I had heard this cautionary tale before and vowed "that would never be me!" However I think I've proved...or am attempting to prove...that you can be a successful (of course, success is all relative) and accomplished attorney without losing your original sense of self. Read on to see what I'm talking about...
(April 2011, Will Meyerhofer)
Two guys from my high school. One year apart.
Hipster…and Lawyer.
Hipster plays in jazz band with Lawyer. They have the same academic advisor, and fall into a casual friendship.
Hipster has trouble in school. He plays drums and guitar, but struggles to maintain the grades. It’s nothing to do with behavior – everyone likes him. The academic advisor does his best, but after failing a few courses, Hipster’s expelled. He ends up bouncing from school to school, and manages to graduate, then heads to a halfway-decent state university known for partying. He spends most of his year there jamming with his buddies and soon drops out. They start a rock band, smoke dope, wear tie-dye, collect Grateful Dead tapes and call each other “dude.”
Lawyer thinks it’s a shame Hipster got kicked out of school. His own grades are A’s. He wins academic prizes, a scholarship to study in England, and advanced placement at Harvard, where he graduates magna cum laude. He heads to a first-tier law school, and places near the top of his class. An offer arrives from a white shoe firm.
Stop the tape.
We know what happens next:
Hipster grows a beer belly, loses the tie-dye and winds up working in a call center. He moves into his old bedroom at home and turns morose. His parents mumble excuses about dyslexia.
Lawyer makes partner and earns a million six. He purchases a loft in SoHo, a little country place upstate and a vintage Porsche. His parents seek opportunities to smugly mention his doings to their friends, who hate them for it.
Here’s what actually happens:
Trey Anastasio’s jam-band, Phish, becomes an international success. He plays sports stadiums and records with Herbie Hancock. He’s worth millions. His parents are pleased.
Lawyer – that’s me! – sinks into abject misery at Sullivan & Cromwell, and gets the shove after his second year. I do a lot of therapy, change careers a couple times, and become The People’s Therapist. I don’t make much money. My parents are relieved I’m not a depressed lawyer anymore.
My point: Being a pothead jam-band guitarist might be a better way to get rich than becoming a lawyer. Especially if that’s who you really are, and being a lawyer isn’t.
It’s a rare thing to get rich. It has to be. Rich means you have more money than everyone else.
If you want to get rich, you have a choice. You can do what you love and hope lightning strikes. That worked for Trey. Or you can sell out and go where the money is.
If you’re banking on the second option, know this: Being a lawyer is a lousy way to get rich. Law puts you in massive debt, and lawyers are poorly-paid compared to finance types and accountants. Also, thanks to the almighty billable hour, you end up working around the clock.
Many lawyers wind up gazing across the divide from lawyer to hipster with a twinge of regret. Their “burn-out” friends might flounder and muddle along from job to job, but eventually, as a hipster, you’ll probably find yourself, get your act together and emerge from the experience – without debt. You also get to wear tie-dye, sleep late, smoke awesome weed, and call people “dude.” You might even find your soul.
Lawyers burn out a lot. That’s when you realize you need some time to flounder and muddle too – but by then you owe $200k to a bank, so even if you hate law, you have to stick around to pay off your ransom. That kills more years, in addition to the three already consumed by law school.
You lose the critical years Hipster spent finding his groove. Essentially, you sacrifice your twenties – an essential decade for floundering and self-discovery.
Everything isn’t rosy for Hipster – all that floundering and muddling can take its toll and it doesn’t always wind up like a fairy tale. But Hipster accomplishes necessary work towards personal growth. He’s allowing the play side of his life to express itself in his choice of work – and every once in a while, Hipsters turn into rockstars. That’s because, when you do something you love, which speaks to who you are and expresses your passions, you tend to get good at it.
As a therapist, it isn’t my job to change anyone – or to tell you what to do. My job is to create awareness of your own your thoughts and feelings, so you can get yourself where you want to be.
But consider becoming a hipster.
(The People's Therapist, http://thepeoplestherapist.com/2011/04/06/hipster-and-lawyer/#more-3285)
Monday, April 30, 2012
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Illinois DUI 101: The Basics of Illinois Drunk Driving Laws
The information contained here is pretty good. I am currently working on a similar article with the most up-to-date information. But, for now, this is a good start...
(April 2009, Jeremy J. Richey)
First of all, always be polite with the officer and don't argue with the officer. You don't want to go out of your way to make the guy with handcuffs dislike you. Second, with that said, keep your mouth shut. You will need to let the officer know who you are and where you live, but don't say anything that can be used against you in court. For example, don't let the officer know how much or what you drank during the evening, don't discuss the quality of your driving, don't discuss why you were pulled over, etc. Anything you tell the officer that could be used against you later in court, will be used against you in court. Tell the officer that want a lawyer and that you wish to remain silent (but never lie - that can get you into more trouble). Third, if the officer orders you out of the car, you will need to exit the car, but, if the officer asks or tells you to perform field-sobriety testing (such as the walk-and-turn test and the one-leg-stand test), respectfully decline to do the testing. Fourth, if you are arrested and taken to the police station, refuse to blow into a breathalyzer device and also refuse any other chemical test the police ask you to take.
When an officer pulls you over and starts investigating you for DUI, he or she is looking for information that the State can use to convict you. You should help yourself and not the State.
(Avvo, http://www.avvo.com/legal-guides/ugc/illinois-drunk-driving-dui-laws)
(April 2009, Jeremy J. Richey)
The Strength of the State's Case Is in Your Hands
When an Illinois police officer pulls your car over and begins investigating you for driving under the influence, there is one person in your vehicle who can damage your case beyond repair and one person who can save you. You are that person. While an exhaustive explanation of what you should do during a drunk driving stop is beyond the scope of this article, this guide will offer you some pointers.First of all, always be polite with the officer and don't argue with the officer. You don't want to go out of your way to make the guy with handcuffs dislike you. Second, with that said, keep your mouth shut. You will need to let the officer know who you are and where you live, but don't say anything that can be used against you in court. For example, don't let the officer know how much or what you drank during the evening, don't discuss the quality of your driving, don't discuss why you were pulled over, etc. Anything you tell the officer that could be used against you later in court, will be used against you in court. Tell the officer that want a lawyer and that you wish to remain silent (but never lie - that can get you into more trouble). Third, if the officer orders you out of the car, you will need to exit the car, but, if the officer asks or tells you to perform field-sobriety testing (such as the walk-and-turn test and the one-leg-stand test), respectfully decline to do the testing. Fourth, if you are arrested and taken to the police station, refuse to blow into a breathalyzer device and also refuse any other chemical test the police ask you to take.
When an officer pulls you over and starts investigating you for DUI, he or she is looking for information that the State can use to convict you. You should help yourself and not the State.
Statutory Summary Suspension
If you are arrested for DUI, you will be asked to submit to chemical testing at the police station. As of January 1, 2009, if you refuse to submit to the chemical testing, and you are a first offender, the Illinois Secretary of State will suspend your license for 12 months. If you submit to the testing and fail, the suspension will last 6 months. The Secretary of State will send you a letter letting you know when your suspension will begin. In any given case, the statutory summary suspension may be attacked on one or more grounds. To attack your statutory summary suspension, you must file a petition to rescind it.You May Be able to Drive During Your Suspension
As of January 1, 2009, if you are a first offender, you can drive during the period of your statutory summary suspension if you install an ignition interlock device on your car. These devices require you to blow into them before your car will run. Unlike the Judicial Driving Permit (JDP) law in effect before January 1, 2009, there will be no route, time, or purpose restrictions.DUI Is a Crime
In Illinois, drunk driving is a crime. At a minimum, DUI is a Class A misdemeanor that carries a potential jail sentence of up to 364 days.Significance of Supervision
If you have been charged with DUI, one possible sentence for your case is judicial supervision. Supervision, as a matter of law, is not considered a conviction for DUI. This is important because if you receive a conviction for DUI, the Illinois Secretary of State will revoke your driver's license and not merely suspend it. If your licensed is revoked, you can't get it back until you convince the Secretary of State to give it back to you.Types of DUI in Illinois
In Illinois, there are many ways to get a DUI charge. Among other ways, you can get a DUI for driving while having a breath or blood alcohol concentration of .08 or higher, for driving under the influence of alcohol (regardless of whether there is a breath or blood test), or for having any amount of cannabis or methamphetamine in your system.Should I Hire a Lawyer?
If you can afford one, yes. If you cannot afford one, then you should request that your judge appoint a public defender for you. As stated above, DUI is a crime and it is best if you have a lawyer to guide you, protect you, and fight for you.(Avvo, http://www.avvo.com/legal-guides/ugc/illinois-drunk-driving-dui-laws)
Illinois Traffic Stop Of Star Trek Fans Raises Concerns About Drug Searches, Police Dogs, Bad Cops
Ever had an encounter with a drug sniffing dog? A recording of a recent traffic stop in Collinsville, IL (roughly an hour east of St. Louis) showing a drug sniffing dog being used got the attention of the national media due to the events/conversation which took place between the conclusion of the traffic stop and the use of the dog. Where this ends up going and what ramifications it has for future citizens pulled over in Illinois are still not known. But, the information in this article regarding how the stop (allegedly) should have been conducted is beneficial for all people who drive or ride in cars in Illinois to read...
(March/April 2012, Radley Balko)
Last December, filmmaker Terrance Huff and his friend Jon Seaton were returning to Ohio after attending a "Star Trek" convention in St. Louis. As they passed through a small town in Illinois, a police officer, Michael Reichert, pulled Huff's red PT Cruiser over to the side of the road, allegedly for an unsafe lane change. Over the next hour, Reichert interrogated the two men, employing a variety of police tactics civil rights attorneys say were aimed at tricking them into giving up their Fourth Amendment rights. Reichert conducted a sweep of Huff's car with a K-9 dog, then searched Huff's car by hand. Ultimately, he sent Huff and Seaton on their way with a warning.
Earlier this month, Huff posted to YouTube audio and video footage of the stop taken from Reichert's dashboard camera. No shots were fired in the incident. No one was beaten, arrested or even handcuffed. Reichert found no measurable amount of contraband in Huff's car. But Huff's 17-and-a-half minute video raises important questions about law enforcement and the criminal justice system, including the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, the drug war, profiling and why it's so difficult to take problematic cops out of the police force.
THE STOP
The stop itself happened Dec. 4 on Interstate 70 in Collinsville, a town of 26,000 people just outside of St. Louis. Law enforcement officials say this stretch of highway is a drug-trafficking corridor. The account that follows is based on Huff’s video, the unedited dashboard footage from Reichert's vehicle and a Huffington Post interview with Huff.
After pulling Huff over, Reichert approaches Huff's car and asks him for his license, registration and proof of insurance. Huff complies. Reichert then asks Huff to step out of the car, because he says he can't hear him over the noise from the highway. Huff complies. Before talking to Huff, Reichert asks Seaton for ID as well, which Seaton isn't obligated to produce, but does.
Reichert then tells Huff he pulled him over for weaving across lanes. Huff says in his video that this is a fabrication. But he didn't challenge Reichert's claim at the time because, "I was from out of state, and I didn't want any trouble."
After running a check on Huff's license, Reichert tells Huff he'll let him off with a warning, and the two men shake hands. Legally, Huff is now free to go. But just as Huff is set to get back into his car, Reichert says, "Let me ask you a question real quick." Huff agrees.
It's here that Reichert adds, seemingly as an afterthought, that Seaton appeared nervous and apprehensive. He then asks Huff a series of what law enforcement officers call "rolling no" questions about whether Huff is transporting any drugs, weapons or cash. Huff says "no" to each.
In his interview with HuffPost, Huff asks, "If he thought Jon was nervous, and that might indicate drug activity, why did he wait so long to bring it up? And why did he wait until he had basically told me I could go?"
"It's a common tactic," says John Rekowski, the public defender for Madison County, where the stop took place. "[Officer Reichert] thinks he's doing something legally significant there. He thinks he's establishing that everything that happens after the handshake is consensual, because after that, Huff was technically free to go. But of course he isn't free to go."
If Huff had ignored Reichert's "Let me ask you a question real quick," gotten into his car and driven off, Rekowski says, there's no way Reichert would have let him leave. "And in Illinois, the definition of a detainment is that you aren't free to leave."
Collinsville Police Chief Scott Williams, who has seen the dash cam video, tells HuffPost "I don't have any reason to doubt the integrity of any of our officers. But we'll do our due diligence and look into that. If we find that any of our officers is taking shortcuts or violating someone's civil rights, that officer will be fired."
HuffPost was unable to reach Reichert for comment.
During the questioning, Reichert tries several times to get Huff to admit to having marijuana in his car, even if only a small amount for personal use. Huff says he has none. "I would just like to go on my way if I could," he tells Reichert. Reichert says that he's going to bring his K-9 out of the car to do an outside sweep.
Reichert pats down both Huff and Seaton and takes the dog around the car twice. He tells Huff that on the second trip, the dog has "alerted" to the presence of drugs, but did so at the front of the car, out of the view of Reichert's dashboard camera. He explains that because the front of the car is downwind, the drug scent would most likely register with the dog at the front of the car.
The dog's alert gives Reichert probable cause for a thorough hand search of Huff's car, as well as Huff and Seaton's luggage and personal belongings.
Reichert finds no drugs. He does claim to find "shake" -- marijuana residue -- beneath the seats of Huff's car. That, Reichert says, must have been why the dog alerted. Reichert never collected any of the alleged shake for testing, however, and Huff says now it's nonsense. After an hour of questioning and searching by Reichert, Huff and Seaton leave Collinsville with only a warning for an unsafe lane change.
THE FORFEITURE CORRIDOR
Asset forfeiture is the process by which law enforcement agencies can take possession of property suspected of being tied to illegal activity. Under these laws, the property itself is presumed to be guilty of criminal activity. Once the property has been seized, it's up to the owner to prove he obtained the property legitimately.
In about 80 percent of civil asset forfeiture cases, the property owner is never charged with a crime. And in Illinois -- like many states -- the law enforcement agency that makes the seizure gets to keep the cash or the proceeds of the forfeiture auction (in Illinois, the prosecutor's office gets 10-12 percent).
