Called a “real American” by Robert E. Lee, Parker was a uniquely American success story.
Most anniversary commemorations of the Confederacy’s surrender 150-years ago in April, 1865, overlooked a meaningful exchange at that little courthouse in Appomattox, Va. After the proud defeated commander, Robert E. Lee, formally surrendered to the short, squat, sloppy winner, Ulysses S. Grant, Grant introduced Lee to his staff. As Lee shook hands with Grant’s military secretary Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian, the Confederate general stared a moment at Parker’s dark features. “I am glad to see one real American here,” the Virginian said. Parker immediately replied: “We are all Americans.”
That, ultimately, was what the war had been all about, just who was an American and what did that mean. Northerners had gone to war—and to their deaths—singing “Glory, Glory Hallelujah,” a song, written by a New England abolitionist, Julia Ward Howe, evoking the Book of Revelation, capturing the millennial idealism that was and is America. Singing “His truth is marching on” imagines a nation of nations, stronger, prouder, freer, than any other, a chosen nation, blessed as more democratic, welcoming, equal, righteous—and thus occasionally more self-righteous—than any other country.
Their Confederate brothers had less grandiose motives. They sang “In Dixie Land I’ll take my stand, an’ lib an’ die in Dixie.” A song epitomizing love of home, this provincial anthem cherished both individual autonomy and regional or ethnic solidarity in a centralizing, homogenizing, nation. Ironically, tragically, disgustingly, the Southerners—most of whom were not slaveholders—defended their liberty, their freedom, their prerogatives, with provincial prejudices that hurt and enslaved three million others.
At its best, this glorious selfishness, combining individualism, provincialism, and a “devil may care” spirit, has shaped Americans’ entrepreneurial and libertarian impulses, especially when balanced by the North’s selfish gloriousness, this grandiose vision of an ideal world which often looked astonishingly like each American’s own backyard.
That “real American,” Ely Parker, lived those paradoxes. Always proud of his people, frequently bruised by prejudice, but ultimately liberated by America at its most glorious, expansive, and redemptive, Hasanowanda, “The Reader,” was born in 1828 on the Towanda Indian Reservation in western New York. Mocked as a young boy while working at an army post for speaking pidgin English, he ultimately became renowned for his eloquence in the language, with penmanship so impressive he won the privilege of drafting the surrender documents ending the Civil War. Ambitious to advance in the white man’s world, he changed his name to Ely Samuel Parker, with Ely pronounced e-Lee as in Robert E. Lee.
Talented and ambitious, he made himself into a role model for today, not just for Native Americans, but for all Americans.
Unfortunately, Parker faced the kind of prejudice that unified Southerners—and that would persist despite the Northern victory. He apprenticed to be a lawyer for three years, only to discover that as a Seneca Indian—one of six nations making up the Iroquois confederation—he was not an American citizen and thus ineligible for the bar. Native Americans would secure those basic rights only in 1924 with the Indian Citizenship Act. In the 1860s, when Parker patriotically tried raising a regiment of Iroquois to fight for the North, New York state officials sneered, “The Civil War is a white man’s war… we will settle our own troubles without any Indian aid.”
A true American, Parker overcame bigotry with pluck and luck. He studied civil engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic in Troy, N.Y. Committed to his Native people despite his all-American ambitions, in 1852 he became a sachem, a subordinate chief renamed Donehogawa, Keeper of the Western Door of the Long House of the Iroquois.
After working on the Erie Canal, Parker ended up at the Mississippi River town of Galena, Ill. There, he befriended, a slovenly, often drunk, former West Point Army captain working as a store clerk. By 1864, that slob was Abraham Lincoln’s best general. Parker served as U.S. Grant’s military secretary as they fought their way toward Appomattox, eventually becoming the Union’s only Native American Brigadier General.
In 1869, now-President Grant made Parker the first Native American Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Parker’s fair, honest approach toward the Indian tribes alienated his Washington rivals. They blasted Grant for appointing a man “who is but a remove from barbarism.” Undeterred. Parker tried balancing his loyalty to his tribe with his loyalty to his country. Occasionally wondering “whether it has been well that I have sought civilization with its bothersome concomitants,” he yearned to return to nature’s “darkness and sacred wilds.” Alas, he realized: “The thought is a happy one, but perhaps impracticable.”
When Parker rushed aid to starving Indians out West without publicizing bids properly, his enemies filed 13 charges of misconduct against him. The resulting Congressional hearing exonerated him—and praised his leadership. Yet the scandal demoralized Parker. He resigned in 1871.
This 19th-century Forrest Gump followed his work on developing the nation’s infrastructure, ending slavery, and Americanizing the West, by experiencing the great post-Civil War Boom, which was then followed by the Bust triggered by the Jay Gould-inspired Panic of 1873. Parker ended his career clerking in Theodore Roosevelt’s police headquarters in New York, as Progressives began reforming the cities. The photographer and urban chronicler, Jacob Riis, was very taken with this “noble old fellow,” who died in 1895. Parker’s only child, Maud Theresa, born in 1878, died in 1956—demonstrating just how few lifespans separate modern Americans from our founders, let alone nineteenth-century heroes like Ely Parker.
