My Breakfast with Tony

It was a good thing, I decided, that the Internet decided to take the day off and go to the beach, because it allowed me to skip reading about today’s corruption and read about corruption in the past.

“It’s going to be one LONG book,” I had told my friend Tony—more formally known as Antonio Quiñones Calderón,—when he first told me about his project, a book entitled “Corrupción e impunidad en Puerto Rico”—and yes, it means exactly what you think. In fact, it came in at fewer than 600 pages, which surprised me, until I realized that the bulk of the book—very logically—concerns the 20^th century and the first decade of the 21^st. In fact, the book is divided by decades, and 1900 starts on page 61.

Why decades, I wondered, instead of administrations? And obviously, others must have posed the question to Tony as well. His answer, sensibly, is that corruption isn’t limited to one party or another.

This, of course, on an island where partisan politics reigns, tends to be sniffed at. “Those damned populares are just better at it,” once cried Mr. Fernández, when I reminded him of the flagrant corruption in the Rosselló government. Nor was it any use to suggest that incompetence was hardly an excuse for dishonesty.

So having had breakfast with Tony, and having gotten a copy of the book—thanks, Tony!—I went to the café, where the Internet had decided to go off somewhere, and without leaving a note. So I sat down, and began reading—and fascinating reading it is.

One of the most troubling things about living in a society riddled with corruption is that, over the long run, you go numb to it all. Was that the theme of William Bennett’s book, The Death of Outrage? If so, it’s true. So it was instructive to read, in the first chapter, three months of reports of corruption, starting with one of my favorites, albeit forgotten. (See?) And that was the arrest, on 7 October 2010, of 61 state police, 16 municipal police—133 law and order guys in all—offering their services to protect drug dealers at their work. In fact, there were 125 audio recordings and videotapes of some 89 officers providing protection with their weapons in the sale of cocaine in the amounts of five kilograms or more. No wonder that Eric Holder came out and said that it was the biggest police corruption case in FBI history….

‘Aha’ I thought, ‘so that’s the answer to the question.’ And the question was?

“Where is your nearest punto de drogas (drug hot spot),” I would ask the students, and it was a rare student indeed who couldn’t tell me—though they all denied vehemently having even thought about using drugs, not even marijuana in college.

“So why do you guys know, and not the cops?”

¿Cómo se dice “shrugs” en español?

In short, the cops not only knew but were providing protection to the drug dealers.

As Tony points out, corruption isn’t unique to Puerto Rico. Still, it’s a bit off-putting to read, towards the end of the first chapter, that Puerto Rico, with its 130 convictions of corruption in 2011, had the highest rate of corruption of any federal district. California, he writes, with its four districts and ten times the population of Puerto Rico, had “just” 52 convictions.

Nor is it a recent problem—the first recorded case was in 1720, though why do I think that there had to be others preceding it? Historically, one of the most famous cases—though by no means the worst—was the practice in the 1940’s and 50’s, a week or two before the elections, of high leaders in the political parties walking through the mountain towns, distributing shoes. Well, jaundiced tongues—a medical impossibility, but you know what I mean—said it was a clear attempt at vote buying, but any reasonable person could see: how could any soul walk barefoot over the rocky roads to the polls to cast their vote? The practice ensured a fair election!

Then there was the practice of routinely walking up and down the aisles of the government offices and stopping by each desk, in order to collect money for the political party in power. After all, the reasoning went, you had your job due to the party, so shouldn’t you give back?

Presumably, none of these practices are occurring now—although I did hear reports in the 90’s that the Office of the First Lady was doing essentially the same thing—but it may be that the corruption has both gotten far more underground and pernicious. In the year 2009, as Tony wrote, the cost to the taxpayer in Puerto Rico was 860 million dollars. The average in the 90’s? 417 million dollars.

It goes on and on. Today’s print edition of El Nuevo Día, for example, has an article on Crece 21, a program paid for by federal monies from No Child Left Behind that was supposed to provide training and certification in specialized areas like math, science, and English to 5,000 teachers around the island. The Feds paid the Department of Education; the Department in turn contracted the University of Puerto Rico to provide the instruction and administer the tests. According to the university, they put in 44 million dollars; the total amount of the funding was 49 million dollars.

Of course people are fighting about what happened. The Department of Education points out that only 350 teachers ever got recertified, and that they won’t pay another nickel. The university says that they only got paid 26 million dollars, and that the program didn’t require that 5,000 teachers passed the test, but only that 5,000 teachers “updated their knowledge and were specialists,” according to Yanaira Vázquez Cruz, the director of the program. Oh, and the teachers complained that they didn’t get materials, among which were computers that they could keep if they were certified.

