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  • Where You Should’ve Gone to High School

    Where You Should’ve Gone to High School

    Like residents of every city, St. Louisans have their quirks that must be explained to outsiders: their fondness for Provel cheese, for one, or their use of the word “hoosier” to mean anybody with three teeth, a pickup and a mullet instead of a person from Indiana.

    But the habit that seems to perplex newcomers the most is the eternal question, “So, where’d you go to high school?” Nobody’s entirely sure how the custom began, but it’s now a topic worthy of academic study: Sarah VanSlette, who once attended St. Joseph’s Academy but who is now a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, has received a grant from the Institute for Urban Research to study the experiences of newcomers to St. Louis, including whether the high school question is giving the region a bad reputation.

    A story that ran in the local daily last week about VanSlette and her research set loose a shitstorm of controversy. Defenders of The Question claimed that it’s just small talk and a way to identify common acquaintances, a useful tool in a town where everyone is separated by only one or two degrees.

    Others, however, saw in the The Question more sinister intentions. It’s all stereotyping, they carped. It’s just another way for people to judge you (as if they’re not already checking out your shoes or the make of your car)! And worst of all, if you’re a transplant, it singles you out and makes you an ideal target for shunning.

    Well, if that’s what you’re worried about, Riverfront Times is here to help! Just answer a few simple questions, and this handy-dandy flow chart will lead you to where you should’ve gone to high school if you didn’t, you know, go to high school somewhere else. We can’t promise you it’ll lead you to your own high school sweetheart or a group of friends that will be just as loyal as they would’ve been if you’d really known them since ninth grade, but hey — at least you’ll have a better idea of your people.

    A disclaimer: This chart is, of course, based on gross stereotypes, but isn’t that part of what the high school question is about?

    To see the flow chart and find out where you should’ve gone to high school, download the PDF here.

  • Ike Turner and Cocaine: A Devastating Dance

    Ike Turner and Cocaine: A Devastating Dance

    Last.fm

    Cocaine ended up sending Ike Turner to jail — and serving as a catalyst in his death.

    There’s a well-established struggle in Ike Turner’s musical legacy. Although he’s considered a rock and roll innovator, his musical accomplishments were sometimes overshadowed by his personal struggles.

    While Turner’s abusive behavior toward Tina Turner garners plenty of attention, another lingering demon — drug abuse — caught up with the former St. Louis resident 22 year ago. On February 16, 1990, Ike Turner was sentenced to four years in prison for a variety of cocaine-related offenses. He eventually was paroled before his entire sentence was completed.

    Back in the 1960s, according to Ebony magazine, Turner had a far different view of drugs and alcohol. The article states that Turner didn’t drink or use drugs for the early part of his career. He even fired members of the Kings of Rhythm that consumed either substance.

    But Turner’s attitude changed considerably. Ebony cites an excerpt of Turner’s autobiography stating how the musician was introduced to cocaine by “two well-known performers in Las Vegas, both now deceased.” Turner tried the drug while writing songs at his piano, and was soon purchasing “pure cocaine” from South America.

  • Last Chance to See Charles Lindbergh’s Nazi Medal

    Last Chance to See Charles Lindbergh’s Nazi Medal

    Missouri History Museum — Service Cross of the German Eagle. Presented to Charles A. Lindbergh by Hermann Goering, 1938.

    Charles A. Lindbergh received dozens of medals and accolades for his 1927 transatlantic flight, and immediately upon landing became one of the first international celebrities. The medal pictured, however, is the Service Cross of the German Eagle, and it was presented to him in 1938 by Hermann Goering on behalf of Adolf Hitler. The medal was ostensibly for Lindbergh’s contributions to aviation, but it was also granted because the all-American boy from Minnesota had become an ardent proponent of Nazi Germany’s military superiority and a vocal advocate for American isolationism.

    As you might imagine, this stance, and his acceptance of Nazi awards, gained the aviator quite a few critics among the American public. This particular medal, along with hundreds of other artifacts and records, is currently displayed in the Missouri History Museum’s long-term exhibit, Lindbergh , which closes at the end of the month.

    Artifacts such as Lindbergh’s Nazi prize and his damaged public image in the late ’30s and early ’40s are part of what makes the exhibition so interesting — there’s no shying away from Lindbergh’s more incendiary political statements, which gives a clearer picture of a complex man who was first hero, then victim, then villain and ultimately no more nor less flawed than any other human being.

    As an unwitting pioneer of America’s celebrity culture, Lindbergh was the first to make many of the more popular missteps. He chafed at the public’s fascination with his private life and yet used his public stature to try to influence politics, with disastrous personal results. And just like any number of modern celebrity screw-ups, Lindbergh eventually rehabilitated his image and was restored to his position of honor in the American pantheon. It’s a cycle that’s familiar, and yet seems strangely out of place in the context of the Greatest Generation (TM Tom Brokaw, used without permission), when everyone was supposedly a great patriot and loyal American.

    Lindbergh closes on Tuesday, January 31, so that the historical objects can be restored and touched up where necessary. Take this final opportunity to see it and reconsider the legacy of Charles Lindbergh from all sides.

  • The trail of an international child-porn ring led to a tiny house in the woods outside St. Louis

    Tucked like a thumbprint inside a bend in the Meramec River, Miramiguoa Park is a remarkably secluded piece of real estate. Surrounded on three sides by the river, the sparsely populated — 127 residents at last count — 200-acre village guards its landward flank with the entirety of Meramec State Park, whose woodlands and bluffs stretch south and west through the Franklin County Ozarks. Only about 50 miles from downtown St. Louis as the crow flies, Miramiguoa is half again more distant to reach by car. To get there one must stay on Interstate 44 all the way to Sullivan, then exit and double back through five miles of state forestland. At winter’s dusk, the leafless trees on the hilltops cast jagged silhouettes against the pale sky, and you might catch a smoky whiff of recently chopped timber.

    You wouldn’t think so to look at it, but for a brief time in 2009, one little house in Miramiguoa was the focus of significant attention. Back then an incongruous sticker festooned a pane of glass in the front door: the goofy, good-natured visage of the cartoon canine Scooby-Doo.

    The man who rented the place wasn’t well known to neighbors. No one appeared to take much note of him or the young boy with whom he sometimes came and went.

    On the chilly afternoon of October 23, 2009, a team of five state and federal law-enforcement agents drove into Miramiguoa Park and took up positions that offered clear views of the cottage. Two more officers parked up the road, just outside the village. For several weeks the lawmen had been looking into a tip from the Los Angeles Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

    Now they were waiting for the man inside the house to come out.

    Thirty-eight-year-old Brian Mize is a bona fide, card-carrying computer geek.

    A St. Louis-based forensic investigator who serves as a special federal officer with the FBI’s cybercrime squad, Mize also finds time to teach Internet-investigation techniques at the St. Louis County Police Academy (and, on the bureau’s behalf, around the world) and attend local and national hacker conferences undercover.

    One of Mize’s investigative specialties is child pornography. His résumé dates back to the VHS days and includes the infamous Michael Devlin case, wherein a suburban pizza-parlor manager kidnapped a rural Missouri boy whom he held hostage and molested for four years. (That ordeal ended in 2007, when agents investigating a recent abduction apprehended Devlin and were shocked to find not only the boy they were looking for but also the victim who’d been missing since 2003 and had been all but given up for dead.) Mize often educates parents and teachers about how much easier child molestation has become in the digital era, when so many young children are equipped with smartphones.

    The nonprofit National Center for Missing & Exploited Children reports that it received 17.3 million pornographic images and videos last year through its Victim Identification Program — twice as many as the program amassed in 2008.

    “It’s no longer a six-foot cord attached to the wall. Bad guys have unprecedented access to communication with kids, and it’s made things more dangerous,” Mize imparts, sitting at a desk in his office in Clayton, surrounded by the electronic tools of his trade.

    Beneath his desk is a behemothic computer that would dwarf a typical workstation. Known as FRED, an acronym for “Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device,” the hunk of hardware is designed to create bit-for-bit copies of each piece of electronic evidence investigators seize in a case and to facilitate the process of decrypting data that has been rendered unreadable and password-protected.

    FRED’s capabilities — and Mize’s — were put to the test in the fall of 2009, after an FBI colleague called to summon him to a house in the backwoods of southern Franklin County.

    A year earlier, in October 2008, FBI agents in Los Angeles got a tip from the bureau’s legal attaché in Copenhagen indicating that two men, Harout Hagop Sarafian of North Hollywood and Woodrow Tracy of Sun Valley, had traveled to Romania the previous year in order to have sex with young boys.

    After obtaining federal warrants, LA’s Sexual Assault and Felony Enforcement Team, a task force comprising federal prosecutors and law-enforcement officers at the local, state and federal level — arrested both men and seized computer equipment that turned out to contain an abundance of child pornography.

    Both Sarafian and Tracy eventually confessed to investigators that they belonged to a group that called itself “Lost Boy,” an international network of pedophiles who exchanged copious quantities of child pornography, including photos and videos depicting men sexually molesting young boys. Lost Boy operated a password-protected online forum that allowed members to post digital images and discuss each other’s contributions; the group also made use of a popular file-sharing site, alerting fellow members by posting samples on the Lost Boy forum along with links to the downloadable files.

    Though the investigators regularly trolled the Web for clues that might lead to active child-porn message boards, this was the first they’d heard of Lost Boy.

    For the task force, the learning curve was both steep and swift. Tracy provided his screen name and password, and under the guise of their informant, the investigators were able to build a profile of the group: about three dozen members on four continents, who identified themselves as “boylovers” and posted under aliases including “Bobo,” “Undy12” and “Harry Potter.”

    Court documents, including a 45-page federal grand jury indictment filed in September 2009 and a 41-page sworn affidavit from an Ohio FBI agent, itemize a vast array of pornographic images involving young boys, described in numbing clinical detail: “[O]ne image depicts a nude, prepubescent boy kneeling on a bed with his buttocks in the air exposing his anus, scrotum, and penis. There is semen on his buttocks.” Another image “depicts the face of a prepubescent boy bent over a bed and facing down. Behind him, a post-pubescent male appears to be engaging in anal sex with the boy, while holding a revolver pointed at the boy’s buttocks.” A series of seven images “depict a minor boy, approximately 12 -13 years old, with a baseball bat inserted in the boy’s anus. Two of the images depict what appears to be the same boy, with a Crayola marker inserted in his anus. In the message, [Lost Boy member] mr bean wrote ‘almost baseball season…’.”