Unlike the fictional Gump, this “real American’s” history-making was purposeful not accidental, active not passive. Talented and ambitious, he made himself into a role model for today, not just for Native Americans, but for all Americans who wish to retain their own particular ethnic or religious identity while being patriotic and who wish to advance themselves personally while contributing collectively.
The prejudice Parker endured reflected the selfishness and sinfulness we have not yet exorcised. But his success demonstrates the power of those glorious basic American rights hundreds of millions exercise every day, transforming obstacles into opportunities. The story of Ely Parker, “the real American” at Appomattox, teaches us that America remains the land of liberty and opportunity, the home of a welcoming, empowering, often epoch-making American dream, powerful enough to eclipse whatever demons, both personal and collective, we face.
share
tweet
post
email
Promoted Stories
40 Rare Photos From The Past You Have to See To Believe
40 Rare Photos From The Past You Have to See To Believe
Check This, Yo!
We Ran the Numbers. Michael Jordan Didn't Make the Top 5 NBA Playoff Performances
We Ran the Numbers. Michael Jordan Didn't Make the Top 5 NBA…
DraftKings
Japan should be worried- Here's what China may be up to in the South China Sea
Japan should be worried- Here's what China may be up to in the…
Nikkei Asian Review
These 10 Dog Breeds Are Extremely Unstable
These 10 Dog Breeds Are Extremely Unstable
Poundwishes
20 Of The Hottest Women In The World
20 Of The Hottest Women In The World
LOLWOT
Say Goodbye to Your Spreadsheet – It’s the Age of the Accounting App
Say Goodbye to Your Spreadsheet – It’s the Age of the Accounting…
GetApp.com
"American Civil War" quiz. Can you answer this trivia about the American Civil War?
"American Civil War" quiz. Can you answer this trivia about the…
Revolvy Nowhere
Stunning Beaches: The World's 20 Most Beautiful
Stunning Beaches: The World's 20 Most Beautiful
Travel Versed
40 Rare Photos From The Past You Have to See To Believe
We Ran the Numbers. Michael Jordan Didn't Make the Top 5 NBA Playoff Performances
Japan should be worried- Here's what China may be up to in the South China Sea
These 10 Dog Breeds Are Extremely Unstable
20 Of The Hottest Women In The World
Say Goodbye to Your Spreadsheet – It’s the Age of the Accounting App
"American Civil War" quiz. Can you answer this trivia about the American Civil War?
Stunning Beaches: The World's 20 Most Beautiful
Recommended by
Photo Illustration by Emil Lendof/The Daily Beast
Jacob Siegel
Jacob Siegel
digg
linkedin
reddit
stumbleupon
google
HAUNTED PAST04.27.155:25 AM ET
An American Fighting ISIS Is Convicted Sex Offender
Presenting himself as a freedom-loving warrior, Michael Windecker has a shady past that’s much more disturbing than he initially let on.
In the small group of American volunteers battling ISIS alongside the Kurdish military in Iraq, “Mickey” is now an outcast. The ex-biker turned ISIS fighter is actually Michael Windecker, a convicted sex offender whose past has caught up to him, causing a rift with the other volunteers and a problem for his Kurdish Peshmerga commanders.
The Daily Beast previously reported on the Americans volunteering in Iraq. That article featured “Mickey” speaking about his frontline view of combat in Iraq but personal history was on his mind as well. “Look, we all have a past and I’m no different,” he said at the time. “I’m human. My criminal record back home has been cleared and I’ve served my time,” he told The Daily Beast.
But Windecker’s criminal record was more serious than he let on. His 28 arrests in Colorado include one conviction for third-degree sexual assault from 1994 when Mickey was 20. His victim was 14.
As “Mickey,” Windecker attracted fans. He, and other American fighters like him, give a stateside audience captivated by news of ISIS a clear image of the U.S. presence in a war where the military’s expanding commitment is harder to measure.
Compared to the airstrikes, political deals, and special operations troops who form the backbone of U.S. policy against ISIS, the handful of Americans in Iraq and Syria are highly visible. That doesn’t mean that the contributions of even the bravest and most altruistic volunteers actually amount to much. Windecker and other Westerners aren’t carrying the burden of fighting ISIS. That falls almost entirely to Kurds, Syrians, and Iraqis. Stories about the personal bravery of Americans, like Windecker’s or others offered by less compromised narrators, can confuse the starkness of a moral struggle against ISIS’s evil with the fate of a war that depends on a complicated tangle of alliances and interests and that shows no signs of ending soon.
“We knew something wasn’t right about him the first day.”
The morning after the story featuring Mickey appeared in The Daily Beast, another American volunteer mentioned in the article contacted its author, Ford Sypher. “That Mickey character is a fraud,” Samuel Swann wrote to Sypher in a private note. Swann also called Windecker a “compulsive liar,” and said, “We knew something wasn’t right about him the first day.”
None of the Americans or Kurds who spoke with The Daily Beast about Windecker dispute his accounts of fighting ISIS. But several of the Americans said they had held him at a distance for weeks, suspicious of his past and worried by his reckless actions in combat.
