American Gangster (23 page)

“I trusted him. In my mind he still represented the
Voice
I knew. Then I got a call from the publisher, Judy Miszner, and she's telling me, ‘So you've decided to resign.' I said, ‘What?' Their attitude was, if I couldn't get along with Forst, I had to go. I couldn't believe it. This, at the
Village Voice
! Then they started giving me a hard time about my severance. I'm there thirty-eight years, and they're trying to stiff me.”

“Richard broke the chain of command,” says one
Voice
writer. “That was the unforgivable thing.”

Finally, Goldstein filed a federal suit charging the
Voice
with, among other things, sexual harassment and age discrimination. “Even after all that, I didn't want to hurt the paper,” he says.

Should you care to, you can go to TheSmokingGun.com, the Web site started by Bill Bastone, former
Voice
writer, to read the court documents in the case of
Richard Goldstein
, plaintiff, v.
Village Voice
Media, defendant.
In it, Goldstein accuses Forst of calling him “an ass-licker,” “a slut boy,” “a pussy boy,” and saying he walked “like a ballerina.” After years of hearing about dreary
Voice
p.c., the case makes surreal but grim reading.

Asked if the
Village Voice
was “the biggest basket case” of his acquisitions, Mike Lacey bugged his eyes like, “duh.” “Without a doubt,” Lacey said, but this only raised the stakes, because the
Voice
, and New York, was “such a big deal.”

“This is it: unique, special, fucking exciting,” Lacey said, walking through a driving rain on Ninth Avenue in the Thirties. He was spritzing, free-associating about what he might do with the
Village Voice
.

“I like the arts coverage. But we've got to work on the front of the book. We can't have stories cribbed from the Net. We have to get out of the office. Robbins seems good. He's a reporter. But I can't believe they don't have a front-of-the-book columnist, someone to give a sense of the fabric of what the streets are like. Come back, Jimmy Breslin!”

He was steaming now, talking louder, stomping across the avenue. “We could cover the courts. Have a reporter down there. We don't have to be
Time Out
.” Did he feel he had a particular responsibility to the
Voice
staff, especially those writers long identified with the paper? “Of course, you want people who love the place, but this is a business that is based on performance. It isn't a legacy.”

No doubt this was going to be hard, Lacey said. He was having some difficulty buying into David Schneiderman's circulation numbers. “Have to see about that,” Lacey said, regretting that he wouldn't be able to move to New York to keep an eye on things. “No, I got this sixteen-year-old. He drove the car through the garage wall back in Phoenix. He requires surveillance.”

Then Lacey said he had to rush. He was flying out in the morning to L.A., where he'd scheduled a meeting at the
LA Weekly
. It promised to be tense, after
New Times
's typically vicious, ultimately losing attempt to start a rival paper to the
Weekly
. There'd be hard feelings, fences to mend, necks to snap back into joint. It was all a giant juggling act, Lacey said. With seventeen papers, you couldn't play favorites.

Meanwhile, the
Voice
threw a little party at Bowery Bar to celebrate the fiftieth-anniversary issue. The turnout was good, especially considering the announcement of the merger and how few whose work had been chronicled in the issue were invited or able to show up. (Newfield, Joel Oppenheimer, Joe Flaherty, Mary Nichols, Geoff Stokes, and Paul Cowan, among others, had a good excuse: they were dead. Many others just hated the paper.) A cake decorated with the famous
Voice
logo was served, and David Schneiderman, after laughingly introducing himself as “that mystery man,” made a speech. Someone quoted Alexander Cockburn's famous line from a previous
Voice
takeover, how the change made him “dizzy with the prospect of a whole galaxy of new asses to kiss.”

Then, with the dinner crowd arriving, the party was over. The
Voice
people walked out onto the Bowery. If you looked to the right you could see CBGB, where the drag queen Jayne (nee Wayne) County once knocked out Handsome Dick Manitoba of the Dictators with a mike stand. James Wolcott wrote a really cool story about it for the
Voice
sometime in 1975. Soon, they might close CBGB because Hilly Kristal won't pay higher rent. But that was the way it went. It was a new world out there, with new times to go with it.

