Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks
By Patrick Radden Keefe

The crimes:

“The Jefferson Bottles”: a billionaire oenophile makes it his mission to take down a fraudster selling new wine in old bottles.

“Crime Family”: a Dutch woman turns informer on her crime boss brother.

“The Avenger”: a documentary filmmaker goes after one of the key figures behind the Lockerbie bombing.

“The Empire of Edge”: insider information fuels a high-profile hedge fund.

“A Loaded Gun”: a university neurobiologist goes postal at a faculty meeting.

“The Hunt for El Chapo”: the Mexican, and ultimately U.S. authorities, finally get their man.

“Winning”: television producer Mark Burnett and the making of Donald Trump.

“Swiss Bank Heist”: a tech guy blows the whistle on a Swiss bank.

“The Prince of Marbella”: the pursuit of a high-rolling arms merchant.

“The Worst of the Worst”: a top death-row defence lawyer represents one of the Boston Marathon bombers.

“Buried Secrets”: an Israeli billionaire gets involved in the dirty business of resource development in Guinea.

“Journeyman”: a look at the life of chef/author/TV personality Anthony Bourdain.

The book:

All of these stories first appeared in The New Yorker. But even having such a prestigious publication behind you doesn’t always land you access. Keefe begins his prefatory remarks by talking about how many of these pieces were “writearounds”: “an article about a subject who declines to grant an interview.” But, he goes on to say, this does not diminish them. “Some journalists hate writearounds,” he tells us, “but I’ve always enjoyed the challenge they pose. It takes a lot of creative reporting to produce a vivid portrait of someone without ever getting to speak to them, but these pieces are often more revealing than the scripted encounters you end up with when the politician or CEO actually cooperates.”

What Keefe says here rhymed with something Michael Lista talks about in his true-crime collection The Human Scale, a book I was reviewing at the same time as I was reading Rogues. Lista describes “end-runs” (it means the same thing as writearound) and says that writing his own fair share of them “proved something profound to me: the interview isn’t necessarily the best way to know the subject of a story.”

I agree wholeheartedly, and indeed I would go even further and say chances are that a writearound or end-run is more likely to reveal something significant about the subject of a piece than one where there is a formal sit-down interview “for the record.” Because what are most interviewees going to say? Only what you would expect them to say. They have no interest in telling the truth while (ostensibly) setting the record straight or explaining themselves. They only want to shape the narrative in what are obviously self-serving ways. The reporter or biographer is better off just ignoring them and doing their own research. But writing about celebrities or people in a position of power, and the compromises that are necessarily made, is something I’ve considered at length elsewhere.

Turning to the people Keefe is writing about here, what would talking to Mark Burnett or Donald Trump have told him? I would expect Burnett to be smarter and more careful in how he expressed himself, but I’m pretty sure neither individual would say anything but what I’d expect them to say. In other words, nothing much. The futility of interviewing people like this is underscored when Keefe does, somewhat surprisingly, get to talk to Beny Steinmetz (“by some estimates, the richest man in Israel”) about his buying up mountains of iron ore in Guinea. It goes down in a totally predictable way. The point isn’t that Steinmetz just blows a lot of smoke, it’s that all he ends up saying is exactly what Keefe must have known he was going to say. He did nothing wrong. Other people are out to get him. They’re the bad guys. We all know how this story goes. So why even bother?

And why would the subjects bother, assuming they knew Keefe wasn’t just going to be a tool? At least for wealthy rogues it makes more sense to operate in the darkness. This ties into another connected theme: privacy.

In my notes on The Missing Crypto Queen I talked about how, whatever their other functions, the main reason for having cryptocurrencies is that they do an end run around the law (taxes and other financial regulations) and are used mainly for the purpose of money laundering and to keep shading dealings away from the prying eyes of law enforcement. I was thinking of that again when I came to a part in the story about sketchy Swiss banking practices and how fanatical they were to maintain their clients’ privacy. And not just their clients. Called before a committee of the British House of Commons, one bank CEO named Stuart Gulliver talked about how, at his institution, he had implemented “root and branch” reform:

But it was hard to see him as an agent of change. When committee members inquired how he chose to receive his personal compensation from the bank, Gulliver acknowledged that for many years he was paid through an anonymous shell company that he had set up in Panama – through Mossack Fonseca [the Panamanian law firm that was shut down after being exposed in the so-called Panama Papers as being involved in various tax evasion and money laundering schemes]. Gulliver insisted that he had always paid his taxes and that he employed the Panamanian shell simply for “privacy.” But he admitted his “inability to convince anyone that these arrangements were not put in place for reasons of tax evasion.”

I can see why that might be a hard sell.

It’s easy to feel ambivalent about privacy. It’s not well known, but the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade was based on finding a Constitutional right to privacy. And fifty years later, privacy is seen as an important right in an age of non-stop monitoring and surveillance. But at the same time, privacy is also used as a shield by bad actors, particularly those with deep pockets, who can afford to buy the sort of cover that allows them to work in secret. Like people being paid in crypto, or setting up shell companies in offshore tax havens. When Keefe starts looking into Beny Steinmetz he begins by noting how “Despite his great wealth, Steinmetz has maintained an exceptionally low profile.” Despite? I think most billionaires avoid appearing on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or as one of the Rich Kids of Instagram. “He’s a very private guy,” one of Steinmetz’s friends tells Keefe. This is said, by the friend, to be mainly because Steinmetz is a family guy, but it has other obvious benefits. When being investigated on charges of corruption, it comes in particularly useful.