“Some of those teachers really made me angry,” said Lady, the owner of the café, when I told her about all this. “You know, I was in the public schools when I was doing Poetry Out Loud, so I saw how they worked. And one teacher—of 11^th grade, no less—was spelling “that” as “taht.” Not once, but in every sentence. So I corrected him, and he got angry and started shouting that it was HIS classroom, and how dare I correct him in front of the students….”

I’ve only read a few chapters of Tony’s book, but I wonder if he ever comes to the conclusion that I—sadly—have come to. And that is?

The intention on Crece 21 was never to certify 5000 teachers, or expand the knowledge of 5,000 teachers, or even to do anything at all to improve the education of the kids on the island. What was the point of the program?

It was about taking the money that was there. There were funds available, there had to be a program, one was created, Washington sent the money down. What happened to it after that?

We’ll never know. The documents don’t exist; the documents are incomplete; the documents contradict each other. Most likely it will be a combination of all three. Oh, and the feds will have to send someone down, someone who speaks Spanish, someone who can wade through the mess of mildewed documents, flared tempers, pointed fingers.

A friend once told me that the worst thing about totalitarian governments was not the repression, not the suppression of free speech and essential liberties, not the sound of footsteps on the pavement outside and the dreaded knock on the door in the middle of the night. No, on a day-to-day level, the worst thing was inefficiency.

I hate corruption on moral grounds. But on an island where an English teacher cannot spell the word “that,” I hate corruption on other grounds as well.

We don’t have this money to waste….

An Excellent Guy

On an island where the seriously screwy tends to be treated, well, seriously, even this situation has 3.6 million people scratching their heads.

Simply put, James Tuller, who had been chief of the New York City Police Department Transportation Bureau and who for four months had been acting as the designated chief of the Puerto Rico Police Department turned out…

…to be cheating on his taxes.

Or maybe not—who knows? But Tuller has been married since 1996, and yet for four years he filed as a single person. So that presented a bit of a challenge, since those pesky senators in charge of approving his nomination were insisting on seeing the tax returns. So what did Tuller do?

Well, he had a couple of strategies—the first of which was to stall. And though it’s true that we tend to move a bit more slowly than those goose-stepping Germans, stalling is a tactic that only works so long.

So the next thing to do was to run up to New York and amend his tax returns. But it turned out—curious, this—that there was a little difference between what he had to pay as a single person versus a married person. Oh, and there were penalties, as well. Nevertheless, he forked over $30,000 to the State of New York. (according to one report, he took five days off work to go up to New York to settle these trifles and get the silly paperwork…)

Did that make the senators happy? By no means. Intent on picking every nit, the senators demanded that Tuller pay the IRS as well. Then they’d see about the nomination—no promises.

So that led to the next problem, which was that Tuller didn’t have the dough, despite making close to 200,000 bucks a year. He was willing, though, to agree to a payment plan. But the senators still balked at assuring him of his nomination. So on Monday night, after 121 days on the job, this excellent though somewhat forgetful public servant made the decision: he would retire his name for consideration.

This has left even members of the governor’s own party wondering what in the world went wrong.  Part of it, of course, was that there was a scramble to find a police superintendent in the first place, since Tuller’s predecessor had up and left one day, all but flipping the bird at the governor as he rode to the airport. And it came at a rather poor time, since the senate was not in session, and it was Christmas.

Ah, Christmas—which in Puerto Rico generally begins the day after Thanksgiving Day and continues until at least the end of January—Fiestas de la Calle de San Sebastián—after the octavitas. So really, it’s only been a couple of months since any of us have had time to trouble ourselves about inessentials like appointing a police chief.

Well, it’s all a little troubling, since we also don’t have a secretary of justice, since that guy got into a little trouble when he went to the police station with his friend. His friend, you see, had been drinking at a party—well, that’s what you do at parties, isn’t it? And look, you gotta get home, don’t you? Does everybody have to be so unreasonable?

Right, so everything would have been fine if only the friend hadn’t pulled out his cell phone while driving—a crime in Puerto Rico. And of course, there had to be that nosy cop, who pulled the friend over, and noted the strong smell of alcohol.

So the papers had a field day with the Secretary of Justice, who had done what any friend would do: gone to the aid of his friend to the police headquarters, to ensure that everything was handled correctly. What harm could there be in that?

So it’s all a bit dampening, especially for the governor, who had to come out in today’s print version of El Nuevo Día as saying, “entiendo, por la información pública que ha surgido….” Or, “I understand, from the public information that has surfaced…” The Gov, apparently, is a regular guy like you or me—getting his news by reading the paper on the bus to work. See?

