Like a true queen of country, Tammy Faye Starlite fairly floats down the aisle on her way to the stage. Clutching the train of her white wedding dress in one hand, she seems propelled by the sinuous strains of a pedal steel guitar. Her regal posture and virginal gown recall the stage shows of Loretta Lynn, one of Tammy’s musical idols and inspirations.
The choreographed entrance is as much a part of country lore as the waltz, the shuffle or the two-step. But this night, in a small downstairs lounge of New York’s Knitting Factory, the slender woman wearing bleached-blond tresses and too much body glitter has anything but sycophantic fantasies in mind. Tammy Faye Starlite has come to skewer country music, to kill the thing she loves, to take all those ballads of pious, overworked women with too many babies and drunken philandering husbands and twist them into sometimes-pornographic satire.
Tammy Faye Starlite — named for the television evangelist’s wife, Tammy Faye Bakker — is a nasty girl. In the course of the evening she will peel off her elbow gloves and strip to a chemise so skimpy it brings a blush to her own husband’s cheeks. But by that time the faint of heart will have fled. Propriety seldom survives into the second verse of a Starlite song. Her lyrics begin with characters found in all country songs: simple men or women on a bad drunk, in a bad marriage or strung out on divorce or unrequited love. But family values soon turn to incest and the love of God gets downright carnal. Her band, the Angels of Mercy, lay down the sure rhythms and artful guitar fills that country fans love. But anyone who takes the genre too seriously is certain to be burned.
Tammy Faye Starlite is the creation of Tammy Lang, a 33-year-old Jewish actress with a long list of soap opera credits, a creative writing degree from NYU, 12 years of yeshiva schooling and a lifelong obsession with country ballads.
In 1994 she and her husband, James Oakes (Jimmy Jay to her fans), began developing the Tammy Faye character for an off-off-Broadway play, “Father Sullivan and the Country Singer,” in which Tammy Faye meets Oakes’ drunken gay Irish priest at St. Patsy’s Cathedral (as in Patsy Cline). At the time, Lang was reacting to the rise of the new right — the ascendance of Newt Gingrich in Washington, the Oklahoma City bombing and the publication of the “Turner Diaries.” Raised in a left-wing family on the Upper West Side (her mother attended the Knitting Factory show), she turned to songs about white supremacy and race hatred. She decided to “combat evil by embodying it.”
Tammy Faye Starlite has since evolved from a political character into a straight country satirist, a stage presence into an act that has played smaller clubs around New York. Eventually she put together the Angels of Mercy and cut the CD “On My Knees.” The title refers to more than reverence; in “If You’re Comin’ Down Sweet Jesus,” Starlite proclaims her readiness to receive the Lord. As she departs from the politically outrageous numbers of the early years, she sticks with the stock characters sung by the great women of country music, a source of inspiration that may never dry up.
“I guess the country music female singer is just fun to play,” Tammy says. “I do love to act, and the Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette and Patsy Cline template is just so rich. They’re like Shakespearean protagonists — valiant, gifted and larger-than-life, but cursed with a tragic flaw that brings them to the depths of despair and degradation and drugs and debauchery — all that juicy stuff. It’s like getting to play Blanche DuBois from ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’”
Starlite draws much from Lynn, the “coal miner’s daughter” and onetime belle of Nashville. In 1971, Lynn had a hit with Shel Silverstein’s comic song “One’s on the Way,” a cutesy number about a harried Topeka, Kan., housewife who doesn’t have time for celebrity news. How could she care about the luxurious lives of Liz Taylor and Raquel Welch? Her kids are crying and she’s got yet another child on the way. Starlite sets her response to the song during 1970s feminism. She is, she says in the introduction, the third of 16 children. Her mother had all of the kids between the ages of 15 and 25. She always had “one on her and one in her.” Corrupted by “that little Jewish dwarf, Andrea Dworkin,” the third daughter suggests that Mom have an abortion. Mama sets her daughter straight with the anti-abortion anthem: “God Has Lodged a Tenant in My Uterus.”