But how do you prove corruption? By its nature, corruption is covert; payoffs are designed to be difficult to detect. The international financial system has evolved to accommodate a wide array of illicit activities, and shell companies and banking havens make it easy to camouflage transfers, payment orders, and copies of checks. . . . The result . . . is “a web of corporate opacity” that is spun largely by wealthy professionals in financial capitals like London and New York. A recent study found that the easiest country in which to establish an untraceable shell company is not some tropical banking haven but the United States.

So what do you want? Protection for the little guy, a right to be left alone and to not have your data harvested with every click and text? Or more transparency for billionaires and corporate bad actors? It’s hard not to think that the rich and powerful are always going to find some way to weaponize every nice thing that comes along, so I guess we’re stuck with taking the bad with the good. All you can do, and probably should do, is be suspicious of any rich person with secrets.

This is a solid collection of reporting that reads long in a good way. The last story on Anthony Bourdain seemed the most of out of place, though I guess his drug use made him into a bit of a “rogue.” In any event, I can understand Bourdain’s popularity though his beat – food and travel – are subjects that don’t interest me much and I never watched his show. I also managed to avoid ever seeing more than maybe a couple of episodes of The Apprentice, and it’s interesting how I guess it’s taken for granted that Trump (and maybe Burnett) were both rogues without being involved in anything illegal. That we know of. But of course, we’d likely never know.

Noted in passing:

It’s often remarked how stupid even highly educated and indeed highly intelligent people can be. I was thinking of this when reading about Amy Bishop’s meltdown at a meeting of the faculty that had recently denied her tenure, which ended with her killing three of them. One of the profs in attendance who had voted against Bishop receiving tenure considered herself to be close to Bishop, and before things went to hell had “made a mental note to ask Bishop how her search for a new job was going.”

I have a hard time imagining how she thought Bishop, who she must have known was someone who did not enjoy robust mental health, was likely to take such a friendly inquiry. As it is, she ended up on her knees begging Bishop to spare her and her life was only saved because Bishop’s gun jammed. Bishop did actually try to shoot her twice.

I may have already known that the bulletproof glass in the president’s armoured car (nicknamed “The Beast”) was 5 inches thick, but it still surprised me. How do you see anything out of glass 5 inches thick?

Even more impressive though was the front door to one of El Chapo’s safe houses. Breaking this down turned out to be no easy matter.

The marines readied their weapons and produced a battering ram, but when they moved to breach the front door, it didn’t budge. A wooden door would have splintered off its hinges, but this door was a marvel of reinforced steel – some of the marines later likened it to an air lock on a submarine. For all the noise that their efforts made, the door seemed indestructible. Normally, the friction of a battering ram would heat the steel, rendering it more pliable. But the door was custom-made: inside the steel skin, it was filled with water so that if anyone tried to break it down, the heat from the impact would not spread. The marines hammered the door again and again, until the ram buckled and had to be replaced. It took ten minutes to gain entry to the house.

That’s some door! Provides quite a bit of privacy, I would think.

I’m always amazed at how cheap really rich people can be. Beny Steinmetz made a killing flipping part of his company’s interest in the iron ore range, turning a profit of over $2 billion. However, his company apparently only offered one of the parties to the deal $1 million to destroy some documents they were supposed to have. The payoff would have gone up to $5 million, but only if the company was able to win at trial and hold on to the assets. If I’d been offered such a cheap bribe I would have rejected it just on general principle.

Takeaways:

It’s hard to go through life trusting no one, but at the very least you shouldn’t extend trust to anyone who doesn’t trust you.

True Crime Files

The Count and the Confession
By John Taylor

The crime:

On the morning of March 5, 1992 the body of 60-year-old Roger Zygmunt de la Burde was discovered lying on a couch in the library of his Virginia estate with a revolver next to him and a bullet in his head. Originally considered a suicide, police investigators began to suspect Burde’s lover, Beverly Monroe, of being his killer. Monroe had been with Burde the previous evening and was the last person known to have seen him alive. After a long battery of coercive interrogation Monroe seemed to confess to killing him. Upon being formally charged she denied having been involved and claimed to have been brainwashed by the police. She was convicted at trial, but the decision was reversed on appeal in 2003 and Monroe was released from prison. It’s still unknown who killed Burde, or if it was a case of suicide.

The book:

A year or so ago I did a bunch of research into the culture that has grown up online that deals out supposed “hard truths” about dating and relationships grounded in evolutionary psychology and big data.  A lot of this on the male side – the manosphere or red-pill community – is openly misogynist, though there are similar hard truths, culled from the same sources, for women to take aim at men with.

I found myself thinking about these findings when reading The Count and the Confession because they provided a helpful paradigm for thinking about the relationship between Roger de la Burde and Beverly Monroe. Helpful in the sense of making understandable what, on the face of it, made little sense to me. This isn’t to say that I took the book as endorsing any of these paradigms, whose validity I find open to question in various ways, but I do think they provide an interesting entry point to the case. With that caveat registered, let’s dig in.