Critics say civil asset forfeiture is rife with poor incentives, and violates the Fifth Amendment’s protection against seizure of property without due process of law. Police can seize a car, cash, even a home on the flimsiest of evidence.
Madison County, Ill., where Huff was pulled over, is bisected by I-70 just outside of St. Louis. Interstates are a particularly rich ground for forfeiture. Law enforcement officials say that's because interstates are ideal for drug running.
Critics say it's because police can target out-of-state drivers, who are more likely than local residents to accept a police officer's baseless accusations and turn over their property, rather than refuse and face arrest, multiple returns to the state for court dates and thousands of dollars in legal expenses. Sometimes winning the property back can exceed the actual value of the property.
Faced with that choice, it isn't difficult to see why innocent people would opt to hand over their cash and head home.
"The joke around our office is that all you need for probable cause in Madison County is an Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, or Florida license plate," says Rekowski, the public defender. Collinsville defense attorney Jessica Koester says she's seen the same thing. "If you're from out of state, they're simply going to find a reason to pull you over."
Local news reports indicate that Illinois law enforcement agencies along the I-70 corridor have ramped up their forfeiture efforts in recent years. Rekowski said one tactic police use is to put up a sign for a "drug checkpoint" roadblock ahead. In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court said such checkpoints are illegal; roadblocks are legal for DWI checks, but not for narcotics checks. But Rekowski says that isn't the point.
"They put the sign up so there's only one exit you can take to avoid it. Then they pull over and search anyone who tries to exit before the roadblock."
That tactic too is constitutionally suspect. Police can't pull a driver over merely for exiting before an announced (and illegal) drug checkpoint. "But, of course, that isn't why they'll say they've pulled you over," Rekowski says. "They'll say you crossed two lanes to get to the exit, or switched lanes without signaling, or that you cut someone off."
The Edwardsville Intelligencer reported in 2010 that the Madison County State's Attorney's Office has reaped a half-million dollars from the policy over eight years, which at the prosecutor's take of 10-12 percent suggests a total bounty of $4.5 million to $5 million. Madison County Assistant State's Attorney Stephanie Robbins, who handles forfeiture cases for the office, told local paper the Telegraph in 2010, "Law-abiding citizens have nothing to worry about."
But maybe they do. Jerome Chennault, a Nevada resident had the misfortune of driving through Madison County on his way home after visiting his son in Philadelphia.
Chennault said he had withdrawn $22,870 in cash to take with him before leaving Nevada, which he had intended to use for a downpayment on a home. After he was pulled over for following another car too closely, Chennault gave police permission to use a drug dog to sweep his car. The dog then "alerted" to the bag containing Chennault's cash.
Police found no actual drugs on Chennault or in his car. He was never charged with a crime. But the dog alert itself was enough to allow police to seize Chennault's cash. Over the next several months, Chennault had to travel to Edwardsville, Ill., at his own expense to fight in court for the return of his property. He had to put up a bond equal to 10 percent of the value of the property taken from him in order to secure it.
Cheannault won in court. His money was returned. But he won't be reimbursed for his travel or his legal expenses.
Similar stories have been reported along other forfeiture corridors across the country. In Teneha, Texas, police reportedly routinely pull over cars from out of state (the highway is popular for drivers, flush with cash and jewelry, going to and from casinos). A Nashville TV station recently reported on a stretch in Tennessee where the vast majority of police stops were of suspected drug runners leaving the city, meaning the police apparently preferred to let the drugs come into the city so they could seize the cash on the way out.
"When we saw the Huff video in our office, we just laughed," Rekowski says. "Not because it wasn't outrageous. But because it's the kind of thing we see all the time. The stop for a so-called 'inappropriate lane change,' the games they play in the questioning, the claims about nervousness or inappropriate behavior that can't really be contradicted. It's all routine."
According to Koester, the defense attorney in private practice, "The dog alert that happens off-camera isn't unusual either. You see that all the time."
Koester and Rekowski say the Huff stop has all the markings of a forfeiture fishing expedition. "You see where he asks if [Huff] is carrying large amounts of U.S. currency," Rekowski says. "It's pretty clear what they're after. These kinds of cases put my kids through college." He laughs, then adds, "I'm only half joking."
THE DRUG DOG
HuffPost showed the video of Huff's stop to two K-9 experts. Gene Papet is executive director of K9 Resources, a company that trains detection dogs, including police dogs. Papet found a number of problems with the way Reichert handled his dog.
"Just before the dog alerts, you can hear a change in the tone of the handler's voice. That's troubling. I don't know anything about this particular handler, but that's often an indication of a handler that's cuing a response." In other words, it's indicative of a handler instructing the dog to alert, not waiting to see whether the dog will alert.
"You also hear the handler say at one point that the dog alerted from the front of the car because the wind is blowing from the back of the car to the front, so the scent would have carried with the wind," Papet says. "But the dog was brought around the car twice. If that's the case, the dog should have alerted the first time he was brought to the front of the car. The dog only alerted the second time, which corresponded to what would be consistent with a vocal cue from the handler."
Russ Jones is a former police officer with 10 years in drug enforcement, including as a K-9 officer. He's now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of current and former cops and prosecutors who favor ending the war on drugs. "That dog was going to do what ever (Officer Reichert) needed it to do," Jones says. "Throughout the video, the dog is looking for handler feedback, which isn't how it's supposed to work."
In the 2005 case Illinois v. Caballes, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that having a drug dog sniff the exterior of a vehicle during a routine traffic stop does not violate the Fourth Amendment. But in a dissent to that opinion, Justice David Souter pointed to mounting evidence that drug dogs aren't as infallible as police departments often claim. Souter noted a study that the state of Illinois itself used in its briefs showing that in lab tests, drug dogs fail 12.5 to 60 percent of the time.
Since then, more evidence has emerged to support Souter's concerns.
The problem isn't that the dogs aren't capable of picking up the scent, it's that dogs have been bred to please and interact with humans. A dog can easily be manipulated to alert whenever needed. But even with conscientious cops, a dog without the proper training may pick up on its handler's body language and alert whenever it detects its handler is suspicious.
In one study published last year in the journal Animal Cognition, researchers rigged some tests designed to fool dogs into falsely alerting and others designed to trick handlers into thinking a package contained narcotics (it didn't). Of the 144 total searches performed, the dogs falsely alerted 123 times. More interesting, the dogs were twice as likely to falsely alert to packages designed to trick their handlers than those designed to trick the dogs.
In 2011, the Chicago Tribune published a review of drug dog searches conducted over three years by police departments in the Chicago suburbs. The paper found that just 44 percent of dog "alerts" led to the discovery of actual contraband. Interestingly, for Hispanic drivers the success rate dipped to 27 percent, again supporting the theory that drug dogs tend to confirm the suspicions (and, consequently, the biases) of their handlers.
A 2006 statistical analysis (PDF) of police dog tests by University of North Carolina law professor Richard Myers concluded that the dogs aren't reliable enough to provide probable cause for a search.
HuffPost obtained the records for one Illinois state police K-9 unit for an 11-month period in 2007 and 2008. Of the 136 times this particular dog alerted to the presence of drugs during a traffic stop over that period, 35 of the subsequent hand searches found measurable quantities of illegal drugs.
See accompanying article for a more thorough analysis of the K-9 records:
____________________________________________________________________________________ An analysis of the K9 records shows that only 25.7 percent of the drug dog's "alerts" resulted in police finding a measurable quantity of illicit drugs. Just 13 percent resulted in the recovery of more than 10 grams of marijuana, generally considered an amount for personal use, and 10.4 percent turned up enough drugs to charge the motorists or their passengers with at least one felony. Read more here.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Jones, the former narcotics and K-9 officer, said those sorts of numbers are why he now opposes the drug war. "Ninety percent of these dog-handler teams are utter failures. They're just ways to get around the Fourth Amendment," he says. "When I debate these people around the country, I always challenge the K-9 officers to a double-blind test to see how accurate they and their dogs really are. They always refuse."
These figures strongly suggest that while the Supreme Court has ruled that there's nothing invasive about an exterior drug dog sniff of a car, in truth, the dog’s alert may be nothing more than the dog confirming its handler's hunches -- which is exactly what the Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect against.
THE BAD COP
If drug dog searches and poorly incentivized forfeiture policies are bad ideas in general, both can be particularly damaging when utilized by an unscrupulous police officer. And Michael Reichert has both a reputation and a documented history of questionable scruples.
"All the departments around here are bad when it comes to these searches, but he's really the poster boy," says Rekowski, the public defender. Another defense attorney, who didn't wish to be quoted by name, went further: "The guy is a menace to society."
In a 2005 case, U.S. v. Zambrana, U.S. District Judge Michael J. Reagan overturned a federal drug conviction because he didn't find Reichert's testimony credible.
Reagan's assessment of Reichert's methods and credibility is blunt. He calls Reichert "polished" and his testimony "rehearsed, coached and robotic as to be rote." He continues, “It was a generic, almost default performance not dependent upon the facts of this case, but suitable for any case in which Reichert might testify to having found reasonable suspicion."
In that case too, Reichert's stated reason for pulling Zambrana over was that Zambrana crossed over a lane divider. According to Reagan's opinion, Reichert also stated that the motorist appeared "nervous," like Huff, and again nearly let the driver go (he told Zambrano he was "free to leave.") Then, again nearly as an afterthought, Reichert started in with the "rolling no" questions. Reichert described Zambrano's refusal to consent to a search as "suspicious."
Reagan writes that Reichert is so confident in his ability to observe body language to detect deceit, he appears to be a "human polygraph." Reichert taught a class on how to conduct roadside searches, which Reagan wrote could easily have been titled, "How to avoid the warrant requirement in searching a vehicle."
Reagan's opinion, along with the fact that Reichert was also convicted on federal charges of selling knockoff designer sunglasses, led to Reichert's dismissal from the Collinsville Police Department in 2006. But with the help of the police union, Reichert sued to get his job back.
In subsequent hearings, the local state's attorney's office said it didn't trust Reichert, as did the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Illinois. Reagan and the state circuit court judge also made clear that they felt Reichert was untrustworthy.
Despite these concerns, in March 2009, an Illinois appellate court ordered Reichert rehired.
In much of the country, discipline and dismissal of police officers is governed by union-negotiated contracts. Some states have a “police officer bill of rights,” which affords police accused of misconduct and criminal acts more rights than are afforded other citizens. Others send officer misconduct cases to union-negotiated arbitrators. Federal law also protects police from being fired for refusing to answer questions in a misconduct investigation, even if their answers can’t be used against them in any ensuing criminal case.
Police watchdogs say all of this makes it extremely difficult to fire even cops with long histories of misconduct.
These concerns have been raised at police and sheriff departments across the country, including in King County, Wash.; Maywood, Calif.; Gary, Ind.; Cincinnati, Covington, Texas, Aurora, Colo., San Diego; Spokane, Wash., Louisville, Ken.; Milwaukee; and the entire state of Florida.
By spring of 2009, Reichert was back on the job in Collinsville. Soon after, federal prosecutors raised new concerns about Reichert's credibility. Those too were dismissed.
In January 2011, Williams gave Reichert the Chief's Award of Merit (PDF), and in April 2011, he was named Officer of the Month. For the latter, Reichert was cited for making six arrests and seven citations out of 166 total incidents. According to Williams, "incidents are dispatched calls for service. They range from traffic crashes to domestic disputes and everything in between."
Despite Reichert's past, Williams said he sees no reason to question the officer's integrity.
As for Huff, he said he just wants to raise awareness, so fewer people are subjected to the same sorts of searches he and Seaton were.
(Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/31/drug-search-trekies-stopped-searched-illinois_n_1364087.html)
(March/April 2012, Radley Balko)
Last December, filmmaker Terrance Huff and his friend Jon Seaton were returning to Ohio after attending a "Star Trek" convention in St. Louis. As they passed through a small town in Illinois, a police officer, Michael Reichert, pulled Huff's red PT Cruiser over to the side of the road, allegedly for an unsafe lane change. Over the next hour, Reichert interrogated the two men, employing a variety of police tactics civil rights attorneys say were aimed at tricking them into giving up their Fourth Amendment rights. Reichert conducted a sweep of Huff's car with a K-9 dog, then searched Huff's car by hand. Ultimately, he sent Huff and Seaton on their way with a warning.
Earlier this month, Huff posted to YouTube audio and video footage of the stop taken from Reichert's dashboard camera. No shots were fired in the incident. No one was beaten, arrested or even handcuffed. Reichert found no measurable amount of contraband in Huff's car. But Huff's 17-and-a-half minute video raises important questions about law enforcement and the criminal justice system, including the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, the drug war, profiling and why it's so difficult to take problematic cops out of the police force.
THE STOP
The stop itself happened Dec. 4 on Interstate 70 in Collinsville, a town of 26,000 people just outside of St. Louis. Law enforcement officials say this stretch of highway is a drug-trafficking corridor. The account that follows is based on Huff’s video, the unedited dashboard footage from Reichert's vehicle and a Huffington Post interview with Huff.
After pulling Huff over, Reichert approaches Huff's car and asks him for his license, registration and proof of insurance. Huff complies. Reichert then asks Huff to step out of the car, because he says he can't hear him over the noise from the highway. Huff complies. Before talking to Huff, Reichert asks Seaton for ID as well, which Seaton isn't obligated to produce, but does.
Reichert then tells Huff he pulled him over for weaving across lanes. Huff says in his video that this is a fabrication. But he didn't challenge Reichert's claim at the time because, "I was from out of state, and I didn't want any trouble."
After running a check on Huff's license, Reichert tells Huff he'll let him off with a warning, and the two men shake hands. Legally, Huff is now free to go. But just as Huff is set to get back into his car, Reichert says, "Let me ask you a question real quick." Huff agrees.
It's here that Reichert adds, seemingly as an afterthought, that Seaton appeared nervous and apprehensive. He then asks Huff a series of what law enforcement officers call "rolling no" questions about whether Huff is transporting any drugs, weapons or cash. Huff says "no" to each.
In his interview with HuffPost, Huff asks, "If he thought Jon was nervous, and that might indicate drug activity, why did he wait so long to bring it up? And why did he wait until he had basically told me I could go?"
