Gun Violence in Chicago, Tamar Manasseh & M.A.S.K

The iconic downtown Chicago skyline at night  

Last Wednesday night I watched my beloved New York Yankees win their third-straight away-game against the Chicago White Sox on my iPhone as I battled through a tough case of writer's block.

While the Yanks boast one of the best records in baseball, they limped into Chicago early last Monday morning for a 3-game series against the White Sox, still licking their wounds after losing 4 straight games to their AL East rivals the Boston Red Sox.


A positive end to tough road trip after getting swept in Boston's Fenway Park.

While the Yankees arrived home early Thursday morning for a few hours rest before they beat the visiting Texas Rangers 7-3 to start a welcome eleven-game home stand up in the Bronx, the images of Chicago still linger in my mind.

As a sports fan, former TV reporter and ex-professional athlete, I appreciate good camera work, and one of the visual highlights of the past three Yankees-White Sox game broadcasts (which I watched using the Fox Sports App on my iPhone) were the various stunning evening views of the Chicago skyline with the illuminated downtown towers and streetlights of the city's vast neighborhoods stretching off into the distance on three consecutive clear nights.

My younger brother, who's in town for the weekend, was born in Chicago when my family used to live just outside the city in the suburb of Downer's Grove, Illinois in the early 70's, and I've visited the Windy City a few times since for both work and pleasure.

Most recently for a Penn State vs Notre Dame football game in South Bend, Indiana a few years ago (as a fan, not a player) when I got to spend the weekend at a friend's family's swanky high-rise condo on Chicago's famous Gold Coast on the west side next to Lake Michigan - talk about a view.

Those images, both on the screen of my iPhone and in my mind, stand in stark contrast to the shocking spate of deadly shootings that rocked some sections of Chicago last weekend.

17-year-old Jahnae Patterson, one of 12 people shot
and killed in Chicago between August 3rd - 5th

As was widely reported, between 6pm Friday August 3rd and the night of Sunday August 5th, a staggering 74 people were shot in an explosion of violence that left 12 people between the ages of 11 and 62 dead.

That grisly death toll included 17-year-old Jahnae Patterson who was killed early last Sunday morning when two alleged gang members approached a group of people she was talking with on a sidewalk in the Lawndale section of Chicago and opened fire.

The high-school junior was shot in the face and five others, including two boys aged 11 and 14-years-old, were wounded.

As her horrified mother Tanika Humphries told reporters, "They took my baby's life for no reason."

"No reason" is about the only way to possibly sum up that volume of gun violence taking place over the course of three days - according to Chicago PD, in one three-hour period during that stretch, a person was shot every six minutes.

The devastating toll that the injuries, loss of life and psychological trauma has taken on the residents of the economically-marginalized communities where gun violence is so prevalent, is all but invisible to the radar of the current White House administration - and the majority-Republican lawmakers in Congress responsible drafting the kinds of legislation that could help curb the availability of illegal guns in America.

I mean let's be honest, of all the different guns used to shoot 74 people over three days in Chicago last weekend, how many of those firearms were legally purchased or registered?

How many came from neighboring states like Indiana with much more lax regulations on firearms?

As journalist Tony Cook reported in an Indianapolis Star article re-posted on USA Today.com back in 2015:

"A report from Chicago authorities found that nearly 60% of illegal guns recovered in the city from 2009 to 2013 were first sold in states with more lax gun laws. The largest portion came from Indiana, which accounted for 19% of the illegal guns in Chicago. The report blames Indiana's lax gun laws, which allow gun owners to sell their weapons to other people without background checks or paperwork recording the sale."

NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre with accused Russian spy
Maria Butina in 2014

Don't hold you breath waiting for the National Rifle Association to answer pesky questions like that.

The NRA hasn't had much to say on that lately, or much else for that matter.

They're too busy deifying the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms.

As if it were a commandment etched in stone on a mountain by God, rather than a section of the U.S. Constitution written back in 1787 just six years after occupying British Army forces under General Charles Cornwallis surrendered to the Continental Army under General George Washington at Yorktown on October 19, 1781.

The ideologically conservative, dependably self-righteous and normally preachy front for gun manufacturers has been conspicuously silent in the wake of the arrest last month of Maria Butina, the 29-year-old Russian national charged with conspiracy and acting as an agent of a foreign government.

