"Assassinated" Arizona congressional Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is UNDEAD

She has become Ligeia, every simultaneously living and dead character straight out of Poe's short stories. The press disagrees all over the place: She's alive, she's dead, she's in critical condition--no, no, wait, she's dead, really, we mean it this time, really.

Welcome to the (mis)information age. One story has it that she's alive one moment, the next, that she is dead. No one needs to be told to jump to conclusions when the press has already done it for them in this era of instant gratification.

Nothing is true, everything is permitted--under copyright law. Welcome to the 19th century, it's back, and everyone's an expert on anything you can name, regardless of whether they have any credentials or not.

Breaking News: Gabrielle Giffords is undead, undead, undead, undead...

http://news.google.com/news/story?hl=en&q=Arizona+congresswoman+dead&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ncl=dyWPwW5FGhNgspMMUxFOa5u4-U5_M&ei=vMkoTZ6OOISq8AahufT8AQ&sa=X&oi=news_result&ct=more-results&resnum=1&ved=0CBkQqgIwAA

Has the Poe Toaster called it quits?

Baltimore, Maryland--I think the Poe Toaster--whoever they were over the years--made the right choice in calling it quits. Why? It keeps the memory and the mystery intact and ends things on a good foot. There was good reason to. With the problems of nitwits trying to unmask the shadowy figure who each year made a toast of cognac to Poe, his aunt, and his wife, and left roses to their memory, or senile old men claiming they were that person, it was time to close the curtain. Why make any changes with a legend? Why let someone finally ruin it?

Just three years ago, a self-proclaimed "Poe scholar" named Sam Popora claimed that he was the Poe Toaster stating that he began in 1967, but forgetting that back issues of Baltimore papers record it as having begun around 1949. That's an incredibly bad lie, yet the press swallowed it, sending-out dozens of journalists and video crews to speak with him. A brief search of the Internet would have told them all they needed to know, that Popora was full of shit! Hit on the Poe-labels for more, I was thanked by the director of the Poe house at the time in my comments section during the Popora mishap.

The mystery is very much intact and I hope that the individual who began this journey in 1949 and his family take the facts to the grave. One of the points to life is that there should be mystery to it or it's boring. We need these symbols to feed our souls. Our souls will remain fed on this count, at least for the foreseeable future. I don't expect everyone who reads this to understand why all of this is important, but let sleeping dogs lie, and let the dead finally have their rest.

Mr. Poe's life was a troubled one, and fighting over his remains and trying to attach oneself to his legacy as his literary executors in the 19th century did; Popora in this one attempted to do and also failed; as well as Philadelphia and Boston have during this decade; is undignified. The great American writer is never leaving his resting place in Baltimore, it's never going to happen. Poe died in that city and belongs buried there. Richmond--perhaps--has some claim to him, but Poe lived in Baltimore and has been interred there for well over a century without contest. He is our national treasure, and the man who introduced many of us to mystery. Fitting then that this mystery related to him should remain one, hopefully for all time.

Edgar Allan Poe @ J to the Power of 7

WWW--Of all of the pieces, articles, and observations I've written on this site since August of 2006, I can say that this series written on Edgar Allan Poe comprises some of the very best of my writing. I have related very deeply to Poe almost my entire life for a host of reasons and consider him above Whitman and the New England "mystics." His only real peer in my opinion is Mark Twain, possibly Herman Melville, and Ambrose Bierce coming close on his heels.

Poe saw the horror that was the America of his time and the darkness of the human soul, while Melville, Twain, and Bierce saw where it was all heading, Melville even before the American Civil War in his prescient short story, "Bartelby, the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street" (1853). Read this story now and tell me with a straight face that the man wasn't brilliant, wasn't aware of the wrong-turn America began taking around that time, now culminating in what could very well be the endgame of the species.

For being the bearer of bad news, Melville's incredible popularity waned, and he died poor and all-but-forgotten. Edgar Allan Poe wasn't much luckier, yet the notion that he wasn't popular or famous during his short life is inaccurate--he was. The problem was that Poe's publishers were greedy scumbags who paid him poorly, just like most employers nowadays; he was literally the very first American to attempt making a living by writing alone, which should tell you something about the rest of his literary peers at the time.

At the very end of his life, things were looking up. I admire all of the aforementioned writers deeply, but with Poe--with Poe--I feel like one of many of his humble protectors. In the last few years, morons in various America cities have tried to claim him as their own, and without any merit. Philadelphia is perhaps the most egregious case in their claim to his remains, but Boston might be even more galling, the town he hated the most and called "frogpondia." What do these people want?

Publicity, of course, and God knows they don't have the moral courage Poe had to be himself, for better or for worse. What they want is to take the easy route: none of the suffering and poverty that the great writer had to endure, with some of the benefits he was barely able to have in life. The legend came after his death. Riding on the coattails of a dead man who suffered the tortures of the damned is immoral. Enjoy (or don't)...

A good place to start (follow the labels):http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2007/08/poe-toaster-is-not-mark-felt.html

Boston joins Philadelphia in the stupidity of claiming Southerner Edgar Allan Poe as their own

Boston, Massachusetts--He hated the city. He hated the Trancendentalist writers like Emerson and Thoreau, accused Longfellow of plagiarism, and referred to the literary community of Boston during his lifetime as "Frogpondium." If there was a city that Poe hated more than Philadelphia, it was Boston. I agree with him, both towns are vile filth-holes of human iniquity that show no signs of ever changing.

Not that that's stopping the same kind of silver spoon people that Poe would have loathed from claiming him--an avowed Southerner--as one of their own.

Poe was merely born in Boston to his actor parents who had lived a gypsy-like vagabond existence that he was tragically destined to repeat. Yet, "Poe is a Bostonian." He was? The reality is that he was born in Boston--at best--on accident, and it could have been in Trenton, New Jersey depending on the day he arrived into the world.

Never mind that his readings in the town were meant to insult everyone there, or that he was generally loathed by the well-heeled writers that populated Boston and its environs--he's "ours," according to a jackass Professor, Dr. Paul Lewis, some misguided grad students who want a good grade, and Boston College officials who should know better but smell the tourist dollars along with the city council. At least they weren't as stupid as Philadelphia and its own literary scion, Edward Pettit--they wanted Poe's body disinterred and ferried "Back" to the city that he hated the most.

As if in some perverse parody of one of Poe's tales, Pettit enjoined his fellow Pennsylvanians to grab a shovel and follow him there. Boston was a close second in the writer's mind as a cesspool.

Quit fooling yourselves, he hated Boston. At least Dr. Lewis and the rest of them got to ride Poe's coattails like Sam Popora last year. I used to wonder why Poe railed so viciously against people like Emerson, Thoreau, his step-father, and his main nemesis, the awful poet and compiler Rufus Griswold: they had the easy road in life without matching talent. Poe was the first American writer to attempt making-a-living at writing, and the first to die in poverty.

It's easy to claim him today, but a living Poe would get the same reaction, he wouldn't be pleasant to these people. Twenty-twenty hindsight doesn't count. He would rightly belittle them, revile them, and tell them how empty and irrelevant they all are. He could be expected to point-out how poor their own writing likely is, and how pampered and hypocritical they are. Poe wouldn't have kind words for these people at all, they're the same kinds of little pricks that he hated so much during his short lifetime. Eventually, they would begin to ignore him as his own contemporaries did, just as they're ignoring the living-talent right under their bourgeois noses in the Boston of today. Celebrate the living, remember the dead, but let the man rest in peace.

He is not yours, he is everyone's, but he was a son of the South first. I hope you enjoyed your fifteen minutes at his expense, Boston, because it's all you're likely to get. We're all going to be forgotten, while Poe will go on, eternal, because he was the real thing. He meant what he said and what he wrote and wasn't a bringer of "good news," but an observer of human frailty, of madness and despair. He wasn't a bringer of "good news" about America.

