Set Work

I. Master the pronunciation of the words below. Learn and translate them.

Narcissistic, indictment, cantonal, Nazis, cognoscenti, detritus, tapestry, bravado, esthetic, torment (n,v).

II. Explain the meaning of the following words. Say how they were used in the article.

To break down, to carry out, a brash art theft, haul, to span, mug shots, pillage, sb’s exploits, to make the cognoscenti cringe, to dredge sth out of the water, modus operandi, to retrieve, to hang on to sth, to be botched, murky.

III. Scan the article for the English equivalents of:

чрезмерная страсть к искусству, одиночка, осудить кого-л. за кражу, колоссальная утрата, кого-то привлекают работы классиков, ошеломить, разбить вдребезги, тайно хранить, спрятать под пальто, часы работы музея, в мельчайших подробностях, с психическими отклонениями (о человеке), старшая медсестра, мягкое уголовное наказание, рюкзак, признаться в чем-л.

IV. Make up a list of the geographical places mentioned in the article. Say what you know about them. Make sure that you pronounce them correctly.

V. Say what you know about:

Lucas Cranach, Pieter Bruegel, Art Loss Register.

VI. Explain what is meant by:

the closing chapter in the bizarre tale of a narcissistic loner, a colossal loss to the heritage of humanity, a stealing spree, an eclectic take, underfunded and understaffed museums, not on the same industrial scale, sb’s esthetic cravings got the best of sb, to paint oneself into a corner, the sheer weirdness of the story, the reality was darker, a sizable sum for a garcon de café.

VII. State the difference between the given words. Give examples to illustrate their usage.

Channel – canal;

unclear – murky;

to want – to crave.

VIII. Points for discussion.

1. Why do you think Stéphane Breitwiesser has gone on an art theft spree? Was he an art lover? What speaks for it?

2. Are art thefts frequent today? Should art thefts be regarded as a kind of barbarity or vandalism?

3. Do you believe that the most precious items of Stéphane Breitwiesser’s stolen collection were really hacked to pieces and thrown into the Rhine-Rhone Canal by the Thief’s mother?

   1. If your answer is “yes” express your attitude to this action.

   2. If the answer is “no” say what you think has happened to the masterpieces in fact.

4. Why was Stéphane Breitwiesser dubbed the “gentleman thief”? Was he a gentleman?

5. What’s the right penalty for the described crime? Are art thefts grave felonies?

Part IV. Drugs and Crime.

Drugs and crime

Michael McFarlane is escorted down the hallway, past a poster that reads Enough Tears, Stop the Killing, America, then shown into the warden’s office. A black-and-yellow knit cap sits atop his head, a white towel is draped around his bull-like neck, the ends stuffed into his prison jumpsuit. He weighs 230 pounds, but his voice is gentle and still carries the lilt of a Jamaican boyhood. His smile is disarming and shows off a gleaming gold tooth. Once an aspiring chef, he’s now, at thirty-five, just another expert on the link between drugs and crime, both of which have consumed him. “I’ve seen a lot of blood run,” he says. Behind his ear is a scar where a bullet creased his skull. “It just wasn’t my time,” he laughs. A friend and trafficking partner was not so fortunate. He caught seven bullets in the back from a New York dealer unwilling to share his turf. McFarlane watched as his friend crawled across the floor and died at his feet.

McFarlane was once one of Washington, D.C.’s lesser princes of the crack trade. “My first addiction was money,” he says. “I always wanted to push the Benz and the BMW.” He adorned himself with gold necklaces and rings, packed a nine-millimeter semiautomatic, and boasted of a one-hundred-thousand-dollar stash. Then his own addiction pulled him under. Every few days, he’d go through another ounce of cocaine – street value, two thousand dollars. “My hustling ability was going because I became my own best customer,” he says. “I found myself on the streets. I stole, I robbed – whatever – to support my habit.” When the ache for crack became unbearable, he would slam his weight against a stranger’s front door and break it open, then gather up the television and VCR – whatever a drug dealer might take as payment for a fix. Once, he followed a middle-aged woman into a Chinese take-out restaurant and snatched her purse only to discover that it was empty and that a policeman had witnessed the mugging.

