Feature Stories
White Rhino, Black Market
By MALCOLM GAY
BY THE TIME I pulled in at the Super 8 in Moberly, Missouri, the parking lot was thick with muddy trucks. In fact, the young clerk told me, the motel was full—she’d just rented her last room to a lady with a sloth.
“It’s the auction,” the girl said, pointing me in the direction of the closest available bed—some 35 miles south. “We’ve got people in from all over.”
Four times a year, in nearby Macon, Lolli Bros. Livestock Market holds one of the country’s biggest exotic-animal auctions and taxidermy sales. When I arrived last spring, preteen girls roamed the halls with marmosets on their shoulders. Amish families looked sternly on as men in camouflage jackets vied for zebras and Bactrian camels. Nearby, a blond woman in a sweatshirt bottle-nursed a baby orangutan wearing a diaper, while a white buffalo calf wandered past a stuffed polar bear.
Read the rest of the story at The Atlantic.
Dark Past in Balkan War Intrudes on New Life
- Photo: David Perry/The Lexington Herald-Leader, via Associated Press
By MALCOLM GAY
STANTON, Ky. — Nearly two decades after fleeing her native Croatia, the squat, hardworking woman known as Issabell Basic lived a quiet life in this small town, firing up her Jeep Cherokee each day for the 25-minute commute to her job making Hot Pockets.
She doted on the dog she had bottle-fed as a puppy, was handy at sinking a fence post, and though neighbors never took to her stuffed grape leaves and cabbage, friends loved the cakes she baked each time a birthday rolled around.
Emphysema kept her close to the series of homes she shared with Steve Loman and his wife, Lucy, whom she called “Sis.” The Lomans, in turn, describe Ms. Basic, 51, as a “big-hearted” person — the kind who would not buy something for herself without first picking up a gift for a friend, but who was also so scarred by the Bosnian conflict that she could not watch war movies and had severed all ties with her native land.
But perhaps there was another reason for the break: the woman known here as Issabell is identified in court papers as Azra Basic, and prosecutors in Bosnia allege that in 1992 she was part of a vicious brigade of Croatian Army soldiers that tortured and killed ethnic Serbs at three detention camps in the early years of the Bosnian war.
Victims and witnesses from the camps, quoted in court documents, say that while wearing a Croatian uniform, twin knives strapped to her belt and a boot, Ms. Basic carved crosses into prisoners’ foreheads. They accuse her of slitting one man’s throat and forcing others to drink from the dead man’s wound.
Read the rest of the story at The New York Times.
More States Allowing Guns in Bars
- Josh Anderson for The New York Times
By MALCOLM GAY
NASHVILLE — Happy-hour beers were going for $5 at Past Perfect, a cavernous bar just off this city’s strip of honky-tonks and tourist shops when Adam Ringenberg walked in with a loaded 9-millimeter pistol in the front pocket of his gray slacks.
Mr. Ringenberg, a technology consultant, is one of the state’s nearly 300,000 handgun permit holders who have recently seen their rights greatly expanded by a new law — one of the nation’s first — that allows them to carry loaded firearms into bars and restaurants that serve alcohol.
“If someone’s sticking a gun in my face, I’m not relying on their charity to keep me alive,” said Mr. Ringenberg, 30, who said he carries the gun for personal protection when he is not at work.
Gun rights advocates like Mr. Ringenberg may applaud the new law, but many customers, waiters and restaurateurs here are dismayed by the decision.
“That’s not cool in my book,” Art Andersen, 44, said as he nursed a Coors Light at Sam’s Sports Bar and Grill near Vanderbilt University. “It opens the door to trouble. It’s giving you the right to be Wyatt Earp.”
Tennessee is one of four states, along with Arizona, Georgia and Virginia, that recently enacted laws explicitly allowing loaded guns in bars. (Eighteen other states allow weapons in restaurants that serve alcohol.) The new measures in Tennessee and the three other states come after two landmark Supreme Court rulings that citizens have an individual right — not just in connection with a well-regulated militia — to keep a loaded handgun for home defense.
Read the rest of the story at The New York Times,
Thieves Cart Off St. Louis Bricks
Dan Gill for The New York Times
By MALCOLM GAY
ST. LOUIS — By the time Raymond Feemster awoke to the pounding of firefighters at his door, flames were already licking his shotgun-style home. The vacant house next door, which neighbors said was frequented by squatters, had burst into flames and was now threatening to engulf houses on each side.