Whatever his peers knew or suspected about Windecker, it didn’t surface when Sypher initially spoke with the other Americans fighting alongside the Kurdish Peshmerga and who have now cast him out. Swann was present when Windecker was interviewed by The Daily Beast but at the time did not express any doubts about his character. Neither did any of the other Westerners, mostly Americans, who spoke with The Daily Beast on the same day they saw Windecker being interviewed.
Confronted with the accusations against him, Windecker told The Daily Beast, “Anyone can go on the Colorado sex offender web site, but I have my paperwork to show my case is closed.”
That’s true. All 28 charges against Windecker are closed, according to a Colorado district court official. His arrests span 16 years. They range from domestic violence and weapons violations to the felony sexual assault charge, for which he was convicted and sentenced to two years. Windecker’s last arrest in Colorado was in 2010 for failing to register as a sex offender. He was fined $816.50 and sentenced to a year in jail.
General Tariq Hawleri, the Peshmerga commander who praised Windecker’s “ferocity” in battle when he first spoke to The Daily Beast, is more reserved now. “We were not aware of any criminal charges against Mickey,” Tariq said. “He is a volunteer and we thank him for volunteering, but we do not accept criminals. We will be looking into this.” Several of the other Americans who spoke with The Daily Beast about Windecker have already drawn their conclusions.
“Nobody wants him around at all,” Swann said. “We contemplated kicking his ass every day. Hope he goes to prison when he returns to the States. He’s a huge liability.”
Like the other Americans who have joined the Peshmerga, Windecker exists in a legal gray area. Secretary of State John Kerry has “the authority to revoke the passports” of any American citizen who travels to Syria to join armed groups.
In practice, the U.S. government is worried about jihadis returning to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S., not the few dozen anti-ISIS crusaders like Windecker. But traveling to Iraq without the government’s protection forces volunteers like Windecker to rely on the Kurds who take them in, and perhaps most of all, on the trust and protection of the few Westerners who share their background. Windecker has lost that.
In every war, there are people who see opportunity. While other groups fight for conquest or survival, for people like Windecker, a far off battlefield can hold the promise of redemption or personal glory. Though that’s not how he described his motivations when he told The Daily Beast he traveled to Iraq, “for the people, nobody else. I’m here for all of those who want to live a peaceful life that has been deprived to them by ISIS.”
The only common trait among the Americans who have joined the war against ISIS is the large number who say they are veterans of the U.S. military. Windecker initially said he had served in the French Foreign Legion. But he backed off that claim, which was publicly disputed even at the time he made it, in a subsequent conversation with The Daily Beast. When asked to provide a, “direct yes, or no, regarding prior service in the [French Foreign] Legion,” Windecker became evasive saying, “Just put no on there I don’t need all my past issues jumping up.”
Even among the actual military veterans fighting ISIS there is no single explanation for what drew them there. Some may feel an obligation to the Kurdish people whom they bonded with on past deployments and see as staunch American allies now under threat. Others see a clash of civilizations or a biblical struggle between good and evil. There are war seekers, though hardly anyone admits to being a member, for whom a long peaceful American life sounds like a curse. And then there are those like Windecker who might have hoped that as “Mickey” the war in Iraq would allow him to escape or transform his past.
Last year, when Jordan Matson left Wisconsin to join the YPG, a Kurdish militia group battling ISIS in Syria, he became an early hero of the cause. Last September when photos of Matson began appearing publicly, he became a kind of heroic meme.
Stories spread on social media and new sites of the purportedly ex-Marine and “Conservative Bad Ass” fighting ISIS. The truth was more complicated. Matson had served in the military but in the Army rather than the Marines, where he’d been given an early discharge. The initial story touting a hardened combat veteran who had turned his sights on ISIS hid an earlier suicide attempt where Matson expressed anguish over being “railroaded out” out of the Army to police officers who found him with a loaded gun.
Matson never tried to hurt anyone but himself. But like Windecker, his journey to defend suffering people in Iraq started from a haunted past.
For Kurdish forces, like the Peshmerga and the YPG, who have welcomed them, Western volunteers may be useful as fighters but they also provide a constant spotlight useful for capturing media attention even when more dire local causes go unnoticed.
One American who had joined the YPG to fight ISIS in Syria left the group because he was treated more like a prop, he said after leaving the group.
The outcome of the war against ISIS depends on a number of things: Iraq’s ability to rebuild its military, American air support and special operations assistance, the direction of Iranian strategic planning, and the potential to reconcile anti-government Sunni groups to Baghdad and turn them against ISIS. A few dozen American volunteers, who might see some private or altruistic purpose in the fighting, won’t directly affect the war’s outcome one way or the other.