Incest is another favorite theme: Lang loves country star and songwriter Holly Dunn’s song, “Daddy’s Hands,” but she couldn’t resist adding a verse about daddy sneaking into the bedroom at night. She wrote “Moonshiner’s Child,” another incest song, and introduces it as her answer to “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” Least likely of all to get radio play is her take on Deana Carter’s 1996 hit, “Did I Shave My Legs for This?” Tammy says she “just kind of stole the title” and asked her guitar player, Mark McCarran, to write a new melody for her original lyrics. The result is another type of ballad: “Did I Shave My Vagina for This?”
“I did like [Carter's] song a lot,” Lang said. “So, generally the stuff that I do comes from stuff that I actually like.”
Not everyone appreciates Starlite’s work. In Nashville, Tenn., for the first time several years ago, Starlite took her songs to one of Music City’s most famous venues. “At the Bluebird Cafe, you know, the legendary Bluebird, I went up there on open mike with a guitar player and I did ‘Moonshiner’s Child,’ my happy incest song.” The club turned off her mike, but Starlite did not surrender the stage. “I did a song that I wrote called ‘Ride the Cotton Pony,’ uh, which is about going down on your girlfriend when she’s menstruating.”
“I also have an extreme love of shock,” Starlite admits. “In the late ’80s and early ’90s, I just loved listening to Howard Stern. That was when he was really good. Now he’s just all about titties. Everything he did was to antagonize. I knew that he wasn’t a racist and I knew that he, you know, maybe he’s a misogynist, but it was so funny. He’d say things and it was like that roller coaster, when you go down, you know. Wow, that’s a cool feeling.”
In that spirit, she sometimes does a song about Ricky Skaggs, a great guitarist and mandolin player whose wife caught him in bed with his male drummer. “My Friend Ricky” might never have been written if Skaggs were less “sanctimonious and Christian,” as Starlite puts it — or if Nashville were less homophobic. “He’s a big old queen,” she says. “In the song, I tell the story about Ricky and then I name all of them in Nashville, you know, who are closeted. I’m country music’s Hedda Hopper.”
Is there anything sacred? Anything that Starlite will not make fun of? “I’d like to say nothing,” she says cautiously. In most cases, she will only cut a number if audience reactions are severely negative. For instance, she was dumped from a bill at NYU after she played “Angels Are Hard to Find” — a racist song from “Father Sullivan” — at the Fez, a downtown club in New York. (Lang is creating another character, Crystal Night — as in Kristallnacht — who will revisit her harshest songs. The character is married to a Klan member. Her theme song: “He’s Lynching and I’m Lonely.”) “I don’t like to gratuitously use words like ‘nigger’ or ‘faggot,’” says Starlite. “I’ll say ‘kike’ because I’m a Jew. But I don’t really want to be harsh to people who are not in power — like people who are not white male Protestants.”
Starlite is starting to receive better receptions in Nashville. She says that she has been recognized in record stores, and that at her shows some cowboys in the back yell for her to “play that uterus song again.” Her shows have received good reviews from L.A. to New Orleans and even Nashville. Yet Starlite cannot resist antagonizing mainstream country culture. “I loved that dichotomy between, you know, the upstanding family-values Christians and then the drug-taking, philandering, wife-killing reality of it all.”
How seriously does the country scene take Tammy Faye Starlite? One measure is the quality of musicians she attracts. Ken Coomer from Wilco was slated to play last month’s tour of six Southern states, but had to drop out after the Nashville shows. His replacements were Jimmy Lester from the Straight Jackets and Will Rigby, a New Yorker who moved to Nashville to play with Steve Earle.
Tammy Lang does not live by country music alone. She is currently playing a gun moll in “Pooty Tang” a film written and directed by Louis C.K., who invented the main character for “The Chris Rock Show.” She’s also playing Mick Jagger in a Rolling Stones cover group called the Mike Hunt Band. The band plays smaller clubs around New York and usually plays an entire Stones album in the round. (They’re booked to play “Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out” at the Lakeside Lounge this Saturday.) Last week their version of “Let It Bleed” dumbfounded an audience at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, N.J., who had come to see Spacehog, the night’s headliner.
