Thomas Boker stalked a 30-year-old woman for blocks as she walked a familiar path to her apartment in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood.

He shadowed her as she headed to the Van Dyke housing projects. He stepped into the elevator she got on. When the doors opened on her floor, the woman stepped into the hallway and Boker grabbed her from behind.

He brandished a knife.

“I will kill you if you don’t stop screaming.”

Boker, according to news reports, pulled his victim into the stairwell and forced her to climb. When they reached a landing on the 14th floor, he raped her.

It was a crime that police claimed would be a lot harder to commit. A multi-million dollar surveillance camera system staffed by police officers is supposed to catch suspicious actions. But Boker’s rape highlights key shortcomings in the video network.

The hour-long nightmare in 2008 occurred in sight of Van Dyke’s surveillance cameras. Live footage streamed onto 30 television screens monitored by two police officers in a room within a block of the woman’s building.

But the officers on duty said they saw nothing.

It wasn’t the first crime Boker pulled off under the eyes of Van Dyke’s surveillance cameras. Over four weeks in early 2008, Boker committed three rapes and two robberies in New York City’s public housing buildings.  Each time, police in the surveillance room said they saw nothing.

That is not the only case where the city’s crime-fighting system failed to prevent assaults, and is a dramatic example in the dispute over whether video surveillance stops crime. Though police insist the cameras help solve cases, the overall track record is unclear. City officials, in turns, cite contradictory figures, fight requests to release crime figures and, after a public records request lasting more than a year, disclosed details that cast doubt about whether cameras have led to any significant effect at Brooklyn projects.

At the same time, some city officials are questioning whether the camera system- developed for more than $50 million, and requiring millions more in maintenance and operating expenses – are worth the cost. And New York is not alone: studies elsewhere have raised questions about how well video systems really work in fighting crime.

These video surveillance systems have proliferated throughout New York City’s public housing complexes during the past 14 years. Today, cameras are wired in about a quarter of the New York City Housing Authority’s 336 projects.  The equipment is a key part of a police program called Video Interactive Patrol Enhanced Response, or VIPER.

Police officials tout it for working on three levels: deterring criminals from striking, catching crimes underway, and providing key evidence to solve crimes.

In Boker’s case, VIPER struck out on all three.

After failing to see the crime when it was happening, the New York Police Department went back through the video tape. Police told reporters that Boker was actually captured on 30 minutes of video as he stalked, threatened and raped his 30-year-old victim. But video images were of poor quality. Pictures of him were indecipherable. The images were so bad that investigators needed a sketch artist to draw a composite of Boker’s face so they could circulate a picture of him to the public and help with his capture.

When Boker was finally arrested two weeks after the rape, it wasn’t video of the crime that did him in. It was old-fashioned evidence: his fingerprints in the stairwell and a victim’s identification of him in a line up.

That isn’t how the video system was supposed to work.

Since the first cameras were installed in New York public housing in 1997, officials from the police and housing agency have touted VIPER and its less-expensive sibling, Closed-Circuit Television, as successful in fighting crime.

VIPER is owned and run by the NYPD, and is wired in 15 city housing authority developments across the city, including Van Dyke, according to 2010 data from the housing agency. In addition, CCTV systems are run by the public housing agency. Its images are not live streamed. Instead, they are recorded, stored for seven days and retrieved when crimes are reported.

All these cameras are mounted in busy areas like lobbies, or in secluded places prone to crime, like elevators. They are also placed outside buildings to monitor courtyards, playgrounds and walkways. No cameras track residential floors because of tenant privacy concerns. Police officers monitor live images from VIPER cameras in surveillance rooms tucked away nearby in the projects.

Despite all the effort – the expense of developing the surveillance network and the staffing by police – a key question is whether the system has cut crime.

The police and housing authority have credited video system with rapid drops in lawlessness.  At Van Dyke, for instance, 117 major felonies were committed in 2000, according to NYPD data. VIPER cameras were installed in 2001. The next year, 78 major felonies were reported – a 33 percent drop. That far surpassed the reduction in crime elsewhere in the city, where the major crime rate fell just 17 percent.

But the story since then is far less clear. City officials give contradictory accounts about crime reduction, have fought inquiries to disclose more details, and, perhaps more troubling, under an open records request, were unable to show any overall significant success in Brooklyn.

STATISTICS THAT DON’T ADD UP AND NOT DISCLOSED

City agencies sometimes cite figures that are at odds. For instance, months after Boker’s series of rapes and assaults at Van Dyke in 2008, Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne told The New York Times that VIPER has been a success. He claimed that housing projects saw crime drop an average 35 percent a year after being installed. But just a year earlier, the city housing authority, in a published newsletter, told residents that the average drop in crime was 25 percent.

NYCHA spokeswoman Sheila Stainback couldn’t explain the contradictions.

“I have no idea” where the numbers came from, Stainback said. “I don’t know if those numbers were made spontaneously and could not be supported.”

Statistics are not an academic discussion. Police and housing officials cite successes regularly when they press the cash-strapped city to fund the massive video surveillance operation.

Meanwhile, city officials fought repeated requests by the CUNY news service to provide more details about crime in city housing projects, and in areas with VIPER cameras. For more than a year, both the housing authority and the police refused repeated requests to release crime statistics for public housing developments where video surveillance has been installed.

Housing authority spokesman Brent Grier told the CUNY news service at one point that the agency refused to disclose data because “there are certain statistics they wouldn’t want published.”

It was not the first time city officials refused to release detailed accounts about crime in housing projects. While the police publish weekly summary statistics about major crimes in each precinct across the city, they do not release separate figures for murders and other serious offenses in public housing projects.

The New York City Council criticized this lack of transparency in a 2004 investigative report about safety problems in housing projects. In that report, the City Council recommended police change, and have its housing bureau post summary figures for crime in housing projects.

“Members of the public, and NYCHA residents in particular, are entitled to know the incidence of crime in public housing developments,” the report stated.

Then-Queens councilman Eric Gioia, who chaired the Council committee that wrote the report, said “it’s incredibly disappointing” that the housing authority is not more transparent about crime rates.

Gioia supported spending for video surveillance systems while in office. But he believes housing authority needs to better assess the video system’s effectiveness. “What you find with public housing is it’s close your eyes, cross your fingers and hope for the best,” Gioia said. “You need to measure [the crime rate] before you can manage it.”

BROOKLYN HOUSING CRIME DROP NOT CLEAR

Perhaps no better place underscores the use of questionable crime statistics than Brooklyn.

Under a CUNY news service request citing state open records laws, the agency relented after more than a year and provided details about Brooklyn housing projects where cameras have been installed.  The data outlined major crimes that occurred in 21 housing developments during the last year before the cameras were operating, and the first full year after they were in use.

There were clear indications of success. Six developments saw crime drop more than 35 percent over two years. Eleven others also saw crime fall, but less than 35 percent.

But there were also places where crime did not drop. Four developments – Williams Plaza, Atlantic Terminal Site 4B, Gowanus and Independence Towers – saw crime rates actually increase after the cameras were installed.

All told, Brooklyn sites where camera systems were installed averaged a 3 percent increase in crime.

Housing authority representatives repeatedly refused to discuss the increase in crime in their Brooklyn projects.

Meanwhile, Stainback said the housing authority is reconsidering the impact of its 14-year-old video surveillance system to determine if the cameras are worth mounting maintenance costs.

While the city pays for buying and installing the surveillance systems, the cost of upkeep comes out of the housing authority’s budget.

“They are even more expensive to maintain,” Stainback said. “We’re re-evaluating the system.”

The agency was slated to spend $30.9 million in capital project funds on its video surveillance systems last fiscal year, more than it budgeted to spend on heating and plumbing in 2010. For that amount, the police could fund the salaries of 8,500 entry-level cops for a year.

And the cash put into maintaining the security cameras each year has soared more five times since 2006, when NYCHA spent just $4.8 million on maintenance.

NEW YORK NOT ALONE

But New York’s housing projects are not the only place where questions have been raised about whether cameras cut crime. Surveillance cameras have proliferated in cities around the world during the past two decades. Yet, studies of their effectiveness have drawn varied conclusions about whether they work.

A 2008 study by the University of California in Berkeley found no significant change in the number of homicides, rapes, assaults and robberies in the areas surrounding two-year-old surveillance cameras installed in San Francisco’s most dangerous neighborhood, according to The San Francisco Examiner.

Just last year, a New York University study of crime rates in two private Manhattan housing complexes, Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town, concluded that there was no evidence that video surveillance had an overall impact on serious crime.

In Great Britian, a 2005 report for the United Kingdom’s anti-terrorism department found just two of 13 security systems evaluated recorded a statistically significant reduction in crime.

Yet, the authors warned against drawing conclusions from those figures because not all serious crimes are reported. At the same time, it criticized government agencies for overstating the benefits of video surveillance and setting unrealistic expectations: “In short, [CCTV] was oversold – by successive governments – as the answer to crime problems.”

TENANTS WAIT FOR CAMERAS

The number of surveillance cameras installed in NYCHA housing properties more than doubled between 2005 and 2010, reaching 6,300. The cameras cost about $175,000 each. Funding has come primarily from the New York City Council, which has earmarked an increasingly large chunk of its discretionary dollars and federal funding to the security project since 2004.

City Council members said they are responding to residents’ demands for the cameras.

For instance, after years of lobbying from the Louis H. Pink Houses tenants association, elected officials, including Councilman Charles Barron, allocated $4.5 million to install CCTV systems there and in three other East New York developments. The funding was unveiled with great fanfare. Barron and housing chairman John B. Rhea held an enthusiastic press conference with other city officials in October 2009.

“Beginning tomorrow and after we install these cameras, you have much more sense of security in terms of how you feel, but also in reality,” Rhea told the crowd of residents. “The data has shown that crime goes down 25 percent – 25 percent – immediately after installation of cameras in housing developments.”

Then he added, for emphasis: “That is real.”

Though Brooklyn has the most public housing apartments in the city, surveillance cameras are far more common in Manhattan and Queens.

Agency figures show that, as of 2010, in Brooklyn, there was a camera for every 42 apartments. In Manhattan, there was one for every 32. And in Queens the rate was far higher — one for every 12 apartments.

And the demand is not receding. Roberto Napoleon, president of the Baruch Houses tenant association on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, wants the surveillance system. He said he as pressed elected officials for several years. “Nothing has happened,” he lamented. “According to public officials and housing, they don’t have enough money.”

He said the lack of cameras has led to crime. The area saw a rash of attacks against Asian women in the spring of 2010 — five assaults in one week. Most of the attacks occurred at the Baruch Houses. Napoleon believes that’s because of the absence of video cameras.

“They are afraid of the cameras,” he said of criminals. “Those people are afraid of those cameras because they know they’ll be able to identify them. They’ll think twice.”

At Brooklyn’s Van Dyke Houses, where Thomas Boker’s 2008 rape spree went undetected by the development’s VIPER system for weeks, current tenants association President Lisa Kenner conceded the system’s track record is spotty. Still, she thinks it’s worth the money.

“The cameras really help with the crime here, I believe,” she said. “I’m not saying people don’t get robbed. But I remember when it was shoot ‘em up bang bang. Those cameras brought crime down.”

Kenner said unlike the Boker assaults, there are also cases where cameras worked. She cited a robbery last year, when two men took jewelry from a groundskeeper. The crime was captured on video and the pair was later arrested, she said.

But she admitted there were other times the cameras did not live up to their promise. A senior resident has been robbed twice this year by people who followed her into the elevators. They had hats to hide their faces from surveillance video, and attacked her in an unmonitored hallway outside of her apartment door.

Kenner said the problem is not just the cameras, but shoddy housing maintenance that leave wide areas dangerous because of lights not working at night. “If a person gets robbed down by that walkway and the lights are out, if there’s people sitting in the [VIPER] surveillance room, how are they gonna see it?” she questioned.

A mirrored pink beauty salon, a tiki lounge, basketball courts and a movie theater. Nestled among trees more than 200 miles from New York City, the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center seems worlds away from Gotham’s public schools–yet most of the children in the classrooms at this New England boarding school hail from the five boroughs.

The controversial facility, known for punishing special needs children with electrical shocks, has been fighting to prevent New York from joining a growing list of states that have stopped government funds paying for students to go there.

The Massachusetts school relies heavily on getting students from New York. Millions of dollars, and perhaps even the school’s existence as it now stands, are at stake.

With lobbying in Albany, courtrooms battles and advertisements on the airwaves targeted at poorer minority communities, an investigation by the New York City News Service found the Massachusetts school spends hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to press its case in New York. Its efforts have ensured that New York state spends millions of dollars every year to send more than 100 students to the school, and so more keep coming.

And it has worked. At a time when New York state education officials are slashing programs because of budget shortfalls, New York City alone paid more than $30 million last year to the private Boston school. That covers about two-thirds of the facility’s annual operating budget, according to its most recent publicly available financial statements.

This despite the fact a top United Nations’ torture investigator last year decried the institution’s methods and called for further investigations. In February 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an inquiry into possible civil rights violations at the school.

The Judge Rotenberg Center is not the only special education school to fight hard to attract New York City special education students, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars that come with them. But it may, in spite of decades of controversy, be one of the most successful.

Electric shocks, Investigations, and Reticence from Other States

The story of the Rotenberg Center’s controversial methods has been told. But few have looked at how, in the face of continued opposition, the school has continued to flourish. To understand, it helps to look at its evolution.

Founded in the 1970s by a Harvard-trained psychologist named Doctor Matthew Israel, the Rotenberg Center was a small institution for the severely autistic and mentally disabled children and adults. In the nineties, the school began to broaden its scope, accepting increasing numbers of school-aged children with “emotional disturbances” ranging from Attention Deficit Disorder to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to issues stemming from abuse. Many of these students came from New York City, skipping from school to school. Many had spent time in psychiatric hospitals. Some came straight from Rikers Island jail.

Under federal law, all students are entitled to a “free and appropriate” education until they are 21 years old. But New York City and State do not have enough beds in residential schools–public or private–to provide that education. With its “near-zero rejection” policy, the Rotenberg Center welcomes the nation’s most difficult students.

In an interview last fall, Dr. Israel described the patterns at other schools that often turn students away. “You’ll find that when they get the really difficult students they expel them—and then what’s the poor parent to do?”

Many parents call Dr. Israel a miracle worker, and have approved for their children a broad range of experimental behavioral treatment meant to curb bad behavior–some were denied food or sprayed with ammonia, others submitted to a noise helmet or four-point restraint boards.

In 1989, Dr. Israel developed a proprietary device now infamous. Students approved for the device wear it throughout the day in a backpack or fanny pack. Wires snake out and attach to their legs and torso. When they engage in a prohibited activity, the press of a button by an administrator jolts them with a two-second electrical shock.

A Massachusetts probate court must approve the treatment before a student starts on the device, known at the Rotenberg Center as the Graduated Electronic Device. While the Rotenberg Center contends its unorthodox methods help severely autistic as well as emotionally and behaviorally troubled children, the results are not always good.

In 2006, the mother of a child named Antwone Nicholson, 17 at the time, sued the school, saying her son was subjected to inhumane treatment because electrical shocks were used far more often than she was led to believe. Nicholson was one of about 140 New York State students enrolled at the school.

The suit prompted an investigation by the New York State Department of Education. The experts sent to the school found a wide range of problems, including lack of oversight on how students are shocked, restrained and denied food as punishment. The use of electrical shocks “raises health and safety concerns,” according to the report. Withholding meals “may impose unnecessary risks affecting the normal growth and development” of students. Education at the school was deemed “insufficient.”

Nicholson’s case was settled last year, but the controversy continues. Massachusetts authorities have tried unsuccessfully to shut the school down several times in its 40-year history. A prosecutor recently settled charges against the school’s longtime director that workers, in a prank gone wrong, inappropriately restrained and shocked two students–one was shocked 77 times in a row.

The incident helped convince Washington, D.C., to no longer send students to the Rotenberg Center. Tameria Lewis, assistant superintendent of special education, described her inspection of the institution, “We continuously heard this howling and screaming through the facility of students reacting to pain from their punishments.”

