Salon.com > Patrick Tracey

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in custody and alive

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 01:06:00 +0000

WATERTOWN, Mass. -- A very bloodied Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the individual thought to be the younger of two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombing, has been apprehended.

Earlier in the evening, conflicting reports on Boston police scanners had suspect No. 2 being reported as alive or dead, his legs appearing to move or not from under a backyard boat on a small street in east Watertown, a close-in community in the Greater Boston area. But as a crowd cheered at 8:43, rumors were swirling that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had been taken alive.

It is confirmed in east Watertown that the second suspect cornered here has been arrested following a firefight that resumed before 7 p.m. after ending last night. In that time the scene moved a few blocks closer to the tony boutiques of Watertown Square to this relatively small but densely populated residential street of two-family homes off Mount Auburn Street, the main thoroughfare through Watertown.

Portrait emerges of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 18:12:00 +0000

BOSTON -- None of the young local neighborhood guys who grew up with the brothers Tsarnaev could believe they were the same pair fingered on video last night as the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings.

“When I first heard the news (last night), I thought they were joking,” said Derek Winbush, who graduated in 2011 from Cambridge Rindge and Latin high school with Dzhokhar, the youngest brother.

“But the way they [the two brothers] were walking, the way [he] was holding his backpack, it was them” seen placing the bombs near the finish line Monday afternoon on Boylston Street in Boston’s Copley Square.

“I wouldn’t say he was a good friend, but we hung out,” Winbush said of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev from the seat of his silver Schwinn 7-speed bike, amid an endless stream of SWAT team vehicles arriving to cordon off the working-class Cambridge neighborhood where the brothers have lived since they were preteens.

Although they kept their home lives to themselves, the brothers got respect on these streets as skilled wrestlers and boxers, and also as fairly good students. Winbush said they used to attend parties on nearby Magazine Street with ordinary high school kids, just drinking and smoking pot.

Scott Brown’s triumphant makeover

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 17:42:00 +0000

The so-called People’s Pledge seemed like a somewhat gimmicky win-win proposition for both incumbent Republican Sen. Scott Brown and his Democratic challenger, Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, in their race for the seat once held by Ted Kennedy. The idea, proposed by Brown, was to staunch the flow of super PAC money into the race with an agreement of elegant simplicity: If a candidate is attacked by name in an ad, then the one who comes off looking better is obliged to donate half the cost of the ad buy to a charity of the other candidate's choice. Pretty simple: Why shoot yourself in the foot, right?

The trick in the gimmick became clear this week when Brown announced that he was holding up his end of the pledge, agreeing to pay half the costs of an ad from a group called Coalition of Americans for Political Equality (CAPE PAC) and asking it to pull its Google ads promoting him. The group's website is now offline. Jeff Loyd, a Tea Party activist from Arizona who chairs the PAC, confirmed that his group spent all of $673.99 in pro-Brown online advertising with Google.

On birth control, Romney mirrored Obama

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Cracking down on contraception was never the way for Mitt Romney to ingratiate himself with voters in Massachusetts, even the Roman Catholics who mostly see it as a moral neutral. Now that that position is coming back to haunt Romney like the ghost of Christmas past, he's taking cover with the religious right. And after last night’s surprising three-state sweep by social conservative Rick Santorum he'll need all the cover he can get.

Some Catholic leaders in Massachusetts are already (finally) speaking up against what they see as Romney’s politically convenient about-face in the emergency contraception debate. C.J. Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, told Salon he didn't want to "let Romney off the hook because the initial injury to Catholic religious freedom came not from the Obama administration but from Romney's administration"; he explained that there was a preexisting exemption for religious institutions already in the Massachusetts law that was stripped out on the advice of Romney’s gubernatorial legal counsel. "President Obama's plan certainly constitutes an assault on the constitutional rights of Catholics, but I'm not sure Governor Romney is in a position to assert that, given his own very mixed record on this."

Super PACs not welcome in Massachusetts Senate race

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:00:00 +0000

BOSTON—If there’s a lonely glimmer of hope in the gloom and doom over money in politics, it was born this week in Boston with the signing of the People’s Pledge agreement to extinguish the onslaught of SuperPac ads polluting the Massachusetts airwaves, ten months before the nation’s most closely watched Senate race comes to an end.

The brainchild of Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren, the darling of the left—yet prompted by Senator Scott Brown, the Tea Party centerfold who took Ted Kennedy's seat—the key enforcement mechanism is remarkably simple in its conception: the candidate favored in a third-party ad on TV, radio or online must make a contribution worth half of the ad’s costs to the opposing candidate’s charity of choice within three days of broadcast.