The accused Russian spy has ties to, or met with, a long list of current and former Republican politicians including Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, former Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and many others.

Including South Dakota businessman Paul Erickson, a well-known Republican political consultant and conservative rainmaker currently under investigation for acting as a link between Russian figures working to influence the outcome of the 2016 elections and top Republican officials.

Butina's deep ties to the NRA, as well as to Aleksandr Torshin, the deputy governor of the Central Bank of Russia (a close ally of Russian President Vladimir with alleged ties to the Russian mafia),  have made the NRA's well-known outsized influence over the Republican Party a rather prickly subject for both the GOP and Donald Trump as the latter's ties to Russia threaten to topple his chaotic presidency.

Is the President of the United States responsible for alleged gang members going on a three-day shooting spree in a major American city?

Of course not, but leadership starts at the top, and the contrast in how a sitting president uses the office to address the epidemic of gun violence in Chicago couldn't be more stark.

President Obama addresses the IACP in Chicago

Back on October 27, 2015, President Obama gave a speech to law enforcement professionals gathered at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) annual conference in Chicago.

In an effort to shed light on some of the root causes of gun violence in the city, and bring attention to the devastating effects on local communities, Obama highlighted specific ways in which lax gun regulations in neighboring states allow illegal firearms to flow unchecked into the city - and the socioeconomic factors that contribute to the violence.

As journalist Rick Pearson reported about Obama's speech for the Chicago Tribune:

"Obama said the root of the city's gun violence rested in neighborhoods facing poverty, few job prospects, rampant drug abuse, broken families and easy availability of guns that youths can buy cheaper than books."

On the rare occasions that Donald Trump or his White House press secretary Sarah Sanders bother to publicly mention gun violence in Chicago, it's not about the toll it takes on the communities where it happens.

It's usually in the context of a dishonest attempt to use the firearms epidemic in the Windy City as a talking point to justify NOT passing new gun control legislation - and of course nurture Trump's warped perception of the city as some kind of violent, dystopian wasteland overrun by crime and populated by the types of "others" he regularly vilifies.

Both Trump and Sanders, dependable mouthpieces for the NRA's propaganda, are both fond of spreading the oft-repeated lie that Chicago is an example of why gun control laws are not effective.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sander tears up
as a student asks her about gun violence in May, 2018 

As Sanders suggested in a White House press conference in October, 2017 after the horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas that left 58 people dead and 851 injured.

When a reporter asked Sanders whether the Las Vegas mass shooting indicated the time had finally come for the Republican-majority Congress to act and pass gun control measures, she robotically repeated the standard Republican response to any kind of mass shooting.


Saying that it was "premature" to discuss passing stronger gun control legislation, Sanders said:

"If you look to Chicago, where you had over 4,000 victims of gun-related crimes last year, they have the strictest gun laws in the country. That certainly hasn't helped there." 

As reporter Matt Dietrich reported in an article for Politifact.com, that statement was a lie.

Back in 1982 the city of Chicago did pass a ban on all handguns, so at one point it actually did have some of the most stringent firearms laws in the country.

But as Dietrich reported, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a ban on handguns in Washington, D.C. in the case of District of Columbia vs. Heller in 2008, the conservative-majority SCOTUS decision in McDonald vs. City of Chicago in 2010 struck down Chicago's ban on handguns.

A prime example of the NRA and firearms manufacturers actively lobbying to use the federal courts to override gun control laws passed on the state, local and municipal level based on arcane and often questionable interpretations of the U.S. Constitution.

A Chicago protest against gun violence

By 2012, with a solid Republican majority in Congress and most state legislatures around the country, the state of Illinois allowed its citizens to carry concealed firearms after a lower federal court ruled that a ban on carrying concealed firearms was unconstitutional.

But that hasn't stopped Trump and Sanders from repeating the NRA propaganda that Chicago has the "strictest gun laws in the country".

Even as thousands of Chicagoans have been injured or killed by the almost unrestricted proliferation of firearms that have flooded into the city.

Including the 74 victims injured or killed in Chicago last weekend.

On the Tuesday August 7th edition of the PBS Newshour, host Nick Schifrin (who filled in last week for the vacationing regular host Judy Woodruff) did an interesting segment on the recent spate of deadly shootings that rocked some sections of Chicago from last Friday evening to Sunday evening.

If you want to get a sense of how those shootings are impacting the people who live in those communities, scroll forward to the 37-minute, 20-second mark to watch the PBS segment.