“I just get up there and assume that I am Mick Jagger,” Lang says. And, not surprisingly her Jagger is, well, shocking. She introduces the band by name, famous sexual peccadilloes, drug overdoses and criminal prosecutions. On stage she strips to bra and panties during “Monkey Man” (“I love this song. It shows what a buffoon I am.”) and taunts her audience with sexual gestures and come-ons.
Tammy Lang as Tammy Faye Starlite, Mick Jagger and Crystal Night. Will there come a time when Lang sings her own songs? Until creative difference split them up, Tammy and Kramer (of Shockabilly and Shimmy Disc fame) had a joint project in 1997 and 1998. “Our band was Glen or Glenda and I did love those songs,” she says. “We had some great shows, and I got to just sing, which was kind of a nice respite.”
But for now she seems content to play Tammy Faye. “Tammy Faye Starlite is indeed a creation of mine, but our worlds have begun to blend and cross-fade. I do love ambiguity, so that’s fun for me. It’s nice that some folks think Tammy Faye Starlite is real. Makes me kinda proud — y’know, I must be doin’ my job.”
There’s a lot at stake when 350 nearly naked buff guys take turns climbing a platform to have their physiques rated by experts. This isn’t a dream date on an MTV vacation special. This is professional football. Every year, the National Football League invites top college players to Indianapolis to have their bodies and minds probed and tested by the pro teams.
“It’s a medical meat market,” said Rob Huizenga, a former team doctor for the Oakland Raiders and author of “You’re Okay, It’s Just a Bruise: A Doctor’s Sideline Secrets About Pro Football’s Most Outrageous Team.” The test results can make or break an NFL hopeful. Coaches say the medical information is the most valuable intelligence they get at the scouting combine — even more important than the bellwether 40-yard dash.
The combine is something like a mass job interview for college football players who hope to be selected in the NFL draft, which will be held Saturday and Sunday. The young men who make it to the NFL will last, on average, three to four years. With minimum salaries of more than $190,000 for rookies, and signing bonuses that totaled $142 million for the 31 top picks last year, teams are understandably careful about whom they hire. At the combine, months before the draft, players are put through physical tests to assess their aptitude and durability for one of the most violent of sports.
“It’s not a livestock show,” says George Young, an NFL executive and former general manager of the New York Giants. “We just have to see the product before we spend that kind of money.”
Since 1993, 62 percent of the players invited to the combine have been selected in the NFL draft.
The combine kicks off with the body assessment. “That’s where they take your height and weight,” said Casey Crawford, a tight end who played for University of Virginia. “But more than that it’s walking up on a platform, taking your shirt off, getting into your skivvies or whatever, and having representatives of all 31 teams go through a sheet looking at every body part: shoulders, biceps, trunk, legs.” The spectacle is videotaped, and the player is asked to pirouette for the camera so other coaches can look later.
Crawford, 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds, is blond, bright-eyed, curious and friendly. After finishing his sociology degree early, he took graduate courses in economics during his final football season. He lives with his parents in Northern Virginia and has interviewed with investment banks and Internet start-ups as well as 31 NFL teams. I met him at the combine in late February, in the bar of the players’ hotel adjacent to the stadium — workouts are closed to journalists.
Coaches checked out Crawford, while about 20 players watched and waited their turns. “Everyone sits around you and looks you up and down and takes their notes,” he said. “Then they take your height and call it out. And then they take your weight and yell again: ’250 pounds.’ And then they measure your hand from the thumb to the pinkie, they measure the length of your arm and they take your body fat and they yell that out.”