    Most of the boys in the photos were between seven and twelve years old. One had Down syndrome.

    Click here to read the indictment.

    Among the videos the LA task force found were several that featured an identical opening sequence: an image swirling into focus to reveal the iconic Hanna-Barbera cartoon Great Dane Scooby-Doo, accompanied by the tag line “Scooby-Doo Productions.” The agents would discover that Scooby-Doo videos had cropped up in child-porn investigations nationwide, but no one had been able to trace the videos back to their source.

    In its efforts to evade detection, the group resembled an exclusive country club. A prospective Lost Boy had to be nominated by an existing member, and in order to remain in good standing, all members were required to upload new images on a regular basis; a prolonged stretch of inactivity was taken as a sign that authorities had hijacked a member’s account.

    Court documents indicate that members believed they were immune to detection.
    “[S]ome Latin boys for your enjoyment,” wrote one. “Have fun and watch out for sticky keyboards, lol,” posted another. “That top boy is super hot,” one man commented on a fellow member’s recent contribution.

    In another exchange, a member expressed his distaste for “Asian boys or darker,” writing, “If I had one in my arms, they would just be like tissue paper. Use and then throw away.”

    Responded a fellow commenter: “yeesh why throw them away when you know that me and [Lost Boy member] flipper will gladly take them? [emoticon]”

    Offered a subsequent commenter on the same thread: “hey! i am attracted to tissue paper so i don’t appreciate your comments. i like the rolled up kind that most people call toilet paper. i saw a roll at the grocery store the other day that looked good to me. it was 100% recycled roll so it wasx [sic] slightly darker than the rest. that turned me on. it was really soft and smooth and had a good personality. i paid a man so I could take it home with me. we played, Xbox, watched some Adam Sandler movies, and then had sweaty sex on the floor. the next day we went into town and i bought it a skateboard.”

    The 2009 Los Angeles indictment named twelve alleged Lost Boy members and charged them with operating a child-exploitation enterprise; conspiracy to advertise, transport, receive, distribute, solicit, and posses child pornography; and transportation of child pornography.

    But the task force was left with more questions than answers. They had uncovered a mother lode of child porn and rooted out a diverse crew of pedophiles who got their kicks from viewing and sharing it.

    But who was producing the material? Who were the men depicted in the photos and the videos, committing seemingly countless acts of molestation?

    Who — and where — were the children?

    Carrie Costantin’s office on the 21st floor of the Thomas F. Eagleton Federal Courthouse faces north, affording the federal prosecutor an enviable view of downtown St. Louis’ Gateway Mall. At 50, the veteran assistant U.S. attorney, who grew up in University City and studied law at the University of Chicago, is slightly built, slim and easygoing, blessed with a streak of spontaneous understated humor that belies the dark nature of her specialization.

    During her eleven years trying cases for the Eastern District of Missouri, Costantin has prosecuted hundreds of child molesters. In 2006 she was tapped as the regional coordinator for the U.S. Department of Justice’s new Project Safe Childhood program, a national initiative to combat the sexual exploitation of minors. (She stepped down last year in order to assume a new role as supervisor of the district’s White Collar Crime Unit.) It’s not inconceivable that Costantin has tried more child-pornography cases than anyone else in the nation.

    In the twelve months ending in September 2010, the Eastern District of Missouri took on 84 child-exploitation cases — more than any other judicial district in the United States. In each of the two years preceding, the office ranked second.

    In September 2009 Costantin received a call from federal agents in St. Louis, indicating that a Los Angeles investigation into an Internet-based network of child-porn aficionados had turned up a possible connection to the St. Louis metropolitan area.

    A pedophile living abroad had told the LA investigators that a man who went by the screen name “Muddyfeet” was producing copious quantities of child pornography in Missouri. “Muddyfeet” also came up during the questioning of a Lost Boy suspect who attributed a large set of pornographic stills of young boys to a photographer who operated under that alias. A third clue, an archived chat-room exchange between a Lost Boy member and an outside acquaintance who went by the screen name Muddyfeet that was found on a computer the LA team seized as evidence, brought the picture into better focus: The file included an e-mail address, which the agents were able to trace to Franklin County and a man named Jeffrey Greenwell.

    Though the information was tantalizing, Costantin knew better than to be optimistic. It would be difficult, she knew, to secure a search warrant, let alone prosecute anybody, with nothing to go on but an Internet alias, two addresses, a possible name and a handful of photos of unidentified boys being molested.

    “In order to get a search warrant, we needed to identify a child,’” Costantin explains.

    At the same time, she was fully cognizant of the urgency involved. Her LA counterparts were pursuing an ongoing child-porn enterprise and had good reason to presume that some of the men involved were actively molesting children. As Michael Osborn, the FBI agent who heads up the SAFE task force in LA, notes, “We knew there were hands-on victims out there that we had to ID as quickly as possible. We didn’t have a six-month luxury. Every day counted.”

    The FBI assigned a St. Louis-based agent to track down the lead. For local assistance, the bureau turned to the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department.

    Lieutenant Chuck Subke, who runs the county sheriff’s detective division, began by visiting the two addresses linked to Greenwell. One was vacant. The other, about the size of a single-wide mobile home, was tucked at the back end of Meramec State Park, a few hundred yards from the river.

    Subke traced the license plates on the two cars he saw parked in front of the little house. Both were registered in Greenwell’s name. It appeared he was living there alone.

    Next Subke and the FBI agent visited several Franklin County elementary schools, where they asked each principal to go through the handful of photos of fully clothed boys they’d received from LA in search of familiar faces. On October 22, 2009, two weeks into a fruitless fishing expedition, they got their first nibble when a principal pointed out one of the boys in his school’s hallway — a fourth grader.

    The lawmen contacted the boy’s mother, then flew in an FBI investigator from Detroit who specialized in questioning children and adolescents. The investigator, Catherine S. Connell, had spent the past year flying around the nation, interviewing the majority of the victims who’d emerged from the Lost Boy probe.

    Speaking with children about molestation is tricky, as most infamously evidenced in the 1980s, by the McMartin Preschool case in California. That fiasco, which cost the U.S. government $15 million and jailed an innocent man for five years, was brought on by false testimony, embellished to the point of absurdity, that a therapist elicited from hundreds of children.

    You don’t set out to upset the children you interview, Connell explains, but you don’t want them to suppress memories that by their nature are upsetting. Nor do you want to put words in their mouths. “You talk about the truth, and you test whether they can tell the difference between a truth and a lie.”

    Connell says that when broaching potentially traumatizing subjects with kids, she’s careful to be both reassuring and skeptical.

    “I try to reduce suggestibility and authority,” she says, describing a technique based on guidelines adopted by the state of Michigan designed to prevent kids from fabricating stories. “The difference between what we do and what other investigators do is that we go in unbiased, seeking to test the hypothesis rather than confirm it. We use phrases like, ‘If you don’t know the answer, then tell me you don’t know it.’”

    While the St. Louis-based FBI agent watched a live video feed in a room nearby, Connell sat down one-on-one with the fourth grader. As soon as the boy told her that Jeffrey Greenwell had fondled his genitals and photographed the experience, the FBI agent phoned Subke.

    “I said, ‘I got it, Chuck, let’s go,’” he recalls. (The agent consented to an on-the-record interview for this story on the condition that Riverfront Times not reveal his identity. The FBI’s St. Louis division declined to share any details about the Greenwell case that might identify any of the victims or jeopardize future investigations.)

    Subke, who had prepared for this eventuality by readying a search warrant, led his team into the woods.

    The FBI agent also alerted Brian Mize, asking the decryption specialist to drive down from Clayton to lend his expertise in collecting evidence.

    A mere 24 hours after the school principal pointed out the fourth grader, federal agents and Franklin County detectives reached Miramiguoa Park. When they saw Greenwell, a baldheaded man with a close-cropped beard, exit his house and drive away, the search team went in.

    The Scooby-Doo sticker on the door was merely a preview of what they would find inside.

    “The whole place was littered with Scooby-Doo,” Mize recounts, enumerating the highlights: a Scooby-Doo bedspread, a life-size Scooby-Doo blowup doll and numerous Scooby-Doo figurines.

    There was also a small dog in a crate in the living room, happily wagging its tail. The dog’s name, recalls Subke, was “Scrappy.”

    What with the square jaw and short-cropped hair, Brian Mize’s appearance practically screams cop. In fact, the computer forensics whiz is a detective on the Chesterfield police force in west St. Louis County. But when he talks about crime-scene analysis, Mize sounds more like a physician, which is what he aimed to be back when he majored in biology. Then he fell in love with law enforcement.

    “We’re crime-scene technicians, and our magnifying glass is software, which lets us look for clues,” Mize sums up.

    Mize belongs to the Regional Computer Crimes Education and Enforcement Group, a task force launched in 2002 in order to team the FBI’s area cybercrime squad with its counterparts from the U.S. Secret Service and local law-enforcement agencies. Working as a unit, the group provides technical forensic support to fight computer crimes throughout Missouri, including those related to child abuse.

    The FBI seized two computers from Greenwell’s cottage, along with multiple external storage drives, two digital cameras and a Sony Handycam video camera, as well as a cache of DVDs and CDs the agents found locked in a safe. (Greenwell’s landlord would later find a third digital camera, wrapped in clothing, while clearing out his former tenant’s bureau drawers.)

    Mize quickly saw that Greenwell had encrypted the hard drive on his main PC. After working his way past the suspect’s safeguards, Mize would find 15,000 still images of child pornography. Some of the photos included Greenwell or other men in the frame, engaging in sex with the boys.

    Many of the photos were composed so as not to reveal faces. In order to identify victims, Mize searched for reappearing details — a birthmark or scar, or a specific pair of pajamas, for example — and began the painstaking process of sorting and grouping the images. If he noticed a discarded article of children’s clothing in the background of one photo and then spotted it being worn by a boy in another, he’d group the photos together.

    In this fashion, Mize was able to create a file for each suspected victim. These he named “1 Series,” “2 Series” and so on. For each series, he created a “sanitized” non-pornographic image that showed the boy’s face and any distinctive physical features that might aid in identification. The work took weeks. When he was finished, Mize believed he had found at least five victims whom Greenwell had molested — and perhaps as many as ten.

    Investigators were subsequently able to determine that Greenwell had been molesting and photographing his victims since at least 2003. Most of the photos were taken in whatever home Greenwell was renting at the time, though some were shot during excursions to other towns and tourist attractions.