And all this comes at a rather unsettling time, since the United States Department of Justice…wait, let those fire-breathing liberals from the ACLU tell you about it:

A report released by the ACLU in June 2012 concludes that the Puerto Rico Police Department is plagued by a culture of unrestrained abuse and impunity. The PRPD – which, with over 17,000 officers, is the second-largest police department in the U.S – is charged with policing the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

In July 2013, the U.S. Justice Department entered into a legally binding consent decree with the Puerto Rican government that requires sweeping reforms to end the widespread police brutality on the island.

Well, to make sure that the police department complies with the “sweeping reforms,” Tuller appointed a retired US Army colonel, Michelle Hernández de Fraley, to oversee the whole process. And good luck to her, since the US Department of Justice determined that the police practiced discrimination, especially against blacks and Dominicans, were poorly trained, and didn’t investigate cases of domestic abuse. Oh, and that they used excessive force, especially in cases of peaceful protest.

Nor is that the only challenge she might face, if nominated and approved. Because we have more police officers than any place I have ever seen—but the monthly pay for our cops? It’s $2,600, or slightly over 30,000 dollars annually. On the island, that’s not bad—but consider, the other news of this morning: the police hauled in nearly two tons of cocaine in an interception off the north coast of Puerto Rico. In fact, in March alone, the police have pulled in nearly three tons of cocaine.

And what does that mean?

Well, we’re awash in drugs, and with the drugs comes the money, and with the money? Corruption—which is a distinct possibility. How much honesty does a base salary of $30,000 buy you?

The sad news is that the previous chief of police was—by all accounts—a very effective guy who had the support of the force, even as he was changing it. And the one who just left?

By all accounts an excellent guy…

Look, he just cheated on his taxes….

Down and Out in Milwaukee

Damn, I feel bad about it. I mean, I know how it is to be broke, having lost my job a couple years ago. Sure, I get by with a few teaching gigs, selling some (very few) books, and the occasional odd job—but job security? Insurance? Paid vacations? 401K plans? Ah, happy days….

So I sympathize, I really do, with the Archdiocese of Milwaukee because guess what? They’re broke, too! And not only that, but they’ve had to pay a cartload of money in attorney fees—the Miami Herald says the tab adds up to 12 million bucks just to declare themselves broke. Think that’s bad? WISN.com puts the figure at 19 million.

So they’re scrounging—just getting by, those good guys in the Roman collars up there in cold Milwaukee. Had to take out a mortgage in 2006 on the Lake Michigan headquarters. Tried to find you a picture of it, but all I could find was Google Map. Take a look!

Well, they got the mortgage to pay off ten pesky victims of sexual abuse in 2006—settlement was almost 16.7 million. And now the headquarters is underwater—no, not the lake, but the debt is higher than the value of the property.

So of course the then archbishop of Milwaukee, Timothy A. Dolan—now Cardinal of New York, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and everybody’s favorite—had to do a smooth move, which he did. He wrote off to Rome in 2007 asking permission to transfer almost 57 million dollars to a cemetery fund. And—as revealed last summer…well, here’s The New York Times:

“I foresee an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability.” The Vatican approved the request in five weeks, the files show.

OK—let’s take the tongue out of the cheek. Five weeks? FIVE FRIGGING WEEKS! When I, following the several cases of misconduct, have routinely seen correspondence about abusive priests between bishops and the Vatican that extends for DECADES! One of the worst abusers in the Catholic church, Marcial Maciel—a guy who actually had six children by two women, suffered from morphine addiction, and abused at least nine boys—never got thrown out of the church at all. Nor, by the way, did he ever apologize. So five weeks to approve a money transfer in 2007? That’s fucking outrageous.

Well, they may have acted so swiftly because of words that Dolan had written to Ratzinger in 2003; were the words still ringing through the chambers of the Vatican?

“As victims organize and become more public, the potential for true scandal is very real,” he wrote in such a request in 2003 to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the head of the Vatican office charged with handling abuse cases until he became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005.

So almost 57 million bucks were transferred to a fund for cemeteries. And then what happened? Predictably, in 2011, the archdiocese declared bankruptcy, joining ten other dioceses around the country to have done so in the last ten years.

But that settlement for the 16.7 million-buck settlement back in 2006? It was just for paying off the victims of two priests. The real scope of the problem was much bigger:

At least 45 Milwaukee priests face sex abuse accusations. One priest in particular was accused of personally molesting close to 200 deaf boys.  

So all of those victims—well, some of them—got together and filed a civil suit. And then what happened. Here’s The New York Times again:

Since then, negotiations between the two sides in Milwaukee have broken down: the church has argued that about 400 of the 575 cases are invalid, while lawyers for the victims have accused the church of hiding assets.

