25 March 21
Big Problems Over Trivial Cash
We are really struggling for the bare-bones budget that we need to function. The reason, the ratio of readers to donors is 1000 to 1.
Many people are helping. Many, many more are not.
Have to break through that barrier.
Situation growing unnecessarily dire, again.
In earnest.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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24 March 21
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Jesse Jackson | Our Diversity Is Truly America's Strength, but Hateful Violence Is America's Weakness
Jesse Jackson, The Chicago Sun-Times
Jackson writes: "The pandemic and the poisonous rhetoric of Donald Trump have exposed once more the hard work that must be done to bring together an inclusive society."
ast week’s murder of eight people in North Georgia, six of them Asian American women, has brought national attention to the increasing violence and hatred suffered by Asian Americans in this country, and to the continuing reality of violence against women.
Hate crimes against Asian Americans were up a staggering 150% in 2020, with Asian American women twice as likely to be victimized as men. Those targeted are of all ages and all different Asian nationalities. The violent attacks are often simply random, as when Xiao Zhen Xie, a 76-year-old grandmother in San Francisco, was punched in the face by a stranger. Children have been bullied and insulted. Asian-owned businesses have been vandalized; homes smeared with hateful graffiti.
The immediate cause of the increasing violence can be traced back to Donald Trump labeling the COVID-19 pandemic the “Kung Flu” and blaming the Chinese for its spread. Trump’s taunts focused the anger of frightened people on Asian Americans, despite the fact that Asian Americans — often front-line essential workers — were disproportionately hit by the disease. This comes on top of the resentment fueled by the loss of good jobs in America, as rapacious multinationals and foolish policymakers conspired to cripple manufacturing.
The recent outbreak of race crimes directed at Asian Americans is the most recent chapter of a long, dismal history in this country, dating back to when Chinese workers were first imported in the 1850s to do dangerous, low-wage jobs in mining and railroad construction. Employers suppressed their wages, stripped them of their rights and stomped out any effort to organize. Immediately, fears that the “Chinese were taking American jobs” spread wildly.
Just as with African Americans, Asian Americans were victimized repeatedly by vigilante violence and official injustice. In 1854, the California Supreme Court in People v. Hall ruled that Asians could not testify against a white person. Hall, who had murdered a Chinese immigrant, walked away without penalty.
In 1871, in Los Angeles, a vengeful mob lynched 17 Chinese men. No one was ever punished. In 1882, the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, a ban on Chinese immigration that was extended for 60 years. In World War II, Japanese Americans were interned in what were essentially concentration camps, a brazen violation of their rights that the Supreme Court, to its shame, ratified. More recently, when refugees from Vietnam began to work in shrimping off the coast of Texas, the local Ku Klux Klan, garbed in their regalia, set their boats on fire. After 9/11, violence against South Asians soared.
In reality, the 20 million Asian Americans in the United States are very diverse, coming from 20 countries with different languages, religions and races. The largest numbers come from China, India and the Philippines. Collectively, they are the fastest growing minority in the United States.
On average, they are remarkably successful. Their median annual wage is higher than that of all Americans. They are less likely to live in poverty. Over half of those older than 25 have a college degree or more, compared with 30% of all Americans. Seven in 10 who are 5 or older speak English proficiently.
Yet, despite this success, they suffer from systemic racism and face a growing threat of violence. Now is the time to confront this plague. The murders in North Georgia have sparked vigils across the country. Civil rights organizations, African American and Latino groups have rallied in solidarity. The mainstream media has finally put a spotlight on the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes. The Asian American Leaders Table has called on the federal government to ensure robust enforcement of civil rights laws, and to prioritize violence prevention and restorative justice.
Strikingly, they understand that all communities of color struggle in the face of racism and hate crimes. They call on Congress to invest in communities at risk, building for all Americans basic economic rights that include jobs, housing, health care and education. The founding vision of the Rainbow Coalition was the inclusive society. We realized when you combine all the marginalized people who suffer from discrimination — African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, members of the LGBTQ communities, undocumented immigrants, the disabled and more — we represent the majority of America. And when workers come together across lines of race and religion, they can change the world.
The pandemic and the poisonous rhetoric of Donald Trump have exposed once more the hard work that must be done to bring together an inclusive society. Our diversity is truly America’s strength, and the hateful reaction to it America’s weakness. The rising violence against Asian Americans, the Black Lives Matter marches against police brutality, the tragic epidemic of deaths of despair plaguing displaced working people, the increasing anger at immigrants require all of us to come together, across lines of race and religion and region, to protect one another and to unite in the call for equal justice. Together we can make a more perfect union.
Nina Turner waits backstage to be introduced at a rally for Sen. Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign at Winston-Salem State University on Feb. 27. 2020. (photo: Salwan Georges/Getty)
Nina Turner's Campaign Gets a Boost From the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC
Akela Lacy, The Intercept
Lacy writes: "The CPC has been taking a more active role in contested Democratic primaries since the last election cycle."
he Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC has endorsed Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator and co-chair of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, for Congress.
Turner’s campaign to replace former Rep. Marcia Fudge, who was recently confirmed as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, has so far gained the most traction among the Democratic candidates in Ohio’s 11th Congressional District. In addition to a number of high-profile endorsements, she raised more than $1 million during the first few months of her campaign.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC has endorsed Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator and co-chair of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, for Congress.
Turner’s campaign to replace former Rep. Marcia Fudge, who was recently confirmed as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, has so far gained the most traction among the Democratic candidates in Ohio’s 11th Congressional District. In addition to a number of high-profile endorsements, she raised more than $1 million during the first few months of her campaign.
Turner started thinking about running for the seat in 2008, she told The Intercept. If elected, she plans to help the caucus continue growing its power, pushing the same policies she’s platforming in her “opportunity agenda,” which focuses on improving conditions for working people, women, and people of color.
Turner’s campaign has also been backed by a number of union groups and local organizations, including the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers International Union Local 19, which was the first union to endorse her, the Amalgamated Transit Union, and the International Association of Black Professional Firefighters. “That momentum that we are building is connected to something,” Turner said. “This is not just happening out of nowhere.”
One of Turner’s opponents in the Democratic primary, Shontel Brown, leads the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party and had Fudge’s support when she ran for that position. Brown has backing from a number of local elected officials and unions, including Rep. Joyce Beatty; the International Union of Painter and Allied Trades; the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers, or SMART; Akron Mayor Dan Horrigan; and Ohio state Reps. Kent Smith and Terrence Upchurch. Brown is also backed by the PAC for the Democratic Majority for Israel, a pro-Israel political organization that seeks to suppress criticism of Israel from progressives by targeting primary challenges against pro-Israel officials. DMFI PAC endorsed Brown in February and has attacked Turner for helping to “lead the unsuccessful effort to make the Democratic platform less pro-Israel.”