The attack on the World Trade Center, with its attendant political and moral fallout, is without doubt the biggest story I ever covered. It doesn't stop. It is a rare day that goes by I don't think of the events of that nightmarish time. Along with almost every journalist in the City, I've written several pieces on the WTC and no doubt will continue to do so. For me, 9/11 time falls into several catagories. The first period is the event itself, the very day when “everything” supposed to have changed. I was there that day, at Ground Zero, arriving a couple hours after the towers fell. I was there when 7 World Trade Center collapsed. I'll know I've got the Alezheimer's when a day goes by and I don't think about what happened then. Another part of my version of 9/11 time involves the immediate political fallout, especially the exploitation of the event by the powers that be. The Republican Party's cynical decision to hold their 2004 nominating convention at Madison Square Garden was an affront to any real New Yorker. The notion that these creeps (fearmongering former Mayor Rudy Giuliani was one of the worst) could use the city as backdrop to push their increasingly disastrous post-9/11 agenda deserved nothing but a stiff middle finger, not the fawning, phony hospitality extended by Mayor Bloomberg. The strongarm policing job done by Commissioner Ray Kelly during the
convention, indiscriminately herding non-violent protesters into paddy wagons so people like Dick Cheney would hear nary a discouraging word, ranks as a low point in New York's long tradition of loud-mouthed democracy. New Yorkers showed what they thought of Bush's visit by giving him a big-time 16 percent of the vote in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx
.

Past that is what I'd call the inevitable long-range psychology of 9/11, covered in the piece printed below. Conspiracy theory has a bad name these days, and this seems highly judgemental and unfair. It is only human to invent some sort of reason for the inexplicable. This said, if the pieces I've written about 9/11 reveal anything, it is that my feelings remain consistent: I experience as a New Yorker first, a citizen of the City. From
New York
magazine, 2006
.

They keep telling us 9/11 changed everything. But even in this photo-shopped age of unreliable narrators, omniscient and otherwise, much remains the same. As with 9/11, the assassination of President John Kennedy in Dallas on 11/22/63, the Crime of the Century, occurred in plain sight, in front of thousands, yet no one can exactly be sure what happened. Like 9/11, an official explanation of the Kennedy assassination was produced. The Warren Commission confirmed early reports that Lee Harvey Oswald, a ne'er-do-well member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, shot Kennedy with a cheap Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from a sixth-floor window of the Texas Book Depository. The Commission said Oswald, who two days later would be shot dead by nightclub owner Jack Ruby, acted alone.

Yet, as with many major events, there is the sanctioned history and the the so-called secret history—actions and motives hidden from view, covered up, by the official historians. Many believe this was the case with the Kennedy assassination. Myriad theories have arisen about what really happened that day. Any number of culprits, from the Cuban government, to the Mafia and/or the CIA, have been deemed responsible. These ideas gained increasing traction in the popular mind-set.

The precise tipping point—the moment the Grassy Knoll supplanted the sixth-floor window—is not exactly clear, but four decades past Kennedy's murder it is difficult to find anyone who sincerely believes Lee Harvey Oswald was solely responsible. But if Oswald didn't kill the President, who did? No comprehensive, universally believed chronicle of events has emerged. 11/22 remains an open case, an open wound.

Now here we are again, contemplating the unthinkable of September 11. Again we confront an event that occurred on a bright clear day, with thousands of eyewitnesses, yet shrouded in mystery. The official explanation, offered first by the Bush administration and later confirmed, with some amendment, by the 9/11 Commission Report, has been released: the nation was attacked by the forces of radical Islam led by Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda jihadists.

Again, many Americans believe the official story. But not all.

“We're just your average wild-eyed, foaming at the mouth, tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy nuts,” said Father Frank Morales, a priest at the St. Mark's Church on the Lower East Side as he surveyed the two hundred or so graying beatniks and neighborhood anarchist punks sporting “Is It Fascism Yet” buttons who had arrived for the weekly Sunday night meeting of the New York 9/11 Truth movement. They'd come to the church to hear a lecture by Webster Tarpley, author of the recent book,
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in the USA
.