Hiding assets would mean that transfer to the cemetery fund: very logically, the victims of abuse went to court, alleging that the transfer was—in legal terms—a fraudulent conveyance. At first, they got a bankruptcy judge to agree that it was, then a U.S. District judge—Rudolph T. Randa—came out in July of 2013 and said the deal was kosher, citing the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. Obviously, liberal minds were appalled: here’s thinkprogress.com:

Randa concludes that the church has a constitutional right to shield its funds. By raising his opinion to constitutional status, Randa effectively strips Congress of its ability to correct his sweeping interpretation of the law.  

(Oh, by the way, Randa’s parents and many relatives are buried in Milwaukee Catholic cemeteries—but that wasn’t, he felt, a cause for recusing himself…)

OK—so we’ve gotten up to last summer. Today? Well, the archdiocese came up two days ago with a plan to pay 4 million bucks to the 125 victims that it admits were abused. Right—so where is this relatively trivial sum coming from? Here’s Yahoo News:

The archdiocese will raise $2 million in a loan from a cemetery trust fund created under New York Cardinal and former Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan.

Yup, Dear Reader, the archdiocese is proposing to pay two million dollars out of the same fund into which they had transferred 57 million dollars seven years earlier.

It is a brazen as it is depraved. And both the depravity and the brazenness have been taken to astronomical, never-before-heard-of, proportions.

Vasallo Dreams Up a Canal

Good news—the city has a terrific museum. And why not, since the founder, Luis A. Ferré, was, in addition to being governor, a seriously rich guy. How rich? Well, he owned the factory that produced all the island’s cement at the time. (Critics suggest that his intrusion into politics was to further the law that required all cement to be locally produced—is there anyone left with faith in the basic goodness of man?).

So Ferré went running around collecting Pre-Raphaelites, which at the time were both around and cheap, relatively. Consequently, the city of Ponce, Puerto Rico, has one or two of the best collections of Pre-Raphaelites in the world. Want to see this picture?

Head to Ponce!

What doesn’t Ponce have? Well, despite two seriously large cranes, and despite ten years of dithering, it doesn’t have the super port that the late mayor proposed for it. And why not? It wasn’t lack of money—we’ve already spent a quarter of a billion on it. Nor was it lack of potential: we had the infrastructure, the ties to the US mainland, the engineers to do the job. In fact, ten years ago we were in a good position to capture a developing market. Now? Here’s Caribbean Business on the subject last year:

"At that time, all the horses were at the starting gate. Now, all the other horses have finished the race. Our neighboring islands expanded their facilities, signed agreements with global operators and are fully functional while we never got out of the gate," Lewis said.

What happened?

Well, I could look it up and tell you all the various issues and controversies that cropped up, but why bother? In a nutshell, it was business as usual, which in Puerto Rico means politics. And so when the governor was of one party, the mayor of Ponce was of the other party. And on those rare occasions when the mayor and the governor were of the same party? Well, then they only had four years—insufficient time to reverse all of the progress that had been made—if any,—revoke the contracts to the former governor’s friends, fight the legal challenges that ensued, and re-award the contracts to the preferred companies / cronies / friends. All of this takes time, you see.

Time which the Dominican Republic used well, since they now have a super port and cheap labor, whereas Puerto Rico? No super port, expensive labor.

Happily, while Ponce may have blown—or had it blown—their shot at a super port, they are not without resources. As proof, Inquiring Reader, I bring you this….

OK—here’s what you need to know about Ponce: it’s fiercely hot and just as dry. In fact, there is a certain point in crossing over the central mountain range when I will unconsciously start to sing Copland’s Rodeo—because at any moment you think that Agnes de Mille is going to send her dancers out. Oh, and the mountains spontaneously burn during dry season, which lasts nine months.

It’s perhaps the fact that he has never seen a river that accounts for the desire of a legislator from Ponce, Víctor Vassallo, to convert this “body” of water into the Panama Canal. Because where you and I might see a ditch, what does Vassallo see? Let The New Day tell the story:

Vassallo está convencido que su proyecto es viable y sueña con la idea de que Ponce tenga una obra que opere con un sistema de compuertas o esclusas con ingeniería de la utilizada en el Canal de Panamá. Otro que confía en la viabilidad del proyecto es el presidente de la Comisión de Desarrollo de la Industria Turística, Ángel Matos García, quien desconocía el costo total del proyecto. Indicó que “en su primera etapa no veo (que la inversión sea) mayor a $2 millones”.

Loosely, “Vassallo is convinced that his project is viable and dreams of the idea that Ponce have a work that operates on a system of compartments and locks with engineering like that used in the Panama Canal. Another who believes in the viability of the project is the president of the Commission for the Development of the Tourism Industry, Ángel Matos-García, who was unaware of the total cost of the project. He indicated that, “in the first stage, I don’t see that the investment would be greater than two million.”