All this smacks of disrespect to his memory by today's inhabitants of "Frogpondium," that comfy world of the trust fund and a meaningless bourgeois existence, the living death that Poe and others wrote about. Why wouldn't they want to attach themselves barnacle-like to something so great, so tortured, and so sincere when they have nothing to offer? All these fools claiming Poe as their own are part of the horrible new order that writers like Blake, Mary Shelly, Poe, Melville wrote of, where man is wolf to man.

They watched the emergence of our modern world in terror, and they were right to be alarmed. Blake reacted in horror to the smashing of "Albion," his agricultural England, and saw the rise of a "demonic" industrialized one dominated by soulless businessmen and clerks, where people were truly enslaved. Poe also watched his Albion--the Antebellum South--crumble in the same manner, and he found city life disagreeable and fearful. As wrong-headed as he was about so many things, he at least treasured an aristocratic set-of-values where honor and principle matter.

It takes a kind of greatness to recognize the horror of one's time, and you have to be at the ground level to really apprehend its qualities. But why would someone want to do something as silly as to claim Poe when that claim is tenuous? Easy.

Because those are characteristics none of the advocates display or have inherently, they lack the inspiration of a Poe or a Melville in their dour careerist paths. Say what you want about Poe's bad behaviors during his lifetime--the drinking, the mania and obsessiveness, the literary quarreling, his constant begging for money, his personal affronts against well-heeled writers, and so on--but at least he had the excuse of being poor. Greatness requires a modicum of genuine suffering, something alien to today's bourgeois viper. Zum kotzen!

"The pendulum swings: Boston urged to reclaim Poe," The Boston Globe, 11.14.2008: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2008/11/14/the_pendulum_swings_boston_urged_to_reclaim_poe/?p1=Well_MostPop_Emailed5

Question: Are Orrick, Herrington, & Sutcliffe working with the Palfrey Estate (and others) to recover additional DC Madam "assets"?

Jeane Palfrey: "Matt, nobody has a monopoly on the truth."

The Shadow World--In a conference call that occurred between myself, Los Angeles attorney Sam Deskin, and my co-researcher Monique Rawlings ("Bil"/"SP Biloxi"), Deskin began talking about how Palfrey couldn't have made the $2.2 million that she and the government were claiming from 1993-2006.

From looking at the phone lists covering 13 years in-detail, it seems mathematically impossible that that was all that she accrued from her escort service. This unprompted topic from Deskin wasn't news to my ears--I'd considered it as early as May of 2007. The conference call was around late-February of this year. Just two-days-later, Palfrey would forward everyone connected to or on the defense team itself an e-mail stating she wasn't going to be taken alive.

I agreed with Deskin, guilt or innocence aside. Rawlings was non-plussed, and I assume that she and journalist Jason Leopold still wrong-headedly cling to the assertion that Palfrey was somehow "innocent." Well yes--until proven guilty, and I believed by the end that she was, and I still do. That's their mistake to make, and I have no problem with them continuing down that road.

But "guilt" wasn't the central issue to me anyway, rather that the defendant wasn't receiving due process and needed help. At the time of the teleconference call (my first ever!), I was only tangentially-connected to the defense, was unpaid, and I was tiring of all the back-stabbing that most assuredly went on without my direct knowledge. In addition, the "client" was acting very erratically, and I'd had enough. By March 18th, it was over, and I never heard from her again. By May 1st, she had committed suicide. It was a crushing-blow that I assumed was coming in some form since last summer.

Palfrey told me herself on a few occasions that she was very well-traveled, and recommended it to me. Yeah, sure. Always the Sphinx, she seemed to be telling me more than she was on the surface. That's what was so unique about our correspondence--she communicated things to me that I don't believe she did with anyone else, though it was often coded by an indirectness and euphemism. And this all brings me to the nexus of why she approached me for aid: I had written in a couple of observational pieces on her case that both she and the government were lying. But what about? Why would the prosecution and the defense lie in a case like hers? The money, and where the rest of it was.

I believe it's out there in offshore accounts, waiting, like pirate treasure, like booty. I believe that the government is trying to recover the money for nefarious purposes, probably through Orrick, Herrington, & Sutcliffe. Why? Because they offices in over 18 nations, including Russia, China--you-name-it. Orrick does business with the United States Government routinely, and one of their attorneys--Preston Burton--now works with and administers the estate of the deceased DC Madam with other Orrick sub-firms. This is extremely convenient, and together with the government, they'll probably find that money...if it's in-fact out there. Like Poe's "The Gold Bug," and the late Jeane Palfrey, it's an encrypted riddle. Which narrative will hold? Which narrative is correct? Nobody seems to know.

Even though it's likely that Jeane would have kicked myself and others to the curb had she won her case, I cannot escape the strong desire that she had survived all of this. The government ensured that this would not occur, and they did their best to hide and to protect her influential clients as well as the putrid picture of American politics and economy that will eventually emerge from the primary materials. Truth crushed to earth rises again.

Statement of intellectual ownership: This article and all other writings generated by the proprietor of this website are the property of said proprietor (Matt Janovic) and may not be republished, transmitted, or quoted past four lines of content without written permission.

The Poe Toaster Enjoys an Unmolested Anniversary

Baltimore, Maryland--He's been doing it since as early as 1949, and he got to do it again this year without being molested by Sam Porpora or a bunch of punks. It appears that Mr. Porpora is still claiming his false title of being the 'real Poe toaster,' but the legend itself was allowed to continue into another year.

Each year the anonymous toaster comes in his nondescript outfit, leaving three red roses and a partially-emptied bottle of cognac at the original site of Edgar Allan Poe's grave at the cemetery of Westminster Presbyterian Church.

Here's to keeping a mystery alive, we need them. There's no mystery to the fact that the Poe toaster isn't Sam Porpora, one only needs to know how to count-backwards. This isn't 'The Gold Bug,' it's a demented old man clutching pathetically at fame.

On graverobbers and resurrectionists: http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2007/11/why-edgar-allan-poe-belongs-in.html#links
http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2007/08/poe-toaster-is-not-mark-felt.html#links

Why Edgar Allan Poe Belongs in Baltimore

Baltimore, Maryland/Philadelphia, Pennsylvania--As a disinterested party living in Indiana, this whole affair seems somewhat concocted and at the primary instigation of one Edward Pettit, who wrote a provocative piece on October 2nd in the Philadelphia City Paper (a cover article) calling for the disinterment of the writer from Baltimore to the city of brotherly love.

Pettit is a literary scholar and critic living in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, and has a good pedigree as as a member of the National Book Critics Circle. That said, his own piece contains elements that undermine his argument on a number of key-points.

Overall, the reasoning by Mr. Pettit for why Poe belongs buried in Philadelphia is flatly wrong: Edgar Allan Poe always considered himself a Southerner first, and was raised primarily in Richmond, Virginia. This is a frequently overlooked fact, perhaps more than his time in Philadelphia is. Beyond this obvious fact is what we all know--that Poe died in Baltimore, and that he wrote his very first horror short story 'Berenice' while in the city.

The story was published in 1835, in the Southern Literary Messenger. This has been astutely noted by the Poe House and Museum's curator Jeff Jerome, in an October 10th issue of the Baltimore Sun, but is widely known, and certainly known to Mr. Pettit. But it appears a number of individuals with selfish interests would like to hijack the legacy of our greatest writer for the sake of local prestige and those coveted tourism dollars. Remember back to August when the doddering Sam Porpora claimed to be the Poe toaster, an obvious and bald lie. Yet, the press ate the story up with undue credulity. The call by Pettit is begging-the-question of where Poe's body belongs, and engages in some very peculiar logic. While the writer and critic has uncovered some very interesting details on Poe's time in Philadelphia, he makes the peculiar assertion that the great writer somehow felt in his element there and would have had a large funeral in the city of brotherly love at the time of his death...had he died there. As we all know, he did not.