The negative air war that was predicted two years ago as a consequence of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling could very well be thwarted in this one key race. It’s the little engine that could, nationally, but if the Massachusetts experiment in self-punishment proves enforceable here, it could catch on elsewhere, sort of like the Pledge of Allegiance against dirty politics, a yardstick that blunts the worst consequences of the high court’s decision.

Do we need another Kennedy?

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 20:00:00 +0000

BOSTON -- Where does noblesse oblige end and craven nepotism begin? It’s a question that’s sure to be heard in Massachusetts as Joseph Kennedy III vies for the 4th District seat vacated by Rep. Barney Frank. The 31-year-old assistant district attorney, a son of former Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II and a grandson of the late Robert F. Kennedy, has zero political experience apart from helping Uncle Teddy on his final campaign before he went off to the great Kennedy compound in the sky. Still, Joe III announced yesterday that he was “considering” a run, selling himself as a selfless public servant for entering the family business.

Why should we buy it? Where does the fair-haired kid get off thinking he is the best person who's to hold the seat held consecutively by such towering political figures as the President John F. Kennedy and House Speaker Tip O’Neill.

Because he can’t dodge his roots, the assistant district attorney (which is pretty much an entry-level job right out of law school) is sticking to the selfless-service narrative, like some great patrician politician from the era of his maternal great grandfather, Honey Fitzgerald, the mayor of Boston.

Convicted for words, not deeds

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:55:00 +0000

BOSTON -- Call it “the week that was” when it comes to shredding the Constitution. First the Senate passes a rider to the defense bill that would make it legal for the military to arrest American citizens anywhere in the world, including U.S. soil, at the whim of the executive branch — this or any future executive branch.

Then comes the conviction yesterday of a Massachusetts man for viewing and translating jihadi videos online. The eight-week trial featured starkly contrasting portrayals of the bearded Muslim, Tarek Mehanna, a Sudbury, Mass., fundamentalist who traveled to Yemen and has made no secret of his contempt for U.S. foreign policy.

His Boston legal team haloed him as a kind and loving man, if an angry and opinionated intellectual type. They argued he was being persecuted for his disapproval of U.S. foreign policy. The government countered with the belief that Mehanna was just the sort of hater who’d take glee in seeing Americans getting gunned down in bloody shopping malls.

Raid ends longest-standing occupation camp

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 15:18:00 +0000

The longest-standing occupation camp in the country folded early this morning when Boston cops pounced in the wee hours, arresting at least three dozen protesters on trespassing charges.

Half of the 300-strong group of on-site and off-site occupiers had struck camp voluntarily 24 hours before when a Boston Superior Court judge lifted a restraining order on the police from closing down the 10-week-old campsite that formed days after protesters in New York had occupied Zuccotti Park off Wall Street.

More than three dozen who remained were arrested this morning, according to Boston Police spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll.

Both internally and in the face it shows to the world, the occupation movement has now reached an inflection point. In the frozen mud of the Dewey Square camp, just outside of the gleaming tower of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the protesters had been hugging and congratulating themselves for hanging in there as the hardcore, even while sorely disappointed that others had decamped so obediently after asking Boston Superior Court Judge Frances MacIntyre what was to be done in the event of mass arrests. Her restraining order was lifted 25 hours before the police swooped in. Essentially, the judge agreed that America is not like England, where squatters' rights are enshrined in law. America is a country where the SWAT teams swoop in on peaceful protesters in public parks.

“Bloomberg in sheep’s clothing”

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 22:57:00 +0000

BOSTON -- "A Bloomberg in sheep’s clothing" was how Boston occupier John Ford described Boston Mayor Thomas Menino as 150-odd anti-banker protesters chucked placards, folded tarps and prepared for a midnight dance party on the pitiful parcel of exhaust-choked public land where 300 colorful tents once bloomed.

John Ford, the camp librarian, was echoing a common sentiment among occupiers that the Boston mayor had played a deft hand politically by only pretending to be sympatico with their cause, all the while planning to remove their tiny tent town at his personal discretion, as a Suffolk Superior Court judge gave him the power to do, finally, on Wednesday

A beat down of some type seems unavoidable, quite possibly by Thursday night, and certainly by Sunday, according to rumors coming out of City Hall. Meanwhile, city officials are sticking to the official story line that they have no immediate plans to remove the protesters as some other cities have done, including New York City, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, but the protesters have all been put on notice that the nightsticks and pepper spray could fly any time.