—With reporting by Ford Sypher and research contributed by Brandy Zadrozny.
share
tweet
post
email
Fashion icon Iris Apfel at her home in New York, July 27, 2011. Apfel, who has a wardrobe so large it is kept in a warehouse, will soon be selling her designs on the Home Shopping Network. (Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times)
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times, via Redux
Allison McNearney
Allison McNearney
digg
linkedin
reddit
stumbleupon
google
Peerless04.23.155:15 AM ET
The Fabulous Life of Iris Apfel: A Fashion Icon’s Late-in-Life Fame
Celebrity came late to the model and fashion-world personality Iris Apfel—and she’s relishing every delicious minute. Here she imparts her wisdom on style, ageing, and living life to the max.
“Mamma mia,” Iris Apfel exclaims as she settles into a chair at Le Cirque in New York.
She’s running late from a doctor’s appointment to fix a neck problem that has been bothering her.
“It’s made me like a zombie. I’ve been walking around like ‘ahh’” she puts her arms out and makes a face, turning herself into perhaps the most stylish zombie ever to theoretically roam the earth.
The 93-year-old is everywhere these days. Her shock of white hair, iconic oversized round black glasses, and “more is more” approach to layering big, bold, statement jewelry make her instantly—and internationally—recognizable.
Among her countless ongoing projects are an HSN jewelry line, a modeling gig as the face of Kate Spade’s spring campaign (alongside supermodel Karlie Kloss), and a book of “musings” she recently started writing.
She’s also the subject of a new documentary, Iris, by the late, great director Albert Maysles, which opens April 29.
While the “geriatric starlet,” as she calls herself, may be advanced in years, her fame is quite young. In 2005, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art had a sudden and unexpected hole to fill for its fall show.
Curator Harold Koda asked the relatively unknown fashion maven if she would contribute pieces from her incredible collection of jewelry and clothing acquired throughout her life. The resulting show, Rara Avis: Selections from the Iris Apfel Collection, was a spectacular success.
“Life is grey and dull. You may as well have a little fun when you dress and amuse people,” Iris is seen telling an enthralled crowd of museum goers who stand surrounded by her outrageous and enchanting stylings.
“Style implies attitude, mostly, and originality. And if you don’t have those two, well, you’re done.”
Previously, Apfel had enjoyed a modest amount of renown in the design world. She was a long-time interior designer, and, with her beloved husband Carl, had founded a textile company, Old World Weavers.
They even collaborated on White House restorations. Her favorite administration to work with: the Nixons. “Mrs. Nixon, strangely enough, was the most interested of all the ladies. She was passionately interested. Most of them didn’t give a damn.”
But the Met show changed everything, shooting her into the super-star stratosphere.
“Oh it’s very surprising to me. I can’t get over it, I still don’t believe it,” Apfel tells The Daily Beast of her new-found fame. “I went to Brazil last year, and all these kids were jumping all over me at the airport. I couldn’t believe it. And they photographed me for Vogue and all kinds of stuff. I mean they carry on with me like I invented Penicillin.”
Apfel may not have invented a life-saving drug, but her playful, fun, and wholly original attitude towards life, not to mention her sense of style, is a breath of fresh air sorely needed in the world of all-pervasive yoga pants and plastic surgery.
“You have to work at [developing style], find out who you are and what you can handle, whether you get upset if people look at you, whether you like a lot of stuff, whether you’re comfortable being a minimalist,” Apfel says. “Copying someone else’s style is not being stylish. Style implies attitude, mostly, and originality. And if you don’t have those two, well, you’re done.”
Her early style inspiration was her mother, who “worshipped at the altar of accessory” and dressed more like “the Duchess of Windsor. She was very proper. Everything was just so.”
Apfel took this inspiration in a more innovative, even rebellious direction, a move her mother supported. She has an eye for assembling outfits that would be unimaginable to most of us, and is often decked out in layers upon layers of necklaces and armfuls of bangles and bracelets.
She dresses for herself, and it’s obvious how much fun she has doing it. In Iris, she chuckles at the camera as she displays “another mad outfit.”
Growing up in Astoria, Apfel says she used to cut class every Thursday afternoon when she was 11. “In those days for a nickel, five cents, you could go all over Manhattan, and I was a very curious child. So I used to each week go to another area.”
She particularly fell in love with Greenwich Village, where she found a little shop in the basement of an “old rat-trap building” that was run by “a little old man who was very elegant, very down on his luck. He had frayed cuffs, but he always wore spats and a boutonniere, and he had a monocle. He was very elegant.”
There, she set her sights on a brooch that had a high gallery with filigree and rose-cut diamonds.
“I lusted after this pin but I didn’t have a penny to my name. So I saved and I scrimped and sometime later I went back. It was the first time in my life I ever haggled. And finally—he was going to give it to me anyway—he gave it to me for the huge sum of 65 cents. I still have it. I don’t wear it, but I still have it.”
Her unparalleled haggling skills (seriously, viewers will be overwhelmed with admiration and a little fear watching her work her magic in shops and markets around New York City) and her collection of baubles and clothing grew from there.
Today, “the obsession,” as she calls it, fills entire rooms and two-story closets in her Park Avenue and Palm Beach apartments.
While her collection may consume a lot of space, Apfel never takes fashion too seriously and isn’t a snob about what she likes. She is just as happy buying a $4 cuff she’s fallen in love with as a designer piece with a wallet-breaking price tag.