"It's a common tactic," says John Rekowski, the public defender for Madison County, where the stop took place. "[Officer Reichert] thinks he's doing something legally significant there. He thinks he's establishing that everything that happens after the handshake is consensual, because after that, Huff was technically free to go. But of course he isn't free to go."
If Huff had ignored Reichert's "Let me ask you a question real quick," gotten into his car and driven off, Rekowski says, there's no way Reichert would have let him leave. "And in Illinois, the definition of a detainment is that you aren't free to leave."
Collinsville Police Chief Scott Williams, who has seen the dash cam video, tells HuffPost "I don't have any reason to doubt the integrity of any of our officers. But we'll do our due diligence and look into that. If we find that any of our officers is taking shortcuts or violating someone's civil rights, that officer will be fired."
HuffPost was unable to reach Reichert for comment.
During the questioning, Reichert tries several times to get Huff to admit to having marijuana in his car, even if only a small amount for personal use. Huff says he has none. "I would just like to go on my way if I could," he tells Reichert. Reichert says that he's going to bring his K-9 out of the car to do an outside sweep.
Reichert pats down both Huff and Seaton and takes the dog around the car twice. He tells Huff that on the second trip, the dog has "alerted" to the presence of drugs, but did so at the front of the car, out of the view of Reichert's dashboard camera. He explains that because the front of the car is downwind, the drug scent would most likely register with the dog at the front of the car.
The dog's alert gives Reichert probable cause for a thorough hand search of Huff's car, as well as Huff and Seaton's luggage and personal belongings.
Reichert finds no drugs. He does claim to find "shake" -- marijuana residue -- beneath the seats of Huff's car. That, Reichert says, must have been why the dog alerted. Reichert never collected any of the alleged shake for testing, however, and Huff says now it's nonsense. After an hour of questioning and searching by Reichert, Huff and Seaton leave Collinsville with only a warning for an unsafe lane change.
THE FORFEITURE CORRIDOR
Asset forfeiture is the process by which law enforcement agencies can take possession of property suspected of being tied to illegal activity. Under these laws, the property itself is presumed to be guilty of criminal activity. Once the property has been seized, it's up to the owner to prove he obtained the property legitimately.
In about 80 percent of civil asset forfeiture cases, the property owner is never charged with a crime. And in Illinois -- like many states -- the law enforcement agency that makes the seizure gets to keep the cash or the proceeds of the forfeiture auction (in Illinois, the prosecutor's office gets 10-12 percent).
Critics say civil asset forfeiture is rife with poor incentives, and violates the Fifth Amendment’s protection against seizure of property without due process of law. Police can seize a car, cash, even a home on the flimsiest of evidence.
Madison County, Ill., where Huff was pulled over, is bisected by I-70 just outside of St. Louis. Interstates are a particularly rich ground for forfeiture. Law enforcement officials say that's because interstates are ideal for drug running.
Critics say it's because police can target out-of-state drivers, who are more likely than local residents to accept a police officer's baseless accusations and turn over their property, rather than refuse and face arrest, multiple returns to the state for court dates and thousands of dollars in legal expenses. Sometimes winning the property back can exceed the actual value of the property.
Faced with that choice, it isn't difficult to see why innocent people would opt to hand over their cash and head home.
"The joke around our office is that all you need for probable cause in Madison County is an Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, or Florida license plate," says Rekowski, the public defender. Collinsville defense attorney Jessica Koester says she's seen the same thing. "If you're from out of state, they're simply going to find a reason to pull you over."
Local news reports indicate that Illinois law enforcement agencies along the I-70 corridor have ramped up their forfeiture efforts in recent years. Rekowski said one tactic police use is to put up a sign for a "drug checkpoint" roadblock ahead. In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court said such checkpoints are illegal; roadblocks are legal for DWI checks, but not for narcotics checks. But Rekowski says that isn't the point.
"They put the sign up so there's only one exit you can take to avoid it. Then they pull over and search anyone who tries to exit before the roadblock."
That tactic too is constitutionally suspect. Police can't pull a driver over merely for exiting before an announced (and illegal) drug checkpoint. "But, of course, that isn't why they'll say they've pulled you over," Rekowski says. "They'll say you crossed two lanes to get to the exit, or switched lanes without signaling, or that you cut someone off."
The Edwardsville Intelligencer reported in 2010 that the Madison County State's Attorney's Office has reaped a half-million dollars from the policy over eight years, which at the prosecutor's take of 10-12 percent suggests a total bounty of $4.5 million to $5 million. Madison County Assistant State's Attorney Stephanie Robbins, who handles forfeiture cases for the office, told local paper the Telegraph in 2010, "Law-abiding citizens have nothing to worry about."
But maybe they do. Jerome Chennault, a Nevada resident had the misfortune of driving through Madison County on his way home after visiting his son in Philadelphia.
Chennault said he had withdrawn $22,870 in cash to take with him before leaving Nevada, which he had intended to use for a downpayment on a home. After he was pulled over for following another car too closely, Chennault gave police permission to use a drug dog to sweep his car. The dog then "alerted" to the bag containing Chennault's cash.
Police found no actual drugs on Chennault or in his car. He was never charged with a crime. But the dog alert itself was enough to allow police to seize Chennault's cash. Over the next several months, Chennault had to travel to Edwardsville, Ill., at his own expense to fight in court for the return of his property. He had to put up a bond equal to 10 percent of the value of the property taken from him in order to secure it.
Cheannault won in court. His money was returned. But he won't be reimbursed for his travel or his legal expenses.
Similar stories have been reported along other forfeiture corridors across the country. In Teneha, Texas, police reportedly routinely pull over cars from out of state (the highway is popular for drivers, flush with cash and jewelry, going to and from casinos). A Nashville TV station recently reported on a stretch in Tennessee where the vast majority of police stops were of suspected drug runners leaving the city, meaning the police apparently preferred to let the drugs come into the city so they could seize the cash on the way out.
"When we saw the Huff video in our office, we just laughed," Rekowski says. "Not because it wasn't outrageous. But because it's the kind of thing we see all the time. The stop for a so-called 'inappropriate lane change,' the games they play in the questioning, the claims about nervousness or inappropriate behavior that can't really be contradicted. It's all routine."
According to Koester, the defense attorney in private practice, "The dog alert that happens off-camera isn't unusual either. You see that all the time."
Koester and Rekowski say the Huff stop has all the markings of a forfeiture fishing expedition. "You see where he asks if [Huff] is carrying large amounts of U.S. currency," Rekowski says. "It's pretty clear what they're after. These kinds of cases put my kids through college." He laughs, then adds, "I'm only half joking."
THE DRUG DOG
HuffPost showed the video of Huff's stop to two K-9 experts. Gene Papet is executive director of K9 Resources, a company that trains detection dogs, including police dogs. Papet found a number of problems with the way Reichert handled his dog.
"Just before the dog alerts, you can hear a change in the tone of the handler's voice. That's troubling. I don't know anything about this particular handler, but that's often an indication of a handler that's cuing a response." In other words, it's indicative of a handler instructing the dog to alert, not waiting to see whether the dog will alert.
"You also hear the handler say at one point that the dog alerted from the front of the car because the wind is blowing from the back of the car to the front, so the scent would have carried with the wind," Papet says. "But the dog was brought around the car twice. If that's the case, the dog should have alerted the first time he was brought to the front of the car. The dog only alerted the second time, which corresponded to what would be consistent with a vocal cue from the handler."
Russ Jones is a former police officer with 10 years in drug enforcement, including as a K-9 officer. He's now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of current and former cops and prosecutors who favor ending the war on drugs. "That dog was going to do what ever (Officer Reichert) needed it to do," Jones says. "Throughout the video, the dog is looking for handler feedback, which isn't how it's supposed to work."
In the 2005 case Illinois v. Caballes, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that having a drug dog sniff the exterior of a vehicle during a routine traffic stop does not violate the Fourth Amendment. But in a dissent to that opinion, Justice David Souter pointed to mounting evidence that drug dogs aren't as infallible as police departments often claim. Souter noted a study that the state of Illinois itself used in its briefs showing that in lab tests, drug dogs fail 12.5 to 60 percent of the time.
Since then, more evidence has emerged to support Souter's concerns.
The problem isn't that the dogs aren't capable of picking up the scent, it's that dogs have been bred to please and interact with humans. A dog can easily be manipulated to alert whenever needed. But even with conscientious cops, a dog without the proper training may pick up on its handler's body language and alert whenever it detects its handler is suspicious.
In one study published last year in the journal Animal Cognition, researchers rigged some tests designed to fool dogs into falsely alerting and others designed to trick handlers into thinking a package contained narcotics (it didn't). Of the 144 total searches performed, the dogs falsely alerted 123 times. More interesting, the dogs were twice as likely to falsely alert to packages designed to trick their handlers than those designed to trick the dogs.
In 2011, the Chicago Tribune published a review of drug dog searches conducted over three years by police departments in the Chicago suburbs. The paper found that just 44 percent of dog "alerts" led to the discovery of actual contraband. Interestingly, for Hispanic drivers the success rate dipped to 27 percent, again supporting the theory that drug dogs tend to confirm the suspicions (and, consequently, the biases) of their handlers.
A 2006 statistical analysis (PDF) of police dog tests by University of North Carolina law professor Richard Myers concluded that the dogs aren't reliable enough to provide probable cause for a search.
HuffPost obtained the records for one Illinois state police K-9 unit for an 11-month period in 2007 and 2008. Of the 136 times this particular dog alerted to the presence of drugs during a traffic stop over that period, 35 of the subsequent hand searches found measurable quantities of illegal drugs.
See accompanying article for a more thorough analysis of the K-9 records:
Jones, the former narcotics and K-9 officer, said those sorts of numbers are why he now opposes the drug war. "Ninety percent of these dog-handler teams are utter failures. They're just ways to get around the Fourth Amendment," he says. "When I debate these people around the country, I always challenge the K-9 officers to a double-blind test to see how accurate they and their dogs really are. They always refuse."
These figures strongly suggest that while the Supreme Court has ruled that there's nothing invasive about an exterior drug dog sniff of a car, in truth, the dog’s alert may be nothing more than the dog confirming its handler's hunches -- which is exactly what the Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect against.
THE BAD COP
If drug dog searches and poorly incentivized forfeiture policies are bad ideas in general, both can be particularly damaging when utilized by an unscrupulous police officer. And Michael Reichert has both a reputation and a documented history of questionable scruples.
"All the departments around here are bad when it comes to these searches, but he's really the poster boy," says Rekowski, the public defender. Another defense attorney, who didn't wish to be quoted by name, went further: "The guy is a menace to society."
In a 2005 case, U.S. v. Zambrana, U.S. District Judge Michael J. Reagan overturned a federal drug conviction because he didn't find Reichert's testimony credible.
Reagan's assessment of Reichert's methods and credibility is blunt. He calls Reichert "polished" and his testimony "rehearsed, coached and robotic as to be rote." He continues, “It was a generic, almost default performance not dependent upon the facts of this case, but suitable for any case in which Reichert might testify to having found reasonable suspicion."
In that case too, Reichert's stated reason for pulling Zambrana over was that Zambrana crossed over a lane divider. According to Reagan's opinion, Reichert also stated that the motorist appeared "nervous," like Huff, and again nearly let the driver go (he told Zambrano he was "free to leave.") Then, again nearly as an afterthought, Reichert started in with the "rolling no" questions. Reichert described Zambrano's refusal to consent to a search as "suspicious."
Reagan writes that Reichert is so confident in his ability to observe body language to detect deceit, he appears to be a "human polygraph." Reichert taught a class on how to conduct roadside searches, which Reagan wrote could easily have been titled, "How to avoid the warrant requirement in searching a vehicle."
Reagan's opinion, along with the fact that Reichert was also convicted on federal charges of selling knockoff designer sunglasses, led to Reichert's dismissal from the Collinsville Police Department in 2006. But with the help of the police union, Reichert sued to get his job back.
In subsequent hearings, the local state's attorney's office said it didn't trust Reichert, as did the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Illinois. Reagan and the state circuit court judge also made clear that they felt Reichert was untrustworthy.
Despite these concerns, in March 2009, an Illinois appellate court ordered Reichert rehired.
In much of the country, discipline and dismissal of police officers is governed by union-negotiated contracts. Some states have a “police officer bill of rights,” which affords police accused of misconduct and criminal acts more rights than are afforded other citizens. Others send officer misconduct cases to union-negotiated arbitrators. Federal law also protects police from being fired for refusing to answer questions in a misconduct investigation, even if their answers can’t be used against them in any ensuing criminal case.
Police watchdogs say all of this makes it extremely difficult to fire even cops with long histories of misconduct.
These concerns have been raised at police and sheriff departments across the country, including in King County, Wash.; Maywood, Calif.; Gary, Ind.; Cincinnati, Covington, Texas, Aurora, Colo., San Diego; Spokane, Wash., Louisville, Ken.; Milwaukee; and the entire state of Florida.
By spring of 2009, Reichert was back on the job in Collinsville. Soon after, federal prosecutors raised new concerns about Reichert's credibility. Those too were dismissed.
In January 2011, Williams gave Reichert the Chief's Award of Merit (PDF), and in April 2011, he was named Officer of the Month. For the latter, Reichert was cited for making six arrests and seven citations out of 166 total incidents. According to Williams, "incidents are dispatched calls for service. They range from traffic crashes to domestic disputes and everything in between."
Despite Reichert's past, Williams said he sees no reason to question the officer's integrity.
As for Huff, he said he just wants to raise awareness, so fewer people are subjected to the same sorts of searches he and Seaton were.
(Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/31/drug-search-trekies-stopped-searched-illinois_n_1364087.html)
Friday, April 27, 2012
Music Devotion: Festival Season 2012
Okay, so tomorrow I'll get back to posting on the law again. I found this and just felt it was really sweet and wanted to share it. Enjoy :) ...
(April 2012, Amy Ettinger)
Standing boldly at the front of the crowd, the stage beckons fans and believers as a place of worship. The massive speakers and alluring lights excite and tease as the music gods take the stage. An infectious wrath of heavy bass detonates through the speakers and a vigorous audience of believers explodes into celebration. Their one true faith? Music.
The days are growing longer and the weather is slowly turning sweeter. Summer’s batting her lashes and taunting us with hints of sunshine and anticipation. It’s the season of worship – festival season is upon us again.