“It was difficult to see what was happening at JRC under the guise of helping,” she said in an interview last fall.

Washington, D.C., was not alone. States including California, New Jersey, Illinois and Connecticut have virtually stopped sending any students to the school. Maine and Nevada have both banned methods that include electric shock therapy, stopping any public dollars from paying for students to go to the Rotenberg Center.

New York, too, has now banned the use of electric shocks on nearly all its students. But more than four years after the stinging New York State Department of Education investigation, New York remains the suburban Boston institution’s largest customer.

The Rotenberg Center once saw students from states around the country. Now, despite efforts by New York State to curb enrollment there, about 90 percent of its school-aged residents now come from New York. The majority is from New York City.

As of last spring, there were 144 school-aged children enrolled at the Rotenberg Center. New York City accounted for 118 of those children under 21.

In addition to students, there are about 80 disabled adults at the Rotenberg Center. Some had been at the facility as children, and remained there as they got older. And some of those are also from New York, and continue to get state aid to remain at the facility.

Records from the New York City Comptroller show the city alone paid nearly $32.5 million to the Rotenberg Center during fiscal year 2011. Of that, $16.8 million comes from the city Department of Education. The balance comes from the Administration for Children Services. Hundreds of thousands of dollars also come from other local school district funds to pay for students from elsewhere in New York State.

New York State continues to be a leading source of students and money for the Rotenberg Center despite several recent measures that attempt to address concerns about its operations.

Lobbying For Government-funded Students

The Rotenberg Center has fought hard to keep students coming. To combat the possibility that New York and others will pull out, the institution has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years to contest regulations that would prevent students from going there at public expense.

The debate around “aversive therapy,” which includes shocks, is one of the most contentious in special education. States around the country have rejected the school’s methods. Districts in Illinois, California, Pennsylvania and elsewhere no longer send students there. Maine and Nevada have issued bans against any school that uses electrical shocks.

Last year, the U.S. Senate passed a bill that would do the same at the federal level. Congress people in the house and senate have for years introduced, and failed to pass, legislation that would severely limit or ban the use of restraint and seclusion in schools, including the use of aversives.

California Rep. George Miller’s bill died in the house last year. “In the year since this legislation passed the House but failed to become law, more children were abused in school,” said Rep. Miller in a statement. He has re-introduced his bill, called “Keeping All Students Safe Act,” this year. “This legislation makes it very clear that there is no room for torture and abuse in America’s schools,” he said.

Federal records show the Rotenberg Center spent more than $116,000 to lobby against such legislation in the halls of Congress last year. The bulk of that went Bracewell and Giuliani, the firm of former New York City mayor Rudolf Giuliani.

It was not the school’s first foray into intensive lobbying efforts. Since 2005, JRC has spent at least $1.2 million to fight measures that would curb or bar the use of such controversial measure. State disclosure records show that in 2010, the school spent $123,000 to lobby in New York State alone.

Steven Sanders, a lobbyist with the firm Malkin and Ross, has represented the Rotenberg Center. He is a former New York State assemblyman, and served on the state education committee for ten years until stepping down in 2005.

He acknowledged objections raised by opponents, but countered that its programs work.

“Some people believe aversives should not be used on children, even though they are perfectly legal,” Sanders said. “These kids are in school, they are learning. Their violent behavior is controlled.”

Still, despite these efforts, New York City recently began to officially warn parents about its concerns, and it now recommends students go elsewhere.

“We don’t agree with the school’s behavioral approach,” said Matthew Mittenthal, deputy press secretary at the New York City Department of Education. “Parents of students who attend JRC have been advised that we are uncomfortable with the school’s practices, and that we strongly recommend they attend a different school.”

Radio Ads and Basketballs

Yet students keep coming, in part because the Rotenberg Center has reached out to their parents in a variety of ways.

It has paid for radio ads, including one broadcast on the popular FM station Hot 97, the city’s most prominent outlet for hip-hop and R&B. “Is your child autistic or emotionally disturbed?” it began. “Unmanageable, failing in school or refusing to attend or stuck in psychiatric or correctional setting?” At the end, the advertisement offers a number to call for “free consultation and placement assistance.”

Documents and interviews with parents describe how those who show interest in the school receive home visits from the school’s marketing representatives. According to a 2006 New York State Education Department report that included a review of the Rotenberg Center’s internal records, representatives “provide the family with information and gifts for the family and student.” The presents include gift bags for family members and basketballs for students. In all, tax documents from 2008 show the school spent more than $390,000 on advertising and promotion that year.

The school also markets to professionals at psychiatric and juvenile justice conferences, who then suggest the school to parents and guardians. Some children also come directly out of the foster system.

Helping Families Sue New York

Once families decide they want to send their children to the Rotenberg Center, the next step may well be in a courtroom.

New York City is legally required to pay for special education services when it cannot provide them itself. Parents who want to send their children to the Rotenberg Center argue that is exactly why they need the Rotenberg Center – that no place in the state provides the same approach that help those with severe special needs.

That is because, under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, states must provide a “free and appropriate” education to all students. If a school district cannot provide that education, it must pay to send a student to a school in New York, or outside the state, that will help them.

The Rotenberg Center has remained on the New York State’s list of approved out-of-state schools. Indeed, when New York City students go to an out of state school, the one that has the largest single enrollment is the Rotenberg School.

The city Department of Education often fights parents who seek to send their children to the Massachusetts facility, contending in court that those families can get similar services closer to home.

Lawyers have been a key to the school’s success. The Rotenberg Center has guided parents to particular lawyers to help fight their way into the school. Those attorneys have worked on behalf of parents within the special education system to negotiate the scope of a student’s individualized education plan.

The school declined to say how many New York students have gone to court in order to attend the school. Government records that would detail the scope of litigation are not public.

In an interview last spring, school founder Dr. Israel said the Rotenberg Center directs New York City parents to one attorney: Brooklyn-based Anton Papakhin.

There are few public records that reveal the number of clients Papakhin has represented to go to the Rotenberg Center. He declined to reveal that number. Lawsuits involving special education students are largely protected by privacy rules, and are conducted behind closed doors. One of the few times these cases become public is when lower court decisions are appealed.

Papakhin is listed as the attorney of record on at least seven appeals, which become public record when they move to higher appellate state courts.  In cases in which parents prevail, Papakhin may also be awarded attorneys fees, paid for by the city.

Papakhin has also been paid directly by the Rotenberg Center. At the same time that Papakhin has represented families in legal proceedings to convince courts to send students to the Rotenberg Center, he is also listed by the school as a contractor. The most recent financial filings, for 2008, show he was paid more than $270,000 for his work that year. Papakhin declined repeated requests to clarify the nature of the services provided to the Rotenberg Center in 2008. The Rotenberg Center declined to provide further details on its relationship with Papakhin.

In a brief interview last spring, Papakhin explained he works closely for about four years with Arthur Block, another New York attorney with a background in special education law, who is documented as having earned more than $600,000 in 2007 and 2008 for unspecified “legal services” for the Rotenberg Center. Block, too, declined repeated requests to discuss his work for the school.

It is not illegal or unethical for an attorney who is paid by an organization to represent people and benefit financially from the arrangement. Professor Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert at New York University, said, “There’s nothing wrong with a person who is not a client paying the lawyer to represent a client.”

Lawyers are used for more than just getting students into the Rotenberg Center. The institution also makes efforts to keep students at the institution after they “age out” of the state school system’s jurisdiction when they become 21 years old. The Rotenberg Center has launched lawsuits for back payment from school districts and states for care provided to these forgotten students.

Meanwhile in Massachusetts, the fight over aversive therapy continues. This month, Gov. Deval Patrick’s administration put forward new regulations that would ban all aversive therapy going forward, and impose yearly reviews on individuals already receiving such treatment. The Rotenberg Center has already begun to fight back.

Check out an archive of documents related to this story

~By Hannah Rappleye~

One night a few weeks before the 2010 World Cup, 33-year-old Terrance Mbuleo lay bleeding under a street lamp, on a narrow strip of dirt separating thousands of shacks from a handful of brick houses.

That afternoon, men set shacks ablaze and slashed wires that diverted electricity from their houses, subsidized by the South African government, to a sprawling network of tin-and-cardboard dwellings called Protea South, a shantytown about a 45-minute drive from Johannesburg. Like the estimated 2.1 million South Africans who live in slums, Protea South’s residents lack basic services such as electricity and clean water. But they knew how to take electricity from the houses, leaving the homeowners to foot the bill for thousands of people.

After the men disappeared back into their homes, a group of shack dwellers set fire to the transformer that stood between the houses and the shacks.

They did it to send a message: if everyone can’t have electricity, then no one will.

The embers of the transformer fire were still glowing red in the blue dusk of that Sunday in late May, when a smaller group of homeowners left their houses and stood across from the street lamp where Mbuleo would die. They seemed to be planning something. People watched from inside their shacks, nervous about what the men would do.

And then, as Mbuleo began to walk across the path to a small, makeshift store that sold basic goods like cigarettes and soap to the shack dwellers, one of the homeowners pulled a gun from his pocket.

It was then, at a time when the South African government was desperate to prove to the international community that South Africa had both the infrastructural and civil capability to host the world’s largest sporting event, that Mbuleo fell to the ground.

He was dead because his community was forced to fight each other for the most basic of services.

While South Africa’s impressive economic growth has pushed some out of poverty, and brought homes, shopping malls and middle-class tastes—like wine-tasting festivals and swimming pools—to formerly impoverished black townships, millions of people are being left behind. Today, over 2.1 million South Africans live in shacks. They live in cramped, sprawling slums without basic services, like electricity or clean water. South Africa recently surpassed Brazil as the most unequal society in the world, with 1.6 percent of the population earning a quarter of all personal income. Life expectancy is 52, the lowest it has been since 1970.

Only 41 percent of the population has a job.

In Protea South, and many other communities across South Africa, there is often a very thin line between the haves and the have-nots—a narrow patch of dirt separates the poor from the houses of the emerging black middle class, houses with wrought iron and brick gates that safeguard satellite dishes and brand-new cars. When the poor live pressed against the middle class and a government hesitates to implement policies that promote equality, the turning of ordinary men into vigilantes and innocents into murder victims seems explicable, but no less tragic. What happened in Protea South, and to Terrance Mbuleo and his family, is just one example of a recent spate of violence between the poor and the middle class—and sometimes, the South African government.

“They are the working class,” one resident told me as he stood near the spot where Mbuelo died, across the path from a brick house. A teenager leaned against the house’s gate, nodding his head to the music on his iPod. “They have houses. We have nothing.”

By the 1950s, control of how and where blacks—and other South Africans of color—lived formed the linchpin of apartheid ideology. The Group Areas Act of 1950 and 1966 made it illegal for blacks to live in cities, and by the end of the 1950s the regime had begun demolishing black neighborhoods and forcibly relocating blacks to rural “homelands,” situated on uncultivable, desolate land, that were often far away from urban areas. By the end of the 1960s, the government slowed housing construction in many black townships or stopped it altogether, while simultaneously enforcing anti-squatting laws, thus forcing thousands of displaced blacks to find refuge in the homelands.

But the regime had to allow some blacks to live near the cities, which depended on cheap, black labor. Many of the homelands were close enough for their inhabitants to commute daily to the cities, but black men also lived in mining hostels or slums outside of the cities while they worked to support their families in the homelands.  Massive shack towns bloomed in townships outside cities like Johannesburg, Capetown, and Durban.

Homeownership in the townships was a rarity: by the 1980s, at the height of resistance to apartheid, banks and other lending institutions regularly practiced redlining in the townships, where residents participated in rent strikes and violence occurred on a daily basis.

Once apartheid finally fell in 1994, the new government, led by Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, had inherited a staggering housing crisis. Over 10 million South Africans lived in shacks. Housing was at the top of the new nation’s agenda. The party campaigned on the slogan “Houses for All,” and promised to build one million houses in its first five years.

In October that year, Joe Slovo, formerly the leader of the South African Communist Party and the new democracy’s first Housing Minister, traveled to Botshabelo, a former “homeland,” to make official the first non-discriminatory housing policy in South African history.

Botshabelo, which means “place of refuge” in the Sotho language, was established as a homeland in 1979. The government gave each relocated family a 15×30 meter plot of ground, a tent, three days worth of food and told the families to build a shack as quickly as they could. The tents would be needed for the other families who were arriving on a daily basis. Infectious diseases ran rampant in the desolate homelands, and infant mortality was high. During a typhoid outbreak in Botshabelo in July 1980, researchers found 258 adult graves in the homeland cemetery and 269 children’s graves.

By 1985, over 148,000 migrant workers and their families lived in Botshabelo. Workers commuted daily to Bloemfontein, the judicial capital of South Africa, about 55 kilometers away. For six years, Straun Roberston, a South African photographer and writer, traveled with the aid group Operation Hunger through rural South Africa. His subsequent book, titled The Cold Choice: Pictures of a South African Reality, paints a brutal and accurate picture of Botshabelo, which he saw with the daughter-in-law of a former ANC leader, Dr. J.S. Moroka:  “She guided us over the hills to Botshabelo. I was aghast as each new fold of ground disclosed more and more of it. Tin shanties and sod huts, each with its brown tin outhouse, stretched on and on. Every ridge showed us yet another vista. In the bleak grey light under the low clouds, with rain veils sweeping across it, the township seemed to go on forever. Mrs. Moroka told us that 80 per cent of the people were unemployed, living on remittances from working relatives or on government pensions which are too low for subsistence…Ine [Moroka] said: ‘This whole place is an obscenity.”

At the ceremony, surrounded by activists, ANC leaders and citizens, Slovo outlined South Africa’s new housing policy. It was important that the document was going to be signed near the shacks of Botshabelo and not in one of South Africa’s “many fine conference centers with a golf course attached,” Slovo said.

“We were determined that the most significant gathering of people involved in the South African housing process should take place in an area which makes clear the size and importance of the task we face. Botshabelo allows us to see and to experience the disastrous legacy of apartheid’s botched attempt to manipulate housing and the people. Botshabelo tells us about shortages—not only of housing but of work and of many of the social amenities which form the basis of community life.”

Long before Slovo signed the Housing Accord, various activist groups, trade unions and financial and construction groups had been working on crafting a sustainable housing policy for the country. They called it the Reconstruction and Development Programme, a program that blended free-market principles with government intervention. The program encouraged private home ownership, rather than public housing: the poor would buy their own homes, built by private developers, and would be assisted by a government subsidy of up to 15,000 rand, or about $3,200. By 1996, however, the most basic house cost around 45,000 rand. The remaining cost to the prospective homeowners— 30,000 rand—was over three times what the poorest two-fifths of South African families made in a year.

While the ANC made big promises of “Houses for All” during their election campaign, in the years after the first democratic election in South Africa’s history, in meetings and in statements to the press, the new officials took a more realistic, if wary, stance. “Let us be quite frank,” Slovo’s successor, Sanki Mthembi-Nkondo, told the South African paper The Mail & Guardian in 1995. “The maximum subsidy of R15 000 will seldom, if ever, buy outright the kind of house people imagine when they turn to daydreaming. But it will do something South Africa has never seen before. It will provide the poorest people in our country with a tangible and workable housing opportunity.”

By 2010, the South African government had built about 2.7 million houses, an impressive feat considering what the ANC had inherited. But development has not kept pace with demand. According to the South African Department of Human Settlements, in August 2010 the housing backlog was estimated at more than two million. Currently, more than 12 million South Africans need homes.

Most development experts and academics say that corruption at the local level has prevented houses from reaching many South Africans. The recession has also slowed housing delivery and forced many families into slums. In 2010, 12 percent of South African households lived in RDP houses, but in places like Gauteng Province, home to Protea South, over 22 percent of residents lived in “informal dwellings,” or shacks.

