St. Louis Riverfront Times

Tag: Long Form

  • St. Louis-Based Crossroads Is Under Fire From Past Participants

    St. Louis-Based Crossroads Is Under Fire From Past Participants

    RONAN LYNAM

    At Crossroads, a drug rehab facility in St. Louis that is geared towards teens and young adults, participants say that they experienced traumatizing therapy and a cult-like atmosphere.

    SC* was at work at a fast-food joint snorting crushed-up pills in the walk-in refrigerator when his sister, the manager, caught him. At 19, he’d dropped out of college and was smoking weed all day in addition to abusing opiates.

    “I was pretty miserable,” he recalls. After an ultimatum from his parents, he reached out to a friend from high school who told him about a drug rehab program geared for teens, Crossroads. At the time, SC was in Columbia, Missouri, where the program had an outpost, so he went to check out a meeting in 2011.

    “I never called or anything,” SC recalls. “I just showed up, and the counselors were kind of shocked.”

    It was unlike any meeting that SC had been to before. “I met all the people in the program, and they’re like giving you hugs, telling you how much they love you, and these are people I’ve never met before.”

    Former members describe their first meetings at Crossroads as euphoric. “It’s 30 to 60 kids in a gymnasium chanting your name,” says one former member who joined in 2005.

    The counselors, too, are young and not sober bores. “The counselors had long hair and all smoked cigarettes,” SC recalls. They cursed, talked about doing hard drugs, and wore leather knotted necklaces.

    After the meeting came the phone calls and texts. Suddenly, a new batch of sober friends was at the ready, taking you for late-night hang-outs, parties, games and so much chain-smoking.

    “They use a lot of love bombing,” says Christina Warden, a licensed therapist and former member of Crossroads. “… You’re just inundated with so much attention from these other people in the group, so much positive attention. And your life becomes very quickly only involved with the group.”

    Within 10 days, SC had joined Crossroads’ outpatient treatment program, which was in St. Louis — and unwittingly became part of a wildly controversial group with deep local roots in addition to a national footprint.

    Dozens of former members have described to the RFT what they see as problematic counseling that encouraged them to drop out of school or pick up chain smoking. Some allege blatant homophobia and traumatizing therapy sessions. Many are convinced Crossroads has crossed the line from being supportive into being a cult that seeks to control far too many aspects of its young members’ lives.

    Crossroads is still operating today and has connections to many schools across St. Louis.

    “We have relationships with all the schools in the area,” says Amy Weiland, program director for Crossroads. “And I mean all around St. Louis, even all the way up to Orchard Farms. If they ever need somebody to come in and talk for like speaking engagements, things like that: We’re on call. If they need us, we’re there.”

    Weiland says Crossroads’ counselors are well-trained, and the program is effective, and that many things have changed since people like SC were in the program. But SC and many former members say Crossroads needs to be shut down.

    “You’re really gaslit into living the way that they want you to,” says SC, who became a leader in the group. “You’re so scared of going back to using again, or you’re just so scared of the counselors not thinking that you’re in a good spot, that you’re willing to do whatever it takes to be in their good graces.”

    *SC is a pseudonym. Several people spoke to us on the condition of anonymity.

    The Start of Enthusiastic Sobriety

     

    Bob Meehan (center) created the Enthusiastic Sobriety program that Crossroads uses to get teens off drugs.

    VIA SCREENGRAB

    Bob Meehan (center) created the Enthusiastic Sobriety program that Crossroads uses to get teens off drugs.

    Started in the 1970s by a former felon named Bob Meehan, Crossroads uses a program called Enthusiastic Sobriety to get teens off drugs.

    Meehan started the program in 1971 in Houston, where he moved after being released from prison on charges of burglary and public drunkenness, according to Atavist Magazine. The former heroin addict, who still struggled with alcohol, was hired to sweep the floors at Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, and Father Charles Wyatt-Brown encouraged him to help the kids who would sometimes come to the church. He could tell some of them were using.

    Meehan started with a small cohort of teens. But his sense of humor and, above all, his belief that to keep a teen sober meant you had to make sobriety look as cool as getting high, saw the program gain popularity, and the Palmer Drug Abuse Program, known as PDAP, was born.

    In PDAP, kids — which the program defined as 13 to 25 —- were allowed to have parties, smoke cigarettes, curse, stay out late and drop out of school. There were only three rules: no fixing, no fighting, no fucking. Anything else was fair game in an effort to make kids enthusiastic about sobriety.

    Many parents weren’t thrilled that their teens were becoming chain-smoking high school dropouts, but many were also convinced that without Enthusiastic Sobriety, their kid would die.

    “I’ve talked to people who were counselors back then,” says Brandon Reid, who was in the program in 2001. “And that was their whole model. ‘Your son is going to die.’ My mom was willing to do anything” to prevent that, he says.

    In 1978, actress Carol Burnett’s daughter Carrie Hamilton, then 15, used PDAP to get sober, and a grateful Burnett shared the story on the cover of People magazine and on the Phil Donahue Show. PDAP’s popularity exploded.

    But just two years later, 60 Minutes did a piece on Meehan and PDAP. In it, Dan Rather spoke to several former PDAP counselors who said that the group was a cult that cut teens off from their families and told them that they couldn’t make good decisions, so the program had to decide things for them.

    “As a matter of fact, we’re led to believe that we can’t make it without the program, which I think is one of the greatest disservices that’s done to anybody that goes through the program,” a former counselor told Rather.

    Meehan also admitted that he had no statistics or accurate recordkeeping to back up his claims about his program’s success rate. He didn’t even make his patients give him their actual name when they register. Rather was astonished.

    “We’re not here for names,” Meehan said. “We don’t have the time. We get 400 calls a day.”

    He added, “I’ve been a con all my life. I just now I’m just using it in a good way.”

    A few months later, Meehan was removed from the program. That seemingly led to a split. Even as PDAP continued to expand, with Meehan’s devotees as directors and counselors, Meehan started his own program in San Diego: Freeway, named after Meehan’s band. (At one point, PDAP had forbidden kids from going to concerts except for Freeway’s.) Meehan also started a few live-in treatment centers.

    It wasn’t long before the PDAP program in St. Louis was struggling. When Meehan got wind of it, he persuaded its board to split from PDAP, and Meehan became the leader of the sobriety program, which changed its name to Crossroads, according to Atavist Magazine.

    Then controversy erupted again. The Los Angeles Times wrote that teens in San Diego’s Freeway program had traded “one addiction — to drugs and alcohol — with another addiction — to a lifestyle of self-gratifying antisocial behaviors, dependency on one another at the expense of their home life, and a cult-like adoration of Meehan as the most important person in their life.”

    Freeway’s board of directors voted to disband, and the San Diego district attorney opened an investigation into Meehan’s in-patient facilities. Both were shuttered.

    For a while, St. Louis was Meehan’s only program, but that was enough for him to rebuild his empire. In time, he would go from that outpost to opening other branches and even in-patient rehab facilities — but once again, it was only a matter of time before controversy caught up with him.

    And students in the St. Louis branch say that in the meantime, they suffered.

    Getting to Outpatient

     

    Christina Warden went through the Crossroads program and even became a counselor. She later realized it was a coercive organization.

    COURTESY PHOTO

    Christina Warden went through the Crossroads program and even became a counselor. She later realized it was a coercive organization.

    SC started Crossroads’ 12-week intensive outpatient program in 2011 and says that much of detoxing from opiates was a blur. “Your nervous system is activated all the time,” he says. But he does recall that there were 16 other people in treatment with him and that it smelled like cigarettes.

    “This is so weird you can smoke inside,” SC remembers thinking. “You’re sitting in treatment for addiction, and everyone is smoking cigarettes.”

    (Weiland, the current program director, says previously kids “used to come in smoking. Now it’s rare to have a kid that smokes.”)

    Each meeting began with a chant, kind of like how AA starts with the Preamble. SC doesn’t remember it entirely. But he does remember everyone would chant they wanted to “help others recover from the effects of mind-changing chemicals” and then start chanting “drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs.”

    A counselor led the sessions. Many former members believe the counselors’ only qualifications for drug rehabilitation therapy were having completed the Enthusiastic Sobriety program and being sober.

    Despite being a drug rehabilitation program offering therapy, Crossroads does not take state funding, so it doesn’t have to be licensed. Weiland says that all of the counselors are nevertheless certified through the Missouri Counselor Certification Board.

    “We try to run ourselves as if we were a state-licensed program. We still do all the same things: lock our files and chart. We have a treatment supervisor who is an MSW, and we meet with him twice a week to go over everybody that’s in treatment.”

    SC remembers counselors would begin sessions by pulling an idea from one of Meehan’s books — Beyond the Yellow Brick Road: Our Children and Drugs, about drug rehabilitation, or Bumper Stickers, a book about finding ways to be 10 percent happier.

    A topic might be anxiety, and the counselor would ask what kids were choosing to be afraid of or choosing to attach their fear to.

    “There’s very much an idea [in Enthusiastic Sobriety] that you choose what happens to you, including trauma,” Warden says. “And that you choose basically what your life is going to be. They teach you that your well-being is some expression of your spiritual condition that only they can help you with.”

    Weiland disputes this. “They’re probably making reference to ‘no victims, only volunteers,’” she says, explaining that this is a misunderstanding. “The goal of it was to go, ‘Hey, look, if you’re not getting high, you’re not going to get arrested for doing drug behaviors.’ It was never meant like, ‘If you get raped then you volunteered for it.’ It was taken out of context.”

    Plus, not all members had negative experiences. Former member John Moramarco says that his experience with the group was “overwhelmingly positive.”

    “I never relapsed. I think I spent a total of 10 and a half weeks in intensive outpatient and then things got very good for me in my life.”

    The other focus of the meeting was to get participants to reveal all their trauma, whether they wanted to or not. “There’s also a lot of putting all your shit on blast in front of the entire room of people,” SC remembers. “So if the junior counselor had a talk with me, and he thought I was doing shitty … then the outpatient counselor would use that as a reason to really dig into your shit in outpatient. There’s people talking about their deepest, darkest secrets.”

    The counselors were often looking for “gnarly” stories, former members say. The wilder the tale, the more approval you got from the group.

    Reid, who is now president of Pride STL, joined the group when he was 15. He remembers a girl saying that she’d done heroin at 13. “They put her on a pedestal,” Reid says.

    Group members felt pressure to share stories about abuse, drug use, sexual assault and more. When Reid attended his first Crossroads meeting, he’d never done drugs before. He just liked all of the friendly people, so he stayed in the group and made up stories about drug use whole cloth. Many former members, speaking in the documentary The Group by former Crossroads member Jacob McEndollar, say they also embellished their drug use to stay in Crossroads.

    Members say if they didn’t share enough about how they were a hardcore drug addict, the counselor and other members would accuse them of withholding, or “selfing-out,” which meant you were focused more on yourself than the group. Some people were forced to share traumatic stories that they didn’t want to talk about, their distress and tears proof of a breakthrough.

    Anna Tripolitis, who joined in 2016, remembers being in outpatient and not wanting to talk about a time that she was roofied at a bar.

    “I was accused of not wanting to get sober and not wanting to be part of the group,” she says. “I was accused of getting high and that I was hiding what was wrong with me. There was no option not to talk about anything. People detailed their rapes in outpatient. It was a lot of heavy stuff, and there was no treatment after that. You just said all your trauma, and then were told how it was your fault to a degree, which was really heartbreaking to hear.”

    Reid says that he heard a lot of homophobic and racist comments in the group. He was starting to realize that he was gay and even talked to another member about it but mostly stayed in the closet for the two years that he was in Crossroads.

    Reid also felt like he was excluded from truly belonging to the group due to his mixed race. “You had to be white to be in the inner circle,” he says.

    “It’s bigoted in literally every way you can imagine,” says Warden, who left the group in 2005. “It’s misogynistic, it’s racist, it’s ableist, it’s everything. And homophobia is foundational. They normalized the belief that anything other than being heterosexual and cisgender is delusional and is a function of your spiritual sickness and your addiction disease.”

    Weiland disputes this. She says that counselors are not allowed to use any kinds of slurs or derogatory language, and if they witness anyone doing so, they put a stop to it. “Teenagers are teenagers,” she says. “So sometimes they say stupid things, and when they do, we go, ‘You can’t say that here. That’s inappropriate.’”

    Moramarco, a former member, says that he never witnessed or experienced any bigotry in the group. “There simply weren’t any gay people in the group when I was in it. So there wasn’t anything to be bigoted about,” he says.

    But one member, who wished not to be identified, was in the program at the same time as Reid, and remembers an incident with Mike Weiland, Amy Weiland’s husband, who at the time was a counselor.

    Another member in the group told Reid, “Shut up, fag.”

    “I saw that [Brandon] was upset,” the participant recalls. Reid was sitting by himself, so the other participant went to sit with him. “And this is when Mike Weiland walked up,” says the former participant. “And he said, ‘Hey, what’s going on? What are you guys doing?’” The participant explained that Reid had been called a slur.

    “And then Mike turns to Brandon, he goes, ‘Well, are you a fag?’ And Brandon goes, ‘No.’ And he goes, ‘All right then get the fuck over it.’”

    Reid, speaking in a separate interview, remembers Weiland saying “something to the effect of, ‘If you’re not a fag, why worry about it?’ That was the beginning of the program, and I understood that was how they talked. That’s the type of language they used.”

    Weiland disputes the allegation, although she admits that if the incident happened it was too long ago for her to have any memory of it. “Mike is my husband,” she says. “He doesn’t use language like that, so I don’t believe he did that.”

    After being in the program for two years, Reid told his sponsor at Crossroads that he was gay. He remembers he was at one of the many parties that Crossroads sponsored when senior staff told Reid he couldn’t be in the program anymore.

    “They insinuated I was a threat to other males in the program for overnights and things like that,” Reid says. They said it gently because Reid remembers not being sure if he was being kicked out of the program. Then they suggested he find somewhere else to go. “That upended my whole world. I’m left with no friends, right? I went from having 200 friends to zero.”

    Reid was 17. “It’s no coincidence that I started using drugs at 17,” he says. “In fact, the first people I ever smoked weed with were ex-Crossroads members.”

    Enthusiastic Sobriety’s Rebirth

     

    Bob Meehan appeared on 60 Minutes and revealed that his Enthusiastic Sobriety program wasn't keep track of its patients.

    VIA SCREENGRAB

    Bob Meehan appeared on 60 Minutes and revealed that his Enthusiastic Sobriety program wasn’t keep track of its patients.

    When Meehan took over the St. Louis chapter of PDAP in 1982, high schools were a big focus. Frank Szachta, who became the director, along with previous director Dave Cherry, would go to high schools and run support groups and talk to kids in the cafeteria. Many people who joined Crossroads were recruited out of Kirkwood High School, Clayton or Mehlville.

    Nowadays, Crossroads has a different presence in local schools, but Weiland says it remains on call to educate the student body about drugs or set up a booth at community events. “It just depends whatever the school’s request is,” she says. During COVID-19, requests for presentations decreased, and Crossroads only gave five presentations in the 2022-2023 school year, but Weiland is optimistic that number will increase.

    “We’re in the Rockwood School District, so we’re the easiest ones to go to all the Rockwood schools,” she says. “We’ve done them at Clayton High School. We’ve done them all over.”

    She says the presentations are not about getting people to join Crossroads but about drug and substance-abuse education.

    One participant, MT, remembers joining Crossroads in 2005. At the time, he went to Clayton High School, where he was “scooped up” in a drug bust.

    “I was a 17-year-old smoking pot,” he says. “Everyone was smoking pot at the time.”

    The high school told his parents that their son should check out Crossroads. MT ended up meeting with a Crossroads counselor during the school day.

    “They would take you to go smoke some cigarettes elsewhere, like they had off-campus privileges,” the participant recalls. “Which is wild to think about. I did like the fact that I could smoke cigarettes. I was 17, so I couldn’t even buy them yet.”

    Weiland says that going into schools like that has stopped, mostly because high schools don’t have open campuses anymore. But she would like to bring back in-school support groups. “Support groups are when we have a number of kids that are sober in one school, the school will often call and say, ‘Do you want to do a support group to support them staying in school?’ And of course we want to support them.” Not all of the kids would necessarily have to be in Crossroads, she says.

    Cherry left the St. Louis branch in the 1980s (his ordeal with Enthusiastic Sobriety was detailed in the Atavist article, “The Love Bomb“), but Szachta ran Crossroads for a long time and was still the head of it in 2005 when the RFT first profiled the group. (Now Szachta runs an Enthusiastic Sobriety program in Colorado.)

    As the RFT reported at the time (“Kids & Drugs & Rock & Roll,” March 11, 2005), the program had expanded to include branches in Columbia and Kansas City in addition to the one in St. Louis. The Enthusiastic Sobriety program as a whole had branches in North Carolina, Colorado, Georgia and other states, though the treatment centers all had different names. Participants who went through the program in the early aughts remember large groups, as well as outposts in other cities and an even more intensive inpatient treatment facility in Arizona that some kids who were really in need of help were sent to. The participant who was friends with Brandon Reid was sent there in the early aughts. “It wasn’t like a real facility,” he says. “It was a double-wide trailer out in the middle of the desert.”

    An ABC investigation into Meehan’s drug rehab program in 2005, however, once again accused the group of being harmful for teens. As Atavist later recalled, the investigation included footage of Meehan, filmed years earlier, singing a song called “White Woman and a Ni**er” before he told kids to ignore their families and “let those motherfuckers eat shit.” (The videos had been recorded for training tapes and leaked by a former member.)