Schifrin interviews local community activist Tamar Manasseh, a founder of Mothers/Men Against Senseless Killings (M.A.S.K), a grass-roots group that works to prevent violence, address food insecurity and housing issues, and also ensure that local citizens have access to city services.

Tamar Manasseh out on the block in one of MASK's
distinctive, pink "Moms On Patrol" t-shirts

Manasseh was motivated to try and do something to stop the gun violence devastating neighborhoods on the south and west sides of Chicago after becoming fed up - and her approach is simple.

She began coming out onto a street corner to establish a presence of caring adults by simply cooking food and feeding neighborhood kids dinner; her efforts have attached local volunteers and encouraged men and women to simply start showing up and being visible in high crime areas to deter street violence.

Her efforts have paid off as shootings have drastically dropped in the in the Lawndale section of Chicago where she lives, MASK also now has chapters and volunteers out on the streets working to make a difference in Evansville, Indiana, Memphis, Tennessee and Staten Island, New York.

PBS correspondent John Yang also interviewed Manasseh back in the summer 2016 when over 500 people had been killed - including 90 in the month of August 2016 alone.

In my view, Manasseh's efforts represent the kind of volunteer spirit and sense of giving that is the true definition of what American values are.

People stepping up to improve the lives of folks in their communities by giving of their time, energy  and resources - and just being a good neighbor.

Susan Bro visits the spot where her daughter Heather
Heyer was killed by a neo-Nazi in Charlottesville

On a weekend when a lot of media focus was on the one-year anniversary of the violent white supremacist marches that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, Tamar Manasseh and the volunteers who work on behalf of MASK demonstrate how average Americans can make a positive difference.

Rather than simmer and shake my head over the string of shootings that took place in Chicago last weekend, I just went online and donated a few bucks to MASK (you can donate here) because it's a group out on the front lines quietly making a difference in the lives of average Americans.

People who've been largely ignored by the current White House administration and Republican leaders in Congress who control the purse strings and the ability to draft legislation that could make a difference.

Republican lawmakers practically tripped over themselves passing a massive tax cut that slashed taxes on the wealthiest Americans and U.S. corporations already flush with cash - even though it's going to literally explode the same federal deficit conservatives spent 8 years whining about when Obama was in office trying to get Congress to pass critical infrastructure spending initiatives.

On a weekend when another 27 people were shot in the streets of Chicago, including one person killed, Trump is playing golf and spending taxpayer money to have Secret Service personnel protect him and his family at a Bedminster, New Jersey country club that he owns and profits off of while he tweets about spending $8 billion in taxpayer funds to build a "Space Force".

If Trump authorized just a fraction of that to someone like Tamar Manasseh to spend on providing meals to kids in marginalized neighborhoods in Chicago to help curb gun violence, just imagine the lives that could be saved and the positive impact it could have on local communities.

A small percentage of that kind of money could go a long way in counteracting the impact of unrestricted firearms in Chicago and other communities.

And it would make a helluva lot more difference in the lives of Americans than a "Space Force".

South of the Border: Don Winslow, El Chapo & Narcos

Lately my mind has been south of the border.

And not just because multiple toxic waste sites in Texas are still under water from Hurricane Harvey, including at least one Superfund site, and no representatives of the Scott Pruitt-led Environmental Protection Agency are on site (welcome to the Trump-era EPA).

At present I'm 3/4 into "The Power of the Dog" author Don Winslow's brilliant, hard-hitting fictional 2005 novel about the origins and rise of the Mexican drug cartels and one determined DEA agent's efforts to stop them.

The book was first recommended to me by my friend "Charles", an ex-Navy SEAL who served in the Iraq War and still makes a living doing dangerous contract work overseas.

"Charles" and I both graduated from West Windsor-Plainsboro South HS, he was younger than me but my younger brother (his classmate) introduced us and we became friends when we both lived out in Los Angeles.

This was 2010 - 2011, and though we'd moved there separately, both of us were living out there as two of the scores of aspirational screenwriters trying to break into the business, and over the years we've edited and critiqued each other's writing, bounced creative ideas off one another, offered mutual encouragement and shared suggestions for different books and films.

From my perspective, "The Power of the Dog" is one of those books that's a must-read for screenwriters, and for anyone who wants to gain a better understanding of the origins of the Mexican drug cartels, the men and women who populate their ranks - and the immense power they wield.