And sometimes, initiatives simply never take off. A new, mixed-income housing strategy called Breaking New Ground, intended to integrate poor black communities and rich white communities—who live in suburbs close to city centers, in gated compounds with swimming pools and black gardeners—has failed to get off the ground. The debate about the Breaking New Ground strategy inevitably hung on the question that is always posed by the upper and middle-class residents of upper and middle-class neighborhoods of South Africa, the majority of whom are white, whenever such strategies are proposed: does the movement of black residents into their neighborhoods mean higher crime rates and lower property values, and thus an end to a particular way of life?

In 2009, a mob of men attacked Kennedy Road, a large slum outside of Durban. The men chanted ANC slogans while they forced people out of their shacks, looted their belongings and tore down walls and smashed roofs. The men beat anyone who resisted. Over 1,000 residents fled Kennedy Road with their meager belongings—clothes, baskets, shoes, sometimes mattresses—atop their heads. By the morning, helicopters circled over the slum and paramedics loaded people into waiting ambulances. Many were injured, two were killed.

The incident made headlines around South Africa. Reports circulated that local ANC politicians instigated the mob, because the party felt threatened by an organization called Abahlali baseMjondolo, which had been growing in the Kennedy Road settlement since the mid-2000s. Abahlali baseMjondolo, which means the Shack Dweller’s Movement, had initially been formed by shack dwellers as a “development committee,” a way to organize the community for better sanitation and safety, but quickly grew throughout Kennedy Road and surrounding slums into an outspoken grassroots movement of the poor, agitating for service delivery and safe, affordable housing.

S’bu Zikode, a short, soft-spoken man who had moved into the shacks in 1997, emerged as the leader of the movement. Zikode grew up in rural Kwa-Zulu Natal with a single mother who worked as a domestic worker for a white family.

He entered law school in 1997, only to quit months later because he could not afford the fees. He moved into a shack in Kennedy Road later that year.

“It was hard to accept that any human being could live like that,” Zikode said in early November. He was sitting at a kitchen table in an activist’s house in Astoria, Queens, wearing a white polo shirt with the words “Land and Dignity” ironed on to it. He had been invited to the United States by a number of progressive housing organizations and asked to speak about the movement he spearheaded, which had grown into a network that reached into most major cities in South Africa, including Johannesburg and Capetown. “People there, they don’t have water, they don’t have toilets, they don’t have lights.”

“As a result,” he went on, “we have had to create our own space. We had to acknowledge that the government is not for us, and is not with us.”

After he moved into Kennedy Road, Zikode joined the ANC and was elected chairperson of his local branch. He tried, he said, to bring up issues of housing and development. But he soon grew frustrated by the other members, who drove fancy cars and, in his eyes, did not care about the poor. “What disturbed me most was the top-down system that was there,” he said. “You go to a meeting, you have issues, and you have mandates from the shack settlements.

But when you get into the meeting, suddenly an agenda is already there. There is no window to discuss anything. I believe in a bottom-up system. This is a democratic country. People mandate you. People elect you because they trust you.”

Zikode left the ANC soon after. By 2006, he was invited to speak on local radio stations and was interviewed for news reports about service delivery and housing. That same year, Zikode was arrested and tortured by a local white police superintendent and began to receive threats against his life. Shacks had spread like wildfire across the country, and it was becoming common to hear of township and slum residents holding marches and other demonstrations to protest against the ANC and the fact that they had no electricity or safe water. The ANC retaliated by evicting residents from slums, without court orders, and sending police to break up peaceful protests. Residents of the slums, many of which sat next to dangerous mine runoffs or other hazardous areas, were often evicted from the land by the government, without notice, and placed into dingy “transit camps.” The camps were meant to be temporary stopovers until the residents were given better land or placed in housing. But the temporary camps were, more often than not, permanent.

Some believe that what happened on Kennedy Road represented a turning point in the ANC’s history. While the party was once considered to be the party of the poor, many academics and other South Africans regarded the incident as the first organized attempt to stifle dissent amongst the poor.

“It’s important to see this in the wider context because this turn towards supporting vigilante ways of doing things hearkens back to apartheid, when the government would arm paramilitary groups or try to prevent unrest in the townships to try to undermine the fight against apartheid,” Jared Sacks, Executive Director of Children of South Africa, told me. “At the local level, in South Africa, there is very little democracy going on. The councilors are very authoritarian and they often instigate violence. What happened has a lot of side effects for poor people because now, there is this fear of reprisals when you speak out. That prevents a whole lot of communities saying things that need to be said.”

Zikode was out of town when the attacks on Kennedy Road occurred, but his wife and four children were there. They fled to a family member’s house and, when ikode came back, neighbors told him that men had been looking for him and his family. With the help of Amnesty International, Zikode moved underground for six months. Now, he considers himself a political refugee.

“The ANC is in power now,” Zikode said as he folded his hands on the table. “If you are opposing them, they will say you are anti-revolutionary, and they will call you thugs who are being funded by foreign agencies to destabilize the country. Our hard-won democracy. That’s what they often say. Our hard-won democracy.”

In early July 2010, while soccer fans flocked to Soweto’s Soccer City stadium—a few minutes drive from Protea South—to catch the last games of the World Cup, I talked with Soloman Mdakane, Mbuleo’s father, while he sat with his wife in their shack and cried.

“Even now we can’t cope,” he said. Mdakane, a rail-thin man with a goatee, looked up at his wife. She sat across from him and looked down at the floor, as her shaking fingers pulled at the end of her shawl. Tears streamed down her face. A group of women, her neighbors, huddled around her and laid their hands on her shoulder. It had been months, Mdakane said, and still, she couldn’t talk about it.

The homeowners had shot another young man from the settlement, but he survived, and the day I arrived in Protea South, he refused to come out of his shack. His neighbors said that he had been afraid to leave his home ever since he was shot in the leg. But Mdakane wanted to talk about his son’s death because, he said, nobody—not the police or the media—seemed to be paying attention.

As Mbuleo lay dying and his father knelt by his side, shack dwellers called the police and an ambulance. Mbuleo was dead before they arrived. The ambulance carted him off to the hospital, and the police stayed behind. But, shack dwellers say, they refused to take down statements from the many who witnessed the shooting. They arrested a few homeowners but released them soon after, without any charges. Mbuleo left behind four children and a wife.

“We know those people were arrested but now released,” Mdakane said. “The police don’t come. I ask myself, ‘Why he was killed?’ He was just going to buy cigarettes. I should have been killed.”

In Protea South it is crowded. Like in any slum in any part of the world, people live pushed up against each other. The United Nations estimates that throughout the world, over 827 million people currently live in slums; the number stands to grow to 889 million by 2020. In Protea South, the government estimates that over 6,000 families live in the shacks.

There, where between cardboard and corrugated iron shacks, rats traverse tiny, trickling rivers of urine and old dishwater, people were less than thrilled about the development possibilities of the World Cup.

“They say we should ‘Feel it, it is here,’” Maureen Mnisi said, scoffing at one of the slogans of the World Cup. Mnisi is a well-respected housing organizer who lives in Protea South. “But how can we feel it when we live like this?”

Mnisi, a black woman with bobbed hair and strong arms, stood in front of her home in the slum and pointed out where a group of marauding homeowners tried to set fires the same night that Mbuleo died. They were trying to force her out of her home, she said, because they knew she was an activist and a symbol of power: she encouraged the shack dwellers to organize and agitate for services.

“They can build a stadium for billions of rand,” she said. “But they can’t build homes for the people.”

She paused for a moment, and then she said something that many other residents of Protea South told me: “This government has failed its people.”

For the thousands in Protea South, there are only a hundred or so portable toilets. For many women in the settlement, the toilets are symbols of rape and sexual assault—too many times, they said, they have met a drunk or violent man inside one of the toilets at night.

Many of the men are unemployed here, residents told me, and are often forced into petty crime to support their families—or they simply wash their pain away with home-brewed beer. Women, as they did under apartheid, often travel hours to work as domestics in mostly-white suburbs or, barring that, take in sewing or laundry to make ends meet.

In the face of all this, the residents of Protea South struggle to maintain normalcy. They plant tight rows of vegetables in front of their shacks and do their laundry and send their children to school. Women collect dirty water from a nearby creek for their families to drink. And they try to get electricity in whatever way they can.

Above the shacks, tall wooden poles thrust into the air, their tops bound with wires that give electricity to some of the shacks. The wires, residents said, mean that their children can study at night without inhaling smoke from the paraffin lamps. Electricity also means they won’t have to worry that their shacks will burn down—paraffin oil tends to spit and jump from the lamps, causing fires.

But the homeowners object to the stealing of their electricity, and that is understandable—they end up footing the bill for the entire settlement.  None of this would be a problem, most shack dwellers say, if the ANC fulfilled its promises.

“We haven’t got toilets, we haven’t got water, we haven’t got electricity,” Busisiwe Tawala, a 22-year-old resident of the settlement, said. “We need houses. And we keep being promised that in such and such day and in such and such year the government will build houses. But nothing is done.”

What she said next is illuminative of the massive shift in thought for thousands of South Africa’s poor, many of whom organized or rallied for the ANC during apartheid or grew up under the transition: that the party of liberation had become the party of the status quo. “The poor people should stop voting the rich in,” she said. “It was better under apartheid.”

Throughout the slums, it is a common refrain: life was better under apartheid. How could anyone say this?

“We feel that we have been betrayed by our brothers and sisters that we trusted the most,” Zikode had told me that morning in Astoria. “Most people were voting for the ANC. Most people were part of the struggle to end apartheid. A lot of people worked hard within the ANC to end old rule. But it has become clear that the government has turned on us. It is clear to us that even the apartheid we fought against, yes, it was there. But it’s not the race question anymore.”

“Some people talk about the farmers, the Boers,” or the Afrikaaners, Zikode continued. “That stole our land. But today, we have black Boers. We have black elites that have enriched themselves. This government has turned into a business. There are government ministers that are now multi-millionaires. You have a ituation in South Africa where you cannot differentiate between the private business sector and the government. The gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Those that are in power have become blind to our suffering. They pretend not to see, but they were once with us. They should know how it is to be in the shacks.”

“It is better to be betrayed by your enemy, than your brother,” he said.

Later that month, a few miles away from the shacks in Protea South, a hundred or so people danced and sang anti-apartheid protest songs on the side of a highway. The blinding afternoon sun hung high over the dancing people as they kicked up dust over the black tarmac and women ululated. A man stood in front of the crowd and shouted into a bullhorn. A police car was parked in front of the man and two policemen stood leaning against its open doors, watching.

Across the road, a handful of private security guards and an ANC councilor were also watching the crowd. They stood on a corner where the highway intersected with a long, dusty road that receded far into the distance. On that road, between the security guards and the horizon line, was a patch of newly constructed affordable housing units. From the other side of the highway, one could make out the dinosaur-like neck of a yellow bulldozer moving between the squat, red-roofed homes.

The people in the crowd gathered that day to protest. They said that the houses rightfully belonged to them, but their local ANC councilors told them the houses had already been allocated to new owners. The man with the bullhorn, a housing activist from Soweto named Sipho Nhlapo, told the crowd that they would not move from the highway.  They would appoint “security guards,” he said, to wait on the corner from morning until night, waiting to see the families who had been given the homes.

The people cheered. Old women moved to the front and shuffled their feet back and forth as the crowd of swaying bodies morphed to form a semi-circle. The old women held up laminated copies of their applications for subsidized housing. Most of the applications dated back to 1996. Nhlapo moved in front of the women and pumped his fist in the air. The crowd kept singing. The police leaned against the open doors of their car, and the security guards across the street crossed their arms at their chests.

But nothing happened.

Eventually the crowd stopped dancing and the hundred or so people without homes stood and craned their necks over the police car to catch a glimpse of the security guards and the houses behind them.

Women began to crowd around, desperate to tell their stories. “I have been living in a shack since 1996,” one of them told me. “I have no job. There are no jobs.”  “We all live in one room together,” said another. “My mother, my sister, her children, and my children. There is not enough room.” “I have been waiting so long,” said another woman. She wore a kerchief on her head and she shut her eyes and clenched her fists in frustration. “How much longer can I wait? I have no money to build a house, and no land.”

Many of the women did not live in shacks, but in rented rooms or one-room houses, stuffed full of children and extended family members.

“I feel like crying, or killing myself,” Emily Moleane, 50, who lives with her sister and large extended family in a small room in Soweto, said.  She began to cry. “How can you wait 14 years for a place to live? Even with the previous government it was not like this.”

Nhlapo, the housing activist, and a tall, dark man named Samson Nembudani stood near a stop sign, next to a handful of women resting their round bodies on a patch of yellow grass. Nhlapo clutched the bullhorn in his hand. They suspected, Nhlapo said, that the government was giving away the houses not to South Africans, but to “rich foreigners.”

“They are taking foreigners and putting them in these houses,” he said. “We are not promoting xenophobia, we just want everyone who applied for housing in this country to get it.”

Citizens in any country suffering from a scarcity of housing, jobs and other resources tend to search for someone, or something, to blame. South Africa is no different. A diplomat once told me that some of South Africa’s problems lie in the fact that it was an “island of prosperity in a sea of suffering.” South Africa’s cities have long been a promised land for migrants desperate for jobs and a better life for their families. Some migrants are highly skilled and come to the country legally to work. Most, however, cross the South African border in secret, smuggled in the back of trucks or simply on foot in the middle of the night.

The neighborhoods of Johannesburg’s inner city teem with immigrants from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Botswana, Nigeria, Mozambique, Central African Republic and, perhaps most controversially, Zimbabwe. Zimbabweans share a border with South Africa and have always migrated back and forth between the two states, but as the political and economic situation in Zimbabwe began to deteriorate in 2007 Zimbabweans flocked to South Africa in droves. Migration to South Africa increased even more in 2008, after Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party launched a brutal campaign of torture and political repression against ordinary Zimbabweans. Today, South Africa has the largest population of Zimbabweans outside of Zimbabwe, and most of them live in abject poverty.

For those fleeing violence, war and economic insecurity, life in South Africa is much better than the alternative. But both successful immigrants — Somali or Pakistani shop owners, for example—and poor immigrants, like many Zimbabweans, face harassment from native South Africans. Sometimes the harassment turns violent. The narrative goes, much like it does in the United States, that these immigrants lower wages for native South Africans with their willingness to do any job at any price.

Locals make jokes about Zimbabweans being as common as cockroaches and hold rallies accusing immigrants of spreading HIV/AIDS and crime. In the years since apartheid ended, acts of violence against foreigners, including murder, rape and beatings, although not common, have occurred with enough regularity to make some worry that the seams of the “Rainbow Nation” were coming apart.

In May 2008, South Africans’ distrust of immigrants and their frustration with the high unemployment rate hit a fever pitch. Across the country, local ANC councilors up for re-election roused anger in the townships and shantytowns by publicly blaming immigrants for poor service delivery and scarcity of employment. Riots spread across the country, and soon news outlets around the world carried photos of a man, a suspected foreigner, being burned alive in a slum.

During the riots, 62 people died. Refugee camps built by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees sprung up on the outskirts of Johannesburg to house those fleeing the violence.

As the world waited for the 2010 World Cup, South African papers began to publish rumors that xenophobic violence would return after the games ended.

And when they did, immigrants began to leave the cities en masse, armed with bus tickets back home. But aside from a few beatings around the country, predictions of violence on a massive scale were largely unfounded.

So it was, perhaps, not surprising that Nhlapo and his associate, Samson Nembudani, were standing on the side of the highway that day in late July, with no doubt in their minds that the problem here was not only the corrupt ANC councilors standing between them and a safe, clean place to live, but also foreigners, who had jobs, money and, therefore, a chance at being placed in a government-subsidized home.

But it was frightening, nonetheless.

Nembudani said that the group would appoint “guards” to watch who went in and out of the houses. “And then we will ask to see their papers, to see if they are citizens or not,” he said.

I asked him if he thought that might encourage violence.  He shrugged. “Violence is a thing you cannot guarantee. We cannot guarantee nothing will happen. If you’ve applied for housing since 1996 and you don’t get it, how do you feel?”

Nhlapo nodded and looked across the road.

“We will go into the houses and drag them out by force,” he said.

