Mendocino County Today: Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2023

Partly Sunny | New Teacher | County Response | Willits Hills | Water Woes | Lights Festival | Transit Workshop | Big River | Wood's Seat | KMUD Reporter | Flu Shot | Thankful | Hibshman Book | Thanksgiving Foods | Messiah Sing-Along | Pot Bust | Yesterday's Catch | Hostage Deal | Giant Cat | Blank Check | Way Forward | Classy Guy | X Lawsuit | SF Sunset | Supreme Ethics | Winterland Ballroom | Monkey Transport | Ford v Chevy | Ukraine | School Subjects | Free Bird | Indian Life | Dark Side | Five Cats

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A crisp 41F on the coast this Wednesday morning with a few high clouds. We can expect partly cloudy today & a little breeze on Thanksgiving. Temps will drop off this weekend leading to a cold start for next week. It looks we can expect more rain later next week as well.

LIGHT RAIN will be possible with a weakening front over the Del Norte coast today. Otherwise, dry and somewhat cool conditions will occur through early to middle portions of next week. In addition, periods of breezy north winds are expected across exposed ridges and coastal headlands Thursday through Saturday. (NWS)

BIG EXCITING NEWS!

Anderson Valley High School and Agriculture Dept. is adding a second agriculture teacher!

Mr. Bautista will be joining our agriculture dept. in January after Winter Break!

Welcome Mr. Bautista.

COUNTY DENIES BROWN ACT VIOLATION in Cubbison Suspension Action

by Mark Scaramella

On October 20, 2023 we filed a Brown Act violation notice with the County alleging that the October 17 agenda item which ended up suspending Auditor-Controller/Treasurer Tax Collector Chamise Cubbison violated the Brown Act.

https://theava.com/archives/230635#5

Basically we said that the County had cited the wrong code in the agenda item and they didn’t comply with the code they cited. By citing the wrong government code section, they effectively deprived the public from properly commenting or disputing the proposed action. The government code they cited, Section 27120, applies to a “County Treasurer,” not the unique title Mendo had given Ms. Cubbison with three additional functions. Further, Section 27120 requires that whoever the Board appoints “shall qualify.” Yet, neither the agenda item nor the attached resolution mentioned anything about the qualifications of Sara Pierce who the Board immediately appointed in the same agenda item. (Probably another Brown Act violation because the entire suspension exercise was obviously planned and orchestrated in advance in illegal closed session.)

We demanded that the action taken be corrected and cured by being rescinded and re-agendized with the proper government code and with a demonstration that the person appointed “shall qualify” for the position.

The County had 30 days to respond. They took 29 days. On Friday, November 17, County Counsel Christian Curtis responded.

“Mr. Scaramella,

The County reviewed your email dated October 20, 2023 and determined that it was not a ‘cure and correct’ demand under Government Code section 54960.1. That process allows for a member of the public to request that the Board take action to correct an alleged violation of certain portions of the Brown Act (i.e., violations of Government Code sections 54953, 54954.2, 54954.5, 54954.6, 54956, or 54956.5). The ‘cure and correct’ process affords a legislative body the opportunity to fix noticing or similar errors that are easily remedied by offering additional opportunity for public input prior to retaking the underlying action. Your email did not identify any agenda error or other Brown Act violation. Instead, that email exclusively sought to argue the merits of the underlying action and debate interpretation of the statutes authorizing Board action. Your email has been provided to the Board as public comment, but no action under Government Code section 54960.1 is possible or appropriate at this time.

Sincerely,

Christian M. Curtis

County Counsel, County of Mendocino

501 Low Gap Road, Room 1030, Ukiah, CA 95482

Phone: (707) 234-6885 · Fax: (707) 463-4592

Email: curtisc@mendocinocounty.org”

In effect, Curtis said that they can cite the wrong code in agenda item and not follow the code they cited and yet it’s not a Brown Act violation. 

We disagree, of course. But Curtis may be legally correct. We do not want to spend a lot of money on lawyers in a court dispute which we might well lose on a technicality, given that the courts in this County are not known for their concern about public matters. 

We’re still smarting from our attempt back in 2011 to force then-Supervisor Kendall Smith to return over $3,000 in travel reimbursements she falsely claimed, as documented thoroughly in four (4) consecutive Grand Jury reports. 

https://theava.com/archives/9552

In that case, Judge John Behnke ruled that our attempt to get then-Auditor Meredith Ford to take the money back via a paycheck deduction “wasn’t cognizable under the law.” And the only person who could force Smith to return the money was the District Attorney — the public didn’t have standing to bring the case. Behnke also ruled that the statute of limitations had run out on Smith’s misapprorpriation, never mind that we had been forced to wait for the Grand Jury and District Attorney (Meredith Lintott) to do their jobs before we could file a case.