The inspection continues with a medical examination. Each player goes to a room. League and team physicians scurry in and out. “They just said, ‘Lay down,’ and then three doctors kind of surrounded me,” said Joe Dean Davenport, a tight end from the University of Arkansas who never missed a game or practice due to injury. “They were pushing and pulling and yelling out big words — ‘The medial collateral tendon is bilateral,’ these big scientific terms. You’re kind of like, What does that mean? I didn’t ask them. I didn’t want to make ‘em think I’m not very bright.”
Thorough examinations occur in other professional sports, of course, but the sheer number of new bodies required in the NFL has an effect on the league’s methods. Counting undrafted rookie free agents, about 300 new players will make NFL squads this year. That’s nearly 10 players per team — or nearly as many players as suit up in the entire National Basketball Association. In baseball and hockey, both sports with high turnover, players come up through club-affiliated minor-league systems, where team doctors can follow them for years.
The NFL, in contrast, relies primarily on college football to train its young players — and the rules of amateur sports prohibit pro teams from approaching players until their college eligibility runs out. Teams must examine and interview hundreds of players between the end of the football season in December and the draft in mid-April.
The league centralized the interviews partly because top recruits got exhausted talking with all the teams that wanted to meet them. Gil Brandt, a draft consultant who then headed the Dallas Cowboys personnel staff, remembers interviewing Nolan Cromwell, a Kansas star drafted by Los Angeles in 1977. “He got off a red-eye flight in the morning and could barely keep his eyes open at the morning workout.”
Another story, perhaps apocryphal: One top receiver managed to conceal the fact that he was nearly blind in one eye by memorizing the eye chart.
Professional teams have watched some of the prospects at the combine since their teen years. Scouts have attended their games to videotape, analyze and evaluate their performances. College coaches and trainers often share information about injuries. But NFL coaches say that only doctors familiar with the professional game can assess the durability of players.
“Sometimes a player will have no history of injuries but the doctors will say that his knee is a little loose,” said Sherman Lewis, the offensive coordinator of the Minnesota Vikings. Lewis is new to the Vikings and was reluctant to speak about the team’s medical practices. But Sherman said the doctors at one of his former teams (which include the San Francisco 49ers and
Green Bay Packers) rated the players on a scale of 1 to 3, where 1 was a clean bill of health and 3 indicated some problem that disqualified them as draft picks. Other teams use a 1 to 5 scale. “A lot of this is more of an art than a science,” Lewis said. “You just add the medical information to the rest. Some players are so good you have to take a chance on them.”
Huizenga, an internist who now practices in Beverly Hills, said the pre-draft checks are supposed to protect teams from unpleasant surprises. But sometimes it’s the young player who gets the surprise. Doctors found a quarterback with a rare bleeding disorder. Several times they’ve discovered cancer.
“Each team gives its doctors a secret sheet of paper with special
requests,” Huizenga said. “The scouting team wants specific information on particular players it hopes to draft. But horrible things still happened [at the Raiders]. Once we were drafting a guy and he was in the hospital for back surgery at the time. It had slipped right through.”
Dr. Elliott Hershman is the orthopedist for the New York Jets as well as the New York Islanders hockey team. When he takes his turn bending over players on the combine examining
tables, Hershman looks for possible arthritis, unstable joints or old injuries that could be aggravated. “When I started doing this 15 years ago, the players arrived with all kinds of problems,” he said. “Now, with the advances in sports medicine — arthroscopy and MRIs — we see healthier players coming into the league than 15 years ago.”
In addition to the medical exams, which are repeated when players are traded or move around the league as free agents, recruits at the combine take intelligence tests. Here the combine offers teams a unique opportunity, because the NFL Players Association forbids such tests after a player is hired. The league standard is the Illinois Wonderlic test, a 12-minute battery of 50 questions that start out simple and get more difficult. Quarterback Todd Husek of Stanford and defensive back Ahmed Plummer of Ohio State led the field of 327 test-takers with 39 right answers, according to Football Insider, one of many pre-draft Web sites for NFL junkies. According to the site, Crawford scored 31 on the Wonderlic; only 19 test takers at the combine scored 30 or higher. National Invitational Camp, which runs the combine and administers the Wonderlic test, does not comment on scores.