She claims to “mostly” know where and what everything is, and her instant, detailed recall of pieces fished off packed clothing racks seemingly at random in Iris is truly astounding. But the filming process also helped her discover—and wear—gems she had forgotten she had.
“When they came to do the show and they were going through everything, there were things in the closet seriously for 30 years with a ticket on it that I’d never put on my back.”
Despite its museum-quality breadth (she’s in the process of donating part of her collection to the Peabody Essex Museum), Apfel claims, “I’m not a fashionista. I don’t live to get dressed. I think it’s fun and I like it. I like to see other people do it. But I’m very busy with a lot of other things.”
This is all-too-evident in Iris, which shows just how crazy Apfel’s life has become (“the telephone calls are enough to kill you” she tells me).
The nonagenarian star has embraced new projects and opportunities—like sitting for an “insane” Dazed & Confused cover shoot—that have followed on the heels of fame with an enthusiasm and sheer enjoyment that shows just how young at heart she really is.
And if you had any doubts, one look inside her Palm Beach apartment will leave your jaw on the floor.
Apfel and her 101-year-old husband Carl (who calls their relationship “one trip, beautiful trip”) have created a tchotchke and stuffed animal-filled wonderland of an apartment that photographer Bruce Weber observes is “the perfect house for two children.”
“That’s Gussy. Gussy is a bore. Her wing goes up and her belly is full of booze,” Apfel says of a life-size ostrich-cum-bar as she shows the Iris camera crew around. “And Kermit decided he’d like to live here and he’s become a terrible lush. See how tipsy he is?”
A green Kermit the Frog stuffed animal is perched on Gussy, arms lolling around the ostrich’s neck.
Even her inanimate friends aren’t immune to her love of accessorizing. “He loves jewelry and I couldn’t get anything to fit him, he has such a fat neck,” Apfel says petting a large dog figurine with bedazzled collars around his neck. “I told him if he went on a diet…Finally I was in the hat shop and these are hat bands. So, I said, ‘Gee, that’ll fit that fatso.’”
Apfel’s playfulness and endless curiosity are infectious when you’re in her presence. Her eyes still light up when talking about flea markets she wants to check out and exciting new projects that she just “fall[s] into.” Fame doesn’t seem to have changed her.
“What do you do with chewing gum if you want to be elegant?” she asks at one point during lunch. “Years ago in school they used to put them under the desk.” (“Not at Le Cirque, Iris!” the film’s PR representative, exclaimed in response, helping her out of the bind with a sugar packet.)
Apfel is a true original when it comes to her sense of style, and that extends to her emphatic championship of aging gracefully.
She is opposed to the “insane obsession with youth in this country” and is solidly—and hilariously—against plastic surgery. Unless “you have a nose like Pinocchio or, God forbid, you’re in an accident or fire or something,” she thinks the aesthetic risks are just not worth it. “You pay all this money, you go through all this pain, and you don’t know what you’re going to look like when you get finished. You could come out looking like a Picasso painting.”
“We used to go to parties in Palm Beach and my husband would look around and say, ‘Baby, you’re the only one here with your own face,’” Apfel says.
Iris will only make that face more recognizable. One of Albert Maysles’ last projects before his death this past March, the documentary almost didn’t happen.
Apfel originally turned down Maysles request, but luckily Linda Fargo, Senior Vice President at Bergdorf Goodman, convinced her to change her mind.
“Linda said, ‘You must be insane. People would drop dead to just have Albert take a still photograph, and he wants to do a documentary and you have the nerve to tell him no? What’s wrong with you?’ Fortunately he called again, and I went up to Harlem, and we all fell in love.”
And, boy, should we be grateful that she did. Apfel is a hilarious and brilliant reminder that being true to oneself is the only way to live, and that it’s never too late to say “yes” to new opportunities, as long as you’re having fun.
As she so succinctly puts it to the camera, “If you’re going to sit there and do the same damn thing all the time, you might as well jump into the box yourself.”
share
tweet
post
email
Bola Tinubu, one of the leaders of Nigeria's leading opposition All Progressive Congress, tries to calm the crowd after violence broke out during a campaign rally at the Taslim Balogun Stadium in Lagos on January 30, 2015. Nigeria's main opposition party APC, which is expected to push the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) close at the February 14 presidential and parliamentary vote, on January 29 accused the government of blocking foreign journalists from covering next month's elections and urged international monitors to press for access. AFP PHOTO / PIUS UTOMI EKPEI (Photo credit should read PIUS UTOMI EKPEI/AFP/Getty Images)
Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Images
Michael Weiss
Michael Weiss
digg
linkedin
reddit
stumbleupon
google
Nigerian Princes04.27.155:18 AM ET
Nigeria’s Next Leader’s Ties to a Heroin Ring
General Muhammed Buhari’s political partner is a former bagman for two heroin traffickers. But that’s just business as usual in Nigeria.