(The kinds of irrelevant “not my job” legalistic evasions that Behnke invoked are eerily typical of the way Mendo courts work. If anyone thinks that Ms. Cubbison’s case will be adjudicated in anything like a timely manner — much less fairly, even with the considerable skills of her heavyweight attorney Chris Andrian — they’ve never had the pleasure.)

Although the District Attorney could pursue this current Brown Act violation, given DA Eyster’s personal involvement in this case, we doubt he’d take action either.

At this time we are considering our options. But for now we may have to wait, perhaps for years, until the Cubbison suspension and associated misappropriation matter is heard in court before we find out if the suspension process was legally sufficient. We remain unconvinced by Mr. Curtis’s narrow interpretation of the Brown Act.

ADAM GASKA

The loss of Scott and Cape Horn dams will affect all of Mendocino, Sonoma and even Marin County’s as Marin buys water from Sonoma Water. Marin Municipal Water District gets 25% of its water from Sonoma Water and wants more. They are currently looking at a $100 million pipeline to get more water from East Bay Municipal Utility District.

Potter Valley has a special district, Potter Valley Irrigation District which charges for water. They are the only ones that have paid anything for the water, albeit not very much. PVID is also a part of IWPC, a JPA that includes the City of Ukiah, County of Mendocino, Redwood Valley County Water District and Russian River Flood Control. Ukiah is concerned enough to be an active participant in the future of the project, Sonoma Water as well. PVID has already secured grants to look at the best places in Potter Valley to do groundwater recharge and to do preliminary studies on two reservoirs. While Potter Valley will be hit the hardest, the effects will trickle down. Property values in Potter Valley are already declining as is seen in current property prices which eventually will effect county property tax revenues. With an increase in the cost of water, some crops will become unprofitable. The grape market is in a glut/slump that likely will persist for years. There is no easy high value, low water use crop that can only be grown in Mendocino County. Less gross revenues will equate to less sales tax revenue which will especially hurt the City of Ukiah which has already been hurt by the decline of cannabis.

We are lucky last year was a wet one. Flow levels have been good enough that there wasn’t curtailments. PG&E has already drastically cut down the diversion rate. If we hit a dry year, curtailments will kick in early without the water that historically was coming from the PVP during the summer. Any and all right holders along the Russian from Lake Mendocino to Alexander Valley will be cut off from direct diversions. Most do not have enough storage to see them through summer. Municipalities will kick in conservation measures and rely heavily on groundwater. Sonoma Water is moving to annex Healdsburg into the Lake Sonoma district and give them a water contract.

Even if we magically pull off putting in new infrastructure to divert water in the winter from the Eel to the Russian, we need more storage capacity. What’s the point of diverting water if the Army Corp of Engineers dumps it out of Lake Mendocino for flood control?

It looks as though most of Mendocino County is economically disadvantaged, including Potter Valley. 

One of the problems is that the water PG&E was using to generate power was “abandoned” so it was available for free to anyone with an appropriative water right which the state gave out a lot of water rights based on the historic volume of water. PG&E never wanted to charge as they are not in the water business. So now these users need to get organized and form some kind of JPA or district to charge for water.

If it is a pay to play situation, then it goes to housing developers and ag/open space loses out.

Water rights are held by individuals and in some cases, government agencies. In Mendocino County, most water rights are held by individuals. They are free to use the water as they wish.

As for the rail, the Great Redwood Trail is hoping to turn it into a walking/biking path and remove the option for rail service to return north of Cloverdale.

MTA BOARD TO RECEIVE PRESENTATION ON DRAFT UKIAH TRANSIT CENTER FEASIBILITY STUDY

The Mendocino Transit Authority (MTA) Board of Directors will receive a presentation on the draft Ukiah Transit Center feasibility study at their meeting on December 6, 2023. The meeting will be held at 1:30 p.m. at the Ukiah Valley Conference Center, 200 S. School Street, Ukiah.

According to MCOG, the project will focus on working closely with community residents and stakeholders to identify transportation needs and explore innovative mobility solutions that can connect residents with the places they need to go.