Looking like a cross between a kindly medieval parson and Dick Cheney, whom he accuses of “high treason” in his book, the sixty-year-old Tarpley said he was in New York, “the scene of the crime, to debunk the myth … the absurd fairy tale” that tragic events of September 11, 2001, were the work of nineteen guys with boxcutters commanded to fly airplanes into buildings by a bearded cave-dwelling evildoer.

To this end, Tarpley displayed a slide titled “State-Sponsored False Flag
Terrorism,” directing the audience's attention to a Venn diagram of three interconnected circles. Circle one was labeled “Patsies,” denoted as “dupes,” “useful idiots,” “fanatics,” “provocateurs,” and “Oswalds.” Included here were bin Laden and the alleged lead hijacker, Mohammad Atta. The second sphere, marked “Moles,” contained “government officials loyal to the invisible government” such as Paul Wolfowitz, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney and, of course, George W. Bush. The third circle, “professional killers,” encompassed “technicians, CIA and special forces, old boys”—the unnamed ones who did the dirty work and knew how to keep their mouths shut.

This was the true face of corporatized terror as practiced by the infinite octopus of the “secret government,” said Tarpley, graduate of Flushing High School, class of 1962 (also Princeton). It was a terrain Tarpley knew well, as the author of an “unauthorized” biography of George Herbert Walker Bush, a tome that paints the Bush family patriarch, U.S. Senator Prescott Bush, as knowingly profiting from Hitler's Third Reich in his role as a director of the Union Banking Corporation.

According to Tarpley, this is how it went down, roughly, on September 11. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the
Pet Goat
–engrossed president played their assigned roles enabling the strange events of that day, including the whole-scale malfunction of the multitrillion-dollar American air defense system. Cued by fellow mole Richard Clarke, the main players made sure the CIA-owned-and-operated Osama and his alleged seventy-two-virgin craving crew got the racist/religionist-fueled blame as Boeings were flown, likely aided by remote control, into the Trade Center towers, which collapsed not from the impact and resulting fire, as reported by the brainwashed mainstream media, but rather due to planted bombs and controlled demolition.

Laying out his scenario, Tarpley touched on many of the “unanswered questions” that make up the core of the 9/11 Truth critique of the so-called Official Story.

Like: How, if no steel-frame building had ever collapsed from fire, did three such edifices fall that day, including 7 World Trade Center, which was not hit by any airplane?

And why, if hydrocarbon-fueled fire maxes out at 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit and steel melts at 2,700 degrees, did the towers weaken sufficiently to fall in such a short time—only fifty-six minutes in the case of the South Tower?

And why, if the impact destroyed the planes' supposedly crash-proof flight-recorder black boxes, was the FBI able to find, in perfect condition, the passport of Satam al Suqami, one of the alleged American Airlines Flight 11 hijackers?

And how to explain the nonperformance of the FAA and NORAD? And why did the Defense Department choose to stage an extraordinary number of military exercises on 9/11—occupying matériel and spreading confusion about who was who on that day?

How could the U.S. government allow, an hour after the first World Trade Center crash, an obviously hostile plane to penetrate the world's most heavily protected air space and smash into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the entire military-industrial complex, for chrissakes?

And what about the short-selling spree on American and United airlines stock in the days before the attacks? Betting on the stocks to go down—was this real sicko Wall Street insider trading?

There were so many questions. But when it came to the big “why” of 9/11, there was only the classic conspiratorial query: “Who benefits?”

When it came to September 11, this was a virtual no-brainer. Here was a holocaust-as-ordered by the neocon cabal Project for the New American Century who in the mode of its shadowy mentor, Leo Strauss, understood the people of the U.S.A. to be nothing but robotized, meth-addled, postliterate, and postlogical lardasses, a race of “sheeple” who would never rise to mantle of world dominators without (as the PNAC said) “some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” In other words, a new Pearl Harbor like the old Pearl Harbor, which Roosevelt was supposed to have known about weeks in advance and used as an excuse to get us into World War II.