THOMAS LARSON

(University of San Diego Magazine Winter 2005)

San Diego’s leading consumer activist won’t admit it, but he’s feeling a tad pushed. Michael Shames ’83 (J.D.) is with a photographer on a Friday afternoon. He’s being worked through poses at his desk.

Pick up the phone. Look busy. Look natural. No. Look angry.

“I don’t do angry,” says the executive director of UCAN, the Utility Consumers’ Action Network, a nonprofit watchdog that protects consumers against fraud and utility abuse.

To do angry, Shames says, he needs to be in a meeting with energy company bosses, he needs to hear about their unnecessary rate hikes, he needs to get frustrated when they don’t listen to the consumers’ point of view. “Right before I walk out,” he says. “That’s when I get angry.”

(San Diego Reader September 29, 2005)

Up there in the pantheon of California's 1990s financial swindlers is Donald Marquis Bickerstaff. Bickerstaff was charged in 1997 with a Ponzi scheme involving 75 investors, the majority women, in San Diego and Marin counties. The investors—one was the unwitting mother of Bickerstaff's partner—lost $11.8 million. Using client money, Bickerstaff bought multimillion-dollar homes in Poway and Mill Valley, a $93,000 Porsche and other sports cars, a 5.5-carat diamond ring, 31 thoroughbred horses in Kentucky and southern England, and membership in the Turf Club at Del Mar. At the time of his indictment, Bickerstaff was trying to keep his business, Bickerstaff Financial Associates, afloat; he was being sued for securities fraud by Prudential Securities; and his legal bills had grown sizable.

(San Diego Union-Tribune September 4, 2005)

A Big Self-Conscious Mess

If a novelist writes a bad novel, a critic has a duty to say why: The plot is lame, the characters flat, the conflict uncoiled, the theme old hat. But if the novelist is Bret Easton Ellis, who began his career in 1985 with the strangely beguiling "Less Than Zero" and whose newest fiction reads like his last two roundly detested works—the BTK-like screed "American Psycho" (a novel that women's groups vehemently objected to, Simon and Schuster dropped, eating their $300,000 advance, and Knopf published) and the fashionista flop "Glamorama"—a reviewer has to watch it. He shouldn't let his disgust with Ellis' predictably affected infantilism overcome his judgment.

(San Diego Reader August 18, 2005)

On the afternoon of April 15, 1920, in the small industrial town of South Braintree, Massachusetts, a paymaster named Frederick Parmenter and a guard named Alessandro Berardelli set out to carry cash boxes—which contained the payroll of the Slater & Morrill Shoe Company—from the factory's upper office to a lower one at the end of Pearl Street. Due to a spate of recent payroll robberies, many of which were committed by gangs of Italian immigrants, Berardelli was armed. South Braintree lay ten miles outside of Boston, and as Parmenter and Berardelli passed by its stables, poolrooms, meeting halls, and factories, they chatted with some of the city's 15,000 residents. Parmenter was in his early forties—a burly, loquacious man. Berardelli was a quiet and withdrawn 28-year-old. Each held a steel box fastened with a Yale lock. Taken together, the boxes contained $15,776.51. Midway up Pearl Street, Parmenter and Berardelli were attacked by two men who had been idling beside a fence. One wore a cap; the other, a felt hat. The man in the cap grabbed Berardelli's shoulder, swung him around, and fired three shots into his chest.

(Counterpunch August 16, 2005)

Abridged Too Far

I am a freelance journalist for the weekly San Diego Reader, where, during last seven years, my profiles, narrative nonfiction, and investigative articles have appeared. This past spring, the Reader published my 12,000-word cover profile of Dinesh D'Souza. D'Souza is an Indian-American immigrant who is one of America's prominent conservative authors as well as a skilled debater and right-wing pundit. D'Souza is best known for two books: Illiberal Education (1991), which attacked affirmative action and political correctness on campus, and The End of Racism (1995), a book still mired in debate because of D'Souza's claims that the economic disadvantage of African-Americans are due to the "pathologies of black culture."

(San Diego Reader August 11, 2005)

Forth From My Pioneer Speakers

The summer of 1976, PBS broadcast The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard by Leonard Bernstein. Each week Bernstein explained the structure and the meaning of music as well as the crisis of harmony composers faced in the 20th Century. I was in my 20s, a folk-blues-ragtime-jazz guitar player, a composer of songs and instrumental pieces that fit that wide vein. But I was also bored with the smallness and the lack of abstraction of these musical forms. My musical-analytic interests were spiraling outward like a nautilus. But whither? In lecture five, Bernstein played Charles Ives's "The Unanswered Question," a mystical work for strings, woodwinds, and trumpet.

(San Diego Reader June 12, 2005)

Every weekday, in a small room on the sixth floor of the Wyndham San Diego Hotel at Emerald Plaza, dozens of people come to close the book on their personal bankruptcies. Today eight debtors have shown up in suite 630 well before their 8:00 a.m. appointment to file for either Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 with an attorney present and in front of a United States trustee. They sit apart from one another in rubber-upholstered chairs and stare at notices on the wall. One notice tells them to read the pink form and fill out the white form; both forms are prominently displayed in plastic racks. Most cast their eyes over the notice but don't seem to read it. They look lost or anxious, thumbing wrinkled manila envelopes brimming with paperwork. A few finger their purses or wallets that once bulged with a half-dozen credit cards. Awaiting attorneys, most may wonder what a debt-free tomorrow will look like.