Vassallo sees the canal as having twin benefits. First, it would be an excellent form of transit, and who hasn’t suffered through a Ponce traffic jam? Second, it would be a terrific tourist attraction—who wouldn’t want to come and see the canal, the locks, the boats floating gently through the arid landscape?

The predictable scoffers are sniffing, of course. There’s the fact that not one of Puerto Rico’s rivers is navigable. There’ also the fact that the US government has stuck in 375 million bucks to build a dam on the river four miles north of the city. Why? Because when the weather isn’t being fiercely hot and dry, it’s being torrential. So what happens? The ditch that you saw above overflows, carrying off cars, cows and the occasional child.

Despite all these obstacles, what’s happened to Vassallo’s proposal? Well, even despite all the objections and difficulties, guess what? Our legislators have agreed to study the matter.

Oh, and the water level in the Río Portugués yesterday?

Two inches!

Two Degrees of Separation

Until you’ve experienced it, it’s impossible to imagine how connected certain worlds are in Puerto Rico.

Consider—there are 3.7 million people in Puerto Rico; how can it be that everyone knows everyone else?

I exaggerate, of course, but not by much. And the first order of business of any two Puerto Ricans is to establish whom we both know in common, what high schools and universities we went to, anything that will make a bond, and assure us that we can cheerfully kiss and embrace at the end of trading reminisces about our friends in common. Six degrees of separation? Forget it—in Puerto Rico, it’s barely over two.

And when you get to the professional classes, it gets even lower.

“Tell Carlos Romero Barceló hello from Uncle Lemuel,” said Mr. Fernández, whom I had called from a party; I was using ex-governor Romero Barceló as bait to get Mr. Fernández to the party. Of course, Uncle Lemuel had been a law partner with Romero Barceló half a century ago; more to the point, Uncle Lemuel died before the turn of the century—but not a problem. He was still being social.

It was therefore no surprise that my friend Tony could tell me the whole story of the Sagardía family. They’re prominent on the island, and Antonio Sagardía is in the news, since he is expected to face charges of misuse of public funds, falsification of documents, and violation of government ethics. All this while he was in charge of the…

…Department of Justice.

I can hear the gasps of horror, of astonishment, out there. Yes, Horrified Readers, our top lawman, number three in the government, is going up against the very court system that he used to administer.

You’re wondering, perhaps, what the ex-Secretary of Justice did? Well, there was the little matter of the $7000 in credit card charges that the Comptroller deemed questionable.

“He whipped out a government credit card to pay $3.50 for two Tylenol for a headache he got while on a business trip,” Tony said.

“Well, was it an official headache?” I asked.

There are other charges as well. In May of 2009, Sagardía got into a shouting match with a legislator, when that legislator questioned why the Secretary of Justice was granting contracts to his former law firm, Aldaronda, López y Bras (Bras being a prominent family from Mayagüez, a member of which married Mr. Fernández’s sister—bijte?). Here’s the exchange, for which my mother—actually any mother—would have sent all parties to their rooms….

(My apologies for subjecting you to the infamous La Comay—but it was the only clip I could capture. Oh, and by the way, the fight begins at about minute 4….)

For those needing a bit of translation, the “gentleman” on the right is the legislator, Luis Vega Ramos, who has just asked why $25,000 this year, with an equal sum the following year, is going to Sagardía’s former law partner. “That’s my problem, not your problem,” replies Sagardía. Not so, retorts Vega Ramos, who points out that these are public funds.

You see how quickly it erupts—in five seconds, Sagardía is shouting at Vega Ramos not to point his finger at him. He then proceeds to call, in the words of Wikipedia, “a scoundrel, a chump lawyer, and an intellectual dwarf.”

What had provoked the response, and why was the Secretary so on edge?

Well, it had just been established that the Secretary had supported the release from prison of an ex-client of Sagardía’s former law partner. And not just a release—but Sagardía was arguing for a new trial. Ohh, and wanting the public to pay his old law firm to represent the ex-con….

It all gets down to a Latin thing—falta de respeto. It was one of the first phrases I learned in Spanish; I soon learned to invoke it in every discussion. Here’s how it works: at the first elevation of the emotional temperature, Puerto Rican men immediately raise the pitch of their voice by about a fifth—basses become tenors, tenors become altos. The hands are flying everywhere, and then something pisses off one or the other. In this case, was it the pointed finger? Was it the “my problem, not your problem?” It doesn’t matter—the term falta de respeto functions as the red cape in the bullring, with identical effects and consequences.