The test may be more useful for raising questions about a player than providing answers. “The test gives us something to investigate,” said Young, who began his professional career as a high school coach and served as general manager of the Giants in their Super Bowl seasons in the 1980s. He said that most successful quarterbacks have scored at least a 22 since teams began using the test in 1968. Young distinguishes between schooling and intelligence — he has given oral exams to players who could not read well enough to take the Wonderlic. For many positions, Young said, the essential question is whether the player has sufficient ability to learn and remember plays, and to remain focused on a task.
Young pioneered the use of personality inventories with the Giants, which still use a 460-question Meyers-Briggs inventory to assess the psyches of prospective players. “Who knows how well balanced a player should be?” Young wonders. “Well-balanced individuals don’t usually look for jobs where they have to hit other people as hard as they can. This is just
another tool. We try to talk to them and get a feel for who they are and how they grew up.”
Young, who says he had room for no more than two “head
cases” on a team when he was coaching, acknowledges that different teams have different standards — different cultures of adjustment, if you will.
The Vikings are frequently congratulated for taking All-Pro wide receiver Randy Moss in the first round of the 1998 draft despite the his reputation for trouble off the field. “We did well with Randy, but we got burned on Dimitrius Underwood,” said Dennis Green, head coach of the Vikings. Underwood, a 6-foot-6, 280-pound defensive end from Michigan State, left Minnesota’s training camp the day after signing a $5 million contract,
telling the team he didn’t want to play football anymore. He later signed with the Miami Dolphins, was injured and was reported to have attempted to kill himself before briefly checking into a mental health center.
“Now it is starting to look like Dimitrius’ problems were the sort that the medical staff should have caught,” Green told me in the lobby of his Indianapolis hotel. The Cowboys also believe Underwood has a treatable malady. The team signed him last month.
Casey Crawford, the tight end from Virginia, was interviewed about his body proportions, not his brain: “They asked me, ‘What kind of [weight] lifting do you do?’” he said. “Things like: ‘I’ve noticed you have very developed thighs and calves. But your upper body is not as developed as your lower half. Is that because you focus on your lower half and not your upper half when you
lift?’ They start nit-picking: Is that a physical thing? Is that how you were born, your genetics? Or is that something they can try to manipulate and change once you get to the NFL?”
The combine is also the place to spot a gifted athlete who might be molded into a football player. Leif Larson, a 300-pound Norwegian judo and boxing champion is one such candidate. Although he played only two years of football at the University of Texas at El Paso, he created a sensation at the combine when he bench-pressed a 225-pound barbell 45 times without stopping — a record performance. Many highly regarded recruits his size did fewer than 30 repetitions. With Larson’s score of 34 on the Wonderlic test, a team may draft him as a special project.
In a world where good deeds seldom go unpunished, the latest benefit CD for Kosovar refugees seems like one that will escape the lash of lawyers and critics alike. Assembled with little interference from major record labels — something Pearl Jam and the Beastie Boys can’t say for their high-profile efforts this summer — the eclectic CD reflects New York’s quirky, unregimented downtown music scene.
The CD is called “Refuge,” and it appears on Orchard Records, a new label founded by the Net-based record distributors of the same name. The project was conceived in a casual e-mail by Michele Stuart Rubin, the 30-year-old poet and public-school teacher who founded Artists Responding to Crisis; her spontaneous impulse to “get some New York musicians together and do a compilation album fund-raiser” took flight when she called Joy Askew, a vocalist who has backed up Peter Gabriel and Joe Jackson.
Askew put her own projects on hold for two months to produce the record. The roster of musicians reads like the guest list at her own record launch: friends, collaborators and friends of friends. Melanie Gabriel emotes to music she wrote with her father, Peter, and Askew. Former Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid cut a feral track the moment he returned from a European tour, and the ever-melodious Richard Barone, who used to play with pop-wave group the Bongos back in the ’80s, set a prayer to music.
