431: See No Evil

Ira Glass

One thing about living under a dictator, there's stuff you have to ignore or suffer the consequences. A decade ago in Egypt, you could get thrown in prison for suggesting publicly that the president was laying the groundwork for his own son to replace him someday, which, by the way, he was. When a member of the Egyptian parliament implied on television that the military might have been extensively involved in the assassination of former president Anwar Sadat--

Ira Glass

Michelle Dunne was a Mideast specialist at the State Department and the White House. She lived in Egypt. She speaks Arabic. She's now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She edits the Arab Reform Bulletin. She says that back when Hosni Mubarak was running Egypt, the way he used the intelligence services and security forces, everyone was forced to report on everyone else to the authorities. She knew whenever she would be with anybody in Egypt, the would get a phone call afterwards asking what the conversation was about.

Ira Glass

That's changing now, she says. She was there last week and says Egyptians are starting to feel like they don't have to rat people out anymore. As the Arab Spring has reminded everybody and made abundantly clear, we Americans have been and still are allies with some terrible leaders, not just in Egypt but across the Mideast.

It's This American Life, by the way, from WBEZ, Chicago, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass.

We were putting together this week's program. And the theme of our program this week is "See No Evil"-- stories of people basically burying their heads in the sand in the face of wrongs being committed of various sorts. And we wondered about all those years that we were allies with Mubarak and all those other guys-- how much what we really pushing them to hold fair elections and respect human rights? And how much was our policy "see no evil?" Don't deal with it. Don't push.

And so we called Michele Dunne because she had insider's knowledge. From 2000 to 2002, she was the US government official dealing with human rights questions in Egypt. She was the Human Rights Officer at the US Embassy in Cairo.

Ira Glass

So, she says, usually there was no strategy to tie human rights changes that we wanted to see to things that the Egyptians wanted from us. Instead, she'd gather examples of people being jailed and treated unfairly. And she and the head of the Political Section at the US Embassy would then go in to discuss-- it was kind of a routine thing-- go in to discuss these with Egyptian officials.

Ira Glass

President Bush, she says, did have a period of really pushing the Egyptian government on human rights. In 2002, President Bush withheld $133 million in aid because Mubarak's government had jailed a democracy advocate, Saad Ibrahim.

Ira Glass

But it worked. Ibraham finally was freed. President Bush pushed for freer elections and those happened in 2005. But after the election results put members of the Muslim Brotherhood into 20% of parliament seats, Mubarak cracked down and the Bush administration stopped pushing them so hard. Then when President Obama came in, he actually cut back-- he cut the funding by half for the remaining pro-democracy initiatives that the US still had going.

Ira Glass

And we've paid the price for that, she says. Because it just contributed to the feeling that the Egyptian people now have that we were not on their side.

Today on our show, we have three stories of people turning their backs, turning their heads, not dealing with wrongdoing, sometimes for very good reasons, sometimes for not such good reasons. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Blood Brothers. Let's start with a family story. In a family it can be hard getting everyone to admit and agree when something has gone wrong. Lisa Pollak has a very extreme example of that.

Lisa Pollak

When Josh Martin was a kid, his mother asked him to promise something. If anything ever happens to me, she said, you need to look out for your brother Ben. The unusual thing about that request is that Ben was Josh's older brother, 10 years older. And Josh had thought it was Ben's job to look out for him. Since Josh's father was out of the picture, he relied on Ben as a substitute dad.

But Ben had his problems. And as he got older, Josh saw those too. Ben had a learning disability and struggled in school. He'd spent time living in homeless shelters and went in and out of low wage jobs. "Be sure to study," Josh remembers his mother, Nancy, saying. "You don't want to end up like Ben."

Josh thought his mom was too hard on Ben. But Nancy wanted Ben to do better. One day after a fight with Ben, her frustration boiled over. She walked outside crying and confided in a neighbor that she worried what would become of her oldest son. The eerie thing about that conversation with her neighbor is that it turned out to be one of the last conversations Nancy Martin ever had. After that, Ben did need his brother's help, just like his mother thought he would. And for Josh, keeping his promise to his mother turned out to be more complicated than he'd ever imagined.

Nancy Martin was a college fund raiser. And five years ago, she went on a business trip and didn't come home. Her rental car was missing. She didn't answer her cell phone. After two weeks with no sign of her, her sons knew the situation was about as bad as it could possibly be. Only then, it got worse. The local news reported that police had a suspect.

Lisa Pollak

Her oldest son, Ben. A week earlier, he'd reported his mother missing. Now he was suspected of causing her death. Not only was he the last person to see her, but their last conversation didn't end so well.