Well, Sagardía didn’t last long as Secretary of Justice; he resigned in October of 2009. And then guess what he did? He signed on as the lawyer for a woman, Ana Cacho, whose child was murdered 9 March 2010. But that wasn’t surprising, since Sagardía’s brother had represented Cacho’s primo hermano, literally a first brother, but actually a first cousin with whom you’ve grown up and whom you know like a brother.

Remember what I was saying about the degrees of connectivity in Puerto Rico?

Oh, and when did anybody ever hear about Ana Cacho’s primo hermano? In 2005, when he came to light in the investigation of the murder of Adam Anhang, the murdered rich Canadian whose widow was recently arrested in Spain, and is facing extradition. And what was the connection between Cacho and Anhang?

Business partners….

I rest my case.

Vatican Airs

Well, as a gay man who is peculiarly fascinated by the Vatican, of course I had to read it. And I give it to you straight from The New York Times….

Striking a breathtakingly conciliatory approach to a hot-button issue that has divided Catholics, Pope Francis on Monday said that he would not judge priests for their sexual orientation. “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis said, according to media reports.

“Breathtakingly conciliatory?” Well, maybe. Certainly it’s a step—but presumably the pope is still toeing the line about being gay—that’s no problem. Acting on it? A sin.

Actually, it may be that the real sin is coming out and saying, “yeah, I’m gay and yeah, I have sex with men.” Because we all know—minimally 30% of the priesthood is gay. Find me a gay Catholic who thinks it’s that low, in fact, and I’ll buy you dinner.

So it’s no surprise that the rumor swirling around the Vatican is that the director, Battista Ricca, of the guest house where Francis is hanging out is gay. And apparently gay with a past—when he was with the nunciature of Montevideo, Uruguay in 1999, he was living more or less openly with a Swiss army captain, Patrick Haari. Here’s what one writer had to say:

The intimacy of the relations between Ricca and Haari was so open as to scandalize numerous bishops, priests, and laity of that little South American country, not least the sisters who attended to the nunciature.

Nor was that all. The Telegraph reports that Ricca visited an area frequented by “known homosexuals,” got into a fight, or got jumped—at any rate, he had to call priests to come get him home. His face apparently was bloody or swollen.

Then there was the time he got stuck in the elevator in the middle of the night—now was he alone, but with a younger man. All this, according to the Telegraph, was sufficient to get him shipped off to Trinidad and Tobago in 2004, where he also “butted heads” with the nunciature. So he was sent back to the Vatican, and set to the task of running the Domus Sanctae Marthae—which is where Francis presumably bumped into him.

And now, Francis has appointed Ricca to be the pope’s eyes and ears in the Vatican Bank, or the Institute for the Works of Religion, its formal name. Well, if so—he could start by zeroing in on the interesting case of Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, who is accused of using his account at the bank to launder money. Here’s Catholic News Agency on the matter:

The investigation concerns transactions Msgr. Scarano made in 2009.

At that time, he took 560,000 euro in cash out of his personal Vatican bank account and carried it into Italy, to help pay off a mortgage on his Salerno home.

According to the Salerno public prosecutor, Msgr. Scarano asked 56 close friends to accept 10,000 euros in cash in exchange for writing a check of the same amount to deposit the money into an Italian bank account.


Nor is this the monsignor’s first brush with the law. You may remember, he was arrested in late June of this year for plotting to sneak in 26 million bucks in cash into Italy. And Ricca might also put his ears to any rumors regarding the source of Scarano’s wealth. Reports are that he is called “Monsignor 500” for the 500 euro notes that he reportedly carries on him at all times. Oh, and then there’s his penthouse, allegedly filled with fine art.

Well, it seems that Francis may choose to devote himself to the poor—a noble thing, indeed—but why about the spiritual needs of the rich? Scarano seems to concern himself not only with the spiritual but the temporal needs—and in particular the needs of the Agnelli family.

Nor is he alone; here’s what The Telegraph has to say:

According to officials at the Bank of Italy, the Institute for Works of Religion – the Vatican’s own offshore bank – has for years been allowing organized criminals, even terrorists, to launder money with impunity.

Well, all this brought down the director of the bank, Paolo Cipriani, as well as the assistant director, Massimo Tulli.

Well, the pope apparently is a vigorous guy, judging from his recent trip to Brazil. Great—he’s gonna have to be. Because in addition to it all, the UN has asked him to hand over files related to the sex abuse scandals. It seems that the Committee on the Rights of Children (CRC), a UN committee, has deemed this a human rights issue. Here’s what The Guardian says:

The information sought includes cases where priests were transferred to other parishes, "where instructions were given not to report such offences, and at which level of the clergy", and "where children were silenced in order to minimize the risk of public disclosure." The CRC has also asked for "the investigations and legal proceedings conducted under penal canon law against perpetrators of sexual crimes" and "the number of child victims who have been given assistance for recovery, including psychological support and social reintegration and have received financial compensation."