Brown has raised $500,000 to date, according to her campaign. Meanwhile, state Sen. Jeff Johnson, who is also running for the seat, had raised $5,700 as of December 31, according to FEC records. Other people are exploring bids as well.
The congressional seat will remain vacant until a special election takes place in November. Primary elections for the 11th District take place in August.
Women embrace next to a makeshift memorial outside a King Soopers grocery store on March 23, 2021 where multiple people, including a police officer, were killed in a shooting yesterday. (photo: Michael Ciaglo/USA Today)
Americans Are Stubbornly Unmoved by Death
Robin Givhan, The Washington Post
Givhan writes: "Studies have shown that the human brain can lose the capacity to process death, to absorb the meaning of it, when the numbers of the dead begin to reach staggering levels."
he scene looked heartbreakingly familiar: the rumble of tactical vehicles, the swarm of law enforcement officers, the long ribbons of yellow police tape and the eyewitness descriptions thick with residual terror. Monday evening’s deadly shooting in Boulder, Colo., which resulted in the deaths of 10 people, including a police officer, was the second mass shooting in a week.
A dreadful normalcy has returned. Muscle memory demands that we lament it — even as all evidence suggests that many of us are unmoved by death. It doesn’t cause behavior to change. It doesn’t shake people from their moorings at the center of their own universe. Death is not a deterrent.
In the days after a mass shooting, the nation mourns and those who died are named. The hearts of our elected officials have been broken so many times that surely they must be in shards by now. The flags are lowered to half-staff. And the president speaks. Joe Biden, a man who is expert at consoling, did the best that he could to say something true that did not sound like a cliche.
“I even hate to say it because we’re saying it so often: My heart goes out. Our hearts go out for the survivors, the — who had to — had to flee for their lives and who hid, terrified, unsure if they would ever see their families again, their friends again,” Biden said Tuesday afternoon from the State Dining Room. “The consequences of all this are deeper than I suspect we know. By that, I mean the mental consequences — a feeling of — anyway, it just — we’ve been through too many of these.”
The images from these shootings can be gut-wrenching. In video and still images, people see shellshocked survivors pouring out of the school, the night club and, this time, the grocery store. There’s blood in these images, sometimes even the blurred image of one of the deceased. There’s nothing sanitized about them. The shooting may happen behind closed doors, but the death is in the open. The terror rises off the survivors like a stench; the sound of fear reverberates.
And still the deaths don’t spur action to make the guns harder to get, to make the guns less efficient. The president, some politicians and many activists cry out for “common sense” gun laws to stop the senseless death even as it seems that they are pleading with a country that’s engaged in a completely different kind of calculation.
Increasingly it seems that we simply do not care about the other person, that other family, someone else’s child. The self is everything. It’s freedom and liberty, whims and desires. Community doesn’t extend beyond one’s front door. Everything else is someone else’s concern.
Studies have shown that the human brain can lose the capacity to process death, to absorb the meaning of it, when the numbers of the dead begin to reach staggering levels. We have been told that the heart can go numb in response to such enormity. This is one of the explanations for why people have continued to engage in risky behavior during the coronavirus pandemic even as it has become ever clearer how best to protect our fellow Americans. The end is on the horizon, and if people simply wear a mask, social distance and persevere with patience, we might get there — not all of us, sadly, but most of us.
Yet unmasked revelers crowded onto the streets of Miami Beach. The very real possibility of death has not been a deterrent. The community didn’t matter as these partyers and tourists ostensibly shot a different kind of deadly slug into the Florida air.
More than 544,000 deaths in the United States due to the coronavirus have not sent everyone scurrying to protect their neighbor. To follow common sense recommendations. To center the community instead of the individual.
If that number is too big for people to grapple with, what is the right number? What number is small enough that each death touches the heart and therefore motivates people to act, to be better? Is it 58 — the number of people a man killed at a Las Vegas country music festival in 2017? Is it 49 — the number killed in a shooting at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub in 2016? Or perhaps the motivating number is nine, which accounts for those who were fatally shot in Charleston during a prayer meeting. Is it eight — the number who were killed in Georgia just last week? It surely can’t be one because there are singular deadly shootings in communities all too often and still nothing happens. Nothing.
We have not gone numb to death. To “go numb” suggests that once there was feeling, once there was sensitivity. When was that? Perhaps it was back in 1968 when, after the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, Congress passed gun laws that formed the basis of federal regulation that has been regularly eroded and only occasionally strengthened. We haven’t cared for a long time. Not when the dying were schoolchildren, people in the midst of prayer or contented folks just living quiet lives.
Today, some in this country argue against gun laws with a ferocity that moves beyond a right to hunt rabbits, or defend oneself against an assailant or one’s property in the face of an intruder. We refuse to relinquish the delusion that 21st-century America is a frontier town in which gunplay is a form of justice.
Many insist that the very real possibility of mass deaths does not outweigh a personal inconvenience or the setting aside of a myth. Give up large-capacity magazines. Wear a mask. These deaths matter.
We are not numb to death. We stubbornly, selfishly dismiss it. We shake it off. But there is always an assault that has the capacity to bring an individual low. Some bracing gut punch that stings and startles. The pain might finally register in a way that is deep and lasting. And that person begins to feel something.
But that may require death coming directly to their own doorstep, since that’s the only one that, for many of us, seems to matter.
Mount Vernon police officer Murashea Bovell secretly recorded colleagues' accounts of police misconduct and brutality. (photo: George Joseph/WNYC)
For Years, a Tactical Police Unit in Mount Vernon, New York, Reigned With Impunity. Then One of Its Own Started Documenting the Abuse.
George Joseph, Esquire and WNYC
Joseph writes: "For years, a tactical police unit in Mount Vernon, New York, reigned with impunity-protecting drug dealers, planting evidence, brutalizing citizens. Then one of its own started covertly documenting the abuse."
ne night in the spring of 2017, Michelle Campbell was in her kitchen, cooking hot dogs for a few friends, when she heard the boom of her front door breaking. It was the narcotics unit of the Mount Vernon, New York, police. They carried a search warrant and a battering ram. They swarmed in, guns drawn.
The police ordered Campbell and her guests onto the floor and cuffed them. One officer, a detective in a tactical vest and a black hat named Camilo Antonini, surveyed the bodies. He singled out Campbell’s nephew, a skinny man with a scruffy beard and big eyes named Reginald Gallman.
As Gallman would later testify in a civil case, Antonini pulled him into the bathroom, threw him against the water pipe, and pummeled his rib cage with swift, tight punches. Gallman asked why he was being beaten. “You know why, you stupid motherfucker, you dumb-ass nigger,” he recalls the detective saying. The unit’s commander, a sergeant named Sean Fegan, came in and told Antonini to chill out. After five minutes, Gallman testified, he finally did.