As historians--and Pettit himself--have pointed-out, dying at an early age in Philadelphia during the time Poe resided there (1838-1844) would have been fairly easy. The city was riven with ghastly official corruption, labor violence and strikes, race riots, rampant and unsolved crime, poor hygiene, runaway disease, and squalid poverty. Appropriately, it all sounds a bit like Poe's own life (because it was), as well as a page from one of his own short stories.

All of these factors were typical of conditions in the city centers at the time, but Philadelphia was one of the worst examples (and still is), along with New York City at the bottom for its inhumanity and modern indifference. Another city had the same conditions: Baltimore, a fact made clear by the very few facts that we know surrounding Poe's mysterious death. Note this passage from Pettit's op-ed from October 2nd:

Poe, if we define him by his macabre works, felt right at home. Could he have experienced all of this in other cities? [Ed.-As a matter of fact, he could have.] He most certainly could have, but it was in Philadelphia that he wrote most about these kinds of experiences. Before living in Philadelphia, his horror tales were more grounded in a European Gothicism. Post-Philadelphia, Poe's personal problems — erratic behavior, sporadic drunkenness, poverty, his wife's illness and death — take over his life, diminishing his creative output until his own early death a mere five years later. (Philadelphia City Paper, 10.02.2007, http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/10/04/were-taking-poe-back )

The problem with Pettit's so-called 'logic' should be obvious even on casual inspection--he notes that Poe's writing tails-off after Philadelphia, and he makes a bald move to separate the writer's life from his work while simultaneously saying they are one. This reveals the self-serving component of a Pennsylvania son. To say it has an element of the tedious and the banal would be too fair.

For Poe to return to Philadelphia would have been some kind of nightmare for Poe, and it still is to many living there today. While living in Philly during the late-1960s, director David Lynch witnessed a murder in front of his own flat. This has proven to be the genesis of his own confrontations with the darkness throughout his own original body of work in film. Should the Montanan David Lynch be interred in Philadelphia when he dies? He's lived in Los Angeles since 1970. Abraham Lincoln lived in Indiana for over ten years of his life--should he buried here? There are equally serious questions.

Poe didn't need Philadelphia in any exclusive sense to find horror along the American landscape of his time. Like many fallen Southern aristocrats, he feared 'the mob,' or 'the crowd' of 'rabble.' Crime, rioting and strife were everywhere, punctuated by the occasional slave rebellion. Poe was not enamored with democracy. To his eyes--rightly--chaos was everywhere. Labor conditions were so horrible that they spawned violence, rioting, strikes, and the birth of organized unions. Flight to the frontier offered little respite from misery. Just two years before his untimely death, we would see the ethnic cleansing of the Trail of Tears, while the year before brought us the horrors of the Mexican-American war under that forerunner of George W. Bush, President James K. Polk. Slave rebellions occurred during Poe's life as well, and poverty and rioting were a common part of life.

In 1833--just two years before Poe wrote 'Berenice'--the Nat Turner slave rebellion occurred, nearly touching-off civil war decades before the real thing exploded in 1861. The heads of the rebellious slaves were fitted onto posts as a warning to other rebels. There were other economic woes. Mr. Pettit mentions the economic depression of 1842 (occurring while Poe was in Philly) in his sprawling piece, which is really more a testament to typing than a valid attempt at proving a thesis. This fitting example should prove the point:

Between his reputation for writing imaginative fiction and withering reviews, his writings were sought after by many other periodicals around the nation." Poe's initial successes in the city diminished by 1844. Poe's irascibility and drinking problems, exacerbated by his wife's tuberculosis, began to alienate the editors whom Poe needed to court for work. (ibid)

Yet:

Had Poe died in Philadelphia, there would have been a huge funeral. The penny press would have trumpeted the announcement for a solid week. Philadelphia has always had a way of celebrating its disasters, its ne'er-do-wells. Poe, found delirious, possibly drunk, in a tavern, taken to a hospital where he dies raving like a lunatic? ...True enough, while newspapers around the country were maligning Poe's name, Philadelphia's Quaker City Weekly was blasting a clarion to defend it: "As an author, his name will live, while three-fourths of the bastard critics and mongrel authors of the present day go down to nothingness and night." Poe still had friends in Philadelphia. (ibid)

Pettit waxes faux-nostalgic on how there would have been parades in the city of Philadelphia had Poe died there...but history isn't about 'what ifs,' as any credible historiographer will tell you. What seems most likely is to be found in his own article--that Poe hated the city and its squalor, its crime, its indifference, and that he feared the people of the city who Pettit claims would have championed him. It's a ludicrous assertion.

The city of Philadelphia was not good for him or his young wife who was dying from tuberculosis the entire time. Poe found the dark city to be a slice of hell. Had the support for him been so ubiquitous as Pettit implies, why did he have to leave to find work elsewhere? All he had were the 'editors,' and his friends were few in the city of brotherly love. Poe earned much of this animus due to a very unstable nature made worse by his alcoholism. Very few people attended his funeral in 1849, as he likely would have had it.

What is well known is that Poe contributed greatly to the indifference and animosity--if not outright hatred--he was frequently greeted with, and like most writers of his time, he was treated very poorly indeed by his publishers and 'editors.' Note also in Pettit's piece that he willfully ignores the fact that Poe wanted to be known as a poet, and that the horror stories were a way of paying the bills to his mind.

'The Raven' was a new step in his writing career that melded both together in way that was probably more pleasing to a very troubled man with a very miserable and unsatisfying life, but a good part of the misery was of his own making. That life, and his works, are inseparable, and Mr. Pettit knows better. It's unlikely Mr. Poe would have wanted to continue his vagabond life on-the-move in death as he had in life. Lastly, in what is already an unwarranted piece overall, Mr. Pettit enjoins his fellow members of the crowd to break the law and disinter Mr. Poe's remains by traveling down I-95 to Baltimore, echoing the lawless attitudes of 160 years ago that the writer so feared.

You're not taking anything back, Mr. Pettit, he was never yours. What's likely is Poe will never leave Maryland, lawsuits will drag-on well after all of our insignificant lifetimes, and that an armed guard will be indefinitely posted at the Westminster Burying Grounds if it's necessary. You can bank on it.

The response from 'Balmer,' 10.10.2007: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.vozzella10oct10,0,3325218.column?coll=bal_news_local_util

THE POE TOASTER IS NOT MARK FELT

Baltimore, Maryland--Does anyone really believe this man is the real "Poe toaster"? He might be, but the press is acting too credulous here. This writer grants that his age of 92 fits the timeline--the mysterious visitor to Poe's, Virginia Clemm's, and her mother's grave, reportedly began his cognac toasts to the dead on January 19th of 1949 (on the 100th anniversary of Poe's peculiar death).

This is interesting, since it signifies both Poe's birth and death. I have known of the Poe toaster since 1982, and the story has always been that an older, frail man began his vigils in 1949, but Sam Porpora--a "Poe historian"--is saying he began in 1967. Ostensibly, it was to save a nearby church by bringing in tourists, which sounds dodgy. Does this all sound familiar?

The claim is hard to verify, especially considering by most accounts the so-called “Poe Toaster” has been visiting the grave since 1949. Jeff Jerome, curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum in Baltimore, said it started in 1949, but he started watching for the mystery man in 1977. “I drove to the cemetery that morning, and lo and behold there were roses and liquor there. I just about collapsed. I couldn’t believe it was still going on,” he said. (The Examiner, 08.15.2007)

Do you think Mr. Porpora ever enjoyed telling his grandchildren there was no Santa? To be polite, it might be added here that old men sometimes claim to be something they are not as the years go by, particularly in taverns. But it all has an air of Mark Felt's self-outing as the legendary "Deep Throat" who informed Bob Woodward on the Watergate break-in at a parking garage.

As we know, Felt was no hero, but a man who had felt spurned by the appointment of Patrick Gray as director of the FBI after the timely death of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972. Seeing the timeline better now?