The presentation will include the recommended preferred transit center site located just north of Kohls, on North Orchard Avenue in Ukiah. The public is invited to this meeting to hear the consultant’s presentation and offer comments. The final study/plan is expected to be completed in January, 2024.

This study is funded by the Mendocino Council of Governments, with Local Transportation Funds. For additional information or to view a virtual workshop, please visit the project website at mendocinocog.org/ukiah-transit-center-project-update.

Contact MCOG project manager Loretta Ellard at lellard@dbcteam.net or 707-234-3434 with any questions.

TWO ANNOUNCE INTENTION TO RUN FOR WOOD’S SEAT - Neither has filed paperwork yet; deadline to file is Dec. 8

by Jackson Guilfoil

North Coast State Assemblymember Jim Wood is not running for re-election, and so far, two people could be in the running for his seat.

Healdsburg Mayor Ariel Kelley announced she will run and Humboldt County-based Margarita Fedorova has taken out the paperwork, but has not submitted it. Kelley said she would file nomination paperwork before the Dec. 8 deadline. However, given that Wood is not running, there will be a five-day extension to file nomination paperwork.

“I have a proven record on the issues that matter — reducing homelessness, supporting working families down on their luck, leading a city during the COVID-19 crisis, supporting our small businesses that are the backbone of our communities and implementing a robust housing plan to get homes built for our middle class,” Kelley said in a statement sent via email.

Fedorova did not respond to questions sent via Facebook by our deadline. According to a recent on-line article, Fedorova is a Cal Poly Humboldt student who volunteered to help organize vigils and protests in support of Palestinians.

A worker at the Humboldt County Office of Elections said that Fedorova had picked up a candidate intention statement from the office, but had not submitted it yet.

Both Fedorova and Kelley still need to pay the $1,226.94 filing fee, as the deadline for collecting signatures instead of the fee is already over.

“The North Coast is one of the most beautiful places on Earth — and it’s up to us to protect it. We have complex regional challenges ahead. Whether it’s the upcoming decision on the decommissioning of the Potter Valley project and removal of the dams on the Eel River, or opportunities to build offshore wind infrastructure, our region needs a proven leader who can sit down and listen to local voices and cut through bureaucracy to deliver results for our community,” Kelley said.

(Eureka Times-Standard via Ukiah Daily Journal.)

ED NOTE: We do not know why Mendocino Supervisor Ted Williams’ apparent intent to run for Wood’s seat was not included in Mr. Guilfoil’s rundown.

JOHN REDDING: I am still trying to process this idea. A kind nurse recently encouraged me to get the flu shot. I replied that I never, ever get the flu with the exception of the one time I did get the flu vaccine. The reason for that, I was told, is that my immune system had no defense against the flu, so the vaccine stimulated it. Thus, the symptoms. So, I ask myself, what are the odds that for decades the flu virus couldn't find me? Until it was forcefully injected into me via a shot. Weird, right?

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Each day you wake up and get to live, eat, breathe, etc, that is a day to be thankful for. Things always seem to be bad in the moment, but then in retrospect not so bad. All in all, we here have it pretty good. The fact that we all get to convene here on this blog at least twice a week to bitch and gossip shows that we have it pretty good.

On Thursday I am going to eat my turkey, drink some beer, and get a good night’s sleep. Sounds pretty peachy to me.

GOBBLE, GOBBLE, AT KELLEY HOUSE

by Sarah Nathe

I was in the grocery store the other day looking at the displays of all the edibles and drinkables I am supposed to buy for Thanksgiving. Turkey, cornbread stuffing, pumpkin pie, cranberries, sweet and mashed potatoes, gravy, Beans or Brussel sprouts, and, of course, dinner rolls. Is there any other holiday with so many prescribed foods? Actually, is there any other holiday with so many associated myths—about the food at the 1621 meal, the Mayflower, Plymouth rock, the “Pilgrims,” the “Indians,” and the lovely cross-cultural experience they had eating together.

After over 400 years, there’s much more Thanksgiving fiction than there is fact, and separating them is like trying to keep cranberry sauce from running into the mashed potatoes.

Fortunately, an article by Megan Gambino in the November 21, 2011 Smithsonian Magazine discusses what we know or can surmise about the actual menu, and a recent book (This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving, by David Silverman) demonstrates that, long before Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, the story of the Plymouth settlers and their Wampanoag guests had been extensively elaborated upon in order to put the best spin on the United States’ history of colonization.