    Investigators in Los Angeles found that one area of the Lost Boy forum was conceived as a work in progress, an ever-growing handbook of tips on how to coerce boys into a trusting relationship, a process often referred to as “grooming.” Every Lost Boy member was expected to contribute to the handbook, which contained suggestions that include targeting children from broken homes or impoverished conditions and going after the sons of drug abusers. One member reported that “introverted boys from Latin America’s poor broken homes (street kids) are the easies to handled [sic] and for cost per boy ratio they are the cheapest.”

    Elsewhere the handbook advised plying boys with drugs, alcohol and sleeping pills in order to lower their inhibitions and suggested molesting them while they’re unconscious. Another section offered advice on ways to move on from victims who’ve outgrown their allure.

    At the sheriff’s office in Union, the Franklin County seat, Chuck Subke slides a red binder across a conference-room table. A sticker on the cover reads: Sensitive information enclosed. Not for public release. Law-enforcement eyes only.

    Inside is a 175-page document, entitled, “How to practice child love. Child love explained by professionals.” Subke and the St. Louis FBI agent say the handbook is much like the one on the Lost Boy forum, covering everything from “risks involved” and “when to start/what age” to “exploring the child’s genitals” and “making love for the first time.” This particular version contains a section called “Our Latest Project: How to kidnap children.”

    Observes the FBI agent: “It’s basically Wikipedia for predators.”

    The St. Louis investigators point out one section that has particular relevance to the Greenwell case.

    Its title: “Single parents and moms with kids.”

    “Unfortunately not all of us are blessed with children in our lives, as in having our own children, or children in the family,” the chapter begins. “But do not worry, that is not a show stopper.”

    The handbook suggests advertising for dates on websites and in newspapers and limiting one’s search to single mothers looking for long-term relationships. “The usual guy does not really like single moms with a lot of kids running around,” the book states. “So these moms are therefore suffering from the lack of men, love and self-confidence.” Readers are encouraged to emphasize a mom’s “inner values” during courtship.

    “We want to apologize in advance for this statement,” the writer warns. “The uglier and fatter the moms, the easier it will be for you to get into that family.”

    (Forensic computer analyst Brian Mize notes that pedophiles increasingly are connecting with their young prey via interest-specific websites, such as a youth soccer team’s home page. Sometimes, Mize says, predators adjust their Facebook profiles to match the interests of the kid they’re targeting. The near-ubiquity of smartphones facilitates communication out of range of parents’ prying eyes and ensures that video capability is a mere touchscreen away.)

    FBI investigators say Jeffrey Greenwell relied on a consistent method to seduce boys: In nearly every instance, he sought out single mothers on online dating websites. He would romance a woman and spoil her son, lavishing the boy with attention and gifts. After a time he’d move the relationship to a more intimate level, taking the boy on trips to Six Flags or babysitting him and, finally, sexually molesting him.

    “You’re talking about the best predators ever,” the federal agent from St. Louis says. “Greenwell was very smooth-talking. He dressed normally. He wooed the heck out of the mothers. This wasn’t ‘the guy in the ice cream truck.’”

    The agent points to a flow chart the investigators created to diagram Greenwell’s various connections to molestation victims and their parents, as well as two suspected fellow pedophiles. He gestures to photos of four mothers and ticks off Greenwell’s tie to each: “boyfriend, boyfriend, babysitter, coworker.”

    Subke and his partner from the FBI questioned their quarry at the sheriff’s office on the evening of his arrest.

    Subke began by offering Greenwell, 37 years old at the time, a soda. After reading him his rights, the investigators explained that there had been some allegations made against him. At first the conversation skewed toward small talk. A Riverfront Times request for a transcript of the interrogation under the federal Freedom of Information Act was denied by the Records Management Division in Winchester, Virginia, because the investigation into Lost Boy is ongoing. But Subke and the St. Louis-based federal agent consented to describe the interview.

    “Mr. Greenwell, what kinds of hobbies are you into?” asked the detectives.

    Scooby Doo, SpongeBob and playing Xbox, the suspect replied.

    “What’s your type, Mr. Greenwell? Guys or girls?”

    Guys, the man answered. Young males, specifically — around eight to twelve years old. “But I don’t like hardcore sex images,” he asserted. “Society doesn’t look too kindly upon adult males who like young boys.”

    “Let’s talk about child porn,” the interrogators suggested a little later.

    “They’re boring,” the suspect replied. His computer skills, he added in response to another question, were “beginner to low-intermediate.” He said he had encrypted the contents of his hard drive “because of personal information.”

    The FBI agent asked about a framed photo of a boy he’d seen on a wall in Greenwell’s home: It appeared to be a formal school portrait. Greenwell explained that it was an old photo of a boy he’d been a father figure to.

    After a while the investigators brought up the fourth grader who had described how Greenwell had sexually molested him. Eventually Greenwell admitted that he had fondled the boy’s penis and photographed the experience.

    But Greenwell didn’t stop there.

    Mindful of Greenwell’s penchant for Scooby-Doo merchandise, the interrogators broached the topic in the hope that he might be familiar with the “Scooby-Doo Productions” material that LA investigators had turned up on Lost Boy. But instead of referencing those videos, Greenwell described a pornographic video a friend had sent to him — and also a non-pornographic video he had made, which featured the son of a coworker playing in a park.

    “We didn’t know what the hell he was talking about,” says the FBI agent. “So we played off of it.”

    “Yeah, tell us about those other videos,” the agent prompted.

    At that Greenwell abruptly opened up.

    He admitted incorporating Scooby-Doo imagery into the home movie he’d shot in the park, featuring a boy he knew. He began spouting “computer lingo,” as the agent puts it — saying he’d used the Sony Vegas software to tag three other videos with his “Scooby-Doo Productions” imprimatur. He hadn’t shot those videos, he said; they’d been sent to him by acquaintances. He said he’d blurred background details so as not to reveal where the videos had been shot.

    “Everyone knew him as ‘the computer guy,’” the federal agent notes in retrospect. “If there was something in the background that identified someone, he would take care of it.”

    The detectives asked Greenwell who’d sent him the videos. One man was from New Hampshire, he said; another, who went by the screen name “SpongeBob,” was from Utah.

    The investigators could hardly believe what they were hearing.

    “LA was hot after ‘SpongeBob,’” the FBI agent explains. When Greenwell offered up the man’s name, Antonio Cardenas, “We immediately call LA, and Salt Lake starts their investigation full-bore.”

    Greenwell kept talking.

    He admitted that the framed photo on his wall was of a boy he’d molested, and he told Subke and the agent where the boy’s mother lived. He admitted he was “Muddyfeet.” He admitted to operating a child-porn message board of his own, called “aLL bois.” He identified by name all of the boys in photos that had been sent from Los Angeles. He coughed up the screen names of ten additional fellow porn traders.

    After three and a half hours of questioning, minus a few breaks for cigarettes, Greenwell finally wound down.

    The next day Subke and his partner from the FBI set out to find the boy in the framed photograph.

    As he catalogued the contents of Greenwell’s porn cache, Brian Mize considered how to identify the men in the photos. Part of the solution lay in the DVDs Greenwell had stashed in his safe.

    Though Mize encountered pornographic examples of Greenwell’s Scooby-Doo Productions handiwork, the DVDs in the safe contained no sexually explicit content but instead depicted scenes from trips Greenwell took with other men and small groups of boys. Destinations included nearby attractions Six Flags and Jellystone Park, as well as towns in Arkansas and Illinois. The footage was outwardly innocuous, though every now and then the banter betrayed the men’s forbidden proclivities. Mize viewed the travelogues over and over again for four straight days, searching for clues.

    Eventually he found one.

    During a road trip to Arkansas, one of Greenwell’s adult traveling companions pointed out various landmarks, leading Mize to conclude that the man must live in that state. After watching for hours, the cyber-sleuth heard Greenwell address the man by name: Evan.

    Mize had Greenwell’s cell phone, and when he checked it, he discovered a match — a man named Evan Batton, who turned out to be a youth pastor at a Baptist church near the town of Dardanelle, off Interstate 40 about 80 miles northwest of Little Rock.

    Just as he had with Greenwell, Mize constructed a photo series for each boy he suspected was one of Batton’s victims. He sanitized one photo for each series and sent the package to his colleagues in Arkansas. Batton was later arrested and convicted for raping a seven-year-old.

    In the end Mize discovered two more names through video analysis and repeated his cataloguing process twice more, preparing a package for agents in another Midwestern state and one in New England. By the time investigators located the New England suspect, the man had committed suicide; the Midwestern suspect remains at large.

    Meanwhile, in December 2010 the U.S. Department of Justice announced that its investigation had dismantled the Lost Boy network. Federal authorities in LA had indicted nineteen defendants on charges of running a child-exploitation enterprise. Two were charged with production of child pornography. (To date, fifteen have been convicted, including Harout Sarafian and Woodrow Tracy. One died in custody; three remain at large. Only one defendant has been sentenced; an FBI spokeswoman in LA declines to reveal whether Sarafian and Tracy were promised leniency in exchange for providing information, saying only that “it’s fair, as a general statement, to say that cooperation is among multiple variables that factor into a sentence for a given defendant.”) Fourteen Lost Boy members living in foreign countries were indicted in absentia.

    All told, the authorities identified 200 victims.

    “You can’t overstate the significance of rescuing more than 200 kids worldwide, so it was obviously a good day,” says the FBI’s Michael Osborn, the special agent who supervises LA’s SAFE task force. His team, Osborn says, watched long-term victims “basically growing up in front of our eyes” as they gathered photographic evidence.

    The Lost Boy investigation produced twenty spinoff investigations. Officials in Los Angeles say the Greenwell and SpongeBob cases were the most significant among them. (To read more about the various investigation

  • Pitch Sessions: A look back at the wild and wacky local TV ads of yesteryear.

    Schweig Engel: Dying for Deals

    Explaining an old Schweig Engel television commercial is like describing an LSD bender, given that it involved (1) home furnishings, (2) extreme slapstick violence, and (3) absolutely no finance charges.

    During the 1980s and ’90s, Schweig Engel, a.k.a. “The King of Credit,” self-produced ads of such hysteria and surrealism, they approached the avant-garde. While the goal never altered — they aimed to unload TVs, appliances, furniture and jewelry — their strategies varied wildly. Employees appearing in the spots sliced each other’s heads off. One manager exploded. Another was gobbled up by a dinosaur. Another donned a giant turkey costume and got chased by a pilgrim wielding an ax. All three pranced in Santa Claus garb. It was impossible to not watch these things.