    At one point, an ABC investigative team tracked down Meehan outside of the Meehan Institute in Georgia, a facility for training counselors in the Enthusiastic Sobriety message. Warden was there.

    “I was standing outside with him and a news crew came running up asking, ‘Bob Meehan, how do you answer to these allegations of abuse and unethical treatment?’ And that moment broke through my essentially being a true believer of this organization and got me to start questioning it and ultimately got me to break free and leave,” Warden recalls.

    The only outcome was that Meehan stepped down. By then, he was in his 60s and his son-in-law, Clint Stonebreaker, was already running the show, adhering closely to Meehan’s methodologies.

    Fun felonies

    The appeal of a program like Crossroads is apparent.

    For starters, there are not a lot of programs catering to drug-dependent teens. SC remembers visiting another program with his dad.

    “There were a lot of older people, guys in their 60s that were alcoholics and trying to stop dr

  • Complaints About Victor Goines Preceded Jazz St. Louis Conflict

    Complaints About Victor Goines Preceded Jazz St. Louis Conflict

    Cedric Ellsworth

    Jazz St. Louis named Victor Goines its new president and CEO last year.

    Not long after the RFT published an article detailing allegations from employees and volunteers about troubles at Jazz St. Louis under new president and CEO Victor Goines, former students of Goines reached out with a common response: sounds familiar.

    They say the stories about Goines exploding in anger at Jazz St. Louis’ Young Friends Board — and other incidents that had some local staff members and volunteers alarmed — echoed their experiences.

    His former Northwestern students say Goines alternated between being absent and micromanaging, often subjecting students to angry outbursts. A Juilliard graduate reports a hostile environment where another instructor would warn her away when Goines was in a foul mood.

    Goines, 61, is an accomplished musician who has played with Wynton Marsalis since childhood. He served as artistic director of Juilliard Jazz, which he’d helped found, from 2000 to 2007 and as the director of jazz studies at Northwestern University from 2007 until last July.

    In both cases, Goines’ former students report that his departure followed groups of students reporting concerns about his behavior to administrators.

    “When you meet him, initially, he’s always very cordial, very nice, very personable, approachable, but the minute you get in deep with him in terms of in a professional setting for a long term or an education setting with students, that’s when things turn really, really negative,” says Erica von Kleist, a Juilliard graduate who has played at the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and is an instructor at the Manhattan School of Music.

    When asked to comment on allegations about Goines’ tenure, Northwestern Director of Media Relations Hilary Hurd Anyaso said via email on May 3, “[W]e do not comment on personnel matters.” In April, Juilliard Director of Communications Allegra Thoresen directed the RFT to an article detailing Goines’ plans to focus on his music. Thoresen indicated today that the school did not have further comment.

    In response to a detailed list of questions, Jazz St. Louis Board Chair Bill Higley issued a statement in support of Goines, writing: “As part of the search process that led us to hire Victor, the Board sought input from colleagues who know him well, including during his time as a tenured professor at Northwestern. We received overwhelmingly positive reports demonstrating not just Victor’s qualifications but his commitment to our values of diversity and inclusion.”

    The arts are rife with cliches of tough and sometimes harsh directors and teachers who turn out peerless musicians. Goines — and many of his supporters — seemed to place himself in that category.

    “I would talk to some people about his behavior, and they would just be like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s just the way he does things.’ And certainly some of the older generation of players were like, ‘Yeah, but, you know, he gets results, and that’s the way that he’s decided to do things,” says Mikey Ahearn, a second-year graduate student at Northwestern. “He had this whole joke about, ‘This is why the boss has to be an asshole.’”

    Higley has a similar idea, writing in a statement that Goines has a “more direct leadership style” that will “necessitate a period of adjustment.”

    But did Goines’ behavior get results? Five of his former students say no, and Northwestern teacher evaluations shared with the RFT seem to back them up.

    The problems with the Northwestern jazz program began with Goines’ absences. His students report he spent a significant amount of time away on tour, which caused logistical problems — even as he insisted on having all decision-making power.

    “He was away for most of rehearsals,” a former student says. “He would try to micromanage the logistics of everything via email or phone, and it just wasn’t really working.”

    Von Kleist says that pattern dates back to Juilliard. “Not only was he not overseeing the functionality of the program because he was there intermittently, when he was there, if there was any confusion or anything wasn’t going right, he would be angry at the students,” she says. “He’d be angry at us, and he would let us know how awful we were.”

    Goines would sometimes fall asleep in rehearsal after returning from touring, which could lead to tension. One student says Goines had “outbursts” from time to time, especially when “overworked and sleep deprived” but that “as long as he felt like he was on the moral high ground, then it was OK.”

    “I’ve had lessons where he’s falling asleep because he is tired from touring,” a different student says. “Then I’ve had lessons where I just never had a shot of it being a good lesson because he was pissed off going into it.”

    Northwestern teaching evaluations shared with the RFT show similar sentiments. “[P]rof Goines is rarely present – when he is, he’s in a flurry trying to fix and adjust things, only to disappear again as quickly as he came,” one wrote after the spring 2022 semester. Another wrote that Goines “was absent the majority of the quarter and would sometimes doze off or leave unexplainedly [sic] when he was present.”

    Goines’ Northwestern students also take issue with the jazz program he designed. They say the curriculum was not differentiated enough from the classical music program and did not include a jazz theory sequence. (Northwestern did not respond to an email last week asking for comment on those complaints.)

    Students were also frustrated by the hurry-up-and-wait push-pull caused by his absences.

    “We didn’t know what we were playing until like two weeks before the show,” one student says. “We’d have three rehearsals a week that, at that time, were not managed well because Goines was absent. And we were just sitting there kind of twiddling our thumbs playing different songs until eventually we had like crunch time, and all of a sudden he decided our setlist and then he got angry at us for not knowing the music.”

    The teacher evaluations, which are public to everyone at Northwestern, reflect these statements. Students from the winter 2021 semester said, “This quarter was — in general — a failure.” “NUJO made jazz not fun for me.” “[T]ough environment in rehearsals.”

    From spring 2021: “poor directorial management,” “Consistently disorganized. We are treated by Mr. Goines like children and are frequently made examples of and talked down to in a demeaning and unhelpful manner.” “Woefully underwhelmed by jazz orchestra.” “Everything that went wrong with the winter quarter has happened again.”

    The trend continued in spring 2022, though there are fewer overall: “Oh man, what to say that hasn’t already been said. I think we should take a second look at how we are handling this class’s instruction. Structure is lacking.”

    What’s the difference between talk that’s tough and abusive?

    Von Kleist says that Goines was “punitive in his demeanor” toward students at Juilliard, that he’d open rehearsals by saying things like, “You are the most disrespectful students I’ve ever had.” She continues, “He would say things like, ‘You were the most ungrateful, immature people, young people I’ve ever worked with.’” Even so, she says he was angry but calm, and she only witnessed him raising his voice a few times.

    It was different at Northwestern. The students there say Goines semi-regularly yelled at them in rehearsal or over the phone and that he’d make threats in the heat of the moment.

    “He would bully us; he was incredibly emotionally abusive to a lot of us and would throw a tantrum when he’d been away on tour for three, four months and then came back and couldn’t micromanage everything,” Ahearn says. “He’d get into shouting matches with us for no apparent reason other than to just assert some kind of dominance.”

    An undergraduate said Goines would use the Socratic method with his students and then get frustrated if they didn’t furnish the correct answer, describing how Goines’ temper would flare, and he’d raise his voice. “It would just kind of be sudden and unexpected.”

    The student describes an incident in rehearsal, saying Goines liked to close the door and have what he called a “come to Jesus” moment. Once, when displeased with a recent concert performance, Goines told the students that they weren’t motivated and not practicing enough. The student made a suggestion about submitting videos of practice and Goines said that was too strict and boxed in, going so far as to compare it to slavery.

    “I was like, ‘Whoa,’” the jazz student recalls, saying that they replied that Goines’ statement was an over-exaggeration and a fallacy. “Then [Goines] said, ‘You don’t have to contribute to the conversation.’”

    During the discussion, the student says Goines raised his voice and laughed in the student’s face. “It was demeaning,” the jazz student says. “… He got extremely defensive, like, ‘What are you saying? I’m part of the problem?’”

    A third student describes how Goines went up to a student in rehearsal and started “aggressively clapping in his face,” and told the room, “If you guys don’t play well, ‘I’ll be Whiplash’” — referencing the 2014 movie about an abusive music instructor.

    “It’s just an absurd comment to make for anybody to model any of their teaching off of that movie,” the student says, noting that Goines was never physical with them.

    Goines’ temper, Ahearn says, often came up when someone questioned him. “He would start off speaking kind of naturally. And then you’d suggest an alternative or maybe question a bit further. And he’d go nuts.”

    Von Kleist says that Goines’ temper was so known that her private instructor, the late Joe Temperley, would warn her if Goines was in a bad mood. “He would call me and say, ‘Hey, you might want to avoid Victor because he’s just on a rampage,’” she says.

    Ahearn, who is non-binary and had used a move from London to Chicago to study jazz and “live a little more authentically,” says initially Goines was supportive and OK with them wearing dresses during performances. Yet, “the more I spoke to him about it,” the more Goines seemed to misgender Ahearn.

    When Ahearn brought up these issues with Goines, Goines asked if Ahearn had considered it might be difficult for others.

    “And had I considered that maybe, you know, I don’t have to wake up every morning and pick up a gun and fight in Ukraine?’” Ahearn recalls. “I said, ‘Well, I do have to risk my life because every time I walk out the door, I might not come back. The only choice I’m making here is whether to live authentically or not.”

    Several students who spoke with the RFT about Goines had either considered dropping out of the program or actually had.

    “I think the environment was such that people found it easier to quit and not say anything rather than face any potential repercussion,” Ahearn says.

    Two of the undergrad students who spoke with the RFT left the jazz program. One dropped the major but picked it up again after hearing Goines was gone.

    “I thought about coming back,” a third student says. “This is something quite sad — or was quite sad to me and now I’m OK with — I think my interest in pursuing music professionally is gone. I don’t know if I can fully say that Goines took it out of me.”

    Von Kleist says that she cried in the bathroom after rehearsal almost daily and that she couldn’t listen to a jazz record for five years after graduating. “They were so soured for me, they gave me such a pit in my stomach because I associated school with them,” she says. “… He really nearly killed my love of this music.”

    About a year after she graduated in 2004, Von Kleist says she declined to take part in a group of jazz students who’d gone to make a formal complaint about Goines to then-President Joseph W. Polisi because she was “so traumatized that I can’t even be in that building.” But she is sure the meeting happened.

    Reached by phone on Tuesday, Polisi said that he couldn’t recall the incident and that he can’t comment on it.

    Ahearn says that it was difficult to say anything about Goines because he is a famous, well-connected musician and because he’d alternate between generosity and verbal abuse.

    “No one would believe us,” Ahearn says. “Like we’d go out maybe after a concert, and he would treat all his friends to this wonderful meal, and they would think he was so friendly. And so wonderful.”

    Then, in another moment, he’d lose his temper at the students.

    “[Goines] threatened people with not not having a future in the program because of not knowing one simple thing or you’d get phone calls about how you were really fucking up and then a phone call later, asking you how your life was going and him telling you to just treat him as another guy when he just kind of ruined your entire self esteem,” Ahearn says.

    Ahearn never reported Goines’ behavior to Northwestern. But the other three students say that they did and that a group of other students did as well.

    “[The assistant dean’s] response was always, ‘Yeah, we’ve heard this before,’” one student says.

    How Goines came to leave Northwestern and how he ended up at Jazz St. Louis is not clear.

    In an interview with the RFT last August, Goines said that he’d retired from Northwestern because “it’s a good time to hand the football off to somebody else.” At that time, Goines said he was aware of the opening at Jazz St. Louis but that he didn’t apply for it immediately.

    “However, in the past month or two, some information was coming to me that made me reconsider and look at it through a different lens,” Goines told the RFT.

    Ahearn says that they and others didn’t hear about Goines’ departure at the end of the semester. Instead, in a letter dated August 25, Dean Toni-Marie Montgomery announced that Goines had left and that an interim director had been appointed.

    “I am writing to share the news that Professor Victor Goines has resigned, effective July 31, from his positions as a member of the faculty in the Bienen School of Music and as Director of the Jazz Studies Program. We are grateful to Professor Goines for his contributions during his 14-year tenure in the Bienen School of Music,” Montgomery writes.

    Then the Northwestern students saw that Goines had landed at Jazz St. Louis — and, as weeks turned to months, read that some jazz supporters here were having similar experiences.

    “It was interesting seeing the parallels,” one Northwestern student notes, later saying, “I just wanted to make aware that this is a pattern about Mr. Goines.”

    This story has been updated.

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  • Inside the Rupture That Sent Dancakes Co-Founder Daniel Drake Packing

    Inside the Rupture That Sent Dancakes Co-Founder Daniel Drake Packing

    BRADEN MCMAKIN

    Daniel Drake setting up to create pancake art.

    In September 2018, at the United Square Shopping Mall in Singapore, two friends sat down to play a game. Well, first, they sat down for a cup of coffee between rounds of crafting elaborate pancakes for six-year-olds. To most people, the second half of that sentence might seem odd. But for Daniel Drake and Hank Gustafson, this was business as usual since founding Dancakes, the world’s first name in professional pancake art.

    If Gustafson had his way, the two of them wouldn’t have gone to a cafe in the first place on the grounds that homemade coffee was cheaper. But Drake loved cafes, and Gustafson loved Drake. As they sipped their overpriced coffee, Drake looked up at Gustafson with a strange look in his eye. He knew what Drake would ask before he asked it.

    “Wanna play Anthromancer?”

    Anthromancer is the board game that the friends had invented in their time off from flipping pancakes for celebrities and billionaires (and schoolchildren in Singapore). Drake had the idea for Anthromancer on the flight home from a television appearance in Brazil three years prior, and they’d adopted it as a pet project. They’d play it between gigs, quibble endlessly over its mechanics and text each other at odd hours of the night with new ideas. By the time they reached Singapore, the two had played hundreds of iterations of the game.

    The cafe’s floor-to-ceiling windows flooded its mahogany interior with light as Drake and Gustafson set up their makeshift board and cards. After an hour and a half of intense gameplay — Drake won twice, Gustafson once — Anthromancer began to garner some attention. It wasn’t nearly as much as for their pancakes, but their contacts in the city and even some passersby became engrossed. One even asked if the mall sold it. As the duo began their second pancake art demo of the day, Gustafson felt profoundly satisfied.

    “That was a beautiful moment,” he says. “We’re halfway around the world, and we’re playing this board game that we made in a cafe, and we’re here because we’re doing pancake art.”

    Neither knew at the time that the game would drive them apart, end a decade-old friendship and propel Drake into a business venture even stranger than pancake art. How it happened is clear, but the two still argue over why. Things were simpler in 2018, but even then, Gustafson could see a reckoning coming.

    “I’m like, this game is pretty good, and if we do this right, it could take off,” Gustafson recalls. “And I know, for a fact, Dan’s gonna have to focus on it.”

     

    The pancake and post that would ultimately make Drake go viral.

    BRENT HOLZAPFEL

    The pancake and post that would ultimately make Drake go viral.

    When Drake first tried his hand at pancake art, it was a side job, not a calling.

    The year 2009 found him working the night shift at Courtesy Diner, a greasy spoon on South Kingshighway Boulevard with edible food and adequate service. Prior to Courtesy, Drake hadn’t had any professional experience in the kitchen. As a teenager, he passed his time doodling on his assignments instead of turning them in. He wrote and illustrated his own comic books. He graduated with mediocre grades and skipped college, hungry for “the simple freedom that came with working paycheck to paycheck.” He tried his hand at music and founded a band, his first of three, called the Psychedelic Psychonauts.

    He demanded a spontaneity from life that it hadn’t afforded him thus far. But Drake also needed to pay the bills, which is why at 19, he applied for a job as a fry cook.

    Drake got stuck with the slow shifts until he could earn his place as a cook. They say time is money, but without enough customers to yield substantial tips, Drake was left with a lot of one and little of the other. He had hoped Courtesy would support one artistic career. Little did he know, it would jumpstart another.

    One particularly slow night behind the griddle, Drake recalled the advice of a coworker who told him that adding little mouse ears to the pancakes usually boosted tips. The only customer in the diner was a man named Chad, who seemed to be having a bad day. Drake whipped up a simple smiley face pancake for him. Chad left him $15.

    Drake would come to view this as a “light-bulb moment.” He began to push the boundaries of what pancakes could look like, starting with their shape. A friend showed him how to layer the batter so that some parts of the pancake would darken before others, allowing his designs to become increasingly elaborate. He developed a small following at the diner. People would come for the pancake guy, asking for all sorts of intricate designs. Drake would deliver every time.

    A few years passed in this manner. Drake made pancakes. He churned out stars, dinosaur eggs, jellyfish and even the infamous meme-turned-NFT Nyan Cat to eager customers. He also hadn’t given up on his music career. In the late summer of 2013, Drake wanted the Psychedelic Psychonauts to film a music video. A coworker put Drake in touch with Gustafson, an amateur videographer.

    The music video never happened, but it was the start of a decade-long friendship.