“We tried to get some names big enough to sell the record,” Askew said. “Some better-known bands wanted to donate tracks — the B-52′s, Patti Smith’s band, Natalie Merchant — but working with the big labels was too complicated. We ended up looking for musicians with smaller labels, or who were currently unattached.”
Many of the artists, including the younger Gabriel, Barone and folk-rockers the Wild Colonials, gathered to fete the CD during two shows at the Bottom Line in New York City last weekend. Joe Jackson — who does not appear on the CD — performed solo piano versions of “Be My Number Two” and “Home Town” before Askew chimed in on “It’s Different for Girls.”
The most eagerly anticipated performance of all was by Ahmed Best, the actor who played Jar-Jar Binks in “Star Wars: Episode One — The Phantom Menace.” Best, it turns out, is Askew’s piano student. He played a gentle ballad about a death in his family. The crowd was quiet and reverent for his song, but afterward, a few people — some of whom had left the show to buy action figures — approached him for autographs.
Artists and labels donated all the tracks, and Orchard is taking no distribution fees for marketing the record. Ninety percent of the proceeds will go directly to Kosova Relief Fund, a registered nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the people of Kosovo (Kosova is the Albanian name for the war-torn province).
An unpaid traffic ticket resulting in a suspended driver’s license was all
it took to launch Carlos Morales on a 20-hour trip through judicial hell.
The 33-year-old hotel worker didn’t know his license was suspended, but the
officers who stopped his laundry van for a broken taillight in midtown Manhattan two years ago
did. They arrested him, charged him with a misdemeanor and sent him to
Central Booking, a warren of crowded holding pens attached to the Manhattan
criminal
courts. There, New York City corrections officers strip-searched Morales in
front of jeering prisoners, threatened him with rape if he didn’t disrobe
faster, tossed his shoes down a crowded cellblock corridor and forced him
to retrieve them naked. When Morales finally saw a judge, he was fined $75
and sent on his way.
What happened to Morales was not an isolated incident. Today he is a
plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of at least 63,000
people who were illegally strip-searched while awaiting arraignment on
misdemeanor charges in Queens and Manhattan. In 1986, a federal appeals
court had declared it unconstitutional to strip-search misdemeanor suspects
without probable cause. But for more than 10 months in 1996 and 1997,
corrections officers searched every single prisoner — a number that could
reach 115,000 according to plaintiffs’ lawyers — who passed through
Central Booking in Queens and Manhattan. The searches did not stop until
the class-action suit was filed in late May 1997.
The city does not deny that unconstitutional strip-searches occurred.
But Lorna Goodman, one of the city’s top staff lawyers and a spokeswoman for
the Corporation Counsel, said the practice was an administrative mistake that
didn’t hurt most prisoners. “To the 90th percentile, the persons who were strip-searched
had been in the system before. They had been through it all. If a striptease
person is strip-searched, the injury is less than the injury to a 17-year-old
parochial school girl who’s never been arrested.”
The strip-searches, Goodman explains, resulted from what she calls an
“administrative shift.” In order to make more police officers available for
Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s celebrated war on crime, the NYPD turned over control
of the pre-arraignment holding pens in Queens and Manhattan to the
Department of Corrections. The police officers who had worked there were
reassigned to crime-fighting duties. When the jailers took over,
they brought along their policy of strip-searching everyone
who comes into corrections custody. “You can say that this was based on
negligence or poor management or sloppy supervision,” Goodman acknowledged. “But
it was a mistake, not a policy decision.”
Goodman’s legalistic notion of policy is as counterintuitive as the
definitions of sexual contact offered by lawyers in the Clinton-Lewinsky
scandal. Departmental memos approved by the senior wardens for Manhattan and Queens ordered
strip-searches for every prisoner awaiting arraignment. The memos included specific
instructions outlining which corrections personnel were responsible for strip-searches on the
various shifts. The procedures outlined in the memos, which are included in court papers,
took effect on July 27, 1996, the day the Corrections Department took over from the NYPD.
