Today, we'll talk about how court budget cuts are threatening the 50-year-old Gideon v. Wainwright decision guaranteeing a right to counsel. Then, photographer David Gilkey shares his photos and experience as one of the first embedded journalists during the Iraq War. Plus, the Dodgers/Time Warner deal, Villaraigosa's legacy and much more.
Obama taps former civil rights attorney Thomas Perez to head Labor Dept.
Thomas E Perez, who heads up the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department, has been picked to replace Hilda Solis as Labor Secretary. The son of Dominican immigrants is the first Latino to be nominated to the President's second term cabinet.
Introducing him in the East Room of the White House, Obama said Perez "knows what it's like to climb the ladder of opportunity," and has been "consensus builder" working alongside Attorney General Eric Holder.
"Tom's knowledge and experience will make him an outstanding Secretary of Labor," Obama said. "We are going to have to work very hard to make sure that folks find jobs with good wages and good benefits. We got to make sure that our veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan have a chance to put their incredible skills and leadership to work at home. We need to build an immigration system that works for every employee and every family and every business. I am confident that Tom is going to be able to promote economic growth, but also make sure that that growth is broad-based."
Perez then thanked the President in Spanish and said he would use his position to fight for the rights of immigrant workers and reach across the aisle to work with Republicans.
"Over my career, I have found that true progress is possible if you keep an open mind, listen to all sides and focus on results," Perez said Monday.
The nomination comes just a week after the Inspector General issued a scathing report of Perez' civil rights division, saying it "suffers from deep ideological polarization" and a "disappointing lack of professionalism" including harassing of colleagues with opposing political views and leaks of sensitive case information.
Matt Vasilogambros, who covers the White House for the National Journal, tells Take Two that some Senate Republicans are already gearing up for a confirmation fight.
50 years later, court budget cuts threaten Gideon v. Wainwright decision
Fifty years ago today, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that in criminal cases, state courts must provide counsel for defendants who are unable to afford an attorney.
The case was Gideon v. Wainwright, and though it's a half-century old, the decision may be more timely than ever due to budget cuts on the California court system.
For more on this issue, we're joined now by Tani Cantil-Sakauye, California's chief justice.
To Baghdad and Back: SoCal veterans on the Iraq War, 10 years later (Photos)
Today, we begin a series about the 10-year anniversary of the Iraq War. KPCC's Josie Huang takes a look back at the first year of the conflict through the eyes of a couple of Southern California veterans and at what life, post-Iraq, is like for them.
At dawn in Iraq, on March 20, 2003, the first U.S. bombs fell over Baghdad. While the rest of the world watched "shock and awe" on TV, Oscar Barretto, Jr. of Simi Valley was positioned within earshot. Barretto, then a 25-year-old Army specialist, was part of the first wave of troops deployed to invade Iraq.
His unit arrived in Baghdad the month before, joining a convoy that spanned the length of several football fields and traveled at night to escape enemy scrutiny, though sandstorms were unavoidable.
RELATED: The war in Iraq: A decade later
Barretto was specially trained in chemical warfare — detection, decontamination — and it was his job to teach other soldiers and Iraqi civilians how to protect themselves. He was proud to serve his country — the country’s leaders, he said, were going off the information that they had at the time — but the timing couldn’t have been worse.
His second child — a boy — was scheduled to be born any day. Barretto's only consolation was that he would see him when his tour was over.
“That gave me the boost to last through the whole war,” Barretto said.
So close, yet so far away
Ten years later, Operation Iraqi Freedom feels both distant and fresh, say some of the soldiers who were first to arrive for the ground invasion. The intervening years have added perspective.
The eight-year conflict would claim the lives of close to 4,500 troops and more than 100,000 civilians by its official end on Dec. 15, 2011. It would shake up the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East and pit Americans who believed in the mission against those who felt they had been misled.
A little more than half of the country would come to believe that the Iraq War was a mistake, polls show today. But even during that first year in Iraq, some troops began to harbor doubts, said Hollywood resident and former Army reservist Bobby Yen, who was called up in 2003.
“In the beginning everybody was hard-charging and motivated, and they thought we'll find the weapons of mass destruction," Yen said.