Lisa Pollak

That's Josh, Ben's brother. Josh thought this was all a mistake. He knew his brother was innocent. And he worried that Ben-- who wanted to be so helpful to police that he'd given two taped statements without an attorney-- could end up in jail for a crime he didn't commit. Here's Ben.

Lisa Pollak

Again, Josh.

Lisa Pollak

That's Stephanie Perot. She was Josh's girlfriend then. They're actually engaged now. They're a cute couple. He's super tall and boyish looking. She's pretty and petite. Back then, Stephanie and Josh lived near enough to Ben to see him most weekends, and Stephanie and Ben had gotten close. Josh and Ben had a third brother, Matthew Leschan, who lived in Illinois but was traveling to New Jersey so all three brothers could be together. But for now when it came to helping Ben, Josh and Stephanie were on their own.

Lisa Pollak

It's true that Ben was the last person to see their mom. And it's true that their last meeting ended in a big fight. But that didn't seem suspicious to Josh and Stephanie at all.

On the first day of her business trip to New Jersey, Nancy had surprised Ben with an unannounced visit. The house in Pitman where Ben lived was actually Nancy's house. Ben was living there because she asked him to move and act as a caretaker for the place when she moved Illinois the year before. But basic life skills like cleaning were not Ben's strong suit. And on the day of Nancy's visit-- a surprise visit-- the house was a complete wreck-- bags worth of garbage all over the house, unwashed dishes that were growing mold, litter boxes that had gone so long without being cleaned that the cats-- there were six in the house-- weren't using them anymore. When their mother walked and saw all this, Ben told his brothers, she let him have it.

Here's Josh.

Lisa Pollak

Josh and Matt told me they were used to their mother's outbursts. Her mood swings were unpredictable, they said. And if something set her off, her tirades could get nasty, especially, Josh says, if she'd been drinking. It wasn't something most people in their lives knew about. In fact, a few outsiders had told them they don't believe it. And it's still painful for them to discuss.

Their childhood memories include happy moments interspersed with harrowing ones, like the time Nancy ordered Ben to tie Matthew up to a chair with an electrical cord. Josh told me she'd kick them out of the house as punishment, forcing them to find their own places to stay. He remembers coming home and seeing Ben sleeping in the bushes, and having to sneak food out to him, knowing he'd get in trouble if he let him in. Of the three sons, Ben always got it the worst.

Ben reported his mother missing on March 19, 2006. A couple days later, two detectives went to the house in Pitman-- Robert Hemphill and his colleague, Greg Owens.

Lisa Pollak

The neighbors across the street corroborated part of Ben's story-- that Nancy had come to visit. One of them had even talked to her outside and heard about the messy house and how upset Nancy was. But something worried the neighbors. They thought Nancy said she'd be in town all week. But they hadn't seen her, even though they'd seen her grey rental car in the driveway-- the same grey rental car that Ben said she'd left in. When detective Owens heard that, he knew there was a problem.

Lisa Pollak

You can probably see where this is going. That night, after cops had talked with the neighbors, the grey rental car with Virginia plates was found in a strip mall parking lot about five miles from Pitman. There was no sign in the car of Nancy Martin, her luggage, or computer. But there were traces of blood on the bumper and trunk. While police searched his house for evidence, Ben went to the library and emailed his brother Josh. Police believe mom is dead, Ben wrote. They also think I did something to her.

By now, Ben was staying at Josh and Stephanie's apartment. Josh and Ben's brother Matthew was there now too, along with his wife. Her name's also Stephanie. Josh and his brother Matt were in a weird situation. They were the sons of the victim, so they desperately wanted police to solve the case. But they were the brothers of the suspect, so they wanted police to back off. The day after Josh and Ben were on that TV news story saying that police were wrong, investigators asked all of them except Ben to come in and talk. When they arrived, the mood was tense. Here's detective Hemphill.

Lisa Pollak

Matt was angry too.

Lisa Pollak

That afternoon they saw the evidence. Detectives took out pictures of the crime scene showing blood in the house and in the garage, as if a body had been dragged there. Ben himself had said no one had been in the house but him.

And there was other evidence, including a surveillance tape showing Ben after he'd abandoned the rental car, wearing a shirt that had been found in the house with blood on it. At this point, the only thing the homicide case didn't have was a body. They were still searching, the detective said. But they were confident that Ben knew where his mother was.

Ben didn't come to the meeting, but he'd driven there with his brothers. When it ended, he was still in the car, where he'd been waiting the whole time.

Again, Josh.

