have nothing left to say. And their aging congregants, who are fleeing the church in droves, know it. But don’t think the world will be a better place for their demise.

As we devolve into a commodity culture, in which celebrity, power and money reign, the older, dimming values of another era are being replaced. We are becoming objects, consumer products and marketable commodities. We have no intrinsic value. We are obsessed with self-presentation. We must remain youthful. We must achieve notoriety and money or the illusion of it.

And it does not matter what we do to get there. Success, as Goldman Sachs illustrates, is its own morality. Other people’s humiliation, pain and weakness become the fodder for popular entertainment. Education, building community, honesty, transparency and sharing see contestants disappeared from any reality television show or laughed out of any Wall Street firm.

We live in the age of the Übermensch who rejects the sentimental tenets of traditional religion. The Übermensch creates his own morality based on human instincts, drive and will. We worship the “will to power” and think we have gone “beyond good and evil.”

We spurn virtue. We think we have the moral fortitude and wisdom to create our own moral code. The high priests of our new religion run Wall Street, the Pentagon and the corporate state. They flood our airwaves with the tawdry and the salacious. They, too, promise a utopia. They redefine truth, beauty, morality, desire and goodness. And we imbibe their poison as blind followers once imbibed the poison of the medieval church.

Nietzsche had his doubts. He suspected that this new secular faith might prefigure an endless middle-class charade. Nietzsche feared the deadening effects of the constant search for material possessions and personal hedonism.

Science and technology might rather bring about a new, distorted character Nietzsche called “the Last Man.” The Last Man, Nietzsche feared, would engage in the worst kinds of provincialism, believing he had nothing to learn from history.

The Last Man would wallow and revel in his ignorance and quest for personal fulfillment. He would be satisfied with everything that he had done and become, and would seek to become nothing more. He would be intellectually and morally stagnant, incapable of growth, and become part of an easily manipulated herd.

The Last Man would mistake cynicism for knowledge.
“The time is coming when man will give birth to no more stars,” Nietzsche wrote about the Last Man in the prologue of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” “Alas! The time of the most contemptible man is coming, the man who can no longer despise himself.”

“They are clever and know everything that has ever happened: so there is no end to their mockery.” The Last Men indulge in “their little pleasure for the day, and their little pleasure for the night.”

The consumer culture, as Nietzsche feared, has turned us into what Chalmers Johnson calls a “consumerist Sparta.” The immigrants and the poor, all but invisible to us, work as serfs in this new temple of greed and imperialism. Curtis White in “The Middle Mind” argues that most Americans are aware of the brutality and injustice used to maintain the excesses of their consumer society and empire. He suspects they do not care.

They don’t want to see what is done in their name. They do not want to look at the rows of flag-draped coffins or the horribly maimed bodies and faces of veterans or the human suffering in the blighted and deserted former manufacturing centers. It is too upsetting.

Government and corporate censorship is welcomed and appreciated. It ensures that we remain Last Men. And the death of religious institutions will only cement into place the new secular religion of the Last Man, the one that worships military power, personal advancement, hedonism and greed, the one that justifies our callousness toward the weak and the poor.

              

“Sometimes right, sometimes wrong–Everybody has to be careful.”

---

May 7, 2010, 1:05 pm

Times Square Evacuated After ‘Suspicious Package’ Report

By BAO ONG AND ANDY NEWMAN

| The north end of Times Square has been evacuated, from West 44th to West 47th Streets, after the police received reports of a suspicious package at Broadway and West 46th Street at about 12:45 p.m.

The package “looks like a cooler,” a police spokesman said. “We’re trying to see if it’s clear.”

It was the second suspicious-package call and at least partial evacuation in the area today.

---

Following in the footsteps of the Times Square hawkers who spotted the illegally parked Nissan Pathfinder, another street vendor on hyper-alert reported a suspicious package Friday morning.

The vendor, Hassane Soliman Elbaz, 30, parked his silver cupcake cart at the northwest corner of 45th Street and Eighth Avenue around 5 a.m. Several hours later, he noticed a small black duffel bag near a trash bin. He reported the bag to a mounted police officer shortly after 9 a.m.

“Sometimes right, sometimes wrong,” Mr. Elbaz said. “Everybody has to be careful.”

Within 30 minutes, police officers cleared the area and brought in a bomb squad to check the bag.

They found a gray shirt, white tube socks, a toothbrush and pens.

The police deemed the bag not suspicious and left the scene before 11 a.m.

It was at least the seventh suspicious package brought to the attention of the police since the car bomb attempt on Saturday.

Mr. Elbaz, an immigrant from Egypt who lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, said he was relieved. It was only his second day running his Little Cupcake Lover cart. He sells coffee, bagels, croissants and other pastries in the morning before the red velvet, Oreo, Nutella mint and ocean-sprinkled cupcakes arrive.

He said the owners of the Chicken Bar, a lunch operation behind where he works, had given him a difficult time so far, but joked that not even a suspicious bag could have thwarted his business.

“Anything crazy can happen in New York,” Mr. Elbaz said as he dealt with a customer.

A Package Spotted, and Times Sq. Pauses

Mark Lennihan/Associated Press

Times Square Reopened After ‘Suspicious Package’ Report 

By BAO ONG AND ANDY NEWMAN

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters An area of Times Square was evacuated on Friday afternoon after a suspicious cooler was discovered.