But as time wore on, Yen said, morale took a hit. Soldiers began to question the basis for going to war in search of WMDs — for example, when they were no longer asked to bring their masks with them on patrols, he said.
Even historic moments, Yen said, did little to boost spirits.
"You know, like, we're allowing them to have their own election, now they're writing their own constitution, now we captured Saddam,” Yen said. “But after a while, like the threat of death, you start getting inured to it all, and you just start thinking about going home."
Battles on the homefront
Upon their return, veterans found a country ill-prepared to deal with their numbers and problems. As of last month, about 600,000 veterans were still waiting for the Department of Veterans Affairs to process their disability claims.
This worries advocacy groups such as the nonprofit Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. IAVA's Jason Hansman said that waits are preventing veterans from getting the care they need for issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. Left untreated, Hansman said, such issues can raise the risk of suicide.
“The suicide rate is still high — much higher than certainly people that are dying in Afghanistan due to combat,” Hansman said. “In January, the Army alone reported 33 potential suicides among active duty and Reserves."
UCLA psychiatrist Patricia Lester, who works with veterans and their families, said a large number of veterans suffer from "invisible wounds of war." Studies put the rate of PTSD at 19 percent among post-9/11 veterans.
“Then when you combine the numbers of traumatic brain injury, it's probably upward of 30 percent of folks coming from their combat experiences," Lester said.
Lester attributes these numbers to multiple deployments and the type of battles being waged.
“It's really an urban warfare and everybody has some level of exposure,” Lester said.
After the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, insurgents used improvised explosive devices, making no distinction between troops that were combat and those that weren't.
Getting help
Oscar Barretto said he feels fortunate he's been able to see a VA counselor about the nightmares that strike once or twice a week.
It's like, he said, “I'm going through a reenactment. Like it's happening all over again. Are we getting attacked? Or I see bodies or I see blood.”
His wife, Jennifer, is relieved that the nightmares' frequency have decreased, but she doesn't know how else to respond than to stay quiet when Barretto wakes up and bolts up in bed. He would “start socking the air and sometimes just start talking, or mumbling stuff or (say) to kill something.”
As for Yen, he said that he has never sought treatment for PTSD, because he thought his experiences were comparatively light. Still, he finds himself unnerved by how clearly he remembers his tour.
"When you're asleep," he recalled, "and there's a mortar attack you wake up for a second, and then you go back to sleep. If there's another mortar attack, you wake up and then you pull your armor on top of yourself, then you go back to sleep. If you don't adapt, then you lose it a bit."
Jobs. Jobs. Jobs.
Yen returned Stateside in 2004, and left the Army Reserves to resume a career in video game design. He now works out of an airy, modern house in Hollywood that he shares with his girlfriend, a cat and dog.
But the return to civilian life has not gone as smoothly for many other veterans. As a group, veterans have higher rates of unemployment than the general population.
Jason Hansman of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America said that in January, the rate of unemployment for veterans nationally was 11.7 percent, compared to 7.9 percent for the general population.
Hansman said former military members sometimes have trouble selling their skills to civilian employers.
“You get discipline, you get responsibility, you get leadership in a lot of these vets and I don't think the civilian population has really made that connection yet,” Hansman said.
Barretto, who left the Army as a sergeant in 2007, went on many interviews but rarely had follow-up calls.
"I felt like I was qualified to do the job," said Hansman. But he got the impression that being a veteran did little to impress prospective bosses, and in some cases, was a turn-off.
Facing forward
Despite his job-hunting woes and PTSD, despite the fact that many Americans think the war he fought in was wrong, Barretto said he is still glad he served .
The way he sees it, troops toppled a ruthless dictator and made life better for the Iraqis.
“They have the same aspirations as we do," Barretto said. "Nice home. Food on the table. I want to work, and I want to live life abundantly."
Which he's trying to do. He has a clerical job at LA County child protective services. A doting wife, healthy children - and another boy to be born in June.
Barretto said nothing can keep him from missing it.
Picture This: Photographer David Gilkey on capturing the Iraq War
Along with the thousands of soldiers who deployed to Iraq in 2003 were hundreds of journalists. Almost 800 members of the media embedded with the military during the initial invasion.