The only participant description of the meal is in a letter dated December 11, 1621, from Plymouth colonist Edward Winslow to a friend. Winslow reports that the colonists recently feasted for three days to celebrate their first good crops of barley, the seeds of which they brought with them from Europe, and of the corn the local Wampanoag people had introduced to them. He doesn’t mention eating turkey at the meal, though they were present in the area, but he notes that they dined on duck and goose, and the venison that the Wampanoag had contributed. In addition, there was probably seafood on the table since Winslow remarks that fish were abundant in Plymouth, boasting that, “In the autumn, we can take a barrel of eels in one night.”

That’s pretty much all the hard data we have about the harvest meal. The harvested corn would have been dried and the kernels cracked and ground for use in corn meal mush or cornbread. The corn could also be boiled up with a dried common bean (something like kidney or lima) to become succotash. That name came from a Narragansett (neighbors of the Wampanoag) word meaning “broken corn kernels.” The succotash of 1621 bore little resemblance to modern versions with various colorful and delicious fresh vegetables.

There would have been pumpkin or squash in some form, probably stewed, but certainly not in a pie as no one in Plymouth had wheat flour for a crust. Or for dinner rolls. Cranberries were used by the Native Americans in the area, but lacking access to enough sweetener to make the acidic bog berries palatable, they usually mixed them into pemmican. Blueberries, which were plentiful, would have been a much more likely addition to the menu. Neither potatoes nor sweet potatoes had made it from South America to New England by 1621. Ditto for yams, which came to the Americas from West Africa in conjunction with the slave trade.

Turkey claimed pride of place on our Thanksgiving dinner tables through the interweaving of much fiction with the few facts. Most important was the fiction of Sarah Josepha Hale, whose 1827 novel, Northwood: Or a Tale of New England, devoted an entire chapter to an appetizing description of a “traditional Thanksgiving dinner” with a “roasted turkey at the head of the table accompanied by gravy, savory stuffing, and pumpkin pie. Little known today, Hale was prominent as a writer and the editor, from 1837 to 1877, of the most widely circulated U.S. magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book. As an important arbiter of taste and values, Hale used her influence to campaign tirelessly for a national Thanksgiving holiday, which she believed would unify the country as it drifted toward a civil war. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way but, after Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, President Lincoln was feeling thankful enough to make the holiday official. Once that happened, Godey’s had all the Thanksgiving recipes homemakers needed.

(The Kelley House Museum is open from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM Thursday through Monday. If you have a question for the curator, reach out to curator@kelleyhousemuseum.org to make an appointment. Walking tours of the historic district depart from the Kelley House regularly; for a tour schedule, visit www.kelleyhousemuseum.org.)

ANDERSON VALLEY’S LAST POT BUST

by Bruce Anderson 

It was October of 1999 when California's Attorney General made national news by announcing that marijuana cops had racked up a record haul of marijuana from Mendocino County gardens. The Attorney General's triumphant press release even went so far as to calculate the number of joints that might have been rolled out of the confiscated pot plants, arousing suspicions among the cannabis-savvy that a heartbroken toker had composed the AG's announcement. 

What California's lawyer-in-chief didn't say was that none of the marijuana farmers were arrested. None. Which would seem to be a statistical improbability considering that tons of the stuff was pulled up. The pot raiders had found their way to some big pot patches, but they never seemed to quite catch up with the people who were growing it, probably because the raids were entirely a ritualistic 9-5 enterprise, the whole show as predictable as winter rain. A raid before noon, another one after lunch, and it’s Miller Time for the camo buddies. The pot pharmas performed their half of the ritual by not being present when the raiders arrived. 

But lots of people used to get arrested on various pot-related charges, and lots of people still managed to get themselves busted. 

The people who got arrested were people like Jeanne Smith, then of Philo. 

On Thursday evening, October 7th of 1999, Ms. Smith, 53, her son, Mylan Logan, 23, and Ms. Smith's 4-year-old granddaughter, set out from their home on Monte Bloyd Road heading south towards Philo. Mylan was sitting in the back seat with what became a disputed amount of marijuana. The little girl was strapped in a car seat next to her grandmother, the driver. This improbable trio of alleged dope mules was driving to a house Mylan had arranged to share with surfer friends on the Mendocino Coast. 