An unusual man, David Pecheco decided at the age of 50 that he wanted to live the rest of his life in the treacherous South Pole, his wife Tina by his side. In October 2003, he took a job as a journeyman plumber and moved to the McMurdo Station in the southernmost tip of Antarctica, the hub of the United States’ scientific research efforts in the region.

The thrill didn’t last long.  On the morning of January 28, 2007, David Pacheco was sent to an empty building to drain and put antifreeze on pipes without knowing that the electricity was still on. When the water slashed out of the pipes, it conducted two lines of 277 volts throughout his body.

He flew 20 feet in the air. For a minute his heartbeat stopped.

“Your brain works but your body doesn’t work and you start shaking like a fish and then you try to get up and you can’t,” he said. “It’s like winning a lottery that I am alive.”

When his supervisors finally arrived, it took them an hour and a half to turn off the electricity.

“I saw them running around with blueprints,” said his wife Tina Pacheco who worked at McMurdo as an administrative assistant. “They couldn’t even figure out where the switch was to turn off the electricity. And then later they blamed David for not turning it off. And that’s just, on so many levels, that’s ridiculous.”

After several years of physical therapy for brain and nerve damage, Pacheco is still not expected to fully recover. Liberty Mutual, Raytheon’s insurance and worker’s compensation carrier, didn’t give total disability compensation and never paid his medical expenses. When he tried to seek compensation, he learned the hard way that American labor laws barely apply in the secluded world of Antarctica.

More than 3,500 Americans live in Antarctica to support scientific research for the National Science Foundation’s United States Antarctic Program. Those brave enough to work during the three months of Antarctic winter in perpetual night, at temperatures sometimes averaging –80 degrees, are called winterovers. They have to pass a special psychological test to prove their ability to bear the constant darkness and confinement. Temperatures are so cold that planes usually can’t land in the winter, leaving winterovers trapped; evacuations are often impossible in those challenging austral winter conditions.

What do you do when nothing works at 80 below zero? It’s the cutoff temperature at the South Pole where equipment that would work on warmer continents suddenly stops functioning, resulting in numerous accidents every year.

There are 27 nations, including India, China, and the United States that send scientists and logistical support to Antartica to conduct research, but none of these countries technically owns the vast, icy land, and so deny jurisdiction over workplace injuries.

The Supreme Court decided that Antarctica was a sovereignless country out of its jurisdiction in 1993 when Sandra Jean Smith lost a wrongful death action in the name of her husband who died in Antarctica.

Hundreds of injuries have occurred in Antarctica since 2001, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, but only three cases have been reported to the U.S. Department of Labor. This, despite the fact that Antarctic contract employees are entitled to special insurance benefits under the Defense Base Act laws and contract companies are required to report all injuries to the Department of Labor. But Raytheon Polar Services (RPSC), the company hired to run the U.S. Antarctic program, failed to comply with the law.

The continent’s unclear political status makes it almost impossible for employees to appeal denied worker’s compensation claims and assert their Defense Base Act rights in American courts. They have to pay state and federal taxes but are not considered to be American employees and are not covered by most labor laws.

“We pay the taxes and do not get the rights,” one South Pole worker wrote in an email.  She injured several times working three winters in a row outdoors at South Pole in tempatures that averaged 75 below.

She was on crutches this past season after breaking her ankle after falling face down a flight of metal stairs. Her employer failed to provide her her with the proper equipment, she says.  Her goggles fogged and then froze up in an instant of hitting winter temperatures, she wrote. Her mittens had no grip or traction and fell apart  with little use.

“We are inadequately protected against the elements we deal with. We are not provided with sufficient training or gear to do what we need to do,” she wrote.

In 2008, the National Science Foundation in Antarctica could only retain 60% of its contract employees from the summer season, according to safety and injury reports obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request. Auditors also found out that the  work sites had outdated and unusable equipment.

In 2004, a Massachusetts district held that the Fair Labor Standards Act overtime pay rate is not applicable in a foreign country such as Antarctica. The court based its decision on the 1961 Antarctic Treaty, which specifies that Antarctica is not under the sovereignty of any government.

But the IRS held that Antarctica was not a foreign country for tax purposes. The United States Tax Court ruled against Dave Arnett in 2006, the lead case for 150 RPSC employees who thought they didn’t have to pay taxes since Antarctica was a foreign country.

Raytheon Polar Services found more than one hundred instances of health and safety non-compliance in 2006 after the contractor inspected its facilities, according to safety and injury reports obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Raytheon also found out that the buildings didn’t have enough equipment available. Much of it was outdated and unusable. Research stations are deteriorating from age and use, according to the audit report. For every major injury that occurs, there were 29 minor injuries and 330 near misses or unsafe acts, the reports shows.

Raytheon Polar Services is supposed to follow the federal regulation of the Safety and Health Administration’s federal regulation (OSHA) and reports all OSHA recordable injuries to the National Science Foundation. They can result in restricted or lost work time. Raytheon Polar Services blamed budgets cuts, which caused them to reduce the summer staff from 750 to 670. The report also suggest that injuries are related to less job specific training before the start of the summer season.

Before they leave for the Ice, employees are warned about the medical risks that come with living and working in the coldest of all continents. Most of them work at the three year-round stations of South Pole, McMurdo and Palmer to support scientific research and logistics. During the Antarctic summer, from November to March, the population in Antarctica is at its highest, about 1,000 workers at the McMurdo station and 250 at the Scott-Amundsen South Pole station.

All NSF-Sponsored personnel traveling to Antarctica have to sign a form informing them that “travel to Antarctica imparts certain risks to the traveler, because of harsh environmental conditions encountered, limitations in the medical care available in Antarctica, and difficulties, in emergencies, of providing timely evacuation to tertiary medical care facilities on New Zealand, South America, or in the United States.”

Heavy machinery accidents were numerous with an employee’s left leg run over by a Mattrack, another worker crushed by a heavy flat bed trailer, and an employee injured while driving a bulldozer by the ice pier.

“About any legal opinion will reach the conclusion that workers may be entitled to DBA [Defense Base Act] benefits,” Bruce H. Nicholson, Defense Base Act attorney, said. “But clearer answers require people asserting their rights to compensation and treatment.”

A building commissioned in January 2008 was not up to the OSHA and the National Fire Protection Agency American codes, a South Pole senior safety employee wrote. Fire sprinkler heads were not in the right place, handrails, siderails and toekicks were missing leaving large gaps and exit signs were incorrectly hung.

“They rely on a flux of people that changes so that problems just sort of go away with the next season’s turnover,” she wrote.

In Antarctica, Pacheco saw a lot of accidents go unreported.

RPSC employees only have access to Raytheon doctors and fear that reporting injuries may lead to a reduction of their annual bonuses and affect their chances of being rehired. There is a medical underground of medical technicians and physician assistants that are not employed as such on the Ice but treat injuries when workers fear that it may reflect on their job evaluations, workers said.

Since employees are technically always on their job site, any injury even off-duty or recreational should be covered by RPSC’s insurance carrier Liberty Mutual. But it doesn’t always happen. The average worker’s comp cost per injury is $13,261. Liberty Mutual managed to reduce claims by about $1.2 million in 2002, Raytheon reported.

Liberty Mutual, Raytheon’s insurance and worker’s compensation carrier, never paid Pacheco’s $14,000 New Zealand hospital bill.  In the United States, the Pachecos were left to pay for most of their medical expenses. They’re now $20,000 in debt on credit cards.

“I am in the mercy of Liberty Mutual right now,” Pacheco said.

This is common, Raytheon employees say. “It is easier for Liberty Mutual to deny one of our claims because by the time we contact them we are unemployed, or between contracts,” a worker wrote.  “Liberty Mutual is renowned for and feared by RPSC employees for not accepting worker’s compensation claims for those injuries for which there may be any personal blame.”

Raytheon Polar Services, a subsidiary of defense contractor Raytheon based in Centennial, Colorado, took over the management of American activities in Antarctica in 1999. Last year, the government allocated about $295 million for RPSC to run the U.S. Antarctic Program. Their contract is supposed to end on March 31, 2012 but the contractor hopes to win the next contract bidding by then.

Pacheco said that Jim Scott, the head of McMurdo told him that Raytheon didn’t receive enough funding to update the building to safety standards.  Pacheco feels lucky for receiving any compensation and doesn’t hope he will ever receive full compensation from Raytheon.

“Nobody wants to take the case because it’s out in Colorado, and then it’s another nation, it’s not a territory. It’s nothing,” Pacheco said. “It’s a sweetheart deal in the fine print.”

Before 9/11, as told by New Yorkers who call Little Pakistan home, their neighborhood in Midwood, Brooklyn was a true microcosm of the old country 7,000 miles away. Today, this enclave, desolate and reclusive, wrestles with population loss and ignorance. And fear.

Residents say the community was thriving with few available parking spots and plenty of jewelry stores, music and DVD outlets, sweet shops, immigration and tax service shops, traditional clothing shops. People would travel from Queens and New Jersey to shop, eat and worship there.

“It was a very lively area,” said Bazah Roohi, 36, a small business owner and long time resident of “Little Pakistan.” “The restaurants [were] busy. Boutiques [were] busy. The grocery store was all the time busy.”

This all changed when the federal Department of Homeland Security created the Special Registration initiative, or Entry-Exit Registration System, a system for registration of non-citizens. It’s primary target is Muslim-majority countries, like Pakistan. Special Registration began in September 2002 in an attempt to remove members of al-Qa’eda and other terrorist organizations from the United States’ borders.

The Council of Peoples Organization (formerly Council of Pakistan Organization) was started in 2002 to respond to the crisis and fear in Little Pakistan that ensued after Special Registration.

According to CoPO, up to 45,000 of the South Asians in Brooklyn left voluntarily or were deported after Special Registration. Those who left voluntarily did so because they were illegal and feared eventual deportation or for other reasons.

They estimate that this cut the immigrant population of Little Pakistan in half.

CoPO also reports that in addition to the closing of 30 major businesses – mostly jewelry stores  – aimed at the Pakistani-American community those businesses left standing incurred losses of between 30 and 70 percent. Restaurants and the remaining jewelry stores were hardest hit.

“Could you imagine a knock on your door and a guy is holding a card like this and you don’t speak English?,” said Mohammed Razvi, the executive director of CoPO. He was holding a tattered, overstuffed album filled with the business cards of FBI and CIA agents with notes handwritten on the back.

“In this school next door to us, 50 students packed-up and left,” said Razvi, seated at his office desk in the heart of “Little Pakistan.” “Fifty students. You’re talking about fifty families.”

Residents have also suffered from post-9/11 discrimination by other locals.

From a worn, heavy, 3 inch thick binder, Razvi read accounts of harassment: A man was stabbed out of retribution for being Muslim, but didn’t tell the police because he was undocumented and feared he deportation. Another account was of an 11-year-old girl walking to school wearing her traditional headscarf. The girl was called a “sand nigger” and spit on by a woman on the street and was told she should be sorry for dropping the Twin Towers.

Where did they go?

“They went to Canada, seeking asylum from the United States, ironically. They went back to Pakistan or Bangladesh,” said Razvi. The residents of Little Pakistan also report that many of those who left went to other states.

According to reports from the Canadian Globe and Mail newspaper, Pakistanis represented five percent of people requesting refugee hearings in Canada in November 2002 and 58 percent in February 2003.

The desperation of this community is being felt all the way down to the economic level, and by everyone.

“They don’t want to spend money. If tomorrow they’ll have to leave things and fabric, everything will be [left] here. At least they have cash. They can get to their country. That’s why they are not spending money,” said Mrs. Jilani, 50, and co-owner of Zoque Fashion on Coney Island Avenue. Mrs. Jilani has been living in the area for 30 years and opened her shop, which sells traditional Pakistani women’s clothing, in 1994. She reports that business is still down for her.

The economic situation in Little Pakistan is particularly acute as the majority of residents are employed as cab drivers, or as small business owners, reports Al Jazeera English. In 2000, the per capita income of a Pakistani in New York City was $11,992 with 28 percent of the population living below the poverty line.

And the global recession isn’t helping.

According to Razvi, besides not being able to speak English, many community members did not know their rights after Special Registration began and many still don’t. CoPO also addresses these problems and offers ESL – English as a Second Language – classes and legal workshops in Urdu, Punjabi and Bengali.

According to numbers from the Office of Immigration Statistics, the number of Pakistani-born aliens deported from the U.S. only began to drop to levels similar to those of 2001 during this past year.

“And now what’s happening is it’s starting to come back,” said Razvi about Brooklyn’s South Asian population. “But it’s coming back from all the filings from family members who had filed [for immigration] for their loved ones for all these years because their cases become current.”

And the numbers demonstrate this. While Pakistanis are still coming to the U.S., they are doing so in fewer numbers. Nonimmigrant admissions for Pakistanis is still down: by 20 percent, for 2008, compared to 2001. But as previously filed immigration cases become current, the number of Pakistanis obtaining U.S. legal permanent resident status has actually increased: 40 percent higher than in 2001.

Razvi estimates it will take up to 15 years for the area to return to the way is was before 9/11.

“It’s starting to come back, but it’s still not there,” Razvi said. “Because even the cab driver was prospering at that time, prior to 9/11.”

According to residents, the deportations have not come to an end, either. Community members with citizenship are reportedly being paid by the FBI when they give information about an undocumented immigrant.

“They complain to the FBI and they [say] ‘He is illegal. She is illegal. They are illegal.’,” said Roohi. “They receive $500 from the FBI. They work for the FBI, still they are working for the FBI. And everyone knows who they are. They are very well known persons. I don’t want to mention their names.”

“A lot people, still, they are scared and don’t want to shop around here,” said Roohi.

For nearly six decades, Vivian Scarpati has lived within blocks of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. In the 1970s, she married a man who lived on her street. Her husband’s family had lived a block east of the Canal—for four generations.

Tragedy struck in 1981: Scarpati’s husband, James, passed away from lung and bone cancer at 33 years old, leaving her with two kids to raise. Perhaps only a coincidence, her husband’s grandfather also died young of cancer.

And perhaps also only a coincidence, the Gowanus had long been a heavily polluted industrial area. The Canal was created in the 1860s to bring raw
w material to rapidly developing residential Brooklyn. Within years, toxic waste was in the water and on its banks.

“There were other people in the neighborhood who died around the same age, so we always wondered,” Scarpati said. For over 25 years she has wondered; no one has conducted a comprehensive study of residents’ health in the area.

It is impossible to conclusively link Scarpati’s death, or illness in general, to contamination, scientists say. There can be myriad possible factors. Even so, for residents who live near the Gowanus Canal, concerns about toxic hazards are certainly legitimate. Dangerous chemicals—usually measured in parts per million or billion—have been measured in parts per hundred here.

“It’s dangerous, let’s face it,” said Linda Mariano, a neighborhood resident since 1974 and member of the group, Friends and Residents Of the Greater Gowanus. “The federal government said it’s highly toxic,” she said, as she stood on the Carroll Street Bridge gagging on the putrid air. “There are dozens of contaminants that I can barely understand or even read, they’re so exotic sounding. But they are real. And we should not be living with this.”

They may not have to. After years of debate, the federal Environmental Protection Agency fhas inally declared the Canal a “Superfund” site. It’s a designation reserved for the nation’s most contaminated toxic waste sites.

Yet a careful examination by the NYCity News Service of thousands of pages of documents has illustrated just how entrenched the pollution actually is. As early as the 1880s, local residents have protested the contamination, sewage overflows and foul odors. Public records have also revealed a number of companies are potentially liable for clean-up costs. Some joined with developers and property owners to form a coalition opposed to Superfund and to support the city’s plan. Details also emerged about the city’s strategy to avoid a listing. And interviews with various stakeholders and scientists have illuminated the complex nature of a cleanup, potential health risks accompanying development plans, and competing visions for the Canal’s future.

For nearly a year, residents, politicians, businesspeople and others battled over the EPA’s consideration of the 1.8-mile waterway for a Superfund listing. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg opposed the Superfund process and instead the city presented its own alternative clean-up proposal. His administration said a listing would lower property values and delay or even kill ambitious development plans for the area.