In the first place you have the question of what men want. At the most basic biological level this can be boiled down to reproductive success for young men and end-of-life health care for older ones. Burde wanted both. In terms of reproduction this was mixed in with a twist of Old World chauvinism, as only a male heir would do. He had daughters but they really didn’t count. He wanted someone to carry on his (made-up) family name. This became nothing short of an obsession in his final years, as he took to basically looking for any available womb and inquiring if it might be for rent. And I very much don’t mean he was looking for sex with younger women. He wanted a woman who was capable of having children and that was it. When he found one it was straight off to the fertility clinic and drawing up a legal agreement laying out how all this was going to work (Item 3: “Child/children will carry de la Burde name. This name cannot be changed until maturity or marriage.”).

The last part of the written arrangement, however, also provided for the second biological imperative. Item 6 states that the surrogate “obliges herself to help care and cater to R. B. in his advancing age.” One suspects this is why he kept Monroe around as well. She was past child-bearing age but could still function adequately as a nurse. Oh, those selfish genes!

Then you have the question of what women want. Again staying at the most basic level, this is usually reduced to resources. In cultural terms this translates as status, which is something that even outlives the reproductive imperative. Which is to say, even after menopause women are still mating for status.

But the thing about status is that it isn’t a real thing. The perception of status is the reality. This, at least, is the only explanation I had for Monroe’s attraction to Burde. As far as can be gleaned from the story here, Burde wasn’t just a complete phoney (his claims to being a Polish aristocrat were entirely bogus and even some of his much ballyhooed art collection was apparently forged) but someone who alienated many of the people who knew him best, including his own kids. Despite living in a big house he wasn’t that rich, and money troubles may have been one of the things weighing on him at the end. But he was educated and he did go to swank parties and he dressed well and he lived on that big estate. In short, he had status.

I wasn’t the only one scratching my head over Monroe’s attraction. Even she had to sit down and write out her thoughts on why she stayed with him to try to understand. Meanwhile, the jury found Burde “so despicable a person” that while finding Monroe guilty of murder “it was almost justifiable homicide.” The incredulity of one lawyer at the trial sums the matter up pretty nicely:

Warren Von Schuch, who had not known what Krystyna’s testimony would be [Krystyna was the woman Burde had gotten pregnant just before his death], listened with mounting incredulity to her story. The feminist movement would not be pleased, he decided. Beverly with her master’s degree  and Krystyna with her Ph.D. in biochemistry and they’re fighting over Roger de la Burde. Twenty-five years of feminism and this was far as they’d gotten.

Even Monroe’s defence lawyer had to go out of his way to address the point. “You may ask yourself why . . . why did this lady, this nice-looking lady sitting behind me, why did she put up with all this malarkey, this junk? Why didn’t she say, ‘I want out of here,’ ‘Hit the road,’ ‘Forget it fellow’? And the answer is . . . she loved him.”

And I’m sure she did. But this begs the question of what is meant by “love.” Wasn’t what Roger felt for the future mother of his children love? Wasn’t it love he felt for the woman, or women, who would promise to “care and cater” to him in his old age? This is where I find the harsher, evolutionary psychology approach to relationships comes into things. It’s incredible to me that Monroe could have loved someone like Burde, but if you translate “love” as an attraction to a man who had status and presumably some charm, however false, then it makes sense. One of the harsher mantras among the red-pill community is that women don’t fall in love with a man but a lifestyle. The lifestyle is something Burde had. The man was worthless.

I don’t know if that’s what was going on. It’s just a way of viewing the personalities involved through a particular lens. But in a “true murder mystery” like this you naturally start looking around for guideposts. For what it’s worth, it seems highly unlikely to me that Monroe killed Burde. Her behaviour after the fact, especially in relation to the police, doesn’t make any sense if she did. Her “confession,” such as it was, was so obscure as to seem almost surreal even when placed in context. It also appears to have been co-opted, and the behaviour of the police went beyond the usual (and inevitably disastrous) tunnel vision into something altogether darker. One of the investigators hired by the defence made a note on how he thought the agent in charge might even have been insane.

John Taylor provides a very full reckoning of the case. Indeed, I thought there was more here than I cared to have, especially with regard to Monroe’s family (one of her daughters played a key role in her appeals). Though not a particularly long book, it feels heavier than its page count and I could have wished it a hundred pages shorter. It does read well, however, and for anyone interested in the psychology of the false confession, or just looking for a true crime story that has the drama of a well-scripted podcast without playing fast and loose with the facts, it can be heartily recommended.

Noted in passing:

Why are polygraph devices or “lie detectors” (I have to put the scare quotes on such a name) still in use? Just to manufacture evidence in cases where the police have nothing else to go on? I think they must be like diet pills for obese people: a magic bullet that will make the problem go away without having to actually do the hard work of losing weight/investigating a crime. They’ve never been shown to have any significant scientific validity and yet they’re still widely employed by law enforcement.

So why are they still with us? Wikipedia provides one answer:

In 2018, Wired magazine reported that an estimated 2.5 million polygraph tests were given each year in the United States, with the majority administered to paramedics, police officers, firefighters, and state troopers. The average cost to administer the test is more than $700 and is part of a $2 billion industry.

