text:
APNewsBreak: NRC panel: Nuke chief damages agency
WASHINGTON (AP) — Four Nuclear Regulatory commissioners from both parties say they have "grave concerns" about the panel's chairman, charging that the actions of Gregory Jaczko are "causing serious damage" to the commission and creating a "chilled work environment at the NRC."
In a letter to the White House, the commissioners say Jaczko's bullying style could adversely affect the agency's mission to protect health and safety at the nation's 104 commercial nuclear reactors.
The two-page letter, signed by four of Jaczko's colleagues on the five-member panel, stops short of calling for the chairman to resign. But it says he "intimidated and bullied" senior career staff, ordered staff to withhold information and ignored the will of the panel's majority. The letter was signed by Democrats William Magwood and George Apostolakis, as well as Republicans Kristine Svinicki and William Ostendorff.
Jaczko, in a detailed response also sent to the White House, said problems at the agency were not his fault but instead stem from "lack of understanding" on the part of the other four commissioners.
Copies of the letters were obtained by The Associated Press.
The dueling letters come as Jaczko faces hearings in the House and Senate next week in which his behavior is likely to be an issue.
Commission members and staffers have long complained about Jaczko's brusque style, particularly when it comes to a decision he made last year to shut down the technical review of a proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. GOP lawmakers also complained that Jaczko may have acted illegally when he declared in March that Japan's nuclear crisis constituted an emergency in the United States.
Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said the letter from the four NRC commissioners shows a serious breach in trust among the five-member commission. Issa's committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on the NRC on Wednesday.
President Barack Obama "has the authority to take action to address these concerns," Issa wrote in a letter Friday to White House Chief of Staff William Daley. "The public deserves to understand what actions have been taken, and whether the president still believes that Chairman Jaczko is capable of leading the NRC."
The dispute comes after an inspector general's report released in June exposed long-simmering internal strife under Jaczko. The agency watchdog said Jaczko intimidated staff members who disagreed with him and withheld information from members of the commission to gain their support.
In August, Republican senators asked the inspector general to investigate whether Jaczko had authority to declare the Japan nuclear crisis an emergency — which grants him additional powers — since the crisis occurred on foreign soil. A Japanese nuclear plant was crippled by a tsunami last March. The senators also said they were not certain that Jaczko has rescinded the order, despite his public claims to the contrary.
In addition to the Oct. 13 letter to Daley, the four NRC commissioners also wrote a letter to Jaczko, saying his "intemperate and disrespectful behavior towards your fellow commission members is completely unacceptable."
They cited an Oct. 5 meeting with senior staff in which he reportedly expressed "disdain" for commission procedures and "contempt for the commission" itself. The letter called the conduct "absolutely unacceptable."
Jaczko said in his letter that his "sole and passionate focus" since joining the agency in 2005 has been on nuclear safety and security.
"Unfortunately, all too often, when faced with tough policy calls, a majority of this current commission has taken an approach that is not as protective of public health and safety as I believe is necessary," Jaczko wrote.
Jaczko denied there is a "chilled work environment around me" and said he never attempted to intimidate anyone.
Jaczko, 41, who is a Democrat, was named to the commission by President George W. Bush and appointed chairman by Obama in May 2009. He said he has a seven-year track record of working collegially and productively with many different commissioners, members of Congress, administration officials from both parties, nuclear plant operators and members of the public.
Earlier this week, Jaczko told reporters he could not think of anything he would have done differently in the past year.
"I come to work every day to do my job better than I did the day before," he said. "So I am sure there are things I could have done differently."
He has not had a chance to reflect, Jaczko added, "but I'm the last person to tell you that I'm perfect, and I'm sure there are plenty of things I could have done better."
Still, Jaczko said he was "very proud of the way this agency responded to a tremendously difficult circumstance" after the crisis in Japan.
Most of the criticism of Jaczko centers on his response to the Japan crisis and his efforts to stop the nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain.
Jaczko, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who is Yucca's leading opponent, has made a series of decisions that have aided the Obama administration's goal of shutting down Yucca Mountain. His purported reasons for doing so have come under attack by Congress, his fellow commissioners and in-house experts as being contrary to the 1982 law that requires the NRC to review the government's plans for an underground repository in Nevada for the country's spent nuclear fuel.
Follow Matthew Daly's energy coverage at http://twitter.com/MatthewDalyWDC
News from The Associated Press, and a taste of the great journalism produced by AP members and customers. Managed 24/7 by these editors: apne.ws/APSocial Read more ›


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Yiazmat - Finally this goal is met.
, Do you still have this left?
Mar 17 2008, 12:53 AM
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Group: Members
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Member No.: 3589
6 hours and 58 minutes. 10 stages.
I'm one of those players that NEVER gets lucky in the game. I mean NEVER. I don't get easy or multiple drops and it always takes me hours to get something rare to happen. I screwed up in the beginning and have no Zodiac Spear. Should I try to get it to pop in the Henne Mines? Well...no. I'm not that much of a completionist. Besides - why? I just killed the biggest doofus in the game.
First on a scale of difficulty: Omega Weapon is faaaaaaaaar and away easier than Yiazmat in my opinion. Finding Omega Weapon is more frustrating than actually defeating it. Omega's gone and I tell you it gave me a real sense of overconfidence.
OK. My primary team going against Yiazmat was basically Vaan, Basch and Ashe. Vaan had the Masamune (I wasn't slick enough to steal SQUAT from Gilgamesh beause I was too busy trying to live through that battle against him and his stupid mutt and forgot to steal...and knowing my luck it would take me weeks of attempts to even SPAWN a Bombshell yet alone get lucky enough for it to drop a Yagyu Darkblade). Basch had a Tournesol and Ashe had the Fomalhaut with Dark Shot. Grand Armor on Vaan, Maximillians on the other two. Circlet on Basch and Golden Skullcap on Ashe. No helm on homeboy Vaan.
Vaan has a Bubble Belt. Ashe and Basch have Ribbons...at least for now. And there is a reason.
OK - go into this fight with as many Hi Ethers, Chrono Tears, Remedies and Golden Needles that you can carry. (99) Go to Rabanastre and buy some Windbreakers from the Protectives shop there too. Ahh you want to know about Gambit Setup? Let me tell you there are a million of 'em. This is what I used:
Vaan: Ally any: arise and Foe nearest: attack.
The other two had the same stuff. Ally any: arise, Ally Vaan: decoy, Ally Vaan: reverse, Self HP<70% Curaga, Self: bubble, foe nearest: attack. Simple eh?
You have to do some manual stuff. It makes it more fun anyway. Watch Yiazmat for buffs especially if you've had to run away-save-and return. Dispel them manually. Expose Yiazmat too - periodically. If you feel like it - Bravery out, Berserk out (your tank hello), Protectga out your party to your heart's content - but don't make it automatic. If your MP gets low - Syphon it from Vaan or whoever your tank is. DO NOT USE SHELLGA. Sure you might think this is a fine idea but SHELLGA tends to make things like all the magic you try and use on yourself miss more often. Not what you want.
While you're hammering away at the beast keep an eye on the upper left corner of the screen. When the stinker starts to ready Cyclone - do a quick change-o into Windbreakers and as soon as the animation ends go back to what you had on. During the first 8/10 of the battle (at least for me with Collector's Edition) this goon used Stone Breath and White Breath. He didn't stop doing this until he had 4 bars left. This is why it is very important to keep ribbons on Ashe and Basch. You only want to be wasting your finite supply of Golden Needles , Remedies and Chrono Tears on one individual: the tank. Otherwise you'll burn thru 'em. Now of course the flip side of this is that I'm casting Bubble all the time burning up MP but honestly - I need the turns. Even with Windbreakers on: Cyclone will cause a Sap effect and it sucks to be using all your turn slots curing status effects because Yiazmat doesn't wait.
It is a heavenly idea to keep your ranger (in my case Ashe) on the stairs. I also make her my party leader too so if I need to run it isn't far.
OK this is pretty much rinse and repeat and then Yiazmat begins using Death Strike. Typically he'll KO your Lured character first but sometimes he'll get you. This is where your Ally any: arise gambit on the tank can come in handy. It will be Life from an unexpected place.
It begins to be a real turd around the last 3 to 4 bars. He cast Growing Threat. He uses buffs (which must be dispelled when you return to the fight) and then Cyclone (equip da Windbreakers) followed by Reflectga on your party (dispel it immediately). Always remember to Expose this beast too - it does help. Now that he isn't using White or Stone Breath anymore - you can ditch the ribbons and take on the Bubble Belts. The only status effect you'll have to concern yourself with is Sap and Remedies will take care of that issue as will Esuna. And anyway - at this stage of the game the chances are just great that Yiazmat will get you long before Sap will. Reincarnation is a cure for status effects.
Now listen. You have to have a stout heart because sometimes Yiazmat will use Death Strike often and for a few moments it will feel as if you're getting decimated. All you'll be doing is Arising, dying, Arising, dying...but be smart. You know when you need to run - or switch in the other party. Usually I actually caught a break and managed to get back on track. Be patient - don't interrupt the flow by doing something different from your pattern. Don't for example interrupt things by Berserking your tank or shooting a Hastega. It can be fatal.