    In November 2013, when he was 23, Drake’s life changed forever. One of his creations went viral on Reddit. It was a rendition of the iconic Mario Bros. mushroom that he’d posted to Facebook almost seven months prior.

    “Daniel, aka ‘that guy from Courtesy Diner that does the thing,’” the post read. Under it, Drake sports a goofy grin as the pancake that would make him famous sits unassumingly on the griddle behind him.

    Drake was in bed when he first went viral. It was late afternoon, and he was resting up for a late shift at Courtesy. Normally, he’d wake up to see the sun setting on his apartment in Tower Grove. Instead, he arose to a barrage of texts from friends, family and coworkers, all with the same thing to say: “Dan, you’re all over Reddit.”

    Next came a whirlwind. Drake’s Facebook page, Dr. Dan the Pancake Man, quickly amassed a substantial following. The Today Show flew him out to New York City the day before Thanksgiving, and his pancake portraits of hosts Matt Lauer and Al Roker were broadcast live to millions. When he returned to St. Louis, fans flooded Drake with requests to appear at their birthday parties and brunches. Within days, he went from scrappy fry cook to local celebrity.

     

    Daniel Drake the pancake artist and co-founder of Dancakes created this week's RFT cover.

    BRADEN MCMAKIN

    Daniel Drake, the pancake artist and co-founder of Dancakes, created this week’s RFT cover.

    As his star rose, Drake was allowed to take one person with him — at least, that’s the number of friends The Today Show offered to fly out. Drake chose Gustafson. The former was creative and spontaneous. The latter was practical and prudent. Both were just crazy enough to “chase the dragon,” as Gustafson puts it. In January 2014, after two months of successful local events and YouTube tutorials, the pair officially incorporated: Dancakes, a professional pancake art business, was born.

    The next eight years would see Drake and Gustafson traverse the globe together. Dancakes took them everywhere including Louisville, Kentucky; Monterey, California; Dubai in the United Arab Emirates; and Hong Kong. Their work was featured on hundreds of companies’ social media platforms, including Disney and Dungeons and Dragons. They flipped pancakes with Steve Harvey and Katy Perry. The two became inseparable, partly because they had only each other for company as they bounced around from gig to gig. But their professional relationship would have been impossible if it weren’t for the genuine friendship on which it was founded.

    That’s the story of how in September of 2018, Gustafson and Drake found themselves in Singapore, making pancakes for schoolchildren in a supermall.

    As for how they found themselves playing Anthromancer in that cafe? That one’s a bit more complicated.

     

    Daniel Drake (back center) and Hank Gustafson (far left) on the red carpet.

    COURTESY DANIEL DRAKE

    Daniel Drake (back center) and Hank Gustafson (far left) on the red carpet.

    The motto of Dancakes is “mistakes are delicious.” For much of his life, it’s been Drake’s motto as well.

    At 33 years old, Drake has made peace with the fact that fitting in isn’t his speciality. As a child, he was “very ponderous” and prone to morbid thoughts.

    “I remember from being a kid where, for instance, I think I was like seven, and I was standing in my bedroom looking at my bookshelf, and it occurred to me that, technically, a car could come through my room at any time and kill me,” he says.

    In middle school, Drake befriended “all the smart kids,” with whom he spent his days playing video games, such as Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dungeons and Dragons. During that time, his parents went through a divorce, and custody arrangements meant he bounced around a lot — to this day, Drake has never lived in one home for more than three years.

    Drake attended high school at Gateway Institute of Technology, while his friends — the ones he would do “all the nerd shit” with — went to the more prestigious Metro Academic and Classical High School. Without his band of misfits, Drake turned inward and developed a chip on his shoulder that hasn’t quite disappeared.

    “On some very, very deep level, I have a crippling fear of being unloved and not having been good enough, and that leading to people wanting to push me away,” he says.

    When Drake was 19, he experienced “the single most fucked up thing that’s ever happened” to him: His 16-year-old stepbrother was shot by his biological mother, who then took her own life.

    Drake’s family had moved through several Christian denominations, yet none could provide a satisfying explanation of how something so devastating could happen in a world that was inherently good. Drake spiraled into what he calls “high school nihilism,” spending joyless shifts at Courtesy contemplating life and death.

    “At that time, I was still laying on my floor after my shifts looking up at my ceiling, dreading the void,” he recalls. “I think there’s a phase where the oncoming inevitability of your own death, like, fucks with you for a minute, you know?”

    Drake seriously considered getting “nihilism” tattooed on his forearm, but his friends talked him out of it. Instead, a year and a half after his stepbrother’s death, he and those same friends did ecstasy together. They piled into his ex’s bathtub while new-age German band Enigma blared in the background, and Drake had a realization: He could imbue a meaningless universe with its own significance.

    “What if I used the pain it made me feel to inspire me to live a more authentic life?” Drake asks. “What’s the worst that’ll happen?”

    Since that epiphany, Drake’s been on a quest to be authentically himself and make money doing it.

    The biggest obstacle? He can be a complex, and often difficult, pill to swallow.

    For starters, he is a staunch advocate of cryptocurrency, which he views as the most viable route to legitimate systemic change. He’s also a self-identified Christian Anarchist, the ethos of which can best be summarized as “no kings but the King of Kings.” Finally, Drake is polyamorous — he finds monogamy too limiting.

    Drake is so fringe that he’s even on the fringe of esoteric groups.

    For instance, cryptocurrency, particularly bitcoin, has developed a reputation on par with that of the “tech bros” of Silicon Valley. Drake has found a home in the ethereum community, which he describes as full of “weird occultist people” like him, but strangers jump to the conclusion that he’s another “entitled-ass white man” salivating over the next get-rich-quick scheme.

    “I’m gonna come across as an asshole to certain people regardless of what I do because I’m loud, because I’m not going to be quiet and small, because there are people who think I should be, because they see me, as a white man, as somehow responsible for everything bad that’s ever been done in capitalism,” he says.

    He also concedes that part of him may simply crave controversy.

    “There is a strengthening of the ego that takes place when you are certain of your correctness about something and you have the strength of character to not care if people malign you, or if you get canceled or whatever,” he says. “There’s definitely a spiritual satisfaction.”

    “Spiritual satisfaction” is something Drake has been in search of his whole life. The advent of Dancakes momentarily threw him off course. However, he resumed his quest in 2015, when he was flown out to So Paulo, Brazil, to appear on a national talk show called Hoje em Dia. Gustafson stayed behind. It was the first time Drake had ever gone out of the country by himself.

    “They just had me down there for a week doing pancake art for folks, and the last day was super high pressure, in the studio live with a bunch of soap opera stars I’d never heard of,” he says. “It was very surreal — I had a translator.”

    The show was a success, and Drake boarded the plane home high on his own sense of accomplishment. He had seven hours in the air to fill and took to flipping through the idea notebook he carried at all times. As he did so, he stirred up the impulse he had as a kid to make his own deck of cards. Then, he had the thought that would change his life, again: Why didn’t he?

    That thought became Anthromancer.

    “I was feeling very empowered,” he recalls. “I credit that state of mind — that, coupled with the seven-hour flight where I was just kind of bored.”

    Drake deplaned and began toying around with paper cutouts of square cards.

    “Over the course of the next seven years, that idea just layered and layered and layered,” he says. “I was making these decisions along the way that kind of put me down a spiritual path — like I wasn’t expecting this at all.”

    So what does this all have to do with pancakes?

    The answer is not much. Which speaks to why, in May of 2022, Drake left Dancakes.

    His departure was hard. Especially because it also meant a departure from Gustafson.

     

    Daniel Drake started Dancakes with his friend Hank Gustafson. He has since left and started The Joy of Pancakes.

    BRADEN MCMAKIN

    Daniel Drake started Dancakes with his friend Hank Gustafson. He has since left and started The Joy of Pancakes.

    Drake and Gustafson hit the ground running when they incorporated Dancakes in 2014, and they didn’t stop for the next six years. In Drake, Gustafson found a dreamer who whisked him from Kingshighway Boulevard to Katy Perry’s kitchen and beyond. In Gustafson, Drake found someone with the business acumen to make those dreams a reality.

    “For the first six years of it, it was gold,” Gustafson says.

    Neither had intended to make a name for themselves selling pancakes. But the internet had spoken, and the money was good.

    “It’s not like we sat there in 2014 and said, ‘Let’s create this.’ It was literally through virality that this became a thing,” Gustafson says. “An article would blow up, and people would reach out and we’d do those events, and then someone would see us with those, so it was just a snowball effect.”

    For Gustafson, Dancakes marked an exciting departure from his previous job in construction, though he did occasionally miss working with his hands. Drake saw the company’s success and his subsequent rise to pancake fame as a considerably more mixed blessing.

    “Courtesy Diner was my frickin’ three-days-a-week day job that I did just to barely pay for my bills, so I could focus all of my other energy on what I really wanted, which was to create a career and be taken seriously for my artistic expression,” Drake says. “Then pancake art comes along, and it makes me go viral, and I get on TV and suddenly there’s this more viable path to economic well-being, and I feel like I’d be stupid not to do it.”

    By 2017, two additional artists had joined Dancakes full-time, marking a new chapter in the company’s development. Dancakes had far surpassed its status as a serendipitous windfall of his former side job — yet, it was still just pancakes.

    “There was definitely a sense of, ‘Shit man, the universe is just punkin’ me.’ Here I am now doing large amounts of low-effort commissions that people eat or throw away right away, and they’re based on what people want, and nobody’s really interested in what I have to say,” Drake says. “When you go to a museum, you’re looking at artists paint[ing] from their souls. It’s really frustrating when that’s what you want, and the universe is like, ‘No, no, no, no, no. You’re gonna be a breakfast jester, and you’re gonna like it. And if you don’t like it, people are gonna resent you for looking a gift horse in the mouth.’”

    Drake became less interested in Dancakes and its members. Artists on the road with him would return and note to Gustafson that he’d been checked out, his mind on music, Anthromancer or somewhere else completely. Even as Drake tired of his work, patrons continued to request him specifically, compounding his pancake art fatigue — and the other artists’ fatigue with him.

    All the while, Drake delved deeper into the realms of cryptocurrency, Eastern philosophy and Anthromancer.

    “There was a mood shift in Dan after he became interested in this stuff,” Gustafson says. “His jovialness kind of went away.”

    Whatever momentum Drake still had came crashing to a halt, along with the rest of the world’s activities, with the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Dancakes’ primary source of income was live events, and with the world on lockdown, the artists found themselves static for the first time in years.

    “[Dan] fell in love with this board game, the music behind it, all this stuff,” Gustafson says. “All these things we had to throw aside when Dancakes became a thing because we were chasing the money, chasing the fame … [We] finally got to reflect on the last seven years.”

    Although Dancakes found inventive ways to sustain itself through the pandemic, the team remained largely unemployed. Drake grew increasingly restless with what he saw as his partners’ lack of vision — a gripe he maintained well after live events trickled back.

    “We were never really making any big moves,” Drake says. “We weren’t like, ‘OK, what’s the big vision?’”

    Meanwhile, Gustafson became frustrated with Drake’s focus on the board game and similar efforts.

    “At the end of the day, when you’re Nike, people know you for shoes,” Gustafson says. “People know us for making pancakes live in front of them. That’s what will always work.”

    But Drake says his primary concern wasn’t with what “will always work” — he “would rather be a messy bitch on Dancakes social media than be reined in all the time.

    “What’s the worst that could happen? The business dies? So what? Wouldn’t it be more interesting to see if it doesn’t?” Drake adds.

    Around this time, he was also grappling with challenges in his personal life. Drake and his second wife, to whom he was married for nearly two years, divorced.

    “That kind of stuff can wear on you,” Gustafson says.

    Drake’s mental health continued to slide, and so did his relationship with his coworkers. In January 2022, Gustafson and the five other artists who comprised Dancakes at that point decided to confront Drake, intervention-style. They gave him an ultimatum: Either go to therapy or lose his power to make executive decisions within the business. He went to therapy.

    “I ended up playing along,” Drake says. “I was like, OK, well, maybe I have been really fucked up and shitty, you know? Maybe I’ve been a bad guy.”

    When he helped stage the intervention, Gustafson meant only the best for what he saw as a friend struggling with his mental health. As the “mom” of the group and someone who had himself grappled with mental illness in the past, he wanted Drake to seek the help he needed.

    “We came into that meeting not even as coworkers [but] as friends,” Gustafson says. “He needed to talk to someone about it, and it wasn’t us because we tried. I sat there and I’m like, ‘We’re not trying to make this an attack at all, but we need to get down to the root of what’s going on.’”

    Although Drake committed to therapy for 12 weeks, Gustafson never felt sure that Drake truly agreed there was a need for it.

    “It was basically like a I’ll-just-do-this-to-humor-you kind of thing,” Gustafson says. “It didn’t seem like he was taking it seriously.”

    Perhaps that’s because Drake saw his coworkers’ confrontation more as an act of betrayal than an act of love.

    “It really fucked with me for a minute,” Drake says. “I realized that they were sort of coming together and wielding power against me, and that’s something I’ve never done to them.”

    Daniel Drake making Barbie pancake art. &n

  • How St. Louis’ Laurell K. Hamilton Created Badass Vampire Hunter Anita Blake

    How St. Louis’ Laurell K. Hamilton Created Badass Vampire Hunter Anita Blake

    BRADEN MCMAKIN

    Laurell K. Hamilton is the author of the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series as well as the popular Merry Gentry, Fey Detective series.

    Anita Blake is a badass bitch. The St. Louisan is not only a vampire hunter turned U.S. Marshall who hunts down and executes supernatural creatures on the wrong side of the law, but she’s one of the most powerful necromancers in the world. If that wasn’t enough for a modern gal, Blake is one third of a vampire triumvirate that boosts the powers of all involved. She has a lot of hot sex — with the triumvirate, vampires and wereanimals — while solving mysteries and generally saving the day.

    This year, she turns 30. Or rather, her books do. Blake is the titular character in St. Louis-based writer Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series. Hamilton is a pioneer in books that blend genres (mystery, fantasy, romance, erotica) and opened the door for many to follow in her footsteps. A New York Times bestselling author of three separate series, Hamilton was born in “the middle of nowhere” Arkansas and moved to an area near Kokomo, Indiana, as a toddler. Inspired by a drugstore dime novel — Pigeons From Hell by Robert Howard — she started writing as a preteen.

    She hasn’t stopped since. As the Anita Blake series hits three decades, I connected with Hamilton over the phone to discuss book 29, Smolder, which published in late March; setting her books in St. Louis; keeping the sex interesting; and more. Head here for an excerpt of Smolder.

    This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

    Congrats on the new book. How does it feel to have been publishing Anita Blake since 1993?

    It’s always amazing because when I first started out, I’d had an earlier series that was going to be four books. But the first book, Night Seer, did not sell well enough, like most first novels don’t, and they did not want the second book. When I got the first Anita Blake contract, it was for three books. I remember going, “There’ll be at least three books in the series.” I had no idea that it would continue to be popular enough and do well enough that I would get the opportunity to publish the 29th book.

    I love what I do. I’ve wanted to do this since I was 14. To be able to have a dream since 14 and not only succeed in that dream, but to still be doing it and still be loving what I do, it just doesn’t get better than that.

    Were there any moments, since 14, where you’ve had doubts?

    Yeah, college. I was in the writing program as a major; I wanted to get a creative writing degree. I entered the writing program with two stories. One was a vampire story, and one was a pastiche of H.P. Lovecraft. But they let me in the program, so I thought they were OK with me writing horror and stuff.

    But two years in, the head of the writing program took me into her office. For between two and four hours — I no longer know — she did everything she could to destroy me as a writer. She told me I was no good. She told me I’d never publish. She sliced and diced me and served me on toast. She did everything she could to destroy me and make sure I’d never write again. Why did she do that? Well, it’s because she let me come into the program writing genre, but she thought she could cure me.

    I would not write again, after she did that to me, for over two years. Since I was 12, especially from 14 on, I’ve written every day, multiple times a day, at least some kind of note. But I would not pick up a pen to do that for two years. I didn’t know if I’d ever write again.

    How did you pick up a pen again?

    Because I’m a writer. That’s what I am. It’s like breathing. I will write till I die.

    What happened, though, is I ended up marrying my college sweetheart, and we moved to California for his job. There was a [writing] contest. I believe every six weeks, I had to have a story to put in. It wasn’t that I thought I would win … so much as I thought it was a deadline. That gave me something to shoot for. It gave me a timeframe. I got back into the habit of writing and telling stories again. I’d had an idea, actually that I’d had since high school, but I’d been too scared to try to write a book. I finally decided, “What do I have to lose?” I would get up at four or five in the morning before work and spend two hours in front of the computer, and I would write two to four pages. I wouldn’t edit as I go, just stack it up beside the computer and then go to work. That is how I wrote most of my first novel.

    How did you decide to place the Anita Blake stories in St. Louis?

    I’m one of those writers that always does a better job if I have walked those streets. If I have been to a place, seen it, touched it. The first book especially, you can literally drive around and find everything. It’s changed since then because one of the houses I use in the first book, Guilty Pleasures, people were knocking on their door looking for the characters.

    I enjoyed Anita trying to figure out how to conceal her gun in the St. Louis humidity.

    The first year to two I lived in St. Louis, every summer was 100-degrees-plus. I mean, it was after coming from California and then northern Indiana. St. Louis was a bit of a shock that first summer, and so there’s so much heat imagery.