The formal practice of officially tying journalists to a particular military unit was new in those days, and it gave the media unprecedented access to the unfolding warfare at the front lines. Photographer David Gilkey was there for the Detroit Free Press.
RELATED: The war in Iraq: A decade later
Gilkey remembers spending countless hours waiting in the the Kuwaiti desert before being whisked across the border in to Iraq. He joined Take Two to share with us the story behind some of his images from the front lines.
Interview Highlights:
On how he had to prepare for a possible chemical attack:
"That was the 800-lb gorilla everybody was afraid of, weapons of mass destruction. They were even afraid that it was going to be launched or mortared — rounds containing Sarin gas or Mustard Gas — before they'd even entered Iraq. So the training really every day was how fast you could deploy that gas mask…It was almost to the point of comedy, trying to get these suits on. It was 2-3 times a day a whistle or a horn would sound and you had to within under a minute try to get the pants, the top and this gas mask on."
On how covering Iraq was much different than other war zones:
"I'd covered wars in the Balkans and other places around the world, and [chemical war] was certainly something that never occurred to you. Also it certainly seemed like a much more awful way of being injured or killed, and I think because we were practicing it every day, that became the routine, obviously somebody was very, very concerned that that was probably going to be the first thing that we had to deal with, some sort of attack involving gas, or who knew? But this gear is next to impossible to put on in under a minute let alone five."
On heading into Iraq embedded with soldiers for the first time:
"You could hear a few gunshots going off and it smelled like war. It had that Cordite smell, because it had just been hit with rockets and mortars. I literally went around the vehicle the wrong way, and the first Sergeant turns and goes 'Hey, the guys went the other way.' So I'm walking off, to catch up with them. I hear 'Hey! Don't forget you signed the waiver!' So a very light moment, but signing that waiver became sort of the running joke. The waiver that basically excuses the government, look you get killed or maimed, we're going to help you off the battlefield to a point, but you signed the waiver and you knew this was dangerous. It's technically called a 'hold harmless agreement.' As serious as everything was that was going on and the fighting and the fact that you were standing in what will be a very historical moment, that lighthearted sort of toss from the guy who's become a very good friend now. 'You signed the waiver,' became the running motto for the next month."
On photographing graphic scenes of dead soldiers:
"When you talk about pictures of dead bodies it becomes even more sensitive when you're talking about dead American soldiers. That's still a very sensitive topic. I think it takes years before pictures of Americans that are killed in action become OK to look at. That said, showing, in this particular case, a dead iraqi solider with a Bradley fighting vehicle behind it, it's important to understand that this is the business of war. War is people get killed, they get horrifically maimed and that is what happens when you prosecute something like this. I think people need to see it, I don't think they need to see it every day, I don't think they need to see things that are completely grotesque...People need to see what the consequences are to an action like this, and it's the fact that people get killed."
Hollywood Monday: MGM, James Franco, Brett Ratner and more
L.A. Times entertainment reporter Rebecca Keegan joins us for her regular Monday update of the latest from Hollywood.
The 88-year-old Metro Goldwyn Mayer studio, behind "Skyfall" and "the Hobbit," is considering whether to take the company public today.
Then, James Franco must be feeling pretty good this Monday morning. His movie, "Oz: The Great and Powerful" held the top spot at the box office for a second week. He also starred in the R-rated comedy "Spring Breakers," which had a limited release this past weekend. Franco plays a drug dealer who bails out a group of college girls after they steal money to fund their spring break.
Also, a redemption story of sorts. In 2011, Brett Ratner stepped down from his gig producing the Oscars after he used a homophobic slur in an interview. This weekend he went on stage to receive an award from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa leaving office with high marks on the environment
When Antonio Villaraigosa became mayor of Los Angeles, solar, wind, and geothermal power made up only about 4 percent of the city’s energy mix. As Villaraigosa prepares to leave office in July after his second term, that number has reached 20 percent.
That shift toward renewable energy is one big reason why many environmentalists give Villaraigosa good marks for his green record.
The dramatic increase in renewables, “Is quite an accomplishment and just an enormous pace of change,” says David Nahai, former general manager of the Department of Water and Power and now an environmental consultant.
RELATED: Antonio Villaraigosa's legacy
Villaraigosa supported specific projects, such as the Pine Tree Wind Farm in Tehachapi, which is the largest city-owned wind project in the country.