Takeaways:

Innocent or guilty, you have nothing to gain by talking to the police. It won’t do you any good and could get you in a lot trouble.

True Crime Files

The Missing Cryptoqueen
By Jamie Bartlett

The crime:

In 2014 OneCoin became just another one of the many newly minted cryptocurrencies looking to cash in on the success of Bitcoin and the much ballyhooed blockchain revolution. What made OneCoin, the brainchild of Bulgarian-born Ruja Ignatova, different was its promotion through a multi-level marketing (MLM) scheme and the fact that there may never have been any actual, or virtual, OneCoins in the first place.

After years of muttering from sceptics over whether OneCoin was a Ponzi or pyramid scheme (in fact it was both, a combination that “rendered facts and logic irrelevant”), the system eventually broke down, a victim of its own success. Billions of “real-world” dollars disappeared, along with tens of billions of “fictitious losses” (an accounting based on what OneCoin was supposed to be worth). Most of the higher-ups in the organization would end up convicted of various financial crimes, but Ignatova herself disappeared in October 2017 and remains missing. Some reports say that she is dead, killed by Russian or Bulgarian mobsters, while others have it that she’s swanning about the Mediterranean on a yacht (which is the conjectural conclusion that’s reached here). As of this writing, she is the only woman on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

The book:

I made a post a couple of years ago expressing my scepticism of all things crypto. My feeling at the time was that it was mainly a tool being used by bad actors or the very rich to hide their financial dealings. But I also said I didn’t understand the first thing about blockchains and mining. And, since one of my maxims is to not invest in things I don’t know anything about, I’ve always stayed away from crypto. Which I think is pretty good advice for anyone.

The people who put their faith (and life savings) into crypto thought differently. In the digital economy it’s never been a problem if “what exactly investors were buying was vague and unclear.” But never mind the investors. It’s doubtful if Ignatova understood what she was doing either. Her OneCoing co-founder certainly didn’t. Nor did anyone in their MLM network. As Jamie Bartlett puts it when telling the story of one befuddled OneCoin promoter, his “job wasn’t to understand OneCoin, it was to sell it.” Or take this account of OneCoin’s launch:

The genesis block was now launched and the first set of new coins was being “mined.” People in the room must have wondered what that phrase actually meant. Oh, they all repeated the words – genesis block, mining, algorithms – but few had any idea about the technology behind it all. What exactly was happening? Bitcoin’s mining was transparent and distributed – anyone could join, and thousands did. But OneCoin’s mining process was mysterious and secretive. Some in the crowd had heard rumors that two “supercomputers” at hidden locations were cracking puzzles and getting the newly generated coins, which would then be sent to investor accounts, depending on how many packages they’d bought. Most people didn’t care about the finer details though. They’d just heard it was the next Bitcoin.

“Good scams aren’t about facts or logic.” What could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile, the psychology behind OneCoin’s success is worth unpacking, which is something Bartlett does a good job with:

Greed or desperation alone doesn’t explain why OneCoin hit momentum so fast because those emotions are present in every MLM company, including the ones that fail. Something more powerful was at play: the fear of missing out . . . FOMO. Most OneCoin investors who put money in around this time said the same thing: They didn’t understand the technology but they’d heard of Bitcoin and regretted having not invested. When Bitcoin went stratospheric in 2013, stories proliferated of ordinary people making life-changing money not because of any particular skill or specialized knowledge, but because they got in early. The majority of these early investors weren’t destitute, but they were often just getting by. OneCoin felt like, for once in their life, they’d finally got a break.

Not so different then from buying lottery tickets, only shadier. “FOMO is driven by a desire to get rich quick, a willingness to replace work or effort with a risky bet.” As Glenn Frey sang in “Smuggler’s Blues”: “It’s the lure of easy money, it’s got a very strong appeal.” You don’t need “any particular skill or specialized knowledge.” It’s all a matter of timing. And this is a point that I think is worth underlining. Timing is everything precisely because you know the next big thing isn’t going to last. At some fundamental level you don’t believe in what you’re investing in. You know it’s a scam. You just think it’s a scam that you’ll be able to walk away from, leaving the proverbial “greater fool” holding the bag.

Of course none of it could stand very much looking into, but then who could look into it? Even if you were one of the dozen or so people in the world capable of figuring out their blockchain, OneCoin was a black box. An empty black box, at that. In any event, for investors, “It was nicer to dream than to think.”

“Money has a funny way of fencing off difficult questions and incentivizing strategic and defensible ignorance.” Because what would you rather believe? You can see how magical thinking feeds into stories like this. Just keep the faith and you too can be a crypto millionaire. You only need what a Bernie Madoff biographer described as a “well-defended mind.” And this isn’t all make-believe. With enough money you really can make your own reality and build a wall between yourself and a world that doesn’t play by your rules.

Given how complicated a story this is on anything but the most basic, crypto gold-rush level, it’s not too surprising that I had trouble keeping up with Bartlett’s narrative in places. The financial shenanigans were as opaque, and as deliberately opaque, as the crypto stuff. The whole enterprise was shell companies inside shell companies and money stuck into hidey-holes in secret accounts in tax havens all over the world. Curacao in the Caribbean, Vanuata in Oceania, Dubai. Again I had to wonder if even the experts who set some of this stuff up understood what they were doing. But complexity was the point.