     

     

    Smolder is the latest book in the continuing saga of Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter.

    COURTESY PHOTO

    Smolder is the latest book in the continuing saga of Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter.


    Do     any of your favorite St. Louis places get nods in the books?

    I love the Fox Theater. I’ve loved it since the first time I walked in. It’s just so gorgeous and so much fun. I make sure that [characters] go there, have a good time and leave. We never trash the Fox, but I’ve had it [as a setting] at least twice and maybe more. When I lived in St. Charles, I would include the Missouri [River]. It’s so pretty in the summer and shallow enough that you don’t feel you’re going to capsize and injure yourself. The Mississippi is shallow, too, so I’m told, but it’s just so big. I’m not going to put an inner tube on the Mississippi.

    When the series starts, Anita is more traditional, almost prudish. How did that change?

    A fan came up to me at a signing and said, “I’m so glad you’re doing the horror movie trope.” I said, “I don’t know which trope you’re talking about.” And he said, “I’m so glad you’re doing the thing where the virgin survives, and the bad girl dies, like a slasher flick.” I think that’s sexist, and I think that’s horrible. I didn’t tell him all this, but I just said, “No, that’s not my intent.”

    That planted the idea. If one person says that, what I’ve learned is, there are other people thinking it, too. I thought that’s a horrible thing to say. Or a horrible trope. I hate that trope. This idea that if you’re pure and virginal you survive, and if you have sex even once, then you’re marked for death. That is such a negative message for women. I thought, OK, the books have been leading toward it. We’re going to pick one of the guys that we’ve been going back and forth with for several books.

    When I tried to write the scene in book six, where we finally break that barrier, I was so uncomfortable with it. I thought, “What does it say about me as a person and as a writer that I’ve written graphic, graphic death scenes, I mean, murder scenes, horrific murder scenes. I don’t do gratuitous violence. But the violence that was necessary, I did it. And what does it say about me that writing sex between two people who care about each other, and who’ve known each other for five books before this, is more uncomfortable?” I didn’t like what it said about me.

    How does one write a good sex scene?

    One of those things to me about the sex scenes is that if you’re doing it right, they tell about character. You can tell something about somebody in an intimate scene like that, which doesn’t come out any other way. I pride myself on trying to make each person have their own style in the bedroom, their own attitudes and interactions because it’s one of the most personal things we do. And because, especially in this country, we don’t talk about it. I don’t think we understand that it is personal. It’s special, and it should be special.

    I am still getting women — all age groups — saying that before they read my books, they didn’t know sex could be fun for women. There’s something wrong that women still think that they’re not allowed to have fun in the bedroom. It should be a pleasure. It’s a gift. This is a soapbox for me, so I’ll stop.

    Were those responses how you got over your discomfort?

    Yeah, it did encourage me to go: This is supposed to be mutually pleasurable. We’re supposed to enjoy ourselves, everyone participating in a consensual relationship is supposed to enjoy themselves. That’s the point. I was one of the first people that talked about birth control because once I realized that people were using it in a more serious manner than I had anticipated, I made sure that I talked about safety. I made sure I talked about certain things that other people didn’t want at the time. I ended up accidentally stumbling into a niche.

    I will add this: I have actually seen some writers online where editors at some smaller houses ask them for sex scenes when there’s no need for it. Don’t do that. Trust your novel, trust your book. If it needs it to succeed, do it, and do a good job. But if it doesn’t need to be there, don’t put it in there.

    You were the first or one of the first to write genre-blending books and books with lots of sex, polyamorous relationships. How does it feel to have opened the door for other writers?

    Well, you’re welcome. First of all, when I was first trying to sell the series, even though it took a while for some of the content to get to where it is, nobody knew what to do with it. The first book was rejected over 200 times. But because I was popular, it opened the door for everybody that’s come after. I love the fact that poly and alternate lifestyles are being better represented, because that is important. Representation matters.

    I’m very happy that so many people came in behind me and expanded it. The only thing is the earlier caveat. I think some writers are feeling forced to put things in their books that they’re not comfortable writing. I don’t agree with that. But other than that, it’s great.

    You’ve had a great amount of success, but you’ve probably taken a lot of flak. Are you able to brush it off?

    When it initially started happening, it hurt more. But over the years, you get a thicker skin, or you just can’t stay in the business. Because the early books had no sex in them, when the sex started coming up, especially polyamory started coming up, I would have people come to signings, and they would smile and nod and talk about the books and hand their book over to be signed. Then they would call me a whore to my face for writing it, say Anita was a whore. The first time it happened, it was like, “Wow, OK.” But I got used to it. Which is a sad thing to say, isn’t it? I say, “‘Whore’ implies that you take money for sex. And since Anita doesn’t, and I don’t, then that’s not the correct definition.” They would always agree with me.

    The fact that I have a pat answer for that insult is sad. But they would always get their books signed first, no matter what they say to me, no matter how insulting they are. There have been other things, but that one has happened the most often. But you know what? Owning your sexuality as a woman doesn’t make you a bad person. It means you have ownership of yourself. That is never a bad thing. Anybody that thinks otherwise — that’s their issue, not mine.

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  • Eric Nepute Is Being Sued for Spreading COVID Misinformation — 10 Million Times

    Eric Nepute Is Being Sued for Spreading COVID Misinformation — 10 Million Times

    Screengrab

    Eric Nepute says that he’s just trying to keep people healthy and sell vitamins. The FTC says that he’s made more than 10 million misleading claims about COVID-19.

    Talk radio is not known for its brevity, and the teaser for Eric Nepute’s radio show is no exception.

    “Even before all the COVID craziness, Dr. Eric Nepute has been a fighter for truth, health and freedom,” it begins. “And he is respected not only in the St. Louis area, but worldwide. Now he’s inviting his like-minded colleagues and friends to help. The so-called government health experts are putting their agenda before your health and well-being and Dr. Eric and friends are debunking the evil …”

    No one should be surprised to learn Nepute broadcasts on a conservative radio station, in this case Real Talk 93.3 FM. He comes on air introduced as “the Rock Doc” while Europe’s “Final Countdown” plays in the background.

    He typically starts the show by giving a rundown of the day’s headlines most likely to alarm and outrage his listeners. A recent episode in January was no exception: Another young athlete had mysteriously dropped dead; the United Kingdom announced there had been 1,000 more deaths of young people per week in 2022 than in previous years; the debt-ceiling limit would soon be reached; millions of taxpayer dollars were going to “transgender training of trout and other weird animals in the Middle East.”

    “You’re not going to believe some of this stuff because you’re not seeing it in the mainstream media,” Nepute told his listeners.

    As with many things on Real Talk with Dr. Eric Nepute and Friends, there is some key information missing. While it is true that both the U.K. and the U.S. have seen upticks in deaths of young people, it has not been at a rate of 1,000 per week in the U.K. and most experts place the blame for the excess deaths on COVID-19 and other pandemic-related knock-on effects and not, as Nepute would later imply, the COVID-19 vaccine. Numerous Google searches for different combinations of “transgender”a and “trout” failed to turn up any results.

    “You need to listen to people who are free thinking, who have common sense and rational logic,” Nepute said. Then he gave a shout out to his chief nemeses. “Good morning, FTC; good morning, DOJ. Hope you guys are having a blessed day. That’s right folks, they literally listen to every word we say because we are in a police state. Our Constitution is literally being trampled upon, ripped up and quite honestly urinated on by these crazy left-leaning — I don’t even know what to call them — lunatics. They’re just lunatics.”

    While this may sound like right-wing paranoia, Nepute was actually spot on about one thing. The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice were almost certainly listening in.

     

    Eric Nepute operates two wellness centers, including this one in South County.

    RYAN KRULL

    Eric Nepute operates two wellness centers, including this one in South County.

    Nepute says that he was raised by a pig farmer in central Illinois and that his parents taught him to “stand up against tyranny.” Growing up, he wanted to be a doctor and says he was enrolled in medical school at Northwestern when he suffered a football injury. The pain from the injury lingered until he visited a chiropractor who helped, inspiring Nepute to become a chiropractor himself.

    After studying chiropractic medicine at Missouri’s Logan University, he earned a Ph.D. in natural medicine from Honolulu’s Quantum University, a “self paced, online learning university.” He followed that with a certification from the Carrick Institute in quantum neurology, a chiropractic practice described in one Medscape article as “word salad” pseudoscience.

    In addition to hosting his morning radio show, Nepute operates wellness centers in Creve Coeur and south county where patients can get an infusion of vitamins or a spinal decompression.

    Nepute also owns Wellness Warrior, a company that sells vitamins and supplements, as well as a “Thyroid Masterclass” workshop and books such as The Parasite Cleanse. He has said numerous times on his show that his company is giving away a million bottles of vitamin D and zinc for free.

    Nepute is a natural broadcaster with a keen ability to deliver a message with urgency, an energy that can’t be easy to sustain for a two-hour broadcast. A prolific user of social media, he often shoots livestreams wearing dark-colored scrubs branded with the Nepute Wellness logo, a medical chart of some sort behind him.

    In December, Nepute was in different attire in a slightly different setting. He wore a suit at the federal courthouse in St. Louis, where he waited in a 10th floor lobby in front of a window overlooking Busch Stadium. He is bald, clean-shaven and broad-shouldered and still has the build of guy who played football in college. One room over, Nepute’s lawyers were conferring with lawyers from the DOJ, hashing out an agreement to avoid Nepute being held in contempt of court. Despite what was going on in the next room, Nepute came across as affable.

    Nepute holds the distinction of being the first person to be sued by the Federal Trade Commission under the COVID-19 Consumer Protection Act, a law that took effect in December 2020. It regulates how products can be advertised in relation to COVID-19. The goal is to prevent unsubstantiated claims that certain products can cure or prevent COVID-19. Whether Nepute’s rhetoric merely tests the bounds of this law or tramples it will be decided later this year by a jury of Nepute’s peers.

    Since getting sued, Nepute has been telling anyone who will listen that he’s a victim of tyrannical government. When asked, he said that he couldn’t talk about the status of his case, explaining that he didn’t want to incur the wrath of his attorneys by talking to the media (though he regularly pops up on right-wing media to talk about it). Instead, he mentions his website, fightwitheric.com. (He might have thought twice about that URL.) The website’s landing page features a graphic of Nepute standing in front of a pair of jack-booted thugs, a strip of duct tape over his mouth, censored and silenced.

    On a recent podcast, Nepute referred to the COVID-19 Consumer Protection Act, the law he’s allegedly run afoul of, as “a brand-new law that nobody knew about until I was sued for half a trillion dollars.”

    Nepute says that the government is trying to bankrupt him just for merely suggesting people take vitamins to stay healthy.

    But suggesting people take vitamins is only part of the story.

     

    Eric Nepute would live stream medical advice on Facebook before he got his radio show. He also has YouTube videos about wellness.

    SCREENGRAB

    Eric Nepute would live stream medical advice on Facebook before he got his radio show. He also has YouTube videos about wellness.

    In December 2018, prior to becoming an FM radio host, Nepute live streamed via his public-figure Facebook page. Many of these live streams have since been deleted, but by 2020, if not sooner, he was interspersing his monologues on health, wellness and nutrition with advertisements encouraging his listeners to buy vitamins from Wellness Warrior, the company he owns.

    Even those dubious about his credentials or the underlying science of some of his claims would be hard-pressed to question his sincerity. He says he gathered his information from years of working as a chiropractor. He only occasionally veers into the overheated bombast that right-wing talk radio is known for, and in such cases it is almost always the topic of the FTC lawsuit that brought him there.

    The FTC is tasked with enforcing laws against deceptive advertising and other fraudulent business practices. It couldn’t care less what Nepute thinks about vitamins or anything else. But it cares a great deal how Wellness Warrior advertises its products. In hawking his vitamins, the FTC says, Nepute disseminated misinformation and exploited fears in the midst of a pandemic.

    In March 2020, the vaccine-to-be-skeptical-of was a long way away. But Nepute was dubious of the need for lockdowns, saying that the pandemic shouldn’t even qualify as a pandemic. The virus, he said, would be nothing to worry about so long as people took their high-dose infusions of vitamin C and saw a good chiropractor.

    “You don’t need to be sitting at home right now scared that you’re going to die from some virus,” he added. “You know what you need to do? Get yourself adjusted. Get yourself your vitamins.”

    In May of 2020, the FTC, which issues regulations specifically focused on advertising on social media, sent Nepute a letter warning him that he was making “unsubstantiated claims” on his show.

    Nepute ignored the warning and kept live streaming.

    Then in April 2021, the FTC again contacted Nepute, this time in the form of a lawsuit.

    Crucially, in between the warning letter and the lawsuit, Donald Trump had signed the COVID-19 Consumer Protection Act into law, making it illegal “to engage in a deceptive act or practice in or affecting commerce associated with the treatment, cure, prevention, mitigation, or diagnosis of COVID–19.”

    The FTC said Nepute had violated the then-five-month-old law, alleging that he said vitamins “are more effective than the available COVID-19 vaccines.”

    Nepute has very publicly disputed the FTC’s claims, saying numerous times that he’s never told anyone not to get the vaccine and that he’s never made statements like that in conjunction with advertising his Wellness Warrior products.

    “They took my words and lied about them. They said that I told people if you take vitamin D you don’t need a vaccine. I never said that,” he said in a video.

    Anyone listening to Nepute’s radio show or live streams has heard him say something to the effect of, “if you want a shot, get a shot.” But he’s also said that the COVID-19 vaccine is “a genetic-modification therapeutic tool.” He has claimed that the mRNA vaccine killed all the cats, ferrets and monkeys unlucky enough to be its test subjects.

    Suzanne Alexander, the bureau chief for St. Louis’ Communicable Disease Division, tells the RFT that the mRNA vaccine is not altering anyone’s DNA. To explain how that vaccine works, she used the analogy of a car engine.

    “Let’s call the DNA your actual engine. Your mRNA is going to be your fluids that go into your engine, like your oil, your transmission fluid, your brake fluid, all that good stuff. The way you maintain your fluids in your car engine is going to impact the way your engine works, but it will not fundamentally change your engine,” she says.

    Nepute has also told his listeners that “the vaccine is going to make spike proteins in the brain cells and the lungs, in the testicles, in every tissue in your body. So it’s pretty crazy. We need to stop those spike proteins from being attached and sticking to the cells. Vitamin D stops that. So that’s why I’m such a big fan of vitamin D and zinc.”

    Nepute is not totally wrong. The spike protein is a feature of the coronavirus, and the mRNA does create spike proteins in your body. But this is precisely why the vaccine works, according to the CDC. Over the course of a few weeks, your immune system learns how to destroy these spike proteins so that if the COVID-19 virus shows up in your body, your immune system will know how to destroy it.

    The FTC says that Nepute is free to express whatever he wants about spike proteins, mRNA, vitamins and the vaccine as a journalist, a chiropractor or just a regular person with opinions. But he’s not free to make these statements in the context of advertising.

    In the same broadcast in which he talked about spike proteins going into your testicles and the ferrets who died from the mRNA tests, he also encouraged listeners 11 times to go to freevitamindeals.com.

    Nepute’s attorneys have said in court filings that they believe the case is government overreach overly reliant on selective snippets of videos and audio taken from broadcasts that sometimes ran for two hours.

    Nepute’s attorneys also cite mainstream medical experts talking about the benefits of vitamins during the pandemic. One filing quotes Dr. Anthony Fauci, Trump’s former chief medical advisor, who said during a September 2020 Instagram Live event that, “If you are deficient in vitamin D, that does have an impact on your susceptibility to infection. So I would not mind recommending, and I do it myself, taking vitamin D supplements.”

    Filings also reference the National Institutes of Health’s website, which says, “Your immune system needs vitamin D to fight off invading bacteria and viruses.”

    When the FTC filed its lawsuit in April 2021, it asked the judge to issue a preliminary injunction against Nepute. To avoid this, Nepute agreed to a consent order in which he didn’t concede any wrongdoing but did agree he wouldn’t broadcast certain claims in connection to Wellness Warrior ads, particularly that vitamins could be used to “cure, mitigate, treat or prevent COVID-19.”

    Both parties signed onto those terms on May 5, 2021. Nepute subsequently moved his broadcast to terrestrial radio, and the government says that over those FM airwaves he violated his end of the agreement.

    On February 4, 2022, Nepute acknowledged on his radio show that the government was taking action against him and then said, “Here’s a big old up your nose with a rubber hose, federal government. Have a listen to this. Brand-new study confirms that vitamin D significantly, significantly reduces the risk of dying from COVID-19.”

    That same broadcast Nepute said that vitamin D is “a hell of a lot more beneficial than these shots that people are taking.” He added: “Federal government asked me not to do this anymore and so, here’s what I’m going to say to them. Uh, go to freevitamindeals.com. That’s freevitamindeals.com.”

    Dr. Erik Dubberke, a professor at Washington University School of Medicine, has evaluated Nepute’s claims on behalf of the government, and he’s written that Nepute’s on-air statements are often based on single studies, which Nepute ignores many key aspects of while mischaracterizing their results.

    In addition to being an MD, Dubberke is an epidemiologist as well as the medical director of infection prevention and control at Missouri Baptist Medical Center. In court filings, he went through many of Nepute’s statements about vitamins and COVID-19, again and again labeling them as misleading.

    According to Dubberke, Nepute commonly takes a study that has found an interesting correlation — for instance, between vitamin D levels and a person’s likelihood of catching COVID-19 — and communicates it to his audience as if it has proved a causation.