Nigeria’s election last month was celebrated as an unlikely victory for democracy in an African country with a tenuous record of free and fair representation. But the man most responsible for midwifing General Muhammed Buhari’s ballot triumph over current President Goodluck Jonathan has a spotty CV. Former Lagos provincial governor Bola Tinubu, affectionately nicknamed the Jagaban, is today seen as a shrewd if not “deeply Machiavellian” Svengali in Nigeria’s politics as well as the architect of a hugely successful anti-corruption platform. But 20 years ago he had to forfeit nearly half a million dollars to the U.S. Treasury Department after being named as an accomplice in a white heroin-trafficking and money-laundering ring that stretched from West Africa to the U.S. Midwest.
Although his case has been bandied about the Nigerian press for years, Tinubu’s involvement in a federal drug and racketeering investigation waged jointly by the DEA, FBI, and IRS has gone unreported elsewhere, even after his ascendance to Karl Rove-like status last month. A recent gauzy Financial Times profile of him, for instance, neglected to mention that two decades ago Tinubu was identified as a bagman for two Nigerian heroin movers who operated out of Chicago and Hammond, Indiana. They were Adegboyega Mueez Akande and Abiodun Agbele, Akande’s nephew, who was exposed to law enforcement after selling white heroin first to Lee Andrew Edwards, another dealer later jailed for trying to murder a federal agent, and then to an undercover cop.
In a 1993 court docket from the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Illinois, which The Daily Beast obtained from Sahara Reporters, a Nigeria-focused news outlet, IRS Special Agent Kevin Moss said that Akande had run the white heroin ring in the late 1980s until 1990, when he handed off the U.S arm of the business to his nephew, who had arrived in 1988. Akande then returned to Nigeria but continued to oversee the operation from abroad with the help of others at home and in the United States, including his relatives. One of the individuals identified in his cartel by Moss was Tinubu, then a Chicago State University-educated accountant working as a treasurer for Mobil Oil Nigeria Ltd, a subsidiary of energy giant Mobil Oil, which was still a few years shy of its famous merger with Exxon in 1999.
In the biography section of his official website, Tinubu is described as having emigrated to the United States in 1975 “in search of the proverbial Golden Fleece with a heart brimming with unrelenting determination to achieve his visions.” This is certainly one way to describe his tenure stateside.
In 1989, Moss said in an affidavit, Tinubu established an individual money market account, into which he deposited $1,000 in traveler’s checks, and a negotiable order of withdrawal account (NOW) at First Heritage Bank in Country Club Hills, Illinois. The address Tinubu gave the bank was the same as the listed headquarters of Globe-Link International, the front company owned by Akande and his relatives.
“There’s a trend of various Nigerian politicians at the highest levels involved in dodgy business deals around the world, in property and cash.”
Bank employees told Moss that Akande had personally introduced them to Tinubu in December 1989 when who also opened a joint checking account with his wife, Oluremi Tinubu, who already kept a joint account with Akande’s wife at First Heritage. Five days after the NOW account was opened, $80,000 was wired into it from a bank in Houston maintained by one of Akande’s relatives. Tinubu would later use the NOW account to buy a $10,000 Certificate of Deposit for an $8,000 car loan, listing Akande as his cousin on the application.
At the time, Tinubu’s take home as a Mobil Oil Nigeria executive was a mere $2,400 a month and he claimed not to have any other revenue streams. Yet he still managed to deposit $661,000 into his individual money market account in 1990 and then another $1,216,500 a year later. He also opened more accounts with Citibank in its worldwide personal banking unit, transferring over half a million dollars from his First Heritage money market account into one of them in early 1991.
Mobil Oil Nigeria told Moss that Tinubu’s role at the company never involved transferring large sums of money between banks and that it didn’t keep deposits in any institutions in the south suburbs of Chicago, where First Heritage was based. Moreover, although Tinubu moved back to Nigeria in 1983, he neglected to file U.S. income tax returns after 1984 despite having sizable, interest-generating deposits in American banks. All of this was enough to persuade a magistrate judge of the Northern District to issue seizure warrants for Tinubu’s First Heritage and Citibank accounts. Collectively, more than $1.4 million belonging to the Nigerian was confiscated.
Tinubu gave differing accounts for his wealth to Moss. In one phone call from Nigeria, shortly after the U.S. Treasury seized his money, he admitted to wiring $100,000 to Akande’s Houston bank account and to receiving the $80,000 from Akande into his First Heritage account. Tinubu also said that apart from one other account in Fairfax, Virginia, he had no other money stashed in U.S. banks.
Except that there were other accounts. Citibank has a worldwide banking division known as Citibank International where Tinubu stashed an additional $550,000. He also controlled an entity called Compass Finance and Investments Company Ltd., of which Akande and Agbele were directors. Still another nexus of money transfers was uncovered by federal investigators, with cash moving from First Heritage to Citibank to Citibank International, where it wound up in Tinubu’s personal accounts and in those belonging to Compass Finance and Investments. In a follow-up exchange with law enforcement officers, Tinubu changed his story. Just days after conceding that he’d sent and received money to and from Akande, he insisted that he had no financial or business dealings with Akande or Agbele.