Ms. Smith was, and probably still is, an attractive blonde who could pass for a much younger woman. She did not at all resemble Grandma Smuckers. Ms. Smith had lived in Mendocino County for years. An accomplished writer who contributed regularly to the Parents Journal, worked with the old A&E magazine at the Mendocino Art Center and, with her son, marketed cigars on the internet. 

Mylan was a competitive surfer of some repute, so good at catching the big waves he qualified for international surfing contests from Bali to Half Moon Bay. 

It was 7:45pm when Jeanne Smith's 1990 Volvo station wagon passed by the service station in Philo. Ms. Smith, echoing several million American soccer moms, said she’d owned Volvos for years “because they’re the safest car there is to drive kids around in.” 

Jay Neiman of the California Highway Patrol sat in his patrol car at the service station with his “five drug” dope dog, an animal trained to detect five different varieties of illegal substances. 

Officer Neiman was prepped for what the police call “drug interdiction,” and October was the month a lot of Mendocino County’s primary export product was on the road south. 

At the time, Mendo Mellow brought about $5,000 for 16 ounces of bud, more money than gold fetched at the time. 

The vigilant officer Neiman couldn’t help but see a Volvo with tinted windows pass by. Tinted windows? Officer Neiman pulled out onto Highway 128 and drove up behind Ms. Smith. As the two vehicles passed through Philo, Officer Neiman flipped on his red lights and pulled Ms. Smith over near the Indian Creek bridge. 

Officer Neiman told Ms. Smith she’d driven through Philo, speed limit 30mph, at 43 mph.

Ms. Smith disagreed. 

“I always go slow there because I know a pedestrian was killed in Philo a few years ago. I’m so aware of that stretch. At most I was going a fraction over 30.” 

Officer Neiman said he could smell pot when he walked up to the Volvo. “Reeked,” was the term another officer used to describe the pervasive odor of fresh bud wafting out of Grandma Smith’s car. 

And then the real action began. 

“My son was yanked out of the car and handcuffed before the cop even looked inside the car, ” Ms. Smith remembered. “The pot was stuffed into bags on the back seat. He could probably see it from outside the car.” 

Standing beside 128 in a bright white t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, his hands cuffed in front of him, young Mylan suddenly made a break for it. He sprinted across 128, and east into the towering redwoods that line the first 50 yards of Indian Creek Road. 

Ms. Smith said officer Neiman pulled his gun and sighted in on the big target presented by her son's rapidly receding but vivid t-shirt. 

“I asked him if he was going to shoot my son. He said he wouldn't have to, the dogs would chew him up.” 

Ms. Smith said officer Neiman seemed unnaturally excited even before Mylan took off. 

“If they'd taken him in for a urine test he'd have come up with meth. He couldn't stand still, which is why my son ran, ” Ms. Smith says, adding that officer Neiman “was sweating like a pig, and bouncing all over the place.” 

As Ms. Smith calmed her granddaughter, officer Neiman called for back-up. He couldn't very well leave his pursuit vehicle unattended, or the Volvo with its “interdicted contraband” and the “suspects,” now reduced to two possible perps, the youthful grandmother, Ms. Smith, and her 4-year-old granddaughter, while he and his dope dog ran after Mylan in the unlighted murk of Indian Creek Road. Reinforcements would be needed to guard the perps and the pot while a search was mounted for Mylan. 

Soon, more cops and more dogs were at the scene. 

Off duty CHP officer Rick Rajeski, who still lives in Boonville, and “another young cop showed up,” Ms. Smith said. She recognized Rajeski “from having seen him around the valley and at the Redwood Drive-In.” She says she heard one of the officers say to the unnaturally excited Neiman, “You need to calm down a little bit.” 

Deputy Squires, Anderson Valley's legendary resident deputy, also soon appeared with his dog and, right behind Squires, a load of Mendo County narcs and more dope dogs. 

Young Mylan, he of the fleet feet, may have been Billy the Kid reincarnated for all law enforcement knew. Sure, his mom and the little girl looked harmless, but there was some scraggly dope in the back of the Volvo and the kid had bolted. What was he running from? 

Whatever it was, there were enough cops at Indian Creek bridge to take out a platoon of Taliban, and enough dope dogs to sniff out all the dope in South Philo. 

Then, according to Ms. Smith, “One of the cops turned to me and said, ‘You're going to jail. Who shall we call to pick up the child?’” 

“There's absolutely no one to call to pick up the child,” the desolate grandmother replied. 