    Like Dubberke, Suzanne Alexander with the city’s Communicable Disease Division is significantly less bullish on vitamin D than Nepute is. She points out that COVID-19 tends to hit worse in the winter when people are inside, so it makes sense that patients hospitalized with COVID-19 after those winter waves would have low vitamin D. Also, she says, taking vitamin megadoses comes with its own risks.

    “There is a problem called hypercalcemia,” she says, referring to a buildup of calcium in the blood, caused by taking too much vitamin D, which can potentially lead to severe kidney issues.

    “If you have someone who is saying, ‘Take megadoses of vitamins,’ and that person has not done their due diligence by having blood tests taken first, you’ve got someone who is essentially saying, ‘I don’t know what your biochemistry is, but here, take this drug,’” Alexander says.

    Over the past year, Nepute has become something of a cause célèbre in corners of the internet where people are skeptical of the federal government’s response to COVID-19. He’s appeared on numerous conservative podcasts and radio shows, saying he’s a victim of censorship and that the government is afraid to go to trial so instead is trying to bankrupt him through legal fees.

    He’s spent $3.5 million on his legal defense so far, he says, and expects to spend a million more. Donations can be made to his website, he adds.

    Many fringe media outlets have run headlines about how the federal government is suing Nepute for half a trillion dollars. That figure, which is about 2 percent of the country’s entire GDP for last year, seems absurd on its face. But as is often the case with Nepute, there is a soupçon of truth in the statement.

    The FTC charged Nepute with more than 10 million violations of the COVID-19 Consumer Protection Act — 10,175,234, to be exact — and wouldn’t reveal how it arrived at this exact number.

    Court filings from the FTC state that the maximum penalty for each violation is $43,792.

    Put those two numbers together and, purely in theory, Nepute could be on the hook for something like half a trillion dollars.

    In actuality, that’s not going to happen. The FTC says that when it assesses how much an individual defendant should pay, it takes into account the amount of money fraud victims were taken for as well as what would be appropriate punitive fines.

    The biggest fine in FTC history is $5 billion against Facebook. Nepute will not be coughing up 100 times more than Mark Zuckerberg and company did. Fines in the dietary supplement area tend to be in the hundreds of thousands, and the figures are typically lower in cases where the defendant is an individual and not a behemoth corporation.

    But all that hasn’t stopped Nepute from saying, in the third person, “Here’s what the government of the United States of America told us: ‘We drew our sword against Dr. Nepute. We’re not putting our sword away until there’s blood on it.’”

    The martyrdom and federal prosecution could be lending Nepute legitimacy. Real Talk with Dr. Nepute airs on a station with shows from former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly, Trump lawyer Rudy Guiliani, and the man who is believed to have originated the idea that Biden’s electoral victory was made possible by fake ballots printed on Chinese bamboo paper. Among this crowd, there is no greater imprimatur of street cred than having the screws put to you by the feds.

    In many ways, Nepute’s case isn’t that different from typical FTC lawsuits.

    In 2013, the agency went after the makers of POM Wonderful for claims the company made about the juice curing prostate cancer. The FTC prevailed and the juice makers had to pay a fine.

    In 2019, the agency sued the makers of a jellyfish extract supplement, arguing their advertisements claimed the capsules cured dementia. That one was dismissed by the judge before trial.

    However, assuming Nepute’s case makes it to trial, it will be wholly unlike most FTC cases because pomegranate juice and jellyfish pills haven’t become politically polarized in the same way the vaccine has.

    It’s going to be very difficult to find jurors who don’t have strongly held beliefs about the pandemic. Poll after poll has found that someone’s beliefs about the danger of COVID-19, the efficacy and safety of the vaccine and the government’s response to the pandemic depend in large part on what political party the person prefers.

    Alicia Campbell, an attorney who studies juries and who has argued many cases in federal court, says that it’s up to the judge to determine what questions can be asked of potential jurors during jury selection.

    “This is a really interesting case because it does implicate jurors a little more personally,” she says. “You’ve either affirmatively chosen to get a vaccine or you have affirmatively chosen not to. And that’s very personal. It’s not like deciding a case over a car wreck.”

    She says that attorneys would likely want to know a potential juror’s vaccine status, but there’s a good chance the judge wouldn’t allow such a question to be asked.

    Campbell also adds that even though this isn’t technically a First Amendment case, “I would think, for people who are anti-vaxxers, it could seem like it is.”

    Court filings suggest that the government may call Dubberke, the Washington University professor of medicine, as an expert witness, but he likely won’t be the only medical doctor to testify.

    One name that Nepute’s attorneys will likely bring up in the courtroom is that of Boston University researcher Michael Holick.

    One of the statements Nepute made that the FTC sited in its suit was, “Boston University’s Dr. Michael Holick found … that people who have enough vitamin D are 54 percent less likely to catch coronavirus in the first place.”

    The complaint against Nepute says that he was telling his audience the study found a causation between vitamin D and not catching COVID-19 when in fact the study’s only finding was that it established “further rationale to explore” a possible causal relationship.

    However, Holick’s own comments to his hometown newspaper seem to be not at all that different from what Nepute is being taken to court for saying.

    “The higher your vitamin D status, [the] lower was your risk,” Holick told the Boston Herald in September 2020. “I think that the message is that everyone should consider improving their vitamin D status — especially in the era of COVID, by taking a vitamin D supplement,” Holick said to another Boston news radio station around that same time.

    An important distinction is that Holick isn’t saying those statements in the context of advertising. But still, it’s not hard to imagine what that will look like to a jury of Nepute’s Missouri peers.

    We welcome tips and feedback. Email the author at [email protected] or follow on Twitter at @RyanWKrull.

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  • Remembering Mississippi Nights, St. Louis’ Most Iconic Nightclub

    Remembering Mississippi Nights, St. Louis’ Most Iconic Nightclub

    SEAN DERRICK

    Alanis Morissette at Mississippi Nights on September 1, 1995.

    Editor’s Note: Garrett and Stacy Enloe love music and actually met at a concert at the now-shuttered American Theater (they were seeing Jackyl). Marriage followed in 2000, and then in 2016, they won a piece of St. Louis music history: a portion of the Mississippi Nights awning. That spurred Garrett to make a Mississippi Nights fan page on Facebook for the venue that opened in 1976 and shuttered in 2007.

    The page soon had 2,000 members recalling working at, playing or attending concerts at the venue. That energetic fan base inspired the book Mississippi Nights: A History of the Music Club in St. Louis, which came out in October. Part scrapbook, part oral history, the book also features a comprehensive list of every band that ever played the venue. It shares photos, ticket stubs, concert fliers, setlists and band photos, as well as stories like the one about the time Hole performed and Courtney Love said she was sick and fell over, or that time Nirvana nearly started a riot. It also highlights the characters of Mississippi Nights, including the Cookie Lady and Beatle Bob.

    Below are excerpts from the book that capture what made the all-ages venue an iconic part of St. Louis for 30 years.

    Welcome to Mississippi Nights

     

    Mississippi Nights on Laclede's Landing was an all-ages concert venue.

    PAUL HILCOFF

    Mississippi Nights on Laclede’s Landing was an all-ages concert venue.

    Los Angeles had the Whiskey a Go Go, Troubadour and the Roxy Theater.

    New York City had CBGB, Studio 54 and the Palladium.

    St. Louis had Mississippi Nights.

    Mississippi Nights, appropriately promoted as “The Music Club of St. Louis,” operated from 1976 until 2007 and was located in the historic Laclede’s Landing section of downtown St. Louis at 914 North First Street.

    To get to Mississippi Nights, you drove past the Gateway Arch grounds, under the ornate arches of the Eads Bridge, over several blocks of cobblestone streets and past century-old buildings that once housed fur traders, slaughterhouses and dry-goods warehouses. The old, weathered brick building had character with its arched doorways and windows. The color variation in the bricks suggested that once there were more windows and doors, removed for unknown reasons. The Eads Bridge, spanning the mighty Mississippi River, could be seen from the parking lot on the south side of the building.

    Upon entering the wooden door on the right, you were in a vestibule surrounded by signed 8×10 band photographs in black frames. To the left, past the second door, were a couple of video games; a pinball machine; a cigarette machine; some round, white-topped tables with black, wooden chairs; a small bar in the corner; and another set of doors that sometimes opened to accommodate large crowds. It was a short walk forward to have your ID checked, hand stamped and ticket torn.

    To the right was the bar with wood paneling up the back wall, neon beer signs and open shelves of liquor and glasses. Following a sloped walk down past two tiers of additional tables and chairs on the left (the first tier also housed the sound mixer), the walkway opened, revealing restrooms and the underage section (the raised area often referred to as the “kiddie corral”) on the right, and to the left was the dance floor and stage.

    The stage was covered with parquet flooring and elevated about three and a half feet off the floor. A small walkway to the right of the stage led to the back door and, behind the building, steep metal steps where the bands loaded out their equipment at the end of the night. (Fortunately for the crew, they were able to load in through the front door into the empty venue in the morning.) Sometimes, metal barricades blocked the front of the stage, but often you could press yourself right up against this platform in front of your favorite band.

    Chuck McPherson* Remembers…
    “What was special about Mississippi Nights? The people. The atmosphere. The smell. The experience. You could not only see a good show but meet the artist. It was seeing up-and-coming bands before everyone else, as well as bands on the way down. It was all-ages shows in a bar atmosphere. I was underage and limited to the floor and the side of the stage for much of my time there, but it didn’t matter. To borrow the phrase, it was the most magical place on Earth. Mississippi Nights was one of the places where I spent much of my mid-teens to early adult years. I made friends at the club that I still have to this day. It’s a place I will never, ever forget. No other club can compare. 914 North First Street will be in my heart until the day I die.”

    *Mississippi Nights patron

    Several factors contributed to the longevity and popularity of Mississippi Nights. [The venue] did an excellent job of booking shows and showcased a variety of music genres, unlike many clubs that catered to one genre. The sound system was incredible, appealing to the audiences and the musicians. The staff was welcoming and made the club feel like a second home to many. Finally, you were able to get up close and personal with the bands — in front of the stage as they played, at the bar while they drank, or outside as they came and went.

    Being the best place to experience music in St. Louis for so many years, countless people forged new relationships and memories at Mississippi Nights. Many concertgoers developed friendships that would last a lifetime with the staff or fellow patrons. Some went to the club on first dates or even met their spouse there. The memories run the gamut from meeting bands, the friendly staff, amazing performances and crazy incidents (some involving liquor).

    Mississippi Nights was a treasure in St. Louis. Unfortunately, as time passes, memories fade. … So, we preserve those memories and the music that Mississippi Nights produced for 30 years with this book.

    Angela Prada* Remembers…

    “Mississippi Nights was lightning in a bottle. Having worked there, I have to say everyone felt they were part of the show, not just watching it. There was a true sense of community and a love of music between patrons, staff and the bands. No one complained about it being hot, crowded, smoky or that they were eating popcorn out of a trash can. They were there to see the show.”

    *Mississippi Nights server

    1867: Pork Packers

    Although the building may date as early as the 1830s, the first confirmed business in the Mississippi Nights building does not appear in records until 1868. James Reilley & Co. Pork Packers may have lasted for less than a decade, but the business is responsible for one of the signature features of the club, the floor that began to slope as you passed the ticket window.

    Documents from 1868 declare the building was owned by James Reilley, David A. Spellen and Michael McEnnis. The 1874 book St. Louis: The Commercial Metropolis of the Mississippi Valley contains an advertisement for James Reilley & Co. Pork Packers, located at 914, 916 and 918 North Main Street. “Pork Packers” is a euphemism for a slaughterhouse or meat processing facility. The building’s signature slanted floor, eventually bordered by the bar and the over-21 seating section, was designed to drain blood from animal carcasses.

    Becoming Mississippi Nights*

     

    Joe Haynes, Michael Stipe, Jim Warchol, and Buddy Weber of Stipe’s pre-REM band Bad Habits, November 13, 1978.

    JOHN KORST

    Joe Haynes, Michael Stipe, Jim Warchol, and Buddy Weber of Stipe’s pre-REM band Bad Habits, November 13, 1978.

    Steve Duebelbeis started Mississippi Nights after attending live concerts at clubs in Springfield, Missouri. He appreciated how the clubs featured more than just cover bands. Duebelbeis looked at the space, which was previously a nightclub called On the Rox, and bought the building on August 30, 1976.

    Duebelbeis sold the venue to real estate investor Rich Frame in 1979. He owned it until it closed in 2007.

    *Editor’s note

    1983: The Grandmother of Rock & Roll

    Pat Lacey’s name is connected with Mississippi Nights more than anyone who worked there in the club’s 30-year history. She began her association with the club by taking her daughter Sarah and her friends to concerts at Mississippi Nights.

    On the night of the X show, October 24, 1983, [owner] Rich Frame asked Lacey if she knew of anyone who would want an office job at the club. Frame knew she worked as a nurse, so he was surprised when she responded, “Yes, me!”

    With her husband laid off and their daughter Susan in college, Lacey needed another job to make ends meet.

    Lacey admits she did a terrible job in her interview with Frame. She kept reinforcing that she didn’t have any experience and was uncertain she could do the job. However, with his knack for reading people, Frame had the confidence in Lacey that she lacked, and he hired her on the spot.

    Frame speaks of Lacey with reverence. “She did everything,” he asserts. She juggled nursing and rock & roll for four years before leaving her nursing job to dedicate her time to the club.

    Lacey broke down her duties. “I wrote the checks, sold tickets, did the inventory and the ordering. I did the pouring costs, which was how much we spent on alcohol and whether we made a profit or not, and I did the same thing with shows. When [manager] Patrick [Hagin] left [in 1990], I stepped in and took on a lot more. I was doing everything that he did: doing the contracts, going to the bank, making sure the shows were advanced, so that we knew what time bands were coming in and what time they wanted to be fed, etcetera,” Lacey says. “I was the den mother there. I took care of the bands. A lot of them became my friends.”

     

    Danny, Mike (holding their RFT Slammie Award) and Steve of New World Spirits, and Brandi Welti, December 3, 1996.

    ANDY MAYBERRY

    Danny, Mike (holding their RFT Slammie Award) and Steve of New World Spirits, and Brandi Welti, December 3, 1996.

    “Lacey had many jobs,” says manager Tim Weber (1998- 2007), “but arguably her most important job was to advance the shows.”

    She organized hospitality events for bands and their crews, including solving problems before they arrived.

    Jason Voigt* Remembers…

    The only event I attended at Mississippi Nights was Joan Jett & the Blackhearts on October 27, 2006. Eagles of Death Metal opened. They rocked the house, but there were other things on people’s minds that night; that was the same night the St. Louis Cardinals won their first World Series since ’82. There were no TVs on, and this was before smartphones. Suddenly, people were yelling right in the middle of a song. Everyone knew it happened. I left the concert early and joined in on the fun outside as people were happily shouting and cheering on the Landing.

    *Mississippi Nights patron

    “She’d call up and say, ‘Do you really need four gallons of hummus?’ She was able to do it in the nicest possible way so that every band that showed up was in a good mood when they got there,” Weber says. “If you screw that up, every band shows up in a shitty mood, and the days are wrecked. So that tiny little thing of making the bands understand ahead of time that they were going to be cared for at least gave you a running shot to start every day pretty good.” Lacey made the bands happy, everyone’s job more manageable, and Mississippi Nights more successful.

    “Absolutely nobody tops the legend that is Pat Lacey,” proclaims Mississippi Nights patron Chuck McPherson. “She was the heart and soul of the club. … She always treated me and my friends like her children. She got to know us on a first-name basis and was supportive of us in our love for music.”

    Patron Michelle Weber Rigden says, “Pat Lacey was my concert mom. She was so kind and nurturing, but I also knew she would take my ass out if I misbehaved as a minor.”

    Patron Wade Monnig says, “Pat Lacey was always amazing, always so nice and sweet. I’d always go see the Alarm at Mississippi Nights, not just because they were a great band [but] because Pat was so passionate about them. I wanted to support her!”

    Lacey decided to retire the year she turned 65, thinking that’s just what you do at age 65, and at the end of 2002, she did.

    In May 2003, Lacey entered Mississippi Nights with a gift of strawberry shortcake for the staff. She quickly learned that her replacement was having problems managing the office. For example, he wrote checks out for every invoice without checking if they were already paid.

     

    A signed promo shot of one of St. Louis' breakout glam bands King of the Hill.

    COURTESY RICH FRAME

    A signed promo shot of one of St. Louis’ breakout glam bands King of the Hill.

    Before long, Mississippi Nights had substantial credits with the vendors. Tim Weber asked Lacey to return, and she agreed to come back two days a week. After that, she didn’t think of retiring from Mississippi Nights again and worked there through February 2007. “The Nights officially closed at the end of January, but I needed to clean out the office,” she remembers.

    At 84 years old in 2022, Lacey wishes she could still be working at her beloved Mississippi Nights.

    “[Pat Lacey] was the grandmother of rock & roll,” says Tim Weber. “She cared more about more people and more bands than anybody I’ve ever met in my life.” He adds, “I still get tour managers at the Old Rock House that remember Pat Lacey.”