In the middle of grass parking lots, cars are parked side-by-side, lined in perfect rows across a muddy, abandoned field. The sun is sweltering and relentless – skin is sticky with dried sweat. The air reeks of pungent body odor, over heated porta-potties and wafts of vendor pizza and vegetarian burritos.
Our neighbors are a dynamic tribe of merrymakers, amiable and outspoken. They saunter over to the canopy at first sign of constructing a temporary home.
Regardless of age, appearance or origin, festivalgoers create makeshift families united by a love for the music.
--
The music festival is a celebration of appreciation and reverence for music. It embodies an entire subculture of passionate and devoted believers. Attracting an ever-growing, cult-like following, festivals have invited enthusiasts into laboratories of light and sound where musical scientists experiment with chemicals of noise and vibration to stimulate a reaction.
And while capitalist parasites are not wholly eradicated, both the good and the bad elements share the grounds in harmony. The mutual appreciation, respect and care born among sincere believers trump the wicked.
Thousands of people slowly herd like cattle in the same direction. Some are flaunting amusing outfits, drowned in glitter and metallics. From sunglasses and beads, to full costumes, the laissez-faire dress code heightens the excitement and exhilaration permeating the atmosphere.
Behind a set of white canopies, the stage looms ahead of the masses. Its grandeur and sheer majesty is captivating, and it boldly stands as a sacred emblem of expression, engagement, escape and ecstasy.
The clang of a symbol and pluck of a single guitar string tease the anxious and impatient masses. Clouds of smoke billow above the crowd as we wait for a sign, any sign of music. We wait for our preacher to ignite the stage and we wait for the overwhelming exuberance and madness of passion to explode around us.
Song is unlike any medium – its comprehension lies in the reaction to a melody awakening the body, the sensation of vibrations pulsating the eardrum and the fervor it ignites in the spirit.
Live music is collaboration between artist and crowd – a piece of work created through the genuine energy and enthusiasm level of the fans that is reflected in evolving and layered grooves.
May the music stay fiery and its influence as genuine and momentous as the last, as we embark again on the epic search for transcendental enlightenment before the stage of our dreams.
(Headstash.com, http://headstash.com/magazine/on-the-beat/1623-music-devotion-festival-season-2012)
(April 2012, Amy Ettinger)
Standing boldly at the front of the crowd, the stage beckons fans and believers as a place of worship. The massive speakers and alluring lights excite and tease as the music gods take the stage. An infectious wrath of heavy bass detonates through the speakers and a vigorous audience of believers explodes into celebration. Their one true faith? Music.
The days are growing longer and the weather is slowly turning sweeter. Summer’s batting her lashes and taunting us with hints of sunshine and anticipation. It’s the season of worship – festival season is upon us again.
In the middle of grass parking lots, cars are parked side-by-side, lined in perfect rows across a muddy, abandoned field. The sun is sweltering and relentless – skin is sticky with dried sweat. The air reeks of pungent body odor, over heated porta-potties and wafts of vendor pizza and vegetarian burritos.
Our neighbors are a dynamic tribe of merrymakers, amiable and outspoken. They saunter over to the canopy at first sign of constructing a temporary home.
Regardless of age, appearance or origin, festivalgoers create makeshift families united by a love for the music.
--
The music festival is a celebration of appreciation and reverence for music. It embodies an entire subculture of passionate and devoted believers. Attracting an ever-growing, cult-like following, festivals have invited enthusiasts into laboratories of light and sound where musical scientists experiment with chemicals of noise and vibration to stimulate a reaction.
And while capitalist parasites are not wholly eradicated, both the good and the bad elements share the grounds in harmony. The mutual appreciation, respect and care born among sincere believers trump the wicked.
Thousands of people slowly herd like cattle in the same direction. Some are flaunting amusing outfits, drowned in glitter and metallics. From sunglasses and beads, to full costumes, the laissez-faire dress code heightens the excitement and exhilaration permeating the atmosphere.
Behind a set of white canopies, the stage looms ahead of the masses. Its grandeur and sheer majesty is captivating, and it boldly stands as a sacred emblem of expression, engagement, escape and ecstasy.
The clang of a symbol and pluck of a single guitar string tease the anxious and impatient masses. Clouds of smoke billow above the crowd as we wait for a sign, any sign of music. We wait for our preacher to ignite the stage and we wait for the overwhelming exuberance and madness of passion to explode around us.
Song is unlike any medium – its comprehension lies in the reaction to a melody awakening the body, the sensation of vibrations pulsating the eardrum and the fervor it ignites in the spirit.
Live music is collaboration between artist and crowd – a piece of work created through the genuine energy and enthusiasm level of the fans that is reflected in evolving and layered grooves.
May the music stay fiery and its influence as genuine and momentous as the last, as we embark again on the epic search for transcendental enlightenment before the stage of our dreams.
(Headstash.com, http://headstash.com/magazine/on-the-beat/1623-music-devotion-festival-season-2012)
2012 Music Festival Guide (Headstash)
Still not 100% which festivals to go to this summer? Here is a NON-ALL-INCLUSIVE (that means there's WAY more than just these!) list of some popular U.S. music festivals...
2012 Headstash Music Festival Guide
2012 Lineup, Tickets, Dates, Rumors and Previews (additions in bold)All Good | Bonnaroo | Camp Bisco | Coachella | Electric Forest |
Electric Zoo | Gathering of the Vibes | The Hangout | High Sierra | Lollapalooza | moe.down | Mountain Jam |
Outside Lands | Phish Festival 2012 | Re:Generation |
Starscape | Summer Camp | Ultra | Wakarusa | Wanee
Electric Zoo | Gathering of the Vibes | The Hangout | High Sierra | Lollapalooza | moe.down | Mountain Jam |
Outside Lands | Phish Festival 2012 | Re:Generation |
Starscape | Summer Camp | Ultra | Wakarusa | Wanee
| Sponsored Festivals: Camp Barefoot | elseFest | Impulse | Poor Farm Fest | Rootwire FOR A COMPLETE DESCRIPTION OF ALL THESE SHOWS GO TO Headstash.com/2012FestivalGuide |
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Inside the Nitrous Mafia, an East Coast Hippie-Crack Ring
The first time I heard of the "Nitrous Mafia" was after I attended Rothbury 2009. The most recent time was after Phish at UIC last summer (2011). Between then I had found this article...and now I re-found it for anyone who hasn't read it yet or wants to read it again :) Enjoy...
(July 2010, John H. Tucker)
Summer concert season means jamming to the familiar hiss of 'hippie crack'...
A hiss pierces the air as music fans wait in line outside the Brooklyn Bowl in Williamsburg. Across the street from the venue, a man stoops over his tank, inflating balloons and passing them to his associates by the fistful. He shuts off the valve and surveys the scene. Deciding his handlers are moving too slowly, he picks up the tank and slams it against the corner of the warehouse, sending a shrieking echo into the night. "I don't see you working fast enough!" he yells. Then he unleashes an exploding stream of gas into the air, rapidly firing left and right and cackling devilishly like a kid with a water pistol.
The balloon man, who asks not to be named, has a shaved head and a New England accent. He's the leader of the Boston ring of the "Nitrous Mafia"—a term invented by critics of his business. The Disco Biscuits performance is about to start. And the fans in line are high from his laughing gas.
"Fatty whippets!" yell the balloon man's eight or nine dealers, holding balloon clusters high in the air. Some of the dealers are locals, contracted out for the night, while the rest hail from Massachusetts and Rhode Island. When a police car is seen from a distance, a trio of spotters yells, "Six-Up"—a warning to keep cool. Selling nitrous oxide for the purpose of getting high is illegal, but the club's bouncers don't seem to mind the huffing. "The security here is cool," says a dealer named Chrystal, a single mother who is dating the Boston capo, whom we'll call Dmitri.
Throughout the year, the Nitrous Mafia travels from state to state, selling balloons at concert sites. The scene in Williamsburg is only a small preview of what happens in summer, when the outdoor festival season kicks into gear. During these campground events, which last two to four days, the Mafia, which is divided into two rings, based in Boston and Philadelphia, can burn through hundreds of nitrous tanks. With the ability to fill up to 350 balloons per tank, which they sell for $5 and $10, they can bank more than $300,000 per festival, minus expenses. Year after year, security guards at these events attempt to crack down on the illicit business, but, in most cases, they're outmatched by a phalanx of menacing gas dealers who have little regard for unarmed concert personnel.
And for some musicians and their fans, the illicit trade is a bummer. "It has a negative impact on the entire scene," says Don Richards, the tour manager for Umphrey's McGee, ranked the No. 4 jam band in a recent Rolling Stone poll. "It's a very controlling group, to the point where I've seen people get beat up."
"It's something that should be left to the dentist's office," says Josh Clark, the lead vocalist for the San Francisco–based jam band Tea Leaf Green.
But Dmitri, who has been in and out of jail on multiple occasions, defends the operation. "You don't want it, don't buy it," he says, taking a break from his balloon hustle. "We're not forcing you to do anything. You can keep walking." He lives in Rhode Island, but he and his associates will crash at his New York apartment tonight. Business has been slow, he says, and each worker will probably clear only $300 for this show. But he hopes things will pick up during the summer. When asked, he denies his crew is an organized crime ring. "There is no Nitrous Mafia," he says.
It is inevitable. At any East Coast summer music festival, from Maine to Miami Beach, the opening chords eventually give way to the whistling of tanks. In parking lots and alleyways. In mountain crevasses and open fields. At popular campsite events like All Good, in Masontown, West Virginia; Bonnaroo, in Manchester, Tennessee; and Gathering of the Vibes, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The Nitrous Mafia is there.
"You hear the hiss of that tank, and you know you're approaching a shady corner," says Clark, of Tea Leaf Green. "When I'm near it, I'm always afraid I'll wind up in some blurb for a music magazine."
Nitrous is called "hippie crack" because of its addictive qualities. Every morning, the festival campgrounds are riddled with balloons, "like bullet shells on a battlefield," says a fan. Unlike traditional drugs, which have long-lasting effects and can carry a fan through a concert, the high from N20 is cheap and quick. After that, it's often back to the end of the tank line for another round. "It's an instant rush of pure euphoria, but it only lasts for 30 seconds or a minute, and then you want it back," says Justin Heller, a fan who owns his own biodiesel company. He no longer does balloons, but remembers the days of buying 15 in a row. "You don't think about your money—you're just like, 'I want that again, I want that again, I want that again.' "
But some jam-band fans complain that the nitrous racket is harshing their idyllic pursuit, recalling a time, they say, when laughing gas was a part of the hippie ethos.
"It's a sore on the scene," says Kevin Calabro, a Brooklyn-based publicist for jam bands. "It's been taken over by dirtbags and Mafia punks. It used to be, in the old Dead days, that some hippies got their hands on a tank, and it was a mellow and loose kind of thing. Now it's become some dirty-ass shit that's too easy to abuse."
"These people are evil," says Don Bryant, a retired Army captain and emergency medical technician, who also vends T-shirts at shows. During a recent Bonnaroo festival, he says, "One guy with a $5 balloon of nitrous came crashing through my booth, being chased by a guy with a knife. He almost took out my daughter, who was a little baby."
Scott Percival, a Boston police officer who serves as a security guard for the Gathering of the Vibes, says he was once offered $10,000 by a dealer to look the other way, and recalls stumbling onto one beaten-up and unconscious seller lying in the parking lot, pockets empty. "He was selling nitrous, and the other guys came in and took him out. It happens all the time," he says. "It's a big-time problem," echoes Dennis O'Connor, a Hartford police officer who confiscated 25 tanks outside a Phish show last year.
Forced to play a four-day game of Whac-a-Mole, the guards at festivals move in on one dealer with a tank, and another pops up on the other side of the park. "It's frighteningly organized," says Richards, of Umphrey's McGee. "They know how to hide and get out of a scene very quickly. I've witnessed them set up for 10 minutes and make thousands of dollars selling balloons. And as soon as security and police converge on a location, they're gone. They disappear. They think things out very clearly about how they're going to escape certain situations."
For concertgoers, the most dangerous risk of nitrous is the potential for users to pass out and hit the pavement. "I've watched so many young people crack their heads and faces open that I have personally stopped providing emergency first aid," says Bryant, the EMT. "People will crack themselves open. I've seen them fall and bust out all their teeth. I've seen them fall and hit glass.
They fall like flies all over the place. It's a sad thing." Pointing to a scar on his chin, one fan elaborates on a recent nitrous experience in Pittsburgh: "My last thoughts were, 'I need to sit down right now,' and the next thing I know, I wake up in a pool of blood with five people surrounding me."
Last year, a festivalgoer turned up dead at Gathering of the Vibes. Within days, the jam-band blogosphere lit up, hurling accusations at the Nitrous Mafia, with claims that the victim was beaten with a tank, sprayed with gas, and burned alive. Weeks later, a toxicology report ruled that he died from a simple drug overdose, but the episode was still a black eye for festival promoter Ken Hays, who came under fire from Bridgeport authorities for failure to control the scene. Despite confiscating about 100 tanks, the security guards at Vibes proved no match for the gas mob.
"We were overrun," admits a security executive. "We weren't counting on the amount of nitrous they would bring in." Kevin O'Brien, the marketing director of last year's Vibes, says he was offered a bribe of thousands of dollars by a nitrous dealer named "Crispy." The firm Security Operations Consultants, one of five security companies that worked the festival, was the subject of an FBI investigation for allegedly failing to turn over tanks and drugs taken from concertgoers to the police.
Despite the scandal, Hays eventually won his months-long battle to bring his festival, born out of Jerry Garcia's death, back to Bridgeport. (The event is scheduled to run July 29 to August 1.) He has instituted a zero-tolerance balloon ban this year and is working with the Bridgeport police force and City Council to make the possession of nitrous oxide illegal in Bridgeport's public parks. He says he hopes legislation will be enacted before the festival, though the parks commissioner isn't sure that it can be enforced.
The guards aren't sure, either. "People just don't know what's going on," says Marshall Rodriguez, the owner of the security firm in charge of the backstage area of Vibes. (Indeed, two cops interviewed by the Voice referred to the gas as "helium.") A few years ago, Rodriguez almost shut down his business after one of his guards was pistol-whipped and another threatened at knifepoint by nitrous dealers at a festival in West Virginia. "You got a group of guys who are coming in . . . [making] money they're willing to go to great lengths to protect, even if it means hurting somebody, even if it means hurting security," he said. "It's just starting to get out of control."