    Click here to watch the slapstick-violence masterpieces, or here to watch the spoofs.

    Schweig Engel shuttered its doors for good in 2004. But within a few years, the TV spots began to resurface on YouTube, warming the hearts of commenters who remembered them.

    The videos also caught the attention of Nick Corirossi, a writer and director for Funny or Die, the popular website owned by Will Ferrell and AdamMcKay (creators of Anchorman and Talladega Nights).

    One of Corirossi’s friends from St. Louis recommended the YouTube videos. So he watched them.

    “They were literally the funniest fucking commercials I’d ever seen,” he says.

    Now, Corirossi and his colleagues are arranging to fly members of team Schweig Engel to Los Angeles in January to write, shoot and star in ads for Funny or Die. “The whole thing is tentative,” Corirossi says. “Will Ferrell knows nothing about any of this. But it’s become a passion project for the staff here. We have to make it happen. I will make it happen.”

    Mike Stein was just a 28-year-old white kid with a squeaky voice when he left Florida in 1981 and arrived in St. Louis. His mission: manage the original Schweig Engel store at Delmar Boulevard and Kingshighway.

    Stein’s grandfather, Sam Singer, had been one of its first employees after it opened in 1919. He bought the store in 1938. It had begun as a photography shop, but by the time Stein showed up in the early ’80s, the inventory had switched to TVs and appliances. The neighborhood had changed, too, from white and affluent and to primarily black and lower-middle class.

    “We could have moved out to west county,” Stein says. “But I didn’t want to compete against big-box stores. And at that time, finance companies didn’t want to lend to black people. That gave us a great opportunity.”

    Schweig Engel did charge high interest rates — sometimes, the highest allowed by state law. But they were not, they emphasized, a rent-to-own firm. They targeted customers who had bad credit but held good jobs. If those patrons made all their payments on time, they earned a rebate after the final payment. Meanwhile, their diligence was reported to the credit bureau.

    In 1983 the company moved to Union Boulevard and Natural Bridge Avenue. Stein trained his attention on advertising. Print ads had flopped. Stein’s conventional TV ads didn’t jolt the masses, either. So Stein joined forces with his colleague, Warren Lewis, a man with an offensive lineman’s build who’d worked his way up from company janitor to head of the furniture department.

    Their first zany commercial: “Schweig Engel Vice,” a crude takeoff of Miami Vice. Clad in a white blazer à la Don Johnson, Stein sucked on a cigarette and said, “We’re gonna take these rental places out of action and give credit to you!” Then he and Lewis whipped out big assault weapons and fired off-screen at…no one in particular.

    “It went off the charts,” Stein recalls. “We had to pull the ad off the air. We were growing too fast.”

    A lanky and quick-witted salesman named John North came up with the next spot: A man visiting a rent-to-own shop has to rip off his own arm and leg to pay the high rates.

    The trio even ventured outside the TV studio to shoot on location.

    “We actually did one by the zoo in Tarzan suits,” Lewis recalls. “We almost got poison ivy hiding in the trees. I actually had a loincloth on. It was wild.”

    The Schweig Engel boys were by no means the area’s first wacky pitchmen. Others also left an indelible mark on the psyche of St. Louis couch potatoes. The first was Steve Mizerany and his roller-skating Decent Boys from the New Deal appliance store near the Bevo Mill.

    Uncle Leonard, a diminutive salesman in a skipper’s cap, buddied up to Cardinals players to hawk electronics from his north St. Louis shop. The folks at Home Furniture in Collinsville, Illinois, dressed up in a gorilla suit and promised customers “no monkey business” at their store.

    Stein and his colleagues weren’t even the first to take advantage of the green screen, either. The Slyman Brothers used the technology in the early 1970s to superimpose themselves sitting atop the Arch and waving down at viewers. Becky “Queen of Carpet” and Wanda “Princess of Tile” used the green screen to float above downtown on an enchanted rug.

    But it was Schweig Engel who took the green screen and ran with it like ADHD kids in a Pixy Stix factory. In one ad, Mr. T (John North) grew enraged that Lewis and Stein didn’t have any Schweig Engel jewelry. So he tossed them three stories up against a brick wall. In the spot called “Jurassic Credit,” Lewis and Stein rode bareback on dinosaurs (which, inexplicably, they kept petting).

    Some of the spoofs drew the ire of the spoofees. Columbia Pictures insisted they stop running “Credit Busters” (modeled on Ghostbusters). And Chuck Berry’s lawyer sent a cease-and-desist letter when they released an ad called “Credit B. Goode.”

    The big advantage of low-budget commercials, Stein says, was that they offered a lot of bang for your buck. Most were produced at the KPLR (Channel 11) studio and ran during The Three Stooges, Saturday movies and late-night TV.

    KPLR sweetened the deal by producing them for free.

    “We might’ve spent five- or six-thousand dollars to produce them,” says Henry Elbert, the network’s ad executive who handled the Schweig Engel account. “But they might’ve spent thirty thousand a year to have the ads run.”

    They weren’t risk-free, Elbert concedes.

    “A lot of times people won’t shop at your store because your commercials are so stupid,” explains Elbert, who played Pinnochio in one spot. “But people will remember you. And the bottom line is, when you’re trying to sell something, you never know when somebody’s going to buy. So when they are going to buy, you want that top-of-the-mind awareness.”

    And the big takeaway from each and every Schweig Engel episode was that anybody could secure some kind of credit. To back up this guarantee, they swore that any customer denied credit was formally invited to: punch them in the nose; pop off their heads; blast them with pies; run over them with a free Mercedes-Benz; pull the credit manger out to the parking lot to run him over; obtain a free mountain bike and run over Mike Stein. (There was a distinct emphasis on vehicular assault.)

    Stein estimates he personally approved a half-million credit applications in a fifteen-year span. He denies that any serious assaults took place.

    Jim Winkle, a former producer for KPLR, has an altogether different theory for the success of not only Schweig Engel, but Mizerany, “Becky, Queen of Carpet” and all businesses trafficking in goofball pitches: It was a subtle decoy.

    “I always thought they wanted to give people the impression that they’re dumb so that people would come in and try to take advantage ’em on the price,” Winkle says. “They thought that would get people in the store. What’s that phrase? They were crazy, crazy like foxes.”

    By the mid-’90s, Schweig Engel had ballooned from 11 employees in one store to 65 employees in three locations.

    “The community took care of us,” Lewis remembers. “Mike took the bars off the windows at our Natural Bridge location. That said a lot for north city. And we only had one break-in.”

    The love spilled outside of the retail space. “I couldn’t go to the airport without someone recognizing me,” John North recalls. “It got to the point that people thought we were celebrities.”

    The national affiliate stations considered Schweig Engel’s rise newsy. During an interview with ABC Stein said, “If a person got up and went to the restroom,” he said, “or went to get a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich during my ad, I think I’d die.”

    On KSDK (Channel 5), Art Holliday asked the boys whether they took it as a compliment that Riverfront Times referred to their spots in a 1991 article as “the most absurd on television” and “deranged.”

    “Oh yes,” Stein replied. “We shoot for being the worst commercial in St. Louis.”

    In the 1990s, Schweig Engel began buying ad space on cable in the city, says Jeff McCann, formerly an advertising salesman at TCI.

    “There wasn’t a lot on cable yet,” McCann says. “But Mike bought into it. He knew how to get his name out there.”

    McCann adds that it wasn’t just the ads that created a buzz.

    “When you walked into Schweig Engel you’d see all those guys,” says McCann. There was Mike, there was John, there was Warren. They were that accessible. And I think that’s why they did so well as long as they did.”

    The Schweig Engel party ended in 2004. Stein says the business was still profitable, but the partners were ready to move on. The original building is now, ironically, a National Rent-to-Own.

    Stein became manager of Alro Heating & Cooling in St. Ann. John North moved to DeBary, Florida, where he now runs two separate businesses (one manages credit-card fees for other companies). Warren Lewis works for Value City Furniture but, while vice president at Schweig Engel, took great pride in having risen from maintenance man to the first company officer from outside the family. (He was also one of the very first black furniture buyers in the United States.)

    Stein says he and North are planning on flying out to LA in early 2012 to make the Funny or Die commercials. He’s kicking around an Iron Man spoof. Meanwhile, Nick Corirossi is salivating.

    “Look at all the stuff they did with green screen,” he says. “Can you imagine what they’d do with the new technology, when they have the run of things?”

    Slyman Brothers: Try Us, You’ll Like Us

    Bob Slyman Jr. says hardly a day goes by without a customer walking into one of his family’s appliance stores and asking about the company’s television ads from the 1970s and ’80s.

    The commercial that launched them all first appeared on St. Louis airwaves in 1972 and featured Slyman’s father, Bob, and uncle Harry Slyman superimposed as if they were sitting atop the Gateway Arch.

    “Thanks for making us tops in town,” the brothers announced before ending the spot with the company’s tagline: “Try us, you’ll like us.”

    Slyman Jr. says his father and uncle came up with the idea for that first commercial themselves, and it didn’t take long for the ad to pay off — big time.

    “They opened the business in 1965, the year the Arch was completed, so it was a natural tie-in,” he says. “Within a year or so of running those spots business increased 20 to 30 percent.”

    So successful were the commercials that the brothers nearly did away completely with all other forms of advertising. Over the years they’d create dozens more commercials, filming the first few in the studios at Channel 5. Later they’d move production to the company’s stores. Perhaps the most memorable commercial — besides the spot on top of the Arch — was the ad featuring their mother.

    “They wanted to emphasize that we are a family business, so the spot showed my dad and uncle loading a truck with appliances and then banging on the side of the trailer and yelling, ‘OK, Mom, take it away.’”

    Truth be told, though, mom Slyman never actually appeared in the advertisement. The camera cut away from the cab as the vehicle pulled off the lot.

    “Years later we wanted to do a similar commercial — only this time it would be her grandkids telling her to ‘take it away,’” says Slyman Jr. “But she wouldn’t do it. She was too embarrassed.”

    Now in its third generation, Slyman Brothers is still making its own commercials featuring Bob Jr., his brother and sister — Jon and Darlene — and their children.