Next it was Campbell’s turn for the bathroom. She says he cornered her in the kitchen and got in so close that she could smell his stale breath. But it’s his pockmarked face that sticks with her. “I know where you got the stuff,” he said. “I know whose stuff it is. Just tell me.” Indeed, Campbell had hidden three bags of crack inside her vagina, and she was terrified. At some point, she gave in. “It’s mine,” she said. “I have it.” She was escorted to the makeshift holding room so the bags could be removed.
Campbell swore that the drugs were hers and no one else’s. But she says Antonini pressed her to claim otherwise, that the drugs were in fact Reginald Gallman’s. If she did, the detective said, she could go free.
It was clear to Campbell, then fifty-four, that the officers were there for her nephew. Not because he was a drug dealer, which he was—crack cocaine, primarily—but because he was a drug dealer who’d refused to cooperate with the Mount Vernon police.
Several months earlier, Gallman had been brought into the station on a drug charge. He says that in a small holding room, Antonini, a former Marine with big muscles, made a proposition: Gallman could continue to deal drugs without worry; all he had to do was snitch on his customers. He could, in other words, become a confidential informant.
Eager to avoid jail, Gallman agreed. He says Antonini saved his number to his phone, gave him a code name—“Stretch”—and let him out the side exit. But then Gallman ghosted the detective, going so far as to smash his phone.
Still, run-ins with Antonini were inevitable—the city’s seventy thousand majority-Black residents live within just four square miles of densely packed homes, high-rises, and affordable housing—and whenever that happened, Antonini would demand that Gallman uphold his end of the deal. The raid on Campbell’s apartment was just the latest escalation.
Campbell says she declined Antonini’s offer to turn on her nephew, so she was arrested. At a hearing six days later, the police told their side of the story. Prosecutors did not call on Antonini to testify, but another detective said that as they burst in, the officers saw Gallman hand off a bag containing seventy rocks of crack to his aunt, who inserted the contraband inside herself in full view of the police.
Campbell spent nearly ninety days in jail. Gallman, then thirty-four, got three years’ probation.
This was not an isolated incident. Mount Vernon residents had alleged such abuse by the police for years—fabricating crimes, falsifying reports, detaining individuals who had committed no crime, and using excessive force, including strip and cavity searches that didn’t follow the department’s own protocols. And for those who alleged police misconduct, there was no viable recourse. Citizens didn’t have an independent agency to review their complaints. Their options were limited: They could file a complaint with the department’s internal-affairs bureau, file a complaint with the district attorney, or file a lawsuit.
Gallman chose the third option. From jail, he and his cousin, who was also at Campbell’s that night, filed their handwritten civil complaint against the department and the officers involved in the raid, alleging violent and excessive force. But it was hard to see the point. There was a deep-seated mistrust between the police and the community they were supposed to serve. And what court would believe a dealer’s word over a detective’s?
This time, though, something was different. A disillusioned Mount Vernon officer had been secretly taping conversations with his colleagues. In the following years, his recordings would corroborate many of the abuses that residents had been complaining about in vain.
In 2011, four years after he’d joined the department, Murashea Bovell was assigned to the narcotics unit, a specialized team of the detective division comprising six to eight officers at any given time. They prowled the streets on the south side of the city in unmarked police cars, scanning for dealers and users. They wore plain clothes and conducted undercover drug buys. And they often relied on residents who, facing charges, would trade information for the hope of leniency.
At first, Bovell, then thirty-two, was eager. He especially liked the intricate work of gathering evidence for search warrants. But in just two years, he would request a transfer back to patrol because of what he’d experienced.
Since the nationwide spike in violent crime associated with the surge in crack use in the eighties, police leaders have relied on specialized squads to tally large numbers of drug and gun arrests. Though they have different names—gangs squad, anti-crime, narcotics—they operate on a similar, broken- windows logic: identify and monitor the dealers and gang members whom the police blame for the bloodshed and arrest them before they can spill more.
But with little oversight and an incentive to notch arrests, these units are susceptible to corruption. From Philadelphia to Los Angeles, communities have reckoned with the abuses of elite tactical teams. Last summer, the NYPD, by far the largest police force in the country and a bellwether for all other departments, phased out its anti-crime unit, a vestige of the department’s controversial stop-and-frisk program, which had roiled Black and Latinx communities for decades.
For its part, Mount Vernon, which borders the northern edge of the Bronx, had been on a slow decline for years. In the seventies, it was the proud center of Black culture in very white, very affluent Westchester County. Nina Simone and Betty Shabazz were neighbors. Heavy D, Pete Rock, and Sean “Diddy” Combs grew up there. But the city fell on hard times, and its law-enforcement officers responded with aggressive policing, or worse. In the nineties, the department had such a reputation for pervasive corruption that FBI agents jokingly referred to it as “Mount Vermin.”
In 1994, the feds arrested three officers for stealing $10,000 from a gym bag that the FBI had planted in an apartment. One detective was caught on camera loading the money into his vest and handing a stack to the department’s chief of detectives.
The narcotics unit was often at the center of the misconduct. In 1997, a confidential informant tipped off the unit about a bar owner who allegedly was selling cocaine. The police obtained a search warrant and raided the business. They found their suspect, as well as drugs in a basement file cabinet. But they arrested the bartender, too, who was guilty of nothing more than being at work when the MVPD arrived, a judge found in a civil suit. In a small, windowless room at the station, she was ordered to strip and expose her genitals for inspection. The police found nothing. The bartender sued, claiming that she was arrested without probable cause and searched in violation of her Fourth Amendment rights, and won the case.
By the 2010s, Mount Vernon’s violent-crime rate had fallen, but the narcotics unit continued apace. Sergeant Sean Fegan, who’d served on the squad before, became its leader in the spring of 2013. As Bovell saw it, Fegan emphasized numbers and overlooked misconduct. In this environment, some officers thrived. The year before, Camilo Antonini had made fifty arrests. The year Fegan took over, that number jumped to 106, and in 2014, the year Antonini was promoted from officer to detective, to 151.
According to internal reports that Bovell filed last August at the department’s request, Antonini could be forceful, and he sometimes crossed the line. He slapped a handcuffed, helpless man in the unit’s holding room as Bovell watched. Another time, Antonini pocketed a hundred-dollar bill from a suspect’s purse. When she complained to Fegan about the missing money, the sergeant brushed her off.
Then there was the time the unit got a tip from a confidential informant about a man to whom he’d just sold PCP. Fegan and Antonini, with Bovell and his partner in tow, pulled over the buyer. Antonini called the informant and, as Bovell listened, learned precisely where in the car the stash was hidden. The officers found the drugs and arrested the buyer. The informant not only remained free; he got to keep his earnings.