Ms. Smith was standing beside 128. Her handcuffed son was lost in the woods of Indian Creek with the cops and a bunch of dogs after him. A pound of pot was sitting on the back seat of her car. Her granddaughter was wide eyed with terror at events unlike any she’d seen in Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. And now a cop informed her that unless she gave them permission to search her house they would take her to jail and her granddaughter to a foster home. 

“Give it to me,” grandma said. “I'll sign.” 

Ms. Smith signed the consent-to-search form as deputy Squires and his eager dog jogged down Indian Creek Road to look for Mylan. 

“The kid didn't know where he was going,” deputy Squires said later, “and it was real dark. But the dog found him in some brush right away. I yelled out, ‘The dog will find you. If you run, he will definitely bite you. Come out now and I'll call the dog off’.”

With Deputy Squires' can't miss 'em mutt circling Mylan's bush and growling for the opportunity to sample surfer flesh, Squires shouted out “about ten more warnings than the law says I have to and darned if the kid doesn't get up and run again. And that kid can move, I tell you.” 

But not as fast as the dog, who nipped at Mylan's fleeing form until Mylan jumped off the road and into Indian Creek itself. Deputy Squires said his dog was now looking at surfer dude crouched in “about a four-foot pool.” 

But surfer dude wasn’t through yet. He leaped out of the pool for one more futile dash up Indian Creek Road where deputy Squires’ dog tackled him for the last time and, according to the deputy, “chewed on the kid’s leg pretty good.” 

Deputy Squires and Mylan, the catcher and the caught, chatted amiably as they walked back up to the assembled forces of the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department’s narco squad, three CHP officers, and the Anderson Valley Ambulance crew, all of them arrayed at Grandma Smith’s Volvo station wagon at Indian Creek bridge. 

Surfer dude, having sustained several dog bites to his right leg, climbed into the ambulance for the trip to the emergency room in Ukiah where he was treated for the dog bites and booked into the County Jail on charges related to the production and transportation for the purposes of sale of marijuana. 

As Mylan was hauled off in the Anderson Valley Ambulance, the police cavalcade followed Ms. Smith and her now becalmed granddaughter back to Ms. Smith's home on Monte Bloyd Road. 

Ms. Smith said the cops found some more marijuana at her house. “Altogether there might be three pounds, max,” she said, “and not good stuff either. We're not professionals.” She said the officer who did the search “was very nice. He didn’t tear things up.” Another officer, she says, quizzed her on the physiology of female mid-life. “He asked me if I was going through menopause and asked me what kind of pills I took for it. It was all very weird.” 

Grandma Smith suspected a love-struck neighbor had snitched her off. “I told him I wasn’t interested,” nipping the neighborhood romance in the bud, so to speak. “Just before we left that night, he tore out of his place like he was going to a fire.” 

Ms. Smith insisted she was not speeding and therefore there was no reason for officer Neiman to stop her. Ms. Smith was convinced the tinted windows of her Volvo translated to officer Neiman as “dope car.” She suspected she was the victim of a “pretext” or “profile” stop. The tinted windows were, in the see-through eyes of law enforcement, synonymous with suspicious activity.

“When I bought the car in Santa Rosa it already had the tinted windows,” Ms. Smith maintained. “I didn’t think anything about it until now. And if I was stopped for speeding, where’s my speeding ticket?” 

The CHP's then-spokesman in Ukiah, Sgt. Ron Carfi, said emphatically that the CHP did not make “so-called profile stops.” 

“We make a lot of traffic stops,” Sgt Carfi said, “and as we do we often see other criminal activities.” 

Carfi identified the arresting officer as Jay Neiman — Ms. Smith hadn’t known his name — and confirmed that Neiman had been accompanied that night by a dog trained to “sniff out five different drugs.” The Sgt. said that Mylan Logan had a prior for “transportation.” (Four years earlier Mylan had been arrested in San Diego when he was discovered with 4 ounces of pot during a traffic stop.) The CHP sarge then segued into a brief aside that might be called “The Deterioration of Personal American Ethical Standards.” 

“How old are you?” he asked me before he said, “I'm 49. I remember the days when people would admit that they'd done something wrong. It just amazes me now that everyone's innocent. When I was 23 I remember a drunk driver defendant saying to the judge, ‘I do drink too much, your honor, but I'd like a break in this case.’ But these days? I'm not drunk, I wasn't speeding, the officer's lying.” 

Sgt. Carfi, having put this particular bust into historical perspective, shifted into cop-speak as he read through the CHP's official report on the episode, humming past those sentences he preferred not to share with media slime. 