For the past twenty months, McFarlane has been crossing off calendar days at the aging Central Facility in Lorton, Virginia, serving a three-to-nine-year sentence. His gold and cash are long gone; his identity reduced to District Inmate #223220; his world encircled by concertina wire, floodlights, and guard towers. McFarlane is one of seventy-three hundred prisoners on this thirty-six-hundred-acre stretch of prison complex that, though only twenty-five miles southwest of the nation’s capital, resembles some forsaken gulag at the end of the earth. Eighty percent of the inmates are here because of drugs or drug-related crimes, says the warden, Vincent J. Gibbons. “There is such an elementary connection between drugs and crime, you can’t talk about one without the other,” he says.

The Wages of Addiction

What Vincent Gibbons sees at Lorton is the last stage of the drug-and-crime cycle that afflicts the entire country. Drugs are a central component of nearly even category of crime – homicide, burglary, armed robbery, prostitution, arson, wife beating, child abuse, shoplifting, and auto theft. The wave of drug-related crime has stymied law-enforcement authorities, drained Federal, state, and local coffers in an era of dwindling budgets, corrupted officials, eroded public confidence, and destroyed families and neighborhoods. It was even contributed to dramatic population shifts, as those who are financially able flee the inner cities, where the insidious effects of addiction and violence are perceived to be most rampant. “We have inadvertently fueled an arms race in the cities over the last ten years,” says Dave Fratello, former director of communications at the Washington, D.C.-based Drug Policy Foundation. “This is a very competitive illegal trade system in which violence settles disputes.” The stakes are enormous. The White House estimates that Americans spend $49 billion a year on illegal drugs.

Other numbers, too, are daunting: Fifteen years ago, 25 percent of all federal inmates were drug offenders. Today, that number has soared to nearly 60 percent – a low estimate, according to some experts. The cost of incarcerating approximately 1.1 million men and women in Federal and state prisons is bankrupting the justice system. Last year alone, another ninety thousand Americans were locked up. Hospitals are casualties of the drug-and-crime spree as well. Almost half a million drug-related cases are treated by the nation’s already overburdened emergency rooms. Schools have been transformed by the violence. The installation of metal detectors in public schools, once unthinkable, is now commonplace in urban America. So is the sight of grieving parents.

The brutality and irrationality of these crimes has created the perception that America is a lawless society and the inner city a wasteland. In 1991, for the first time, more than half the nation’s homicide victims were unknown to the murderer. Thirty years ago, nine out of ten murders were solved; today, investigations of more than one-third remain open. Recently, some cities have trumpeted decreases in crime – among them New York City, which since 1993 has seen homicides decrease by 40 percent. But other cities have not been so fortunate. In Minneapolis, for example, the local coroner asked county commissioners for additional funds, in part to purchase more body bags. The city has experienced a 75 percent increase in homicides – in large measure, say local officials, because out-of-town drug gangs have moved in and are fighting over market share. Rising numbers of drive-by shootings and other violent acts are afflicting Kansas City, Saint Paul, Hew Haven, and other cities. And demographers suggest that this may be the prelude to a larger epidemic of crime: A mini-baby boom of young males is about to reach its most violence-prone years. James Fox, dean of Northeastern University’s College of Criminal Justice, has predicted an impending bloodbath if nothing more is done to combat drugs. Attorney General Janet Reno agrees. “The beginning of the twenty-first century could bring levels of violent crime to our communities that far exceed what we have experienced,” she warns.