Now - if you have to run - run all the way. Don't slink out of his range and chill because the dink WILL heal himself completely in only a few moments. Go all the way to the save crystal and take care of business. When you go back - Dispel, Expose, Watch for Cyclone, Dispelga yourself after he casts Reflectga on you. MAKE SURE your Dispelga has EVERYONE in range.
A halfway smart idea is to set up your B-Team the same as your A-Team gambit wise. Still - if things have gone so far wrong that all you have is your B-Team use them to run like hell for the save crystal. DO NOT TRY to get out of his range and have the B-Team "Arise" your KO'ed A-Team. I did this once and when I went back to the battle Yiazmat had full bars and full health. "Quit and return to the title screen"? You bet. But I lost two hours of battle time having to start from my last save. Don't get cocky - if you have to go: go!
If your ranged leader hiding on the stairs gets nailed - pick a new leader and when she (or he) gets Arisen - switch back to them immediately and stick them back on the stairs.
In this battle - the most important things to watch are the upper left corner of the screen (Cyclone), your MP (be ready to Syphon often) and status of tank. In the first 8/10 of the battle you will be using Gold Needles and Chrono Tears A LOT. Try NOT to take manual control of Decoy and Reverse - your people know their gambits and you'll just waste a turn.
If I did it - anyone can. YOU can. There is no magic bullet to this battle - I didn't use Dark Matter or summon Zodiark or any of that stuff. Besides the arcane magick I used it was pretty straightforward.
And finally - always remember to switch back to your original armor after the Windbreakers ...
Good Luck!
If you can catch me - the experience is worth it!
Mar 17 2008, 06:05 PM
Royal Member
Group: Members
Posts: 160
Joined: 21-January 08
From: Eternity's end...
Member No.: 13337
Thanks for your input!
I've vanquished him months ago...
Mar 19 2008, 12:42 AM
Group: Members
Posts: 62
Joined: 23-January 08
Member No.: 13375
congrats on beating him i'm still working at it just a little at a time and thanks to silentbladez01 i found out where yiazmat was, about a glich i could use, that i could leave and come back, and more so thanks silentbladez01 and once again congrats to you metalslime
This post has been edited by
: Mar 30 2008, 05:40 PM
Mar 19 2008, 02:34 AM
Ultimate Member
Group: Members
Posts: 379
Joined: 13-November 06
Member No.: 3589
QUOTE(fran_ @ Mar 18 2008, 08:42 PM)
congrats on beating him i'm still working at it just a little at a time and thanks to silentbladez01 i found out where yiazmat was, about a glich i could use, that i could leave and come back, and more so thanks silentbladez01 and once again congrats to you metalslime
Thanks! A 'glitch' - huh? sounds like something I could have used maybe...
QUOTE(SilentBladez01 @ Mar 17 2008, 02:05 PM)
Thanks for your input!
I've vanquished him months ago...
if felt like I STARTED vanquishing him months ago! LOL!
If you can catch me - the experience is worth it!
Mar 19 2008, 08:29 PM
Group: Members
Posts: 62
Joined: 23-January 08
Member No.: 13375
the glitch was that you could stand in the stair well and shoo
t him with a bow and arrows or a gun but it takes longer so i did not use the glich; althuogh he can only attack you with cyclone and death strike
This post has been edited by
: Mar 19 2008, 08:29 PM
Mar 23 2008, 03:12 AM
Ultimate Member
Group: Members
Posts: 379
Joined: 13-November 06
Member No.: 3589
Thanks Fran! I guess I kind of used that tactic because I kept my leader (Ashe) in the stairs and used the Fomalhaut to paste the scaly beast with Dark Shot and scram if things turned ugly.
And yes - Cyclone and Death Strike still nailed me. The little pentagram thingy that animates during Death Strike would sometimes be floating in the air but the effect was still the same LOL!
If you can catch me - the experience is worth it!
Mar 23 2008, 05:31 PM
Royal Member
Group: Members
Posts: 160
Joined: 21-January 08
From: Eternity's end...
Member No.: 13337
If your having trouble with death strike you could equip one person with shell shield and cast decoy on that person.Don't forget to immobilize that character,so that the person won't run of to Yaizmat, but instead he/she will stay on the stairs.
Mar 30 2008, 05:45 PM
Group: Members
Posts: 62
Joined: 23-January 08
Member No.: 13375
QUOTE(SilentBladez01 @ Mar 23 2008, 01:31 PM)
If your having trouble with death strike you could equip one person with shell shield and cast decoy on that person.Don't forget to immobilize that character,so that the person won't run of to Yaizmat, but instead he/she will stay on the stairs.
when you told me of the glitch you said nothing of that
This post has been edited by
: Mar 30 2008, 05:51 PM
May 14 2008, 04:42 AM
Royal Member
Group: Members
Posts: 150
Joined: 27-July 07
From: Canada
Member No.: 9577
I could of used this sometime last year heh.
Thanks to Amelia For The Siggy 'n' Avatar
My Game Reviews:
Angeousa Quicksilver
May 22 2008, 12:59 PM
Group: Members
Posts: 22
Joined: 17-June 07
Member No.: 8840
I defeated Yiazmat in 3 days 6 h each day, he wasnt too shabby in the beginning but when he got critical, oh boy it was a nightmare. I came up with a tactic:
Gambit on everyone:
Ally Any:Reverse
Ally Any:Phoenix Down
^Spent over 300 phoenix downs, used phoenix downs since they take less time to use.
May 24 2008, 10:54 AM
Group: Members
Posts: 3
Joined: 18-May 08
From: Australia
Member No.: 17679
Yeah i bet Yiazmat the in my first game with all my characters at level 99 and it took me only 2 hours to beat him. The second game i did i defeated Yiazmat with just Vaan at level 90 and it took me about 5 hours. Was an intense fight.
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A woman seen on video jumping on a California Bay Area stage then allegedly attacking soul singer Lester Chambers after he dedicated a song to slain Florida teen Trayvon Martin has been charged with two felonies this week.
But Hayward police did not come to the conclusion that this was a racially-motivated attack, but rather, likely, a reaction of a medical condition.
Court documents (PDF) filed Wednesday at the Alameda County District Attorney's Office show Dinalynn Inez Andrews Potter, 43, of Barstow, was charged with felony assault and elder abuse for the July 13 attack on the 73-year-old jazz singer. Chambers, who is from Petaluma, Calif., was a member of former 1960s soul group The Chambers Brothers.
Hayward police officer Todd Shaheen cites in his report that Chambers is "frail," and that Potter was in the Navy, a retired Yeoman 3rd class, and has a prior DUI.
Police also noted in their report that she suffers from some sort of PTSD, which, "by her own admission, causes her to easily snap, especially when people keep repeating the same thing over and over again."
Sheehan wrote: "Lester Chamber's song was just the type of constant repetition that could and probably did set" Potter off.
Potter was spotted on a video (above) provided by Fuse News, showing a woman with long dirty blonde hair shoving Chambers onstage while he was performing Curtis Mayfield's classic hit "People Get Ready." He had dedicated the song in Martin's memory. That video was cited as police evidence.
The woman yelled something to the effect of, "It's all your fault, you caused this s---," before Chambers was shoved to the ground, the police report indicates.
It's unclear what Potter meant by her "ambiguous" remark, the police report adds. And Shaheen also noted that he does not believe she was racially motivated to harm Chambers, but reacting because of her PTSD symptoms. The only piece of evidence Shaheen cited regarding Potter having any racial animus is that she had liked Hell's Angels on her Facebook Page.
The surprise attack knocked Chambers down at the Hayward Russell City Blues Festival in Hayward, Calif., where a mostly peaceful crowd, many of them wearing tie-dyes, had simply been enjoying the music and hanging out on lawn chairs.
The video shows her giving a hard shove to Chambers and then wrestling with him on the stage and his crew jumped in to stop the fight and pull her off.
RAW VIDEO: Lester Chambers Attacked During "People Get Ready"
Chambers was taken to the hospital but has since been released. The video shows him being wheeled off to an ambulance and saying "I'm gonna pray" when a friend asked him how he was.
Police reports indicate Chambers had some serious bruising on his back, and he injured his knee and couldn't walk for several days.


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- Pedals easily secure in place and release even when muddy
- Knee-friendly non-centering free float for comfort on joints
- Phenomenal weight doesn't add bulk to your steed
- Includes cleats and mounting hardware for easy instllation
- Because of titanium spindle, max rider weight is 185lb


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OD-Global, a subsidiary of less-than-truckload carrier Old Dominion Freight Line which focuses on import and export services, said this week it has opened up four regional command centers in an effort to better serve its global customers.