    Tony P. Pona* Remembers…

    “I worked at Mississippi Nights for 10 years, so I have many memories of the place. One that stands out is the night of [the] Alvin Lee [concert] when Bon Jovi’s Richie Sambora was sitting stage right in a packed house [on October 31, 1984]. I believe [Bon Jovi was] playing in town the same week of Alvin Lee, got in early, and [was] bummin’ in the city. Absolutely every lady in the place knew who Sambora was. He was just there to see Alvin Lee. I worked secondary security. We kept the public away from Sambora (for the most part). He did sign and take a few pics, though.”

    *Mississippi Nights stagehand and security

    1990: The Eyes/Pale Divine

    Opening an exciting new decade for St. Louis music, Richard Fortus was the guitar player of arguably the most popular local band in St. Louis, the Eyes. Fortus founded the band six years earlier when he was merely 15 with vocalist Michael Schaerer, bassist Steve Hanock and drummer Greg Miller (later in Radio Iodine and Suave Octopus). Hanock left the band before 1990 and was replaced with Dan Angenend.

    The Eyes rose through the ranks of local bands in St. Louis, constantly playing at the under-21 club Animal House, Kennedy’s 2nd Street Company (that would come to be known simply as Kennedy’s) on Laclede’s Landing, and Mississippi Nights.

     

    Stewart Copeland of The Police on March 16, 1979.

    DEBBY MIKLES

    Stewart Copeland of The Police on March 16, 1979.

    One night in 1990, record executive Jason Flom saw a line of people waiting in the rain to get into 1227, a club on Washington Avenue in downtown St. Louis, to see the Eyes. Flom was famous for signing hard-rock bands like Skid Row and Twisted Sister. So he decided to send his assistant to Mis

  • Former St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch Has No Regrets

    Former St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch Has No Regrets

    DANNY WICENTOWSKI

    Bob McCulloch served as St. Louis County prosecutor from 1991 to 2018.

    This story was commissioned by the River City Journalism Fund as the second chapter in its series Shadow of Death, which considers St. Louis County’s use of the death penalty.

    On the night of the 2018 Democratic primary election, St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch, a 28-year veteran of the job, held what he expected to be his victory party at the Village Bar in Des Peres.

    He’d won election and reelection by a wide margin seven times, often running unopposed. By all accounts, he expected to be delivered an eighth term that night.

    But with a little more than half the vote in, he was trailing Ferguson City Councilman Wesley Bell by six points. Journalists who had expected McCulloch’s win to be a nonstory suddenly had trouble reaching him and his staff. By the time all the votes had been counted he’d lost by 13 points, a staggering defeat.

    McCulloch had garnered significant media attention, much of it negative, when he announced the grand jury’s non-indictment of Darren Wilson in November 2014 for the shooting death of Michael Brown.

    An investigation from Eric Holder’s Department of Justice ultimately agreed that it could not be proven that Wilson had violated any law, but McCulloch delivered his 45-minute announcement in a way many found to be cold and cavalier. He said that Brown’s death had been tragic but also painted his own office as something of a victim, saying that the biggest impediment to its investigation had been the media’s “insatiable appetite for something, for anything, to talk about.” He balked at the notion that his own law enforcement background might have made him partial to Wilson.

    “After he didn’t indict Darren Wilson for the murder of Mike Brown, he sort of became this law-and-order hero,” says Rodney Brown, an activist who worked to unseat McCulloch in St. Louis in 2018 and is now an organizer in San Antonio.

    McCulloch’s legacy, as well as his electoral defeat, has been defined largely by those days in 2014 when he became an avatar for over-policing and the nascent Blue Lives Matter movement.

    A less examined and underappreciated — though not unrelated — aspect of his almost three decades as the so-called top cop for St. Louis County’s million residents is his office’s relationship to the death penalty.

    In his 28 years as prosecutor, McCulloch won death sentences against 23 people. Ten have been put to death. Frank Baumgartner, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, calls McCulloch “very, very much outside the norm … nationwide, McCulloch qualifies as one of the most active users of the death penalty.”

    A third of the individuals currently on Missouri death row came out of St. Louis County during McCulloch’s tenure. Three have scheduled execution dates in the next four months — including Kevin Johnson, who is set to be executed on Tuesday, November 29.

    Given the number of men from St. Louis County who have been executed, and given the six people currently on death row, capital punishment may be McCulloch’s most lasting legacy.

    “It’s simply punishment”

     

    Bob McCulloch at a press conference.

    DANNY WICENTOWSKI

    At a 2017 press conference, Bob McCulloch announced his office’s decision not to indict officer Darren Wilson — a decision that spurred police-accountability activists to rally around the goal of removing him from office.

    McCulloch has kept a low media profile since leaving office, but in a two-hour conversation on a recent Wednesday, the 71-year-old seemed ready to pick up right where the 2018 election left off — and more than game to defend his record. His recollection of details from cases decades ago was impressive. The only time he seemed less than forthright was when asked about his retirement. He gave the sense that he missed prosecuting cases.

    Aspects of the election clearly still grate, particularly what McCulloch says were ads filled with lies put out by the ACLU regarding his office’s use of cash bail.

    His successor’s first four years in office are widely considered a success, bereft of scandal and with plentiful examples of successful, high-profile prosecutions. But McCulloch is critical of Bell.

    “You can’t have public defenders as prosecutors,” McCulloch says. “Many of the people he brought in for top positions in the prosecutor’s office are public defenders. They went from that side of the hallway literally to this side of the hallway.”

    He cites two cases handled by Bell in which defendants were released on bail and then went on to commit other crimes.

    “The one thing everybody wants, except progressive prosecutors, is for people to be safe in their homes, safe walking down the street, able to go out without worrying about getting hit by a stray bullet,” McCulloch says.

    He cites the recall of San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin and Seattle’s progressive city attorney losing to a Republican as vindication of his point: a pendulum that swung one way and is now coming back.

    It’s telling that McCulloch can make a stronger case in those West Coast cities than in St. Louis County. If Bell running against only longshot Libertarian opposition is any indication, the pendulum may have found a nice spot with the county’s current prosecutor.

    On the topic of capital punishment, McCulloch’s views are not complicated. He seems to think that people who argue vociferously from either side are overthinking things. To his mind, a death sentence is punishment befitting those rare crimes that are “just beyond the pale.”

    “If it deters somebody down the line, that’s great. But I would never do it solely because it might deter somebody else from doing it. That’s insane,” he says. “The same with all the other arguments: ‘It’s revenge, it’s vengeance.’ It’s not any of those things. It’s simply punishment. … The primary purpose of the criminal justice system is punishment.”

    The latter statement represents a rare note of agreement between McCulloch and many of the activists who worked to unseat him.

    “Becoming a prosecutor was the next best thing”

     

    Karen Kraft

    SARAH LOVETT

    Karen Kraft ran Missouri’s Capital Litigation Division, representing clients facing the death penalty, which often put her on the opposie side of McCulloch’s office.

    McCulloch’s hardest-fought election, prior to his unexpected loss to Bell, came in 1990 when he faced off against Tom Mehan. Like McCulloch, Mehan had been a prosecutor when Buzz Westfall ran the county prosecuting attorney’s office. The two men shared an office and bounced ideas off each other. They were friends.

    When Westfall announced his run for county executive, Mehan and McCulloch each left the prosecutor’s office to run for its top job — Mehan on the Republican ticket, McCulloch as a Democrat.

    To call the 1990 race cordial would be an understatement.

    “It was funny when Bob and I would go places and debate,” Mehan says. “We didn’t have a difference of opinion. After about 10 minutes into the debate, I’d be like, ‘Bob, what you got?’ He’d be like, ‘Tom, what do you got?’”

    “It was the most boring debate you ever saw in your life,” says longtime Post-Dispatch reporter Bill Lhotka, who served as moderator.

    McCulloch made his family ties to law enforcement a big part of his campaign.

    McCulloch’s father, Paul, had been a canine patrolman with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department for nine years when, on July 2, 1964, he exchanged fire with Eddie Glenn at the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex. Glenn, a Black man, had kidnapped a white woman and then shot at a different officer. Paul McCulloch was killed when Glenn fired and sent a fragment from a ricocheting bullet into the back of his neck and then his brain.

    Glenn was found guilty of murder and executed in 1972. The German shepherd that Paul McCulloch was handler for was given to the McCulloch family. Bob was 12 at the time.

    In the 1990 race, in addition to the story of his father, McCulloch was quick to mention his retired police-officer uncle, as well as his brother and cousin who served on the force. McCulloch’s right leg had been amputated when he was a teenager due to cancer, thwarting plans to follow the family tradition.

    “I couldn’t be a police officer so becoming a prosecutor was the next best thing,” he told Lhotka just before the 1990 election.

    He won in November by a comfortable margin.

    In retrospect, the 1990 race presents a fascinating counterfactual for the St. Louis County defendants now on death row.

    Mehan went on to become a federal prosecutor. A Catholic, he says that Pope John Paul II changed his thinking about capital punishment. During his 1999 visit to St. Louis, the pope chastised Governor Mel Carnahan over the upcoming execution of convicted murderer Darrell J. Mease — and Carnahan commuted Mease’s sentence to life in prison.

    At the time, federal prosecutors still could pursue capital cases, but Mehan opted out. “I said, ‘Have at it, do it yourself,’” he says. “But I decided that I wasn’t gonna be involved.”

    He says, “At some point, there’s a sense of punishment, yes. But how much?”

    McCulloch never had such a revelation.

    McCulloch’s “signature cases”

     

    Activist Kayla Reed at a Close the Workhouse rally

    DOYLE MURPHY

    Activist Kayla Reed fought to get Bob McCulloch removed from office in 2018.

    Many of McCulloch’s prosecutors were referred to as the “McBoys.” Staffers say he was orderly, approachable and, contrary to his public image, possessed a quick wit and a sense of humor. He engendered respect for never seeking any special treatment or sympathy due to his disability.

    Longtime prosecutor Mark Bishop recounts a going-away party for a colleague in which another prosecutor had a couple drinks too many and, perhaps jokingly, hinted that McCulloch wasn’t aware of what staffers were actually doing in the courtroom.

    In response, as a sort of parlor trick, McCulloch pointed to each prosecutor in the room and rattled off exactly which cases each was handling.

    “You think because the guy has maybe 40 attorneys in the office, he wouldn’t know those kinds of details, but he really knew what he was doing,” Bishop says. He adds, “Just think of all the personnel decisions this guy has to be involved in. He’s running the day-to-day operations of a huge office, and he’s still trying cases.”

    Even so, Lhotka says as long as he covered McCulloch, he only saw him personally try a handful of cases. Several involved the death penalty.

    “I think he felt that those would be his signature cases,” Lhotka says.

    Bishop remembers being third chair to McCulloch’s lead prosecutor in the successful capital conviction of Johnny Johnson, a 24-year-old white man convicted of the 2002 murder and rape of a six-year-old in Valley Park.

    Winning the guilty verdict was not particularly challenging, Bishop says. “The guy was as guilty as sin.”

    “But any death penalty case is tough. Just because of the gravity of it,” Bishop says. “And it’s really tough to get the death penalty on a defendant who’s young. But it was just a horrible, horrible crime.”

    Testimony at trial focused on Johnson’s schizophrenia, but that didn’t give McCulloch pause. He contests the idea that Johnson had mental-health issues, saying today that Johnson had “major drug and substance-abuse issues, which can aggravate or mimic mental-health issues. His biggest problems were his incredible use of controlled substances. Just pick one, and I’m sure he was using it.”

    Mehan says that McCulloch had a knack for conveying passion for a case in a way that a jury didn’t read as emotional.

    “He wasn’t involved in hyperbole, he wasn’t involved in sheer emotion,” Mehan says. “Westfall used to get so wound up that he had two or three death-penalty cases reversed because of his going off the rails.”

    Lhotka is more subdued in his assessment: “In his courtroom ap pearances, he was average, average to above average.”

    By nature of his position, McCulloch had to sign off on every capital case in St. Louis County — and he didn’t shrink from the shadow of death. In 1999, he drove to Potosi to personally watch the execution of Kelvin Malone, a serial killer, whose case he handled as a line prosecutor years before his election. Questioned by a reporter about the possibility of Malone’s innocence, he rejected the idea: “Not a chance.” What about a motive? “He was mean.”

    For all but two years of McCulloch’s 28-year tenure, Karen Kraft ran the state’s Capital Litigation Division, a clique within the state public defender system known colloquially as the “death squad,” which represents clients facing the death penalty. She was capital division supervisor for two decades before retiring in 2016. Kraft and McCulloch only faced off a few times in court, but if the prosecutors and public defender’s offices could be thought of as baseball teams, Kraft and McCulloch would have been their respective managers.

    “Did I see a lot of empathy on the part of the prosecutors in McCulloch’s office? No. I didn’t find him real approachable or wanting to really hear arguments in favor of leniency or mercy,” Kraft says.

    But, she adds, “I didn’t see him as a villain. I’m sure he felt like he was just doing his job.”

    Kraft does cite one case in which McCulloch’s office — though not McCulloch himself — faced the overturning of two separate death-penalty convictions of the same defendant after the defendant, Vincent McFadden, won an appeal based on racial bias in jury selection. McCulloch’s office retried both cases and won them both. (In addition to McFadden, the office saw seven death-penalty convictions from McCulloch’s tenure reversed or commuted by higher courts.)

    According to the advocacy organization Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, McCulloch’s office struck potential jurors based on race in more instances than just the McFadden case. The U.S. Supreme Court has made clear that strikes based on race are illegal — but in most cases, proving a prosecutor’s intent can be impossible.

    Conversations with prosecutors and public defenders from McCulloch’s tenure suggest his office generally played by the rules, even as the rulebook showed itself over decades to be badly flawed.

    “The rules are problematic in that they have a lot of prosecutor discretion,” says Joe Welling, an attorney who does work on capital appeals and also teaches a course on the death penalty at Saint Louis University School of Law. “There’s a lot of places where the rules are set up in favor of getting the conviction that is the maximum punishment.”

    Both Kraft and Ellen Blau, a “death squad” public defender who worked under Kraft, have just as much — if not more — criticism of the system than McCulloch himself. In St. Louis County especially, they say, the scales of justice were tilted toward death.

    “It was stressful, super stressful,” Blau says. “Especially in St. Louis County, it felt like the prosecutor was the prosecutor, the judge was the prosecutor, [too].”

    Many defense attorneys won’t take death-penalty cases because of the stress they entail, which leaves some of the toughest cases to public defenders. And Blau says that the system is set up so that even something as elemental as time is made unfair: The prosecution is always in the pole position, setting the terms to which the defense must react. There’s no statute of limitations for murder, which means prosecutors can take as long as they want determining whether to bring first-degree or lesser murder charges, which would not be death-eligible. Then the defense must act swiftly to prepare their case, accordingly.

    Bishop, the longtime prosecutor, says that he had serious reservations about the state’s right to take the life of one of its citizens. But he’s quick to note that, ultimately, it’s not prosecutors who make the final decision. That is left to juries.

    A common way prosecutors explained this to the jury was the “three-doors approach,” Bishop says. Essentially, three thresholds, or doors, have to be passed through before a death sentence. The first door is proving guilt. Then the prosecutor has to prove sufficient aggravators were involved, like an act of torture, rape or prior convictions, to put the death penalty on the table. That’s door number two. The third door is then whether to give a sentence of death or life without the possibility of parole.

    “All I do on that third door is open the door,” Bishop says. “And then it’s up to you, [the jury], to decide whether to step through it or not.”

    But Blau notes that all capital-murder cases are argued in front of “death-qualified” juries; anyone opposed to the death penalty is barred from serving.

    “Your jury is basically excluding anybody who has moral opposition to the death penalty, which makes the jury whiter, it makes the jury more conservative,” she says. “It excludes a lot of people who may perceive the evidence more favorably for the defense, not just in the punishment part of the trial, but in the merit phase of the trial, too.”

    Welling, the SLU lawyer, also points out an inherent difference between presenting aggravators in a case compared to the mitigation testimony allowed in defense. The presentation of aggravators is often “pretty provocative stuff,” Welling says — gory photos and evidence of other heinous acts. Mitigators tend to be more abstract and cerebral, like information about a defendant’s mental health or a story of childhood abuse.

    When talking about the tilt in St. Louis County sliding defendants toward the death penalty, Kraft brings up Joseph Paul Franklin, a man whose life even some death-penalty opponents have trouble arguing was worth preserving.

    Franklin was a white supremacist who in 1977 fired on a St. Louis synagogue as people were leaving a bar mitzvah, killing one. He also killed a mixed-race couple in Pennsylvania and a white woman in West Virginia because she had a Black boyfriend. Franklin shot Larry Flynt because Flynt published photos of mixed-race couples in his Hustler magazine. All in all, he claimed to have killed 22 people. He hoped to start a race war.

    Franklin was already serving multiple life sentences when he confessed to the St. Louis synagogue shooting. He was extradited to Missouri and found himself facing the death penalty.

    After securing the death penalty, McCulloch’s take on Franklin was just as to-the-point as it was with Malone. Franklin, he said, was a coward who “just hid in the weeds and shot people.”

    Reporters found Franklin incoherent and likely insane. Kraft found herself in the unenviable position of serving as Franklin’s assistant counsel, though she basically served as an observer as the legal system churned forward on auto-pilot. “He was all over the place,” she says of Franklin.

    She didn’t blame McCulloch’s office seeking the death penalty, though she deeply resented the judge for allowing the charade of Franklin representing himself. “The judge actually told [Franklin] he was making a wise decision to try his own case,” Kraft says.