Small Victories

Within this grim picture, there are some bright spots. Last year, Federal law-enforcement officials celebrated the arrest of six of the seven top leaders of the infamous Cali Cartel in Colombia. In Memphis, authorities intercepted a team of assassins sent by the cartel to murder dealers who had not paid their drug debts. In Selma, Alabama, townspeople had watched residential burglaries and armed robberies soar as crack dealers pumped twenty-five kilograms a week into the community of thirty thousand. Then, last August, local police, sheriffs, and a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) team coordinated their efforts and raided the contraband kingpins, netting a cache if drugs, weapons, beepers, cell phones, and other paraphernalia. Fourteen people were arrested. All pleaded guilty. The sweep, says county sheriff Harris Huffman, instantly brought the crime rate down.

Overall, DEA officials say they made 18 percent more arrests last year than in 1994. The beleaguered United States Customs Service boats that in 1995 it seized more than a ton of heroin, 79 tons of cocaine, and 320 tons of marijuana. But almost no one believes that the drug-crime connection will be severed anytime soon – not when annual profits for the Cali Cartel alone are estimated to be as high as $8 billion. Last fall, Federal authorities seized a fishing vessel with twelve tons of cocaine concealed in its fuel tanks – and yet cocaine remained easily obtainable in virtually every city in America. Increasingly, there is a sense that a solution is beyond reach. “For the first time in our history,” DEA Director Thomas A. Constantine recently told Congress, “America’s crime problem is being controlled by worldwide drug syndicates who operate their networks from places like Cali, Colombia, and Burma.”

“Crank”: Old Drug, New Challenge

The rising use of methamphetamine presents new problems. The drug’s link to crime is well documented and often gruesome. A deputy sheriff in Yuma, Arizona, who tested positive for methamphetamine has been charged with slaying two fellow officers – but his alleged crime pales besides that of Eric Smith, who, allegedly delusional from the drug, cut off his fourteen-year-old son’s head and later tossed it out the window while motoring down a New Mexico highway. He was said to have believed his son was the devil. Not far from the brutal murder, a trucker, allegedly “cranked up” on speed, drove his rig through a rest stop, smashing rest rooms, recreational vehicles, and cars. He was described as “screaming like a wild animal.” Between 1992 and 1994, deaths attributable to meth soared. In Phoenix alone, fatalities went from 11 to 122, a jump of more than 1,000 percent.

Heroin use, too, is on the rise. Chinese and West African traffickers have saturated the Northeast with the drug. In the West, Southwest, in Midwest, high-purity black-tar heroin is smuggled in from Mexico. Despite New York City’s drop in crime, officials there have found that among inmates arriving at Rikers Island this year, heroin addiction is up 23 percent. Nationwide, between 1988 and 1994, emergency-room visits for heroin-related conditions soared from 38,063 to 64,221.

And there comparatively new drugs, like “roofies,” a sedative given to preoperative patients that induces a sense of euphoria followed by an anesthesialike stupor. According to the DEA, roofies have been implicated in several cases of college date rape: Men will apparently slip the drug into a girl’s drink, then force themselves on her just before she passes out.

Some old drugs have shown up in new disguises. In Washington, D.C., the craze is “blunts,” named for the fat cigars that are emptied of tobacco and reloaded with marijuana or laced with cocaine. The Cigar Association of America reports that it shipped 1.3 million blunts into the nation’s capital in 1988. Four years later, the popularity of blunts had helped drive that number up to 6.2 million.

Talk, Talk, Talk…

From the political left and right come desperate appeals for solutions. Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke suggests legalizing drugs. So, too, does ultraconservative William F. Buckley, editor of the National Review. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis recommends ending “the so-called war on drugs.… By every rational test, it is a ghastly failure.”