Inside a dimly lit roadhouse in Nowheresville, Massachusetts, "Sean" has agreed to talk about his time as a member of the Nitrous Mafia, provided his real name isn't used and the venue isn't named. Twenty-four years old, Sean sips a bottle of lager and speaks in a raspy whisper. His dreadlocked hair spills over his Grateful Dead visor and down his back, and a green bandanna hangs loosely from his neck. In a few minutes, he will take the stage as a guitarist for one of the bands playing tonight. A self-described hippie, he was considered a valuable member of the Mafia because he blended in at festivals.
Sean explains that the Boston ring of the Nitrous Mafia is made up of about 16 members split into two units, with the entire operation run by the Rhode Island kingpin, Dmitri—the guy with the New England accent slamming the tank against the wall in Williamsburg. With the help of false paperwork, gang members fill up tanks of various sizes at a local nitrous shop, which is a kitchen-supply store called New England Fountain, located in Burlington, Massachusetts. (The store's owner, Paul Abramo, says he's aware that some of his customers might be illegal dealers, but it's impossible to regulate: "We try to make sure they're a business, but beyond that, it's really out of our control.")
During festival season, gang members are able to fill 40 nitrous tanks at a time for $75 each, says Sean. During his employment, the two Boston crews would duel each other every night to see who could make more money. "It was almost like a game to us," he says. Members of each unit split 30 percent of the profits, while the remaining 70 percent was funneled back to their bosses.
The Philadelphia ring is larger and split up into several sub-crews who know each other but operate independently, says Sean. "The Philly guys are more reckless," he says, and more prone to violence and intimidation. "They operate without a code of honor. They were the first kids I saw bringing guns to the lots and putting fuckin' shit to people's heads." The Philadelphia don, who owns his own nitrous supply store and has several workers underneath him, is less apt to show up at festivals himself, says Sean. "He's a fucking nut job," he adds, noting that even Dmitri is deferential to him.
Sean, who admits that he has been in and out of jail for drug charges, was recruited into the Mafia last year during a time when he had no money and no food and was struggling to see his favorite bands. During All Good, a mob acquaintance offered to pay him to go on balloon runs. "Next thing I know, I made $60 in 40 minutes," Sean recalls. "It was big money. Eventually, I started making $900 a weekend." He was employed for a four-month period, during which time he spent nearly every day on the road with his colleagues, living in hotels and U-Haul vans. He fell in love with the lifestyle because of the instant respect that came with being a balloon seller. Girls would remove their tops in front of him just for a huff. "It worked all the fuckin' time," he says. Fans would drop $200 in three hours at his tank.
As a full-time Mafia member, Sean was known for his crafty methods of sneaking tanks past security guards. "I liked to store them inside box springs," he says. "We'd strip out the bottom and stash six cans inside. Then we'd lay it back down, put a mattress and blanket on it and make the bed. Security would open the back of the U-Haul, see a made bed, close the door, and let us ride right on through." On other occasions, he'd rip out the floor panels of vans and stash the tanks, which were always spray-painted black, in the undercarriage. "We'd laugh our way through every check point with three fuckin' tanks underneath the car," he says. A colleague of his—a woman with a young child—would often traffic tanks hidden under blankets in her baby stroller.
During festival season, the Boston and Philadelphia crews band together, operating in higher numbers, assisted by a recruited class of lower-level minions who aren't card-carrying members of the Nitrous Mafia but are eager to make a summer buck. They're often ex-cons—"crack dealers and dirtbag kids straight outta jail," says Sean—who like the idea of selling balloons to rich kids while inhaling all the nitrous balloons they want for free. The full-time workers handle the money and oversee the stash houses, while the younger kids serve as lookouts and runners, communicating with one another with verbal signs and cell phone texts. "It's usually six guys to a tank," explains Sean. "One guy strappin', one guy fillin', one guy takin' money, then usually three lookouts spread out in a triangle about 20 feet in each direction watching for security."
After leaving on bad terms—he won't go into detail—Sean says he wishes he had never gotten caught up with the mob. "I realize the demons associated with it," he says. "They're really ruining the hippie scene." Then he leaves the table, grabs his guitar, and takes the stage, launching into the opening stanza of the blues.
Nitrous oxide has been around as long as the jam bands themselves. There is one brief scene in The Grateful Dead Movie, a documentary about a series of San Francisco shows in 1974, in which nitrous is consumed with an octopus-like hose. "It was easy to come by, and part of the party," says songwriter and producer David Gans, a collaborator of Jerry Garcia's. During the 1970s, the gas was sometimes supplied at recording studios. By the mid-'80s, the tanks began appearing on "Shakedown Street," the name for the public marketplace that Dead Heads ginned up at concert venues to finance their continuous touring. By the end of the decade, nitrous was standard fare, supplied primarily by out-of-town dentists.
But many Dead Heads were turned off by the tanks from the onset and began referring to the dealers as "tour rats" who made money off the mother ship. "They saw the nitrous vendors as people from outside of the subculture sucking profits out of the scene," says sociologist Rebecca Adams, a professor and associate provost at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. "They would sell the nitrous and then disappear, without spending money on tour. They were profiteers, or what Dead Heads called 'corporate vendors.' " Garcia was aware of the problem, says Gans, "but he was pathologically unable to take control and responsibility."
At the turn of the century, following the death of Garcia and the expansion of jam-band culture, Shakedown Streets along the East Coast began attracting nitrous dealers in greater numbers, along with people who looked less like Phish fans. "I began noticing that all the people selling balloons weren't nice hippie kids trying to go from show to show," says fan Justin Heller. "It became clear that they were a bunch of thugs trying to make money."
"They're sketchy," says one fan. "They're shit," says another. One fan cuts right to the point: "These guys don't even know who Jerry Garcia is, and they never will." Other vendors began complaining that nitrous sales drove down their T-shirt and jewelry businesses. "Nitrous straight robs the pockets of the other workers," says Sean, the ex-member of the Nitrous Mafia. "Everybody's fuckin' broke 'cause they dropped every dollar they had on nitrous."
This new class of gas dealers seemed to come almost exclusively from Philadelphia, where nitrous was easy to purchase. By 2003, the gas business had outgrown Shakedown Street and had crept onto street corners. Outside some concerts, tanks were stationed several feet apart from each other. Eventually, turf wars started breaking out, leading to intimidation and violence. Stronger nitrous dealers would ask lower-level merchants to hand over their tanks—or risk the consequences.
"If you start working Shakedown next to a bunch of the mob kids, and you try running your own tank there, you're gonna get that tank taken from you and it's gonna become theirs, unless you're paying them off," says Sean. "They do not let you work around them without being one of them. And that's where the Mafia aspect really came around."
One fan says he was beaten up two years ago at Jones Beach because a dealer thought he stole a balloon. Last year at Vibes (where a portion of the park has been dubbed "Nitrous Alley"), a fan says he saw a dealer smash his tank on a man's head. At a Phish show last year in Portland, Maine, a fan watched a parking attendant get pummeled. Knives and bats were sneaked into lots. "I straight-up saw a Nitrous Mafia guy hit a cop's face in with a tank," says a man who recently attended All Good, a mountainous festival venue where gas is inhaled inside a deep gorge called "Wookie Nitrous Cave." "Nobody fucks with those fuckers," says a tattoo artist who goes by the name PeaT.
Clark, of Tea Leaf Green, doesn't get why his fans are drawn to the stuff: "There are certain drugs that enhance the concert experience—a little doobie here, or some mushrooms there," he says. "But I don't see how nitrous enhances the concert experience. With other drugs, you can dance. With nitrous, you slump onto a car and disappear until it's time for the next balloon. They don't call it 'hippie crack' for nothing."
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency doesn't consider nitrous a controlled substance and doesn't regulate it. Instead, it's monitored by the Food and Drug Administration as a food-grade propellant, medical-grade gas, and prescription drug. It's legal to own it, but, like other inhalants, it's prohibited by the FDA to purchase and sell for the purposes of getting high. Each state has its own laws against it, and most treat the illicit sale of nitrous as a misdemeanor, with penalties ranging from small fines to a few months in prison. In what was likely the most significant federal crackdown on the gas, defendants from Philadelphia and New Jersey were charged with unlawful distribution of nitrous to an undercover police officer in the parking lot outside a Dave Matthews Band show at Washington, D.C.'s Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in 2001. At an appeal hearing, a District Court judge ruled that the dealers' attempt to sell nitrous without a prescription was, in essence, a misbranding crime, in violation of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and the defendants' cases were sent back down to lower courts.
Some environmentalists complain that nitrous is a greenhouse gas. Some music fans say the hiss of the gas keeps them up at night. Still others kvetch that the tank lines clog up the campgrounds, and that dealers use random tents as hiding places. One fan says he was jolted from his sleep when a tank was slipped under his tent and slammed into his head. Another said she had her tires slashed after disobeying orders not to move her car.
"They have a total disregard for anyone's well-being but their own," says Rodriguez, the security executive. "They're only there for one reason: getting that money. And they get it whatever the cost."
"Mad adrenaline, mad money, mad pussy," says a Philadelphia nitrous dealer named Beef, explaining why he got into the business. He's standing outside the Electric Factory, in the club-cluttered Northern Liberties section of the city, near the end of a Wilco show on a Saturday night. Beef is with five of his gang mates; together, they have three watermelon-size tanks stored in Nike gym bags, with reserves stowed inside the trunks of their cars. One of the dealers, an older man who looks to be in his fifties, sits in an illegally parked SUV—a hiding place for tanks in case cops come.
A meter-reader approaches—a black woman, who notices the tanks. Immediately, a tall dealer named Jimmy, who wears a baggy gray sweatsuit and looks like Shaggy from Scooby Doo, diverts her attention. "Damn, what's a fine-lookin' girl like you doing as a parking lady?" he asks, approaching her. She smiles, charmed, and leans against the wall next to him. "I just gave out my last ticket," she says, letting the gang off the hook. Later, Jimmy notices an Electric Factory security director pulling into the parking lot. He is asked whether the director ever puts the kibosh on the nitrous parties. "He works both sides of the fence," he explains. "Most of the time, he's cool, but just like women, he wakes up every once in a while with PMS." (At a later show, on a blisteringly hot day in Baltimore, Jimmy cooled down by emptying the contents of two nitrous balloons directly onto his face. Then he hoisted a clump of black balloons into the air and barked his sales pitch: "Once you go black, you never go back!")
All of the nitrous dealers are civil, with the exception of the older man, who warns against taking photographs. Beef, a husky Italian-American from South Philly, has a tongue ring, a lazy layer of facial scruff, and a pair of young daughters at home. Twenty-four years old, Beef says he operates independently with a couple of associates, who together pocket about $50,000 a weekend in the summertime. He offers a handshake and a free balloon. It produces a pleasant sensation from head to toe.
So where did the term "Nitrous Mafia" come from, anyway?
"I think we use it as a negative connotation, like 'death tax' instead of 'estate tax,' " offers Noah Wilderman, who has followed Phish since the early 1990s and is making a documentary about them. "It's definitely kids and bosses, but does that make it a mafia?" His most vivid memory of the gas dealers was when Trey Anastasio played at Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which attracted an upscale crowd. "I'll always remember a hundred people in ties and dress shirts passing out on the grass," he says.
"They say we're all city guys and not hippie guys," says Beef. "That's why they made the Mafia up. Because of guys like us, who don't blend in, wearing Jordan pants and $200 Jordan sneakers. These kids come out like bobos in their hippie T-shirts."
Beef denies that nitrous leads to problems, and with a jovial, appealing demeanor, he seems anything but dangerous. He says he's a smarter than most dealers. "Some people are ignorant and blast it all night," he says. "But I try to be respectful." Asked about the violence, he says, "Yeah, but you can get in fights over anything. You can fight over a cigarette."
A few fans admit that some of the dealers are cool—and that much of the violence isn't caused by them, but by stoners desperate for free gas. "These kids turn into hippie crackheads and hover over that fucking tank and have no money left," says Sean. "And they beg and beg, and the next thing you know, you got one hippie yelling at a bunch of mob kids, and that's when fist fights break out."
Elliott Dunwoody, the tour manager for the band Bassnectar, once observed one needy fan putting his lips directly to the nozzle of a tank: "He actually tried to sip up the bit of nitrous that gets released after they pull the balloon off," he says. "The kids beat him up."
But other fans say that nitrous enhances the concert experience and appreciate the gas mob. "I love the balloons," says Bobby Goodlife, a nightlife promoter from Baltimore. "They're just fun."
When the Wilco show empties from the Electric Factory, the Philadelphia crew springs to action. Three of the men squat down like catchers, each straddling a tank between their thighs, and begin inflating balloons at a rapid clip. With a half-filled balloon dangling from his mouth and sweat dripping from his brow, Beef is particularly dexterous, able to hold five inflated balloons in his left hand, fill another in his right, and still manage to collect money from customers. The three other men serve as lookouts and runners. The older guy holds a clump of 10 purple balloons high in the air like a cotton candy vendor. "Ice-cold fatties, right off the tank!" he yells to concertgoers, who have now flooded the sidewalk, eager for a slurp of the gas. A bald dealer named Carlo, clad in an '80s-style nylon Phillies jacket, sells five fatties to a man in a limousine rolling by. He offers another fan an entire tank—"wholesale," he says—for $200. Then he gives a free balloon to a legless, homeless man parked in a wheelchair nearby.
A huffer named Stuart Woolf, who is resting against a chain-link fence, balloon in hand, is asked why he appreciates the gas business. "Because nitrous is the best orgasm I've ever had in my life," he says.
There are signs that music fans are fighting back in larger numbers to keep the gas out of the scene. After the death at the Vibes, a vigilante group called the Wrecking Crew, born out of the Grateful Dead Family—fans who followed the band, year after year—retaliated by smashing up a truck with Pennsylvania tags and leading chants of "NO NITROUS!" to a chorus of festivalgoers. "The guy who owned the truck was dealing nitrous all weekend and had been followed back to his truck by the Family," says a fan.