The global reach of the scheme was amazing. Obviously there have been global criminal operations before, but the Internet really kicked this kind of thing into overdrive. All of Europe went into making Ruja: born in Bulgaria, raised in Germany, and with a master’s degree in Comparative European Law at Oxford (the prestige of which helped a lot). When OneCoin took off (or achieved “momentum,” as they say) it hit hardest in Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. From there it spread quite literally everywhere. “Nowhere symbolized the OneCoin craze better than Uganda,” Bartlett writes. The company grew in almost every country on earth, “but nowhere was quite like China.” Then, as the mature markets dried up in Europe, America, and Asia, growth continued in places like Colombia, Malawi, South Africa, Brazil, Trinidad, and Argentina.

As with global financial crises, a scam like OneCoin had no borders.

Despite a lot of it going over my head, I thought Bartlett did a great job telling the story and relating the essential points. He is sympathetic to some of the lower-rung investors while at the same time registering their culpability. He even draws a brief, devastating portrait of “MLM people”:

Despite their ostentatious conviviality, Konstantin [Ruja’s brother] noticed there was an emptiness to the MLM people he was introduced to. All they talked about was money: their cars, their new recruits, their Dolce & Gabbanas, their rank. Conversations revolved around the new downline they’d just opened or their weekly business volumes. Normal human interactions had been hijacked by a commissions parasite that turned everything meaningful into plastic talk disguised by self-help mantras about “first helping others.” They talked about the books they had read, not for enjoyment but to learn how to win friends and influence people. They met relatives for coffee, not to catch up but to propose an exciting new opportunity. Years in MLM does that to people.

Eventually it does it to Konstantin too. He starts out as a somewhat likeable guy but ends up infected with the dirt of the grift. It’s like another fall of man.

Noted in passing:

At one point Bartlett refers to Bulgaria as “the most corrupt country in Europe.” I can’t say this surprised me, but it did make me want to do a fact check since I don’t know what the most corrupt countries in Europe are.

There are different rankings and metrics available. It does seem that Bulgaria was ranking near the top of the corruption chart a few years ago (2019), but has since improved. Or maybe its change in position is more a relative thing. The most recent tables I found had Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine all rating as more corrupt.

I’d also note that Europe scores well on these indexes and that globally the most corrupt nations are far more likely to be found in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.

This is another podcast that’s been turned into a book. There seems to be a lot of this happening, especially in the case of true crime. I’m not complaining, as it makes sense as a way of building interest and some of the books with such an origin have been pretty good (though most, at least in my experience, have been below average to downright poor). I just flag it here because it’s now become such a significant part of the evolution of publishing.

Takeaways:

Obviously, if it seems too good (the money too easy) to be true, then it probably is. Alas, this is a lesson that’s undercut by the everyday operation of our lottery economy. Why shouldn’t the legendary “little guy” get rich off the crypto gold rush? Why shouldn’t they get a break? Because, as a very wealthy investor once told me several decades ago about how to get rich in the stock market, the little guy is always the first to lose when there’s a correction and the market flushes out all the suckers.

True Crime Files

Watergate: A New History
By Garrett M. Graff

The crime:

A team of covert operatives under the direction of the Republican Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CREEP) was arrested after breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Office Building in Washington D.C. in the early hours of June 17, 1972. It would later turn out that the break-in was only part of a larger campaign of dirty tricks (a.k.a. ratfucking) being waged by CREEP. The subsequent investigations and attempted cover-up by the White House would lead to multiple criminal convictions and the resignation of President Richard Nixon a couple of years later.

The book:

In the fifty years since Watergate the suffix –gate has become shorthand for any sort of political scandal. This despite the fact that what actually happened a half-century ago still isn’t all that well known, even among students of the period. Despite its notoriety, the facts in “Watergate,” at least what is known of them, make up a highly complex story that’s hard to get one’s arms all the way around. “Watergate was never a one-off burglary,” Garrett Graff writes. “It was the Gordian knot of scandal, unable to be untied neatly or at all.” Even today there are still a number of unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable, questions.

At nearly 700 pages, Graff’s “new history” certainly tries to be exhaustive as well as precise. Perhaps too much so. I felt that in several places he was getting lost in the weeds. But the thing is, the network of scandal, bad behaviour, “dirty tricks,” and outright criminality that constituted “Watergate” was hard for anyone covering it at the time to keep straight and is even more difficult now when so many of the names and faces, each of them involved in so many shady activities, have been forgotten. Then there were all the different investigations. Reading, I found myself constantly shifting gears as I tried to remember whether a particular legal point being raised had to do with the grand jury proceedings, the Senate Watergate Committee, or the House Judiciary Committee on impeachment. At one point I found myself wishing that Graff had included a cast of characters as a reference, but then wondered how long such an index would have been. Twenty pages at least. There were a lot of players.

A big part of what makes Watergate confusing is the fact that everyone involved had a slightly different, personally exculpatory, tale to tell (and in almost every case a tale they told, in their memoirs) about how it all went down. Then there were all the ancillary examples of other misdemeanors, many of them long forgotten. I think most people know how Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign under a cloud (pleading no contest to a single felony charge to avoid further embarrassment) at the same time as the Watergate hearings were getting all the headlines. This is something that would normally stand out as a historical watershed but for the fact that his boss would soon follow him into exile. But who today remembers the Chennault affair? The Huston plan? The fact that the Pentagon was spying on the National Security Council? The Dita Beard memo? I knew nothing about any of these but they were all part of the same White House culture.