At 92, you might feel that you never left your mark on the world.

Porpora's claim is very lofty and should be viewed with some suspicion, particularly the aspect where he claims to have begun the practice in 1967. This writer is unaware of any account of the Poe toaster where this year is given as the starting-date. Maybe it is true, maybe it is not, but not one article on this story appears to have any real foundation for the claim, just the man's word.

In recent years, a number of bumbling morons have tried to unmask the stranger, without any luck. Many have been chased out of the Westminster Burying Grounds. Good show. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore contends that the Poe toaster pre-dates 1967:

Since 1949, on the night of the anniversary of Poe's birth, a mysterious stranger has entered this cemetery and left as tribute a partial bottle of cognac and three roses on Poe's grave. The identity of the stranger, referred to affectionately as the Poe Toaster, is unknown. The significance of cognac is uncertain as it does not feature in Poe's works as would, for example, amontillado. The presumption for the three roses is that it represents the three persons whose remains are beneath the monument: Poe, his mother-in-law (Maria Clemm) and his wife Virginia. Out of respect, no attempt is made to stop or hinder him. Several of the bottles of cognac from prior years are on display in the Baltimore Poe House and Museum. (http://www.eapoe.org/balt/poegrave.htm)

Why 1967? Because he is mistaken in his contention? Or is it that he is just someone else who began another passing of the torch that year? There could be a half-truth here--a mystery--that appropriately extends what is hidden here. Legends die hard. It is unlikely that Mr. Porpora's "confession" will end the Occult nature of this story, nor should it. Life should have some mysteries to it, and sometimes it is a necessary food for the human soul. We do not need to understand everything. The nature of things is to hide their nature.

If thine eye offends thee... : http://www.examiner.com/a-881772~Poe_historian__I_started__toasting__tradition.html

A Spirited Conversation with author William Keisling Part II of II

"It is impossible that any deed could have been wrought with a more thorough deliberation. For weeks, for months, I pondered upon the means of the murder. I rejected a thousand schemes, because their accomplishment involved a chance of detection. At length, in reading some French memoirs, I found an account of a nearly fatal illness that occurred to Madame Pilau, through the agency of a candle accidentally poisoned: The idea struck my fancy at once. I knew my victim's habit of reading in bed. I knew, too, that his apartment was narrow and ill-ventilated. But I need not vex you with impertinent details. I need not describe the easy artifices by which I substituted, in his bedroom candle-stand, a wax-light of my own making, for the one which I there found. The next morning he was discovered dead in his bed, and the coroner's verdict was, 'Death by the visitation of God.'" --Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Imp of the Perverse,' 1845.

 

The murder of Jonathan P. Luna is a sprawling case involving municipal, federal, and organized crime entities. It also reaches into the politics of Maryland and Pennsylvania, and without Bill Keisling's book, "The Midnight Ride of Jonathan Luna," we wouldn't know many of the problems with the government's story. Like the night ride of Paul Revere, Jonathan P. Luna is still warning us of the approaching threat...from his grave. We only need listen to hear his warning. He might be telling us where Special Agent Steven Skinner was that night.

Like the horror of a tale by Edgar Allan Poe, the murder was committed with extreme malice and some forethought. Whoever murdered assistant U.S. attorney Jonathan Luna in the first-days of December back in 2003 is still free, running around. A vicious murderer is free. Perhaps they're still murdering others out there as I write this, roaming the streets of Baltimore, and the mafia environs of Pennsylvania. In our second installment of this conversation, Mr. Keisling and I hit on a number of interesting themes related to the murder of Luna, as well as its cultural context.

One needn't wonder why modern horror arose in America when considering such crimes as the immolation of the Dawson family in Baltimore, or the discovery of the mutilated-corpse of Jonathan Luna, face down in a Pennsylvania stream, states-away from his office and home. Central to all of this is the trial of Walter Poindexter and Deon Smith, proprietors of Stash House records, and known heroin dealers. It was known during the trial of the two (on completely unrelated drug charges) by the U.S. attorney's office under Thomas DiBiagio, that Poindexter had likely murdered one Alvin Jones.

Special Agent Steve Skinner surely knew this was a fact, as the crime was drug-related, and required prosecution under federal law. This was Luna's stance, and no deals of immunity or skirting the crime in the trial were acceptable to the assistant U.S. attorney. Where was the "Safe Streets Task Force" when the Dawsons were calling 911? Watching Stash House's Poindexter and Smith, and chasing their informant Warren Grace around. Why weren't the Dawsons' 36 calls forwarded to the federal task force? There are a lot of unanswered questions surrounding all of these events in Baltimore during the period surrounding the murders in Baltimore and Pennsylvania.

Matt Janovic: Does anybody know what the whereabouts of Special Agent Steve Skinner were on the night [and morning] of Luna's murder?

Bill Keisling: I think that's an important question. ...With a murder, you want to know [where everybody was]. Usually, a murder is a very simple crime with people right there, having committed it. You know, for example, a shooting at a Burger King or a dry cleaner's--you want to know who was there, what was everybody's alibi is, and so that's we have to do that with this case. ...

Matt Janovic: So this hasn't been adequately addressed by any investigation?

Bill Keisling: No, and what I'm trying to do is point people's attention to that very question. The family and the public needs to know where everybody was, and it's just unacceptable not to tell us. You know, again, if this was your family member you'd have a right to know where everybody was. ...You know what? We're going to find it out.

Matt Janovic: So, we don't even know where [informant] Warren Grace was that night, do we?

Bill Keisling: Well, a read of the records says that he was being ferried back-and-forth by agent Skinner and [Baltimore PD] Detective Tom Moody of the quote, unquote "Safe Streets Task Force"[to a Philadelphia jail]. And attorney Ravenell--one of the defense attorneys [for Smith & Poindexter]--wanted Skinner and Moody (this is the last day of Luna's life) to be removed from that duty. They wanted U.S. Marshals to be doing it. Where Grace was being kept was the Philadelphia Detention Center, away from Baltimore while he testified. And the presumption is that they were taking him back-and-forth to Philadelphia before-and-after the trial--that is when they weren't taking him for conjugal visits, and God knows what else...to Disneyland to do heroin... So, here you have Luna driving halfway to Philadelphia that night. Draw your own conclusions.

Matt Janovic: I noticed that, that in the [official] timeline his car avoids Philadelphia at some point.

Bill Keisling: It's like it's driving around Philadelphia--somebody doesn't want to be seen. ...Again, draw your own conclusion.

Matt Janovic: One of the things that I found very interesting in your book was that Special Agent Skinner seemed to know quite a bit about Luna's being in trouble, or subdued, on the day of his no-show at the Poindexter/Smith trial...

Bill Keisling: ...And that's a very important point. In the very last chapter of the book, called "No Man, No Problem," the court records of that are the most remarkable things I have ever read. It's [also] one of the best things I've ever written. There are a couple things: here they're saying that Luna didn't want to do this case. He says the plea deal is unlawful"because Poindexter has committed this drug-related murder [of Alvin Jones]. He says it's unlawful--repeatedly. [laughs] There are all-kinds of meetings and everything else.

The two really important things that happen on that day while Luna's laying face-dead in the stream: they're [federal attorneys and the FBI] up in his office trying to get that plea deal pasted together--so that's called a crime scene, they're violating the crime scene. This would be akin to if you or I and people we knew were in an office and one of their people goes missing. They would know, if they're up in the office, fooling around with those records, that they're going to be in trouble. Well, I think the Justice Department is in trouble, they violated that crime scene, and they're pretending not to know what a crime scene is. First point.

The second point is: as you point out, they're mysteriously telling the judge, "Oh, we're concerned about Luna," while they're up in his office doing this stuff. So, on the one-hand, they're pretending not to know that it's a crime scene, while on the other hand they're running around saying, "Oh, we've got to look for him, we're worried about him," when, as you know, the day before, Luna was late. I made the point that he could have been out skylarking, getting a cup of coffee. They're acting in a very strange way.