EPA Regional Administrator Judith Enck has disputed some of the city’s claims and said the Superfund process was superior to the city’s alternative. “We have determined that it is the most efficient and comprehensive cleanup,” Enck said, estimating it would take 10-12 years. She also added that it took decades for the Canal to become polluted so a cleanup that lasts as long should be reasonable. “This is not going to happen overnight,” Enck said.

Although the Superfund cleanup will take years, and possibly decades, some local residents can hardly contain their excitement when envisioning a clean canal.

“If we were able to clean it up and restore the ecosystem—wow, what a great resource it could be for the community,” said Ludger Balan, an area resident and program director of the Urban Divers Estuary Conservancy, an environmental group. “Engaging people in coming out to the water—it could be a place you could bring your kids.”

Balan has long studied the Canal and sees more than just pollution when he scans the banks. He sees America’s growth, including when the nation’s first president visited the area. “The kind of history the Canal has, there would be plaques all along it: ‘Here’s where George Washington sailed across.’ ‘Here are the historic bridges,’” said Balan.

But that’s only a vision. “For our community, it’s been no more than a blight,” he said.

The prospect of economic development along the Canal has long been appealing. The Canal sits in a valley between the desirable neighborhoods of Park Slope and Carroll Gardens. For Mayor Bloomberg, whose legacy includes rezoning former industrial areas into a mix of residential and other uses and who has cheered new construction, the location is too tempting not to pursue.

The city claimed there was no time to waste and that polluters would pay sooner for a cleanup if the Canal was not on the Superfund list. But development critics argued that a comprehensive cleanup was required and that this would happen only under Superfund.

Officially the “Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980,” the Superfund process forces polluters to pay for cleanups, through lawsuits if necessary. If polluters cannot be found, then the EPA is able to use some of its own funds. The EPA estimates the total cost of the Gowanus Canal cleanup will be about $300-500 million.

The EPA’s announcement clears the way for the next stage of the process to begin. The EPA says it hopes to complete a Remedial Investigation and an Ecological and Risk Assessment by the end of the year.

Understanding how the Canal is polluted is key to finding a comprehensive solution. It is, however, complicated. At least three distinct areas have been polluted.

LAYERS OF POLLUTION

First is the water itself. The quality of the water has been tainted over time, due to accidental and intentional toxic spills. Complicating matters, due to its relatively low level, the Canal receives sewage overflow and street run-off that cascades from surrounding neighborhoods when it rains heavily. This is often the source of pathogens in the water and the material seen floating on its surface.

Second, pollution is present in the Canal banks and the land farther from the water, known as the “upland” areas. Over generations, the pollution—from direct spills or waste disposal—has spilled onto the land nearer Carroll Gardens and Park Slope, both of which are family neighborhoods. Also, because of the soil composition, some of the contaminants have seeped from the water into the land—sort of a two-way toxic street.

Third, at least six feet of sediment make up the bed beneath the water. Contaminants include coal tar sludge, heavy metals, PCBs, pesticides, and volatile organic compounds, all of which can be carcinogenic. Scientists also talk about a chemical “plume” that exists below the sediment. It contains some of the most hazardous toxins that possibly leach into the water. Roughly the top three feet of sediment are comprised of settled material. The bottom three feet consists of accumulated sediment that traces its contamination back over a century and a half.

One of the most spectacular incidents was a massive 1976 fire at the Patchogue Oil Terminal. It destroyed underground fuel tanks and resulted in about 2 million gallons of oil spilling into the Canal—at the time, the largest oil spill in the nation’s history.

But this sort of pollution wasn’t always there. Prior to the days of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, the Gowanus was a tidal inlet comprised of small creeks winding through fertile salt marshes. Before the 1860s, the Gowanus Creek was teeming with oysters, shrimp, soft-shell crab, lobsters, clams, a host of fish species, as well as deer and beavers that roamed the grasslands, and a remarkable array of bird species. But by the second half of the 19th century, an exploding population and the rise of manufacturing began rapidly destroying the animal and plant habitats.

In the late 1840s, the United States’ western border had just recently reached the Pacific Ocean and steamboats roared through bays, inlets, and rivers transporting materials for the country’s rapid expansion. To accommodate growing industrialization, in 1848 the New York State Legislature authorized the construction of a canal, two and a half miles long, secured by bulkheads that would allow ships to navigate in and out. By the 1860s the Canal was completed, and it quickly became the hub of Brooklyn’s maritime and commercial activity. Stone that was used to build up brownstone and limestone homes was brought in through the Gowanus.

Coal yards, sawmill and lumberyards, coal manufacturing gas plants, oil refineries, printing, paint and ink factories, cement makers, a tartar manufacturer, soap makers, chemical plants, machine shops and tanneries sprouted up along the embankments.

Within a few short decades neighborhood residents began to complain about pollution and odors. The contamination was compounded by a sewer system that deposited raw waste from surrounding neighborhoods directly into the canal and residents’ dumping of garbage in the streets and water.

In 1880 and 1885 the Canal was dredged to deepen the water, which had become so shallow from sewage and waste that ships were getting grounded in the muck.  As government officials and business owners fought over who would pay for canal cleanups and improvements, some local residents concluded that the Canal should be closed altogether. A commission was formed in the late 1880s to study the issue and then report to the mayor.

The pollution was the death knell for Gowanus’ sea and plant life. Though the state passed a bill making it illegal to dump industrial waste and refuse into waterways containing oyster beds in 1886, businesses flagrantly ignored the law.

WHO MAY BE RESPONSIBLE

Hundreds of companies and government entities have polluted the Gowanus Canal since it began hosting ships with industrial cargo in the 1860s. Some continue to pollute today.

The most notorious actors were three manufactured gas plants (MGPs), which spewed coal tar and chemicals into the water and onto the banks of the Canal. These plants produced fuel oil for gas street lamps and heaters during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Near the turn of the 20th century, the MGPs were acquired by Brooklyn Union Gas, which operated them into the 1960s. Eventually, through various mergers and acquisitions, National Grid, a multinational electricity and natural gas corporation, became the owner of the three sites. The company has been working with the state Department of Environmental Conservation through its “Brownfield” program to clean up the contaminated land so that it can be redeveloped for other uses.

Today, National Grid and others may be on the hook for cleaning up both their own sites and the Canal itself.

In 2007, National Grid’s predecessor company, KeySpan, prepared a report identifying the nature and location of contaminants, as well as many of the industrial companies that have existed along the Canal.

Karen Young, a spokeswoman for National Grid, said the company had supported the city’s alternative cleanup plan because it closely would have involved the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has already been working on a Gowanus cleanup project. Also the Army Corps has unique experience working in urban waterways around the country.

Bloomberg officials consistently cited the city’s partnership with National Grid as proof they could get responsible parties to voluntarily step forward to contribute funds for a cleanup, which was a linchpin of their plan. They argued that many years of litigation would delay the cleanup process as companies defend themselves against EPA lawsuits; this scenario has played out at other Superfund sites.

Caswell F. Holloway, the commissioner of the city Department of Environmental Protection and the mayor’s point man on the Gowanus issue, explained last year how the city would have gotten companies to voluntarily pay: “We’re saying ‘Look, you’re going to have to get involved in this one way or another-—either you’re going to be sued and get forced to pay or we can work out a plan, get it done more quickly, and you don’t have to go through the cost of litigation and so forth,’” he said.

The city hoped that it could leverage its relationship with the Army Corps to provide an added financial incentive for companies to step forward on their own. City officials wanted use federal matching funds from Congress through the Water Resources Development Act. They said this would provide 65 percent of the total cost, leaving only 35 percent to be paid by the city and liable companies, reducing the portion those companies will have to pay. However, the federal funds are not guaranteed.

State officials were not convinced. In an August letter to Holloway, Stuart F. Gruskin, the executive deputy commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which had originally requested the EPA consider the Gowanus for its Superfund list, seemed doubtful about the viability of the city’s plan. “There are many assumptions in the proposal, including among other things, a requirement for a very high degree of cooperation among responsible parties,” he wrote.

Holloway also pointed to National Grid as a party that could have signed a binding agreement with the EPA to clean the Canal, an agreement legally required by the alternative approach under which the city submitted its plan. Yet the company appeared to be open to working with the feds whether the Canal was listed or not.

“Given the positive interaction that we have had with the EPA and the openness towards all ideas that they have shown, we are confident that these same benefits can be achieved with either the traditional or alternative regulatory process,” Young said.

In its announcement designating the Canal a Superfund site, the EPA named a number of companies it is holding responsible for contamination (potentially responsible parties or PRPs), with more to be identified in the coming months. Walter Mugdan, the Superfund director for the region, said that an agreement has already been reached with National Grid. Other PRPs include the City of New York, the U.S. Navy, Con Ed, Chemtura Corporation, Rapid American Corporation, Brinks, Beazer East, and Cibro Petroleum Products.

ConEd, the major gas and electric utility, had reportedly spilled oil and gasoline from 14 underground storage tanks located just two blocks east of the canal. In 2002 it removed those tanks, which were the subject of at least six reported spills. Besides the reported incidents, regulators have found illegal levels of volatile organic compounds and lead in the soil and groundwater near the old tanks.

This location used to be closer to the water. Prior to the 1950s, the 1st Street Basin extended from the Canal eastward toward 3rd Avenue. It was filled in sometime between 1953 and 1965. It is unknown what contaminants might be in the landfill.

Bob McGee, a spokesman for ConEd, said that the company’s environmental department wasn’t aware of the 1st Street Basin. “We don’t feel we have a role based on where we were located and what we did,” he said before the EPA made the Superfund designation.

The EPA requested documents and information about two of ConEd’s facilities – the refueling and truck yard near 3rd Avenue and its Gowanus substation located at the intersection of 27th Street and 3rd Avenue. ConEd lawyers replied with a detailed, firmly worded response.

“Con Edison expressly denies any liability for contamination at the Gowanus Canal Site, or for any investigation, response or remediation costs for the Gowanus Canal Site,” they wrote.

So at least one potentially responsible party has begun to fulfill the Bloomberg administration’s prophecy of litigation. “Obviously, there are a lot of lawyers involved. Who knows where it’s going to go,” said McGee.

A slew of toxic chemicals have been detected in the soil surrounding Chemtura Corporation’s former plant near the mouth of the Canal. Chemtura acquired the property in 2005 when the previous owner, Witco Corporation, was merged into the larger organization. Today, Chemtura is a global corporation with $3.8 billion in annual sales. The Gowanus plant closed in 1999, but before that groundwater samples had shown elevated concentrations of benzene, acetone, lead and cadmium and other chemicals. A phone message left with Chemtura seeking comment was not returned.

In recent months, the EPA sent more than 20 letters notifying other companies that they may be on the hook to pay for the cleanup.

One of the recipients of those letters was Amerada Hess Corporation, a global oil and natural gas company, which has operated a petroleum terminal at the mouth of the Gowanus since 1977.

Since the mid-1980s, when the federal government began maintaining detailed databases of hazardous spills, the Hess terminal has had at least 15 reported spills, leaks or instances of contaminated soil, with over 1,200 gallons of diesel and fuel oil spilled or leaked either directly into the canal or onto the land. It also occupies the site of the former Patchogue Oil Terminal, where the 1976 fire spilled millions of gallons of oil.

In early 2008 Hess settled a lawsuit brought by the state DEC alleging violations at the facility’s tanks and bulkheads, by paying $1.1 million.

Lorrie Hecker, a spokeswoman for Hess, said in an e-mail that the company is cooperating with the EPA but declined to comment further.

Bayside Fuel Oil Depot Corp., a family-owned fuel company with one active terminal on the Canal, also received an EPA letter. Up until 2005 it had operated a similar facility near the head of the Canal, selling various types of fuel oil, kerosene and diesel. There is still a potent smell of petroleum and one can see a slick sheen on the surface of the water near Sackett Street where it was located. Government records indicate that Bayside has spilled at least 300 gallons of fuel oil at its two facilities since 1990.

Reached on the phone, an unidentified Bayside representative said that they are barred from speaking about the Canal by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Today, the area along the Canal remains partially industrial, but much less so than in the past. Busy cranes can still be seen scooping scrap metal from yards onto barges. The last large-scale industry that exists here is the cement business.

Ferrara Brothers Building Materials, one of the largest concrete providers in the city, has operated at the major bend in the Canal on the west side at Hoyt Street between 4th and 5th Street since the early 1970s.

The company was one of three that the environmental organization Riverkeeper threatened to sue in September after it allegedly observed Ferrara polluting the Canal. Riverkeeper says it observed and documented the company discharging liquid cement and stone into the water.

Ferrara Brothers greatly benefitted from the building boom of the last few years. It produces half a million cubic feet of concrete annually—about half comes from the Gowanus plant—for major projects in the city, including the new Mets’ Citi Field baseball stadium and the Second Avenue Subway.

As of April, a representative from Riverkeeper said that the state was taking enforcement actions against Ferrara Brothers and 107 Sixth Street LLC and 32-2nd-J Corp., which jointly operate a parking lot on their property.

The third company Riverkeeper was pursuing, 6th Street Iron and Metal, has taken substantial steps to clean its shoreline, said Joshua Verleun, an attorney and investigator for Riverkeeper. It moved large piles of metal further away from the edge of the canal and built a concrete wall along the edge of the property. Verleun has been patrolling the Gowanus on the organization’s boat at least nine months of the year since 2005, looking for violators of environmental laws.

Ferrara Brothers has been in the unkind spotlight before. In the early ’90s, The New York Times reported it was accused of making payoffs to the Colombo crime family in exchange for favors. Calls to Ferrara Brothers were not returned.

CONFLICTING INTERESTS?

Others involved with the Canal have connections that have not been previously disclosed before now. Some were prominent figures in the run-up to the Superfund decision.

Holloway, who had been the point man for the Bloomberg administration on the Gowanus issue over the last year, is also the son of a prominent luxury residential developer, Caswell F. Holloway, III. The younger Holloway has attended community meetings and has been heavily involved in developing the specifics of the city’s alternative clean-up plan. He is now the newly-appointed commissioner of the city DEP, but had no prior environmental experience, having previously worked at a corporate law firm before joining the mayor’s office.

The elder Holloway’s business, C.F. Holloway, III and Company, which builds fancy houses and small-scale developments outside Philadelphia, Penn., has no vested interest in property along the Canal. But critics who say Mayor Bloomberg opposes the Superfund listing simply because he wants to save private development like the Toll Brothers luxury residential project, may be suspect. Repeated requests for an interview with Holloway for this story were denied.

Owen Foote, the treasurer of the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club, a local nonprofit, had criticized the potential Superfund designation while at the same time serving as an assistant vice president with the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which has board members appointed by the mayor.

“Any and all statements made [regarding the Gowanus] have been in my personal time and not while employed by the EDC,” Foote said in an email message. “What I do for a living has no relation to my hobby,” he added.

The Gowanus Dredgers are not directly supported by the city government, but take funding and grants from private donors, including the Citizens Committee for New York City, which is supported by city government funds. Also, if Toll Brothers is able to develop a condominium project on the canal’s banks, it would build a boathouse where the Gowanus Dredgers could store its canoes. Officially, the club did not have a stance about the Superfund controversy.

Since April 2009, the city worked to avoid a Superfund listing, both publicly and behind the scenes. While developing its own clean-up plan, the city employed a high-powered Washington, D.C. lobbying firm to provide consulting and technical services. Dawson & Associates specializes in water and environmental issues and regulatory compliance.

At a June meeting between EPA and city officials, three Dawson employees—Stephen D. Luftig, Dr. Jonathan P. Deason and Lester Edelman—attended on behalf of the city. Each has extensive connections in Washington to the agencies and players that will decide if the Gowanus Canal gets listed as a Superfund site, in addition to a high-level of expertise on environmental regulation. Although the mayor’s office says the three were not involved in lobbying activities, on the company’s Web site, it says the “firm has access to leaders and opinion makers in Washington.”

