Peter hardly seems your average crack- whore enthusiast. Tall, fresh-faced and clad in shorts, shades, athletic sandals and standard-issue rayon clubbing shirt, he looks like any other weekend warrior in search of big-city fun. White and in his early thirties, he holds a master's degree from a respectable local university and is working toward his Ph.D. while living at his grandparents' house. For the past five years or so, when Peter has gone looking for action, he often finds it in north St. Louis, at down- at-the-heels motels like the Grand, where he hires women to score crack and smoke it with him, then pays them to have sex with him at $10 a throw. Join Riverfront Times staff writer Mike Seely for a tour of St. Louis's most notorious no-tell motels.
Seventy thousand copies of Miami Herald's faux alternative were yanked off the streets and within 24 hours were replaced with a new version that deleted an unflattering satirical portrait of local developer Stuart Miller. The Herald's general counsel tells Miami New Times' Tristram Korten that the issue was "withdrawn for legal reasons," but Korten reports that it may have had more to do with management's sensitivity to Miller, whose family and powerful friends lashed out last year at the Herald in response to a column written by New Times alum Jim DeFede.
Nobody is denying that the papers and their corporate parent are still making money, but Howard Blume speculates that the recent layoff at the flagship paper in New York was designed to reassure investors that company management "can be trusted to look out for (their) interests." Blume asserts that VVM profits "have been held below investor expectations" due to a still shaky economy, rising health-care costs and issues associated with the company's controversial deal with New Times. Blume also reports that VVM reached a "tentative, compromise agreement" this week with the union at LA Weekly.
The Courier-Journal’s new tabloid will target 25- to 34-year-olds and will focus on lifestyle and entertainment news, according to an internal memo intercepted by LEO's Tom Peterson. The as-yet-unnamed paper will launch as early as November with shared C-J personnel but ultimately will have its own staff, according to the memo. Boise Weekly Publisher Bingo Barnes tells Peterson that the free weekly published by Gannett's Idaho Statesmen doesn't compete fairly: “They’ve given some advertisers free ads for a year. And we’ve lost some ads as a result. Their goal is total market dominance."
They fly helicopters, guard military bases and provide reconnaissance. They're private military companies -- and they're replacing U.S. soldiers in the war on terrorism. Independent Weekly's Barry Yeoman looks at Blackwater USA's $35.7 million contract with the Pentagon to train more than 10,000 sailors from Virginia, Texas, and California each year. "Other contracts are so secret, says Blackwater president Gary Jackson, that he can't tell one federal agency about the business he's doing with another," Yeoman writes.
The news rack situation in the Big Apple may go from bad to worse, according to Matt Taibbi. The city recently began enforcing a hodgepodge of new regulations governing the use and placement of news racks, and citations are already piling up: New York Press received dozens within a few weeks, and USA Today reports that about 20 percent of its racks have already been ticketed. Meanwhile, Mayor Bloomberg is pursuing a street-furniture proposal that may reward Clear Channel or JCDecaux with a lucrative contract to replace proprietary news racks with city-mandated pedmounts.
Steven Hatfill has been hounded by G-men 24-7 since becoming the FBI's only known "person of interest" in the anthrax attacks. They wait for him in surveillance vans outside his girlfriend's apartment, they follow him to the store when he goes for ice cream, they snap photos when a friend hands him a bag containing homemade soup. They use all kinds of cars: Durangos, Pontiacs, Buicks, Saturns. And after midnight, they patrol the area surrounding his apartment on foot. And if he slips out the back door? Agents will be there. Jason Cherkis hangs out with Hatfill in the backseat of his friend's Plymouth as they drive around D.C. trying to shake the tail.
The epic murals on the cafeteria walls of California's San Quentin State Prison are surely one of America's best-kept art secrets. Twelve feet high and nearly 100 feet long, they chronicle California's history, from the coming of the railroads to the post-war industrial boom, and have drawn favorable comparisons to the WPA post-office murals of the 1930s. For nearly 50 years, the identity of the man who painted the murals has remained a mystery. But, as SF Weekly staff writer Ron Russell reports, the mystery has been solved -- and for the first time in history, a former San Quentin inmate is about to be honored with a "key to the prison."