Then there is the fact that the break-in was so stupid that it’s hard to understand how it made sense to the actors involved. Nixon would go on to win the presidency in the 1972 election in a historic landslide, taking every state except Massachusetts, so why would he bother cheating? What advantage did he think he would gain? Or did the people in charge not take nuts like Gordon Liddy seriously? As Chief of Staff Alexander Haig later opined, “The original crime was stupid, and the idea that it was possible to cover it up was more so . . . I thought that Nixon was just too smart to be involved.”

As an aside on the point of why Nixon bothered, here is biographer John A. Farrell writing in Richard Nixon: The Life:

It is said that the Watergate break-in was an act of folly because by the time the burglars were arrested Nixon had triumphed in Moscow and Beijing, the radical McGovern had clinched the Democratic nomination, and Nixon’s reelection was assured. But until the Easter Offensive [North Vietnam’s invasion of the South], and the Russian summit secured, the White House was still caught up in the fear that the Democrats would coalesce around Senator Edward Kennedy. In mid-April, as Jeb Magruder and Gordon Liddy were plotting to break into the Watergate, Nixon was weighing the ugly prospect of defeat in Vietnam – and the fall election.

I think understanding how it all came about is important, and lies at the heart of what I think is really significant about Watergate. Yes, it was a clusterfuck that very much reflected the personality of the president and the toxic environment that his administration had become: its paranoia, vengefulness, and sheer nastiness. (Though the ball apparently got rolling mainly thanks to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s meltdown over the Pentagon Papers – the publication of which initially didn’t bother Nixon at all.) But the scandal also highlights the way many such power structures operate. The point is to insulate those at the top with what became known as “plausible deniability.” The sign on Harry Truman’s desk, The Buck Stops Here, was always a joke, as it is in every CEO’s office, and Watergate only drove the point home. The buck is meant to stop long before it gets to the guy at the top. Power is all about being free of responsibility.

There was nothing new in Nixon operating this way. Throughout history the man at the top has enjoyed immunity from blame when things go south. Leading up to the Russian Revolution the masses spared the tsar from most of their anger, feeling that he was just surrounded by evil advisors. A few hundred years earlier Oliver Cromwell had to struggle against similar popular sentiments just before the outbreak of the English Civil War. He had to explicitly reject Parliament’s claim that they weren’t going to war against the king but against his “evil counsellors.” As Christopher Hibbert relates the story in his biography of Charles I, “Cromwell thought this pure casuistry and told his men that if he charged the king he would fire his ‘pistol upon him as at any other private person,’ and that anyone among his recruits who didn’t feel able to do the same could go enlist with someone else.”

One way people in positions of leadership maintain this degree of insulation from the acts of their agents, operatives, and flunkies is by the vagueness of their directions. The clearest historical example of this is presented in Ian Kerhaw’s biography of Adolf Hitler, where he describes the process of what he calls “Working towards the Führer.” What this refers to is the way in which radical actions were often instigated from below, not as the result of express directives, but because they were felt to be in line with Hitler’s broadly defined aims. This was so successful that even today there is no “smoking gun” in the historical record tying Hitler to the ordering of the Final Solution.

All of which brings us back to Watergate and Howard Baker’s famous line about “What did the president know and when did he know it?” We still don’t know. In the final pages of this book Graff presents the points of view of two of the closest of the president’s men:

Haldeman, speaking decades later, said, “No one here today, nor anybody else I can identify, knows who ordered the break-in at the Watergate or why it was ordered.” Ehrlichman, for his part, “The break-in itself made no sense to me; it never has.”

Well, as the saying goes, success has many fathers and failure is an orphan. So it has always been. From the evidence we do have though it seems clear that everyone in the administration was “working towards Nixon”: planning a campaign of dirty tricks that weren’t directed from above but which were in line with the sort of thing Nixon wanted to see happening. And he very well might have got away with it, despite everyone knowing he bore ultimate responsibility, but for the fact that there was a smoking gun in the form of the White House tapes. These nailed him for the cover-up, if not the crime.

To recap: I learned a lot more about Watergate from this book than I thought there was to know, as well as the numerous related side-hustles. I did think there was a bit too much detail in places, the getting lost in the weeds I mentioned above, but even the footnotes (of which there are multitudes) are worth reading. I also really appreciated the way Graff took down pretty much everyone involved, including some names who have previously got off relatively easily. The portraits of Mark Felt (Deep Throat), John Dean, and Al Haig are memorably etched in acid. But to be sure there are still unanswered questions that get to the heart of the affair, which is why Watergate will continue to fascinate generations of historians to come.

Today, we’ll never really know the full truth of Watergate. The remaining mysteries are spread among too many people, many of who are now dead, their secrets buried alongside them. There remain big, unanswered – and perhaps now forever unknowable – questions even about the central Watergate break-in itself: Who ultimately ordered it? What was the actual purpose and target of the burglars? Were its central players, Hunt and McCord, cooperating with the CIA even as they carried out the operation at the DNC’s offices? Were the burglars really after political intelligence or were they hunting for blackmail material?