Marc LaVorgna, a mayoral spokesman, said that Dawson & Associates was retained because of its substantive expertise with the Superfund process and the Water Resources Development Act. “They did not have a role in lobbying Washington officials,” he said. “City officials, including the Mayor, have made our case in Washington.” While the Superfund decision was pending, Mayor Bloomberg called EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson on at least one occasion.

HOW DANGEROUS ARE THE CHEMICALS?

In 1997, Ben Longstreth, a member of Baykeeper, an environmental group, placed a mound of oysters covered in netting in the Gowanus Canal, as part of a project to test the health of various New York waterways.

The oysters died within a week. “They were white—seemed like they had just been bleached and then it looked like a rat had clawed a hole in the net,” said Longstreth. “It seemed to be purely a toxicity issue.”

The oysters’ plight is a far cry from the days when they bloomed in the Gowanus Creek. Dutch travelers visiting the area in 1679-1680 deemed them the best in the country. “They are large and full, some of them not less than a foot long, and they grow sometimes ten, twelve and sixteen together,” Jasper Dankers and Peter Lyster marveled in their journal.

Over 300 years later, the Canal’s water and surrounding soil have been contaminated with numerous chemicals and thousands of people have lived in the immediate area surrounding the Canal.

“If somebody were to do a health survey, they would find that people who grew up in these environments all their lives and raise children in these environments have issues,” said Balan of Urban Divers. “And most people in my neighborhood, elders that I’ve met, who have come and died in my time, they’ve died of cancer.”

The city Department of Health does study cancer clusters, but doesn’t break down data specifically for the Gowanus area. The exact risks to human health are debated within the scientific community. Experts do agree that eating fish or swimming in the Canal is considered highly dangerous, but the health risks of simply living near the Canal are less clear. There has never been a comprehensive health study of the area around it.

James Corrigan, a biologist who has studied the Canal for over 30 years, stood on the Third Street Bridge looking down and yelling at some brave folks paddling a canoe. Earlier in the morning, he had been helping one of his graduate students collect samples to test water quality and thought it was important to warn those below. “If your hands were near the water you should go home and launder the clothing well and wash your hands well,” he said, leaning against the drawbridge railing. “What you’ll find in here is fecal contamination bacteria.”

Corrigan was talking about the pathogens found in floating raw sewage. It had rained the night before. Following heavy rains, the sewage overflow runs into the Canal and contact with the water can lead to staph and e.coli infections.

Additionally, Corrigan is concerned about effects of contaminants from a process known as biological amplification. Levels of toxic chemicals become more concentrated, and more toxic, as they make their way through the food chain. Not only is this a problem as it relates to eating fish from the Canal, but it is also an issue if people grow gardens nearby.

“Back in 1983 I had the soil in my garden tested, and, as a result grow only decorative plants in the ground. Many people told me I was paranoid,” wrote Christine Mackellar, a neighborhood resident for almost 30 years, in a letter to the EPA. “However, testing conducted in recent years by the people from The Earth Institute at Columbia University confirmed my worst nightmares concerning the levels of toxicity resident in this body of water and its uplands.

While Corrigan stresses the risk of eating vegetables grown on the land, Joshua Cheng, a geochemist at Brooklyn College, says the risk is greatest from working with the soil. If its contaminants can be ingested – by inhaling dust from a condo construction site or by rubbing an eye after planting gardenias – then the dirt surrounding the canal becomes highly dangerous to human health, he says.

Also, according to Cheng, hydrogen sulfide is one of the biggest risks to human health.  This is the pervasive rotten egg smell in areas of the Canal. Its primary source is human fecal matter in the water. Chronic exposure to low levels of hydrogen sulfide has been implicated in miscarriages and harm to reproductive health.  At high levels it can cause eye irritation, sore throat, cough and nausea.

Another concern is the combined effect of all of the chemicals.

“The health risks of individual compounds are well known,” said Cheng. “But the combination of many contaminants is a huge issue. I don’t think people really know what the risk is.”

While Cheng is more conservative about the health risks of living near the canal and more optimistic about the ability to clean the area, Corrigan is less so.

Given the long history of industrial contamination of the soil, he worries that pollutants are seeping into underground waterways—the land used to be a salt marsh. He argues that attempts to clean the canal will continually be thwarted if the contamination from surrounding soil is not addressed. “The surrounding soil hasn’t been adequately studied,” said Corrigan.

Beyond his concern for plants and vegetable gardens, Corrigan had a more disturbing thought.

“Let’s say everything went well,” he said of plans to develop Gowanus. “The buildings went up, the playgrounds went in, all the wonderful Venice in Brooklyn went in that they want to do. And then 10 or 15 years down the road, all of a sudden they’re getting children coming down with leukemia and all kinds of other medical problems, allergic reactions and everything else. And then they turn around and say the soil has been contaminated all along. Where are we? What went wrong?”

DREAMS OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Of course, there are residents who dream of redevelopment along the Canal and see it as the key to the area’s future. Almost all agree that such reinvestment is key to the region. So it’s ironic that the very thing that got the canal into the most trouble – development – is the same thing that might save it.

The Bloomberg administration argued that it made sense for developers to be responsible for cleaning up the land they wished to develop.

Before the EPA decision, the administration maintained that a Superfund designation would harm development prospects along the Gowanus Canal. For the past seven years, the administration has been attempting to rezone the land around the Canal from industrial to a mix of residential and other uses.

Critics accused the city of opposing the Superfund because of its cozy relationships with developers. “The city bent over backwards to try to make developers who want to develop on the Canal happy,” said Verleun of Riverkeeper.

However, the city recently received a letter from the EPA notifying it that it will be potentially responsible for paying a portion of a Superfund cleanup. The city ran multiple facilities along the banks of the Canal, including a Department of Sanitation Incinerator on Hamilton Avenue. This alone would give the city good reason to oppose a listing. Still, stalled development appears to be the driving motivation for Superfund opposition.

A listing could have “a significant negative impact” on Gowanus neighborhood rezoning, said a survey conducted by the Bloomberg administration. The 25-block rezoning was placed on hold pending the EPA’s decision. According to the city, stigma related to Superfund site designations will be an impediment to fast and efficient development.

Toll Brothers Inc., the luxury condo builder, had publicly considered backing out of its plans unless the city’s cleanup plan moves forward. David Von Spreckelsen, a Toll spokesman, said that people would have such little contact with the sediment it wouldn’t be worth the cost to remove it. “It’s a lofty goal to take that out, but what’s the purpose?” he said. Shortly after the EPA announced its decision, Toll Brothers followed through on its threat and pulled out.

During the two years preceding the EPA announcement, Toll and other builders around the nation had backed out of development projects because the financials didn’t pencil. It was one of the worst housing markets in modern U.S. history. Yet in this case Toll Brothers representatives said that a Superfund designation was reason enough to leave.

Other projects have also been stalled. Whole Foods, the gourmet supermarket, had been developing a site just one block from the Canal, but has since suspended construction and has no immediate plans to build the store.

A mixed-use project, Gowanus Village, which was to include townhouses and loft condos, fell through a year before the Superfund controversy erupted. Africa-Israel, U.S.A., which has a controlling stake in ownership of the land, is still seeking to sell the property. When asked if the company was concerned about liability under Superfund, Andy Ashwal, a senior developer, said it was premature for him to comment.

Studies do show that there is a significant stigma associated with a Superfund listing. They also show that this stigma has created real economic impacts to surrounding property values.

Hilary Sigman, a professor who specializes in environmental economics at Rutgers University, points out that to economists, there is a difference between perceived risk from pollution and actual risk. According to Sigman, if people believe property is worth less, then it is worth less.  “To what extent you can say this is Superfund designation or actual contamination is hard to separate,” she said.

Lindsay Wilhelm, a senior project manager for the city’s Economic Development Corporation, conceded that the stigma may not be directly caused by a Superfund designation. “There is a lot of question over whether property values actually drop because of Superfund listing or if it’s just the knowledge of contamination that makes property values drop,” she said.

Enck, of the EPA, directly addressed the suggestion that development would be impeded by the Superfund listing. Pro-development and business groups had claimed that developers within 3,000 feet of the Canal would have difficulty securing private financing and obtaining loans due to the stigma caused by a listing. “Unfortunately, there is already a stigma there,” Enck said. “I reject this as a reason why development can’t move forward.”

The Gowanus Canal is in some ways the exception to the rule because it’s a densely populated area. Most Superfund sites are in solely industrial areas. Another anomaly is that with most cleanups, the choice is usually Superfund or nothing. In this case there was an alternative approach proposed by the city. No major studies have been conducted that look at the stigma or development costs related to an alternative cleanup option.

“We are not saying under the alternative plan there is not going to be any effect on real property taxes,” said Francesco Brindisi, a chief economist with the EDC, before the EPA’s decision. “There is going to be an effect, except that it’s shorter than what the effect would be under the Superfund listing.”

Therein lies the assumption made by city officials advocating for their proposal: that the city’s clean-up plan will take less time than the Superfund process.

The EDC made the same assumption when it conducted an analysis of the tax impact of a Superfund designation. While the EDC says that the actual analysis itself is confidential, officials were willing to talk about the report’s methodology.

Given the two scenarios—Superfund and the city’s alternative proposal—they relied on an assumption that the city’s plan would allow development in five years and that the Superfund cleanup would allow development in eight to 15 years.

If the Canal is not listed, they said, the planned projects along the Canal alone will generate over $500 million in tax revenue. Assuming that a Superfund designation moves forward, the EDC estimates that it will cost the city between $120 million and $189 million in lost tax revenue, depending on the length of the cleanup.

These projections came during the worst recession since the great depression. Despite the economic conditions, the Bloomberg administration reasoned that tax revenues from development would begin much sooner than if the Canal was listed.

“We’re not painting doomsday scenarios where all investment is delayed forever under Superfund designation,” Brindisi said. “Clearly there is going to be investments in the future when it’s cleaned up and the city is eventually going to get some taxes related to those investments. The city would rather have those tax revenues earlier rather than later.”

ANOTHER ERA’S ALTERNATIVE PLAN

The debates about how to handle the Canal’s pollution problems actually parallel the discussion and arguments being made 100 years ago. A mere 20 years after the Canal’s completion, industrialization had already taken its toll.

The Gowanus Canal Commission, formed in 1889, in a report to the mayor, deemed the Canal detrimental to health and called for it to be permanently filled in.

In its few decades of existence, the Canal was already seen as The Brooklyn Eagle put it in 1902, “a festering pool of filth.” Close living quarters throughout the city hadn’t helped—instead, they encouraged disease. Outbreaks of smallpox, cholera, scarlet fever, dysentery, typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis, yellow fever, diptheria, and malaria plagued the city, and disproportionately affected areas like Gowanus, where there were particularly squalid living conditions.

By 1893, it was described as a disease-breeding, foul-smelling, open sewer, and a “disgrace to Brooklyn,” by The New York Times, a notable accolade for a city whose streets were becoming lined with trash, sewage, horse manure, rats, and rotting horse corpses.

Despite the commission’s report, business interests won—the canal was not closed. The city approved an alternative plan to create a flushing tunnel that would continually refresh the waterway by pushing sewage, trash and industrial waste out to sea.

In 1911, the 6,200 foot underground tunnel, equipped with a 7-foot propeller was revealed to great fanfare. The New York Times wrote: “In gala attire, all South Brooklyn took a holiday yesterday to celebrate its long-looked-for emancipation from the evil smells given forth by the murky waters of Gowanus Canal.”

A parade of decorated craft drifted through the waterway surrounded by factories bedecked with flags and cheering crowds. Nine-year-old Jeanne Haviland, who held the honor of “Miss Gowanus,” threw white lilies out into the putrid water, symbolizing its future purity.

While sewage overflows and industrial pollution continued over the next four decades, the flushing tunnel replaced the water in the canal at an astounding rate of five times a day, washing away evidence of its contamination and significantly decreasing the pungent odors of the Canal.

In the 1950s, the creation of the Gowanus Expressway signaled the end of maritime commerce for Gowanus.  In 1955, the Army Corps abandoned its periodic dredging, and six years later the flushing station broke. For decades, the layers of contaminated sediment at the bottom of the Canal and the raw sewage would fester.

In 2009, the Bloomberg administration announced plans to partially address the issue of combined sewer overflows, or CSOs, which have been an inherent infrastructure problem in the city for over 70 years. In October, Mayor Bloomberg announced that $150 million worth of work would soon begin.

Of that, $85 million will go toward enhancing the pumping station, $50 million will go toward expanding the flushing tunnel’s capacity, and $15 million would go toward dredging the 750 feet at the head of the Canal.

Early on in the clean-up debate, the city worried that this work would not be able to move forward if the Canal were to be designated a Superfund site. EPA officials quickly dispelled this notion.

The work will increase flushing rates by approximately 40 percent and will reduce the volume of sewage discharges by 34 percent. For that reason, some residents remain worried that if the sewage is only reduced by a third, then even while the Canal cleanup moves forward—regardless of the process—sewage discharges will continue to pollute the Canal. Add to that the fact that the EPA says a Superfund cleanup will focus on the contaminated sediments in the Canal—not the floating sewage and storm run-off.

Still, as the Superfund cleanup moves forward, all stakeholders will have to temper their expectations about how fast the process can move. Because of the need for a comprehensive cleanup and considering the multiple levels of government involved, the process will be inherently slow. Compromises will need to be made while keeping a long-term vision for the Gowanus and the community’s health at the forefront.

There are 530 calories, 18 grams of fat, and 2/3 of the daily value of cholesterol in a bacon, egg, and cheese from Dunkin Donuts.

Diana Blanco doesn’t care. Blanco, 19, a senior at Lehman High School in the Bronx, gets the breakfast sandwich four times a week.

“The reason I come here is because it’s really close,” said Blanco, as she gestured to her school’s main entrance steps right across the street. “I never eat school lunch.”

But having fast food restaurants so close to schools may pose health risks for students. A recent study by University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University found that California 9th graders who attend schools with a fast food restaurant one-tenth of a mile away are 5.2 percent more likely to be obese.

One in six South Bronx public high school students is obese, a number 30 percent higher than the rest of the borough and 42 percent higher than all of New York City, according to a June 2007 report by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Lehman High School, near the Westchester Square section of the southeast Bronx, stands near several fast food restaurants. Besides the Dunkin Donuts in front, 40 classrooms on the western wing overlook the track, football field and a White Castle.  A little bit further down the street, the crown of Burger King looms.

All students but freshmen are allowed to leave school grounds for lunch, said Delma Sosa, the community health organizer at Lehman.

“They have a short amount of time for lunch. So they run out and whatever is closest, they eat,” said Sosa, who works for Montefiore Medical Center and visits the school every Monday.

Chris Hernandez, 16, a freshman at Lehman High School, doesn’t like most of his school lunch options.

“I just buy cookies,” he said. So after school, he bounces from one fast food restaurant to another.

Students are more familiar with White Castle sliders (their miniature burgers) than Brussels sprouts and many other vegetables, said Sosa, who introduces new fruits and vegetables weekly to the 30 members of the school’s health club. Sosa says some students come for the free produce and others enjoy learning new healthy recipes.

“It’s not that they don’t want fruits and vegetables. They just don’t have the option,” Sosa said.

In 2008, the New York City Department of City Planning initiated the Supermarket Need Index (SNI) to determine the neighborhoods with the highest levels of diet-related diseases and the largest populations with limited opportunities to purchase fresh foods. Three million New Yorkers live in these areas, including parts of the South Bronx and the Williamsbridge, Wakefield and Pelham Parkway areas of the Central Bronx.

In many of these communities, healthy eating is too expensive.  At Lehman, 3,599 out of the 4,322 students qualify for free or reduced lunch, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

A 2008 report by the Public Health Association of New York City, says “calorie-for-calorie, unhealthy foods cost less than healthy ones. Since unhealthy food is cheaper, low-income families are often forced to choose items that can lead to health problems over time.”

The abundance of fast food restaurants, especially near schools, makes the problem worse, nutrition advocates say.

“They are predatory. They try to get them young. They purposely locate themselves next to schools,” said Amie Hamlin, Executive Director at the New York Coalition for Healthy School Food.