A video currently circulating on YouTube depicts two Wrecking Crew soldiers taunting the Nitrous Mafia while dancing around a stolen tank wrapped in a sign reading "100% $cum." "Hey, Nitrous Mafia motherfuckers! We stole your goddamned tank!" yells a man, face concealed by sunglasses and a towel, middle fingers raised. Midway through the clip, a soiled pair of women's panties is thrown at the canister.
Security guards, too, say they've had enough, claiming they're tired of being accused of being in on the take. Inside a small Irish pub in Worcester, Massachusetts, Rodriguez, the director of Marker Security, which has staffed the Vibes each year since the inaugural Bridgeport festival in 2000, tries to explain the difficulties of controlling the tank-toting dealers at an event as large as the Vibes, which last year attracted 30,000 fans. "If two of my guards try to walk over and take their tank, they're not walking back," says Rodriguez, 36 years old, cupping a bottle of Bud Light between his oversize hands. His six-foot-two, 300-pound frame hulks over the table. "My guards aren't about to take their lives in their own hands and get beat up," he says. "Not for $8 an hour."
The nitrous dealers have different strategies for dealing with security, says Sean. "At Vibes, we brought in 30 tanks and planned to lose about five to security," he says. "At All Good, different crews would take a turn throwing a tank at the fuckin' security. We'd hide the rest, and they'd drive away with one tank, all proud. Then they'd come back an hour later and we'd give 'em another one. Usually we'd give 'em a half-empty or almost-empty one. As long as you keep giving them a bust once in a while, it looked like the security was working. They thought they were hurting us a lot more than they were."
"The cops have no idea how far most of these kids are willing to go," he adds.
Musicians are also starting to speak out. "It's not something that needs to be a part of the music," says Christopher Robin, of the Christopher Robin Band. "Emotionally, I don't want to see it. There's nothing good about it. There are no success stories."
"If someone wants to go hit a whippet in their hotel room, that's great," says Richards of Umphrey's McGee. "But not to the point where it gets to be a very controlled monopoly on the tour. They're just simply out there to make as much money as they possibly can and leave in their wake the destruction—whether it's the garbage or the people they might have beaten up along the way."
Rodriguez swears to me that this year's Vibes will be different. He has a message for the nitrous dealers: "Enough is enough. We're no longer going to sit here and have you ruin our festivals. We're gonna take it back. If you're going to come and try and ruin our scene, we're going to shut you down."
But, minutes later, he pauses, thinking about his decade-long history fighting the balloon men. "I don't think we'll ever wipe it out," he concedes. "It's inevitable. We can only hope to control it."
(The Village Voice, Music, http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-07-06/music/hippie-crack-nitrous-mafia-boston/)
(July 2010, John H. Tucker)
Summer concert season means jamming to the familiar hiss of 'hippie crack'...
A hiss pierces the air as music fans wait in line outside the Brooklyn Bowl in Williamsburg. Across the street from the venue, a man stoops over his tank, inflating balloons and passing them to his associates by the fistful. He shuts off the valve and surveys the scene. Deciding his handlers are moving too slowly, he picks up the tank and slams it against the corner of the warehouse, sending a shrieking echo into the night. "I don't see you working fast enough!" he yells. Then he unleashes an exploding stream of gas into the air, rapidly firing left and right and cackling devilishly like a kid with a water pistol.
The balloon man, who asks not to be named, has a shaved head and a New England accent. He's the leader of the Boston ring of the "Nitrous Mafia"—a term invented by critics of his business. The Disco Biscuits performance is about to start. And the fans in line are high from his laughing gas.
"Fatty whippets!" yell the balloon man's eight or nine dealers, holding balloon clusters high in the air. Some of the dealers are locals, contracted out for the night, while the rest hail from Massachusetts and Rhode Island. When a police car is seen from a distance, a trio of spotters yells, "Six-Up"—a warning to keep cool. Selling nitrous oxide for the purpose of getting high is illegal, but the club's bouncers don't seem to mind the huffing. "The security here is cool," says a dealer named Chrystal, a single mother who is dating the Boston capo, whom we'll call Dmitri.
Throughout the year, the Nitrous Mafia travels from state to state, selling balloons at concert sites. The scene in Williamsburg is only a small preview of what happens in summer, when the outdoor festival season kicks into gear. During these campground events, which last two to four days, the Mafia, which is divided into two rings, based in Boston and Philadelphia, can burn through hundreds of nitrous tanks. With the ability to fill up to 350 balloons per tank, which they sell for $5 and $10, they can bank more than $300,000 per festival, minus expenses. Year after year, security guards at these events attempt to crack down on the illicit business, but, in most cases, they're outmatched by a phalanx of menacing gas dealers who have little regard for unarmed concert personnel.
And for some musicians and their fans, the illicit trade is a bummer. "It has a negative impact on the entire scene," says Don Richards, the tour manager for Umphrey's McGee, ranked the No. 4 jam band in a recent Rolling Stone poll. "It's a very controlling group, to the point where I've seen people get beat up."
"It's something that should be left to the dentist's office," says Josh Clark, the lead vocalist for the San Francisco–based jam band Tea Leaf Green.
But Dmitri, who has been in and out of jail on multiple occasions, defends the operation. "You don't want it, don't buy it," he says, taking a break from his balloon hustle. "We're not forcing you to do anything. You can keep walking." He lives in Rhode Island, but he and his associates will crash at his New York apartment tonight. Business has been slow, he says, and each worker will probably clear only $300 for this show. But he hopes things will pick up during the summer. When asked, he denies his crew is an organized crime ring. "There is no Nitrous Mafia," he says.
It is inevitable. At any East Coast summer music festival, from Maine to Miami Beach, the opening chords eventually give way to the whistling of tanks. In parking lots and alleyways. In mountain crevasses and open fields. At popular campsite events like All Good, in Masontown, West Virginia; Bonnaroo, in Manchester, Tennessee; and Gathering of the Vibes, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The Nitrous Mafia is there.
"You hear the hiss of that tank, and you know you're approaching a shady corner," says Clark, of Tea Leaf Green. "When I'm near it, I'm always afraid I'll wind up in some blurb for a music magazine."
Nitrous is called "hippie crack" because of its addictive qualities. Every morning, the festival campgrounds are riddled with balloons, "like bullet shells on a battlefield," says a fan. Unlike traditional drugs, which have long-lasting effects and can carry a fan through a concert, the high from N20 is cheap and quick. After that, it's often back to the end of the tank line for another round. "It's an instant rush of pure euphoria, but it only lasts for 30 seconds or a minute, and then you want it back," says Justin Heller, a fan who owns his own biodiesel company. He no longer does balloons, but remembers the days of buying 15 in a row. "You don't think about your money—you're just like, 'I want that again, I want that again, I want that again.' "
But some jam-band fans complain that the nitrous racket is harshing their idyllic pursuit, recalling a time, they say, when laughing gas was a part of the hippie ethos.
"It's a sore on the scene," says Kevin Calabro, a Brooklyn-based publicist for jam bands. "It's been taken over by dirtbags and Mafia punks. It used to be, in the old Dead days, that some hippies got their hands on a tank, and it was a mellow and loose kind of thing. Now it's become some dirty-ass shit that's too easy to abuse."
"These people are evil," says Don Bryant, a retired Army captain and emergency medical technician, who also vends T-shirts at shows. During a recent Bonnaroo festival, he says, "One guy with a $5 balloon of nitrous came crashing through my booth, being chased by a guy with a knife. He almost took out my daughter, who was a little baby."
Scott Percival, a Boston police officer who serves as a security guard for the Gathering of the Vibes, says he was once offered $10,000 by a dealer to look the other way, and recalls stumbling onto one beaten-up and unconscious seller lying in the parking lot, pockets empty. "He was selling nitrous, and the other guys came in and took him out. It happens all the time," he says. "It's a big-time problem," echoes Dennis O'Connor, a Hartford police officer who confiscated 25 tanks outside a Phish show last year.
Forced to play a four-day game of Whac-a-Mole, the guards at festivals move in on one dealer with a tank, and another pops up on the other side of the park. "It's frighteningly organized," says Richards, of Umphrey's McGee. "They know how to hide and get out of a scene very quickly. I've witnessed them set up for 10 minutes and make thousands of dollars selling balloons. And as soon as security and police converge on a location, they're gone. They disappear. They think things out very clearly about how they're going to escape certain situations."
For concertgoers, the most dangerous risk of nitrous is the potential for users to pass out and hit the pavement. "I've watched so many young people crack their heads and faces open that I have personally stopped providing emergency first aid," says Bryant, the EMT. "People will crack themselves open. I've seen them fall and bust out all their teeth. I've seen them fall and hit glass.
They fall like flies all over the place. It's a sad thing." Pointing to a scar on his chin, one fan elaborates on a recent nitrous experience in Pittsburgh: "My last thoughts were, 'I need to sit down right now,' and the next thing I know, I wake up in a pool of blood with five people surrounding me."
Last year, a festivalgoer turned up dead at Gathering of the Vibes. Within days, the jam-band blogosphere lit up, hurling accusations at the Nitrous Mafia, with claims that the victim was beaten with a tank, sprayed with gas, and burned alive. Weeks later, a toxicology report ruled that he died from a simple drug overdose, but the episode was still a black eye for festival promoter Ken Hays, who came under fire from Bridgeport authorities for failure to control the scene. Despite confiscating about 100 tanks, the security guards at Vibes proved no match for the gas mob.
"We were overrun," admits a security executive. "We weren't counting on the amount of nitrous they would bring in." Kevin O'Brien, the marketing director of last year's Vibes, says he was offered a bribe of thousands of dollars by a nitrous dealer named "Crispy." The firm Security Operations Consultants, one of five security companies that worked the festival, was the subject of an FBI investigation for allegedly failing to turn over tanks and drugs taken from concertgoers to the police.
Despite the scandal, Hays eventually won his months-long battle to bring his festival, born out of Jerry Garcia's death, back to Bridgeport. (The event is scheduled to run July 29 to August 1.) He has instituted a zero-tolerance balloon ban this year and is working with the Bridgeport police force and City Council to make the possession of nitrous oxide illegal in Bridgeport's public parks. He says he hopes legislation will be enacted before the festival, though the parks commissioner isn't sure that it can be enforced.
The guards aren't sure, either. "People just don't know what's going on," says Marshall Rodriguez, the owner of the security firm in charge of the backstage area of Vibes. (Indeed, two cops interviewed by the Voice referred to the gas as "helium.") A few years ago, Rodriguez almost shut down his business after one of his guards was pistol-whipped and another threatened at knifepoint by nitrous dealers at a festival in West Virginia. "You got a group of guys who are coming in . . . [making] money they're willing to go to great lengths to protect, even if it means hurting somebody, even if it means hurting security," he said. "It's just starting to get out of control."
Inside a dimly lit roadhouse in Nowheresville, Massachusetts, "Sean" has agreed to talk about his time as a member of the Nitrous Mafia, provided his real name isn't used and the venue isn't named. Twenty-four years old, Sean sips a bottle of lager and speaks in a raspy whisper. His dreadlocked hair spills over his Grateful Dead visor and down his back, and a green bandanna hangs loosely from his neck. In a few minutes, he will take the stage as a guitarist for one of the bands playing tonight. A self-described hippie, he was considered a valuable member of the Mafia because he blended in at festivals.
Sean explains that the Boston ring of the Nitrous Mafia is made up of about 16 members split into two units, with the entire operation run by the Rhode Island kingpin, Dmitri—the guy with the New England accent slamming the tank against the wall in Williamsburg. With the help of false paperwork, gang members fill up tanks of various sizes at a local nitrous shop, which is a kitchen-supply store called New England Fountain, located in Burlington, Massachusetts. (The store's owner, Paul Abramo, says he's aware that some of his customers might be illegal dealers, but it's impossible to regulate: "We try to make sure they're a business, but beyond that, it's really out of our control.")
During festival season, gang members are able to fill 40 nitrous tanks at a time for $75 each, says Sean. During his employment, the two Boston crews would duel each other every night to see who could make more money. "It was almost like a game to us," he says. Members of each unit split 30 percent of the profits, while the remaining 70 percent was funneled back to their bosses.
The Philadelphia ring is larger and split up into several sub-crews who know each other but operate independently, says Sean. "The Philly guys are more reckless," he says, and more prone to violence and intimidation. "They operate without a code of honor. They were the first kids I saw bringing guns to the lots and putting fuckin' shit to people's heads." The Philadelphia don, who owns his own nitrous supply store and has several workers underneath him, is less apt to show up at festivals himself, says Sean. "He's a fucking nut job," he adds, noting that even Dmitri is deferential to him.
Sean, who admits that he has been in and out of jail for drug charges, was recruited into the Mafia last year during a time when he had no money and no food and was struggling to see his favorite bands. During All Good, a mob acquaintance offered to pay him to go on balloon runs. "Next thing I know, I made $60 in 40 minutes," Sean recalls. "It was big money. Eventually, I started making $900 a weekend." He was employed for a four-month period, during which time he spent nearly every day on the road with his colleagues, living in hotels and U-Haul vans. He fell in love with the lifestyle because of the instant respect that came with being a balloon seller. Girls would remove their tops in front of him just for a huff. "It worked all the fuckin' time," he says. Fans would drop $200 in three hours at his tank.
As a full-time Mafia member, Sean was known for his crafty methods of sneaking tanks past security guards. "I liked to store them inside box springs," he says. "We'd strip out the bottom and stash six cans inside. Then we'd lay it back down, put a mattress and blanket on it and make the bed. Security would open the back of the U-Haul, see a made bed, close the door, and let us ride right on through." On other occasions, he'd rip out the floor panels of vans and stash the tanks, which were always spray-painted black, in the undercarriage. "We'd laugh our way through every check point with three fuckin' tanks underneath the car," he says. A colleague of his—a woman with a young child—would often traffic tanks hidden under blankets in her baby stroller.
During festival season, the Boston and Philadelphia crews band together, operating in higher numbers, assisted by a recruited class of lower-level minions who aren't card-carrying members of the Nitrous Mafia but are eager to make a summer buck. They're often ex-cons—"crack dealers and dirtbag kids straight outta jail," says Sean—who like the idea of selling balloons to rich kids while inhaling all the nitrous balloons they want for free. The full-time workers handle the money and oversee the stash houses, while the younger kids serve as lookouts and runners, communicating with one another with verbal signs and cell phone texts. "It's usually six guys to a tank," explains Sean. "One guy strappin', one guy fillin', one guy takin' money, then usually three lookouts spread out in a triangle about 20 feet in each direction watching for security."