Mr. Feemster, who gets around on an electric scooter, had to be carried out of the burning building, but today he considers himself lucky that the damage was contained to just two rooms.
“My neighbor’s house was completely destroyed,” said Mr. Feemster, 58. “I guess it was one of the crackheads in that vacant house.”
Perhaps. But the blaze, one of 391 fires at vacant buildings in the city over the past two years, may have had a more sinister cause. Law enforcement officials, politicians and historic preservationists here have concluded that brick thieves are often to blame, deliberately torching buildings to quicken their harvest of St. Louis brick, prized by developers throughout the South for its distinctive character.
“The firemen come and hose them down and shoot all that mortar off with the high-pressure hose,” said Alderman Samuel Moore, whose predominantly black Fourth Ward has been hit particularly hard by brick thieves. When a thief goes to pick up the bricks after a fire, “They’re just laying there nice and clean.”
Read the rest of the story at The New York Times.
A Crisis in Amish Country
- Patrick Fallon for The New York TImes
By MALCOLM GAY
CURRYVILLE, Mo. — A troubled young man from this remote stretch of eastern Missouri, Chester Mast had traveled north in the summer of 2004 to stay with his extended family in Wisconsin. Mr. Mast, a member of a conservative Amish community here that eschews conveniences like electricity and telephones, was meant to apprentice with his uncle, a carpenter.
His uncle opened his home to the young man but, according to court documents, soon began having doubts about Mr. Mast. The uncle later told investigators that while traveling in Michigan he had observed his nephew, then 20, place his arm around his 13-year-old daughter. In the evenings back in Wisconsin, Mr. Mast and his cousins would open the windows and play cards in his bedroom. And it was there, investigators allege, that as the frogs croaked one summer night, the girl complained of a pain in her stomach.
“Chester convinced her that he could take her stomachache away,” James Small, a detective with the Waushara County Sheriff’s Department, reported in Wisconsin court filings. He asked her to lie on his stomach, the probable cause statement said. “She recalled being on top of him in his bedroom and that he ultimately penetrated her.”
These are but a few of the accusations that Mr. Mast, now 26, faces in a pair of sexual-assault cases that stretch between two states. The criminal charges, a rarity for a religious congregation that often resolves its disputes internally, offer an unusual glimpse into an Amish community in crisis. They have also laid bare the fault lines that divide this insular society that resides some 95 miles northwest of St. Louis.
Read the rest of the story at The New York Times.
Sanctuary in Custody Fight Over Elephant
- Josh Anderson for The New York Times
By MALCOLM GAY
HOHENWALD, Tenn. — They’re fighting like elephants.
A territorial feud that sounds like something out of the African savannah has erupted in rural Tennessee between Carol Buckley, one of the world’s leading authorities on elephant rehabilitation, and the sanctuary she co-founded 15 years ago.
This month, Ms. Buckley, 56, filed a lawsuit against the Elephant Sanctuary after its board fired her as president and chief executive, ejected her from her home on sanctuary grounds and barred her from visiting Tarra, the 36-year-old Asian elephant she raised from a calf.
The Elephant Sanctuary is the country’s first natural-habitat refuge for aging elephants — many bearing scars from lives spent living and performing in captivity — where they roam free, perhaps reclaiming part of their true elephant nature. It is a model for havens worldwide, and the dispute has rocked the normally tame world of animal conservation. Experts have written in support of Ms. Buckley, and some of the sanctuary’s roughly 85,000 members have stopped donating.
At the center of the dispute is the custody battle for Tarra, the elephant that served as inspiration for this vast landscape of gentle hills and fresh streams.
“They’ve taken everything: my dog, my bird, my cat, my home, my life’s work — my elephant,” said Ms. Buckley, who has moved to a house not far from the sanctuary. She added: “It’s not real. It can’t be real.”
Read the rest of the story at The New York Times.
A Design Challenge for St. Louis: Connecting the City With Its Symbol
- Illustration courtesy of Behnisch Architekten
By MALCOLM GAY
ST. LOUIS — Since its completion in 1965, the Gateway Arch, Eero Saarinen’s shimmering steel monument to westward expansion, has been an iconic point of pride for this city.