Winslow's no-nonsense prose slams into you like a freight train, he's a master of crime fiction with a tight, mesmerizing writing style that pulls the reader in with graphic, unsparing details of brutality, violence, corruption, death, sex and money that are at times, both hard to read and impossible to look away from.

What's frightening about his writing (aside from his ability to inject humor in the most horrific kinds of scenarios) is that it stems directly from his exhausting research into America's pointless and costly 40-plus year "War on Drugs" - which he chronicles in painstaking detail - and the Mexican drug cartels who've made billions of dollars off of the insatiable global appetite for drugs.

While the complex, morally-ambiguous characters who populate the pages of his books are fictional, like the characters in Mario Puzo's "The Godfather", they are all based on real individuals - and the sometimes harrowing situations they face are based on actual events.

DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena 

For example, in exhaustive and graphic detail "The Power of the Dog" offers an account of the story behind the infamous February 7, 1985 kidnapping and brutal torture of DEA undercover agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena.

Camarena, a 37-year-old Mexican-born veteran of the US Marine Corps, provided intelligence that led to the Mexican authorities' destruction of a 2,500-acre marijuana plantation worth an estimated $8 billion that was owned by notorious drug lord Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo.

A year later, as he was walking to meet his wife for lunch, corrupt Mexican cops snatched him off the streets of Guadalajara in broad daylight, threw him in a Volkswagen and took him to a ranch near Guadalajara where he was savagely tortured for 30 hours.

An act which stunned the globe and prompted a massive manhunt for those responsible.

Camarena's interrogation was so brutal that a local doctor was kept on hand to inject him with drugs to keep him conscious while his abductors pressed him for information and tortured him.

That doctor, Humberto Alvarez Machain, was later extradited to the U.S. to face charges but he was eventually released by a federal judge for lack of evidence.

Winslow's book also uses fictional characters to tell the true story of drug trafficker Hector Luis Palma, whose wife Guadalupe Serrano was seduced by his one-time partner Rafael Enrique Clavel - a drug trafficker from Venezuela. (Palma founded the Sinaloa cartel with Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman)

While Winslow changes some of the specifics, "The Power of the Dog" offers details on the infamous story of how Clavel forced Palma's wife to remove $7 million from a bank before he decapitated her, mailed her head back to Palma in a box - and then reportedly had Palma's two young children Jesus and Nataly thrown off the Puente de la Concordia bridge that spans a gorge near the border between Venezuela and Colombia.

I remember reading that story in the news in the late 1980's and being horrified.

Author Don Winslow

Winslow's unsparing look at the rise of the Mexican cartels also delves into their connections between the American mafia, the Catholic church and the CIA.

It punches serious holes into the ideological fiction peddled by the Reagan and Bush administrations during the "War On Drugs".

I'm definitely looking forward to ordering Winslow's 2015 sequel, "The Cartel" - check out Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times.

If you're interested, he was interviewed last Wednesday on the Leonard Lopate Show to discuss his new novel, "The Force" which centers on drug dealing and corruption within the NYPD.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Winslow's look at the Mexican drug cartels, is that it forces the reader to step back and look at American culture differently.

Consider major U.S. cities for example.

As far back as the 1950's, the Republican Party in America has been dealing in the currency of the distorted narrative of "Urban America", both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan used it as a wedge issue to manipulate white voters into a more conservative stance.

Luring them to the Republican Party by tapping into anxieties, apprehensions and deeply ingrained racial and ethnic prejudices; like Reagan using the term "Welfare Queens" to demonize American women who receive federal assistance like welfare, housing subsidies or SNAP food assistance.

A popular conservative talking point that continues to be bandied about by Fox News and the assortment of usual suspects from right-wing media - talking heads like Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Laura Graham and their ilk, despite evidence that the vast majority of American people who receive federal assistance work full time.

Facts reflected by a 2015 study by the University of California at Berkeley's Center for Labor Research and Education, as Patricia Cohen of the the New York Times reported, "Nearly three quarters of the people helped by programs geared to the poor are members of a family headed by a worker." 

Americans who are often forced by economic conditions, lack of affordable housing and stagnant wages to live in areas affected by the wide availability of heroin and crystal meth - the two drugs which now drive the profits of the Mexican cartels.