Nahai says the mayor also bucked federal inaction on climate and energy issues to set lofty goals for L.A., often before any laws required them.
When Villaraigosa took office in 2005, “I think at the federal level the administration was trying to lower expectations,” Nahai says. “And here in Los Angeles the mayor was telling everybody that we can do more, we can expect more of ourselves, that we can reach ever higher.”
The city won’t reach all of the goals Villaraigosa set. He wanted L.A. to get completely off of coal and to have 40 percent of its energy from renewables by 2020. Neither of those things will happen. Recently Villaraigosa shifted the goal for ending the city’s use of coal to 2025.
Still, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Kristen Eberhard says the goal for renewables transformed the DWP and the city.
“Based on DWP’s past record of complying with regulations where they drag their feet and get extensions and don’t even get the minimum, they might not have even hit 20 percent if he didn’t have the goal out there,” she says.
LA has conserved more water under Villaraigosa, too. Conservation measures advocated by Villaraigosa and his appointees have pushed urban water use down about 20 percent from where it was when he took office.
There’s more work to be done on that front, says David Nahai, but he notes that rate hikes likely would be needed to pay for such things as wastewater recycling, rainfall capture, cleaning up the San Fernando Valley aquifer – and the mayor doesn’t have the power to make those things happen unilaterally.
Villaraigosa has advanced his environmental vision through his appointments to a number of boards that make key decisions about the city’s resources.
“Everybody works for the mayor,” says Tree People’s Andy Lipkis.
For example, he and others credit former Board of Public Works Commissioner Paula Daniels, who is now a Villaraigosa advisor, for leading development of an ordinance that promotes the capturing and cleaning of stormwater, instead of letting it drain untreated into the ocean.
Lipkis says other appointees found ways to encourage disparate agencies to work together. But he wishes Villaraigosa had pushed for even more collaboration on climate change.
The changing climate will bring “severe weather, drought, fire, [and] flooding,” along with the need to increase the community’s understanding and preparedness, says Lipkis. “So yeah, I wish there was more out of the box leadership.”
Nevertheless, Villaraigosa has used his bully pulpit to make fighting climate change a priority. Citywide, carbon emissions are down around 30 percent from where they were 20 years ago. That’s because of initiatives that include everything from promoting bicycling to putting the city’s fleet on natural gas.
Mark Gold, who headed the environmental group Heal the Bay, says Villaraigosa also deserves credit for his transportation policies, particularly for backing a half cent sales tax that has raised money for transit projects.
“You know he really exerted a great deal of political capital to make Measure R happen, and I think that’s really important for the city as a whole,” says Gold.
In 2006 Villaraigosa launched with much fanfare a project to plant 1 million trees in L.A. About seven years later, the city tallies around 380,000, planted at a rate six times faster than under the previous mayor.
Villaraigosa talks about growing up in a smog-choked city where schools regularly cancelled P.E. Former Toronto mayor David Miller worked with Villaraigosa when Miller chaired C40, an international coalition of large cities dealing with climate change. He likes that L.A.’s mayor considers cutting air pollution as important as fixing potholes.
“A mayor’s job is to make real practical change that people can see,” Miller said at an event with Villaraigosa at UCLA last month. “And if you grow up in a city at a time when there’s a significant smog problem it’s the mayor’s duty to try and change that. People can literally see it.”
The mayor’s office says you can see it at the Port of Los Angeles, where air pollution has been cut in half over the past five years. Villaraigosa says that’s mostly because of his Clean Trucks Program, which replaced older rigs with less polluting ones.
Some environmental activists say a downturn in global shipping and federal pollution rules have been just as important.
And the mayor does have some critics among environmentalists, including those who say he’s tarnishing his environmental legacy by supporting a $500 million railyard that would serve the ports.
Angelo Logan, an activist with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, says the project would worsen air pollution in nearby poor and minority neighborhoods.
“It defines environmental racism, and for this to happen under Mayor Villaraigosa’s watch is incredible,” Logan says. “It’s going to be a mark on his record for a lifetime.”
Despite the controversy over the railyard project, Villaraigosa will leave office with the reputation of being one of the “greenest” American mayors in recent times.
