Motivations

 

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Last week was pretty horrible here in southern New England, but things have calmed at last: one of the marathon bombers is dead, the other is in custody and charged with using a weapon of mass destruction.

 

 

I’m thankful that one of them is alive; maybe he can explain to us, in some way, what this was all about.

 

 

When horrible things happen, we try to make them conform to a narrative: good guys and bad guys, mysterious conspiracies. We want to understand why people do the horrible things they do.

 

 

Here’s some of what we know: the brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were ethnic Chechens. They came to the USA when they were young, and went to good schools. They are described as being mostly happy and well-adjusted by those who knew them.

 

 

So what happened to them?

 

 

It appears that Tamerlan became radicalized over the past few years. He was under scrutiny by both American and Russian intelligence, but neither discovered anything of interest.

 

 

All of the clues were subtle:

 

 

-         He visited his family in Russia last year, who noted that he seemed to be much more devout in his religious practice than before.

-         He posted a radical Islamist video on YouTube, and then removed it.

-         He told a friend that the Bible was a poor imitation of the Koran (showing an interesting misconception of the history of both books), and said that the United States used the Bible as an excuse to be a world aggressor.

 

 

We won’t know much more. He’s dead.

 

 

But his brother is alive.

 

 

His brother is a deeper mystery. He seems to have been universally liked, and is still described warmly by those who know him.

 

 

Here’s a narrative. Tell me what you think of this:

 

 

Once upon a time, in Chicago in 1924, there were two young men named Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. They both came from well-to-do families, and were both very intelligent. They decided, for whatever reason, that they were Supermen a la Nietzsche, and were far smarter than anyone else. They decided to demonstrate this by kidnapping, abusing, and killing a little boy named Bobby Franks.

 

 

They didn’t get away with it. A pair of Leopold’s glasses were found at the crime scene, and the whole scheme fell apart.

 

 

Loeb is portrayed as a persuasive seducer, who conned the more suggestible Leopold into coming along with him. (Leopold was a little older, but much shyer by all accounts.) And how about those glasses that Leopold dropped? Do you wonder if he dropped them on purpose?

 

 

It makes for a nice neat narrative.

 

 

But what do we really know?

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The Woonsocket mill fire

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One evening last week, a very odd smell pervaded our apartment. Chemicals, and burning rubber, and wood smoke, and – who knows?

 

 

It turned out that a huge old mill was burning down in Woonsocket, about thirty miles north of Providence. Arson? Accident? No one knew.

 

 

Although, in Rhode Island, arson is always the first assumption.

 

 

Partner told me around 10:00 pm to look at the live radar feed on Accuweather.com: you could actually see the smoke cloud around Woonsocket.

 

 

And then I realized I'd seen something strange earlier that evening, when I was coming home from the health club: a huge cloud, like a cumulonimbus, hanging in the northern sky. I'd though this was strange, as no storms were predicted for that day or the next.

 

 

The smell of the fire was really nauseating here, so many miles away. Can you imagine what it was like in Woonsocket, close by? (The WPRI newsman on the scene, Walt Buteau, was many blocks away from the fire, but said he could still feel the heat. Regard the above picture. I believe him.)

 

 

This kind of thing has happened many times in Rhode Island. When a building is inconvenient, it burns down. There used to be a huge department store in downtown Providence; it went out of business; whammo! it burned down.

 

 

I came back from the Peace Corps in 1987. Friends were showing me around town, to show me what I'd missed in three and a half years. As we turned down Congdon Street, I saw smoke rising from the old train station. “Ah,” I said. “Nothing has changed.”

 

 

I'm not pointin' my finger at anybody.

 

 

I'm not sayin' that people in Rhode Island set fires for the insurance money, and to clear property.

 

 

I'm just sayin'.

 

…

 

(Postscript: the Valley Breeze later reported that the fire was started by a spark from a welder's torch. Of course! What else could it have been?)

 

 

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Memories of the Mob

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I am not a native Rhode Islander. I moved here in 1978, so I will always be a newcomer, although I have been here only a little less time than Roger Williams himself.

I arrived just a few months after the Blizzard of '78, which had taken place in February of that year. Everyone was still talking about it; the state came to a standstill for days. Today, thirty-two years later, if the word “snow” appears in the weather forecast, there's a huge mob at every supermarket in the state, buying milk and bread. “Milk and bread.” I don't even drink milk.

And I arrived toward the end of the Great Rhode Island Mob Era.

(I hope I don't get whacked for this.)

...

In 1981, I took a job on Federal Hill, which is the old Italian neighborhood of Providence. Its Italianness has faded steadily over the years; other groups – Hispanics, Asians – have moved in. And the Italian stuff has taken on a kind of Epcot quality. DePasquale Square has been rebuilt with a big fountain and a mock-Italian plaza; the lampposts are turn-of-the-century mock-European.

But it was still pretty Italian in the late 70s and early 80s. You could still get decent Italian pastry at Piccola Italia, and there was Tony's Colonial Market, and Scialo's Bakery, and the Heritage Loan and Investment Company (which went belly-up in 1990, but that's another story).

Every week or so, the front window of Micheletti's Restaurant got boarded up. Word was that Friday nights was always a “getting out” party: if someone got out of jail, they gave them a big Friday night dinner party, which usually ended with gunshots and violence.

The Patriarca family was still in charge of local crime in those days. There was a vending-machine company with a small storefront on Atwells Avenue; you could usually see someone sitting inside, doing nothing. That was the Patriarca headquarters. For those of you who watched “The Sopranos,” it was sort of like Satriale's. The Corleone family in the “Godfather” movies is based partly on the Patriarca family.

Even nice people were connected somehow. My boss, who was Sicilian, had five or six sisters, all of whom I got to know, and all of whom were terrific. There was one, though, whom I'd never met. Oh, hey, my boss said. They're in Florida. There was some mix-up with real estate, and they're – um – on the lam.

On the lam!

(I finally met her, by the way, and she was amazing. She swept into the room wearing a fur coat, and she and I spent the whole evening telling dirty jokes to one another, and her sisters were scandalized.)

I worked for a small electrical-supply company. Construction, you see? You can imagine. I knew two grown men named “Bambi.” It's short for “bambino,” kids.

A coworker of mine on the Hill was tired of her car. Oh, well, she said. I'll tell my dad. He knows some guys.

Some guys who do what? I said.

She looked embarrassed. You know. They'll – um – make the car go away. And I'll collect the insurance, and I'll get a new car.

Neat, eh?

The final story isn't mine.

I was in Tunisia, in 1985. I was staying for a few weeks with a couple from Maine, who were amused to hear I was from Rhode Island. They'd lived there when they were graduate students, on one side of a duplex house. There was a young married couple, very nice, on the other side of the duplex. Except that, once a month, a big car would pull up in front of the house, and some guys in suits would get out, and there's be a big argument on the other side of the house. Something about the husband not joining the family business.

I stopped them at that point. I know the punchline of your story, I said. The name on the mailbox in front of the house was “Patriarca.”

And they grinned and nodded.

…

Kids, those were horrible days. But everything seems quaint in retrospect.

Even the horrible things.

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