ODFL refers to these centers as OD-Global Command Centers, and they are located in existing company offices in Atlanta, Dallas, New York City, and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
They added that these offices will be up and running by the middle of next month and handle operations for OD-Global's Northern, Southern, and Gulf Coast regions, along with Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
"The expansion of OD-Global to include regional offices has been a part of our planned evolution since the inception of our forwarding/NVOCC operations in 2007," said Greg Plemmons, vice president of OD-Global in an interview. "The timing of the openings was driven by customer demand and growth of our forwarding operations."
Plemmons said that these offices will provide customers with local support in the movement of international ocean and air shipments from beginning to end.
"OD-Global offers a full range of forwarding and supply chain services," he said. "Services provided by our worldwide network of agents and partners is fully integrated with OD's asset based infrastructure in North America including LTL, TL, container drayage, expedited, warehousing and rail. End to end visibility is provided on all OD-Global shipments. It's important to note that OD has one of the lowest claims ratios in the US LTL market, so our customers' freight will be delivered undamaged."
Old Dominion's U.S. operations are divided into seven geographic regions, according to Plemmons. Each of these new offices will serve its customers in one of those geographic regions. Regions included are Northern, Southern and Gulf Coast Regions, as well as Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. The other regions will continue to be handled centrally from ODFL's Thomasville, NC headquarters, and staffing will vary from office to office and will depend on volume and customer demand.
In terms of the biggest benefits of these offices for shippers, Plemmons said that customers have told him they prefer dealing with a local business whenever possible, with relationships between importers and exporters on the one hand and their Global Supply Chain provider being extremely important.
"Opening these new and future planned offices is consistent with Old Dominion's philosophy of providing local customer support," he said.


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Ex-pols can't resist lure of Congress
Congress is about as popular these days as Lindsay Lohan or the IRS.
So it comes as something of a surprise that among the first to lunge at the chance to run for the House in 2014 are people who've already experienced sweltering Washington summers, mind-numbing committee hearings and endless hours begging people for money.
Story Continued Below
The midterm election season is just ramping up, but already four former House members are running for congressional seats, with more almost certainly on the way. And this follows a 2012 election in which the largest number of former members returned to the House in almost a half-century.
Former Pennsylvania Rep. Marjorie Margolies, a Democrat who last served in Congress when Boyz II Men topped the charts, has launched a campaign for a vacant suburban Philadelphia seat. Former Rep. Bob Barr, a 1990s-era libertarian lightning rod who gained fame for helping to oversee President Bill Clinton's impeachment, is running for a seat in the Atlanta suburbs.
( PHOTOS: 13 things more popular than Congress)
Two others — former Democratic Rep. Joe Baca of California and ex-GOP Rep. Robert Dold of Illinois — are waging comebacks after losing their seats last year.
And officials from both parties count at least five other former members who lost last year and are seriously thinking about running again.
Congress, it turns out, is still a desirable place to be.
"It sort of bounces around in your head. Once you have the opportunity to serve in Congress, I don't think a former member stops thinking about coming back," Barr said. "It gets in your blood."
Margolies lost her seat in the 1994 Republican revolution after voting for Clinton's controversial budget (she later became Chelsea Clinton's mother-in-law). She said Congress's lousy public standing was not lost on her.
But after consulting with friends, professional allies and political associates, the former congresswoman said she decided that her desire to return to the political arena made a campaign worth it.
( PHOTOS: 12 things less popular than Congress)
Congress "is unpopular, but that doesn't mean people should say, 'I don't want to step up to the plate,'" Margolies said in an interview. "I don't think the unpopularity and contentiousness should stop one from participating. I think that's irresponsible."
The throwbacks have reason to be encouraged. While Congress's poll numbers are in the tank and voters have no love lost for Washington politicians, nine former members won back congressional seats last year. And in May, former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford won a special election to the congressional seat he held for six years. Altogether, the current Congress has 16 members who have interrupted periods of service, according to a count compiled by Eric Ostermeier, a University of Minnesota political scientist who runs the "Smart Politics" blog.
Gary Jacobson, a University of California at San Diego political scientist who studies congressional elections, said 2012 had the greatest number of former members win seats in any election since 1966.


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Oxford Street, Greater London
Salary: £9.30 /hour
Job Description
Retail Security Officer
Amberstone Guarding is a dynamic and forward thinking company who prides itself on the quality of its staff and the service they provide. The company is an approved Contractor through the SIA and is placed within the top 5% of all security providers which benchmarks our high quality within the industry and shows us as best in class.
Benefits of working with Amberstone Guarding:
Reporting to the Area Support Manager, the post holder will be responsible for maintaining a professional standard of security in a retail store in Oxford Street
Hours: Full Time
Salary: £9.30 per hour.
Main Responsibilities:
Essential Criteria:
Applicants must be able to provide a full 5 year checkable work or back to school history.
Due to the large number of applicants that we receive if you have not been contacted within 14 days of your application please assume that you have been unsuccessful.
Job Type: Full Time
Salary: £9.30 /hour


text:
Chef Matthew Jolie
Hofbrauhaus, www.hofbrauhaus.org, West Springfield, MA
- 4 bison tenderloin steaks
- 1 Tbsp. Butter
- 2 finely chopped shallots
- ¼ cup brandy
- 1 Tbsp. Softened butter
- 1 cup demiglaze (available at cooking specialty stores)
Lightly pound the bison tenderloin with cracked peppercorn then place in a heated pan to sear. Cook for three minutes, turn over, add one tablespoon of butter and finely chopped shallots. Season. Add brandy and flame, demiglaze with red wine add one cup of demiglaze. Remove steak from pan, finish the sauce with tablespoon of softened butter.


text:
October 29,2013
Dear ZTEC Customer,
I am excited to announce that ZTEC has been acquired by LitePoint, a leading provider of wireless test solutions, based in Sunnyvale, California. The combination of ZTEC as a part of LitePoint means a seamless end-to-end solution to help you get-to-market faster. Plus as part of LitePoint we'll be able to offer you even more of the same world class customer service to which you're accustomed.
Best regards,
Chris Ziomek
General Manager
LitePoint • Design Test Solutions, a Teradyne Company
As part of the LitePoint acquisition, all of ZTEC's RF Wireless Test equipment has been migrated to the LitePoint website, under "Test Solutions for the RF Lab".
All other ZTEC Instruments product lines have been migrated to the Teradyne Defense & Aerospace web site, under ZT-Series instrumentation.
• March 18th, 2014 End of Production Notice


text:
Vincent Smothers thought that it would be a job like any other. In the summer of 2007, he told me, his friend Marzell Black asked him for a gun for his mother's boyfriend. Smothers didn't sell guns, and he told him so. A few months later, Marzell amended his request, saying, "That dude who was looking for a gun? He asked me how much he would have to pay to kill somebody." A murder Smothers could handle. "Marzell wasn't the killing type," he said. "I told him, 'That's not something for you to do. I'll talk to him and see what this is all about.' "
Smothers drove Marzell in his black Jeep Commander to a gas station on Detroit's East Side, the rougher part of a rough city. As they waited in the parking lot, a bald black man opened the rear passenger-side door and got in. It was the boyfriend, whom Smothers knew only as Dave. Staring intently at the back of the seat, he explained that the target was his wife; he was leaving her and didn't want her to be alone. "Who says that?" Smothers asked me, his reedy voice rising with indignation. We were in a visiting room at the Michigan Reformatory, a prison in Ionia. "Tell me she's fucking the neighbor or that she killed your baby five years ago. But don't tell me you don't think she can be alone."
Smothers is six feet one, with caramel-colored skin and wavy black hair. He has sixteen tattoos on his upper body. Among them are three in memory of loved ones; his nickname, Vito, emblazoned in red on his back; a rebus that spells out "I never hesitate"; and, in Gothic letters, "LOST SOUL." By the age of twenty-six, he had killed at least a dozen people, most of them drug dealers. As he saw it, he was simply hastening an inevitable conclusion. "When you grow up in the hood, you learn: if you sell drugs, you're going to end up one of two things—in jail or dead," he said. "Those are the results of that life." As for women who got in the line of fire, he reasoned, they'd benefitted from the trade. "When you flock to the ballers"—the nouveau riche of the hood—"you get what they get when it's your turn." But he had never set out to kill a woman, much less a civilian with no connection to the trade.
Smothers wasn't sure he should take the job. A year earlier, he'd fallen in love with Cecily Blok, a nursing student with a two-year-old daughter, and they were about to get married. She knew what he did for a living, and she wanted him to find a different line of work. The truth was, he was tempted to kill Dave, on principle. "Somebody that think like that don't deserve to live," he said. But the job was easy and the money good.
When Smothers met with Dave again, the day after Christmas, he hadn't decided what to do. As he waited in his Jeep in a parking lot, with a .40-calibre pistol held under his right thigh, Dave walked up from behind, in Smothers's blind spot, and sat in the rear passenger seat. Smothers noted his stealthy approach and thought, Cop trick. He tightened his grip on the pistol. In the back seat, Dave said that he would call that evening and pretend to place an order for takeout, then take his wife to a CVS pharmacy nearby. "When I'm going in, you go in and kill her," he said. He handed Smothers gloves and protective sleeves to keep the gunpowder residue off his arms, telling him to throw them away after the murder. He warned him to get rid of the gun and told him that if he was caught he would gain nothing by snitching. By the time Dave left, Smothers felt sure that the job was legitimate—and that Dave was a cop. Now that Dave knew who Smothers was, he couldn't say no.