Oh, and did I mention Patrizio Poggio, an ex-priest who has served time for sex crimes, and who has (according to him) evidence that Roman priests had been buying the services of Romanian male prostitutes?

“Pray for me,” the pope says to everybody and his brother.

I begin to see why….

This Just In From Puerto Rico

It’s one of those things about Puerto Rico—while the rest of the world is occupying themselves about other things (Syria, governmental spying, even a royal birth) we are completely obsessed with our own affairs.

I tell you this because the world into which I woke, this morning, was devoted to three issues, which the morning radio repeated endlessly. First, Pablo Casellas is in a coma.

You may remember this guy, who is the son of Salvador Casellas, a federal judge, whom colleagues describe as completely recto or straight. Allegedly, Pablo Casellas returned home on the morning of 14 July 2012 and saw an intruder jumping over a ten-foot wall by the pool. Casellas, who is an expert marksman and has (or had at the time) 33 guns, went back inside, got a gun, and fired several shots. He then discovered his lifeless wife sitting at the poolside; she’d been shot.

What did Poppa do? Well, the judge rushed to the house to be with his son, and to ensure that the investigation is done properly. The press arrived at about the same time and caught the judge scurrying under the yellow “do not cross—police investigation”—tape. Made a great photo—the judicial rear end bumping up against the tape….

But that was only the beginning. There were bloodstains in Pablo Casellas’s car; the grass on the other side of the wall showed no sign of being trampled; the shots in the wall were from a special gun that Casellas reported stolen in a “carjacking” close to the shooting range where Casellas had been practicing. Except that it was closed, that day; it was Fathers’ Day.

Well, it’s taken a year of legal screwing around to get this case to court, and the trial was to have started next Monday, so what does Casellas do?

The family isn’t talking—do they have to? “Sources” are saying that he’s in very, very delicate shape, and that they will start a process akin to dialysis to cleanse his blood. The next 24 to 48 hours are critical….

So where’s Poppa now? Sitting by the bedside, presumably on the taxpayer’s dime. And morning radio is speculating—is it suicide? Did Casellas fils swallow pills? A guy with all those guns has to do the one spectacularly poor way of offing himself?

I know ‘cause I was a nurse. Every time one of our regular patients presented at the ER with an empty bottle of Tylenol in her hands, the ER nurses had instructions: don’t buy in, be utterly matter-of-fact, and tell the patient, “just sit over there, hon—we’ll take you when we can.”

So Casellas is in the anteroom of death, and the island is hanging on its ears. But what else is going on?

Coffee—the price is going up 40%.

Coffee, according to The New Day, is doing about as well as Pablo Casellas, at the moment. Costs of fertilizer, electricity and everything else have gone up. The farmers are being squeezed out of business—which is serious, because we drink 300,000 quintales (no idea what that is, but sounds impressive) of the stuff but only produce 80,000 quintales annually. So we import the majority of our coffee.

You might ask—isn’t there land for coffee in Puerto Rico?

Of course there is—plenty of it, and in fact there is lots of coffee that goes unpicked. So what’s the problem?

Nobody wants to pick it.

Be fair—it’s a pretty rotten job. You’re standing (hopefully—otherwise you’re sliding) on a wet, muddy mountainside with branches slashing your face and insects stinging you and carrying a sack into which you are putting more and more coffee—thus adding more and more weight as you get more and more tired.

Now it begins to rain….

Second scenario—you can go to the Departamento de la Familia and get the Tarjeta de la Familia and that gets you free food, which you can munch on around noon, when you get up.

Well, fortunately the next island over has never dreamed up the idea of the Departamento de la Familia—so guess what? The mountains are filled with Dominicans (from Santo Domingo—not the religious order), according to a student from Jayuya, deep in the center of the island.

OK—Casellas in coma, coffee in crisis…what’s next?

Well, the island has 14 people who are still in shelters—down from the 88 people who were in shelters last week, when a tropical wave dumped 9.15 inches of water on the island. And now the mayor of San Juan wants the governor to declare San Juan a disaster, since the city has 300 cases of damage to examine.

But there’s a problem.

According to The New Day, the entire island is in a permanent state of emergency. Why? Because the planning has been so wretchedly bad that any rain can cause chaos. We have built on flood plains; squatters have built on flood plains; we have given no maintenance to whatever systems we had to drain water.

Nor is it entirely the government’s fault.