Map showing drug trafficking routes from Mexico
into the United States

Winslow's books punch through that hypocrisy by offering unsettling insight into how for years the U.S. judicial and legal system in conjunction with the law enforcement community and politicians (on the federal, state and local / municipal level) have allowed major urban areas to become destination points and distribution centers for the billions of dollars in drugs shipped into this country every year.

To say nothing of the proliferation of guns, which in some parts of Chicago, are actually easier to purchase than fresh produce.

This global commerce in narcotics is directly linked to America's prison and industrial complex which flourishes with the help of judicial and legal policies that criminalize drug use and incarcerate people for addiction; helping to tear apart the fabric of communities and (not coincidentally) diffuse the political base in communities that tend to vote Democratic along the way.

For example, as the Brennan Center For Justice based at NYU reported back in July, the state of Florida permanently blocks anyone with a felony conviction from voting unless they go through the arduous process of petitioning to have their voting rights restored by filing an appeal with the state's Office of Executive Clemency.

That policy prevents 1.6 million people in Florida from exercising their right to vote; 1 in 5 of those blocked from Florida polls are African-American - who, as studies have shown, are shown to be disproportionately targeted, prosecuted and convicted for minor drug offenses even though blacks and whites use drugs at the same rate.

Want some deeper insight on the impact of narco-trafficking on American communities?

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman in custody in the U.S.

Paul Solotaroff's must-read article "The Hunt For El Chapo" published in the August 24th issue of Rolling Stone, is a disturbing look at how cities like Chicago have become distribution networks for the tons of potent Mexican heroin and crystal meth now flooding into the country.

He tracks the rise of Joaquin "El Chapo" (or "shorty") Guzman's rise from the rural hills of Sinaloa, Mexico to the pinnacle of global drug trafficking

Solotaroff details how the Mexican cartels have become the principle conduit to ship drugs from Asia, South America and Mexico into the United States (and to Europe) using a range of highly complex smuggling routes that are now controlled by the Mexican cartels - who, I think it's important to note, also victimize the Mexican people who are so often denigrated by the current American president and some of his top advisers.

It's also an eye-opening reflection on the approach to marijuana legalization efforts in the U.S.

The article describes how El Chapo and other cartel leaders basically gave up shipping pot into America because the growing legalization took all the profit out of it; and shifted resources into heroin and crystal meth production.

As Solotaroff details, El Chapo visualized a darkly brilliant plan to undercut the U.S. pharmaceutical industry's monopoly on the opioid pain killers that exploded in popularity across wide swaths of America, by hiring chemists to manufacture more potent heroin - then flooding U.S. markets with it.

If you're reading this you're likely familiar with the fact that many heroin users in America, started using it because it was cheaper and more powerful than the opioid-based painkillers prescribed by doctors that have devastated parts of states like New Hampshire and Kentucky.

Chances are that much of that heroin was shipped here by El Chapo's Sinaloa cartel - by the way he's currently in the U.S. awaiting trial in Brooklyn and as the NY Daily News reported yesterday, he's already retained attorney Jeffrey Lichtman (who got "Junior" Gotti off in federal court four times) and other high-powered defense lawyers.

Actor Pedro Pascal in season 3 of Narcos on Netflix

El Chapo could have tens of billions of dollars stashed around the globe, so that, and his knowledge of corrupt Mexican officials who've been bribed by the cartels, could mean that his tenure as one of the world's leading drug traffickers isn't over - and his upcoming trial in federal court is sure to attract global attention and will have repercussions far beyond the borders of the United States.

So as I said, my mind is south of the border - and not just because of El Chapo either.

Season 3 of Narcos was just posted on Netflix, fortunately, and not coincidentally, the weekend after the season 7 finale of Game Of Thrones on HBO.

So like many people, I'm spending no small portion of my Labor Day weekend binge-watching Narcos - which to the uninitiated, chronicles the rise of the Columbian drug cartels and DEA, CIA and Columbian authorities efforts to stop them.

After the death of the world's former number-one drug trafficker, Columbia's Medellin cartel leader Pablo Escobar at the end of season 2 last year, season 3 focuses on the DEA's pursuit of the self-described "Gentlemen of Cali", the Cali cartel.

Those who are fans of Narcos may find Heavy.com's comparison of the real-life Cali cartel figures and season 3 interesting.

Well that's it for my first blog of September folks, my easy chair, wireless headphones and the Gentlemen of Cali await.

Vaya con dios!