By the end of 2013, Bovell had had enough. He was granted his transfer request to patrol duty. (At a public forum last September, Mount Vernon’s current police commissioner, Glenn Scott, said the reports filed by Bovell were vague.)
Over the next two years, city residents lodged several misconduct complaints that involved Antonini, for incidents that included assault, unwarranted cavity searches, and theft. In response, the department opened at least eight internal investigations, then dismissed them.
After returning to patrol, Bovell injured his knee and went on medical leave, which dragged on for months and then years. The department squabbled with him over his medical bills, which put Bovell on edge. Had his departure from the narcotics unit made him a target? At some point, he went into what he calls detective mode. If the department was keeping tabs on him, he could do the same. He started recording.
Alan Seward, forty-eight, is a self-described “ ’hood legend” who goes by the nickname Budda Bless. He grew up in Mount Vernon, where his family has lived for generations. “Everybody in this town knows me,” he says. “Eight to eighty, you know me.”
Seward began selling marijuana when he was eleven. He says that his first brutal encounter with the MVPD came four years later. One summer night, a brown Chevy pulled up to his block and two officers jumped out. They found his weed tucked inside a pack of cigarettes and threw him in the car. They asked his age. Seward said he was fifteen—too young to be charged as an adult. So instead of arresting him, they took him to a nearby park, punched him twice in the gut, and left him.
On the advice of his father, Seward went into the cocaine trade, and he was in and out of prison for three decades. In 2016, he completed his latest sentence, a two-year bit for cocaine possession. A year and a half later, he crossed paths with the MVPD again.
One evening in November 2017, the narcotics unit broke open the front door to Seward’s daughter Kierra Thompson’s apartment. They were looking for her father, according to a civil complaint filed by Seward. Instead, they found Thompson and her two children, ten and eight. As the officers searched, they kept Thompson handcuffed for an hour. They found no drugs, so a few plainclothes officers left to look for Seward at a bar nearby.
It was $2 Tuesday at the Bungalow, and to Seward, that meant betting opportunities at the pool table. He’d win game after game without trying, holding the stick in one hand as he worked the table. He says he’s known there as the One-Handed Bandit. During his sixteenth game that night, he noticed a few men in hoodies lurking by the jukebox. He kept an eye on them. As the men approached from behind, Seward gripped his pool stick, ready to swing. Then he saw their badges. Cops. Including Camilo Antonini.
Though Antonini had arrested him nearly a decade earlier, Seward didn’t recognize the detective. But he’d heard about this narcotics cop who’d been running the streets by his own rules. “Dudes said, ‘He got mad niggas snitching,’ ” Seward told me.
At the Bungalow, the officers cuffed him, then escorted him through the bar and down the block to their unmarked car. Antonini opened the back door, shoved Seward’s torso inside, then pinned down his legs outside the vehicle, according to the civil complaint. In full view of passersby, the detective pulled down Seward’s pants, exposing his genitals to anyone who happened to walk by, spread his cheeks, and searched his rectum. He found no contraband.
The police drove Seward to his daughter’s apartment. There, Antonini took him to the bathroom and strip-searched him a second time. Again, he came up empty. The detective stepped out of the room and returned with a small glassine bag filled with white powder. “Look at this,” Seward recalls the detective saying. “I found ten grams.” From the other room, Thompson yelled, “Daddy, they searched before you got here and they didn’t find nothing!” Seward looked at the bag, then at Antonini. “You can put that ten grams back in your pocket,” he said. Antonini punched him in the face, then said if Seward didn’t claim the drugs as his, the police would have no choice but to arrest his daughter. Seward complied.
At the station, he was strip-searched a third time, according to the complaint, with the same result as before. He was brought to a holding room. Antonini sat down calmly, as if that day’s brutality hadn’t occurred, and made a pitch. “It’s just me and you in here,” he said. “I already know you a real dude.” Antonini said that if Seward provided information that led to a gun arrest, he could walk out a side door of the station. “You won’t gotta worry about getting arrested,” Antonini said. “All you gotta do is give me your information.” Seward could even take the ten grams. “You’d be surprised by how many CIs I got,” the detective said.
Seward had received previous offers to become a confidential informant. But future license to operate with impunity, plus a parting gift? This was new. It didn’t matter. “I don’t even give a fuck,” he said. “One thing I do know is you don’t got me.” According to the complaint, the detective punched his face a second time.
Seward was taken to a cell and charged with possession. Afterward, in official paperwork, the police claimed that Antonini had stayed behind at Thompson’s apartment and that they’d found the ten grams in the pocket of Seward’s jacket at the Bungalow.
Seward was released on his own recognizance. He diligently showed up for court appearances until his mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Fearing that he wouldn’t be around to see her, he stopped attending hearings. During his flight, the police added a felony drug charge on top of the one already pending. The D. A. published his mug shot in a public announcement of twenty-two arrests as part of a “multi-jurisdictional drug sweep” in Westchester County. Mount Vernon’s mayor held a press conference to show off the faces of the suspects. Antonini stood behind him, his gold detective badge strung around his neck.
After Seward’s mother passed away, in 2019, he turned himself in and was promptly charged with a third felony, for bail jumping. The drug charges that had gotten him into trouble were dropped, but he pleaded guilty to the bail-jumping charge.
By 2018, Bovell had amassed more than thirteen hours of recorded conversations with at least four colleagues, three of whom had been on or would be assigned to the narcotics unit. Police leadership had no idea.
Instead, the department had been battling with Bovell, first over medical bills he’d accrued in the wake of his knee injury—he thought they should pay, and they’d had enough—then over whether he was mentally fit to serve. He’d sued for denial of benefits, but also so much more: wild accusations of wrongdoing by his colleagues, involving everything from racial discrimination to brutality and corruption. The case was dismissed.
In 2018, Bovell hired a new lawyer, Joseph Murray, a former NYPD officer with the fists of an amateur boxer, which he once was. At first, he approached the litigious officer with caution.
But then Murray heard the tapes.
In one recording, from 2017, an officer named Avion Lee described a suspect who was beaten so badly during his arrest that she thought his jaw may have been broken. Her sergeant told the officers who’d been on the scene to fabricate having seen the man involved in a hand-to-hand drug sale. In another, Allen Patterson, a detective who’d served alongside Bovell on the narcotics unit, said he saw Antonini assault a suspect at the station. When Patterson reported the incident, the department replied with an offer to transfer out of the squad.