    “I don’t know if it’s a St. Louis thing or what, but people do seem pretty surprised when they come into the store and see that we’re actually here — just like in the commercials,” says Slyman Jr. “Once in a while they even ask for autographs.” — Chad Garrison

    Steve Mizerany: “Godfather” of Slap-Schtick

    Before Schweig Engel was the King of Credit, Steve Mizerany was the undisputed King of Crazy. “Don’t be confused!” he exhorted St. Louisans during the 1970s and ’80s, roller-skating through the New Deal store — a TV and appliance outfit owned by him and his childhood friend, Joe Farhatt, located at “4719 Gravois, next to the Bevo Mill!”

    He called his salesmen “The Decent Boys.” Some associates had nicknames such as “Jelly Roll” and “The Moose.” But it was Mizerany — the son of Lebanese immigrants in St. Raymond’s parish — who courted the spotlight with his crown, suspenders and loud polyester suits. (He later donated the roller skates to the Missouri History Museum).

    He also took to the radio waves. After leaving the New Deal store in 1989, Mizerany did some radio spots for Warehouse of Waterbeds, owned by a pair of nieces. “If you ain’t sleepin’ on water,” he said, “you otter!”

    Former Post-Dispatch columnist Elaine Viets once wrote that Mizerany’s voice squeaked and squealed “like a pig in a packing plant.”

    “He was always kind of like that,” recalls Jim Winkle, a KPLR producer at the time, who shot some of Mizerany’s spots. “But he would get to a new level when the camera was rolling. When it was all done, he might sit down and talk quieter, because his voice was tired from screaming and chasing a monkey around the room.”

    He also displayed a philanthropic streak. It was Mizerany who put together the Annual St. Louis Police Relief Celebrity Ballgame during the 1970s. Raised funds went to families of officers killed in the line of duty.

    A month after his death last April, 14th Ward alderwoman Carol Howard honored him before a full board meeting as “one of the pioneers of TV commercials.”

    “He was just a character,” said Howard, “and a very kind and wonderful businessman.” — Nicholas Phillips

    Uncle Leonard Lewis: Heavyweight Vendor

    I’m the only guy around that can give a girl 50 inches,” Uncle Leonard Lewis told Riverfront Times in 1991. “Of TV that is — don’t get excited.”

    Lewis spent much of his 43-year career at Leonard’s TV at 6800 Natural Bridge Road in Pine Lawn. When he wasn’t selling televisions, he was appearing on them in his trademark Greek fishing cap, alongside athletic greats such as Muhammed Ali, Vince Coleman and Brett Hull (all of whom dwarfed the short businessman).

    “That’s right, folks,” he said in one spot, sidling up to Cardinals pitcher John Tudor. “Come on down to Leonard’s TV, and I’ll give you a major-league deal on a Panasonic camcorder! It’s got auto-focus, remote-control, power zoom, audio dub, omni search, and instant playback, and best of all [pumping fist], the Uncle Leonard big discount!”

    “Now that’s what I call a fast pitch,” Tudor said.

    Click here to watch some of Uncle Leonard’s old TV spots.

    At his peak, Lewis owned six stores. He once offered a sweet deal on a new TV for any kind of trade-in — even “your old mother-in-law.”

    Some didn’t quite get his schtick. When he joked on JC Corcoran’s morning show that people should invest in color air conditioners, Lewis later got a dozen calls from folks pressing for more details.

    By the time he retired in 1992, he’d notched on his belt 43 years in the business. He’d even garnered a Sons of the Desert Celebrity of the Year honor for being “the person who best fosters the spirit of Laurel and Hardy in what they say or do.” But even in his twilight years, before his death at age 91 in 2002, he couldn’t resist the lure of the silver screen: He appeared in commercials for a local Wendy’s franchise.

    Yet as much as he loved attention, he could also be modest. When KDNL (Channel 30) ran a segment on his life in the late ’90s, they mentioned three different people down on their luck who’d received unsolicited checks from Lewis.

    “Uncle Leonard never told us about these good deeds,” the reporter said. “We found them all in local newspapers.” — Nicholas Phillips

    Home Furniture: No Monkey Business

    When the Fredman family decided in the late 1970s that it was time to advertise their Collinsville-based Home Furniture on television, S. Fredman, then a twentysomething-year-old store manager, knew that the television spots had to stand out from the competition.

    “My mother always had this expression that she’d tolerate ‘no monkey business,’ and I thought that could make for a clever commercial,” he says. “Initially, I wanted to get a real monkey that I could chase around the store, but my wife said it would probably bite me.”

    The solution? Fredman drove to south St. Louis and rented himself a gorilla’s suit. Over the next twenty years that same gorilla outfit would appear in dozens of ads for Home Furniture. Each ad was more or less the same. Fredman would interview a business professional from the community about their occupation.

    “Say it was a journalist,” explains the 68-year-old Fredman. “I’d ask: ‘If someone plagiarizes your work, would that make you mad?’ He or she would answer, ‘Well, no. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.’ Then I’d ask a similar question or two until finally asking: ‘What if someone you know bought home furnishing and paid delivery fees, finance charges and other ‘monkey business’ expenses? Would that that make you mad?’ At that point the person would say, ‘Yes, that would make me mad!’ And the monkey would appear on the scene and would get physically hit by the sap who’s being interviewed, and we’d end with the tagline: ‘At Home furniture there is no monkey business!’”

    Immediately after the first ad hit the airwaves (featuring Fredman’s nephew in the monkey suit), business at Home Furniture increased 25 percent. “People were even asking for out autographs,” recalls Fredman.

    Not everyone found the commercials amusing.

    “One bit we did was with an insurance agent asking him if he’d be angry if someone bought a million-dollar policy and then jumped off the Gateway Arch to collect,” says Fredman. “That same spot had been running for months, maybe years, when a person in a parachute actually hit the Arch and fell to his death. We got a call from someone accusing us of making light of the tragedy. We pulled the ad.”

    Fredman says that he aimed at perfection in those first commercials, demanding that they shoot dozens of takes. “Eventually, we’d do two or three takes, and it was done,” he says.

    More important than perfection was that the commercial had a “schtick” — something that Fredman says fellow advertiser Steve Mizerany, who’d roller-skate through his south St. Louis appliance store in his television ads, had in spades.

    “I used to teach a business administration course at St. Louis Community College, and I’d invite Mizerany in to talk to the students,” says Fredman. “He was the godfather of interesting commercials.”

    Until earlier this year, Home Furniture was still running on cable television some of the same commercials it filmed in the early 1990s. Fredman says the store — in business since 1935 — wasn’t seeing as great a return on investment as it used to from the ads. Still, he doesn’t know why more local retailers don’t have a little more fun with their commercials.

    “Unless you’re a funeral home, I think you can make some jokes.”— Chad Garrison

    Becky, Queen of Carpet: Flies Over the Competition

    No matter how high you may have been while watching TV in the 1990s, you weren’t higher than Becky “Queen of Carpet” Rothman and Wanda “Princess of Tile” Kilzer. You did not glide above the Arch on a magic carpet. (Get it? No? You’re still high.)

    Becky and Wanda owned that marketing airspace. They sometimes invited copilots: Cardinals pitcher Greg Mathews. Steve & D.C., morning-show DJs. Diane “Mother” MacKenzie from KIX 104 FM. Even Steve Mizerany, who called them “Decent Girls.”

    But it was they and they alone who promised “rich man’s carpeting at working man’s prices.”

    As business buzzed, the spots got crazier. In 1992, Becky leaped from the Arch and landed safely on the magic carpet. Two years later, she jumped and missed, plummeted to the ground, then simpered into the camera, her crown crooked, birds tweeting in the background (which always means brain injury).

    Click here to watch some of Becky’s old TV spots.

    By the early aughts, Wanda “Princess of Tile” Kilzer had left the company. She died last February.

    Wanda’s departure didn’t mean that Becky flew solo. In 2001 Rothman touted her stain-resistant carpet by soaring along with her large dog (she was, at the time, a devoted breeder of Doberman pinschers).

    “Everybody loves their pets, but they can ruin your carpet!” she says as the spot opens to brassy military music. The dog yawns.

    After Rothman had gastrointestinal surgery in 2003, she lost 185 pounds. She began to appear more sprightly in her ads. In fact, the spots took some Schweig Engel-esque turns. In one, she was struck by lightning. In a more recent commercial, she says, “I’ve got so many things on sale, my head’s going to explode.” And then it does.

    Other local advertisers took notice. In 2004 adult novelty store Very Intimate Playthings ran a parody of Rothman’s ads with porn star Ron Jeremy dressed in drag and floating on a carpet above the Gateway Arch. The Queen of Carpet was not amused.

    That year Riverfront Times wrote how Rothman called KTVI, demanding that VIP’s ads be pulled. Apparently, she wasn’t happy with us reporting that story, either. She was unwilling to call us back last week about her brilliant ads of the ’80s and ’90s and 2000s. We’ll leave the space below for her to chime in, should she wish.

    “….”

    Mark Earls, who has produced Becky’s commercials since the 1980s, tells RFT that her sales numbers exploded the more outlandish her ads became.

    “It’s hard to call it a ‘regular’ commercial when it’s someone wearing a crown and flying on a carpet,” jokes Earls, who’s also worked with car dealer Jim Trenary and InstaCredit Automart. “But when we do the more regular commercials, she doesn’t get as many phone calls as when she does something crazy. When we do those crazy things, her phone rings. That stuff works.”— Nicholas Phillips

  • Former Miss Missouri Is Marrying Barry Zito

    Former Miss Missouri Is Marrying Barry Zito

    Image via — Barry Zito’s new bride, 2007 Miss Missouri Amber Seyer.

    Miss Missouri is becoming Mrs. Missouri-Zito.

    Amber Marie Seyer, who represented the Show-Me State in the 2007 Miss USA pageant, is marrying San Fransisco Giants pitcher Barry Zito this weekend.

    This is one of those prom king and queen unions. Zito, 33, is the John Mayer of baseball, with his dark ruffled hair and a string of public romances involving Alyssa Milano and Paris Hilton. When he’s not busy throwing his frustratingly inconsistent curve-ball, he enjoys playing the guitar, yoga, and surfing. Also, he is mid-way through a seven year $126 million contract.

    Seyer, 25, finished tenth place in the 2007 competition. She grew up in Oran and graduated from Lindenwood University, in St. Charles. She enjoys riding horses and hair styling. She is also an actress , with three credits under her belt including a 2010 episode of the Bold and the Beautiful .