Lisa Pollak

The detectives say they didn't want the family to interrogate Ben-- didn't tell them to do anything, really, other than if Ben said something, they needed to call.

But Ben didn't say anything. Stephanie told Josh that they needed to confront Ben. But Josh refused. They argued about it. Josh wasn't saying that Ben was innocent anymore. He was saying things like, if we talk to Ben and he says he did it, it's over, Steph. You understand that? Over, gone. He told me he felt like a little kid putting his hands over his ears to block everything out.

And for a few days it worked, though these are days that Josh barely remembers now. They drank a lot, he knows that. And though none of them really talked about it, Josh feels like he, Matt, and Ben were using the time to say goodbye. On what ended up being their last night together, the brothers and the two Stephanies drove to Philadelphia and spent hours just hanging out together. They went to Chinatown and drank, and took a long walk to the city's waterfront. They smoked and looked out at the lights until it was too cold to stay outside anymore. That night, at Josh and Stephanie's apartment, Ben shook and cried in his sleep.

The next day, three days after they'd seen the evidence, Stephanie tell Josh it was over. She didn't give him a choice. We're going to sit Ben down and talk to him, she said.

Lisa Pollak

Ben sat on the couch and Stephanie kneeled in front of him. She put her hands on his knees. She was only 20 then. She didn't have any training for this.

Lisa Pollak

And then, almost as if she were talking to a child, she walked Ben through the story of the fight. Nancy comes in the house, she said. What happens?

Lisa Pollak

Josh and Matt and his wife Stephanie were sitting there, just listening. What did Nancy say to you next, Stephanie asked?

Lisa Pollak

It was the first time that Ben ever admitted the fight got physical.

Lisa Pollak

Stephanie went outside and called the police. Later, after Ben's arrest, after he directed a caravan of police cars to the vacant farmhouse where he'd dumped Nancy's body, after he'd cried and said he was sorry and was taken to jail, Detective Hemphill told Stephanie-- and he meant it as a compliment-- that they couldn't have done it without her.

Lisa Pollak

After Ben's arrest, the one thing that didn't change was his brothers wanting to help him. Their goal now was to keep Ben from spending the rest of his life in prison. Using their mother's life insurance money, they hired a defense attorney, and told the court about how their mother had treated Ben. When Ben pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of aggravated manslaughter, the state asked for the maximum sentence, 30 years. At the sentencing hearing, the prosecutor described the gruesome details of Ben's crime, including the fact that he'd kept Nancy's dead body in the house for days before dumping it. In the end, saying he was giving slight to moderate weight to the reports of abuse, the judge sentenced Benjamin Martin to 15 years in prison.

About a year after Nancy's death, like Stephanie mentioned earlier, something shifted for her and Josh. Their anger at Nancy began to fade. And their memories of her-- the good ones-- flooded back. Josh started having this recurring dream where his mom came home and everything was fine. He'd be so happy, and he'd wake up crying.

Lisa Pollak

But every once in awhile, they can't help it. Like this one day when Ben called from prison and Josh was in a bad mood.

Lisa Pollak

In a small way, I recently got a sense of how confusing this all is. A few months ago, Matt's daughter Hannah turned six. And on her birthday, she got a call from her uncle Ben.

Lisa Pollak

Josh and Stephanie have a daughter too. Their baby's name is Isabel, and she'll be one in June. So now there are two little girls who one day will have to learn that the Uncle Ben who calls and sings on their birthday, is the same Uncle Ben who's in prison for killing their grandmother. And two sets of parents who know that one day, they'll have to explain all of this. They just hope that when the time comes to do it, they'll have figured out how.

Ira Glass

Lisa Pollak is one of the producers of our show.

Coming up, pretending that everything is fine, just fine. Nothing unusual going on here-- while the opera plays in the big room next door. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show we choose a theme, of course, bringing you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, See No Evil, stories of people choosing to bury their heads in the sand, choosing to look at the other way. We've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, Denying The Invisible.

At this point, lots of people have said that immediately after the Fukushima reactor was hit by an earthquake and tsunami, the Japanese power company TEPCO and the Japanese government were not so forthcoming with the truth. As you may heard just a few days after the nuclear accident, the head of the American Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that things were a lot worse than the Japanese power company and the government were admitting and suggested that a larger evacuation would be appropriate. The International Atomic Energy Agency later said the same thing.

But as time has gone on, things have improved. The government is posting radiation counts for every Japanese city, every hour. And this week Greenpeace announced that they went out and measured radiation and the government's numbers are accurate. And the examples that you hear of Japan not providing timely information are nothing-- really nothing-- compared to the wholesale whitewashing-- the total denial of reality-- at the biggest nuclear accident before Fukushima, which of course was Chernobyl in 1986.