But to Murray, it was Bovell’s recordings of John Campo, an officer who’d also been on the narcotics unit, that stood out. In one call, Campo said the unit allowed certain informants to sell drugs as “a monopoly.” In another, the officer claimed that some members of the unit carried drugs and paraphernalia such as crack pipes, presumably for when they didn’t find such evidence on suspects. They called it, he said, the rainy-day fund. Campo even admitted to once safeguarding a bundle of crack for a confidential informant, then returning it after an arrest. (In a phone call, Fegan, the unit’s leader, denied Campo’s claims. “Nobody is allowed to sell drugs on the street in Mount Vernon,” he said.) “Here’s an active member of the narcotics unit witnessing all of this and sharing all of this,” Murray told me. “My jaw hit the floor.” He took Bovell’s case.
In the summer of 2018, Bovell and Murray heard from prosecutors for the Westchester County district attorney, Anthony Scarpino. The D. A. had received one of Bovell’s complaints and wanted to hear more.
Seated at a conference table at the D. A.’s office, in White Plains, Bovell told prosecutors about the tapes, describing Antonini’s brutality and the impunity offered to select drug dealers. The D. A.’s staff seemed interested and asked to hear more. Bovell mailed a USB drive with hours of recorded conversations to the D. A. A month later, an investigator confirmed that they’d received the recordings and had begun listening to them.
Then nothing happened.
The city’s political establishment was cannibalizing itself. It was the summer of 2019, and the mayor had recently pled guilty to misusing campaign funds. He said the conviction should not preclude him from serving in office, but Mount Vernon’s charter stated otherwise, so the city council swore in its president as acting mayor. For weeks, both men claimed to be mayor. When the acting mayor’s appointed police commissioner showed up for his first day on the job, he was arrested for trespassing by officers now ostensibly under his authority. He was the fifth commissioner in as many years.
Eventually, the elected, disgraced mayor stepped down, only to reveal that his replacement had mortgaged his home to pay a $1 million bond for a drug kingpin in Manhattan.
Around that time, Bovell returned to work on light duty. He was known as the guy who had named names in a lawsuit. It wasn’t long before he sensed retaliation.
Once, Bovell discovered a white rubber rat in front of his locker. The next day, his lock was smeared with white paste. Soon after, in the middle of announcing an assignment at roll call, a sergeant said, “412 South Second, there’s rats. Not like the rats here at headquarters.” Bovell says the sergeant gestured in his direction. Snickers rose from across the room.
Afterward, Bovell called Murray to tell him what had happened. Murray said the time had come to release the tapes. Bovell had risked his career, and possibly more, and the D. A. hadn’t done a thing.
Bovell says he didn’t want to go to the press. Cops don’t do that. But he felt as if he had a target on his back and that he’d run out of options.
I bumped into Joseph Murray In October 2019, at a police-reform rally I was covering for the public radio station WNYC. We’d never met, but we’d talked over the phone for another story I was reporting. During our call, he’d mentioned a crazy case he was working on, involving corruption in Mount Vernon. Outside the rally, I asked him about the case. We stayed in touch.
After months of poring over Bovell’s recorded conversations, I focused first on the allegations regarding the narcotics unit’s falsified drug charges. The claims themselves were explosive, especially coming from officers who didn’t know they were being recorded. But what stood out to me was the D. A.’s apparent lack of interest in investigating the officers whom colleagues had associated with brutal and often illegal behavior. I found dozens of cases involving arrests by Antonini and others mentioned on the tapes that the D. A. had continued to pursue. Whenever I called the defendants, almost all of whom are Black, or their lawyers, no one knew what I was talking about. When I reached out to the city and the D. A. for comment, neither seemed to recognize the gravity of the accusations, which could call into question hundreds of convictions. An official with the D. A.’s office told me that if citizens had concerns over wrongful convictions, they could file a complaint for review. How they expected citizens to know about Bovell’s tapes was another question, since the D. A. had quietly shut down the investigation into the recordings without disclosing them to the public.
Last June, my first story on Bovell’s taped conversations came out. It sparked public outrage. Congressional and statehouse leaders released letters expressing their concerns. Local officials scrambled to address the situation. Mount Vernon’s new mayor, Shawyn Patterson-Howard—who’d won in a landslide against the acting mayor—tweeted that “bad cops must go” and that she “wouldn’t stand for it.” In a public statement, Anthony Scarpino, the D. A., who was up for reelection, claimed that his office had followed through “with an exhaustive investigation into every allegation made on the tapes.” (Later, a D. A. spokesperson told me, “The allegations that District Attorney Scarpino and this office are not conducting a full and thorough investigation are false” and the office “will not jeopardize the work by commenting publicly on the substance of the investigation.”)
Though the D. A. had prosecuted a couple of Mount Vernon officers, neither from the narcotics unit, Bovell’s tapes came up repeatedly in election debates and local media coverage. Three weeks later, Scarpino lost the primary to a former federal prosecutor named Mimi Rocah, who’d campaigned on her predecessor’s inaction.
In September, Glenn Scott, a veteran of the force, whom Patterson-Howard had appointed as police commissioner, told me that he’d dissolved the beleaguered unit of the MVPD. “The narcotics unit will not be reinstituted until all deficiencies are corrected,” he said. The following week, the department announced that it was investigating Antonini, who was put on desk duty until further notice. In a statement to Esquire, a city spokesperson said that the mayor and her administration are “committed to building a police department that is not only a prime representation of the community that it polices but is also held accountable.” He continued, “We look forward to partnering with the new district attorney to continue our investigation into past allegations of abuse and misconduct in the Mount Vernon Police Department.”
The city and the D. A. may not be alone in probing Mount Vernon’s former narcotics squad. The day my first article on the tapes was published, the chief of the White Plains division of the U. S. attorney’s office reached out to Joseph Murray. The federal prosecutor asked for Bovell’s recordings. As of press time, the status of that investigation is unknown.
Despite all that Bovell’s recordings revealed, much in Mount Vernon remains the same.
Though the narcotics unit is defunct, last year the department launched a violent-crimes unit, which deploys the same plainclothes-policing model as its predecessor.
Bovell remains a patrol officer—he’s still employed, but he hasn’t risen in rank in fourteen years. Patterson-Howard, the mayor, has not met with Bovell, and Scott, the commissioner, has disparaged him and his efforts in public forums. Each day that Bovell walks into work, he risks running into the colleagues he exposed.
Camilo Antonini declined to discuss the allegations against him. “Obviously I’m not going to comment on anything Mr. Joseph has put out there,” he told Esquire. He’s still on desk duty. Yes, he’s off the street. But he still collects a paycheck. So does Sean Fegan.
Of the officers Bovell recorded, John Campo, who’d safeguarded a dealer’s contraband, was suspended without pay in November. He’d talked the most on the tapes, and he was the only officer to confess to his own misconduct.