    Asked why the judge would say something so clearly not true, Kraft responds, “Good question.”

    The judge later helped Franklin waive the appeal of his death sentence. Despite the opposition of his most famous victim, Larry Flynt, he was executed on November 20, 2013.

    “The bullseye for the death penalty”

     

    Kevin Johnson

    JEREMY WEIS

    Kevin Johnson, 37, is scheduled to be executed this month for the 2005 murder of Sgt. William McEntee. He was put on death row by Bob McCulloch.

    Critics of the death penalty often remark on how arbitrarily the punishment is meted out. Over the past 30 years, if you committed first-degree murder in St.

  • Resist STL Infiltrates Anti-Abortion Fundraiser, Crashes Stage in Booty Shorts

    Resist STL Infiltrates Anti-Abortion Fundraiser, Crashes Stage in Booty Shorts

    VIA RESIST STL

    After protesting an anti-abortion group, Resist STL gathered for a group photo.

    Last week, attendees of Coalition Life’s annual benefit dinner got more than they bargained for when the evening’s programming was interrupted by a group of protesters, who took the stage and the mic in a booty-shorted, twerktacular display of pro-choice resistance to the group’s anti-abortion agenda.

    The benefit dinner and decisively disruptive spectacle each took place in an event space in Terminal 1 at Lambert Airport last Wednesday night and were the result of a considerable amount of planning on both sides.

    For the pro-life group, which organizes and helps fund the people who hang out around abortion clinics and bother the women walking inside, there were tables to set up and centerpieces to be made, logistics to consider, and all the usual work that goes into hosting a fundraising event drawing between 600 and 800 people. For the protesters, who operate under the banner of Resist STL, there was a lot of that exact same work — because members of this group had fully infiltrated the other, working as event volunteers before making their actual intentions known loudly and proudly via an onstage dance party during a speech by a former abortion doctor.

    The subterfuge had two primary effects. For one, it helped the protesters make their plans, as they were able to see the event space and learn about the evening’s programming in the lead-up to the big night. They also found themselves helping to assign seating, which meant, most notably, they were able to position protesters at tables near the stage in order to ensure their plans would go off without a hitch.

    Secondly, and perhaps most importantly to members of Resist STL, the fact that some of the evening’s volunteers were actually protesters was meant to have a destabilizing effect on the anti-abortion group members, who would then not know whom they could trust within their own ranks.

    “And that worked really well,” says Emily Ehley, one of the protest organizers and a member of Resist STL. “At some point, they just kicked out all of their volunteers because they weren’t really sure how to know who was real and who wasn’t. So that also helped to destabilize their efforts, because then they just didn’t have any of those volunteers to help them [for] the rest of the event or breaking it down or anything like that. So it was really nice.”

    Two days before the fundraiser, a group of 18 protesters gathered in the backyard of a south-city home to put the finishing touches on their plans. It was a cool summer night, with the rain just barely holding at bay, and one of the attendees brought vegan tacos for the group to enjoy.

    After sorting through some of the logistics, the group turned to the role-play portion of the night’s proceedings, in which the protesters practiced the disruptions they’d be taking part in at the event. The plan was for there to be multiple protests at staggered intervals, with the onstage dance party being the capstone for the night. In keeping, participants were encouraged to practice the disapproving patter they’d say after others were booted from the building, in order to maintain their cover.

    “How are they ever going to get a 401k?” laughed one in a mocking tone. “How uncivilized.”

    A long-handled dustpan served as a makeshift microphone stand, where one protester stood and played the part of one of the event’s speakers. “Blah blah blah, sacred babies,” he said to the assembled crowd. “Blah blah blah, something about crosses. Blah blah blah blah, give us money.”

    Suddenly, the rousing speech was interrupted. There were sirens, whistles, a banner that read “God bless abortion,” and balloons to be used as pregnant bellies, which would then be popped to the shock and horror of the attendees. Some protesters disrobed. There were a few different chants at play, and some discussion as to which would be easiest for a crowd to make out. “Pro-life is a lie, you don’t care if people die,” was one. “Fuck the church, fuck the state, you can’t make us procreate,” was another. Eventually, the commotion was brought to an end by people role-playing as security. The still-incognito protesters who remained in their seats dutifully cheered for the authorities and booed the troublemakers.

    “Can I get another round of applause for the police?” the protester at the dustpan said into his makeshift mic. “As we all know, Jesus was once a cop.”

    Coalition Life’s theme for its benefit dinner this year was airports, in keeping with its location. The programs were made to look like passports, the centerpieces had airplanes on them, and the food was essentially inedible.

    “Destination Life,” as it was dubbed, featured a few speakers, and tickets ranged from free to $10,000 for two tables — assuredly the most anyone has ever paid for the privilege of eating warmed-over chicken out of a steam tray. For just 10 bucks, you could buy a cape with the words “Pro-life superhero” screenprinted on it.

    Seated at a table near the stage were three protesters and five pro-lifers, as well as two reporters. Kay, an older lady wearing a black and white dress with a sweater draped over her shoulders, was there with her husband, Cliff, who had a head full of gray hair and a blue suit jacket pulled on over a striped shirt with a pen in the pocket. Staying with the airport theme, the two discussed how the Lufthansa airline had canceled nearly all of its flights that week due to a strike among its workers.

    “It’s a different society now,” Kay lamented. “I worked two jobs to put my kid through school. It’s amazing they don’t just go to work.”

    Following a prayer, Coalition Life Executive Director and Founder Brian Westbrook kicked off the proceedings with a quote from the Good Book.

    “‘Any idiot can cut costs, but you can’t always build sales, and that’s what I’m doing.’ – Tom Monaghan, Domino’s Pizza,” Westbrook said to the assembled crowd. “Tom Monaghan, he wrote in his book, Pizza Tiger, he explains how he repeatedly pushed the limits of his company, his team and especially his finances. Tonight, our guarantee is that we will be stretching, much like Tom Monaghan and Domino’s Pizza, and instead of just building sales, we will be stretching to save absolutely every life possible, maximizing on every single dollar we can.”

    With the crowd fully warmed up, the night’s speakers took the stage. There was a woman named Lauren Kammerer who spoke about the years that she’s worked as a “sidewalk counselor,” the group’s term for the people who hang around outside of Planned Parenthood and bother people. There was video of a woman who had been bothered into not having an abortion by one of those folks, in which she talked about how glad she was to have had her baby. Next up was keynote speaker Dr. Anthony Levatino, a former abortion doctor, who brought some clamps as a prop and spoke in graphic detail about the abortions he performed 40 years ago, before he changed his ways.

    But meanwhile, elsewhere in the building, the protesters had begun their disruptions. Two erstwhile volunteers stepped into a bathroom and changed into crop tops — out of place at the church-formal event — and re-emerged with literature about reproductive justice, which they began passing out to people in attendance along with condoms and lube. Security soon caught on, and they were escorted out.

    Following that, Coalition Life staffers asked all of the volunteers to leave, since they couldn’t be sure who was a plant.

    “After that happened, the staff really started to crack down,” Ehley explains. “They were walking around, eyeing everyone. They were really, really nervous about potentially having been infiltrated.”

    They surely had been, but sending their volunteers packing didn’t solve the problem. Midway through Levatino’s speech, a group of protesters rushed the stage in various states of undress, some twerking in booty shorts, some holding a banner that read “Abortion is holy,” all of them shouting the chants they’d practiced. One wore a shirt with the slogan “Faggots Against Fascism” emblazoned across it, and all of them openly identified as queer. Since the police were still distracted with the first group of disrupters, it took a good while for any type of official security to get to the commotion, so when one protester grabbed the mic and started reciting the “pro-life is a lie” chant, it was regular staffers that started grabbing and pushing them off the stage. One attendee saw fit to throw a fruit cup at the group.

    Two of the protesters on the stage came from the table Kay and Cliff were sitting at, and a third stood up and filmed the action without breaking cover. Her video shows the cops escorting the group out and ultimately putting some protesters in handcuffs before a middle-aged woman in a red flower dress approached and told the officers that Coalition Life didn’t want to press charges or see anybody get arrested. With that, the officers took down some names and sent everybody on their way.

    The kicker? The woman in the red flower dress was also with the protesters, deep undercover.

     

    Resist STL protesters stormed the stage at a Coalition Life fundraiser. - VIA RESIST STL

    VIA RESIST STL

    Resist STL protesters stormed the stage at a Coalition Life fundraiser.

    The mood at the table was tense after the disruption, with Kay seemingly in disbelief at what she saw.

    “I think that was part of the programming,” she mused, “to show what we’re up against.” Meanwhile, police and staff hovered nearby for the rest of the night, suspicious of everyone in the area where the troublemakers had been seated.

    At the end of the event, Westbrook again took the stage to shake everyone down for money — it was the whole reason people were there, after all. He helpfully explained that if you donated $71,500 you could get a $50,000 tax credit before asking everyone to pray to God for a dollar amount they should give. That money would be used to bring Coalition Life’s mission to as many blue states, where abortion is likely to remain legal, as possible —– in addition to St. Louis, Coalition Life operates in Fairview Heights, Illinois, and a suburb outside Chicago.

    Westbrook then gravely implied that giving generously was the only sure way to avoid bloodshed in the streets.

    “We cannot do this work without you,” he intoned. “This is critically important. And we are at a crossroads in our country like never before. I do not want to solve this abortion issue, like slavery, with bitter civil war.”

    The talk of armed conflict is not idle chatter. Keith Rose, one of the protesters, says he’s heard it mentioned repeatedly from those in the anti-abortion movement in recent weeks. Moreover, it’s a possibility that some on his side of the issue are preparing for as well.

    “I was having a deep conversation with someone like two weeks ago who was passing through town,” Rose says. “And he was like, ‘Yeah, I’m just kind of going from area to area teaching people survival skills. We’re going to need these hard skills, because we’re looking at like an eight-year trajectory for, you know, collapse.’ Basically, he was like, ‘I think there’s gonna be some kind of urban-versus-suburban or urban-versus-rural civil war skirmishes within about eight years from now.’ I don’t feel that way, but that’s a whole damn thing.”

    In the meantime, though, it’s going to be up to activists and organizers to take up the fight. For this group, the efforts at Coalition Life’s event are just the continuation of a long and ongoing battle.

    “We cannot fight them in the courts anymore,” Rose says. “They’ve made that impossible. We can’t really fight them in the legislature, at least here in Missouri, anymore — they’ve made that impossible, even though we are a majority of the national population. So we’re going to be fighting them in a more guerilla style. That’s what they’ve done. They’ve forced us to have to use asymmetrical tactics like infiltration, because they’re not willing to play fair.”

    After the members of Resist STL left the airport, their mission completed, they met up for a group photo that they intend to make into a postcard to send to the people in charge of Coalition Life. As one of them put it, their mom had taught them to always send people a thank-you note after an event. After all, just because it’s a fight doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.

    In fact, for Ehley, a key element of the protest was its joyful, dance-party vibe.

    “We spent quite a bit of time planning this,” she says. “It was really important to us to create an atmosphere of joy and celebration, and to show them: You don’t control us, you don’t control our bodies. You don’t get to say how we live, how we should be. And we are going to be our full selves here in this space, and we are going to try to stop you from consolidating power, consolidating money and doing the work that you’re doing.”

    Ehley hopes that some in the crowd who might have been on the fence or in some way were coerced into attendance saw the freedom and happiness inherent in the disruption and that there’s another way to live.

    “It’s OK to be yourself,” she says. “It’s OK to be loud and queer and take up space and make your own decisions for your body. These people don’t have to speak for you.”

  • The Riotous Life of Stump Stephenson

    The Riotous Life of Stump Stephenson

    There is something that runs through this place where we live. It’s hard to describe, but you know it when you see it. It’s there in dive bars of south city, but also on the floor of a Missouri River casino. It’s in Wash Ave and the empty two-lane highways that roll over low, gorgeous hills. It’s Nelly and the Ozarks, pork steaks and throwed rolls. And you can feel it even beyond state lines in Sauget and East St. Louis. Capturing all that is an impossible task, but we decided to start by giving it a name, Missouriland. This week, we begin the exploration, guided by Reuben Hemmer. His frequent travels, camera in hand, helped inspire this new, recurring RFT feature, so it seemed right for him to kick it off in grand fashion with a special cover story on one of Missouriland’s fascinating characters, Stump Stephenson of Riverport Riot fame. Even (especially?) if you’ve somehow never heard of Stump, you’re going to want to read this and check out the gallery of photos Reuben has collected in recent months.

    In the future, we’ll have more photographers, more guides and more of the poignant and weird in this place. There’s plenty of Missouriland to see. Read on below. —Doyle Murphy

    It’s a sunny summer afternoon in St. Louis, and the Saddle Tramps are partying hard.

    Tucked away in the mostly industrial Patch neighborhood of south city, the local motorcycle club has pulled out all the stops to give area two-wheel enthusiasts a celebration to remember, providing an opportunity for them to showcase their custom choppers while knocking back beers and enjoying some live music. A cover band is on hand to deliver the hard-rocking hits, and anticipation has been building all day for the start of that most proper of South Broadway celebrations: a wet T-shirt contest.

    In the heart of all of the humidity and exhaust smoke, the band launches into Ted Nugent’s “Stranglehold” to the delight of the adoring audience. The group’s vocalist, a man wearing a pierced fedora and using a battle axe for a microphone stand, easily commands the attention of the crowd throughout the duration of the 1975 hit, as well as some similarly classic tracks from Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath. The more the band plays — and the more the man sings — the more pumped the crowd of bikers gets.

    I didn’t realize it at the time, but there’s a good reason for their enthusiasm: As it turns out, the man with the microphone is nothing short of south-city royalty. I’d come to the event to take photos, and yet I didn’t know that I was in the presence of one of the key figures in one of the most infamous events in St. Louis rock & roll history.

    Soon after, the band wraps up, the hoses are drawn out and the crowd gathers together for the main event. The chosen administrator of the wet T-shirt contest is none other than the lead singer, and it’s evident this is not his first rodeo.

    I was able to take numerous photos of the lively contestants and attendees, but one particular photo stuck out. The shot consisted of the singer’s eyes laser-focused on the desired target, with a joyful contestant dancing under the arc of the hose water.

    A month or so later, I used the wet T-shirt contest photo for a gallery opening at the Granite City Art and Design District. A coworker of mine brought a biker friend to the opening, and when he came across the photo his eyes lit up with recognition.

    “Do you know who that is?” he asked, to which I shook my head. “That’s Stump, man!”

    Delighted to finally learn the name of the singer who’d so enthralled me, and even more to learn his name is Stump, I asked him, “Who is Stump?”

    “Stump Stephenson,” he replied. “That’s the dude who Axl Rose tackled in ’91! You know the Riverport Riot? That’s him!”

    I could not believe my luck. I have always been fascinated by the story of the Riverport Riot, and have long thought that the person Axl Rose tackled seemed like such a character. I wanted to learn more about Stump, and, importantly, I wanted to let Stump know there was a photo of him hanging up in an art gallery.

  • An Oral History of Nirvana’s Lone, Near-Riotous St. Louis Show at Mississippi Nights

    An Oral History of Nirvana’s Lone, Near-Riotous St. Louis Show at Mississippi Nights

    VIA SUB POP

    This photo is not from the night in question — proper documentation of Nirvana’s Mississippi Nights show has largely been lost over the years — but it’s an apt visual from the same era.

    Thirty years ago, on October 16, 1991, Nirvana played its first and only St. Louis gig at the beloved and now-bygone venue Mississippi Nights. It was a clear and cool autumn Wednesday when the trio of Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl pulled into the late, famous Landing night club. The band was in the middle of a massive metamorphosis from underground punkers to generation-defining, international superstars; its landmark album Nevermind had been released 22 days earlier on September 24, 1991, by major label DGC Records, and the accompanying music video for its first single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” had premiered as a “Buzz Bin” clip on MTV’s late night alternative video show 120 Minutes just seventeen days prior on September 29. The group’s unexpected ascension to a garish grunge commodity was as close to a viral sensation as anything got in the time before dial-up internet, largely due to “Teen Spirit” almost immediately leaving the “Buzz Bin” and landing in continuous rotation on MTV. In this short period, which was less than a month from the album’s release and the tour stop in St. Louis, the relatively small 1,000-capacity venue was completely oversold (tickets cost between $8 and $10 dollars!), and anticipation was at a fever pitch for Seattle’s greatest flannel-clad exports to play their debut gig in the river city.

    What happened that night has gone down in St. Louis history as one of those legendary gigs, a show that now everyone claims to have attended but only a lucky few actually witnessed. From the start, the crowd erupted into a cacophony of blood, sweat and passion as slam-dancers and crowd-surfers ransacked the pit, stopping the gig more than five times before Cobain got frustrated or inspired (perhaps both) and invited the whole audience onto the stage mid-show.

    Naturally, the crowd enthusiastically complied, with chaotic results. Gear was stolen. The fire marshal was called. Grohl booked it backstage and giddily watched as anarchy engulfed his fellow bandmates, who were pinned to the walls with their instruments, and a near-riot broke out.