“You can’t be serious,” I said to my student, after she had described her flood-plained community’s creative approach to financing redecoration.

Their practice—before the advent of a serious storm—was to throw a few sofas into the Rio Cañas just before the storm. The sofas would block the culvert down by the bridge; the water would rise wonderfully. Soon, it would be swirling deliciously through their house, delightfully whisking away all that stuff the eyes had grown tired of seeing. The press would come, the neighbors would stand woefully in front of their houses, and then FEMA would send the check.

See?

Well, it makes sense down here….

The UPR Blunders Forward

I’m biased, of course, since I spent several decades working as a sort of teacher, but I have to agree with Dr. Manuel Pérez Quiñones, a professor at Virginia Tech, when he says that the worst crime in Puerto Rico has been the savage intrusion of politics on the university system.

This will sound bad—a large part of our murder rate (twice New York City’s with half the population) is drug related. And though the death of any man diminishes me—well, sorry….no. I don’t care if one pusher offs another.

But in the twenty years at which I made a living teaching ESL, it would occasionally occur to me: how can it be that I have this job? Every kid has twelve years in English classes—shouldn’t everybody be bilingual?

Oh, and why was it that I knew the rules for accentuation in Spanish, and they didn’t?

Or there was the time I was buying a $24 product that had a 35% discount. The clerk stood open-mouthed at the register—there was no calculator. $17.80, I told the clerk. Well, we waited several minutes, which I devoted to telling the clerk—once a teacher, always a teacher—the three ways that I had dreamed up to calculate the sum. But it took a manager with a calculator to prove it to him.

I am telling you, then, that we have a serious problem in Puerto Rico. And if we are ever going to get out of this morass, we’ll have to start with kids, teach them, prepare them, and then hope they’ll do a better job than we’ve done.

What Pérez Quiñones bemoans is real. I somehow slid through the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but even I knew that the university’s School of Engineering was very strong. University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez has a school that is just as good, if not better.

According to Pérez Quiñones—well, let the man speak for himself:

The UPR as it has always been, was once again invaded by local Puerto Rican politics. In 5 years at Mayagüez, the campus had 4 Chancellors (i.e., campus president). The turn over in positions from Chancellor, to Deans, to Department heads was so regular, that it was a common joke to ask "who is the Dean this week?" The situation continued to deteriorate. Recently on the press there was an article about the sanctions imposed by NSF to the UPR system after an investigation of misuse of federal funds. The UPR system cancelled the Presidential Fellowships that paid the graduate studies in the US to future UPR faculty. And the faculty at their several campuses continued to either fight for their academic lives or simply hang up the boxing gloves and move on to a better (bitter?) future.

Alert readers of this blog are wondering—what’s the deal with the National Science Foundation (NSF) funds?

If it were irregularities, that would be fine—almost. But it’s much more than that. Which is why in April of this year, the FBI charged onto campuses and locations holding university servings and—reportedly—confiscated a bunch of material.

That’s bad—worse is that the NSF stopped paying 50 million dollars for research projects. Or perhaps it’s 90 million dollars—the Internet is shaky today, and I can’t verify.

Nor is it the case that the NSF simply dropped this on them. The investigation has been going on since 2006, and the university was given the chance to make a Corrective Action Plan (CAP). OK—that was approved, but the university couldn’t follow its own plan.

What was the problem?

Caribbean Business Reports has this to say:

To pay professors involved in research—in addition to their basic salary and a reduced academic schedule—professors are assigned a sum of money from the grants, which can't exceed 30% of their wage as compensation for their participation, according to circular A-21.

The source said the way to report time & effort was out of control, and some professors' salaries had increased by more than 100%. "You could see professors whose basic wages were about $80,000 a year, and suddenly they were earning $300,000 annually."

Right—so you can see why the NSF was a little peeved.

There were other problems, too. Some professors were reportedly receiving money as compensation from funds earmarked for other uses, such as indirect costs.

Well, the university had to get some money from somewhere—so where to turn? To our Government Development Bank, locally called Fomento. So the university submitted a loan application to…

…the wrong people. Somehow, the university ended up submitting the application of the General Fund of the University of Puerto Rico. So they had to do it over again.

Into this comic-horrific scene came the 2012 gubernatorial elections, which the party then out of power won. So what did that mean? That the university’s president had to be changed. And guess what? The gentleman who consistently has assured us that the problem with the NSF has been resolved—only to be told by the NSF that it has not—is now the interim director!

Comic-horrific, I wrote in the last paragraph. Sorry—I’ll take that back.

We’re a strange mix, down here. Half of us don’t work. The other half works harder and often better than anyone else. And our professionals—in general—are more highly trained and educated than any I’ve seen.

They deserve so much more.