Smothers waited in his Jeep at the CVS until the call came, just before 9 P.M. A few minutes later, Dave drove up with his wife and walked into the store, nodding slightly. Smothers walked over to the car, broke the passenger window with a tire iron, and, to give the impression of a robbery, demanded the woman's purse. She screamed and reached for something—her seat belt, Smothers guessed. "She was screaming and fidgeting, doing what, I wasn't sure," he said. "I didn't wait to find out." He shot her in the head, four times, and she slumped over the middle console. "Even before I pulled the trigger, it was different," he said. "I thought about how wrong it was, and I was fighting myself about whether to do it."
Later that night, Smothers felt compelled to return to the scene, by then crowded with police cars and news vans. A cop pulled him over, and Smothers produced a fake I.D. and papers showing that the Jeep belonged to Cecily's father. The officer explained that a witness to the crime had seen a similar Jeep, and then waved him on. At home, Smothers learned from the news that Dave was Sergeant David Cobb, of the Detroit Police Department. His wife's name was Rose.
For the first time, he felt that he'd killed an innocent. "I crossed a line I had been saying I wouldn't," he said. When he started out as a hit man, he didn't care whether he lived or died. But now he had a wife, and a stepdaughter who looked up to him. When he told Cecily, she was furious; she had thought that he wouldn't kill a woman. As she later said to the police, she was "mad that Vincent did it, mad that Vincent told me, and mad that I knew." Smothers wasn't sure that she would ever forgive him. But he knew that he wanted out.
Smothers grew up in a tight-knit family on Detroit's East Side. The fifth of eight siblings, he was close to his father, Willie Frank, a black man from Mississippi who preferred to be called Sonny, even by his children. Sonny scrambled to make a living; at times in his youth he had reportedly resorted to pimping. During Smothers's childhood, he specialized in home repairs. He had met Smothers's mother, Mary, a twenty-one-year-old nurse's aide of Polish descent, on a blind date in 1971. Mary wanted to get away from home, so when Sonny proposed she said yes. At first, Sonny's mother had misgivings about the relationship; she and her husband had fled Mississippi after Emmett Till was killed for flirting with a white woman. But they allowed the young couple to move into a three-bedroom house they owned on Vinton Street. Sonny built a high wooden fence around its large yard, and tended a garden full of tomatoes, corn, and strawberries, which shared space with car parts and broken-down machinery that he was fixing.
When the Smothers family moved to the block, there were about twenty houses on Vinton Street. Now only four are standing. For the past few decades, people with means in Detroit have moved in one direction: north of 8 Mile, the road that divides the predominantly black city from the affluent, mostly white suburbs. Between 2000 and 2010, the population south of 8 Mile fell by a quarter, to 713,000; eighty-three per cent of those who remain are African-American. Among the decent homes in Smothers's neighborhood are others so burned-through that they are mere outlines—a wooden beam suggesting a structure, a pile of rocks that might have been a porch. A row of tires marks the edge of an overgrown field, where the Smothers home once stood, and a yellow handwritten sign in an empty lot across the street asks, "Will the last person to leave Detroit kindly turn out the lights?"
From a young age, Smothers helped his father, learning plumbing, electrical work, painting. "He was good at everything," Mary recalled. "It was like he learned instantly, like he already knew what to do." Sonny took the family to the movies, and went fishing with the boys; Smothers remembers stalking a deer with a bow and arrow at a campsite near Big Rapids. "My dad was very active in our lives," his younger brother Steven said. "We did a lot of things—gardening, ice skating, flying a kite. He wanted us to be better for ourselves. He didn't want to show love, but he showed it in his own way."
Sonny was strict. He expected the children to work hard and didn't abide smoking or drinking, though he'd done his share of both, and had also used crack. When the kids transgressed, he disciplined them with switches, extension cords, or the plastic rods used to close Venetian blinds. Twice, he cut off the ponytail of Smothers's younger sister, Keilea, as punishment; the second time, his aim was off, and he sliced into her scalp. Mary tried to protect the kids but she feared Sonny, who beat her frequently. "They say you should take your kids and go, but I couldn't do that," Mary said. "I had nowhere to go."
In 1989, Vincent's brother Neshon, then fifteen, ran away, and the police found him wandering the streets. After extensive bruising was discovered on him, he was taken into protective custody. Sonny refused to allow Vincent and his older brother Dion to be examined, and they, too, became wards of the state. Smothers, then eight, was desperate to go home. "Me and my father were extremely close," he said. "Children gravitate toward authority, and to me the better parent was my father."
At twelve, Smothers was allowed to return home, and he earned a spot at one of the city's top magnet schools. But it was far from home and from parental oversight, and he often skipped class. A year later, the family's home burned in a woodstove accident; he helped rebuild it and began attending nearby Charles F. Kettering Senior High School, walking back and forth with Keilea, who was a year younger. He was an honors student, with high marks in Spanish and biology. Kenneth Taylor, a teacher at Kettering, said of the family, "I think there was a genuine desire on their part to have a better life."
Smothers had five close friends who also came from stable homes, a rarity in a neighborhood where many children didn't know who their father was. "We were, like, the good kids," he said. "Bad kids start stealing cars at twelve or thirteen, doing weed, shooting at people. We came from solid backgrounds that kept us from those things. If you came home smelling like weed smoke, you had some explaining to do." Smothers had a car, a red Chevy pickup truck, which conferred status. The friends played basketball and hung out near the Packard plant, the blighted shell of an automotive factory that looms over the neighborhood. One of the friends, Barry Morton, remembered a back-door play he perfected with Smothers, who would cut to the basket for an easy lob: "There was not a park we wouldn't take over."
But in the late nineties the family started to flounder. Sonny received a diagnosis of a rare type of lymphoma. Smothers's brother Dion stopped attending school and began selling drugs, and Sonny kicked him out. Around Christmas of 1997, Dion burgled a house in the neighborhood. The man who lived next door, Grady Hudson, was close to the house's owner, and he threatened Dion, "I'm going to whup you every time I see you." Sure enough, each time he spotted Dion after that, he chased him.
One evening the next April, Hudson hosted a barbecue. Around sunset, as he worked the grill and downed Miller Genuine Draft, Dion and a friend pulled up in a white van. Hudson spotted Dion as he went inside and, after a tense encounter with his friend, pulled two revolvers out of the pocket of his hoodie. When Dion emerged, Hudson glared at him and raised a gun. "There ain't but one bullet in the gun—I ain't looking for a shootout," he told me. "I didn't want to shoot up, because I know whatever comes up goes down," he added. "I decided to cut it into the dirt in front of the Smothers house."
As Dion scrambled into the van, Hudson fired, and he heard a scream: Keilea had followed Dion out to say goodbye. Hudson saw her fall, clutching her stomach. "I dropped my gun and ran to her," Hudson said. "I'm pulling her shirt, trying to see where she's hit. I see a little bitty hole in her stomach." Twelve hours later, Keilea died, at the same hospital where her father was being treated for cancer. When Smothers learned of her death, he went upstairs to tell Sonny, who wept and said, "I never got to say sorry about her scalp." He died eight months later. Hudson was sentenced to forty to sixty years in prison for second-degree murder.
Smothers stopped going to school, and his grades slid to C's, D's, and F's. He'd committed petty crimes before, like stealing food from a grocery store, but now his infractions turned serious; he missed graduation day because he'd spent the night in jail for stealing a car. He considered becoming a marine, but instead he got a job making air-conditioning and heating ducts, while he continued his criminal sideline. After two more arrests for stealing cars, he was imprisoned for a year and a half.
When he was released, he returned to his job, working his way up to foreman and earning sixteen dollars an hour. He said that he tried to set an example, once finishing a task that normally took an hour in twelve minutes. In 2003, his left hand, which he favors, got caught in a machine that flattens steel, and he lost mobility in all the fingers but the thumb and index—the two he needed to fire a gun.
If Smothers had been born fifty years earlier, he might have been a company man, helping build the cars that propelled Detroit's growth. But at the turn of the century the dominant business in many parts of town was drugs. Marzell, who dealt crack, told me, "I viewed dealing as bad, but it's, like, an option because it's all you know and all you see. Some guys make a nice living doing it. You see all those better things on television and you want to escape." Smothers had a puritanical streak—he didn't smoke, take drugs, or drink to excess—and he mostly steered clear of the trade. But he wasn't averse to robbing the places where drugs were sold.