Matt Janovic: Has Skinner ever explained his behavior and this air of foreknowledge?

Bill Keisling: No, and we need to have congressional and public hearings about that.

Matt Janovic: One person who seemed to be prominent in the book [Midnight Ride] was the court stenographer. He seemed to be more concerned about the facts surrounding Luna's murder than the FBI.

Bill Keisling: Well, he liked Luna! That's the whole point: that everybody liked Luna, except these goons in the FBI. Who then put out this crap--these blatant falsehoods--to destroy his character [after his murder]. In New York City, we just had two policemen murdered in the line of duty, and you don't hear--I don't know of any other case where you have someone in law enforcement go down, and you have people putting-out what a bad guy he was....except in Luna's case.

Matt Janovic: ...Do you think that a part of Baltimore's problems emanate from organized crime domains in Pennsylvania?

Bill Keisling: Oh certainly. Historically, Baltimore was always a pick-up area between New York, Jersey, Philadelphia, and Pa. mobsters. They always have their own home grown stuff, but it was always fought over. One of the things that's documented in the book is where there's Justice Department figures that there are 50-60 thousand heroin addicts within Baltimore, and another 50-60 thousand addicts in the outlying areas. So, you have around 120,000 heroin addicts, and you do the math...that's a billion dollar industry [per-year].

Matt Janovic: It's massive.

Bill Keisling: It's massive, and obviously it's [the] mob, and obviously for it to continue, it's police corruption.

Matt Janovic: Yeah, it couldn't continue any other way.

Bill Keisling: Again, look at the Warren Grace case. You have an informant dealing heroin, and they know it. They catch him with heroin the same day the Dawson house [burned-down].

Matt Janovic: Do you think that that they [the Baltimore FBI and U.S. attorneys office] were concerned about that serendipitous moment?

Bill Keisling: I think it's what I say in the book--normally, this stuff goes on all the time. The Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post are in the tank, nobody cares, so they figure, "Who's going to give-a-hang?" And what happened when the Dawson house burned down is that suddenly a lot of people cared. Luna was left holding the bag, and he couldn't have liked it. He grew up in that sort of an environment, he wanted to help people like that, and instead he sees that he works with people who are dealing heroin that are protecting perpetrators.

Matt Janovic: I can't imagine he would have done nothing about it.

Bill Keisling: I can imagine that there could be U.S. attorneys and assistants who don't care about that sort of thing. But it seems from Luna's victimology, that he would be the one who would be most likely to care about that sort of thing.

Matt Janovic: Right, he had direct experience with it [drug-related crime] in his childhood [in the Bronx].

Bill Keisling: Yeah, and I find it impossible to believe that Jonathan wouldn't care about that. And again, in the book, his friend Dan Rivera says [paraphrase], "Did you stop to think that all the loopy-things he's doing during the trial were intentionally to get the judge to order an investigation of Skinner?" ...

Matt Janovic: During your investigations, were you ever threatened?

Bill Keisling: Ohhhhh, just by family members who wanted me to do other things! ...My mentality has always been that, I 'd really rather write novels and that I'll probably get back to it. I just think that there's a role in society for writers to write about these things, and we have to do it. I've always been afraid of what happens when people don't do this. ...

Matt Janovic: Why do you think the FBI wanted to take-down Stash House records so badly, and allow an informant like Warren Grace to run around terrorizing his neighbors and deal drugs?

Bill Keisling: Well, the book gets into that. The court reporter makes the point that, here they have 100 hours of [surveillance] tape--this isn't 'Gone With the Wind.' ...You need 40 seconds of tape to have somebody taking the drugs and exchanging money for it, case closed. ...Here's what the public should understand: at the very time that the Dawsons were trying to get help (before they burned alive with their kids), the FBI's Safe Streets Task Force was trying to take over a rap music studio. That's what they were busy doing--dealing heroin and trying to take over a rap music studio...

Matt Janovic: But couldn't that have been [U.S. attorney Thomas] Dibiagio's fault?

Bill Keisling: Although he's in-charge, if you get into the history of the FBI, these guys pretty much do what they want. Relations [between the Baltimore U.S. attorneys' office and] with the Bureau weren't all that good. The point is, when the Dawson's home burned down, you have this guy who did it--Darrell Brooks--[and] you have DiBiagio coming-out saying this drug punk's going to be put away forever, but he doesn't mention the drug punks he's responsible for. I think they thought Smith and Poindexter would flip, that the FBI would be controlling Stash House records, and I think it was almost cynical and funny to them that you would have all these young rappers coming in and rapping their crimes into the FBI's microphone.

Matt Janovic: So, would they have just kept running it [Stash House records] as a business, as a front for years and years?

Bill Keisling: That's a good question, and I think the record shows that that's what happens.

Matt Janovic: ...I suppose this is getting into really arcane federal statutues, but what if they ran-a-profit?

Bill Keisling: [agreeing] What if they put-out good records? [laughter all-around]

Matt Janovic: What if they had a hit?

Bill Keisling: [laughing] I don't know Matt! [a hilarious conversation on "mother-approved" pornography ensues, as well as the bizarreness of what government-approved rap might be] ...the whole thing was incompetent: Skinner, Moody, the Safe Streets Task Force, the death of the Dawsons was an atrocity--the public should understand that family burned to death because these guys were dealing heroin, they didn't want to answer the phone, and they were trying to take over a rap music studio. What was going on, and what wasn't going-on?

Matt Janovic: One gets the feeling when reading 'The Midnight Ride of Jonathan Luna," that either not much has changed since Edgar Allan Poe lived there [Baltimore], or that things have come full-circle. Which do think might be the case?

Bill Keisling: Oh, I kinda like your idea that not much has changed. In the Poe case, actually he was found dying just a few-blocks away from that federal courthouse. Now the best guess is that he was a victim of a practice called "cooping" where you would take unsuspecting people and give them liquor and put different clothes on them and march them around to the polling places. The polling place bar where he was found outside of, a week-or-so before (he couldn't have known), but it was charged that that practice was going on there. It was a sheriff's election. I think Edgar Allan Poe might be the most important writer America has produced.

Matt Janovic: Absolutely. I have to ask a question [relating to the case of] Ms. Palfrey. It's interesting that in both cases--that of [former Baltimore Police Commissioner] Ed Norris and Ms. Palfrey, that you have involvement of the IRS, harrassment of said defendent's families, use of "cooperating witnesses" (or "confidential informants")--but in Palfrey's case, FBI investigators are curiously absent. Why do you think that is?

Bill Keisling: I'm sure they're busy doing other things, huh? What I say in [Midnight Ride] is that you don't often see the FBI's fingerprints, they're more like little traces. You know what I mean?

Matt Janovic: Their role can sometimes be submerged.

Bill Keisling: Right. You can see little traces of it, almost like Luna's EZ pass. You see these little clues, and I think that's the way they like it.

Matt Janovic: What do you think is the significance of this new development with Luna's father contacting the Lancaster [Pennsylvania] county coroner?

Bill Keisling: Well I think his father has the right to that, and what happened here was this gadfly went and filed on his own behalf saying he was representing the friends and family, and it gave the courts the excuse to shut everybody out. But that said, I interviewed the undertaker, and I know what the wounds were, and they're pretty horrific. I think that there's disinformation that they put out--suicide, bogus information about Luna's alleged personal life...you put out stuff like that to distract people from what they should be looking at; and what we should be looking at is the Safe Streets Task Force, Skinner and Moody, their handling of Warren Grace, the deaths of the Dawsons--I think that's where we need to be turning our attention.