“Tonight, if we don’t choose to fully decamp,” said Ford, “And not everyone is choosing to decamp.”

Hip-hop moguls yearn to belong to the 99 percent

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 15:36:00 +0000

BOSTON -- Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons defended fellow superstar Jay-Z from a firestorm of recent media criticism on Tuesday telling a small crowd outnumbered by reporters at the Occupy Boston site that the criticism of the celebrated rapper-businessman was misguided.

Jay-Z, aka Shawn Carter, the frontman for the soon-to-be Brooklyn Nets NBA basketball team, has been blasted by Salon and others for trying to cash in on the Occupy Wall Street movement by selling branded merchandise with an OWS theme.

Simmon was visiting Occupy Boston out of sympathy for the anti-corporate movement that has swept America in the last two months and left certain self-made multimillionaires eager to highlight their social sympathies.

Simmons, co-founder of pioneering Def Jam Records label and chief of an entertainment business empire, insisted that Jay-Z’s loot from the now-canceled clothing deal would amount to “less than what it what it would cost him to buy one earring back for Beyonce." Jay-Z, he said, "doesn’t even own the company. He sold it years ago. But just by wearing the shirt he’s inspired lots of kids who might not know about the movement.”

Occupy the playground

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:00:00 +0000

Think 99 percent of the Oshkosh Begosh set.

Some 60 Boston-area students swarmed into Dewey Square Friday morning, a gang of middle-school kids decked in slickers and Wellingtons for the first official field trip of the Boston occupation. The five dozen kids from the King Open School, an alternative public magnet school, trooped through the big Boston muddy as part of their curriculum studying the U.S. Constitution.

Some were merely along for the ride, but in the faces of many children you could spot activist boys and girls sprouting right there in shadows of Boston’s financial district — baby-faced bohos being schooled in the ways of occupation, nonviolent resistance and direct action in this small tent city between the glowering blackness of the Bank of America building on one side of Dewey Square and the towering Federal Reserve Bank of Boston skyscraper on the other.

A pudgy, bespectacled occupier in a brown woolly cap asked the kids: “So, how often do you get the chance not only to watch history blossom, but also to come together to participate in building a better world?”

“Never,” blinked one boy in blue. “This is pretty much it.”

Arrests galvanize Boston occupation

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 19:10:00 +0000

BOSTON—As the last of 141 anti-corporate protestors underwent arraignment at a Boston district courthouse Wednesday, the crowd at the city's Dewey Square occupation site has grown, along with a tighter police presence. The occupiers released a conciliatory statement about the police action yesterday but the mood on the street seems noticeably tenser than it did a week ago.

The arrests, made by more than 200 police, included what Salon rightly called "the worst moment" of the burgeoning occupation movement: the videotaped clubbing of aging Vietnam veterans—Winston Warfield, a U.S. Army veteran, and John Niles, a U.S. Marine veteran, both of Veterans for Peace. The men were knocked down by a shaved-headed officer surrounded by baton-wielding boys in blue. One vet was punched in the throat.

Others occupiers were clubbed with batons, pepper sprayed, and hauled away, according to eyewitnesses. They said the police made no distinction between protesters, medics, or legal observers. Urszula Masny-Latos, who serves as the Executive Director for the Massachusetts branch of the National Lawyers Guild, was arrested as were four medics trying to treat the injured.

Moving in on Boston

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 14:02:00 +0000

Two weeks after their New York counterparts pitched camp on Wall Street, a thousand mostly youthful protesters followed suit on Friday evening planting themselves outside the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Unlike groups in other cities like Chicago, which failed to attract more than a couple of dozen protesters, the organizers behind Occupy Boston displayed an impressive organizational savvy that suggests their occupation might have staying power.

Formed on Facebook and on Twitter (@occupyboston), the protesters gathered themselves swiftly, holding their first public meeting within three days of the arrest of 80 protesters in clashes with the New York City Police Department last Saturday in Lower Manhattan.

Boasting no leaders, just liaisons, the group first gathered Wednesday in the Boston Common and made the move on Friday down to Dewey Square on the south edge of the Rose Kennedy Greenway, just outside of South Station, toting tents and tarps and musical instruments and riding hundreds of bicycles. Behind them was the black granite edifice of the Bank of America. In front of them: their target, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, a glittering aluminum tower that stood tall against the night sky.