There’s no evidence that Tinubu was ever indicted for any crime. He eventually settled with the district court, turning over $460,000 of the seized $1.4 million, with the remainder released back to him. The Beast tried repeatedly to contact Marsha McClellan, the U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case, but was unsuccessful.
“I’m not surprised at all,” said Virginia Comolli, a specialist on Nigeria and author of Boko Haram: Nigeria’s Islamist Insurgency. “There’s a trend of various Nigerian politicians at the highest levels involved in dodgy business deals around the world, in property and cash. Even ones who seem fairly clean turn out to have some dark histories.” The perfect case in point is Tinubu’s political project and new president-elect of Nigeria, General Muhammed Buhari, who in 1983 helped overthrow a democratically elected government in a military coup d’etat on the grounds that the government was undisciplined and corrupt. “He resorted to brutal methods, beating up people for not queuing properly and imposing limitations on the media,” Comolli said. “I think a lot of the votes Buhari got were anti-Jonathan rather than pro-Buhari.”
But no doubt, many also came from a savvy fusion of political factions. In February 2013, Tinubu successfully merged his own influential Action Congress party with Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change, resulting in the All Progressives Congress. The marriage united Nigeria’s most populous northwest and southwest regions and the ensuing campaign was billed by Tinubu as a “commonsense revolution” against a corrupt and venal incumbency which, in its five years in power, had seen the terrorist group and newly-minted ISIS affiliate Boko Haram thrive. Buhari swept the election with 2.7 million more votes than Jonathan.
Even before that trouncing, however, Tinubu had a relatively positive reputation in Nigeria, according to former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell. “He is widely regarded as having been a highly successful governor of Lagos state,” he said. “Together with Tinubu’s handpicked successor, Babatunde Fashola, Lagos has seen dramatic improvements in everything from practical stuff like garbage collection to the collection of taxes and the provision of public services,” Campbell told The Beast. Though even here, the ex-diplomat admits, Tinubu’s good governance has been clouded by controversy. “He established a company to do the tax collecting in return for a cut and, at one point, Tinubu and Fashola appeared to be splitting over the percentage of Tinubu’s cut.”
Drug charges do indeed appear to be the sine qua non for Nigerian high office. The year 1993, when Tinubu’s assets were seized, was a turbulent period for Nigeria following the cancellation of a national election and the establishment of a military dictatorship. Moshood Abiola, the rightful winner of that election, was accused of narcotics trafficking. So too is “Prince” Buruji Kashamu from the People’s Democratic Party, who has faced extradition back to the United States since 1998. Kashamu was indicted by a federal grand jury in Chicago for being the elusive “Alaji,” a globetrotting drug kingpin who smuggled heroin into O’Hare International Airport from Europe and Asia. Piper Kerman, the memoirist who inspired the Netflix series Orange is the New Black, famously worked for Alaji. Kashamu denies the charges and insists that he was purportedly a counterterrorism informant to the U.S. government before and after 9/11, and that the real trafficker was his now-deceased brother.
Despite his party’s general loss to the All Progressives Congress, Kashumu was elected in March as senator of the southwest Ogun state. In what appeared to be a magnanimous gesture to the winner, he took out an advertisement praising Tinubu as a role model. The Jagaban was distinctly unimpressed. He trashed the comparison in a statement signed by his media adviser, claiming that for Kashamu “to liken himself to Bola Tinubu is for a small rut to call itself a mountain.” Tinubu instructed the “false praise singer” to go face the music in the Windy City before deigning to talk to him.
share
tweet
post
email
Photo Illustration by Emil Lendof/The Daily Beast
Samantha Allen
Samantha Allen
digg
linkedin
reddit
stumbleupon
google
LOVE HURTS04.27.155:15 AM ET
Inside the Fear of Being Gay
An overlooked manifestation of OCD, sexual orientation obsession plagues sufferers with a debilitating fear of being gay. A new study differentiates the mental illness from homophobia.
“Simon” is not gay but he used to spend several hours a day worrying that he might be.
His fear of being gay led him to avoid physical contact with other men at work, where he dodged one-on-one meetings with men, and at home, where he avoided attending his children’s sporting events so that he wouldn’t have to interact with coaches and dads.
Simon suffered from a sexual orientation obsession, a fairly common but under-examined manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) that revolves around the fear of being—or being perceived as—gay.
Simon’s case study is the focus of a 2011 article co-authored by Dr. Monnica T. Williams, a clinical psychologist and the leading expert on sexual orientation-themed OCD (SO-OCD). In a new study published in the April issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, Dr. Williams sheds even more light on this confusing and often debilitating mental disorder.
For Dr. Williams, SO-OCD presents a unique clinical challenge because it can easily be mistaken for internalized homophobia, in which someone who is actually lesbian, gay, or bisexual suffers personal and social anxiety over his or her sexual orientation. Those who suffer from SO-OCD, by contrast, do not take pleasure in homosexual thoughts but nonetheless have an obsessive need to reassure themselves that they do not find them pleasurable.