Avion Lee went on to be assigned to the narcotics unit and later became a detective. She and Allen Patterson remain on the force.
The fourth colleague Bovell recorded, a sergeant named Aristotle Evans, was sued by another officer for sexual abuse. The case was dismissed, but Evans was demoted. He, too, is still getting paid.
Some residents are hopeful that Mimi Rocah, the county’s new district attorney, will follow through with her campaign promise to take on the alleged corruption in Mount Vernon. A D. A. spokesperson told Esquire that had Rocah been in office at the time, “she would have ensured that the investigation was treated with greater urgency than happened under the prior administration.” In a departure from the office under Scarpino, the spokesperson said that “the investigation is high priority and ongoing.” The shadow of a federal probe still hangs over the department.
After falling out with his daughter in the wake of the raid on her apartment, Alan Seward has reconciled with her. He says he’s stopped selling drugs: “You get tired of going to jail.” He’s trying his hand at video production and design. His lawsuit is still pending; the city has signaled it will move to dismiss it.
Reginald Gallman’s lawsuit is ongoing, too. The incident at his aunt’s apartment was hardly his first run-in with law enforcement, but this time, he says, it was unwarranted. He’s particularly upset by the actions he alleges Antonini took that night. “Nah, he’s not gonna be beating up on me for nothing because I don’t wanna work for him,” Gallman told me when we first spoke. “If you catch me, you catch me. I’m gonna do my time, go upstate, do what I gotta do. I broke the law, okay? But you’re not gonna exceed the law and do what you wanna do to me and think I gonna help you.” (The city and the department have denied wrongdoing.)
As for Campbell, the raid convinced her that she had to leave Mount Vernon. Her home for thirteen years is now inseparable from the face and smell of Camilo Antonini. “Mount Vernon is so dark, I don’t even go there anymore,” she told me. “I still see his face to this day.” She took her two cats and left the rest behind.
Campbell says that in many ways, her life has improved. She’s married now, and she’s kicked her addiction. Still, she has nightmares. Sometimes even the television is too much. “I don’t watch scary movies anymore,” she says. “Certain shows I can’t watch, like certain scenes where a man is close up on a woman, like he’s threatening her. It affects me. I get upset. I want to cry. I can’t sleep.”
Campbell wonders how many people like her must come forward for their stories to be believed. “This is not like it’s one or two people,” she says. “It’s a lot of us. We all can’t be lying.”
Illustration of basketball player. (photo: Christina Animashaun/Vox)
The Massive Republican Push to Ban Trans Athletes, Explained
Katelyn Burns, Vox
Burns writes: "28 states have introduced bills to prevent trans kids and women from playing sports. It's the GOP's latest attempt to force trans people into hiding."
race Walker wants you to know that she is just an average athlete. “I’m going to be entirely honest, when it comes to me and my athletics, I am strictly middle of the road. I’m far from exceptional,” the 17-year-old from Minnesota told Vox.
She’s being modest. She’s captain of her school’s cheerleading and tennis teams and hopes to continue her athletic career when she goes off to college next year. Walker says she wasn’t drawn to sports before her transition, citing the alienating masculine atmosphere often baked into boys’ sports. But the moment she transitioned, the idea of sports was suddenly on the table. Being part of a team seemed fun, inclusive, a way not just to challenge her athletic ability but to also be part of something.
“I joined tennis and cheer specifically for the culture,” she said. “I joined cheer to be a cheerleader and be able to walk into school in a uniform that my parents never would have let me wear outside the house. I joined because we had fundraisers and sleepovers where we would sneak out and go get food, or we would do, like, henna tattoos. I joined all these sports just to be surrounded by a bunch of people like me.”
But what Walker and many see as a normal part of creating teenage camaraderie is criminal to others. A Republican lawmaker in her state, Rep. Eric Lucero, introduced a bill this legislative session that would classify trans girls and women playing sports as a petty misdemeanor, roughly equivalent in the state to possessing a small amount of marijuana. Minnesotan trans athletes like Walker could end up having to appear in juvenile court just for playing tennis.
It’s perhaps the harshest in a wave of state-level anti-trans legislation aimed at barring trans girls and women from playing girls’ and women's scholastic sports. Twenty-seven states have introduced similar bills this year, with one, in Mississippi, becoming law earlier this month. Tennessee and Arkansas both passed bans that are awaiting their governors’ signatures. Idaho passed a similar law last year, later to be enjoined by a federal court.
The crusade against trans athletes has been the most successful effort to introduce transphobic discrimination into state law, after numerous states failed to pass larger-scale bathroom bills and puberty blocker bans in recent years. Trans athleticism is a seemingly complicated issue that has found success largely due to a mishmash of cultural attitudes and generally incorrect assumptions, particularly about trans girls’ bodies.
It first gained attention in 2017 when far-right media began waging a campaign against a small handful of trans athletes, most notably two Black trans sprinters who dominated Connecticut girls’ track. Under the Trump administration, the Education Department joined a lawsuit against the Connecticut high school athletics governing body brought by the anti-trans legal group Alliance Defending Freedom and several cisgender girls who lost in track events to the Connecticut trans girls (before later beating them).
The case — along with Cece Telfer’s Division II national hurdling championship in 2019 and Veronica Ivy’s 2018 and 2019 world masters sprint cycling championships — has been held up by conservative media as proof that all trans girls and women have a “biological advantage” at sports, and should therefore be banned.
Anti-trans doomsayers often claim that simply allowing trans women and girls to compete at sports would “destroy women’s sports.” “If the A.C.L.U. gets its way, women’s sports will no longer exist,” Roger Brooks, senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, told the New York Times. “There’ll be men’s sports and there’ll be semi-coed sports, and women and girls in Connecticut will be losers.”
But that narrative largely fails to hold up to real-world evidence — trans athletes have been allowed in girls’ high school and women's college sports for years and no school has had to make “co-ed teams,” a dig that misgenders trans girls and women. Meanwhile, science has found that trans girls who hormonally transition at younger ages do not necessarily have a “biological advantage” athletically. And none of it justifies banning middle school trans girls from the local girls’ soccer team.
Transgender advocates say that using a handful of examples of trans girls succeeding at sports to push widespread and exclusionary legislation is a solution in search of a problem. An Associated Press investigation into these athletic bans found that most lawmakers supporting such bills cannot name a single trans athlete competing in their state. A New York Times report indicated that out of about 200,000 women taking part in NCAA women’s sports at a given time, about 50 are transgender.
“This is a manufactured fear that the politicians pushing hope will be emblematic of a too-swiftly changing culture,” Gillian Branstetter, a spokesperson for the National Women’s Law Center, told Vox. It’s “simply a wedge issue to drive between voters of one party or another. My concern is that the wedge that these bills will drive is not between voters and a political party, but between parents and their children.”