My own sense is that many of these questions would be unanswerable even if we could still question all the principals under oath. The break-in was just one bad idea among many that some loose cannons were allowed to run with and that nobody in a position of authority pumped the brakes on, perhaps in part because they figured it was the kind of thing Nixon was pushing for, or because they didn’t take any of it seriously. What the burglars were after was dirt in a general sense, or any information of value. I doubt they could have had in mind anything specific. Then, when it all went south, Nixon was very much in charge of the cover-up, which is what deservedly finished him.

Noted in passing:

Among the related mini-scandals Graff chronicles that have slipped into obscurity is the “bizarre episode” of the so-called Canuck letter. I didn’t know about this one either, but it has to do with an anonymous letter sent to a New Hampshire newspaper that accused then Democratic primary candidate Ed Muskie of referring “to French-Canadians with the slur ‘Canucks.’” As it turns out the letter had been the work of Republican dirty tricksters, but Muskie’s campaign swiftly derailed.

What surprised me was that the term Canuck (misspelled as “Cannocks” in the letter) was seen as a slur, or specifically directed at French-Canadians. In the nineteenth century “Johnny Canuck” was a cartoon figure (a lumberjack, not specifically French-Canadian) who was used to personify Canada much as John Bull and Uncle Sam were used as stand-ins for England and the United States. During World War 2 Johnny Canuck became a comic-book action hero, and in the 1970s Captain Canuck was born. The Canucks are also Vancouver’s professional hockey team. But, as Wikipedia explains in their entry on the Canuck letter, “While an affectionate term among Canadians today, ‘Canuck’ is a term often considered derogatory when applied to Americans of French-Canadian ancestry in New England.”

Takeaways:

A successful conspiracy has to be limited in membership and tightly targeted in its aims. Watergate failed, epically, on both counts. There were simply too many people involved, with no one clear on what anyone else was doing, or why. When it started coming undone there was no way to keep containment on the cancer.

True Crime Files

Guilty Admissions: The Bribes, Favors, and Phonies behind the College Cheating Scandal
By Nicole LaPorte

The crime:

Throughout the 2010s a college application counsellor named Rick Singer got some of his wealthiest clients to pay him to arrange their children’s acceptance into prestigious American universities. He did this primarily through two different “side-door” processes: (1) the creation of fake athletic profiles that were sent to coaches who were in on the fix, or (2) having a professional test-taker complete the standardized entrance exams, boosting the applicant’s score into the highest percentiles. The FBI investigation into the conspiracy, codenamed Operation Varsity Blues, resulted in over 50 charges being laid, with the mastermind Singer sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison plus forfeiture of over $10 million.

The book:

This was actually the second major book about the Varsity Blues scandal, the first being Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit and the Making of the College Admissions Scandal by Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz, which Nicole LaPorte cites several times as a source. Both books were “timely” though, being published quickly to take advantage of public interest in the case. As it is, things break off here with the March 12 2019 announcement by the FBI of the results of the investigation and then, in an “Author’s Note,” dashing through some of the highlights from the pleas and sentencings.

When the story first broke I remember being underwhelmed by it. Nothing about it struck me as surprising, or particularly heinous. Just a bunch of very rich people who thought – not unreasonably – that they could buy anything. When I went to university there were various incidents of cheating that I could never get that exercised about. I was there to learn something; what other people were up to, what shortcuts they might have been taking just so they could get their piece of paper, didn’t interest me. It didn’t bother me at all if they weren’t doing the work. If they were there paying tuition then it was all good as far as I was concerned.

The admissions scandal was something a bit different in that less qualified students were getting into elite institutions and in doing so taking spots away from stronger applicants who were playing by the rules. But even so, it’s understood that there’s no level playing field when it comes to going to the top colleges and universities. There are legacy admissions, or the “front-door” expedient of just making a huge donation. There are the “special accommodations” made for testing students with “anxiety,” something which overwhelmingly afflicts the wealthy. And then there is the vast gray area full of ways of playing the system that aren’t illegal or even frowned upon that tilt the odds in your favour. Who can afford independent counselling that can cost tens of thousands of dollars in the first place? And what do such counselors do? I laughed out loud, for example, at this little gem: “Independent counselors don’t write a student’s college essay, but rounds of edits and proofreading are provided, giving the student a distinct edge over those who are left to their own devices.” I’ve worked as an editor and I can assure you that “rounds of edits,” especially on a short piece written by someone who can’t write, amounts to, you know, a total rewrite. And given how much they’re being paid, and what’s at stake (including their own reputations), I’d imagine most of these counselors are doing more than that.

I could only wonder at how obsessed the wealthy families LaPorte describes are with status. Despite the fact that going to a top university isn’t going to affect any of these children’s lives, their parents were “just as desperate about college admissions as families without their wealth and connections.” Why?

Because of their high-profile names and the company they kept – the jobs they held, the philanthropy circles they ran in, the country clubs they were members of – having their child anointed by a top-tier school wasn’t a preferable option; it was considered essential in order to keep the family name intact, and the aura of success and perfection. It was status maintenance of the highest order. In many cases, parents simply felt it was their right, something  they were entitled to, regardless of what means were required to reach that end.