Now, Chernobyl was a much, much bigger nuclear disaster than Fukushima, and much more radiation released. There's a great book, published in Russian a decade after the disaster and later translated into English, called Voices From Chernobyl. A reporter named Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people who were there. And the stories people tell are just stunning and really take you there in a way that few interviews ever do.

Reading the book, you realize that not acknowledging just how dangerous the plant was and just how dangerous the situation was, you realize that that was just part of the Soviet system. It took three days for Moscow to even acknowledge that the accident at Chernobyl reactor number four had happened. The population wasn't evacuated immediately, wasn't given potassium iodide to protect themselves, wasn't warned about consuming milk produced in the region that had been contaminated.

One of the men interviewed in the book, somebody who was brought in to bury radioactive plants and trees during the clean-up, says the Russian newspaper headlines in the immediate aftermath were all about triumph. "The Reactor Has Been Defeated!" "Life Goes On." "Chernobyl-- A Place of Achievement." And this man goes on to say, quote, "Just four days after the catastrophe, the red flag was already flying over the fourth reactor. It blazed forth. In a month, the radiation had devoured it. So they put up another flag. And in another month, they put up another one. I try to imagine how the soldiers felt going up on the roof to replace that flag. These were suicide missions. What would you call this? Soviet paganism? Live sacrifice?"

Another thing about these interviews, they remind of something that hasn't been talked about much in coverage from Japan, and that's what radiation can do to a person. At our story meeting for our radio show this week, we were all talking about this. What can it do to you again?

The most heartbreaking interview in the book is with a woman named Lyudmilla Ignatenko, whose name I'm probably mangling here. Her husband, Vasily, got dosed with about as severe a dose of radiation that somebody can get. He was a firefighter sent in the first day of the explosions at the Chernobyl reactor number four. He was sent in in his shirt sleeves, no protective equipment at all, and was in a hospital by 7:00 that night, with radiation poisoning so severe that over the next week his skin started coming off in layers. Within two weeks, he was coughing up pieces of his lungs and another organs as his body disintegrated from inside.

But they were newlyweds. And although it was forbidden, Lyudmilla somehow got herself into the hospital where the radiation patients were so she could be with him. Inside there, the doctors and nurses would give him shots and treat him through this transparent curtain that would shield them from radiation that was now pouring out of his body. But she went inside that curtain day after day, to sit with him.

Here's an excerpt from that interview read by an actor, Sarah Mollo-Christensen.

Ira Glass

Some of the interviews in this book deal a lot on the see no evil aspect of what happened at Chernobyl-- how the government and even the people on the ground dealing with the emergency would turn a blind eye to the truth of what they were dealing with, because the Soviet system just wasn't set up to handle the truth. And so for most people in the middle of the crisis, at many points it was just much easier to look the other way.

We have one more reading from the book, a longer reading from an interview with Zoya Danilovna Bruk, who was environmental inspector in the region.

Ira Glass

Kelly Coffield Park, reading an interview with an environmental inspector from the area near Chernobyl at the time the nuclear accident there. It's an excerpt from this book of unusually vivid interviews called Voices From Chernobyl, by reporter Svetlana Alexievich and translated by Keith Gessin.

[MUSIC - "A HARD RAIN'S A GONNA FALL" BY LEON RUSSELL]

Ira Glass

Act Three, "I Worked At The Kennedy Center And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt." David Kestenbaum has the story of one man's-- this is actually his cousin that this story is about-- one man's search for evil, evil-- I said evil-- in a place that you wouldn't expect.

David Kestenbaum

If the Obamas want to go out for a theater date or to the ballet or to hear Yo-Yo Ma, there is a place that has a special presidential box for them to sit in-- the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC. Plush seats, soaring ceilings, all that stuff. But when my cousin Dan Weiss worked there in the 1970s, he spent a lot of time in the basement. He was a smart, idealistic kid, still in college. The basement is where the stockroom was for the gift shops upstairs.

David Kestenbaum

That's a skill that was in demand at the gift shops, because the gift shops were staffed by volunteers, a lot of them retired. 300 volunteers.

David Kestenbaum

The gift shops-- there were two-- were run kind of like lemonade stands. They sold t-shirts, books, commemorative spoons, but no cash registers, no receipts, just a little cash box. The volunteers would come in whenever their schedules allowed. The Kennedy Center had just opened, and at the beginning, everything seemed sort of charmed. There weren't a lot of a rules. For instance, when Dan found a stray cat meowing and hungry, he kept it in the stock room with all the merchandise. The cat got kind of famous.