Smothers says that he turned to crime because he became "callous" after losing the "two people closest to him"—a somewhat self-serving explanation. But Sonny's death left him with little guidance, in a difficult environment. "Detroit is two underclasses below low-class," he said. "Living paycheck to paycheck is underclass. The people in Detroit haven't seen a paycheck. When I got out of prison, I started seeing everybody with credit cards for the first time. But it was Bridge Cards, for welfare." Smothers and his friends were ambitious and talented—the "élite," as Marzell put it. They wanted to get ahead, and crime seemed like the fastest ticket. In one ten-minute robbery, Smothers said, he made a hundred thousand dollars—the equivalent of three years' salary from his day job. Charlene Handelman, his twelfth-grade English teacher, said, "He wasn't the first of my honors students who turned to murder-for-hire."
In 2005, one of Smothers's basketball buddies introduced him to Leroy Payne, a laid-back, goateed black man in his thirties who liked to shoot dice in high-stakes street games. According to Smothers, Payne worked for DeLano Thomas, a dealer on the East Side who had a predilection for flashy accessories: luxury S.U.V.s with neon headlights, diamonds on his watch and on a pendant worn around his neck. DeLano, in turn, worked for someone whom Marzell described as "real heavy": Adarus Mazio Black, one of the biggest drug suppliers in Detroit.
One day, while Smothers was chatting with Payne and some other men, someone asked, "How much would you kill someone for?" Smothers didn't take the question that seriously. "I looked into how I would do it and gave a price, not thinking it would be agreed to," he said. Payne met his price, Smothers said, and, a couple of months later, Smothers walked up to his first victim and shot him dead. Fifteen minutes later, he was home. "Emotionally, it didn't affect me," he said. "It wasn't, like, 'Wow, I just killed someone.' "
Smothers expected Payne to short him. "I'm still doing my day job," he said. "I'm thinking, Even if they want me to do it again, if all my money isn't there I won't do it again." (Smothers later told the police that he charged five thousand dollars for a typical hit, but other people I talked to suggested that the fee was closer to twenty thousand.) After the hit, Payne met him and handed over a shoebox. All the money was there.
The following year, Smothers's bosses asked him to take a three-dollar-an-hour pay cut; he quit and struggled to find a comparable job. "It's hard to find a job when you're a felon," his friend Barry Morton said. "He needed money, and his mind started playing tricks." Smothers never considered himself a hit man. "Who has a list of people they want taken care of?" he said. "That doesn't happen in real life." But killing became his steady line of work.
Marzell told me, "I think he tried it, and the better he got at it the more intriguing and enticing it became to him. It was a mental exercise for him, for sure. The homework, the plotting. The deed of the murder itself." For most assignments, Smothers said, Payne gave him the target's street name and an address, along with a description of the target and his vehicle. The address was a starting point; dealers rarely stay at a location for long. They also keep their guard up, typically emerging from their cars and their homes with a gun at the ready. Smothers looked for a moment of vulnerability. "When you drive up to your house, you turn your car off. You look around, make sure nobody is around, pull your door handle, push the door open with your foot, and lean over to grab whatever is sitting in the passenger seat," he said. If someone Smothers was following had stopped at McDonald's on the way home, he would inevitably reach for the bag of food on the way out of the car. "That moment you lean over, that's the moment you get killed," Smothers said.
In the summer of 2006, Smothers was hired to kill a dealer named Adrian (A.D.) Thornton, who had been feuding with Payne's boss, DeLano Thomas. In 2000, DeLano's crew allegedly stole some marijuana from A.D. and shot him and his girlfriend. In retaliation, A.D. and his brother killed one of DeLano's people. Now word went around that DeLano had put a fifty-thousand-dollar bounty on A.D., and a similar one on his best friend, Motorhead.
Weeks earlier, Smothers had killed another of A.D.'s friends, catching him as he smoked a cigarette on his porch. A.D. was harder to trap; he switched cars frequently, and sometimes disguised himself with a dreadlocked wig. Smothers determined that he spent most of his time at a drug house, and began to conduct surveillance. "In the hood, you can't pull up on the block and sit in the car," he said. "People think you're either police or you shouldn't be there. You've got to be able to get close without them suspecting you of anything." He joined in pickup games at a basketball hoop next door, where the local kids played.
On stakeouts, Smothers cultivated a benign impression. He has a ready smile, a frame that looks too skinny to hold muscle, and a voice that tends to squeak when he's amused or saying a favorite phrase, like "Be for real!" He sometimes wore suits and, in the suburbs, brought along his dog, a ten-pound Maltese-poodle mix. "If you're out at three in the morning, walking a dog that fits in most women's purses, people drive right by you," he said. When he was tailing A.D., he got as close as possible. At a liquor store near the drug house, he once held the door for Motorhead. "The closer you are to a person, the more you can tell," he said. "Their reactions, their fear level. People who are afraid are dangerous." Motorhead barely noticed Smothers. "He looked at me like I was a peon, like I wasn't a threat to him," he said. "That's a good thing."
One day in August, as Smothers was watching, A.D. emerged from the house, laughing and talking with Motorhead. In the street, a group of kids were heading for the basketball hoop, and Motorhead barely noticed a tall light-skinned man among them. In later testimony, he noted Smothers's methods: "When you fixing to do something to a guy . . . you plan to hit him when the crowd is moving, so it was, like, blended." As he jumped off the porch, he heard gunfire, and felt himself get hit: he took several bullets to his stomach, two to his head, and one through his arm. A.D. ran for his white truck, parked ten yards away, where his girlfriend was strapping their baby into a car seat. He was dead before he could get there.
Smothers said that Payne paid him the same day, before either man learned that Motorhead had survived. "I saw Motorhead's brains," Smothers told the police. "I couldn't believe when I heard he was alive." Gunfire can be capricious, he told me; his sister was killed by a single, misfired shot, while people like Motorhead "eat bullets." Smothers said that Payne wanted to make sure he didn't repeat the mistake: "That's why the other scenes needed to be so gruesome after that."
At the end of 2006, Smothers met Cecily, a pretty twenty-two-year-old "red bone"—someone of mixed ancestry whose light skin has reddish undertones—with a penchant for high heels. The first time they hung out, he told her what he did for a living, and she didn't believe him. By the time she did, they were in love. In three months, they were engaged. They went to the movies and restaurants, but more often stayed home, cooking elaborate meals and bonding over housework; Smothers liked that she kept things clean. They rarely argued, though Cecily had a jealous streak. Once, while they were shopping for groceries, he sneaked away to surprise her with flowers, and she read his evasiveness as guilt over another woman; she realized her mistake when she returned to the Jeep and found the flowers inside. "I never needed to lie to Cecily," Smothers said. "She knew what I did, and I didn't cheat."
In his crowd, dedication to a single woman was unusual. As one East Sider explained, most successful criminals "have a wife, baby mamas, and girls on the side." But Smothers had grown up with his parents' model. "They didn't have one of those book romances, but I know my father loved my mother," he said. He moved with Cecily to a small row house in Shelby Township, a suburb north of Detroit. "I would love to live on the block I grew up on," he said. "But there aren't places in Detroit worth living in." They began to decorate, buying new furniture and a big flat-screen TV.
While Smothers settled into domestic life, the police were tracking his employers. In March of 2007, a special agent with the Wisconsin Department of Justice unlocked the padlock of a storage unit in Milwaukee, which contained a single blue plastic bin. He opened the lid, and found shrink-wrapped wads of bills totalling $1.13 million. The unit's owner admitted that he'd stolen the money from drug dealers and outlined an elaborate scheme: twice a month, two tour buses travelled from Chicago to Detroit, to be loaded with money, and went on to Tucson, where the money was exchanged for marijuana. If the police stopped the buses, the drivers and passengers were paid to say that they were setting up for a band in Las Vegas.
The buses were traced to DeLano's boss, Adarus Mazio Black, who fled to Tucson. "Black became obsessed with concealing his identity," J. Michael Buckley, the assistant U.S. attorney in Detroit who prosecuted him, said. "He had multiple aliases, surgically altered his fingerprints and his face. Those are the three ways that law enforcement identifies people, and he changed all of them."
The buses were searched in April of 2007, and a federal complaint identified two people who had coöperated with the investigation as bus drivers. The next month, Smothers said, Payne hired him to kill two bus drivers from Chicago—an act of retribution, Buckley believes. DeLano made a plan to summon the drivers to a park in Detroit, but Smothers thought that the area was too crowded, so he had the men ordered to a spot around the corner. A few blocks from the meeting place, his car broke down, and he continued on foot, calling Payne to tell him that he would need a ride. While Smothers was on the phone, he saw the drivers, who had pulled their car over to the side of the road. One of them, an elderly black man, was leaning over the open hood, and Smothers, holding his phone to his ear, walked up and asked if he needed help. "Naw, young fella," the man replied. Smothers took out a pistol and, without hanging up the phone, shot him in the head, and then shot the passenger through the windshield. As he walked away, he told Payne that he was ready to be picked up.
Five months later, federal agents traced Black to California and arrested him. (He was later convicted of drug trafficking.) The feds knew that Black was at the top of Detroit's drug hierarchy and that DeLano was his right-hand man. "DeLano was the enforcer, dealing with payments," Ernest Wilson, a sergeant in the Detroit Police Department, explained. "Everything DeLano did was to make sure nobody double-crossed Black." The police didn't know who Smothers was, but they were only two steps away.