After leaving on bad terms—he won't go into detail—Sean says he wishes he had never gotten caught up with the mob. "I realize the demons associated with it," he says. "They're really ruining the hippie scene." Then he leaves the table, grabs his guitar, and takes the stage, launching into the opening stanza of the blues.
Nitrous oxide has been around as long as the jam bands themselves. There is one brief scene in The Grateful Dead Movie, a documentary about a series of San Francisco shows in 1974, in which nitrous is consumed with an octopus-like hose. "It was easy to come by, and part of the party," says songwriter and producer David Gans, a collaborator of Jerry Garcia's. During the 1970s, the gas was sometimes supplied at recording studios. By the mid-'80s, the tanks began appearing on "Shakedown Street," the name for the public marketplace that Dead Heads ginned up at concert venues to finance their continuous touring. By the end of the decade, nitrous was standard fare, supplied primarily by out-of-town dentists.
But many Dead Heads were turned off by the tanks from the onset and began referring to the dealers as "tour rats" who made money off the mother ship. "They saw the nitrous vendors as people from outside of the subculture sucking profits out of the scene," says sociologist Rebecca Adams, a professor and associate provost at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. "They would sell the nitrous and then disappear, without spending money on tour. They were profiteers, or what Dead Heads called 'corporate vendors.' " Garcia was aware of the problem, says Gans, "but he was pathologically unable to take control and responsibility."
At the turn of the century, following the death of Garcia and the expansion of jam-band culture, Shakedown Streets along the East Coast began attracting nitrous dealers in greater numbers, along with people who looked less like Phish fans. "I began noticing that all the people selling balloons weren't nice hippie kids trying to go from show to show," says fan Justin Heller. "It became clear that they were a bunch of thugs trying to make money."
"They're sketchy," says one fan. "They're shit," says another. One fan cuts right to the point: "These guys don't even know who Jerry Garcia is, and they never will." Other vendors began complaining that nitrous sales drove down their T-shirt and jewelry businesses. "Nitrous straight robs the pockets of the other workers," says Sean, the ex-member of the Nitrous Mafia. "Everybody's fuckin' broke 'cause they dropped every dollar they had on nitrous."
This new class of gas dealers seemed to come almost exclusively from Philadelphia, where nitrous was easy to purchase. By 2003, the gas business had outgrown Shakedown Street and had crept onto street corners. Outside some concerts, tanks were stationed several feet apart from each other. Eventually, turf wars started breaking out, leading to intimidation and violence. Stronger nitrous dealers would ask lower-level merchants to hand over their tanks—or risk the consequences.
"If you start working Shakedown next to a bunch of the mob kids, and you try running your own tank there, you're gonna get that tank taken from you and it's gonna become theirs, unless you're paying them off," says Sean. "They do not let you work around them without being one of them. And that's where the Mafia aspect really came around."
One fan says he was beaten up two years ago at Jones Beach because a dealer thought he stole a balloon. Last year at Vibes (where a portion of the park has been dubbed "Nitrous Alley"), a fan says he saw a dealer smash his tank on a man's head. At a Phish show last year in Portland, Maine, a fan watched a parking attendant get pummeled. Knives and bats were sneaked into lots. "I straight-up saw a Nitrous Mafia guy hit a cop's face in with a tank," says a man who recently attended All Good, a mountainous festival venue where gas is inhaled inside a deep gorge called "Wookie Nitrous Cave." "Nobody fucks with those fuckers," says a tattoo artist who goes by the name PeaT.
Clark, of Tea Leaf Green, doesn't get why his fans are drawn to the stuff: "There are certain drugs that enhance the concert experience—a little doobie here, or some mushrooms there," he says. "But I don't see how nitrous enhances the concert experience. With other drugs, you can dance. With nitrous, you slump onto a car and disappear until it's time for the next balloon. They don't call it 'hippie crack' for nothing."
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency doesn't consider nitrous a controlled substance and doesn't regulate it. Instead, it's monitored by the Food and Drug Administration as a food-grade propellant, medical-grade gas, and prescription drug. It's legal to own it, but, like other inhalants, it's prohibited by the FDA to purchase and sell for the purposes of getting high. Each state has its own laws against it, and most treat the illicit sale of nitrous as a misdemeanor, with penalties ranging from small fines to a few months in prison. In what was likely the most significant federal crackdown on the gas, defendants from Philadelphia and New Jersey were charged with unlawful distribution of nitrous to an undercover police officer in the parking lot outside a Dave Matthews Band show at Washington, D.C.'s Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in 2001. At an appeal hearing, a District Court judge ruled that the dealers' attempt to sell nitrous without a prescription was, in essence, a misbranding crime, in violation of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and the defendants' cases were sent back down to lower courts.
Some environmentalists complain that nitrous is a greenhouse gas. Some music fans say the hiss of the gas keeps them up at night. Still others kvetch that the tank lines clog up the campgrounds, and that dealers use random tents as hiding places. One fan says he was jolted from his sleep when a tank was slipped under his tent and slammed into his head. Another said she had her tires slashed after disobeying orders not to move her car.
"They have a total disregard for anyone's well-being but their own," says Rodriguez, the security executive. "They're only there for one reason: getting that money. And they get it whatever the cost."
"Mad adrenaline, mad money, mad pussy," says a Philadelphia nitrous dealer named Beef, explaining why he got into the business. He's standing outside the Electric Factory, in the club-cluttered Northern Liberties section of the city, near the end of a Wilco show on a Saturday night. Beef is with five of his gang mates; together, they have three watermelon-size tanks stored in Nike gym bags, with reserves stowed inside the trunks of their cars. One of the dealers, an older man who looks to be in his fifties, sits in an illegally parked SUV—a hiding place for tanks in case cops come.
A meter-reader approaches—a black woman, who notices the tanks. Immediately, a tall dealer named Jimmy, who wears a baggy gray sweatsuit and looks like Shaggy from Scooby Doo, diverts her attention. "Damn, what's a fine-lookin' girl like you doing as a parking lady?" he asks, approaching her. She smiles, charmed, and leans against the wall next to him. "I just gave out my last ticket," she says, letting the gang off the hook. Later, Jimmy notices an Electric Factory security director pulling into the parking lot. He is asked whether the director ever puts the kibosh on the nitrous parties. "He works both sides of the fence," he explains. "Most of the time, he's cool, but just like women, he wakes up every once in a while with PMS." (At a later show, on a blisteringly hot day in Baltimore, Jimmy cooled down by emptying the contents of two nitrous balloons directly onto his face. Then he hoisted a clump of black balloons into the air and barked his sales pitch: "Once you go black, you never go back!")
All of the nitrous dealers are civil, with the exception of the older man, who warns against taking photographs. Beef, a husky Italian-American from South Philly, has a tongue ring, a lazy layer of facial scruff, and a pair of young daughters at home. Twenty-four years old, Beef says he operates independently with a couple of associates, who together pocket about $50,000 a weekend in the summertime. He offers a handshake and a free balloon. It produces a pleasant sensation from head to toe.
So where did the term "Nitrous Mafia" come from, anyway?
"I think we use it as a negative connotation, like 'death tax' instead of 'estate tax,' " offers Noah Wilderman, who has followed Phish since the early 1990s and is making a documentary about them. "It's definitely kids and bosses, but does that make it a mafia?" His most vivid memory of the gas dealers was when Trey Anastasio played at Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which attracted an upscale crowd. "I'll always remember a hundred people in ties and dress shirts passing out on the grass," he says.
"They say we're all city guys and not hippie guys," says Beef. "That's why they made the Mafia up. Because of guys like us, who don't blend in, wearing Jordan pants and $200 Jordan sneakers. These kids come out like bobos in their hippie T-shirts."
Beef denies that nitrous leads to problems, and with a jovial, appealing demeanor, he seems anything but dangerous. He says he's a smarter than most dealers. "Some people are ignorant and blast it all night," he says. "But I try to be respectful." Asked about the violence, he says, "Yeah, but you can get in fights over anything. You can fight over a cigarette."
A few fans admit that some of the dealers are cool—and that much of the violence isn't caused by them, but by stoners desperate for free gas. "These kids turn into hippie crackheads and hover over that fucking tank and have no money left," says Sean. "And they beg and beg, and the next thing you know, you got one hippie yelling at a bunch of mob kids, and that's when fist fights break out."
Elliott Dunwoody, the tour manager for the band Bassnectar, once observed one needy fan putting his lips directly to the nozzle of a tank: "He actually tried to sip up the bit of nitrous that gets released after they pull the balloon off," he says. "The kids beat him up."
But other fans say that nitrous enhances the concert experience and appreciate the gas mob. "I love the balloons," says Bobby Goodlife, a nightlife promoter from Baltimore. "They're just fun."
When the Wilco show empties from the Electric Factory, the Philadelphia crew springs to action. Three of the men squat down like catchers, each straddling a tank between their thighs, and begin inflating balloons at a rapid clip. With a half-filled balloon dangling from his mouth and sweat dripping from his brow, Beef is particularly dexterous, able to hold five inflated balloons in his left hand, fill another in his right, and still manage to collect money from customers. The three other men serve as lookouts and runners. The older guy holds a clump of 10 purple balloons high in the air like a cotton candy vendor. "Ice-cold fatties, right off the tank!" he yells to concertgoers, who have now flooded the sidewalk, eager for a slurp of the gas. A bald dealer named Carlo, clad in an '80s-style nylon Phillies jacket, sells five fatties to a man in a limousine rolling by. He offers another fan an entire tank—"wholesale," he says—for $200. Then he gives a free balloon to a legless, homeless man parked in a wheelchair nearby.
A huffer named Stuart Woolf, who is resting against a chain-link fence, balloon in hand, is asked why he appreciates the gas business. "Because nitrous is the best orgasm I've ever had in my life," he says.
There are signs that music fans are fighting back in larger numbers to keep the gas out of the scene. After the death at the Vibes, a vigilante group called the Wrecking Crew, born out of the Grateful Dead Family—fans who followed the band, year after year—retaliated by smashing up a truck with Pennsylvania tags and leading chants of "NO NITROUS!" to a chorus of festivalgoers. "The guy who owned the truck was dealing nitrous all weekend and had been followed back to his truck by the Family," says a fan.
A video currently circulating on YouTube depicts two Wrecking Crew soldiers taunting the Nitrous Mafia while dancing around a stolen tank wrapped in a sign reading "100% $cum." "Hey, Nitrous Mafia motherfuckers! We stole your goddamned tank!" yells a man, face concealed by sunglasses and a towel, middle fingers raised. Midway through the clip, a soiled pair of women's panties is thrown at the canister.
Security guards, too, say they've had enough, claiming they're tired of being accused of being in on the take. Inside a small Irish pub in Worcester, Massachusetts, Rodriguez, the director of Marker Security, which has staffed the Vibes each year since the inaugural Bridgeport festival in 2000, tries to explain the difficulties of controlling the tank-toting dealers at an event as large as the Vibes, which last year attracted 30,000 fans. "If two of my guards try to walk over and take their tank, they're not walking back," says Rodriguez, 36 years old, cupping a bottle of Bud Light between his oversize hands. His six-foot-two, 300-pound frame hulks over the table. "My guards aren't about to take their lives in their own hands and get beat up," he says. "Not for $8 an hour."
The nitrous dealers have different strategies for dealing with security, says Sean. "At Vibes, we brought in 30 tanks and planned to lose about five to security," he says. "At All Good, different crews would take a turn throwing a tank at the fuckin' security. We'd hide the rest, and they'd drive away with one tank, all proud. Then they'd come back an hour later and we'd give 'em another one. Usually we'd give 'em a half-empty or almost-empty one. As long as you keep giving them a bust once in a while, it looked like the security was working. They thought they were hurting us a lot more than they were."
"The cops have no idea how far most of these kids are willing to go," he adds.
Musicians are also starting to speak out. "It's not something that needs to be a part of the music," says Christopher Robin, of the Christopher Robin Band. "Emotionally, I don't want to see it. There's nothing good about it. There are no success stories."
"If someone wants to go hit a whippet in their hotel room, that's great," says Richards of Umphrey's McGee. "But not to the point where it gets to be a very controlled monopoly on the tour. They're just simply out there to make as much money as they possibly can and leave in their wake the destruction—whether it's the garbage or the people they might have beaten up along the way."
Rodriguez swears to me that this year's Vibes will be different. He has a message for the nitrous dealers: "Enough is enough. We're no longer going to sit here and have you ruin our festivals. We're gonna take it back. If you're going to come and try and ruin our scene, we're going to shut you down."
But, minutes later, he pauses, thinking about his decade-long history fighting the balloon men. "I don't think we'll ever wipe it out," he concedes. "It's inevitable. We can only hope to control it."
(The Village Voice, Music, http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-07-06/music/hippie-crack-nitrous-mafia-boston/)
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
SoundCloud Raining on Its Own Parade (New Copyright Practices Come Down Hard on the DJs...)
SoundCloud has provided a forum for artists to spread their work and sample the work of other artists, many of whom were discovered on SoundCloud before gaining any notoriety elsewhere. But all good things must come to an end...below is a short piece on SoundCloud's beginning attempts (this is from March 2011) to police the site by removing pieces which were either entirely or partially comprised of copyrighted material (which the individual(s) who uploaded to SoundCloud did not have, or claim to have, any rights to)...
(March 2011, Miles Raymer)
New copyright practices come down hard on the DJs who helped make it one of the most promising music-hosting services on the Web.
MySpace has long since yielded its position as America's dominant social-networking service to Facebook, but well after civilians stopped using it to stalk high school crushes, MySpace remained the preferred platform through which musicians provided free streams and downloads. Recently, though, MySpace has been shedding musicians in droves—and not just because it's infested with spambots, its audio player is creaky and crash prone, and a late 2010 redesign made its profile pages load even slower. Just as Facebook has lured away the general public by offering a cleaner, more efficient, and less sketchy experience, Bandcamp and SoundCloud have lured away musicians.