Advocates say that laws that exclude and punish trans kids — and messaging that classifies young trans girls as “biological boys” — is scare-mongering and unfair, and only seeks to reinforce ugly stereotypes about trans girls and women to an uninformed public. It’s another attack on trans kids that potentially threatens not just their school life but also their relationship with their parents — which, advocates say, is ultimately the goal for anti-trans conservatives: forcing trans kids back into the closet.
The science shows many trans women athletes lose strength after hormonally transitioning
At the heart of the issue is an assumption that male bodies are born with an innate biological athletic superiority. It deems anyone born with a penis to be better at sports than anyone born with a vagina. And this assumption not only drives many issues marginalizing women’s sports — which are frequently underfunded, underdeveloped, and largely ignored in a culture that equates “best” with “male” — it is the narrative driving the push to ban trans girls from competing in girls’ sports, too.
In fact, nearly all of the sweeping legislation to ban trans kids from playing sports primarily focuses on trans girls, with language misgendering them as “biological boys.”
But this “biological male is best” assumption, as with so many other trans issues, is a gross overgeneralization. Children frequently play coed sports until puberty begins, and only then does there begin to be a separation in athletic performance between boys and girls. The existence of girls like Walker, however, further complicates matters. She largely avoided male puberty to begin with, thanks to her middle school puberty blockers and hormonal transition. Taking a look at her slight physique would render absurd the idea that she’s some genetically giant super-athlete compared to her cis peers.
“I wouldn’t even have a shot on the boys’ team,” said Walker. “I don’t have that testosterone. If we really want to talk about fairness and athletics, putting a person like myself or a transgender female on a men’s team would not be fair. I’m a girl, and in no way, shape, or form does my blood work, physique, muscle mass, BMI, or anything like that reflect a man.”
Even for trans women athletes, many experts agree that trans women at least lose some performance ability when they hormonally transition, even if it’s after puberty has been completed, rendering it unlikely that they would be able to keep up — or stay safe — competing against their cis male counterparts.
Estrogen is much less efficient at building and maintaining muscle than testosterone, and early research indicates that trans women lose significant strength through their transition-related hormone replacement therapy regimen. So for trans women athletes, that means they need to take longer to recover between workouts than they did before transition, causing muscle loss.
While some studies have suggested that trans women do retain at least some of their previous pure strength advantage even after a year on estrogen, with further drops past the one-year mark, how this exactly translates to more complicated athletic movements beyond pure strength and endurance tests remains to be proven.
There are physical traits that cannot be changed through hormone replacement, such as height, which is critical in many sports including basketball and volleyball. But human bodies aren’t cleanly split into two distinct types like store mannequins. In my own social circle, I know a 5-foot trans woman and a 6-foot-4 genderqueer person who was assigned female at birth. It would be odd to ban trans women on the basis of height while not holding unusually tall cis women to the same standard.
Part of the problem on the anti-trans side is that they’re starting from the base assumption that trans women are men, and substitute cis male physical traits when discussing whether trans women may have competitive advantages. They’ll argue that men have bigger hearts and more lung capacity, or produce more red blood cells on average than cis women, and then assume trans women’s bodies would be the same.
But initial scientific findings don’t necessarily support that, according to Loughborough University PhD student Joanna Harper, who has spent the past decade researching trans athletes. Harper noted that a trans athlete she previously studied at Arizona State University saw the ejection fraction rate of her heart drop significantly after HRT, meaning less blood was pumped with each beat. “The heart itself might be the same, but the muscles may not work as well,” she told Vox. “And if the ejection fraction goes down, who cares about the size of the heart? It’s how much blood you can pump that matters.”
According to Harper, there are myriad physical traits that may impact a trans woman’s athletic ability, but we yet don’t know enough specific science about trans women’s bodies to draw broad policy conclusions for trans athletes.
“Cis people see a lot of the instantaneous results of the coming-out process, so they assume it’s just a snap decision,” said Canadian sportswriter A.J. Andrews, a trans woman. “They don’t see the years of hormone therapy and the changes it does to a body; they just see the moment of public change and fear some giant bodybuilder is going to do the same thing.”
While conservatives have used Telfer and Ivy for outrage fuel in this debate, neither has competed at the very highest levels of their sport. Ivy won a master’s championship, which is an age-restricted category, meaning she was only competing against other women in their late 30s. She is not a world elite rider and is not a likely competitor to make an Olympic appearance.
Ignored in right-wing media coverage are decidedly average trans performances, like 28-year-old Megan Youngren, who attempted to qualify for the 2020 US Olympic marathon team last February, finishing in 200th place in the qualifying race. Trans women were allowed to begin competing as women in the Olympics if they’d had bottom surgery beginning in 2004. The surgery requirement was lifted in 2016 and replaced by guidelines stating that trans women must lower their testosterone levels for an entire year before eligibility. Despite the more open stance, no openly trans woman has ever qualified to compete as a woman in the Olympics.
Similarly, the NCAA instituted a similar hormone requirement in 2011, and thus far, Telfer has been the only openly trans national champion at any of the association’s three divisions of competition.
Even debating who is allowed into elite athletic sporting competitions like the Olympics is a far cry from legislating whether trans kids can take part in school sports. And caught in the middle are trans kids like Walker.
Far-right conservatives are using this debate to classify trans women and girls as male under law
Speaking with Vox, Walker continuously stressed how average she is, particularly in tennis, where she says she alternated between first and second singles on the team and was voted captain not because of her talent, but because she is likable. But later in the interview, Walker revealed just how hard she’d worked to both make and succeed on the team. She mentioned going to cheer and tennis camp and growing up playing tennis like her mom.
But girls like Walker shouldn’t have to justify their right to play sports by proving how mediocre their results are — and the panic over supposed athletic dominance of trans girls is a convenient lead-in for conservatives and radical feminists to draw distinctions between cis and trans girls in law that they can later build on.
Rep. Lucero’s public comments about his bill belie the endgame of such legislation. “The last several years have been witness to a rise in the number of confused boys and men mistakenly believing themselves to be girls and women when the science says otherwise, yet demanding to play on female sport teams, use female bathrooms, and even shower with females, causing outrage and concern among parents by the threat to their daughters’ safety,” Lucero told the Minnesota television station KTSP earlier this month.
In other words, Lucero and his conservative peers see this as an extension of the bathroom bill debate and are seeking to classify trans girls and women as men under the law, which would then open the door to all sorts of legal exclusions down the road.
So far, just Mississippi and Idaho have signed such bills into law, and the latter state’s bill is caught up in court. (Tennessee and Arkansas have also passed bans, but their governors have yet to sign them.) Any other bill that gets signed into law will likely be challenged in court, too.