Smothers took pride in his discipline. Growing up, he cleaned the toilets at home. At his air-conditioning job, he said, he arrived early and stayed late. When a crew was robbing a dope house, he was the first inside: "I know I'll look around every corner. I'm going to have my own back." Before carrying out a hit, he did his homework, he said. But as the money flowed in he began relying on others and making costly mistakes. In the summer of 2007, Smothers was hired to kill a dealer named Pooch. He brought an accomplice, and the hit went awry. Pooch was killed, but two women were shot in the head: the teen-age mother of Pooch's child, and a friend of hers, who survived. Smothers faulted his accomplice for shooting the women and for leaving the job half-finished. "The police don't care about drug dealers," he said. "But you kill and maim two eighteen-year-old girls with infant children, that don't make no sense."
He took care not to target bystanders—he didn't believe in killing for free—but his collateral damage was mounting. At the end of the summer, he told me, he spent a month on Runyon Street, staking out the home of a marijuana dealer named Michael Robinson, and concealing his intentions by playing baseball in the street with a friend, Ernest Davis. Late in the evening on September 17th, Robinson was sitting in his living room with a neighbor, Valerie Glover, and three other friends. Big Mike, as he was known, had a job working for the city, and liked to cook and to entertain; he had invited his guests over that night to watch the Redskins-Eagles game. Around 11:25 P.M., during the fourth quarter, Smothers began to conduct "recon." Wearing dark clothing and a ski mask and carrying an AK-47, he said, he went up on the porch and approached the storm door to test if it was locked, thinking that he wouldn't be heard over the television. Davis, also standing on the porch, saw a silhouette in the front window. As Smothers reached for the storm door's handle, a man opened the inside door.
The man turned to say something. Smothers saw Robinson sitting in a love seat, with a pistol on a table beside him. "Before he could turn to get his pistol, I shot him," he said. "Ernest shot the silhouette there in the window." Glover later testified that she said, "They shooting in here!" Bullets struck her elbow and thigh, and she fled to the hallway. Smothers stepped into the living room, "gun blazing," he said. Glover took three more shots in her back, and crawled into a bedroom, where Robinson's seven-year-old son was sleeping. When the boy sat up, she told him to lie back down, while she hid under his bed.
"It was unfortunate that they were there and the door got opened when it did," Smothers said of Robinson's guests, adding, "Everything was not according to plan—it was chaotic." He "secured" the living room, handed the AK-47 to Davis, and followed the woman. "I was making sure there was nobody else in the house who was a threat," he said.
When he entered the room at the end of the hallway, Robinson's son was awake in bed, saying, "Daddy."
"Who back here? Who back here?" Smothers asked.
Glover said she was under the bed.
"Where the shit at?" she recalled the shooter saying. "Do you know where the shit at? Because I'm 'bout to kill you." She said she didn't know, and he backed off his threat, telling her to be quiet. Smothers checked the basement, and found marijuana plants. As he moved around the house, he heard gunshots: "Ernest making sure everyone was dead." When the police arrived, around midnight, they found the bodies of three men and a woman; Glover and the boy were the only survivors.
Three months later, Smothers killed Rose Cobb, the policeman's wife, and afterward he couldn't get her out of his mind. The case was in the papers: the officer, David Cobb, was arrested and questioned, and not long afterward he hanged himself in a suburban park. For years, Smothers had murdered with little compunction. His work as a hit man had been contingent on a careful ethical dodge: he didn't believe that he had the moral high ground but, as he saw it, neither did his victims. Of Pooch, he said, "He was a pedophile, having sex with a fourteen-, fifteen-year-old. Don't say I killed one of Detroit's greatest citizens." He experienced Rose Cobb's death differently. "I don't remember the other ones, but I can still see her moving, screaming, stuck in that seat belt," he said.
He decided that this would be his last job. Killing someone he deemed innocent had upended his sense of himself. And he had another incentive, too: Cecily was pregnant. That spring, she gave birth to a girl, whom they named Keilea, after Smothers's sister. He began to envision a safer life, but he couldn't see a way out. "It's a situation where, in a sense, you can't stop," he said. DeLano, who had ordered most of the killings, was still at large. "Though the dude didn't know me, it wasn't like he couldn't find out who I was," Smothers said. "You never want somebody with that knowledge in the shadows."
Smothers said that he "became unavailable" to the people who wanted to hire him. But if he was going to retire he'd need money to support his family, and former hit men have thin résumés. Smothers went to lie low in Frankfort, Kentucky. He and Davis had got an enticing tip: a local dealer had buried five hundred thousand dollars in his yard. "This is the out," Smothers said. "This is half a million dollars." They devised a plan to kidnap the dealer and take the money. Wearing a suit, Smothers approached the dealer in his driveway, saying, "Excuse me, I'm with the homicide division, and I'd like to talk to you." Sensing danger, the dealer backed away and got a neighbor's attention. Smothers retreated, saying he'd return with another officer; he never went back.
Smothers told me that after Cobb he never killed again, but his crisis of conscience had come too late. In April, he returned to Detroit to be with his family. It was a risky trip. Through a source, Smothers had seen a police warrant for his arrest: he was wanted for the hit that had killed Pooch and his girlfriend. He had heard that her friend had survived, and he suspected that she had identified him. He was partly right: she had picked his picture out of a photo lineup. But, as he learned later, he was likely in the lineup because he had been given up by a friend of his. A man named Charles Malone had been arrested for selling drugs, and had talked to the police about Smothers's exploits. In a confidential proceeding, he testified that he saw Vito jogging away from where the bus drivers were murdered. He added that Smothers later told him about the hit. The prosecutor asked, "Did this seem odd to you that he was telling you about all this?"
"No, ma'am."
"So you two are that close?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Does he like to brag about what he does?"
"Yes, ma'am."
One morning shortly after Smothers returned home, he was cooking breakfast for Cecily when he realized that he was out of grits. He put the bacon in the oven and stepped outside with Keilea, making his way toward an opening in the fence alongside his yard that led into the parking lot of the grocery store next door. Before he could get there, a policeman drove up, drew a gun, and ordered him to the ground.
Smothers didn't want to lie down with the baby, so he asked if he could hand her to Cecily, who had come out of the house. The officer wouldn't let him. As Smothers kneeled and then sat awkwardly on the gravel, more police pulled up and pointed their guns. When an officer approached, Smothers handed her the baby and ducked into a police car. Over the radio, he heard an order to arrest Cecily.
Ten hours later, he was at the Schaefer police station, in Detroit, in a room with a square wooden table and two black plastic chairs. He had been brought in to talk with Ira Todd, a member of the city's Violent Crimes Task Force.
"What's going on with you, man?" Todd asked.
"Nothing much," Smothers answered quietly. A video of the interrogation showed him folding himself into the seat, his hands cuffed behind him. His hair was dishevelled, and he had thin sideburns and a mustache. He was wearing shorts and a black T-shirt.
"I've been talking to a lot of people about you, my friend," Todd said, as he set up a camera to take pictures of Smothers.
"You've got troubles."
"Major troubles. I figure you already know that," Todd said. "We know that you are, per se, a hit man, a contract hit man," he went on. "We know that you and somebody else were responsible for trying to take out three people—one girl that lived and she pointed you out."
Smothers listened.
"We know that you killed a cop's wife," Todd continued. "We know that the cop hired you." He said that Cecily had told the police about Rose Cobb's murder, and was showing them weapons that Smothers had asked her to stash. But she had also emphasized that he was a great father to their children. If he coöperated, Todd would talk to the prosecutor on his behalf.
"I'm willing to talk to you about everything," Smothers assured him. He asked what kind of trouble Cecily was in, and Todd hedged, telling him that asking her to hide weapons was a bad idea. If Smothers talked, he said, "I give you my word that we'll look out for you." Smothers cut him off, making clear that he wasn't worried about himself; he wanted to make sure Cecily didn't end up behind bars. "I can do forever," he said. "But I couldn't live with myself if she wasn't able to raise those two little girls."
Over the next twenty hours, Smothers talked. He combed through his memory, trying to keep the order of his hits straight. Toward the end of the interview, he mentioned the killing on Runyon Street.
"Did you hit somebody in there?" an officer asked.
"Yes," Smothers responded.
"Male or female or what?"
"Three guys and, I believe, there was a female in the house." Smothers described the scene in detail, mentioning that he had talked to a young boy before leaving with two thousand dollars, half a pound of marijuana, and a .40-calibre pistol—the one he said he later used to kill Rose Cobb.