The impact of Villaraigosa's three main green talking points
Three of LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s green talking points have wider implications, either beyond the city or beyond environmental policy or both.
What’s happening now with the Clean Trucks Program could set precedent for port operations nationally. A proposal to raise DWP rates to help the city transition away from coal led to more oversight of the utility as contract negotiations loom. And believe it or not, LA’s urban forestry program is setting a national example.
Clean Trucks Program
The Clean Trucks Program is the keystone of the Clean Air Action Plan at the port: the mayor credits the program for cutting emissions from the older, dirtier diesel rigs it forced trucking companies to replace with newer, cleaner ones. It functions through agreements between the port and its concessionaires, the trucking companies, which would agree to provide maintenance and financial records, carry placards with identifying information, and park off-street.
Both the port of Long Beach and the port of Los Angeles set these agreements up; in Los Angeles, port officials included requirements that drivers become employees of the companies, at the behest of the labor community, and in an effort to shift the burden of equipment replacement from the drivers to the companies.
The American Trucking Association appealed these agreements in federal court, and the dispute has wended its way upward. Now the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the dispute this spring, with a decision anticipated this summer. At issue is whether port officials have the authority to make these agreements and limit pollution from trucks that move goods, or whether federal law pre-empts these rules as local measures that affect the price, route, or service of any motor carrier.
Trucking companies say they don’t dispute environmental goals at the harbor. But they say the rules are bad precedent for other communities.
A “Carbon Tax” Proposal
In 2009, the mayor’s office announced with the LA Department of Water and Power a proposal for a “carbon tax” – a rate increase that would fund a “lockbox” of revenue to be spent on energy efficiency and renewable energy. Polling done by the city suggested Angelenos would see rate hikes of $2 a month for such a plan – and that those ratepayers wouldn’t mind paying a little extra for a green cause.
But public reaction played out differently than expected. City council members said the proposal to raise the energy cost adjustment factor raised questions about the DWP’s transparency on the issue of rates and reactivated historic mistrust among the city’s utility and the public. LA voters later approved an Office of Public Accountability, whose employee, Fred Pickel, now serves as a ratepayer advocate for Los Angeles.
Million Trees Los Angeles
In 2006, LA launched an effort to plant 1 million trees. The program was mocked along the way, but now the mayor’s office says the city has planted 380,000 trees within the last 7 years, at a rate six times that of the last two administrations.
A study in the Journal of the American Planning Association backs up LA’s claims. It found that Million Trees was launched with unrealistic expectations about program cost, but authors praised LA’s use of focused corporate sponsorship once Million Trees got overhauled. Nowadays, nonprofits working with the city must steward the trees they plant for two years after they go into the ground. The report concludes that’s working.
(Incidentally, so does Take Two host Alex Cohen…who has one of those 380,000 trees planted in front of her house. It’s gotten pretty big, she says.)
Dodgers have yet to submit Time Warner deal to MLB for approval
For 70, years the Dodgers colors has been largely unchanged from its traditional blue script on a white background. Lately though, the Dodgers have been all about the green.
Last year, the Guggenheim Partners bought the team for over $2 billion. Since then, trades and signings have taken the payroll to Major League record high of $225 million — that's right more than the New York Yankees.
Of course, it helps to have a $7 billion dollar cable TV deal to help pay for all this, but the deal is raising eyebrows, and the Dodgers have yet to submit it for league approval.
Joining us to explain is Andrew Zimabalist is a professor of ecomonics at Smith College and the author of "May the Best Team Win: Baseball Economics and Public Policy."
Groundbreaking system aims to ease LA's traffic woes
Los Angeles has achieved a major traffic milestone. All of LA's nearly 4,400 intersections that have a signal, are now monitored and synchronized for better traffic flow. It's the first city in the world to do it. The agency coordinating the effort, the Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control System, also known as ATSAC occupies a former bomb shelter in downtown Los Angeles. For the California Report, Colin Berry has the story.
Last month, the city of Los Angeles achieved a major milestone: every one of its nearly 4,400 signalized intersections is now monitored and synchronized for more efficient traffic flow. L.A. is the first city in the world to do so, and the Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control System (ATSAC), which coordinates the effort, runs from inside a former bomb shelter four stories under City Hall East.