In the meantime, these statehouse debates have once again forced trans adults, trans kids, and parents of trans kids to turn out to legislative hearings debating their right to exist. In touching testimony in Missouri, Brandon Boulware, the parent of a trans girl, patiently explained to lawmakers his evolution in supporting his daughter’s transition.
“I had a child who did not smile,” Boulware said about his daughter before her social transition. Boulware said he had forbidden his daughter from wearing girls’ clothes or growing her hair out for years, against the advice of teachers, doctors, and therapists. “My daughter was equating being good with being someone else. I was teaching her to deny who she is. As a parent, the one thing we cannot do is silence our child’s spirit.”
Sports — and, ultimately, being part of a team — are a normal part of kids’ socialization. Studies have shown that athletic participation provides all sorts of positive effects on children, from reduced rates of depression to positive physical health outcomes. But more importantly, high school and college sports are a common space for community-building. Small towns often gather at the local high school’s athletic events and socialize and build a common identity. By excluding trans girls from these spaces, it sends a clear message to all trans kids that they don’t belong.
And that’s the thing about this and all debates over trans issues happening in the US and the rest of the world. Behind all the grand pronouncements, Twitter trolls, and armchair experts are the very real lives of trans kids like Grace Walker, who merely want to live a normal life without their transness making things weird or difficult.
“We encourage students to engage in sports,” said Walker. “We know it makes students happier. It makes them more healthy. It makes them more involved in their school environment. We encourage children to be part of sports. For me, it’s so shocking because it’s taking away a core foundation that we have put in place for such a long time. We’re going after the kids.”
Agnes Callamard, UN special rapporteur, says the threats were made at a high-level meeting in Geneva. (photo: Francois Lenoir/Reuters)
Top Saudi Official Issued Death Threat Against UN's Khashoggi Investigator
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "A senior official issued a death threat against UN investigator Agnes Callamard following her inquiry into the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the Guardian reported on Tuesday."
Senior Saudi twice threatened to have Agnes Callamard ‘taken care of’ in meeting with UN colleagues in January 2020, the Guardian reports.
In an interview with the British newspaper, the outgoing special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary killings said a UN colleague alerted her in January 2020 that an unnamed Saudi official twice threatened in a meeting with other senior UN officials in Geneva to have Callamard “taken care of”.
She said the comments were understood as a “death threat” by her colleagues.
Callamard, a French national, will be joining the human rights watchdog Amnesty International as secretary-general this month, according to the news report.
She was the first official to investigate the murder of Washington Post columnist Khashoggi, who was killed by Saudi agents at the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul in October 2018, and publish a detailed report.
Khashoggi was a former royal insider who often wrote critically of the Saudi government.
In the 100-page report published in June 2019, Callamard said Khashoggi’s death “constituted an extrajudicial killing for which the State of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is responsible”.
The report also said Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) should be investigated over the murder.
Last month, an unclassified US intelligence report also concluded MBS approved and likely ordered the killing of Khashoggi. The Saudi government rejected “the negative, false and unacceptable assessment in the report”.
Saudi Arabia has said Khashoggi was killed in a “rogue operation” by agents and Prince Mohammed has denied ordering it.
‘Take care of her’
Callamard told the Guardian the threats against her were made at a “high-level” meeting between Geneva-based Saudi diplomats, visiting Saudi officials, and UN officials in Switzerland.
She was told the Saudis criticised her work on the Khashoggi probe, voicing anger about her investigation and conclusions, the Guardian reported.
The Saudi officials also claimed she received money from Qatar, an allegation frequently used against critics of the Saudi government.
Callamard said one of the visiting senior Saudi officials is then alleged to have said he received phone calls from individuals who were prepared to “take care of her”, the newspaper said.
When UN officials voiced alarm, other Saudis present tried to reassure them the comment should not be taken seriously.
The Saudi group then left the room but the visiting senior Saudi official stayed behind, and repeated the threat to the remaining UN officials in the room, Callamard was told.
The Saudi official said he knew people who offered to “take care of the issue if you don’t”.
“It was reported to me at the time and it was one occasion where the United Nations was actually very strong on that issue. People that were present, and also subsequently, made it clear to the Saudi delegation that this was absolutely inappropriate and that there was an expectation that this should not go further,” Callamard told the Guardian.
The Saudi government did not respond to the news report.
“You know, those threats don’t work on me. Well, I don’t want to call for more threats. But I have to do what I have to do. It didn’t stop me from acting in a way which I think is the right thing to do,” Callamard was quoted as saying.
Al Jazeera contacted Callamard for a comment but did not immediately receive a response on Tuesday.
Greg Gianforte at the state capitol in Helena, Montana, on 10 February. (photo: Thomas Bridge/AP)
Montana Governor Kills Black Wolf in Violation of State Regulations
Tom McCarthy, Guardian UK
McCarthy writes:
Republican governor received warning after failing to take required certification course before killing animal
he Republican governor of Montana has been slapped with a written warning and directed to take an online education course after trapping and killing a black wolf in violation of state regulations.
The governor, Greg Gianforte, was elected in November and was formerly a member of US Congress representing the state. The news was first reported by Nate Hegyi in the Mountain West News Bureau of Boise State public radio in Idaho.
Gianforte reportedly trapped the animal on a ranch just outside Yellowstone national park, on property owned by Robert E Smith, a Republican donor and director of Sinclair Broadcasting, the biggest owner of local television stations in the US.
Gianforte had failed to take a required wolf trapping certification course before killing the animal, state wildlife officials said. He has promised to take the course, the public radio report said.
Despite deep-seated mythology in the American west, biologists have found that wolves do not represent a significant threat to humans or to livestock. Conservation efforts have helped some wolf populations rebound after decades of over-hunting.
But last month, hunters and trappers in Wisconsin killed 216 gray wolves during the state’s 2021 wolf hunting season – more than 82% above the authorities’ stated quota. The gray wolf recently lost Endangered Species Act protection.
John Sullivan, Montana chapter chair for the sportsmen’s group Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, told the Boise state public radio Mountain West News Bureau that Gianforte should have known better.
“He has been hunting and trapping for a long time and I would be surprised to learn that he didn’t know better than to complete that education,” Sullivan said. “We hope that he apologizes to the citizens of the state for circumventing the process that we all have to go through.”
Smith, the ranch owner, gave more than $10,000 to Gianforte’s election campaigns in 2017 and 2018 and also has been a Donald Trump contributor, according to reporting by the Guardian.
Gianforte was previously convicted of assault in state court for body-slamming the reporter Ben Jacobs, at the time a political correspondent for the Guardian, during Gianforte’s 2017 special election campaign to fill Montana’s at-large congressional seat.
In that incident, Gianforte was fined and directed to perform community service and undergo anger management therapy.
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