But while the debate continues, drugs and crime take their inexorable toll: In Oakland, California, rival cocaine-trafficking gangs have been responsible for some thirty murders. In Galveston, Texas, twenty-six juveniles have been killed in turf wars among rival drug gangs, the Bloods, Crips, and Latin Kings. In Worcester, Massachusetts, traffickers from the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Cuba, and Panama are said to be supplying heroin and cocaine and promoting a major increase in violence. The DEA’s Mobile Enforcement Team was sent in August and made twenty-three arrests. In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, two teenage girls – both described as clean-cut high-school kids – were found shot to death at a scenic overlook. The alleged motive, according to an informant: One of the girls had failed to pay a four-hundred-dollar cocaine debt. In Detroit, a woman allegedly sold her fifteen-year-old son into servitude to a crack dealer to pay off her debt.

Hundreds of Innocent Victims

Though the numbers are numbing, they do little to assuage the pain of families who have lost loved ones and communities that have torn apart by drugs. Anyone in Howard University, in Washington, D.C., who knew twenty-two-year-old Derrick Wynn claimed him as a friend. The charismatic senior had been a standout athlete in high school and a speedy cornerback for the college football team as well as an excellent student. A handsome and muscular six-footer, he decided as a senior to prepare for a career as a recreational therapist for the handicapped. A volunteer at area soup kitchens and with the Special Olympics, he would have nothing to do with drugs or guns – when Derrick was seven, his father was shot to death trying to break up a fight. Last November, while he was driving through northeast Washington, D.C., on his way to class, a bullet intended for someone else shattered the windshield of his dark blue Buick, tore into his shoulder, and ruptured an artery. An hour later, Wynn was dead – one 379 men, women, and children murdered in the capital last year. He had simply wandered into the crossfire.

Often, any progress in the war against drugs comes at a terrible cost. Washington’s most notorious crack gang, the First Street Crew, was virtually shut down by police – but not before an informant was murdered. A subsequent investigation revealed that the gang had ruthlessly intimidated those who might testify against them. Eleven witnesses were shot, six fatally, and the house of another was set on fire, according to the DEA. To prosecute the gang, officials had to provide protection to thirty-five potential witnesses. In the end, three members of the gang were sentenced to life without parole, a fourth got twenty-five years, and a fifth received eight to fifteen years.

After Death, Memories That Live

For many, the casualties of the past are still too much to bear. Take a short walk with Frank Edge, a thirty-two-year-old security guard at Malcolm X Elementary in Washington, D.C. Edge is tough – a former pro wrestler, he stands almost six feet, weighs 240 pounds. But what he has seen brings tears to his eyes. He came to this elementary school from a junior high. There, his hardest job was not fending off thugs but escorting grieving mothers and fathers to their children’s lockers. He made the same trip a dozen times, helping put gym shoes and books into paper bags, a simple ritual of finality that attends a schoolboy’s death by shooting.

“It was heartbreaking,” says Edge. “They died horrible deaths. I have their photos in my album at home, and every now and again I talk to them. Sometimes I feel like they’re thanking me for understanding.” The death of one boy, Daniel, is particularly upsetting to Edge, who had been his guardian angel. Someone unloaded a pistol into the boy’s fifteen-year-old body. Only a short time before, Edge had been standing on a street corner talking to him. Edge has tried to come to terms with the loss – moved out of Washington, D.C., sought counseling, and transferred to the elementary school, hoping that by surrounding himself with younger children, he might reach them earlier and help them avoid Daniel’s fate.

“They say not to get too close to the students, but you can’t help it,” he says. “You take a liking to them, and sometimes I can see the same thing happening down the road.” He tells of Marcus, a twelve-year-old at Malcolm X Elementary who lost his brother, Maurice, to gunfire last year. Then a second brother – his nickname was Truck – was stuck down in January. “I wonder what Marcus’s fate will be, because he’s sure to have a lot of anger in him. Imagine what he’s going to do when he gets older.” He looks up, blinking back tears. “Sometimes I can feel them around me, especially Daniel. I have to take a walk around the building because I don’t want people to see me cry. I just wonder when my fate is going to come.”

Patrick Chauvels

/Cosmopolitan, №4, 2000/