David Kestenbaum

The gift shops, I should explain, were not a small operation. They sold $400,000 worth of stuff a year. And while no one liked to talk about it, in these lovely gift shops, in this lovely building where the National Symphony played, something was seriously wrong.

David Kestenbaum

The nice man running the gift shop at the time got fired. And Dan suddenly got a big promotion. At age 21, he became manager of gift shops at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. His new job-- figure out where the money was disappearing to. Dan didn't have any business training. He'd majored in art history and psychology. Aside from a stint in high school at an ice cream parlor, this was his first real job, his first time seeing how business worked. But he's a pretty driven guy. And if you give him a task, he's going to sink his teeth in. And the first thing he did was a bit of math.

David Kestenbaum

Somewhere there had to be a thief. Dan ran through the entire gift shop operation methodically, obsessively. And began to suspect one guy-- a younger guy in his 20s, one of the other paid employees who helped run the place. The guy's job was to transfer the money from the cash box to the safe at closing time.

Dan's next move? Well, if you're the manager of a gift shop, stealing from the cash box is kind of a strange-sized problem to have. You don't call the FBI. Do you call the security guards? Do you call the police? It turns out, if you work at the Kennedy Center, there is someone special you call.

David Kestenbaum

The Park Service assigned Dan a detective.

David Kestenbaum

Detective Loveless had actually seen a lot in his time. And he was amused by the idea of a thief at a place known for opera, musicals, and ballet. But he gave the job his full attention. Told Dan, if you want to catch this guy we're going to have to plan out a sting operation. So after work one day, detective Loveless picked up Dan in an unmarked car and drove to a secret location.

David Kestenbaum

One Friday night, they set the trap. Dan walks as nonchalantly as possible into the Kennedy Center gift shop, says hi to the volunteers like nothing's up at all, and puts some marked bills into the cash box. Then he walks outside to rejoin Detective Loveless, who's chosen the most cliched spot for the stakeout-- in the bushes. They hide in the bushes, on the other side of the road and peer across into the gift shop with binoculars.

David Kestenbaum

They intercept the guy on the way to his car. And find, yes, marked bills in his pocket. They put the guy in handcuffs and arrest him.

And so, you might think, case closed. Right? But the amount of money they found on the thief, it wasn't that much. $60, just $60. In fact, when the case goes before a judge, the judge basically throws it out. All of which meant the problem Dan faced was much bigger. Remember, the amount of revenue they were missing each year was over $150,000.

Dan, though, had another plan of attack-- a much more ordinary one. Paperwork. If the gift shop had been run like a lemonade stand, now he wants it to run like a lemonade factory. Dan sets up an inventory system. He posts price lists in the gift shop-- hats cost this much, t-shirts this much. Tells the retirees volunteering in the gift shop, "When you sell something, write it down." In other words, he basically reinvents on his own what any normal retail business would call record-keeping.

And lo and behold, the leaking stops. The mysterious losses-- that 40% shrinkage-- began to steadily shrink. He got into Macy's territory, down to single digits. At the gift shop, Dan was a hero.

But his victory meant something kind of unsettling. It meant the problem hadn't been a thief. It was lots of thieves. In fact, as best as Dan could figure in that sea of 300 volunteers, those elderly art lovers, a bunch of them were taking stuff. And the paid staff who worked in other parts of building, they were grabbing stuff too.

David Kestenbaum

And people weren't just grabbing t-shirts. Some had been taking cash-- mostly small amounts, like a cab fare home. After all, they'd just worked three hours for free. It's just a few dollars. What's the harm? But still, they put their hands in the cash box, took some bills out, and put the money in their pockets.

David Kestenbaum

If this population, these people, well-meaning, community-minded, classical music fans-- if some of them were stealing, it meant anyone would. For Dan, that was a sad thing.

David Kestenbaum

Fresh out of college, working in a place where fancy people dress up every night, Dan discovered that not so nice truth that we all know but prefer not to think about-- that we set up security cameras, we put locks on doors, we have paperwork and passwords. And those things aren't there just for criminals. They're there, at the saying goes, to keep honest people honest.

Ira Glass

David Kestenbaum is part of the Planet Money team. You can hear him on their free podcast at npr.org/money.

[MUSIC - "SEE NO EVIL", TELEVISION]

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Jonathan Menjivar with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semian, and Alissa Shipp. Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon's our office manager. Jen Berman's filling in as our West Coast producer.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our show by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatea, who explains his boyhood dream to someday work at a radio station this way.

Ira Glass

And indeed, that's what it's like. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Announcer

PRI. Public Radio International.