“Officer Neiman clocked the Volvo at 43 mph in a 30mph zone in Philo at 19:45 hours. When he stopped the vehicle, officer Neiman detected an overwhelming odor of green marijuana in the vehicle. We found 7 pounds in the vehicle in 2 cardboard boxes and 3 paper bags in the rear of the vehicle. The driver signed a consent to search her home where we found a small marijuana-growing operation and about 12 pounds of marijuana, some of it shake. We also found a small number of what we suspect are hallucinogenic mushrooms.” 

Ms. Smith was not arrested. Her Volvo was not confiscated. She was cited for transportation of marijuana with intent to sell and one charge of marijuana cultivation. Ditto for Mylan, although he was held in the County Jail from Thursday night until Monday morning's Courthouse cattle call when the judge released him on his own recognizance. On October 29th, during their 90-second arraignment, Ms. Smith and her son entered not guilty pleas. Ms. Smith was represented by the Public Defender's Office, Mylan hired Ukiah attorney Phil deJong to represent him. 

“There's no way we had as much marijuana as they said,” Ms. Smith insisted. “One of the first things Mylan's lawyer is going to do is get the real weight of the marijuana. It wasn’t anywhere near as much as the police say they found. And I never did get a speeding ticket,” she said. 

Disposition? 

It all disappeared into small fines for mother and son, and probation for both of them. 

CATCH OF THE DAY, Tuesday, November 21, 2023

BONNIE CASTLE, Ukiah. Vandalism.

TALARA CAVALLI-HICKMAN, Orangevale/Ukiah. Parole violation.

LEVI LEON, Willits. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, evidence destruction, probation revocation.

ANJANETTTE MILLER, Gualala. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, failure to appear.

TODD RAMOS, Redwood Valley. False ID, failure to appear.

CALVIN TAYLOR II, Ukiah. Assault with deadly weapon with great bodily injury, cruelty to animals, criminal threats.

KIMBERLY WILLIAMS, Ukiah. Domestic battery, assault with deadly weapon with great bodily injury, false imprisonment, criminal threats.

PHILLIP WINTERS, Fort Bragg. Battery with serious injury, disorderly conduct-alcohol, contempt of court.

ISRAEL AND HAMAS AGREE TO A 4-DAY PAUSE IN FIGHTING AND A HOSTAGE DEAL, Qatar says.

The Israeli government and Hamas agreed to a brief cease-fire in Gaza to allow for the release of 50 hostages captured during Hamas’s assault last month on Israel and the release of 150 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel, Qatar said early Wednesday.

The cease-fire’s start will be announced within the next 24 hours, and it will last for at least four days, said the government of Qatar, which helped lead the negotiations. It added that the pause in fighting would also allow for more aid and fuel to reach civilians in Gaza.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office announced its approval of the deal in a WhatsApp message early Wednesday. If the multiday pause holds, it would be the longest halt in hostilities since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks prompted Israel to begin its bombardment and subsequent ground invasion of Gaza.

Mr. Netanyahu’s office said women and children would be among the hostages released and that “the release of every 10 additional hostages will result in an additional day in the pause.”

“The Israeli government is committed to bringing all the hostages home,” the government added.

Less than an hour later, Hamas said in a statement on Telegram that it too had agreed to the deal.

“After many days of difficult and complex negotiations, we announce, with the help and blessing of God, that we have reached a humanitarian truce,” the Hamas statement read.

Hostages probably will not be released until Thursday at the earliest, to allow time for Israeli judges to review potential legal challenges to the prisoner release, according to Israeli officials.

Mohammed Al Khulaifi, a Qatari state minister who was a main negotiator on the talks, urged both sides to meet their obligations under the agreement and said he hoped it would pave the way for an end to the war.

“This agreement is the first time both sides have agreed to support the diplomatic track over continued fighting, which has inflicted so much pain and suffering on innocent civilians,” he said in a statement.

Until the cease-fire begins, the situation is likely to remain fluid. Hamas added in its statement that while it had agreed to a truce, “our hands will remain on the trigger,” and its fighters “will remain on the lookout to defend our people and to defeat the occupation and aggression.”

Hamas and its allies in Gaza captured about 240 hostages during their raid on southern Israel on Oct. 7, which also killed an estimated 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials. Israel has responded with thousands of airstrikes and by invading Gaza with ground forces, killing more than 12,000 people in the fighting, according to health officials in the Hamas-controlled territory.