ATSAC's headquarters is a calm, quiet nerve center where a team of traffic engineers monitors more than a dozen screens showing live video feeds and animated graphics for every signalized intersection in the city. Engineer Edward Yu, who oversees ATSAC, says gathering traffic data from the roads requires three things, the first of which lies beneath the pavement.
"Loop detectors are the magnetic induction loops embedded in the ground. They're really the eyes that we use to see the traffic," Yu says. "As cars drive over them, they give us data about the speed, volume, and how long the cars have been sitting there."
The second component is cameras. Engineer Eric Zambon says there are more than 400 of them across the city - cameras that have pan, tilt and zoom capabilities mounted on 20 to 30-foot poles.
"Some of our cameras are mounted on high-rises, so that we can see multiple intersections and multiple directions," Zambon says. "We can get 15 or 20 traffic signals out of one camera."
Based on data from the loop detectors, a proprietary algorithm developed by ATSAC determines demand on a given intersection. Then, based on time of day or scheduled events like a Lakers game or the Academy Awards, it can modify a signal's timing in order to move traffic along.
Yu says it's all a balancing act. "We look at every intersection as a challenge, and we try to get it moving as efficiently as possible," he explains.
But has anyone noticed? Philippe Canton runs Dicarlo, a small wood-fired pizzeria at the point where Hillhurst, Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard converge. It's one of L.A.'s craziest intersections: major thoroughfares, each with their own left and right-turn arrows, pedestrian crossings and intricately orchestrated signal cycles that move traffic through a maze of 16 different lanes. Canton does his own deliveries -- sometimes up to 40 of them a day. Has he noticed traffic moving more smoothly?
"Two days ago I was going along Sunset, and for the first time, the traffic lights seemed to be synchronized," Canton says, "I thought it was just a coincidence, but apparently it's not."
But this is L.A. What happens if there's a water main break or a police chase? Engineer Quan Tranh says ATSAC's third component is human responsiveness.
"If we know a particular leg is closed off, we try to divert the traffic from there and use signal timing to change the pattern to re-route the traffic around the area."
Signal synchronization in the city began 30 years ago, in an attempt to improve the flow of cars on the streets in time for the 1984 Summer Olympics. What's different today is that so many more factors are in play: light rail crossings, bicycle lanes, school zones, even equestrians who cross traffic in certain parts of the city. In Jewish neighborhoods on Saturdays, for example, pedestrians who need a WALK light don't have to push a button.
"We recognize that during the Sabbath, they're unable to touch anything mechanical," explains Yu. This system moves them safely across the intersection without having to go against their faith.
A system this complex and adaptive is gently undermining the city's reputation for terrible traffic. Still, Yu says, there's always something to improve.
"The city's always growing, it's always developing. We're looking at ways to improve our existing system, upgrading our system, expanding it, using our data to give more motorists information. It'll be a matter of time before we develop the next big thing."
ATSAC recently licensed its specialized software to the California communities of Gilroy and Long Beach, and hopes to sell it to Washington, D.C., as well. If traffic can be tamed in the City of Angels, it can probably happen almost anywhere.
GOP 'autopsy' pinpoint's party's failures in last year's election
This morning, the Republican National Committee released a new report on its shortcomings. The 98-page analysis has been dubbed an "autopsy" of the GOP, following failures in last fall's election.
Speaking at the National Press Club a few hours ago, RNC chair Reince Preibus outlined some of the study's basic findings:
"Our message was weak- our ground game was insufficient; we weren't inclusive; we were behind in both data and digital."
To help improve the GOP's standing in the digital realm, the party plans to open shop in San Francisco and hire a chief digital and technology officer.
For more on the digital future of the Republican Party, we're joined now by Steve Friess, technology reporter with POLITICO.
Read the full GOP report:
RNC Growth Opportunity Book 2013
Diamond Mountain yoga retreat ends in mysterious death
Last year, 38-year-old Ian Thorson died of apparent dehydration in a cave in southeastern Arizona. Earlier that year, he and his wife Christie McNally travelled to Arizona’s Diamond Mountain to pursue Buddhist perfection. Much of how he died has been shrouded in mystery.
We’ll talk to writer Scott Carney, who wrote an article about it for Playboy.