But Goodman said those memos do not technically constitute city policy statements.
While the distinction may prove important in a court of law, the court of public opinion
is sure to be less forgiving. After a series of high-profile police brutality cases, the
class-action suit will further tarnish Giuliani’s once glittering law-enforcement
practices. The mayor declined to be interviewed for this article.
In 1996 and early 1997, fawning foreign reporters and delegations from
police departments around the world queued up to visit the NYPD’s
“CompStat” meetings, where department chiefs grill precinct commanders on
their crime-fighting performance. As part of New York’s “quality-of-life”
policing strategy, the NYPD dramatically increased misdemeanor arrests
during this period, which enabled the police to pick up criminals wanted on
outstanding warrants and to establish order in high-crime neighborhoods.
Ironically, many of the misdemeanor suspects arrested in Queens and
Manhattan during this period could end up claiming damages from the city.
Giuliani’s hard-nosed anti-crime policies were the locomotive driving the mayor’s
high approval ratings through his first five years in office, when the
murder rate was slashed by more than 50 percent. Now, those achievements
have been diminished by numerous high-profile allegations of police
misconduct, and the mayor’s approval ratings have taken a beating.
“I think you can call what happened in Central Booking the power of
business as usual,” said George Kelling, a professor of criminal justice at
Rutgers University who is generally given credit for inventing the
“quality-of-life” approach to policing. “What sometimes happens is that a
way of doing business
becomes so routine, that the officers forget what their business was in the
first place,” Kelling said. “These routines undermine the officers’
capacity for discretion.”
Questions of policy and intent do not matter much to Carlos Morales.
Interviewed in his lawyers’ office a few days ago, the cheerful, neatly
appointed Puerto Rican immigrant joked about performing rap songs with a
reporter’s microphone. But his sunny disposition darkened when he talked
about the strip-search.
“I still live with this thing,” Morales said, recounting what happened when
officers lined him up with 10 to 20 other men in the corridor of a
crowded cellblock. “I had only my underwear on, and I was told if you don’t
remove your underwear we are going to have one of these big guys come out
of the cell and rape you. Or we are going to put you in the cell so you’re
going to get raped. Then they make me run after my shoes and the guards are
saying to me, ‘Nice butt, man’ and ‘Hey, you got a little weenie …’”
Other plaintiffs recount equally grim tales in court papers. A 42-year-old
woman arrested for the first time was ordered to squat naked
and cough hard, a standard part of the strip search procedure designed to
discharge foreign objects from the anal and vaginal cavities. When she
expelled her sanitary napkin, corrections officers taunted her, telling her
to be sure and put it in a wastebasket although there wasn’t one in the
room.
A man arrested in Queens for driving with a suspended license said he
was ordered to lift his genitals so that a corrections officer could
visually inspect them. The door to the search room was left open and female
corrections officers walking by could look inside. A 48-year-old woman
arrested for the first time on disorderly conduct charges was ordered to
lift her breasts so that corrections officers could look beneath them.
Lifting breasts and genitals is not part of the city’s official
strip-search protocol, according to court papers.
“I really think the searches were emblematic of a bureaucratic, callous
disregard for people’s rights in general,” said Matt Brinckerhoff, Morales’
lawyer. Brinckerhoff filed the class-action suit with his partner, Richard
Emery. “Once people are in the possession of the Department of Corrections,
you can do virtually anything you want to them. That’s what the culture of
corrections is. When they took over these pens, they did what they do to
all of their prisoners. They certainly didn’t hesitate to do anything that
was humiliating or degrading, and I don’t think they ever had any concern
for people’s constitutional rights.”
It is difficult to imagine that city lawyers would risk going to trial with
this case, as New York is still reeling from the fatal shooting of Amadou
Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, by four police officers in February, and the recent guilty plea by a New York police officer in the assault of Abner Louima. Currently, New York State Attorney
General Eliot Spitzer is investigating the aggressive stop-and-frisk
tactics employed by the NYPD Street Crime Unit, the same unit whose
officers shot and killed Diallo.