"I really believe that Smothers was giving me the one-hundred-per-cent truth," Todd told me. The information that Smothers gave about the eight other hits checked out. Todd has interrogated several hit men, but, he said, "Vincent was the first one I ever talked to who seemed human. You literally walked away saying, 'Oh, my God, what happened to this kid?' "
As Smothers was finishing his confession, he asked to use the bathroom, and a sergeant, Michael Russell, escorted him there. Smothers told me that Russell said, "You said you did the Runyon job. That's impossible. We got the guy." (Russell denies having the conversation.) Surprised to have his confession second-guessed, Smothers gave details, mentioning the people in the living room and his discussion with Glover in the back room. "He looked flabbergasted," Smothers told me. "He said, 'A kid confessed to it.' " Seven months before, a young teen-ager named Davontae Sanford had told the police that he was responsible for the killings. "I said, 'Wow, that's really messed up,' " Smothers told me. "He wasn't there."
Last December, I met Sanford, with his lawyer, in a small booth at Ionia Correctional Facility. At nineteen, he is a broad-shouldered young man with a drooping right eyelid. He told me his story from behind an iron grille.
At 1 A.M. on September 18, 2007, he was in his living room when his mother, Taminko, returned from the store and mentioned that something had happened on Runyon Street, two blocks away. When he probed for details, she told him not to worry about it and admonished him to stay inside. Late-night Detroit was dangerous for a kid like Davontae, who was fourteen, blind in one eye, and immature. "He didn't have a fourteen-year-old's mind," Taminko told me. "He still watched cartoons and played with his sister's dolls."
That night, Taminko left the house again, and Sanford stepped outside and walked up the street. News vans had gathered, and two detectives were following a police dog through the neighborhood. One of them, Sergeant Russell, flicked his flashlight on and off, and Sanford stopped to talk. He mentioned that his uncle was a cop, and when Russell's partner said that he knew his uncle well Sanford grew expansive. He told the detectives that he knew who was responsible for "whatever it was that had happened on Runyon." As they questioned him, he said that four of his friends had committed the crime, and that he'd seen one of them running through his yard as he fled the scene.
Russell was skeptical. Sanford's details didn't line up; among other things, he had said that he and his friends met before the crime at a nearby diner, which Russell knew had gone out of business. He picked up Sanford the following evening and brought him to the police station. There Sanford told police that he had participated in the killings. His confession included a sketch of the living room where the murders took place, accurately placing the bodies where they were found.
Sanford had grown up rough on the East Side. According to Taminko, Sanford's father beat her, even when she was pregnant, and he was in prison by the time Sanford was born. Taminko was hooked on crack and, by her own account, not the most attentive parent. Her mother was also an addict, and her brother, who dealt drugs, was killed in his home in 1999. One night in 2006, when Sanford was staying with a cousin, Taminko was burned in a fire at her house. When I met her, the short sleeves of her print shirt revealed a network of keloid scars on her arms.
Taminko moved Sanford from home to home, and he attended seven schools in almost as many years. When he was eight, he was hit in the face with an egg and subsequently lost the vision in his right eye. He was a poor student, and by the time he was in fourth grade Taminko had enrolled him in special-education classes. "We had to see psychiatrists and social workers," she said. "They classified Davontae as emotionally impaired."
At Osborn High, where Sanford was enrolled at the time of the murder, a security guard recalled him as an attention-seeker with a tendency to "overdramatize." Sanford didn't appear to belong to gangs at the school, like All 'Bout Money and the 7-Mile Bloods, but he talked as if he did. "He would say he got into a big fight and he had a gun and all this ammo, and it wasn't true," the guard said. "He just talked a lot. We would tell him to stop doing that—stop claiming things that aren't true."
As Sanford was questioned by the police, he changed key aspects of his story. At first, he laid the blame for the crime on the four friends. Later, he named a different group, including a cousin and the cousin's friends. It wasn't until his arraignment, he told me, that he fully understood what was happening. "They was reading every charge. Every charge was, like, 'Life. Life. Life.' That's when it really kicked in," he said. "They serious."
In an interview with a court-appointed psychologist, he said that his confession was false. But at his bench trial, six months later, he changed his story again. Before the prosecutor finished presenting his case, Sanford pleaded guilty to four counts of second-degree murder. Taminko said that he had been pressured by his lawyer, Robert Slameka, who she later discovered had been disciplined fifteen times by the Michigan Supreme Court. "Our lawyer told us to take the plea," she told me. "He said they had too much evidence on my son. But later we realized the evidence didn't exist." In the trial, Valerie Glover, the woman who had survived the shootings, testified that Sanford's voice sounded like the one she'd heard from under the bed. "He didn't have any bass in his voice," she said, of the shooter. "He just sounded like a kid." The prosecution seized on this as evidence that Sanford was the shooter; later, Glover was played a recording of Smothers speaking and agreed that the voice might have been his.
Neither the police nor the prosecutors believe that Sanford's confession could have been false. But scholars have uncovered at least two hundred and fifty false confessions in the past two decades, and recent studies have found that minors are two to three times as likely to confess falsely. "Interrogations are all about manipulating the suspect's perception of the benefits of confessing, while making the suspect think there are attendant harms if he doesn't confess," Steven Drizin, the co-founder of the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth at Northwestern University School of Law, which filed an amicus brief on Sanford's behalf, said. "The process preys on the vulnerabilities of juveniles, who are naturally bad at assessing and weighing risks." They often confess, he said, because they just want to go home.
Sanford never testified on his own behalf, but he told me that, during the interrogation, Russell pulled out a silver digital camera and showed him pictures of the crime scene. "I could see dead bodies," Sanford said. "He showed me closeup pictures and far-back pictures. One guy in the closeup pictures had his mouth open. I'll never forget that." (Later, Russell denied showing Sanford pictures, but at the preliminary hearing he said that it was his "general practice" to have photos of the scene.) Sanford also said that Russell's boss joined the interrogation and produced the incriminating sketch. "He drew the couch and everything. He said, 'Draw where the bodies are at,' " Sanford said. "Once I drew where the bodies was, he called the other detectives in and said, 'Y'all see that?' "
Despite the problematic evidence, Sanford made a rational choice by taking the plea. At trial, the judge, Brian Sullivan, pushed both sides to plead. Even though the defense never presented its case, Sullivan remarked at sentencing that, had Sanford not agreed to a plea, he likely would have sent him away for life. As it was, he sentenced him to thirty-seven to ninety years in prison.
A couple of weeks later, Smothers confessed to the Runyon murders, but the Detroit Police Department showed little interest in re-opening the case. He was charged with all the killings to which he had confessed, except the four on Runyon Street—and, according to information given to his defense attorney, Gabi Silver, the police interrogated him extensively about every murder other than those four. "Nobody ever came in on the Sanford case," Silver said. "The implication to me is loud and clear: 'We already got somebody.' They knew it was a whole can of worms." Sanford was assigned an appellate attorney, Kim McGinnis, an energetic forty-seven-year-old who had earned a Ph.D. in pharmacology before switching to law. Neither the police nor the prosecutor informed her of Smothers's confession; she learned of it months later, from a local TV newscaster. At the end of 2008, she filed a motion to withdraw Sanford's guilty plea, and requested a new trial.
Smothers was fighting his own legal battle; Silver was trying to get his confession thrown out, arguing that the police had promised illegally that Cecily would not be charged if he coöperated. Before a hearing one morning, three officers escorted Smothers, in handcuffs and a yellow jumpsuit, to a cell in the bullpen where prisoners wait to be transported to the courthouse. An inmate in another cell called out, "Wassup?" Smothers didn't recognize him, so he ignored the greeting. The other inmate was young and had a droopy right eye that made Smothers think he had Down syndrome. After a moment, Smothers remembered hearing from guards that the kid who caught his case was slow; it was Sanford.
A couple of weeks later, the two met again in the bullpen. Sanford introduced himself as "the guy who got locked up for those murders on Runyon," explaining that the police had seen him in the neighborhood, talked to him, and arrested him. Sanford recalled that Smothers told him, "I'm the one who did the shooting on Runyon. You'll be going home soon. Don't worry about it." Smothers wasn't what Sanford had expected. "He didn't seem like a killer," he told me. "He didn't come off tough. He came off real kind. Everything about him was quiet." He thanked Smothers for "stepping up."
But Smothers wasn't ready to step up, not entirely. In the spring of 2009, Michigan's Court of Appeals ordered a hearing to determine whether Sanford was innocent, and Smothers was called to testify. He discussed with Cecily whether he should; she was firmly against it. He had nothing to fear from DeLano Thomas, who had been killed earlier that year, in absurd fashion. He had gone to see an estranged girlfriend, and when he arrived—his neon headlights announced his presence, the girlfriend said—she was having sex with an eighteen-year-old, who was so afraid of DeLano that he killed him preëmptively. But if Smothers named his former associates in open court he risked being seen as a snitch; he and his family could be put in danger. Besides, Smothers told himself, his confession had established Sanford's innocence, so the authorities had no choice but to release the kid. In July of 2009, he pleaded the Fifth.