(March 2011, Miles Raymer)
New copyright practices come down hard on the DJs who helped make it one of the most promising music-hosting services on the Web.
MySpace has long since yielded its position as America's dominant social-networking service to Facebook, but well after civilians stopped using it to stalk high school crushes, MySpace remained the preferred platform through which musicians provided free streams and downloads. Recently, though, MySpace has been shedding musicians in droves—and not just because it's infested with spambots, its audio player is creaky and crash prone, and a late 2010 redesign made its profile pages load even slower. Just as Facebook has lured away the general public by offering a cleaner, more efficient, and less sketchy experience, Bandcamp and SoundCloud have lured away musicians.
SoundCloud is one of the most promising sites stealing MySpace's music market share. Founded in Berlin in 2007, it improves on MySpace's music service for both artists and fans. Its player runs smoothly and predictably, usually with little or no lag, and gives users the option to make any song downloadable for free—a feature MySpace discontinued years ago. SoundCloud displays a waveform for each track, and allows listeners to tag specific points on it—the transition to the bridge, say, or a DJ's segue between songs—with comments. The service is free for nonpremium users, who can keep up to two hours of material on their accounts.
Compared to MySpace, SoundCloud has a simple, transparent architecture—it's much easier to embed SoundCloud-supported songs on blogs and other social-networking services, and visitors are much more likely to be able to play them there. Programmers can easily incorporate SoundCloud's underlying code too: to name a few, the NanoStudio app lets users send recordings directly to their SoundCloud pages, the TuneCore app syncs with users' SoundCloud libraries to simplify digital distribution and sales, and the Hype Machine app tracks how many plays users' SoundCloud songs get via the popular music-blog aggregator. SoundCloud also has a no-frills social-networking aspect—aside from commenting on tracks, users can favorite songs, follow one another, send direct messages, and more.
SoundCloud conspicuously advocates for Creative Commons licensing, a progressive alternative to traditional copyright, by foregrounding it on its home page and pitching it to users as part of the sign-up process. And until recently the site has seemed to take a hands-off approach to the content it hosts, perhaps because it hasn't become a popular channel for pirates—SoundCloud assigns a separate player widget to each track, so people looking to share entire albums tend to prefer sites like RapidShare and Mediafire, which make such an operation considerably simpler and more anonymous. SoundCloud's apparent laissez-faire attitude, along with its affordable ways to share hour-plus tracks, has made it especially popular with DJs, who have so far been its most numerous and vocal users.
"I know DJs who play sets now completely comprised of stuff they find on SoundCloud because it's so underground," says DJ and Fool's Gold label cofounder Nick Catchdubs. "Like you'll find remixes that you've never heard before. You'll find artists that you've never heard before, before they even get to the point of being blogged or being Hype Machined."
But DJ dominance of SoundCloud may be coming to an end, for two reasons. First, in the past several months the site has taken off with artists working outside of dance music and hip-hop. SoundCloud broke the million-user mark in May 2010 and now claims more than two million; a SoundCloud link has become as de rigueur in rock bands' promo e-mails as a MySpace link once was. Second, and likely related to the site's rapid growth, SoundCloud recently started policing uploaded audio files for copyrighted material not owned by the uploader.
In December I started seeing complaints on Twitter and Facebook from DJs and producers using SoundCloud: they said that some of their work, specifically DJ mixes and remixes incorporating copyrighted material, were disappearing from the site, and that they were getting apparently automated messages from SoundCloud saying they'd violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 federal law governing intellectual property on the Internet. Most of the messages I heard about identified the rights holder as Universal Music Group.
According to Audible Magic, a Bay Area company whose website describes its business as "monetizing, protecting, measuring, and verifying content," SoundCloud began using a customized version of its software on November 1. Audible Magic maintains a database of copyrighted music and video on behalf of rights holders and offers services to social networks, ISPs, music-hosting sites, and other organizations to help them stay on the right side of the DMCA. Audible Magic CEO Vance Ikezoye says, "It's all determined by the copyright holder, how they want to set their business rules. We have a lot of artists who view, for example, peer-to-peer as being a promotional mechanism for them. So they might register their content with us because they want people to get access to it, and we register it with the business rule of 'allow for use anywhere.'"
Ikezoye portrays Audible Magic as basically agnostic about copyright—the company sees itself as a way to sort things out, whether that means straight-up busting pirates or just making sure bloggers don't get hassled for sharing tracks an artist has given away. Audible Magic's products identify audio tracks using a sonic fingerprint, similar to the way familiar consumer apps like Shazam and SoundHound work; like those apps it can ID songs from short samples, like the excerpts that commonly appear in DJ sets. (Audible Magic allows rights holders to clear their material for uses like remixing.) DJs are upset that SoundCloud's implementation of this service zaps entire hour-long mixes, even if they contain just a small segment of a single copyrighted track. Many view such mixes as transformative of their source material and thus protected under fair use. They feel betrayed by SoundCloud, given that DJs were the early adopters that helped the site reach critical mass.
"I never saw SoundCloud as a place to, you know, host somebody else's MP3s," says Wayne Marshall, a DJ, ethnomusicologist, and postdoctoral fellow at MIT who blogs at wayneandwax.com. "Everything that I came across there was transformed in some way, whether as a remix or in the context of a mix or what have you. So it seemed to me like they were doing a good job keeping it from becoming another Imeem, which ultimately got so hobbled with really flagrant file sharing that it just couldn't pay the bills. So I think that a lot of people were surprised that SoundCloud had kind of courted that community and then at the very moment that the service was taking off, you know, with a sort of broader audience, that it kind of turns around and goes back on what seems like had been the policy before that."
SoundCloud's decision to use Audible Magic points to a larger question: How big can a music-hosting service get while still supporting DJs and remixers? Is it possible for a site large enough to show up on the radar of the major labels to avoid accepting the majors' strict-constructionist views of copyright?
"Deejaying is essentially playing other people's music," says Catchdubs. "Most people kind of realize that it's 2011 and we know what the deal is with a DJ mix, especially when you're not putting it up for sale. You know, I think there is a bit of a disconnect between the socially accepted uses of copyright and sort of what is legally down there on paper and, you know, the decision-making process of major-label legal departments and the RIAA and shit like that."
Marshall says YouTube provides a clear precedent of a site getting big enough to provoke a copyright crackdown. He also points out that such crackdowns tend to interfere with the promotional power of user-generated content. "'You're a Jerk' by the New Boyz became a huge hit because hundreds of people uploaded videos of themselves dancing to it," he says. "But then as soon as they got signed and that song enters the official database, then all the videos get flagged and get muted or audio-swapped or taken down or whatever."
SoundCloud representatives declined to answer my questions for this column, instead directing me to a page on the SoundCloud blog that addresses the site's new "content identification system." That page points out that the system will allow users who upload content to SoundCloud to find out if their work is being distributed without permission by other users; it also reassures users that there's a "simple dispute process" to resolve cases where content is flagged in error. But the words "fair use" don't appear, except in an aggrieved comment left a month ago.
SoundCloud is at a crossroads here. Right now its practices appear to defer to rights holders, allowing labels and publishing companies to determine almost unilaterally what counts as infringement—a stance that puts an undue burden on uploaders whose employment of copyrighted material might meet the criteria for fair use. Were SoundCloud to take the nobler and more difficult path, it would devise a policy that could differentiate between DJs and remixers on one hand and pirates on the other. Of course, it's easier and cheaper for SoundCloud to just keep serving DMCA notices to its most passionate users—though taking that route could drive off enough of them to make it very expensive indeed.
"If it becomes too annoying," Marshall says, "people are going to pick up and move to the next thing. That's what I've been observing in all of these things. Either the platform completely disappears, or something easier with less hassle pops up."
Why has SoundCloud not been shut down by the RIAA for promoting piracy?
Soundcloud and piracy - there is an exception which has protected it up to this point. However what the future will hold for its users and what will be considered allowable downloadable content is unclear...
(May 2011, Hartley Brody)
When the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed in 1996, there was a provision inserted which is known as the "Safe Harbor" clause.
Legislators recognized that there are many large internet services that allow for the storage of user-uploaded content (YouTube, SoundCloud, MediaFire, etc.) and that these services would face an impossibly difficult game of cat-and-mouse if they would be liable for any infringing content that a user uploaded to their service. They'd essentially have to shut down to ensure nothing illegal was ever uploaded to their servers. This would stifle innovation on the internet and "chill" free speech.
The safe harbor clause addresses that by saying, "Look, we understand users might try to upload material that they don't have rights to, and it's not really fair to penalize you for the actions of your users, even though the infringing content is now sitting on your servers..."
The safe harbor clause proscribes a series of steps that services must follow in order to qualify for the safe harbor provision. As long as the service follows these steps, they're immune from any litigation due to any infringing content on their servers.
In a nutshell, the services must:
This places a strong incentive on the services to respond quickly to all take-down requests, otherwise they risk losing their "safe harbor" status and they suddenly become liable for all of the content on their servers.
From personal experience as a music blogger, SoundCloud is very proactive in responding to take-down requests, even to the point of taking things down that aren't actually infringing, just in case. It sucked for me as a user sometimes, but I know they were doing it to keep their "safe harbor" status and protect themselves from the RIAA.
They've even gone so far as to scan all newly uploaded tracks and look for waveform matches with millions of songs in a huge database of protected content. Now, if you try uploading a song that's too similar to an RIAA-protected one, SoundCloud might automatically reject the upload, without even receiving a take-down request. This has become a little controversial, since many legitimate remixes and samples are being blocked, but SoundCloud is doing it to make sure they never have to face the RIAA or any other mass-infringement lawsuit.
(http://www.quora.com/Hartley-Brody/answers/Intellectual-Property-Law)
(May 2011, Hartley Brody)
When the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed in 1996, there was a provision inserted which is known as the "Safe Harbor" clause.
Legislators recognized that there are many large internet services that allow for the storage of user-uploaded content (YouTube, SoundCloud, MediaFire, etc.) and that these services would face an impossibly difficult game of cat-and-mouse if they would be liable for any infringing content that a user uploaded to their service. They'd essentially have to shut down to ensure nothing illegal was ever uploaded to their servers. This would stifle innovation on the internet and "chill" free speech.
The safe harbor clause addresses that by saying, "Look, we understand users might try to upload material that they don't have rights to, and it's not really fair to penalize you for the actions of your users, even though the infringing content is now sitting on your servers..."
The safe harbor clause proscribes a series of steps that services must follow in order to qualify for the safe harbor provision. As long as the service follows these steps, they're immune from any litigation due to any infringing content on their servers.
In a nutshell, the services must:
- designate and publicize an agent to handle all DMCA take-down requests
- remove any infringing content (almost) immediately upon receiving a take-down request
- institute a "repeat infringer" policy to track and remove users who continually receive take-down requests
This places a strong incentive on the services to respond quickly to all take-down requests, otherwise they risk losing their "safe harbor" status and they suddenly become liable for all of the content on their servers.
From personal experience as a music blogger, SoundCloud is very proactive in responding to take-down requests, even to the point of taking things down that aren't actually infringing, just in case. It sucked for me as a user sometimes, but I know they were doing it to keep their "safe harbor" status and protect themselves from the RIAA.
They've even gone so far as to scan all newly uploaded tracks and look for waveform matches with millions of songs in a huge database of protected content. Now, if you try uploading a song that's too similar to an RIAA-protected one, SoundCloud might automatically reject the upload, without even receiving a take-down request. This has become a little controversial, since many legitimate remixes and samples are being blocked, but SoundCloud is doing it to make sure they never have to face the RIAA or any other mass-infringement lawsuit.
(http://www.quora.com/Hartley-Brody/answers/Intellectual-Property-Law)
Monday, April 23, 2012
Trial Delayed on Camp Zoe Case
(Jan. 2012, Marks Law Firm LLC (of St. Louis, MO) Click here to view the original source)
Federal officials conducted an investigation for four years, and claim to have purchased drugs at Camp Zoe more than 100 times. They insist that the landowner profited from the sales of cocaine, marijuana, LSD, psychedelic mushrooms, Ecstasy and opium.
The 44-year-old landowner was originally charged in June. He asked for the charges to be dismissed in November, but a judge denied his request. His trial is set to begin next month. However, the man's attorney has a scheduling conflict, and has asked that the trial date be moved. The judge has not yet responded to the request.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration and the Internal Revenue Service conducted the four-year long investigation.
Although federal authorities believe the man is guilty of the charges, they may have the story wrong. The landowner may not have been aware of illegal drug transactions on his property, and the man could be maintaining his innocence for a reason.
Anyone who is facing federal criminal charges would likely benefit from working with an experienced criminal defense attorney. An attorney acts as an advocate for those who are charged with crimes, and works to ensure that an individual's rights are protected.
(http://www.stlouisfederalcriminaldefenseblog.com/2012/01/st-louis-man-says-he-is-innocent-of-drug-crimes.shtml)
A St. Louis man is facing federal criminal charges for
allegedly owning and operating land that was used for drug transactions. The
44-year-old man originally purchased 330 acres of land to hold music festivals,
naming it Camp Zoe. Although a trial date has been set, the man argues that he
is innocent of any drug offenses.
Federal officials conducted an investigation for four years, and claim to have purchased drugs at Camp Zoe more than 100 times. They insist that the landowner profited from the sales of cocaine, marijuana, LSD, psychedelic mushrooms, Ecstasy and opium.
The 44-year-old landowner was originally charged in June. He asked for the charges to be dismissed in November, but a judge denied his request. His trial is set to begin next month. However, the man's attorney has a scheduling conflict, and has asked that the trial date be moved. The judge has not yet responded to the request.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration and the Internal Revenue Service conducted the four-year long investigation.
Although federal authorities believe the man is guilty of the charges, they may have the story wrong. The landowner may not have been aware of illegal drug transactions on his property, and the man could be maintaining his innocence for a reason.
Anyone who is facing federal criminal charges would likely benefit from working with an experienced criminal defense attorney. An attorney acts as an advocate for those who are charged with crimes, and works to ensure that an individual's rights are protected.
(http://www.stlouisfederalcriminaldefenseblog.com/2012/01/st-louis-man-says-he-is-innocent-of-drug-crimes.shtml)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)