These reassurances can take the form of time-consuming “checking” rituals that SO-OCD sufferers use to verify their true sexual orientation. In Dr. Williams’s clinical experience, these rituals include mentally picturing homosexual acts and checking for sexual stimulation, asking a loved one to verbally verify one’s heterosexuality, or looking at homosexual imagery to ensure that it does not induce arousal.
One of Dr. Williams’s patients, for example, would watch gay porn even though he could not strictly achieve orgasm through it, switch to thinking about a woman, and, in his words: “Boom, I finish, and I know I am straight.”
“Sufferers have a lot more in common with Jack Nicholson avoiding cracks in the sidewalk in As Good As It Gets than they do with the Westboro Baptist Church.”
Some male sufferers of SO-OCD may even be so hounded by obsessive thoughts that they become “desperate to find out if they would enjoy a homosexual experience,” causing them to seek out unwanted—and ultimately upsetting—same-sex encounters.
Those who experience internalized homophobia or other forms of anxiety over being lesbian, gay, or bisexual, on the other hand, would not experience the activities in these rituals as inherently distressing. In her practice, for instance, Dr. Williams once encountered a middle-aged man who was concerned he might have SO-OCD due to “ongoing doubts about whether he should leave his wife and move to Miami to start a new life as an openly gay man.”
Someone with SO-OCD would find this entire thought pattern intrusive but, in this case, he felt distress only about ending the marriage while “the idea of meeting someone new of the same sex filled him with excitement.”
But automatically assuming that all patients with SO-OCD-like symptoms want to abscond to a Miami gay bar can have disastrous clinical consequences that “increase distress and damage rapport” between patient and the therapist.
One man Dr. Williams studied had reportedly been told by a previous therapist—who did not recognize his SO-OCD—that he “should try to be with a man” because “everybody is bisexual.” He then experienced suicidal ideation for five months and, eventually, “couldn’t be with any person of the same sex alone in the same room” or watch television.
To the untrained eye, this man’s behavior might be mistaken for intense homophobia. But as Dr. Williams and her co-authors point out, an individual with SO-OCD “may or may not have negative feelings toward LGBT individuals” on a sociopolitical or interpersonal level. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual people can even experience SO-OCD about heterosexual thoughts, although this possibility seems less frequent.
The obsessive thought patterns of OCD can intersect with certain social norms, then, but they do not necessarily imply a personal endorsement of those norms. SO-OCD is a mental disorder, not a pathological form of bigotry. SO-OCD sufferers have a lot more in common with Jack Nicholson avoiding cracks in the sidewalk in As Good as It Gets than they do with the Westboro Baptist Church.
SO-OCD also occurs with surprising frequency given how scant the research is on the subject. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) estimates that about 2 percent of the U.S. population receives an OCD diagnosis at some point. And out of individuals with an OCD diagnosis, Dr. Williams observes, 9.9 percent of one sample reported “past or present obsessions related to homosexuality” and 8 percent of another reported “current sexual orientation obsessions.”
Based on those figures, it’s possible that over half a million people in the U.S. currently experience sexual orientation obsessions—a little less than the population of Wyoming but still a sizable group.
Dr. Williams’s own sample of over 1,000 subjects paints one of the first general portraits of this population: Over a quarter of the entire sample had already been diagnosed with OCD. Most subjects who responded to the online survey were heterosexual men but 25 percent were female. There is additional evidence to suggest that women may suffer more acutely from SO-OCD even though they are less likely to have it.
And although sufferers of SO-OCD are a relatively small group, the distress they experience is a serious cause for concern. Dr. Williams’s team found that over 90 percent of their sample experienced “levels of distress ranging from ‘much’ to ‘suicidal.’”
For those who receive treatment, however, this distress can be alleviated using proven therapeutic techniques. As Dr. Williams notes in her team’s 2011 study of Simon, treatment for SO-OCD “follows the same structure as any other form of OCD”: expose the patient to his or her fears and interrupt the rituals that accompany them.
Over the course of 17 treatment sessions, Simon was given various “homework” assignments including looking at men’s fitness magazines, watching Milk and Brokeback Mountain, going to a gay bar, and talking to the coaches of his daughter’s softball team. In some treatment sessions, he watched gay porn with the reminder that “a certain amount of sexual arousal” is normal for people of all orientations when viewing explicit imagery.
Throughout these activities, he was encouraged to “agree” with his obsessive thoughts about being gay in order to expose their irrationality instead of instantly reassuring himself that they were incorrect. When he worried that he was gay throughout the treatment, for example, he mentally told himself, “Yes, I am just gay.”
In any other context, this treatment could be mistaken for conversion therapy—an unethical attempt to change someone’s sexual orientation—but, for Simon, it alleviated his symptoms by allowing him to unmask and dismiss his fears. His depression cleared away and his quality of life score rose dramatically post-treatment.
But Simon’s success story aside, Dr. Williams and her co-authors remain concerned that the larger population of SO-OCD sufferers do not have access to this knowledge or these treatments.
“[The] level of distress experienced by those with SO-OCD demands a response from the research and clinical community,” they write.
For a potentially debilitating form of mental illness that can so easily be confused with internalized homophobia or outright bigotry, some clarity does seem to be in order.
share
tweet
post
email