The 91-acre park that surrounds it? Not so much. Its snaking paths and undulating reflecting ponds have been dubbed an area of “splendid isolation” by critics, who say the park, along with the sunken Interstate that severs the city from the Mississippi River, has acted as a foot to the throat of recent efforts to revitalize the city’s struggling downtown.
Previous efforts to integrate the memorial have foundered on the enormousness of the infrastructural task. But that goal took a major step forward on Tuesday, when an international design competition unveiled plans that could reshape the Arch grounds.
Read the rest of the story at The New York Times.
Renegade Priest Leads a Split St. Louis Parish
- Dan Gill for The New York Times
By MALCOLM GAY
ST. LOUIS — Some say he is on a mission from God. Others say he is the devil. But no matter whom you ask in this city’s tight-knit community of Polish Catholics, the name of Marek Bozek is seldom met with a shrug.
To supporters he is a holy man who has risked his soul’s damnation to rescue St. Stanislaus Kostka church during a long-running dispute over financial control with the Archdiocese of St. Louis. To detractors he is a charlatan — a disgraced priest who has wrested command of the parish and ushered in a vision of Roman Catholicism so progressive as to be unrecognizable to the faithful.
But one thing is clear: Last Sunday, parishioners rejected a proposed settlement that would have ended a lawsuit brought by the archdiocese and returned them to the archbishop’s good graces. Instead, they opted to yoke their church’s fate to the portly priest with thinning hair and a fashionable patch of whiskers just beneath his lower lip.
“They give the church to the devil,” fumed Mary Bach, 75, in heavily accented English after casting her vote to accept the settlement. “People are blind. They don’t see what he’s doing. This is belief in Bozek, not in God.”
Read the rest of the story at The New York Times.
Synthetic Marijuana Spurs State Bans
- Dan Gill for The New York Times
By MALCOLM GAY
ST. LOUIS — Seated at a hookah lounge in the Tower Grove district, Albert Kuo trained his lighter above a marbleized glass pipe stuffed with synthetic marijuana. Inhaling deeply, Mr. Kuo, an art student at an area college, singed the pipe’s leafy contents, emitting a musky cloud of smoke into the afternoon light.
Mr. Kuo, 25, had gathered here with a small cohort of friends for what could be the last time they legally get high in Missouri on a substance known popularly as K2, a blend of herbs treated with synthetic marijuana.
“I know it’s not going to kill me,” said Mr. Kuo, who likened the drug’s effects to clove cigarettes. “It’s a waste of time, effort and money to ban something like this.”
On Tuesday, Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, signed a bill prohibiting possession of K2. Missouri is the nation’s eighth state this year to ban the substance, which has sent users to emergency rooms across the country complaining of everything from elevated heart rates and paranoia to vomiting and hallucinations.
Read the rest of the story at The New York Times.
The Boar War
- Kenneth Nanney
By MALCOLM GAY
THE EAST TEXAS SUN had passed its zenith by the time Buck’s yap turned insistent. The scent dog had tracked his quarry for several miles that morning without a sound, and his clipped bark now meant only one thing: he had cornered a wild hog in the vine-strewn thicket just behind the subdivision. The other tracking dogs dashed toward him, but Mike Bolen had his doubts: we’d been plying this 2,000-acre swath of land just southwest of Houston for seven hours, and so far we’d seen no sign of wild pigs.
But Buck’s yelp didn’t falter, and soon Bolen readied his “catch dog,” Clifford, a brawny American bulldog mix trained to pin a wild hog by latching on to its ear. We were fast approaching the other dogs when Bolen, hearing the besieged pig, unleashed Clifford and hissed, “Get ’im!”
A lifelong hunter, Bolen discovered the earthy pleasures of “hog doggin’” about 10 years ago. He’s since turned his passion into a bit of profit by contracting with Harris County to exterminate feral pigs in and around Houston. And though Bolen’s tally of several hundred hogs may sound impressive, it’s a small victory in a losing battle.
Read the rest of the story at The Atlantic.
Sidelined
- Photo: Virginia Lee Hunter / Layout: Kevin Goodbar
By MALCOLM GAY
And so the barbell takes on more weight.