To help combat this type of marketing, Hamlin’s coalition helps children understand food labels.  A pilot program provides a plant-based lunch menu for students at Future Leaders Institute K-8, a charter school in Harlem. The program also includes nutritional education in the classroom and cooking demos for parents. Hamlin hopes other schools will adopt the program.

“We need to make an environment so all choices are healthy choices,” said Hamlin.

“Parents come up to me and say, “My child always reads the label now. If they see partially hydrogenated oil, they put it back on the shelf,” she said.

Schools can help students make better choices, said Nick Freudenberg, Director of the Public Health program at Hunter College.  They can implement “healthy eating zones,” which parallel the no-smoking zones from a generation ago, he said. These zones would be located around schools and community centers and not allow any vending machines with sugary drinks or any advertisements of unhealthy foods.

Many aging schools, Freudenberg noted, don’t fix broken water fountains. But fixing these fountains and adding more water coolers could help curb soda drinking.

At Lehman, Sosa is working to establish a New York City Green Cart right outside the school. The carts only sell fresh produce like whole carrots, bananas, apples and berries. Sosa hopes these healthy options will have more students forgoing White Castle’s onion rings (540 calories) and picking up an apple for less than a dollar (only 80 calories).

Changing the eating habits of this young, obese community will come about only by changing the culture, according to Hamlin.

“We have to find a way to make a healthy diet hip,” Hamlin said.

 Soon after Nicholas Donaldi-Subero, the 18-year-old son of a Metropolitan Opera singer, was fatally stabbed in Queens, New York in January, some self-declared members of the Latin Kings gang took to the internet to boast about their prowess.

“We shut plenty of clicks down in the past and Corona Queens is not even an exception,” someone named ‘Farrocking’ from Far Rockaway wrote on the site thehoodup.com.

More and more social networking users like Farrockking are boasting about gang exploits, making threats about future activities and posting photos of themselves in gang colors. And increasingly those sites have become helpful tools for law enforcement officials who have used this material to prosecute alleged gangbangers. States like Ohio and California have introduced online evidence to link suspects with street crimes. Meanwhile, Florida has made it a felony offense to post gang-related material online. But this increased presence of both gang activity and law enforcement surveillance online raises questions about how to determine the line between youthful braggadocio and true bad behavior.

 ”If you’re a kid who wants to look cool by posing in gang colors and flashing a sign on your MySpace page it’s pretty chilling that the government can go after you,” said Rebecca Harrison Steele, the Regional Director of the ACLU Foundation of Florida.

Richard “Richy” Figueroa-Santiago has experienced the chill. Sheriff officers in Lee County, Florida, arrested Figueroa-Santiago and 13 others last November on charges that  they were violating a new state law against online gang activity. Figueroa-Santiago has pleaded not guilty.

In an interview, Figueroa-Santiago, 22, said that police singled out one image out of 200 pictures on his MySpace page. He described it as a cartoon of a car with the words “Kings drive-by” (for Latin Kings) written on the body of the car. A spokesman for the Lee County Sheriff’s Office, John Sheehan, said that Figueroa-Santiago was targeted for online gang recruitment as part of the office’s Operation Firewall program.

A Florida law passed in May 2008 makes it a third degree felony for someone to post electronic communications “furthering the interests of a criminal gang.” One of the ways he or she can do this is “to advertise his or her presence in the community” or to “intimidate or harass other persons.”

“It’s nonsense because I’m not in a gang,” said Figueroa-Santiago. “I was just having fun.” He claims he used to befriend members of the Latin Kings but was never involved in their crimes. Sherriff officials, in the record of his November 2008 arrest, listed his aliases as King Taco and King Richy.

Florida lawmakers passed this online statute and other gang measures in response to a growing presence of street gangs—a trend also seen nationwide. The 2009 FBI National Gang Threat Assessment report said that 58 percent of state and local law enforcement agencies reported that criminal gangs were active in their jurisdictions in 2008, compared with 45 percent in 2004.

Lee County Court records show Figueroa-Santiago had no prior charges against him besides traffic and vehicle code violations. Unlike some of the other arrestees who have other pending charges such as cocaine possession, he is only being tried for his online materials. His case and the cases of the others arrested in Operation Firewall are working their way through the court system. At least four have plead not guilty; six of the arrestees were juveniles so their cases are sealed.

Figueroa-Santiago faces up to five years in prison if convicted. Additionally, Florida is one of only three states where convicted felons lose their voting rights for life, even after they complete their sentences.

Police in other states have successfully investigated gang crimes with clues gathered online and provided prosecutors with web-based evidence for their trials. Cincinnati police last November arrested over 20 members of the Northside Taliband gang after tracking its members’ activities on Facebook and MySpace. The suspects were implicated in robberies, burglaries, assaults, firearms and drug trafficking, and at least one homicide, police said.

In 2006 a Northern California judge ruled that two teens charged with beating a boy into a coma could be tried as adults, after prosecutors showed MySpace.com photographs of them flashing local gang hand signs.

MySpace has a law enforcement team that works with police departments and prosecutors to identify gang members, according to a confidential MySpace law enforcement training presentation viewed by the NYC News Service.

One example from the MySpace training materials is about a member of the “Rollin 20’s” gang from Los Angeles who was suspected of murdering a rival. An expert witness needed evidence to prove gang association (which usually carries a harsher sentence). The prosecutor found photos on the suspect’s page in which he was flashing gang signs, holding weapons and hanging out with known gang members, the training materials say.

“It used to be, if you were threatening a rival, it had to be on the street, at a club or, some way or another, in person,” said Professor David Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. “The net just lets it come out in different ways…in websites, rap exchanges and still photos of them brandishing guns.”

Identifying gang members through social networking sites is one of the main responsibilities of the modern gang officer, said Louis Savelli, a retired 21-year veteran of the NYPD gang unit who now trains officers in online investigating. He said law enforcement personnel troll these sites for intelligence on gang activity and to gain corroborating evidence to bolster criminal prosecutions.

“You hear something happen like a stabbing, first thing you do is hit the street, then you hit the Internet,” said Savelli.

New York gang members aren’t online as much as those in other cities, said Savelli, because they’re more focused on drug-dealing than in other parts of the U.S. and avoid this attention. “The real hardcore guys who have a business to run don’t want the pressure,” he said.

Most of the kids at the Queens Police Athletic League are not hardcore. They attend a youth employment training program coordinated by Larry Green, who at 37 is dismayed by gang violence in his hometown of South Jamaica. Green hears about street fights started by online rivals, like the one that claimed Nicholas Donaldi-Subero’s life.

Many teens claim affiliation with a gang just for their own safety, even if the group’s not known for its violence or crime, said Green. “It’s rare to find a kid who’s not part of a clique or a group.”

In March 1996, a bodega clerk scanned a lineup of suspects at a police station in Astoria, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens. Two armed men in ski masks had robbed his nearby store. The clerk recalled glimpses of light black skin behind one mask, though he hadn’t seen either robber’s face.

He picked out John Scott, a construction worker. Scott later testified he was nowhere near the store. The clerk conceded at trial he was uncertain Scott was one of the robbers. Despite the clerk’s reversal, Scott was sentenced to 25 years in jail.

Scott languished in jail four years before an appeals court threw out the conviction.

For his troubles, Scott sued the state under a special law for those wrongfully convicted—a statute written to fulfill a “moral demand” to compensate those who needlessly lost years of their lives behind bars.

It took Scott 6 years to prevail under the law after he was released. He got $25,000 in compensation for each year he lost in jail.

A review by the New York City News Service shows that the state’s legal system shortchanged Scott and that there is a wide disparity in payments for the wrongfully convicted.

In the past ten years, 22 people have been compensated under the state’s law. Lawyers who have handled multiple cases in the system said they believed it doled out payments at an even rate.

But state records show Scott got more than ten times less per year in jail than the person at the upper end of the scale.

Then there are those who fared even worse than Scott—and got nothing.

The wrongful conviction compensation law, passed in 1984, includes several complex provisions so that at least one man exonerated by DNA testing was deemed ineligible for payments.

In another case, a wrongfully convicted woman spent 25 years in prison before key evidence against her was discredited. Her wrongful conviction compensation claim was denied.

And in some cases, the wrongfully convicted got compensation by circumventing the state system altogether.

But despite its drawbacks, the New York State law has some advantages over other state laws.

THE JOHN SCOTT CASE

To best understand the system and its problems, it pays to look closer at the details in the Scott case.

On March 21, 1996, two men wearing black ski masks entered a Queens bodega. Guns drawn, the taller robber demanded cash from William Vizcarrondo, who was working the register.

The robber demanded Vizcarrondo’s jewelry and a pack of cigarettes, and then left with his partner.

John Scott was brought in a week later to the 114th Precinct in Queens as a suspect in an unrelated investigation involving a shooting. He was acquitted on that charge. While there, police asked Scott to be part of a lineup in the bodega robbery investigation. Scott consented.

Vizcarrondo looked at the men arrayed against the wall. He recalled glimpses of the taller robber’s light black skin and his deep voice. Scott fit the man he remembered.

But Scott, a part-time construction worker, wasn’t the taller robber. He wasn’t even in Queens at the time. He was watching television with friends in Manhattan.

During the trial, Vizcarrondo conceded that because the men wore masks, there was no way he could be sure Scott was one of them; witness misidentification is not uncommon in wrongful conviction cases. Still, the jury convicted Scott.

Four years into a 25-year sentence, Scott’s case was reopened before the Second District Court of Appeals.

“The chief witness for the People in this case made no visual identification of the defendant at trial, and conceded his inability to do so,” Judge Lawrence J. Bracken wrote. “This witness also made no in-court identification of the defendant based on his presumed ability to recall the supposedly distinctive voice of the tall robber.”

Scott was free.

Scott then made a wrongful imprisonment compensation claim, something that is possible in 26 states.

“The whole reason that this wrongful conviction statute was enacted in New York was to try to make it quicker and easier, and more certain, for people who it’s quite clear have been wrongfully convicted, and have been exonerated, to get some money,” said Adele Bernhard, a law professor at Pace University who has studied New York’s wrongful conviction compensation statute.

Under the statute a judge reads the facts in the case and, if the lawsuit is appealed by the state—many are—the judge determines whether the facts fit the law’s criteria. If it does, the state tends to settle the claim rather than proceed with a potentially lengthy trial.

In Scott’s case, instead of going to trial, the sides settled for $100,000—an average of $25,000 for every year Scott spent in jail.

Bernard and other attorneys said that while the state law has no explicit provision for evenhanded payments, considering such factors as a person’s income and potential career trajectory, they believe the payments have been about the same—around $100,000 per year of incarceration.

But at $25,000 per year incarcerated, Scott got one of the lowest average payouts in the past ten years.
James O’Donnell, for instance, was wrongfully convicted in the late 1990s of sodomy and spent two years in jail, half the time of Scott. Yet in 2006 he settled to get $150,000 for each year in jail.

Robert McLaughlin, wrongfully convicted of murder and robbery in 1981, spent six years in jail before he was exonerated. In 1989 he was awarded $1.9 million—more than $300,000 per year he spent in jail.

Settling out of court tends to result in slightly less money. Settlements resulted in a median of about $82,000 per year of incarceration for the 29 cases in which the number of years the wrongfully convicted person spent in jail could be determined.

Awards—where the case goes to trial and a judge decides the final amount—resulted in a median of just over $86,000 per year of incarceration.

Yet in the past decade only one case has gone to trial. The other eighteen cases during that period have been settled out of court.

Lawyers interviewed said that if a claim has merit, settling is simply less time consuming and less costly for the claimant and for the state, and that there was once a cap on settlements.

BIRTH OF A WRONGFUL CONVICTION LAW

Before 1984, most wrongful conviction claims were nearly impossible to secure. They required special legislation signed by the governor. From 1947 to 1984, five wrongfully convicted people received awards from the state, ranging from $7,000 to $1 million.

Then came the case of Isidore Zimmerman, which captured headlines and spurred public debate.

Zimmerman, a Columbia student convicted of killing a police detective in 1947, filed one of the state’s most well known unjust conviction claims during that time.

After serving 25 years in prison, an appeals court ruled in 1962 that prosecutors suppressed evidence pointing to Zimmerman’s innocence, and he was freed.

Zimmerman then made several unsuccessful attempts to recover damages. Finally, Governor Hugh Carey signed special legislation in 1981 that allowed Zimmerman to sue the state.

Zimmerman was awarded $1 million by the Court of Claims in 1983, an average of $40,000 for each year he was incarcerated. A year later, Zimmerman died of a heart attack at age 66.

His case, among others, led Governor Mario Cuomo to request that the New York State Law Review Commission draft a wrongful conviction compensation law. The resulting report says “morality demands” that the state compensate the wrongfully convicted, but it does not say much a year in prison might be worth.

“Few occurrences are more tragic than the conviction and imprisonment of a person for a crime he did not commit,” the report says. For a wrongfully convicted person, money is, “the most viable method of assisting him to recoup what he lost.”

“By imposing financial liability upon the State, recognition is given to a proposition that would seem to be self-evident, namely that it is the State’s obligation, and no one else’s, to do what justice and morality demand when an innocent person is convicted of a crime he did not commit,” the report says.

The commission identified four basic criteria for wrongful conviction claims: a person must have been convicted and incarcerated; that conviction must have been overturned or vacated; the convicted person must be able to prove his innocence; and, he must not have contributed to his conviction by his own conduct, for instance, by confessing to police.

Since the law was enacted in 1984, at least 250 compensation claims have been filed, resulting in 15 awards and 27 settlements totaling nearly $24 million in payments.

HOW AWARDS ARE MADE

Many of the cases that went to trial are not easily available, but one case that is available provides some insight into the judge’s thought process.

Terrence Ferrer filed a claim after he was exonerated of a Bronx murder in 1984. He spent about 12 years in prison.

“I tried Ferrer because you couldn’t settle for more than $50,000 in those days,” said Ferrer’s attorney, Irving Cohen, who has represented people in roughly a dozen wrongful compensation claims.

At trial, Cohen called an economic expert to estimate Ferrer’s foregone earning potential. Ferrer was awarded a Master’s degree in prison and expressed interest in getting a law degree. The expert found Ferrer would have earned a total of $1.58 million in past and future wages alone.

Judge Robert Abrams disagreed. He mentioned Ferrer’s past employment at fast food restaurants, though not how much Ferrer earned. The judge said there was no way of knowing whether Ferrer’s employment goals would have been met.

But Abrams was much more sympathetic to the stigma attached with a prison term.

“It is as if a man’s life has been terminated at one point and then resurrected later; yet with all the intervening traumas, dangers and injuries that will endure, linger and become a permanent part of his life,” Abrams wrote.

For past wages, the judge awarded $135,000, roughly $11,250 per year incarcerated. For the loss of future earning capacity, Abrams awarded $225,000, without explaining how he arrived at the amount.

The remainder of Ferrer’s $1.56 million award was for mental anguish and loss of reputation.

At age 43 Ferrer died of a heart attack.

THE NATIONAL LANDSCAPE

New York’s compensation law does have some distinct advantages compared with the rest of the country. The Court of Claims may award any amount—there is no floor or ceiling.

Federal claims, meanwhile, are capped at $100,000 per year of incarceration for plaintiffs sentenced to death, and $50,000 per year of incarceration for all others.

In Montana, people wrongfully convicted of a felony who served time are entitled only to financial aid toward education at state colleges.

In Missouri, only those who are found wrongfully convicted by DNA evidence may apply for restitution, at a limit of just over $18,000 per year of incarceration. A wrongfully convicted person is barred from civil lawsuits if he makes a claim under that law.

The New Jersey law creates a floor of $20,000 for each year incarcerated, making it one of the few states that has a minimum award. The maximum is twice the yearly salary of the person the year before he was convicted.

Awards in Massachusetts are limited to $500,000, but the court may also order the state to provide physical and emotional health services, and half-off tuition at state universities.

And in North Carolina, awards are capped at $750,000, but job training and tuition reimbursement may also be awarded.