But even if the two sides settle, the potential cost to the city is
staggering. In a settlement agreement earlier this month, the city agreed
to pay $25,000 apiece to four female Fordham University students who were
illegally strip-searched at a Bronx station house after being arrested for
not paying their subway fare. Filmmaker Nancy Tong received a $35,000 settlement
following an illegal strip search at a Chinatown precinct in 1994. An earlier
strip-search case brought by Emery and Brinckerhoff on behalf of a 75-year-old
woman resulted in a $200,000 settlement.
“The city has settled wrongful strip-search cases in the past for $25,000
when it concerned strip searches in private circumstances,” Brinckerhoff
said, “Whereas most of the men in this case were strip-searched in large
groups. We don’t see any reason why $25,000 shouldn’t be a rational and
reasonable settlement for any of the people who were subjected to this kind
of degrading treatment. That’s not to say that we aren’t willing to have an
adjusted kind of scale depending on what people’s circumstances were.” Even
so, Brinckerhoff acknowledges that less than half of the 60,000 to 115,000
people who might be eligible for damages are likely to actually fill out
the forms and make a claim for damages.
Goodman believes that many plaintiffs should be entitled to only
nominal damages, if any. “I’d give them $1,” she said. “Their rights were violated,
but they did not suffer any emotional damage.”
Brinckerhoff points out that changes in pre-arraignment routines
could be frightening even to some seasoned prisoners. One of his clients, a
woman arrested for selling sneakers on the sidewalk without a permit, had
been to jail on Rikers Island, where she was used to being strip-searched
in a group. At Central Booking, she was brought into a private room
with two big guards who put on rubber gloves and told her to remove all of her
clothes. She didn’t realize it was only a strip-search
until they told her to put her clothes back on.
How could a massive bureaucratic blunder involving tens of thousands of
illegal strip searches go undetected for so long? “For many months, no
individual person complained about it or we would have known about it and
stopped it,” Goodman said. But couldn’t it also be that no one took
complaints seriously? Jails are notoriously full of self-proclaimed
innocent men, and these days they are equally full of prisoners protesting
violations of their constitutional rights. Or did the city receive complaints
but fail to respond? A Legal Aid Society lawyer wrote a letter of complaint to
Commissioner of Corrections Michael Jacobson on April 3, 1997, about eight
weeks before the class-action lawsuit was filed. It apparently went
unheeded, at least until the suit was filed.
Again, Goodman defended the city’s response to complaints. “When it came to our
attention we put a stop to it. I’m not sure that however long it took is so
long in the context of a city-wide bureaucracy,” she said.
One new Y2K fix is so elegant that it makes you long for the problem. For once, the fate of a tiny section of the wired world isn’t in the hands of faceless computer technicians cleaning miles of code. Saving yourself from sure malfunction is now as easy as reprogramming your VCR.
An oft-forwarded e-mail, traced through Channel 13 in New York, a university in Florida and back to a New York real estate broker, suggests that VCR owners whose machines won’t accept the date 2000 reset the year to 1972. The year of the Watergate break-in shares the same days of the week and month as 2000, which is all the advanced recording function of your VCR needs to know.
Alas, finding a VCR with faulty coding isn’t easy. A salesman at a Wiz electronics store explained that manufacturers code newer VCRs with two-digit numbers — 00 already means 2000. Furthermore, MTZ Electronics repairman Mark Zackiewicz says the older machines in his Brooklyn shop, those made before 1992, are immune to the Y2K bug since they are programmed only by day of the week.
There is a slight chance that some short-sighted manufacturer may have coded the non-lethal error in the mid-1990s, in which case the intuitive e-mail solution may have a problem after all. In the meantime, don’t be too impressed by a VCR boasting a Y2K compliant sticker, and don’t put too much faith in the wisdom of spam.