Lying just beneath it, Muhammad Abdulqaadir grips the steel bar firmly in his calloused hands as his abdomen, a muscular landscape of hills and valleys, heaves beneath his sweat-stained T-shirt. Veins bulging and muscles taut, Abdulqaadir first engages his elbows, then his triceps, his deltoids and pecs. Raising the barbell’s 225-pound load, he breathes deeply as he lowers the bar to his chest, holds his breath on the ascent and expels a short, sharp hiss as he brings the weight to its zenith.
It’s 4 o’clock on a sweltering July afternoon, and Abdulqaadir is midway through the two-hour workout he performs each day at HammerBodies, an elite sports clinic in Maryland Heights. A two-time All-American running back, Abdulqaadir has already gone through a series of hip-opening exercises on the facility’s indoor track. He’s run innumerable 40-yard dashes, churning his feet hard against the synthetic track while propelling his knees skyward toward his chest. He’s lain prone across two BOSU domes while the clinic’s owner, known to all as Coach Hammer, laid 35-pound weights across the muscular plane of his back. He’s run backwards, forwards and sideways. He’s completed hundreds of weighted sit-ups and scores of pull-ups. And then there’s always the bench press …
“Ten! Eleven! Twelve!” Hammer barks, encouraging his charge as Abdulqaadir narrows his eyes under the barbell’s weight. “He’s never been like this before. He’s totally reinvented his body.”
When Abdulqaadir arrived at Hammer’s doorstep intent on bulking up for a shot at the National Football League, he was carrying a respectable 13 percent body fat. Today, he stands 5-foot-7, weighs a sculpted 203 pounds and harbors a mere 6 percent body fat. He’s recently run the 40-yard dash in 4.22 seconds. He can squat 615 pounds, and his vertical jump has reached a dizzying 40 inches.
“As far as his numbers go, they’re as good as anybody’s,” says Braden Jones, a tight end for the Minnesota Vikings who has often seen Abdulqaadir work out, but has never seen him play. “In the three-cone drill, his times are as good as any I’ve ever seen. If you stack him up against any back in the NFL, he’d compare favorably.”
Yet Abdulqaadir’s football career, which includes several 1,000-yard rushing seasons in college, has been marked by several mystifying rejections. He says that in 2002 Washington State University hastily rescinded an informal scholarship offer. During the 2004 draft, as many lesser talents happily entered the NFL, he was passed over by every team in the league. Adding insult to injury: Abdulqaadir was never even invited to a team’s training camp as a free agent.
Of course, it could be that in the calculus of an NFL offense, a 5-foot-7 back like Abdulqaadir simply never fit into a team’s offensive equation. But Abdulqaadir and his supporters chalk up the league’s rejection to a more nefarious cause: His father, a Sunni Muslim convert named Mujahid Abdulqaadir Menepta, was detained as a material witness after the 9/11 attacks for his alleged ties to Zacarias Moussaoui, once known as the “20th hijacker.”
Abdulqaadir’s father was never formally indicted, but his arrest warrant states that he was investigated for, among other things, “bombing conspiracy” and “seditious conspiracy to levy war against the United States.” He has also been linked, albeit tenuously, to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
With a family member like that, Abdulqaadir and others say, his lineage may have simply been too hot for the flag-waving NFL to handle.
Read the rest of the story at St. Louis Magazine.
Hometown Honor, Earned in Eye Pokes and Dropkicks
Virginia Lee Hunter for The New York Times
By MALCOLM GAY
ST. LOUIS — Even for the hardest of ring-hardened wrestling fans on hand here for the $2 beers and homegrown grappling action, Gary Jackson’s recent Saturday night victory was a particular outrage.
Mr. Jackson’s rivals had clawed his eyes. They had drubbed him from behind, hurled him on his back and gouged his face with the soles of their boots. All in a night’s work for a man like Mr. Jackson, until, that is, his opponents were disqualified for kicking the referee in the head.
Dressed in shiny yellow briefs and matching kneepads, Mr. Jackson, who wrestles under the name Gorgeous Gary, grabbed a beer from a nearby fan as he descended the ring to join his wrestling partner and demand a rematch. “We don’t want no win by no stinking disqualification,” Mr. Jackson yelled into a microphone after pouring the half-drunk beer over his head. “We want the 1-2-3!”
And so went another night at the South Broadway Athletic Club, where for more than a century wrestling fans have watched an evolving crew of local heroes slug it out in the beery St. Louis night.
Read the rest of the story and see the accompanying slideshow at The New York Times.