In New York, innocence must be shown by clear and convincing evidence—not the lowest burden of proof, but also not the highest. In contrast, claimants in Connecticut need only show a preponderance of evidence, the lowest burden of proof.

Once a New York claimant proves his innocence he has a good chance of winning an award or reaching a settlement. In a way, the case is decided before it is accepted by the court.

“It’s an odd statute that way, but I understood why they did it,” Cohen said. “But, I think if the case is reversed or thrown out on any ground you should be able to bring the lawsuit and let the judge decide early on.”

“There are going to be people prevented from suing,” he added.

UNABLE TO SUE

In 1973, Betty Tyson was a 25-year-old drug addict and prostitute working the streets of Rochester.

In December that year, a consultant to the Eastman Kodak Company soliciting prostitution was found strangled in an alley.

Tyson was convicted of the murder based on two eyewitness accounts. There was no physical evidence linking her to the crime.

After more than two decades in prison, Rochester media and activists took up Tyson’s case. By 1998, Betty Tyson was free—but her $12.5 million wrongful conviction claim was denied.

That’s because her conviction was reversed based on police misconduct. The police had withheld evidence that showed to her innocence. But prosecutors did not retry her case, and Tyson was never acquitted.

Even as he upheld the state’s appeal of Tyson’s suit, Court of Claims judge Donald Corbett wrote that her case highlighted problems with the New York law.

“The Legislature, in its wisdom, has placed a high threshold upon those seeking recompense under this statute, and unfortunately for Betty Tyson, her claim cannot surmount that limitation,” Corbett wrote. “So, unfortunately for Betty Tyson, there can be no recovery here, and no opportunity for her to prove her innocence, perhaps her ultimate goal. Regardless of whether this decision survives appellate scrutiny, the Legislature may wish to revisit this ‘structurally complicated statute.’”

There has been only one legislative update to the statute since it was passed. “Anthony’s Law” named for Anthony Capozzi, a wrongfully convicted man who was exonerated by DNA evidence after more than 20 years in prison, gives docket priority to compensation claims in which innocence is proven through DNA evidence.

WHEN SCIENCE FAILS

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) contains the genetic code that convicts criminals and sets the innocent free.

But when New York’s compensation law was passed, DNA technology was in its infancy. If a person confessed to a crime, he probably did it, the thinking went.

“One of the things we’ve learned is that people can be innocent and still confess,” said Adele Bernhard, the Pace professor.

That’s exactly what Douglas Warney did when he confessed to a stabbing murder in Rochester in 1996.

Warney’s knowledge of the crime scene ultimately led to his conviction. He knew the layout of the murder victim’s house, according to court papers. He knew what the victim was cooking. When an officer asked how he was doing, Warney said, “not good…I got a body.”

He was convicted on the strength of his unrecorded confession—though blood found at the scene did not match his, or the victim’s.

Ten years later, DNA testing matched that blood and other physical evidence to Eldred Johnson, who was already in prison for a similar murder. Johnson confessed to the crime, and Warney was freed.

Earlier this year, Warney sued the state for wrongful conviction compensation. Despite the DNA evidence, his $10 million claim was denied.

“There is no doubt that this confession contributed to [Warney’s] conviction,” Court of Claims Judge Renee Forgensi Minarik wrote. “[Warney] argues, however, that because his confession contained information that [he] could not possibly have known, his confession was obviously the product of misconduct and coercion on the part of the police officers that secured it.”

Judge Minarik decided that Warney did not provide substantial evidence of coercion. She decided that Warney had contributed to his own conviction and that, by law, he was not entitled to compensation.

When Warney was released in 2006, news reports elaborated on his psyche and pointed to a different conclusion. They pointed to a man who was, at the least, confused when he confessed.

Warney had AIDS-related dementia, an eighth-grade education, and an IQ of 68, according to the news reports. He claimed he was ill when he confessed. Several points in his confession were patently untrue—at one point he said he’d used his brother’s car that day, a car the brother gave up six years before the murder.

THE CIVIL ROUTE

But compensation through the state law is not the only means for the wrongfully convicted to recover money. If there is evidence of a civil rights violation the wrongfully convicted may successfully file a civil rights lawsuit.

Although the Court of Claims process is streamlined compared to the civil route, attorney Joel Rudin complained that in the Court of Claims, “you have a trial in front of a single judge paid by the State of New York.”

Awards in civil suits are decided by a jury, and damages tend to be higher than in the Court of Claims, Rudin said. The burden of proof in civil cases is also lower—the claimant does not have to clearly and convincingly prove his innocence.

In 2003, Rudin helped secure a $5 million settlement for Albert Ramos, who spent seven years in jail on a rape conviction that resulted from prosecutorial misconduct. That settlement is far higher than any of the settlements or awards under the state’s wrongful conviction law.

Betty Tyson, the former prostitute and drug addict, got $1.2 million in 1998 by filing a civil rights suit against the City of Rochester.

In 1989, five teenagers from Harlem admitted to beating and raping then-Salomon Brothers employee Trisha Meili in Central Park. The teenagers, aged 14 to 16, were all convicted and sentenced to prison.

But the confessions, four of which were videotaped, were coerced, and DNA evidence found at the scene matched none of the boys’.

The confessions were secured using, “force and trickery, sleep deprivation and isolation from their families,” according to court documents.

The DNA evidence matched that of Matias Reyes, who was in jail for a separate rape and murder. The boys were not fully cleared until Reyes confessed to the crime in 2002.

The wrongfully convicted men and their families have since filed a $250 million federal civil rights lawsuit against the police and prosecutors who arrested them and tried their case.

At least one of the exonerated men, Yusef Salaam, has also filed a compensation claim with the Court of Claims. His lawyer, Myron Beldock, said it would “complicated” to win damages under the state’s wrongful conviction law because Salaam and the others made false confessions.

“We decided to bring both cases,” Beldock said. “There are a lot of reasons why, but that is something I would consider confidential.”

He added, “If we recover full damages in the civil rights case there is no reason to go back,” to the Court of Claims.

LEFT WANTING

For more than a decade, Michael Clancy’s life was reduced to confinement and routine. He was convicted in 1999 of a murder in the Bronx that witness testimony would later show he didn’t commit.

“Every morning I woke up and I saw those bars, and that was my greeting every morning,” Michael Clancy said. “Every morning I’d wake up, I would sit up, I would look up—and there they are. And that’s what I went through for 11 years.”

Clancy didn’t know what to do when he was released. He didn’t know how to establish credit. He didn’t know how to get a state ID.

“Thank God” his lawyer was waiting for him outside, Clancy said, because he didn’t even know how to use a Metrocard.

State-funded programs to help ex-convicts readjust to life outside of prison were unavailable to him. Their money was reserved for people who had actually committed crimes, Clancy said.

Indeed, no social services, such as job and readjustment training, were awarded to those wrongfully convicted in any of the cases reviewed for this article.

“They didn’t have a system for a person who was found innocent,” he said.

Clancy is doing well for himself now. He has an apartment, owns an Ipod, and says he bought an $8,000 bed.

But in a way, Clancy was lucky. His sister was able to support him after his release, and his union, the International Union of Elevator Constructors, offered him work immediately.

“They welcomed me with open arms,” Clancy said. “They said, ‘listen, you’ve been through so much the least we can do is at least give you an opportunity to prove yourself.’”

“People in my position, I hate to say, usually don’t get a break. A lot of these people, even though they’re found innocent, there’s always a question in the back of an employer’s mind, you know? This guy’s been in jail for this amount of time, you know? What did that do to him?”

On the advice of his lawyer, Clancy wouldn’t say whether he would file a claim under New York’s wrongful conviction law.

Additional reporting by Steven Bronner, Joshua Cinelli, Dan Macht, Rosaleen Ortiz and Matt Townsend.

Many gay and lesbian bookstores followed, all over the country, as the movement grew in the following years. Many of those bookstores have closed recently, however, including the Oscar Wilde. Many see the disappearance of the stores as a sign of success growing out of the wider acceptance of gays and lesbians throughout society. They don’t need their own special bookstores any more because so many general bookstores carry gay and lesbian books.

The doors at Oscar Wilde closed in the spring of 2009, only weeks before Amazon.com accidentally pushed all books deemed gay and lesbian to the pornography section, a sad reminder of the days when a gay and lesbian bookstore was necessary due to discrimination. It’s worth taking a look back on those days.

Forty years ago, Christopher Street was the center of the Stonewall Inn riots. Today, the street still has problems with theives and vandals, but it still lies in one of the pricest areas of real estate, even for New York. Those riots of the 1960s and ‘70s, when Greenwich Village was the heart of a revolution seem like a long time ago in an age when gay marriage has been passed in Iowa, and when the Oscar winner for Best Picture played gay politician Harvey Milk, who was frequent visitor to the store and, for a time, a boyfriend of Craig Rodwell, the founder.

“You could say it’s really good because it means we don’t need segregated facilities but at the same time there’s something about going to a queer space that gets lost,” said Sarah Chinn, the executive director of the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at CUNY Graduate Center.

In 42 years, however, Rodwell’s tiny shop became packed with not only books and DVDs, but also people. Located on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village—just one block from the infamous Stonewall Inn—the bookstore became an information center, intellectual hothouse gather place and a home for the gay and lesbian movement.

When the Oscar Wilde Bookshop first opened its doors, the nearby Christopher Street park was home to homeless gay youths, now a statue stands in memory of the Stonewall Inn riots. The Christopher Street Liberation Parade, organized at the Oscar Wilde, is now known as the Gay Pride Parade.

While there was a once a network of gay and lesbian bookstores in New York, the Oscar Wilde was the first and now the last to fall. Other famous institutions such as Creative Visions on Hudson Street and A Different Light in Chelsea all closed their doors in the last decade. The website for Oscar Wilde suggests only three stores for patrons looking for gay titles: Lambda Rising in Washington D.C., Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia and Common Language Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Martin Duberman, the author of the book “Stonewall” and a professor emeritus at Lehman College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, suggested this is part of a trend of gay bookstores closing.

“I’m always sad when a bookstore closes, especially a gay bookstore,” Duberman said.

Rodwell died in 1993, and the neighborhood surrounding his store is no longer the revolutionary one it once was. While up and down Christopher Street, from its western edges near the Hudson to the eastern end at Sixth Avenue, gay pride flags still wave proudly outside many of the stores and the Stonewall Inn still stands, instead of having a notorious reputation, the old articles about the Stonewall riots are framed in the window in order to attract tourists. A Starbucks is now at the corner of Sheridan Square, where young homeless gay youths used to sleep because they had nowhere to go. Christopher Street has become one of the priciest areas of real estate, with tree-lined streets and old buildings that were once dilapidated have been fixed up and for sale for high prices.

In the last few weeks before the store closed, the shop filled with regulars, tourists and reporters.

Cecilia Martin, 39, working the register, called the store a “safe place” for the gay community. She herself remembered her first time visiting the store, which she loved so much she later applied for a job.

“I didn’t even know what being gay was—when I was 16, I thought I was the only one that was,” said Gary Merston, 46, of East Orange. “Since I was 16, I’ve been coming to this store. I love this place.”

Merston stopped by with one his 14-year-old son, one of two children he adopted with his partner. Merston and his son said were saving souvenirs from the bookstore, right down to the shopping.

“When I saw Channel 7 broadcast, I couldn’t believe it,” Merston said. “I said, this is not really happening. We must have watched it 10 times, and repeated the news over and over again.”

Both Martin and the last owner of the bookstore, Kim Brinster, a former manager who bought the place after one of the store’s near-death experiences in 2003, said they felt the store is a victim of the current hard economic times, and the increasing presence of on-line retailers.

“Unfortunately, we do not have the resources to weather the current economic crisis and find it’s time to call it a day,” Brinster said.  “So thanks to all those who have been a part of the Oscar Wilde family over the years, you have truly been a part of the global community.”

Rodwell had been one of the more militant members of the homophile movement in the early 1960s, but by 1966, he was fed up with the Mattachine organization, the leading group fighting for gay rights across the country. Rodwell wanted to open a bookstore that would be an intellectual gathering place for gay people, and in fact, he banned the sale of any pornography in the early years. In order to save up the money for the bookstore, he worked summers at a motel at the Fire Island Pines, the popular vacation spot for gays on Long Island.

After two summers, Rodwell had saved enough money to rent space at 291 Mercer Street, the first location of the store. It moved two years later to its famed home on Christopher Street. The Mercer Street location, according to Duberman, was the cheapest place Rodwell could find.

Duberman profiles Rodwell in his book and wrote Rodwell struggled in those early days—and even had to ask his own mother to help set up the store the night before it opened due to a lack of resources. Rodwell later relented on the pornography ban in order to make some money, Duberman said.

When the bookstore first opened, the mainstream press either ignored it or attacked its existence. According to Duberman, a columnist for the New York Post compared it with see-through dresses and topless flicks, despite Rodwell’s hatred of pornography. Some gay activists were not happy with the store because it did not stack pornography, and other claimed it was stinted more toward men. Still, Rodwell put in 70-hour weeks and ran the store by himself for the first 18 months.

In addition to the bookstore, Rodwell also began his own gay and lesbian organization, called the Homophile Youth Movement—later amended to Homophile Youth Movement in Neighborhoods, so the acronym would be HYMN and less gender-specific—and used the store as the headquarters. He published a newsletter called The New York Hymnal, where he called for homosexual law reform in New York State. Rodwell even hung a banner in the front window proclaiming “Bookshop of the Homophile Movement.” He would later replace it with a bumper sticker proclaiming “Gay is Good.”

During the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, the police attempted to raid the Stonewall Inn, located at 51 Christopher Street, only a few doors down from the new location of the bookstore. But the raid did not go as planned and turned into a full-scale riot. Rodwell, who personally hated the Stonewall Inn because he thought it was unsanitary, could see the riot going on from Oscar Wilde and called the newspapers and three New York papers—The New York Times, the New York Post, and the New York Daily News—all covered the siege. For the next few nights, people gathered on Christopher Street to protest—and Rodwell printed leaflets from the bookstore to help organize. From the back room of the bookstore, Rodwell encouraged a boycott of the Stonewall Inn, which closed only a few weeks after the riot.

One year later, Rodwell organized “Christopher Street Liberation Day” from Oscar Wilde, now celebrated each year as “Gay Pride Day.” The gay rights revolution had been born.

Rodwell died of stomach cancer in 1993, and one of the store’s managers, Bill Offenbaker, bought the store. After Offenbaker struggled to keep it afloat, Larry Lingle took over in 1996.

But Lingle could not save it either, and he announced he would have to close its doors in 2003. At the last minute, Deacon Maccubbin, the owner of gay bookstore Lambda Rising in Washington D.C., bought the store and rescued it at the last minute. Three years later, Brinster, then one of the store’s managers, took over.

While rents in Greenwich Village have increased over the years, Brinster said the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop paid only $3,000 a month, well below market value. But that was still too much.

Sarah Chinn, the gay and lesbian center director at CUNY, said she thought the world around Oscar Wilde had changed too much for it to survive.

“Now you don’t have to schlep all the way to the Village to buy a gay book—you can just go on-line and order it,” Chinn said. “I think someone could see it as a good sign. That we’re not totally marginalized, but at the same time, community-run institutions have a place and they have a value beyond what’s available. It’s essentially a shame that it’s the oldest gay bookshop in the United States and it’s closing.”

Martin said the full force of the bookstore’s closing hadn’t hit her yet.

“I think it’s definitely a loss,” Martin said. “It’s like, you may realize someone is dying, but you don’t understand the real impact…and they won’t until they don’t have us as a resource—the regulars who come in every week.”

One month before the scheduled closing date, the last meeting of the Lesbian Book Club still met. Instead of Rodwell’s famous “Gay is Good” sticker in the front windows, they were covered in “Final Sale” stickers. The club was meeting to discuss “Aimee and Jaguar” by Erica Fisher.

On the last day, the store officially closed at 7 p.m. The doors were locked, but the club members lingered in the trailblazing store for just a little while longer.