Ah, “entitlement.” Along with its close companion “privilege” it shares a special place in today’s language of opprobrium. But behind all of its perversities and delusions there’s a reality that LaPorte is alert to. That reality is fear.

The anxiety isn’t limited to wealthy parents living in Bel-Air or Beverly Hills. It’s an endemic that’s become a universal among almost all the parents who plan to send their child off to a four-year institution in the hopes of launching them successfully into the world. Indeed, for middle-class families, who don’t have a cushion of wealth and resources to fall back on, one of the most significant rites of passage for an American teen has become fraught with fear. The fear stems from the extreme wealth divide in our country, and the belief that simply getting a college degree – any college degree – no longer implies upward mobility the way it once did. Given the current state of affairs in the United States – the endless headlines about burdensome student debt, the high cost of living, and the growing unemployment rate for college graduates – the desire for an impressive college degree is not just a lofty wish; it’s a do-or-die imperative.

This is fine as far as it goes, but that fear grounded in an awareness of “the current state of affairs in the United States” and its “extreme wealth divide” has a deeper resonance. It’s not just the fear of not getting in or being left behind but also the fear of falling. White people, a former Stanford dean opines, are “terrified, because they’re losing a privilege that they never realized was a privilege” (a pretty good definition of entitlement). And those lucky enough to have found themselves living in Bel-Air and Beverly Hills are only sure of one thing: they never want to lose any part of the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed. To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus . . .

Status maintenance is then a priority for those suffering from status anxiety, and the parents profiled here had the worst possible case of that. After all, by their actions they as much as admit that they don’t believe in the notion of America as a meritocracy. Indeed, they see such notions as being for suckers. How then to stay on top? By rigging the game.

Guilty Admissions is an eye-opening tour of the epicenter of the affluenza pandemic. And it’s an insider’s account too, as LaPorte is resident in the same neighbourhood, with her two kids attending one of the exclusive schools she describes. Being a part of this world, she is able to provide a lot of insight into a world that I didn’t even know existed. Take, for example, the “budding industry of kindergarten-prep tutors and companies,” with one the most popular services offering “one-on-one tutoring, for $350 an hour, to help children master the skills they will need for kindergarten.” This is a thing.

LaPorte has sympathy for the parents (as noted, she is one herself), and her account of the environment of “competitive parenting” that Singer exploited is valuable. But at one point in the story this fellow-feeling does lead to an unintentionally hilarious, and revealing, use of language:

At times, the parents’ spiritual wrestling was painfully palpable, as when Caplan said on a call to Singer. “It’s just, to be honest, I’m not worried about the moral issue here. I’m worried about the, if [his daughter’s] caught doing that, you know, she’s finished.”

Did you get that? The parent isn’t worried about moral issues but only at how his daughter might lose status if she’s caught. This is what counts as “painfully palpable” “spiritual wrestling” in this world!

If status anxiety among the uber-wealthy is one part, the demand part, of the criminal equation, the supply side was provided by Rick Singer. It’s become easy to track everything in the Age of Trump back to the example of the president during the time when Singer’s enterprise was in its fullest swing, but given that the shoe fits so well I have no problem with putting it on again. Singer was an inveterate and indefatigable hustler and con man who took personal-branding and “truthful hyperbole” (Trump’s preferred euphemism for lying) to new levels. And if he was lying all the time then he just assumed that’s what everyone else was doing, or would want to be doing, too. Anything that would help grow not the individual but the brand. “If you’re not cheating, you’re not winning,” was the age’s mantra. And if you weren’t winning you were a loser. The rich would get richer and everyone else would go extinct, which is an observation not limited to individuals. Many colleges and universities would find themselves going under at this time, while the “elite” schools with brand recognition and huge endowments would keep getting richer.

But even the richest most well-endowed universities were grubbing for cash. Like everyone else, they could never get enough. “The culture [at USC] was one of enrichment at all costs, and multiple scandals would come to light down the road as a result.” But wasn’t all the scandal just the price of winning? Everything about the Varsity Blues case comes back to this point: was what Singer was doing really that out of the ordinary? Was it even that bad? The great thing about Guilty Admissions is that it demands we answer these questions for ourselves, forcing us to think hard about how the modern class structure affects all of us today.

Noted in passing:

Those twin demons of entitlement and privilege can reveal themselves in truly shocking ways. All the more shocking for being expressed so matter-of-factly. I already mentioned the demented sense of grievance and of being somehow cheated that pervades all levels of society today, and that the wealthy families who sought to rig the game by Singer’s side-door methods were representative of this. What’s amazing is the way they justified what they were doing by seeing the game as being rigged against them. Why, they were just fighting back against an unjust system! When Singer explained how he proposed to raise the SAT score of one client’s daughter he referred to it as a way to “level the playing field.” Later, that same client would write a letter to the judge sentencing her that she had only wanted to give her daughter “a fair shot.” It tells you something when even the most fortunate among us, and we’re talking about the 0.01% here, feel so hard done by.

Takeaways:

It’s not being cynical to feel that life isn’t fair and that we don’t live in a meritocracy. The game really is rigged. There was a time, however, when the winners weren’t quite so arrogant, deluded, and willfully destructive of the social fabric. That was a long time ago though, and I don’t see how there’s any way we’re getting back to health.

True Crime Files