    According to the San Francisco Chronicle , the wedding will take place in a private ceremony in Marin County, which is just north of San Francisco. The paper notes that the couple plans to split time between the Bay Area and Los Angeles.

    Zito has drawn loads of criticism over the years for, most would argue, failing to live up to his historically large contract, which at the time made him the highest paid pitcher in the MLB history. But, despite his 43-61 record in his five years with the 2010 World Series champs, Zito has also made it difficult for Giants fans to personally despise him. He is just so got damn likeable.

    For instance, there’s this gem from the Chronicle :

    Zito and his bride-to-be showed up at the Marin County clerk’s office Nov. 18 to take out a marriage license. “I asked if he wanted a confidential one, and he said ‘no,’ ” said Joyce Whitney, a senior deputy county clerk. “He said, ‘Just give me a public one – I’m over myself.’ “

  • Rare Glimpse Into Underground Tunnels of River Des Peres

    Rare Glimpse Into Underground Tunnels of River Des Peres

    Sunlight pours into the stairs to the River Des Peres.

    The entrance to the tunnels of the River Des Peres lies hidden beneath a grate east of the Forest Park Visitor Center. Lift the metal cover and a staircase descends 40 feet into the cool darkness.

    For more than 100 years the River Des Peres has traversed the park out of public view. It was the 1904 World’s Fair that first prompted city leaders to bury the river, which by then had become something of an open sewer. They enclosed the water in a wooden channel and sealed it on top with a roadway.

    Years later — in 1915 — a storm dumped seven inches of rain on St. Louis and the waters were too much for the flood-prone River Des Peres to handle. The resulting deluge killed 11 people and destroyed hundreds of homes. The river had to be tamed, once and for all.

    Thus began a project that today remains an engineering marvel — and a reminder that much of the region’s water and sewer system is rapidly nearing the end of its lifespan.

     

    Unlike the open-air sections of River Des Peres, the tunnels below Forest Park contain a mixture of sewage and stormwater.

    Unlike the open-air sections of River Des Peres, the tunnels below Forest Park contain a mixture of sewage and stormwater.

    This week the Metro Water Infrastructure Partnership released a study highlighting the need to replace aging sewer pipes running through the St. Louis region. According to the partnership, much of region’s storm and wastewater system must be replaced within the next two decades.

    For being nearly 90 years old, the tunnels through Forest Park look to be in remarkable shape. Still, rebar can be seen poking out of some fractured sections of the giant channels, which are 32 feet wide. After a media tour of the tunnels today, Metropolitan Sewer District spokesman Lance LeComb told Daily RFT that his agency must improve the pump stations near Manchester and Macklind avenues, where the tunnels empty.

    “That’s part of our efforts to comply with the EPA,” says LeComb. “We need excess capacity to store sewage during periods of heavy rain, so it doesn’t mix with stormwater.”

    MSD is seeking approval to begin $4.7 billion in infrastructure work over the next quarter-century. Construction of the tunnels beneath Forest Park, by contrast, cost about $11 million and took about three years to complete, from 1927 to 1930.

    Continue on to view more photos from inside the tunnels.

  • The Piano Made of Fruit, and Four More Edible Instruments

    Really, who hasn’t played air guitar on a baguette? (Uh, y’all, why is mine the only hand raised here?) But a working musical instrument made out of actual food?

    That’s pretty damn cool.

    We were amazed by this video, via Gawker, of a working piano that a hacker collective called NYC Resistor made out of fruit:

    Naturally, we had to search for other examples of musical food (beans don’t count)…

    This guy has made a bit of a name for himself on the Internet playing songs on vegetables. Here he is playing a pan flute made from carrots:

    This guy, on the other hand, turns his carrot into a clarinet. (Though we’re not sure whether to be impressed or to deduct points for his use of non-food items for a richer sound):

  • The Agony and the Ecstasy: A decade after the heyday of St. Louis’ rave scene, it still feels like the morning after

    It is 8:30 p.m., and Kenny is dancing alone.

    You might actually say he is flailing alone. In the next room, a dreadlocked man in a cowboy hat and plaid suspenders is freaking out, also solo, to an acerbic techno beat backed only by the words “MUSCLE, GUNS, BURN” on repeat. But Kenny is the only one in Atomic Cowboy’s central room. Darting frantically across the dark dance floor, Kenny rhythmically snakes his limp wrists vertically, then horizontally, then diagonally, then almost double-jointedly through the air around his face. His legs follow a similar, if more stilted, trajectory as he twists his thighs and jerks his feet even faster than his fingers, nine of which sport glow rings he ordered in bulk online. (The tenth one fell off during an ill-conceived dance move.) Kenny is raving — and he is recruiting.

    The other patrons at Atomic Cowboy are, as a result, scooting further into the recesses of their leather sofas. They probably missed most of the era Kenny is single-handedly reviving with all the gusto it takes to be the first person on a dance floor devoted entirely to ’90s rave music. The Kenny dancing by himself is now 42, which means he learned how to dance this way in his twenties.

    Even today, Kenny holds fast to all the tenets that come with his moves. The first unofficial rule revolves around his lack of a surname. We know only Kenny’s first name because that is all Kenny told us, and it’s all he told most people at the raves he attended twenty years ago. The second rule is constant motion. If you stop dancing, you stop mattering. “You’ve got to do it,” Kenny tells his attempted recruits as he offers them light-up necklaces. It takes a while for him to find his first partner, and when he does, she is considerably less vigorous than he. “You’ve got to move more than that,” he chides. “Your feet aren’t even moving.”

    The key, he says, is in the hands. “It’s simple. Take your hands and pretend you’re holding an invisible ball. Now just start rolling that ball, and don’t stop until it’s not even about the motherfucking ball anymore.”

    Perhaps it is this instant, with Kenny cradling his make-believe ball, or perhaps it was earlier, when someone plugged in the strobe lights. Maybe it comes even later, when Kenny is finally joined by hundreds of dance partners, and the old feeling of community comes flooding back.

    Regardless, at some point, in one of the moments of this night, it becomes clear: The city’s original rave culture, one that peaked and plummeted in the ten-year span between 1992 and 2002, has been revived almost twenty years after it mattered the most.

    This feeling will last exactly one night.

    Even now, there’s dissension in the ranks. For a period of approximately ten years, some of them more vibrant than others, St. Louis was a cultural hub for both rave music and the lifestyle that accompanied it. The city was a tactical post between Detroit techno and Chicago’s house scene, and its lack of territorial music rivalries made it the most open-minded rave stop in the central United States. St. Louis parties packed the biggest and most diverse setlists in a collection of regional-based sound, says Marc Buxton, a former St. Louis DJ.

    Fans of either style of music — and those in between, like trance, ambient and trip-hop — found a comfortable home on the couches of St. Louis apartments. Every weekend, ravers flooded the city’s warehouse district on rented buses and in shared cars, coming from Indianapolis, Akron, Dayton, Chicago, Cleveland, Memphis and Nashville. Some of them made the same trip almost every weekend for ten years, while some St. Louis natives were unable to use their own couches for the same period.

    When St. Louis lost its title, it was largely because of a deteriorated internal dynamic: A newly mercurial group of people, jaded by drugs and the demands of constant partying, no longer resembled the naïve high school students they’d been when the party started. In the end, dancers kept their backs to the walls and watched their belongings. In the end, ravers called in their friends’ drug habits rather than face their own being reported instead. In a homogenized era of pacifiers and phat pants, style-biting grew rampant, and people began to clone each other.

    When it was time, the end was quick in coming.

    “I have mixed emotions about it,” says Davidian Alterior, a founding member of the local scene. “The whole old-school rave scene nostalgia bit — I haven’t been too gung ho about it.”

    Today, most of the stories about the city’s rave legacy — how the drugs entered the scene, what genre was most popular, whether rave still exists in St. Louis, whether the reunion should have happened — come from two camps, both arguing aggressively for their own perspective. Members of both groups will warn you whom to talk to, who was first-string, whose memories are wrong and who never cared enough. Those camps came to a head even at the scene’s one-off reunion at Atomic Cowboy July 9, with rival factions disagreeing about the event’s intentions, lineup and setting.

    Alterior, who is the business half of Superstars of Love, one of the scene’s dominant promoters, was invited to the event but not asked to be one of the nineteen old-school artists on its lineup. What he sees as a snub influenced his decision to back out and skip a reunion with people he had not seen for more than a decade: “I felt excluded from it, and it was difficult.”

    He was not alone in his reaction. The most common complaint about the evening is that it attempted to re-create the sentiments of a time that ended past its expiration date. And while several hundred people attended the reunion, it’s worth noting one person who didn’t — the only mainstream celeb to come out of the St. Louis rave scene, Lance Robertson, better known as Yo Gabba Gabba!‘s DJ Lance Rock.

    The only thing everyone agrees on, perhaps, is that the scene’s heyday can’t be re-created. What is less certain is whether nostalgia is enough to bring rave’s most devoted followers back together again for more than just a single night.

    A dynamic, pulsing, electronic sound predicated on rhythms that compel dancing and sounds that don’t appear in nature, rave music originally found footing in the UK in the late ’80s and early 1990s. It wasn’t long before it reached the United States and cemented itself as a subculture in the coastal fringes. When it reached Brooklyn, rave enthusiasts hosted renegade parties under bridges and refused to disclose the details until a rave was only minutes from happening.

    Rave came from underground, and it stayed there as long as it could. Dancers who grew tired of predictable club nights and rotations were drawn to the illicit nature of all-night raves.

    In St. Louis, the scene’s strongest years took place between 1993 and 1995. The parties were as creative in their execution as they were in their conceptual names: Terror Nova, Nocturnal Wonderland, Rejuvenation, Sodom and Gomorrah, Love Generator, Cyberdelica.

    “There was no real nightlife in St. Louis at the time,” former raver Aaron Overfield says. “If you were going down the highway at night on I-40 and there was a car next to you, you would slow down to see who was in the car because they were probably going to the same place.” Rather than head to a club to listen to the music they already heard on the radio, ravers moved the party to the empty (and technically illegal) warehouses along the city’s river. It was an industrial revolution, of sorts: If you were young and had grown tired of the Seattle grunge movement, this, too, could be your alternative.

    “The fact that it was underground and slightly illegal had its allure,” says Joel Sansone, known at the time as DJ Merlin. (Merlin, a surprisingly common name in rave culture, represented the forging of new and frequently magical identities.) “Are we doing something bad? Are we rebelling a little bit? It worked for me.”