Now, where it really ties-in with Palfrey is, that in Pennsylvania, in a murder case, you don't release the autopsy report because you want to have information there that only the perpetrator would know about. So, it's a tool for law enforcement to keep certain cards close to the vest, so that you can identify the true perpetrator who would have information about this. That said, what's in-common between this case and Palfrey's is, the Justice Department isn't acting in good faith--as we saw with Vitter and Tobias--they're actually concealing law-breaking with their actions, and that's unacceptable. ...The public can take the truth, the public is smart [enough]. 

Part I:

http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2007/07/spirited-conversation-with-author_30.html

End of Part II

Statement of intellectual ownership: All content in this interview (and all content on this site produced by the Editor), and its subsequent part are the intellectual property of Matt Janovic, sole proprietor of this website. Quotations of more than four lines requires written permission from the author.

Masters of Horror: The Black Cat DVD (2006) review

"I've read two or three biographies of his, and one of the things that really interested me is that he's a Southerner. A lot of people don't think of him that way. He wasn't even from Baltimore. I mean, there's a football team named after him and he spent some time in Baltimore, but his formative years were spent in Richmond, Virginia, and in England. Richmond, Virginia is where he came from. During his entire literary career, he had to go where the work was, which was Philadelphia and New York. At the time, this was ten years before the Civil War, all that tension between the North and South didn't come out of nowhere." --Jeffrey Combs (UGO.com, 2006?)

I cannot fathom it, but somehow, some way, Stuart Gordon just improves as a director with each film. This is the atypical view of movie making, which usually tells us that a director does their best work when they're in their 30s-40s. It's being trashed here, in what is the best translation-to-screen of Edgar Allan Poe's short story, "The Black Cat" to date.

Gordon and his frequent co-writer Dennis Paoli have given us a wonderful gift: the finest version of a Poe tale, and an illuminating look at the misery that was his life (though tinged with a little joy). Besides his screenwriting work with Gordon, Paoli is a noted Poe scholar, and even star Jeffrey Combs did an enormous amount of research into our greatest writer's peculiar life. This is evident in the use of Poe's favorite song throughout the film, as well as the little details such as his continued wearing of his West Point jacket (its silken-lining worn inside-out--he was expelled from the academy for gambling).

By now, most Americans understand how horrific the 1840s were, largely-thanks to Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York." A good dose of Poe's horror springs from his own specific time-and-place, and his constant displacements weren't uncommon. The vast-majority of Americans were impoverished at this time, slavery was still firmly in-place, the frontier was still young and dangerous, the Indian wars were still raging (with the trail of tears coming during Poe's last years), there was rampant criminality and banditry, rampant corruption, rigged elections, labor violence, unhygienic conditions, an impending war with Mexico, extreme contentions over immigration, and much more. It was a bloody time that echoes our own.

Therefore, it should be unsurprising that horror is popular again, as it would be by the end of Poe's lifetime. America is horror. Contrary to popular belief, Edgar Allan Poe was experiencing reasonable success as a writer at the time of his mysterious disappearance--and reappearance--in Baltimore during October of 1849. He was the only show in town who wrote tales of horror and of the fantastic.

If you've read the short story, you'll know that it's rarely been done well. There are a number of them that literally have nothing to do with the original, and several elements are generally left-out due to how graphic the original short story still is, even today. Edgar J. Ulmer's 1934 version is great, but it's not the same story at all. The same can be said for Lucio Fulci's 1981 film. Roger Corman's take is much closer, but couldn't show us a number of crucial actions (the removal of the cat's eye with a penknife, as well as the protagonist burying an axe in his wife's brain).

The Argento version in "Two Evil Eyes" (1990) has been one of the best until this version. Simply doing the story proud would have been enough, but Gordon and Paoli did-one-better--they fused the facts of Poe's tortured life with the tale itself! This elevates this film to that of a timeless classic, and it's unlikely to be outdone anytime soon, if ever. Coupled with this, cinematographer Jon Joffin's photography is just breathtaking, with a sepia-tone look of an old 19th century tintype. The only tinges of color we see are scant, usually being blood & alcohol, as well as a cat's eye. The effect is dramatic, and the end-result is genuine horror.

Poe's life with Virginia Clemm--his first cousin--was only troubled by their poverty and her tuberculosis, and their love for each other was uninterrupted by her untimely death. She is the muse of "The Raven," and "Annabel Lee," the ghost that would haunt him until the day he died. One could imagine that even in his last moments of delirium, he was thinking of her. Death would not part them, even after Poe remarried and continued to write. The cat in his short story is the guilt and the specter of death (hence, the name "Pluto," the lord of the underworld and death) that haunted he and Virginia throughout their poverty-stricken years together, and she was one of his great champions.

Their love was unconditional, a rarity in this life, but also a part of that romantic "Southern gentility" of the time that would be felled by the Civil War. Poe, after all, was a Southern "gentleman," and part of a fallen aristocracy (like Lovecraft, though he was of Rhode Island extraction) that didn't understand the new industrial order arising in the Northern and Eastern states. He was of a dying feudal order, a pre-capitalist romantic watching his world die. No tears should be shed for the ending of slavery, but other great things were lost in the destruction of the Antebellum South.

This is probably part of why we got such stories of decline and decay from Poe. He was seeing a lot of it during his lifetime, and the beginnings of what he would have rightly seen as a horrible new order in America (you don't have to be a Marxist to dislike bourgeois capitalism). Poe had other problems--mental ones. Jeffrey Combs captures Poe's self-destructive perversity well, and it's going to be a surprise to many how truly Southern his portrayal of the writer's dialect is. But what may come as the greatest surprise is just how tortured his imagination was, and we get some great references to "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Telltale Heart," and more, woven throughout the biographical details and The Black Cat's plot.

Poe had an interesting insight into the minds of killers, and The Black Cat seems very prescient today, considering the link between animal torture that has been found in the biographies of serial killers. Viewers will meet an Edgar Allan Poe that they never knew existed, and hopefully, they will grow to empathize with his difficult life (and those of the living). This isn't one for the squeamish. It's pretty bloody, and filled with madness and obsession--it is Poe in all his glory, and our ongoing American nightmare. Bravo.

A Spirited Conversation with author William Keisling on the Murder of Assistant US Attorney Jonathan Luna (and much more) Part I of II

It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, black and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.
 
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from "Paul Revere's Ride," 10th stanza.

It was on the cold day of December 4th, 2003 when Lancaster, Pennsylvania authorities found the mutilated-body of assistant U.S. attorney Jonathan P. Luna. He was supposed to be in the court of U.S. District Judge William D. Quarles Jr., in a very troubling federal trial in which he appeared to be attempting to scuttle a corrupt investigation by the FBI. Why would he do this? He had good reason to: during the FBI's dubious investigation into a Baltimore rap label, a Black family named the Dawsons were burned-to-death at the end of October of 2002 after repeated calls (36, by most accounts) to the city's federal "Safe Streets Task Force."

For reasons that are unclear, the calls were never forwarded by members of the Baltimore PD to federal agents. It should be noted that the Safe Streets Task Force was populated by the very same investigators in the Stash House investigation, and members of the Baltimore PD. They were nowhere to be seen while the Dawsons were fighting-off drug dealers in their East Baltimore neighborhood. Not one of them has ever been held responsible for this negligence. 

Even worse, Special Agent Steven Skinner allowed the key informant in the Stash House case (one Warren Grace) to sell heroin and terrorize his neighbors, just like the murderer of the Dawsons, one Darrell Brooks. Both were repeat offenders. Grace was caught in a drug-transaction on the day the Dawsons were murdered by Brooks, possibly even being supplied the heroin by an FBI agent. While the feds were trying to take over a rap label, the Dawsons were frantically trying to contact them, were ignored, and died in flames. Roughly a year later, Jonathan Luna would join the Dawson family. In a very short time after his body was discovered in faraway Pennsylvania, Luna's character would be assassinated, probably by his killer (or killers). An air of institutionalized racism and neglect hangs over all these events, and our nation.