The proceedings of Sanford's innocence hearing went on for more than two years, and provided a great deal of exonerating evidence. A key witness—a neighbor who saw the shooters as they were fleeing—testified that one was "five-eleven," close to Smothers's height, and the other was a little shorter, "but not as much as six inches shorter," Sanford's height. Ballistics evidence showed that cartridge casings at the crime scene matched a .45 linked to Smothers, and that bullets at the scene had been fired from the same AK-47 used in another Smothers homicide; experts disagreed about whether additional AKs were used. Smothers's account largely matched that evidence; Sanford had confessed to shooting in the window with a mini-14. The evidence was persuasive enough so that Nancy Diehl, the former chief of the trial division for the Wayne County prosecutor's office, which has jurisdiction over Detroit, argued that the plea should be set aside. But even though the county prosecutor conceded, "There are aspects of the People's case that elude explanation," she refused to allow Sanford to withdraw his plea.
As Smothers awaited his own trial, he was placed on twenty-three-hour lockdown at a jail in Detroit. He read books, learned some chess moves from his neighbor, a man named Phillip Zabawa, and spent time scrubbing his cell and the communal areas. Smothers's cell happened to be positioned across the catwalk—a six-foot-wide passageway between cells—from a TV, and he rigged a string and two spoons over a pipe so that he could change channels from his cell. Zabawa described the contraption as a "minor feat of mechanical engineering."
The police have shown little interest in large parts of Smothers's confession. There is no evidence that Payne, DeLano, or Davis was ever questioned about any of Smothers's murders. (Payne, through his attorney, proclaimed his innocence, and suggested that Smothers was fabricating the allegations. Davis did not respond to a request for an interview.) When I asked Smothers why he thought no one else has been arrested for his crimes, he responded, "Because the police think what I do—that the streets clean up themselves."
On December 26, 2009—the anniversary of the day Smothers's father died, and of Rose Cobb's murder—Zabawa was lying on his cot, absorbed in a book, when he heard a rustling noise from Smothers's cell. The prisoners had toilets in their cells, and Zabawa wrinkled his nose at the smell. "Hey, dude, put some water on it," he yelled to Smothers. He got no response, so after a minute he asked again, "Hey, how about a courtesy flush?"
A female guard doing her rounds looked down the catwalk, then opened the gate and rushed forward. Her partner jumped onto a table on the catwalk, and climbed the bars of Smothers's cell to reach him. He was hanging from a pipe, with his bowels emptied; he had fashioned a noose out of two large plastic garbage bags. The partner sawed through the plastic with a pocketknife while the guard, a small woman, tried to prop up Smothers. She couldn't support his weight, and he fell down with a thud.
Smothers failed to kill himself: his heart stopped, but the guards and E.M.T.s revived him, and, he said, he spent about a week in a coma. When he returned to his cell, his chess game was still good, Zabawa said, but his consciousness seemed altered. Now thirty-one, Smothers spends his days quietly, often reading. He admires "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and Elie Wiesel's "Night," and he's read more than a hundred romance novels. "I like books that stir my emotion, in a good and a bad way," he said. He talks to his mother almost daily and to Cecily often, though he has encouraged her to find someone else.
Zabawa speculated that the near-death experience "brought home to Vito what he did to the families" of his victims. The following summer, Smothers pleaded guilty to eight murders, and was sentenced to fifty to a hundred years in prison. He declined to address his victims. "There is no atonement," Smothers later told me. "I've taken people away from people who love them. I can't give them back. By my sister being killed, I understand that level of pain and hurt."
Like many who have crossed paths with him, Smothers doesn't know what to make of himself. He feels that he is "not a bad person, in the sense I'm not an asshole," even though he did some of the "worst things imaginable." His punishment is just, he said: "I think society would take a hit if someone with my criminal past was to be free." At times, he feels overwhelmed by the years ahead of him, and regrets that his suicide attempt didn't work. He talks longingly of the day when "I run across whoever will kill me."
As he reviewed his crimes, he told me, "I can't do nothing to change nothing." But he has thought often about what might have happened if he had testified at Sanford's hearing. He wanted to help however he could, but was still reluctant to take the stand, so, at the end of 2010, he devised a partial solution: if he waived his attorney-client privilege, his lawyer could testify about what he'd told her. Judge Sullivan would not allow it.
Last February, Sullivan ruled against Sanford, refusing to set aside his plea. While he agreed that Smothers's statement to the police offered "a plausible version of what happened," he described the ballistics evidence as "unexplained." He also noted that Smothers had twice invoked his right not to speak on Sanford's behalf. "I was skeptical about testifying," Smothers said. "But the more I hear about what they continue to say and lie about, it makes me want to testify that much more."
After Smothers first confessed, Sanford's lawyer, Kim McGinnis, told him that he'd be out by his seventeenth birthday. He's nearly twenty now, and his defense has been largely unsuccessful. In January, McGinnis filed a motion to allow Smothers to appear in court; the judge refused. So Smothers took his last available option: he wrote a detailed affidavit stating that he was contracted to kill Michael Robinson on Runyon Street, and insisting that he had no connection to Sanford or his family. It is now up to Michigan's Court of Appeals to decide whether his account calls Sanford's guilt into question. But Smothers is still hopeful that he has done some good. "I look at it as, I'm saving somebody's life," he told me. "He's not guilty. Maybe it's time for him to go home." ♦


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Interchange - The Open Source Online Shop Platform
Interchange - The Open Source Online Shop Platform
By Stefan Hornburg (Racke) from Hannover.pm
Date: Friday, 7 November 2008 16:55
Duration: 40 minutes
Target audience: Any
Language: English
Tags: dbi ecommerce shop web
You can find more information on the speaker's site:
Interchange is a mature open source online shop platform constantly developed since 1995. Perl as implementation language allows Interchange to be a robust, secure and very flexible application.
This talk starts with an introduction on the architecture and capabilities of Interchange.
It continues with a detailed description how the beauty of Perl helped to evolve Interchange into a software which drives high traffic e-commerce sites.
Practical programming examples and an overview about new developments in Interchange will be at the end of the talk.
Attended by: Michael Kröll (pepl), Petr Pajas, Jure Kodzoman (Yure), Branislav Sott (srott), Reini Urban (rurban), Jozef Kutej (jozef), Herbert Breunung (lichtkind),
Copyright © 2003-2008 Verein 'Vienna.pm - Verein zur Förderung der Programmiersprache Perl'.
To contact the organisers send an email to email@example.com


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Which of these two homes is built to the so called modular codes, and which one to the HUD Codes? Is it important? Not sure? Continue reading
Author Archives: Edward Hicks
I Want to Buy Your Mobile Home Park!
I have a client who is seeking to purchase manufactured home land lease communities (mobile home parks) in the price range of $1.0M to $10.0M or more.
At today´s low interest rates, community prices are at an all time high. Continue reading
The following is a "conversation" with the developer of a newly built family m/h land lease community. It is a compendium of conversations with many developers across the USA, who find their projects floundering under similar circumstances.
Continue reading
Why am I having such a hard time finding a suitable mhp investment?
Why am I having such a hard time finding a suitable investment grade m/h land lease community? Don C., Midland, TX
There are many more buyers than sellers of m/h land lease (M/HLL) communities right now, and it probably isn't going to improve in the near future, so you can expect a lot of competition. It's no secret anymore that investing in M/HLL communities, at the right price and good financing, can be one of the most lucrative and safe of all the real estate investment opportunities. With so many buyers and so few communities for sale Continue reading


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The Brooks Stevens Archives is one of several special Museum Collection archives and was acquired from the Stevens family in 1997. As one of the country's first industrial designers, Stevens—acutely aware of his own place in history—began visually documenting the activities of his design firm in 1935. The archive is composed of nearly 20,000 visual materials spanning Stevens' entire career.
George Mann Niedecken Archives
The collections of the George Mann Niedecken Archives consist primarily of the design drawings for interior furnishings, including furniture, rugs, window treatments, lighting, and murals, executed by George Mann Niedecken. The collections contain office records, documents, furniture catalogs, and ephemera of the Niedecken-Walbridge Company, as well as vintage photographs of Niedecken-designed interiors. The collection also includes drawings and paintings of various subjects completed by Niedecken while he was an art student and throughout his life.
The Landfall Press Archive, acquired by the Milwaukee Art Museum in 1992, includes etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts by artists of national and international renown. The collection consists of more than six hundred prints, as well as supplementary materials. Among the nearly five thousand pieces in the archive are more than 600 editioned prints as well as supplementary materials, including; proofs, plates, negatives, and color separations.
The Anthony Petullo Collection Archives
The Anthony Petullo Collection of Self-Taught and Outsider Art is one of the premier collections of its kind in the country. Comprised of nearly five hundred pieces, two-thirds of which are European, the collection consists of works ranging from the early twentieth-century to the present, and includes many of the most renowned American artists in the field such as Bill Traylor, Henry Darger, and Minnie Evans. In 2010, Petullo gave the bulk of his collection to the Milwaukee Art Museum, comprising more than 300 drawings, paintings and sculptures. Along with artwork, Petullo donated his personal papers for this manuscript collection.
The records of the Anthony Petullo Manuscript Collection include correspondence, photographs of the artists and Mr. Petullo, his personal research, artwork, articles, general ephemera, etc., relating largely to his collecting activities.