    Until its demise, rave was always a young person’s scene but rarely a teenager’s scene. The average age range of those on the dance floor fell somewhere between 19 and 26. Their aesthetic was noticeably similar. “Once you met somebody, you knew them,” says Angelo Dower, who attended his first rave in 1990. “A lot of them were outcasts, people who didn’t really feel like they fit in. The rave movement was the closest thing people our age could get to the hippie movement of the ’60s.”

    Ravers joined the scene for the music, or maybe even for the dancing, but they stayed for the relationships. Eventually, though, many stayed for the drugs. The DIY aesthetic that covered the scene like a haze became harder to maintain when parties grew larger, longer and ultimately younger. Fifteen- and sixteen-year-old attendees meant less control of the drugs permeating the scene’s ranks, and increased drug use meant a noticeable spike in police attention. Parties that originated as uninhibited, music-centric celebrations in grimy warehouses now came with considerable price tags, city paperwork and cops for hire.

    And then people started dying.

    “I was living in a bubble in this little world we had created for ourselves,” Sansone says. “While I might have had some intuitive feeling that what we had started doing wasn’t right, it didn’t deter me from this fantasy. We got away with it as long as we could — and then we were always on the radar at that point.”

    One of the St. Louis rave scene’s cheesier relics is a two-part news segment that aired in April 1994 and was uploaded to YouTube fifteen years later. In its introduction, the news anchors on KMOV-TV (Channel 4) look visibly uncomfortable as their voices imply the air quotes behind their confusion about why these “kids” do it. “Do you know where your children are?” asks one stoic anchor. “They might be at a so-called ‘rave party.’”

    His cohost makes sure to lean forward and chime in: “Rave is all the rage among the young group.” After this, it’s not long before we’re introduced to reporter Jamie Allman, who, in a moment verging on parody, uses the phrase “hip and happening” without either irony or embarrassment.

    The video finds its story arc in interviews with ravers in hoodies and overalls who appear dejected even as they gush about their lifestyle. “They don’t hate their parents,” the host over-enunciates. “They don’t hate the police. They don’t hate the government. ‘Peace through the government’ is their motto.”

    Spliced between wide-angle shots of a rave dance scene, these interviews show the pleasantly sloppy teens you know doing wacky things behind closed warehouse doors. The entire segment is targeted hook, line and sinker for the parents and grandparents of a generation they are hopelessly far from understanding. The proof is in the pairing: When the candid dance footage is looped under the misunderstood voice-over, the need for rave becomes apparent: It’s to escape from all this.

    The single astute comment from Allman is this one, shrouded behind the unfortunate line that the teens “no longer want their MTV”: “If the rave generation is rebelling against anything, it’s boredom.” To that extent, music was an antidote of sorts, in addition to being the rave purist’s sole reason for involvement.

    St. Louis raves often drew thousands, but they began with a budget and roughly four people. Leading rave promoters Superstars of Love, most of whom lived together in a Central West End apartment known as the “rave cave,” followed a specific strategy for their events. “Other people were throwing events, and we just felt like we could do it better,” says Ryan Paradise, the group’s creative brain. “It was the beginning of something, and we all kind of knew it.”

    For a rave with a target audience of 15,000 people, the work began three months in advance of a date carefully selected for weather and, perhaps, a seasonal theme. Then came the venue (the bigger, the better) and the talent (the more, the merrier). They used to be significantly cheaper: “If you look at the rosters of the DJs who were playing at these shows, you’re talking about shows that would cost more than $100,000 these days,” Buxton says.

    In the scene’s early days, organizers shared a reticence to repeat venues. No event should be noticeably similar to any other; organizers planned even the internal structures of their events to allow for maximum diversity in sound.

    In a seven-story warehouse like the one where Superstars of Love hosted some of their parties, each floor was earmarked for a different genre of dance music in a layered strategy that started with tripped-out house and ended with cool-down ambient. “I always went for the trilogy: sound, lighting and flow,” says Alexis Tucci Hansen, a former promoter and current DJ. “My plan was for people to get completely high off of their environment. I wasn’t ignorant to what was going on, but I didn’t want to create a playground for people to eat drugs and lose their minds.

    “Other promoters,” she adds, “intentionally created a Disney World for people on drugs.”

    Promoters based the entrance fees, typically somewhere between $5 and $15, on the number of people they hoped to attract and the overall cost of setup. Superstars of Love drew their early financial backing from a friend. (A few less-than-successful parties left them $18,000 in debt to him at one point in their career.)

    Before rampant Internet use, the quickest way to guarantee attendance was through fliers, first black-and-white and then full-color, designed to sell the theme of a party in the space of a quarter-sheet of paper. If you wanted 1,000 people at your event, you’d be safe passing out 10,000 to 20,000 fliers a minimum of a month in advance.

    The final preparations covered the enticements to keep the party going. Before ecstasy and LSD spread, that was mostly caffeine-saturated beverages and vitamin drinks, Red Bull predecessors like Nitro Cola that included quadruple the caffeine of a Coke. “How innocuous,” says Buxton about the caffeine he ingested. He continues with only, “It was a really exciting time for music.”

    Not all raves took place on a large scale, however. The community was split between extravagant events and standard ones, smaller-scale raves hosted by forward-thinking clubs such as 1227, Fallout, Evolution and the Other World, all defunct today. The handful of clubs that hosted regular rave nights placed a firm emphasis on the music. In the company of two similarly deceased record stores co-owned by Buxton, Deep Grooves and Ultrasonic, they promoted rave culture in the mainstream even as the underground parties did the same outside of it.

    “One of the reasons the energy was really special right then is that, rather than the DJ being steps above the audience, they were all dancing on the same level,” Buxton says. “Don’t tell any club owners that now because they won’t put the DJs on zero level anymore. They might as well just sit in a corner with a label on them that says, ‘Tonight’s Jukebox.’”

    To this day, the music remains hard to describe, even for those who still listen to it. St. Louis’ role as a musically open-minded city meant it housed no shortage of variety inside the span of a single rave. For a bill that included ten acts before 6 a.m., a setlist could cross trip-hop, trance, techno, tribal, house, disco, ambient, noisecore and early dubstep, depending on which room of the warehouse you preferred.

    “It was techno but quirky and sped-up and jittery and boundary-less,” says Hansen, who today plays her own variation on the sounds she grew up with. “It was electronic and deep. It was organic and dreamy and always changing. It was intense.”

    In the beginning, St. Louis’ rave scene was all about the music. When the drugs spread, it became all about the drugs. The national and local rave communities were a victim of nothing if not excess, and bigger parties meant younger people, stronger drugs and increased tolerance for what happens when the two combine.

    Again, the story has two sides. One argues that drugs were not even a real part of the scene until 1993, when club drugs were said to have been introduced to St. Louis through north-county hangouts. The other, more popular belief, is that the drugs started with the scene. The truth is most likely a bit of both: Although the drugs were always a part of rave, they definitively left the eaves somewhere around 1993.

    Joel Sansone’s story follows a path similar to the majority of those who participated in rave culture, if ultimately more serious: Chronologically, the music came first, and the drugs came second. On a list of priorities, he admits, the two would eventually be reversed.

    By 1995, Sansone’s identity as DJ Merlin became prominent enough to require an upgrade in lighting and sound equipment but not quite successful enough to pay for the changes on its own.

    “I decided that the only way to support my lifestyle of just playing music and partying was to sell drugs,” Sansone says. The ecstasy he sold was expensive, $25 to 30 a hit, while acid cost $1,500 a sheet. Demand was high — until someone called the police.

    In his apartment with his girlfriend that night in 1995, Sansone heard yelling and rapping at his door, but his reaction time was too slow to make sense of it before police kicked their way in. Federal officers, already made aware of his drug sales by an informant, spent an hour tearing through his apartment while he lay on the floor, at times with a gun pointed to his head.

    “Very dramatic, these guys. I had just gotten a shipment of acid the night before, and they knew it,” Sansone says. But a friend had already visited and taken the acid from him. “They were like, ‘Where is it?’”

    Although they didn’t find the acid, the police easily discovered evidence of other drugs and more than $7,000 in cash inside Sansone’s south-city apartment — enough that he was charged with conspiring to possess with an intent to distribute LSD, ecstasy and marijuana.

    Sansone was the first on the scene to go away, and the retelling of his story contributed to a spike in finger-pointing. “The reason the bubble popped at that point is that, until then, everyone was family,” Sansone says. “I would never do anything to hurt anyone — ever. But then you realize that the reason I was convicted was because someone told on me.”

    Sentenced to five years in federal prison, he served approximately three and a half before his release. Sansone returned to St. Louis only temporarily before backing out of the scene altogether and moving to Los Angeles. (Now 38, he works as a computer tech and Web designer.) “After that, people started falling like dominoes.”

    In that misguided April 1994 newscast, Buxton is quoted while standing inside Deep Grooves, the record store he co-owned, saying drug use within the scene was impermissible. Although two teens concede to the TV reporter that drug use existed, another rave figure, DJ Nitro, suggests onscreen that the music is his real drug.

    When it’s Buxton’s turn, he shakes his ponytail. “None of us allow it to go on. It’s definitely taboo.” Seventeen years later, however, he admits the drugs are the reason he left St. Louis for Chicago.

    Drugs infiltrated the scene like a fever: What began as a focus on club drugs such as ecstasy and LSD spread to include cocaine, heroin and a generous cocktail of harder and lesser-known partners.

    They augmented the party, made it stronger, increased its duration and let ravers stay up longer, conducting their frantic, tripped-out dancing in chemical euphoria. Parties that used to end at 7 or 8 a.m. now lasted past noon, well into the next day. The pull of the drugs and their social effects added ease to the relationships formed in gritty warehouses and packed clubs. One raver met his best friend as a direct result of a bag of acid he found in a Porta-Potty.

    Morby, a former member of Superstars of Love who designed the group’s logo, took his drug use to an extreme that led to a thirteen-year absence from the community. After a New Year’s party at the armory building in 1996, Morby was not seen for more than a decade; he was only recently discovered, homeless and schizophrenic, in St. Petersburg, Florida.

    “If you have a party with 2,000 people at it, there’s a good chance 20 people are going to be really messed up,” Davidian Alterior says. Parties eventually came with EMTs and off-duty police officers. (Just about every source interviewed in this story conceded to using drugs at some time, though to varying degrees.) “There’s always some shady character standing in the corner and selling god knows what to people.”