Federal law enforcement close to Luna's work on the Smith/Poindexter trial (the FBI wanted to own Stash House Records--what if they had a hit-single?) figure prominently on the suspects-list, which adds a certain irony to the fact that the case is no longer considered a federal one. It's great when one agrees with oneself. To-this-day no genuine suspects have been investigated, and nobody has been convicted. The press have been far-too-credulous in their trust of the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office in Baltimore, Maryland. At that time, the office was headed by one Thomas DiBiagio, now in private practice, a man who has made a lot of broken promises. I can only dimly remember the flash on the news (CNN) in December of 2003. There was an image of the crime scene that showed a car in a field and some crime scene tape-barriers. If the public had seen the condition of Luna, the outrage would have been everywhere, and palpable.

We never saw how despicable the crime really was: Luna's body was horribly-mutilated. He was stabbed at least 36-times, with a coup de gras through the back of his throat. His hands were shredded--cut to-the-bone, clearly illustrating that the assistant U.S. attorney suffered the tortures of the damned defending himself. Incredibly, the feds wanted to paint it as a suicide. Some in the media followed their lead, and still are. The FBI's role in all of this is unsettling, particularly in the case of Special Agent Steven Skinner. Skinner is still serving in Baltimore's FBI field office, probably falsifying more 302s (field reports from agents on cases and incidents).

Where was the "Safe Streets Task Force" when the Dawsons were calling 911? Watching Stash House's Poindexter and Smith, and chasing their informant Warren Grace around. He was out committing crimes just as the murderer of the Dawsons--one Darrell Brooks--was, and on the government's payroll. Why weren't the Dawsons' 36-calls forwarded to the federal task force? There are a lot of unanswered questions surrounding all of these events in Baltimore during the period surrounding the murders in Baltimore and Pennsylvania.

The murder of Jonathan P. Luna is a sprawling case involving municipal, federal, and organized crime entities. It also reaches into the politics of Maryland and Pennsylvania, and without Bill Keisling's book, "The Midnight Ride of Jonathan Luna," we wouldn't know many of the problems with the government's story. Like the night ride of Paul Revere, Jonathan P. Luna is still warning us of the approaching threat...from his grave. We only need listen to hear his warning. He might be telling us where Special Agent Steven Skinner was that night.

Matt Janovic: For members of the public who maybe only heard of the murder of assistant U.S. attorney Jonathan Luna, what can you tell them about its significance?

Bill Keisling: Well, I think that the title, "The Midnight Ride of Jonathan Luna,"refers to is the midnight ride of Paul Revere. That it's a warning to the American public of a new level of corruption in American government. What they've done here is to manage to silence the press, they've eliminated public participation, and you don't read in the papers about how there's government corruption anymore--or court corruptions--not that the problems are solved. They've eliminated the criticism, and the checks-and-balances are rooted-out. What the Luna case appears to be is the case of a federal prosecutor who was murdered, and how they then destroyed his reputation so that the public might not even care about him. The truth comes out.

Matt Janovic: Do you think assistant U.S. attorney Luna was a hero, a villain--or maybe something in-between?

Bill Keisling: I think you have to look at it like this: while writing Midnight Ride, I had to study this book on "victimology"--I had to study victims and where they're coming from. Luna grew up in the Bronx in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, and they [drug dealers] were dealing drugs at his door, they were shooting through his apartment building door, and he generally wanted to help people. He was really remarkable. This isn't somebody whose daddy put him through school, he did it for himself. I think that he genuinely wanted to help people that find themselves in the inner city neglect that he grew-up in.

He joined the Bush Justice Department, and in his last case the FBI had an informant who--while on the government payroll--was dealing heroin, [and] was being sent in by the FBI to halfway houses to deal heroin. At the same time, the FBI was ignoring [the Dawsons]. They had this so-called "Safe Streets Task Force,"but they were dealing heroin. They weren't helping people like the Dawsons, who were burned out of their home. So, I think is that what he came to see was that in the Bush Justice Department--he couldn't see a hero, he couldn't see white hats because it was too compromised.

Matt Janovic: Are there other similar cases of murders of U.S. attorneys and assistant U.S. attorneys going-on in the continental United States currently?

Bill Keisling: Oh yeah. The assistant U.S. attorney in Seattle [Tom Wales, who was murdered exactly one month after 9/11] who was shot from his basement window, and it appears to be connected to one case or another. The operative phrase that the Justice Department is using in both the Luna and Seattle assistant U.S. attorney is that it wasn't connected to their jobs, or the line-of-duty. But I don't think it's just the U.S. attorneys. You have the federal judge in Chicago who came home and found her family killed. ...The point is, in the United States, we used to have this idea that our law enforcement and our judges--that nothing was going to happen to them.

Matt Janovic: Things are happening to them.

Bill Keisling: But things are happening to them, and again, that's the point of Midnight Ride. It's a warning that it has risen to a point where where it's open season on judges and prosecutors--the next step is journalists and writers.

Matt Janovic: I think that's already begun...at least in Iraq. This is just for your opinion: who might be murdering them?

Bill Keisling: Well, I think that the body-of-evidence that's being developed--and I don't know who's murdering them--but I know one of the parties that have actively participated in mob murder is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I think that's what has come out in congressional hearings. Up in Boston, with Whitey Bulger...these guys were worshipped as the stars of the streets along with their informants. ...So, if your readers watch the Sopranos, they'll see that these agents are so tied-in with their informants, [and] there's no oversight.

You either turn your back, or pretend you don't know what's going-on, or you actively participate in it [the crimes], and you have the mob running the FBI. The FBI works both sides of the street, and the problem is, there's no oversight. They're not responsible to the Senate, they're not responsible to the American public. What your readers have to understand is that the FBI's informant program is their holy of holies.

They don't want to talk about it. This is breeding all-kinds of corruption. At the same time, what you have is the Justice Department not respecting the writers' and reporters' sources. Now, reporters are being jailed. What I think is that there needs to be oversight, and that whole [informant] program needs to go out the window. It's time for Americans to really focus on what's going-on and get involved here.

Matt Janovic: Do you believe the use of informants by the FBI has some overarching goals, or is federal law enforcement simply broken, or both?

Bill Keisling: What I try to point-out in the book is that there is a long history--not only in this country, but going back to Shakespeare's time, the Roman Empire, and Alexander the Great--of using informants and counterintelligence. There's definitely a role in that. I talk about how it saved us during the Revolutionary War, that General Washington was very adept at the use of informants and misinformation. He kept Cornwallis at-bay in Philadelphia, planting false information. ...He really was a hero. Washington had a prohibition against torture, but look what's going-on now. ...I'm a big defender of George Washington. The proof's in the pudding.

Matt Janovic: Why do you think FBI agent Steve Skinner is important in the context of Jonathan Luna's murder?

Bill Keisling: He's important because he mishandled Luna's last case, his informant Warren Grace was out dealing heroin, they [Safe Streets Task Force] were ignoring the calls of the Dawson family who needed help, he's dishonest, he likes to meet people in the dead of night, he scares people, we don't where Skinner was the night Luna was murdered--I just think he's a really important character in all this.

Matt Janovic: What's Warren Grace and Mr. Skinner doing these days?

Bill Keisling: Well, Warren Grace is in the hoosegow, and Skinner is still a Special Agent in Baltimore as far as I know. I think Skinner should get a new job--there's probably opportunities at McDonald's or Walmart. As for Warren Grace, you don't have to read the book too-carefully to see here's a guy who found himself in the driver's seat: he was driving the [Stash House Records] case, he was driving the investigation.

I think that whole case is a classic study of why there needs to be more oversight and reform. What happens is, Luna is just left holding the bag. You have this one guy who is up-against the Bureau and their corrupt practices, and I think they helped contribute to his death.
When I was researching this book, and writing it, I thought, "Oh my God, I can just imagine some moron like Ethan Brown [another investigative author on the Luna murder] coming up and trying to put Warren Grace back in the driver's seat of this case." Here he [Grace] was leading this investigation, leading the trial, and caused all this tragedy, and which moron is going to put Warren Grace back in-charge? But it wasn't going to be me! [laughter]

Matt Janovic: Do you think Ed Norris was ferrying prostitutes with the Baltimore Police Department's Executive Protection Unit [created, ostensibly, to protect the then Police Commissioner]?