    School-yard legend among ’90s stoners about the gig alleged that Cobain wanted to cause a stir that would rival Guns N’ Roses’ infamous “Riverport Riot.” A few months earlier, on July 2, 1991, Axl Rose had stormed off stage after attacking a fan who was taking pictures of the band and pouted, “Well, thanks to the lame-ass security, I’m going home!” An actual three-hour riot ensued, with dozens of injuries, as intoxicated fans angry about Rose’s early departure attempted to rip seats out of the then less-than-a-month-old amphitheater in Maryland Heights. Though the rivalry between Nirvana and Guns N’ Roses was very real in the early ’90s and is used by many rock historians as a way of describing the cultural shift from the days of hair-metal dominance to the Nevermind era, this was likely not on the minds of the Nirvana crowd. Novoselic even allegedly pleaded that night with the audience, saying, “Don’t be like the GnR crowd, because shit attracts flies.” The fervor at Mississippi Nights was more spontaneous, with a crowd simply elated by a fleeting few hours of raucous rock & roll and the opportunity to see a band at the peak of its performance in a venue the size of which it would likely never play again.

    The Riverfront Times spoke with some of the lucky few who were there that night in a series of one-on-one interviews to build an oral history of the chaotic show.

    Pat Hagin, booking agent for Mississippi Nights, current owner of the Pageant and Delmar Hall: I booked the show. In those days, it was probably [booked] six weeks to eight weeks before the show. We booked [Nirvana] before we had any idea about the band.

    Rob Wagoner, Ultraman and Bent, Euclid Records: When Bleach came out it wasn’t really my thing. I knew a lot of people who liked them a lot. Ultraman was in Munich playing on September 24 when Nevermind came out. We were in the club in the daytime and they were playing it. I remember thinking, “Wow, is this the same band?” And the kid from Scream was on drums.

    Matt Harnish, Bunnygrunt, Matt Harnish’s Pink Guitar, Vintage Vinyl: I had heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on Tony & Cat’s radio show on KDHX, “The Groove Machine,” on Saturday nights. That was the only song I had heard by [Nirvana].

    Eric Eyster, Hell Night: I remember it was particularly exciting because they’d never played St. Louis before. Their buzz was strong though, because the show was sold out at Mississippi Nights. My friends and I had already heard most of Nevermind because of all the bootleg recordings of the demos that were floating around. Most of us already knew the songs, we just didn’t know a lot of their correct titles.

    Hagin: The guest list might have been huge because everyone was crawling out of the woodwork trying to go to that show. There could have been another hundred people in there just from various record stores, newspapers, fan-zines.

    Roberta Patterson, former KCOU music director: In 1991, I was a music director at KCOU in Columbia, Missouri. The station was an early supporter of grunge and other alternative music, and we had played Bleach. When Nevermind came out, I remember writing the album review for the station. Since the station was so supportive, the DGC college radio rep hooked me up with tickets and my roommates and I were going to drive to STL for the show.

    Thomas Crone, former Riverfront Times music writer: I was really, really lucky because I was covering music for the RFT, so my ticket was comped. I certainly would have paid for a ticket. I absolutely wanted to see them. I think a lot of people at the time felt like Urge Overkill was the better band. I never quite found my clique as a fan of Urge Overkill. For me it was 100 percent a Nirvana concert.

     

    Thomas Crone's preview for the show, from the Riverfront Times archives. - VIA RFT ARCHIVES

    VIA RFT ARCHIVES

    Thomas Crone’s preview for the show, from the Riverfront Times archives.

    Harnish: Probably the reason I was at the show was because my roommate was a big Urge Overkill fan. I was in college. I was DJing at KSLU. Mississippi Nights was kind enough to give us free tickets to almost every show to give away, but we had essentially zero listenership. It was pretty much always the DJs that went to the shows.

    Jim Utz, former Vintage Vinyl employee: The night before I went to Columbia, Missouri, to see the Meat Puppets and Urge Overkill play at the Blue Note. We’re hanging out after the show at the Blue Note, and Urge Overkill was just hanging out too. I was talking to them. I told them I was going to see them tomorrow night with Nirvana. They asked if there were cool places to shop [in St. Louis] for vintage clothes. I told them about Haberdashery and Hullabaloo. We exchanged numbers. I drove back to St. Louis and went to work the next day at Vintage Vinyl and they called me at work. They told me [Hullabaloo was] great. So they said, “Thanks, we’re going to leave tickets for you at the door.”

    Patterson: Urge Overkill played a warm-up show at the Blue Note. We were big fans, and the band came by KCOU and did an interview before the show.
    As it turns out, UO left the Blue Note without a guitar, a bunch of tools and a sweater. When they got to STL, they went by Vintage Vinyl. That is where Jim Utz had spoken to them, and they asked him if he knew anyone in Columbia that could get the things and bring them to the show. Jim knew I was driving in and put them in contact with me. I was able to pick up the things and deliver them to Mississippi Nights. I remember walking up with the guitar and the other things and there were loads of people all around the club. Since I already had tickets, UO gave me and my friends backstage all-access passes for our trouble.

    Wagoner: During Urge Overkill you could freely walk around and not bump into anybody. I remember when Urge Overkill played, Grohl was standing on the first riser by himself and nobody was paying him any attention. We knew him from when he was in Scream, so we went up and talked to him for a while.

    Utz: I get to the door that night, and Urge Overkill put my name on the guest list and gave me some backstage passes. When Urge Overkill finished their set, I went backstage. Between bands, I’m back there hanging out with Urge Overkill and they said “Hey, why don’t you watch with us from the side of the stage.” I’m like, “Cool!”

     

    A backstage pass from the show. - VIA JIM UTZ

    VIA JIM UTZ

    A backstage pass from the show.

    Crone: The lights guy invited me into the light booth, which was all the way at the back of the club and up a small flight of steps. I remember it was so crowded. He saw me and fished me out. I watched both bands from the sound booth, which gave me this outrageously cool ability to see as it all started to break down. From that vantage point it was quite a thing to see.

    Eyster: By the time the lights went out for Nirvana, the place was ready. I was jam-packed in the very front, knowing full well I would soon be feeling crushed. Everyone was hypnotized by Nirvana’s opening song, “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam.”

    Crone: I think everyone in the room felt like they were there for something special. The room was really alive, in the sense of, like, electric. It seemed like there was a lot of chaos happening in front of the stage, spilling onto the stage.

    Hagin: I went down that night and ended up sitting in the office talking to the owner. Urge Overkill plays. Set break. Then Nirvana goes onstage. I was still talking to the owner, but I was listening out of one ear to the show, and I could pick up [that] something wasn’t going right by what I could hear from the stage.

  • STL Mugshots Built an Empire of Shame for $150 a Week

    STL Mugshots Built an Empire of Shame for $150 a Week

    On STLMugshots.com, crimes are content. The site’s visitors are treated to an endless scroll of thousand-yard stares, people reduced to their facial expressions at their lowest moments, with each mugshot, each click, leading to separate pages that package the arrest details alongside a column of automatically generated online ads.

    On the homepage, an animated wall of prison bars slams across the St. Louis skyline, all-caps text screaming “NEW MUGSHOTS EVERY DAY” — and it’s a promise the site has kept since at least 2014, with hundreds of mugshots harvested weekly and supplied directly from a central repository of the region’s law enforcement data.

    But on April 1, 2021, STL Mugshots suddenly went still. The website is still live, and the weekly newsletters keep coming, but each one displays the same mugshots, the faces never changing from those arrested and booked on March 31.

    Functionally, the site is unchanged. It still features a “Matching Game” page, which summons five random mugshots and scrambles them alongside the associated charges — offenses ranging from minor traffic infractions to violent felonies. Refreshing the page yields new faces from the bottomless supply, challenging players to correctly match the face to the alleged crime: Does a bald, middle-aged white man seem like a trespasser, or someone who would drive without a license? Did a short-haired Black woman fail to register her vehicle, or was she arrested for parental neglect, or drug possession, or speeding, or domestic assault?

    No matter the circumstances that led to their mugshots, or whether their charges were later dropped or amended or expunged, in St. Louis, they all wound up in the same place. The same website.

    That is, until the supply was cut off.

    Those running the website have not responded to requests for comment. The site’s elusive owner, Edmund Tauk, is currently being sued by former publishers of his mugshot-focused newspaper, Behind the Bars, whose issues were sold in city gas stations for $1 before quietly disappearing at some point in the past three years.

    For the people featured on the website, efforts to remove mugshots are met with either silence or demands for proof that a charge has been dropped — while others allege the website’s owner demands cash for removal. No law exists to define this process, and even an official expungement by the court is no guarantee for action online. The site’s mugshots persist in Google searches and background checks, following their subjects for years.

    But there’s no mystery here. The end of STLMugshots.com began on March 5, when the Riverfront Times contacted the St. Louis County Police Department with questions about how the website was able to not only post mugshots from every municipality in the county, but with remarkable speed — mugshots were being added in real time, with booking dates showing arrests occurring the same day the images appeared online.

    In an email, the RFT asked if the department had a position on the use of its police work: Was it aware that its mugshots were being funneled to a website that exposed arrestee booking information from even minor incidents — or that the mugshots were being monetized alongside “sponsored content” and clickbait celebrity listicles?

    “We are now aware,” Tracy Panus, a sergeant and spokeswoman for the department, replied on March 11. She went on to explain that the RFT‘s inquiry had prompted further research into the department’s protocols for distributing mugshots. The policy had been set in 2011, she wrote, “at the request of the County Counselor.”

    As a result, Panus wrote, the department would be reviewing its longstanding mugshot policy — and, as she put it, “looking into a way to change it.”

     

    A past issue of the Behind the Bars tabloid, Edmund Tauk's first mugshot-powered publication. (Faces blurred by RFT.) - SCREENSHOT VIA FACEBOOK

    SCREENSHOT VIA FACEBOOK

    A past issue of the Behind the Bars tabloid, Edmund Tauk’s first mugshot-powered publication. (Faces blurred by RFT.)

    For years, STL Mugshots and the Behind the Bars newspaper comprised a niche media empire that thrived on an inexhaustible supply of new material, courtesy of St. Louis law enforcement.

    But the real story of how mugshots travel from multiple police departments to a for-profit website is one that twists through a little-known government agency, the Regional Justice Information Service, better known as REJIS.

    Based in St. Louis and founded in 1974, REJIS’ website states that it was formed “under a cooperative agreement between St. Louis County and the City of St. Louis.” It is governed by an executive director and a seven-member commission appointed by the St. Louis mayor and St. Louis County executive. In Missouri police departments, its footprint is nearly everywhere, functioning as a central hub for information, connecting federal, state and local law enforcement as they run license plates, check warrants and pull up booking photos.

    And it is REJIS’ ubiquity, and essential efficiency, that helped a local entrepreneur named Edmund Tauk become the king of St. Louis’ mugshot publishing industry.

    In an August 2018 letter to an attorney representing people suing STL Mugshots, Assistant St. Louis County Counselor Priscilla Gunn, acting as counsel for REJIS, revealed that in 2011 the county had asked the agency to give two publishers “arrest reports and specific data on a continuing and on-going basis.”

    There was nothing illegal about this. REJIS concluded that records were public under the state’s Sunshine Law, which empowers anybody to request certain Missouri criminal records.

    The open records law allows news sources, including the RFT, to request police departments provide details of ongoing criminal cases, even though the defendant hasn’t been found guilty or innocent. It means stories can quote directly from probable cause documents and, yes, publish mugshots. Beyond just crime coverage, documents and information revealed through Sunshine requests are often key to quantifying the impact of government policies and identifying corruption.

    This was something different, but, as Gunn’s letter to the attorney repeatedly noted, entirely legal. She wrote that REJIS is “required to comply” with the state’s open records law, and therefore would continue to provide Tauk, owner of the Behind the Bars newspaper, with direct access to the region’s public safety data.

    In return, Gunn wrote that Tauk and a second “requestor,” Kyle Prall, the Austin-based founder of BustedMugshots.com, agreed to pay REJIS $150 every week to offset the “programming costs to provide specific information in the format requested.”

    “REJIS does not sell mugshots or data,” Gunn’s email continued. “REJIS passed the costs of producing the information to the requesters.”

    The exchange meant that Tauk and Prall received dozens of mugshots every day, direct from REJIS, with the monthly totals often exceeding 2,000 individual cases. Meanwhile, the public and journalists still had to file Sunshine requests and wait for the county to respond, a process that can take days (and sometimes, weeks) to get a single document. But Tauk and Prall now had nearly instantaneous access to the mugshots en masse.

    With the arrangement in place, REJIS opened the floodgates of St. Louis County’s crime data. According to Gunn, Prall was the first customer to make use of the data, gaining access in May 2012. The date corresponds with the start of the Busted Mugshots collection of more than 120,000 St. Louis County mugshots still available on the site.

    Busted Mugshots stopped updating in April 2019 — just a few months after Prall himself became the subject of a twenty-count federal indictment. Prosecutors accused him of diverting more than $500,000 from sham political action committees backing 2016 presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Prall eventually pleaded guilty and, in October 2019, a judge sentenced him to three years in prison.

    Tauk ran into no such trouble with the law in St. Louis. He gained access to the REJIS mugshot supply in 2014, around four years after founding Behind the Bars. The sixteen-page tabloid offered eye-catching and often suggestive headlines — one run of issues featured stories titled “East side stripper tells all,” “Fried chicken & cocaine” and “Clowning and frowning.”

    Around the same time, Tauk founded STLMugshots.com.

  • A Terrible, Familiar Story of Abuse

    A Terrible, Familiar Story of Abuse

    Trigger warning: This story includes descriptions of sexual assault that may be upsetting to some readers.

    Amanda Cleary Spiller had no idea the reckoning she was about to foment when she fired off a Facebook post on June 18 before she went to bed.

    That night, St. Louis’ bar and tattoo communities were aflame with allegations of sexual assault against several of its prominent scenesters. Reading through the details online, Cleary Spiller felt a simmering fire within. It had been six years since she says she was drugged and raped by a well-known member of the city’s craft beer scene. The pain was something she’d buried after trying in vain to get justice at the time, and she thought that’s how it would remain. Until that night. The explosion of allegations blowing up on social media triggered something in her. Furious, she typed out a detailed account of what she says happened to her, posted it to what she thought was a comment thread on a private Facebook post, hit “reply” and went to sleep.

    “To be perfectly honest, I thought I was sharing it in a private group,” explains Cleary Spiller, who now lives out of state. “It was really late here when I did it, and when I woke up the next morning, I realized I had posted it publicly when I had 325 friend requests and so many message requests thanking me for speaking out. I had no idea, but it opened the floodgates. I said to myself, ‘Well, I guess we are doing this.’”

    Scrolling through those hundreds of friend requests, direct messages and comments on her Facebook post that following morning, Cleary Spiller was horrified by what she saw: Not only were there dozens of accounts of abuse within the St. Louis bar (in particular, those in the Grove) and tattoo scene, multiple women claimed they had been sexually assaulted by the same man. In her original post, Cleary Spiller said a (now-former) sales rep for 4 Hands Brewing Company named Steve Salas assaulted her after she encountered him at a bar in 2014. One by one, several other women contacted Cleary Spiller with similar stories — encountering Salas, becoming drunk beyond what would be expected from the amount of alcohol consumed, blacking out and, ultimately, waking up in bed with Salas and no recognition of the night’s events.

    Salas has not been charged with any crimes in connection with any of the allegations, and police have not released any information indicating he is under investigation. He and his attorney did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

    In reporting this story, the Riverfront Times interviewed five women, including Cleary Spiller, who say they were abused by Salas, reviewed sworn affidavits the women provided in a child custody case involving the ex-beer rep and interviewed four of Salas’ former coworkers at 4 Hands.

    Like Cleary Spiller, those interviewed came forward as the tsunami of allegations against figures in St. Louis’ overlapping nightlife and tattoo scenes surfaced in June.

    The accounts of abuse stretched across the city but centered on the Grove neighborhood. Once known primarily as a safe space for the LGBTQIA community with a concentration of the metro’s oldest and best-known gay bars, the south-city stretch of Manchester Avenue has transformed over the past decade into a heteronormative party neighborhood, increasingly dominated by themed bars and restaurants, trendy shops and new high-rise apartment complexes catering to the young and financially comfortable.

     

    Takashima Records remains closed as the estranged business partners battle. - STEVEN DUONG

    STEVEN DUONG

    Takashima Records remains closed as the estranged business partners battle.

    The Grove’s shifting identity has long been a source of controversy, but on the night of Cleary Spiller’s post, a series of allegations ripped through its adult-playground reputation to reveal something far darker than the culture clash.

    It began with a post by Twitter user @karaxlorraine alleging sexual assault by some of the owners of Grove hot spots Parlor and Takashima Records. The claim spread like wildfire, prompting others to come forward with disturbing stories about their experiences in the Grove nightlife scene and the larger St. Louis-area tattoo community. Internally, the accusations created a ragged split among the ownership of Parlor and Takashima. The bars announced temporary closures as the estranged partners denounced each other in the press and on social media.

    Sean Baltzell, a tattoo-artist-turned-entrepreneur who is an owner of both bars as well as Tower Classic Tattoo, warred openly with other owners after he was targeted by some of the barbs on social media, filing a multi-million-dollar defamation lawsuit against three of the partners. His attorney also sent letters threatening legal action against Cleary Spiller over an Instagram account, SurvivingSTL, that she started as a platform for victims to share their stories.

    In a statement issued through his attorney, Baltzell said he supported victims but was “falsely and unjustifiably named by several of his business partners” during the social media firestorm. In an interview with KMOV, he again denied any wrongdoing and promised to reopen at some point in the future.