    When the number of those who died began to swell, some hoped that it would wake people up, which would then change everything. It never did. Paradise remembers a particularly painful example when Jajo, an early link to Superstars of Love, overdosed.

    Jajo was the first person he knew to die as a result of drug use. “It was devastating,” Paradise says. “It’s interesting because if it wasn’t for the rave scene, I wouldn’t have gotten involved in drugs. After a while, there was nothing I would say no to.”

    On the day he heard the news, Paradise was scheduled to meet Jajo at 9 a.m. The two had made plans to meet at Paradise’s club, Quazar. Flustered by Jajo’s absence, Paradise drove his Toyota Camry to the hardware store to pick up supplies for a party, where a friend called him: Jajo had died the night before of a heroin overdose.

    “He was doing uppers, and he was having difficulty sleeping, so someone gave him heroin, and it killed him,” Paradise says. “Or at least that’s the story I heard. There were so many stories back then.”

    In the end, it was the Internet that reunited what’s left of the city’s rave culture. Six months ago, second-string ravers started (what else?) a Facebook group called “Oldschool crew” for a community that hadn’t even been aware of the Internet in its heyday.

    Discussion threads list hundreds of replies to prompts such as “You know you’re an old-school raver if…” as people share photos of Jajo and others who never left the scene. Without the Facebook group, the one-night reunion at Atomic Cowboy could never have been organized.

    Some members joined the group through both their personal accounts (for friends and family) and their public accounts (for parties). Some use the site to promote their upcoming shows, others to post old show fliers, still others to insult dubstep, the child of rave. The point, though, is that they’re together again, even if the relationship is based on nostalgia. For a long time, that seemed unlikely at best.

    As she talks about just how unlikely the reunion has been, the tone of Hansen’s conversation in no way matches her surroundings. Wearing a sundress, Hansen is seated at a table outside the Forest Park visitors’ center and arguing about music on her cell phone. Although the person she’s talking to can’t see her, she’s shaking her head with fervor as she mentions “local draw” and “lineup consistency.” It’s the same trilogy she has worked with since the ’90s: sound, lighting and flow.

    Today, Hansen, a special-events designer for MAC Meetings & Events, uses the same skills she picked up as a fifteen-year-old in the rave scene to execute large-scale local events such as Soulard Oktoberfest. Nothing in her career since has approached the difficulty of pulling an enormous warehouse up to code for legal permits for a crowd of 6,000 people in five days.

    “I need a vacation,” she jokes with a bite of chicken-salad sandwich in her mouth. “It’s festival season, and it’s a three-ring circus. I’ll be able to breathe in November.”

    In the days since St. Louis’ original rave scene gave way to excess, its legacy has cemented itself through the careers of those who experienced it. The music itself has morphed into new sounds — dubstep, trip-hop, fusion — while the ravers have evolved into adults in their late thirties and early forties, people who either use their former rave connections to their advantage or hide any evidence from their bosses. It’s a mixed bag: “All of the hustlers have hustler jobs in life, and the ones who never really hustled still aren’t,” Hansen says.

    Those careers include party planning (rave promotion) and sound engineering (DJing), as well as hotel management, art and Web design, marketing, PR and jobs such as Hansen’s that mix more than one niche. Buxton, Paradise, Alterior and Sansone still DJ at clubs, and Hansen has joined them in a hobby developed after her days in promotion ended. Paradise maintains a weekend residency at Debonair Social Club in Chicago, where he is a pioneer of new disco.

    Even today, those people disagree on one key question: whether the rave scene still exists. There are those who choose to believe that the scene ended when the big parties did, that it died when their friends died, when the fun stopped and a police presence replaced it, when the crowds got younger and the first wave ravers could no longer relate.

    Symbolically, that’s probably true. But in reality, the rave kept going, albeit with less intensity. The scene took a sizable hit in 2001 after Operation: Get Down, a street party on Washington Avenue that drew 6,000 people and became a swan song for the scene. While rave communities in states such as Colorado and California still draw thousands on an average night, and mainstream events like Electric Daisy Carnival tour to spots of 100,000 people, in St. Louis, police opposition and a new law prohibiting the registration of parties that size meant the scene was officially no longer underground. It was a while before it went there again.

    “The players have just changed,” Buxton says. “There’s so much pressure in St. Louis to become detached, to have your kids and move to the suburbs. It’s still a place where people are afraid of the city. The chasm between an urban and a suburban lifestyle is immense, and people are going to try to fill it.”

    By the new millennium, Superstars of Love was promoting acts such as Moby and the Chemical Brothers, while Boogie Knights hosted a three-day rave, or the closest modern approximation to one, in the woods an hour from the city September 2 through 4. Although the lineup was more expansive, and the promotion was digital, the party came with the same info line setup as its predecessors: Ravers were asked to dial a landline to find out where to show up.

    If you did show up, you probably noticed that the game has changed. Today’s parties have again moved underground, though the definition of that word has expanded with the Internet to include websites, glossy full-color fliers and online promotion codes. Many Missouri events are hosted by third-wave ravers, promotion groups such as Boogie Knights that picked up where Superstars of Love left off.

    For the original ravers, looking back means realizing all the things they did without. It means wondering how the scene lasted as long as it did and when it all ended. The latest rave generation, after all, is a digital one.

    “Now that I look back, I think, ‘How long could we possibly have gotten away with this?’” Sansone says. “As far as I was concerned, everything changed. It definitely lost its innocence.”

  • Angie Young: St. Louis Homicide No. 85; Shot in White Castle Parking Lot

    Angie Young: St. Louis Homicide No. 85; Shot in White Castle Parking Lot

    Police this morning are trying to figure out who shot Angie Young as the 36-year-old mother sat in her car around 11:39 p.m. yesterday at the White Castle at North Kingshighway and Natural Bridge (below).

     

    Angie Young: St. Louis Homicide No. 85; Shot in White Castle Parking Lot

    Witnesses told police they saw a black male in his late 20s or early 30s fire numerous shots into Young’s vehicle before running to a truck that was parked nearby and driving away. Young was struck multiple times, including once in the head.

    Her family told reporters earlier this morning that they have no idea why someone would murder Young, who works as a medical technician at Delmar Gardens and has a 15-year-old daughter.

  • Battle European Spread: Nutella Vs. Biscoff

    Battle European Spread: Nutella Vs. Biscoff

    You might have sampled Nutella on a crepe, which is standard fare in France. The creamy chocolate-hazelnut spread melts on a hot, buttery crepe shell, and the combination is nothing less than divine.However, France’s neighbor to the north boasts its own sweet spread. The Belgians have always been famous for their waffles and cookies, but now they’ve created a real tour de force: Speculoos Spread. Speculoos, or “Biscoff” spread as its known in North America, is a thick, creamy confection with the consistency of peanut butter. To the naked eye, it even looks like peanut butter: the same brown color, many shades lighter than Nutella. If you’ve ever flown Delta, you might have been served the cookie version of the spread (albeit in shiny plastic Delta wrappers). Both the spread and the cookie taste like gingerbread, with a warm cinnamon aftertaste.

    It’s hard to put to equally delicious contenders up for the prize of Best European spread. Some might say it’s like comparing apples and oranges: Nutella has a strong chocolate-hazelnut taste, and Biscoff tastes more like peanut butter, just with a little more cinnamon. Gut Check had a hard time finding Biscoff, but when Straub’s ran an ad for it in the paper, it set the stage for the duel.

    The Contenders:

     

    Battle European Spread: Nutella Vs. Biscoff

    Image via

    Biscoff Spread – $4.19

    For lovers of peanut butter, this spread undoubtedly has the upper hand. It is thicker and creamier than Nutella, and the lids boasts that it is “made with original Biscoff cookies.” In Europe, they eat the spread on toast for breakfast, but we’ve found that it tastes wonderful mixed into hot coffee, on Eggo waffles, or even on top of a banana. We’re sure that Europeans would shudder, but hey, they were the ones to unleash their creation. The only downside is its unavailability. As of right now, you can only find Biscoff at Straub’s, and a fourteen-ounce jar runs a steep $4.19. Not everyone would be willing to shell out the money, but after one taste of the creamy spread, we’re sure that you’ll be hooked.

    Nutella Spread – $3

     

    Battle European Spread: Nutella Vs. Biscoff

    Image via

    Nutella is better known in the United States than Biscoff, and you can find it at almost any grocery or convenience store. Also unlike Biscoff, the spread boasts more beneficial qualities. Nutella is made from real skim milk and cocoa, and contains no artificial preservatives. This gives the spread a lighter consistency than Biscoff, and the sweetness lingers in your mouth. Plus, there are more than 50 real hazelnuts in every Nutella jar. It’s hard to imagine all of those nuts squeezing into thirteen ounces, but somehow, the Italians found a way. Delicious and nutritious: Does Nutella deliver the knockout punch?

    The Verdict:

    It was a long and hard deliberation, but in the end, Gut Check decided on Biscoff. Both spreads taste good on almost anything and are best served on a large spoon: Serving Size, All. But while we could compare Nutella to the popular kid in the schoolyard, Biscoff is the one with the quiet confidence. You can’t find Biscoff as easily, and it is a bit pricier. Yet it delivers a more unique taste, one that has been crafted by Belgian cookie experts. Who wouldn’t love a spread created from the same recipe as a cookie? We’re not discouraging you from an old favorite. But Biscoff proves that innovation and transformation are the name of the spread game.

  • South St. Louis Residents Fed Up with Prostitution (Again)

    South St. Louis Residents Fed Up with Prostitution (Again)

    The intersections of Jefferson, Chippewa and South Broadway (above) has been a nexus for St. Louis prostitutes. Now residents living farther south on Broadway say the hookers have moved there.

    About 100 residents of the Carondelet and Patch neighborhoods met with St. Louis police last night to discuss rampant prostitution in their neighborhoods.

    According to the Post-Dispatch, the residents “cursed” to police about the hookers and questioned why officials weren’t doing more to stop the trade along South Broadway and South Grand. This week, police say they’ve picked up at least 16 women working the streets in the area, but proving prostitution is often a difficult task. Instead, suspects are more often charged with impeding traffic flow and illegal demonstration.

    Last night’s meeting was only the most recent episode in which south city residents have complained about prostitution. The same issue made news last fall. And back in 2005, south-side aldermen Ken Ortrmann bemoaned prostitution to the daily, saying he constantly got  complaints about people having sex in cars and condoms being
    left in alleys.

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