Bill Keisling: I don't know! That's one of the things we have to find out. There's females 1-6--Ed tells me (I was on his show last year) that they were his "friends," so people need to look at the information on my site and decide for themselves [www.yardbird.com]. I think it's very troubling to have this sort of thing going-on with the head of a police department.

Matt Janovic: Is it true that you were the first to report the 36 stab-wounds on Jonathan Luna's body?

Bill Keisling: That was a count issued by the Lancaster county coroner. I was the first one to realize that the 36 wounds matched-up with...

Matt Janovic: The missing $36,0000 from [money stolen from evidence from a previous federal trial in Baltimore in a bank robbery case. Luna and an FBI agent were the last to handle the money...]...

Bill Keisling: Right, and the number of times the Dawsons tried to call for help [to the Safe Streets Task Force. Skinner was a lead member.]. That's called a crime signature, and you can't ignore something like that. ...So, why was he stabbed 36-times? Incidentally, the undertaker said she counted 32. What do I say in the book--who's counting? He was hurt. It looks like the coup de gras was the neck-wound, and probably with the others he was being held at knifepoint. The undertaker said that the wounds to his hands between his fingers cut to-the-bone. Luna was obviously trying to defend himself. ...The guy was taken out and tortured.

Matt Janovic: Not a suicide, definitely.

Bill Keisling: That's misinformation. ...If this was happening to me--while it was happening--the last thing I would want is for someone to think I did this to myself.

End of Part I

Statement of intellectual ownership: All content in this interview (and all content on this site produced by the Editor), and its subsequent part are the intellectual property of Matt Janovic, sole proprietor of this website. Quotations of more than four lines requires written permission from the author. (Transcript corrected and revised, 08.16.2007)

The Dead Zone (1983) review

Greg Stillson: "The missiles are flying. Hallelujah, Hallelujah!"

1983 was still a pretty good year for horror and genre fans, and a bad one for ordinary people. Director David Cronenberg did this film back-to-back with his other political film, Videodrome, and they both compliment each other in their statements on the rightist and authoritarian threat to liberty in North America.

The Reagan revolution's effects were being felt by Latin Americans, the urban poor, small farmers, minorities, women, deinstitutionalized inmates of state asylums, the working-class, and the Cold War was heating-up again with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. As the GOP were in-power, the rich got much richer. However, the corruption of the Reagan years has been handily eclipsed by the administration of George W. Bush.

Reagan was never truly popular, but managed to sneak into office due to voter apathy. The rest is bunting and chest-beating by his backers, and he was elected by a slim majority of eligible voters. The arms race (reignited by Carter) was being accelerated by Reagan to a frightening degree, and we were funding death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala, Asia, Africa, and Nicaragua. Those who noticed the insanity were watching the skies again, just as they did during the Cuban Missile Crisis (which was the fault of the GOP and Kennedy, making Sheen a proper choice). Things were pretty grim, and there was a recession. In this context, The Dead Zone did well at the box-office, and is still remembered fondly as one of the best King movies.

Politician Greg Stillson (Martin Sheen) is a progressive, seemingly "Populist" politician, but in-appearance only. In reality, Stillson is a ruthless criminal who uses intimidation, blackmail, and any means he can use to achieve power. This is a very grim portrait of North American politics, and at a time when Reaganism was sweeping-through the culture; all of it still resonates strongly today. We may never know how close America has brushed-up with a "Stillson scenario," though Boam and Cronenberg seem to be suggesting that this is commonplace.

King's and Boam's allusions to Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe are powerful and fitting for such a fateful and psychological tale, which gives the film a wider sense of scope. It has something important to say about North American culture that defies any simple explanations--I could write an entire book on this film, and still be left with more to explain, it is that rich a tale. Above everything, however, it is a tale of loss and of what could have been. Americans know the tragedy of this all too well.

Jeffrey Boam and David Cronenberg took Stephen King's "Rip Van Winkle" retelling, and made it much-much more--a parable of 1983, but also of our common era. Like most good-literature, nothing-is-as-it-seems in the "Dead Zone", but entering into this is the character Johnny (played beautifully by Christopher Walken). Without any supernatural-explanations, Cronenberg gives us a character who is somehow able to penetrate the deceptions in life and what is hidden in the lives of the people he encounters (and touches). Basically, Johnny is an instrument of fate. His role is to stop a local murderer, as well as to stop Greg Stillson from attaining power, and here, all of the authors suggest that destiny and fate limit the structure of our lives. It has been remarked (apocryphally, by Steven Spielberg, a director who fears Cronenberg's depth) that the film's storyline supports the notion of assassination--it absolutely does, and unapolegetically. It also posits--like King's book--that not all people who appear insane or eccentric are wrong in their different take on reality.

For many Americans--and one can suppose, Canadians too--someone like Stillson reaching the pillars of power and authority is impossible, unthinkable. It shouldn't seem "impossible" after George W. Bush, a phony Populist if there ever was one. His resemblance to the character Greg Stillson is eerie, and he is not alone. Boam, King and Cronenberg insisted in 1983 that "this is possible", and that only an ordinary man, poised by providence, can affect the course of this path to destruction. Will the evil end entirely? Cronenberg and Boam don't answer this, but Stillson's and Johnny's journeys and destinies have. This is because they were intertwined. Evil and destruction never truly end, and neither does the resistance to it.

This movie was a "hire" job for David Cronenberg, and yet it so resembles the political and social-implications of all of his work from his early period, a strange fact. Often, the "adversaries" in his films are faceless, or murky, only showing themselves at the right moment to strike. His adversaries are often social forces, and trends, often disembodied and invisible. The 1980s were simply an ugly and vulgar era, with a lot of submerged politics--like Iran-Contra, where even drug-running was alleged in funding Reagan allies in Nicauragua. Reagan said, "We don't negotiate with terrorists," and did just-that! Today, it is safe-to-assume that much-worse is being done in our names, and only needs uncovering by the bravest amongst-us. Johnny shows that there is a price in this ability; he dies-a-piece with every revelation he is privy to, and he's almost like a missionary or a Civil Rights worker, or a saint.

Most of the philosophical arguments and implications are dealt-with in the dialog between Johnny and his rehabilitation counselor (Herbert Lom, in one of his greatest performances). What would you do if you knew who the next Hitler was, and could do something about it? Lom has the perfect answer: "I am a doctor...I love people...but, I would have to kill the son-of-a-bitch." The politics of the film are very clear, but so are the consequences of the sacrifice.This is why so few people ever "rise-to-the-occasion" to fight an encroaching evil. It is simply easier not to. Even nonviolence is basically a cop-out when you're facing an enemy who proves we're in a universe without morality. Johnny Smith is a messianic figure, and a revolutionary one who must eschew an ordinary life (this is where some of the "loss" figures-in).

The subtext of covert political activity is always there, waiting to be discovered, and fought, by ordinary people. And so, the horror of this film is a political horror, our political nightmare. It is the revelation that flies-in-the-face of homespun, North American values of fair-play and hard work--that many of those who wish to govern us do not wish us well, but quite-the-opposite: they wish us death, ultimately, the logical conclusion of the will to power.

This was a post-Watergate lesson we have conveniently forgotten, but are now reawakening to, and that is the horror we all face. Cronenberg made a classic that will continue to affect caring people profoundly, it speaks-to our hopes and our fears. The Dead Zone also speaks to our regrets in this vale-of-tears, an oddly "Puritan" message, but it fits the story's locale. The late Michael Kamen's score is both moving and warm, and the film would be very cold indeed without it. The TV series is worthless. It has nothing to say.