Hamas said in its statement that Israel had also agreed to let in more aid supplies to Gaza, continue to allow civilians to evacuate northern Gaza and halt its flights over Gaza except for a six-hour window every day.

Israel and Hamas have been negotiating indirectly for weeks over the hostages. A deal had seemed within reach on a few occasions, only for the negotiations to stall or fall apart.

The Israeli government has vowed to destroy Hamas, but it has also come under domestic pressure to free the hostages. A brief cease-fire could allow Israel to achieve part of the latter objective before returning to the former.

Mr. Netanyahu said on Tuesday, before the deal was announced, that Israel’s campaign to prevent Hamas from controlling any part of Gaza would continue after the cease-fire.

“We are at war, and we’ll continue this war until we meet all our objectives,” Mr. Netanyahu said.

A pause in the fighting, however brief, could bring some measure of relief to Palestinian civilians in Gaza. More than one million Gazans have been displaced, and civilians are running perilously low on basic necessities like food and water. As part of its offensive against Hamas, Israel has cut off electricity to Gaza and blocked the delivery of most fuel, saying it could be diverted for the armed group’s use.

(nytimes.com)

US-ISRAEL AID

Dear Editor,

The blindness of US foreign policy makers contines as the war between Hamas, the Palestinian Gazan “terrorist” group, and the Israeli War Cabiniet rages on with deaths of innocent Palestinian civilians and hostages. The people of Israel, if they really could direct their own IDF force, might cut down on or even temporarily halt the bombing of Gaza. 12,000 Gazans are dead, countless wounded.

Hamas began this awful conflict on October 7 by its murderous attack on the kabbutzes, most of which were very near the border of Israel and Gaza. At least 1,200 Israelis, including babes in arms, were slaughtered and 242 hostages, according to the government of Israel, were taken prisoner.

Three are dead. An unknown number of others also may be dead. President Biden has been trying to spur negotiations for their exchange, yet his authority isn’t clear. Hopefully his effort will succeed. Sen. Bernie Sanders has suggested we should demand Israel stop its bombing as a contingent before handing Israel $14 billion annually, We have been writing Israel this blank check which we should rethink. Some of this money could be set aside to rebuild Gaza after all the war ends.

Frank H. Baumgardner, III 

Santa Rosa

HORRIFIED AND HEARTBROKEN

Editor: 

I am an American Jew, horrified and heartbroken by Hamas’ attack on Israel and the Israeli government’s response. I’m saddened that many Jewish people are using our historical trauma to prioritize our feelings over Palestinian lives and politicians following suit.

This is not the Holocaust, and it’s not Jewish people who are being slaughtered by the tens of thousands. Stephens claims Israel is “one of the world’s most successful movements of national liberation.” Does he care that this “success” is predicated on denying basic human rights to generations of Palestinians? Does he care that “success” is a never-ending cycle of violence that deprives Israelis and Palestinians of even the hope of a secure future?

We all must acknowledge the facts of Israel’s creation and ongoing discrimination against those born into different circumstances. We must do everything we can to stop the bloodshed and destruction in the short term, and in the long term ensure Palestinian’s rights to freedom, equality and justice. Wanting these things is not anti-Jewish. It’s just the only way forward.

Ellen Forman Obstler

Petaluma

A REAL CLASSY GUY: Stuart Seldowitz, 64, has been identified as the man hurling vile insults at a food cart vendor in New York City. 

Seldowitz was a foreign policy advisor under President Barack Obama and the Deputy Director/Senior Political Officer in the U.S. State Department's Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs from 1999 to 2003. Gotham Government Relations, a New York-based firm, “ended all affiliation” with Seldowitz over the videos. Seldowitz can be heard saying “if we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids? It wasn't enough,” in reference to Israel's response to the Hamas terror attack that killed 1,200 people. He goes on to ask the halal truck vendor: “Did you rape your daughter like Mohammed did?” Seldowitz refers to the man as a “rapist” and calls him “ignorant” for his lack of English, then going on a tirade about the Quran.

MEDIA MATTERS AND THE FAKE NEWS ERA GO TO COURT

The X/Twitter lawsuit against David Brock's media arm could become a referendum on the fake news era

by Matt Taibbi

On Tuesday, X/Twitter filed a lawsuit against Media Matters for America (MMfA), the media arm of political smear artist David Brock. Brock made his living in the nineties attacking Democrats, pushing the Paula Jones story and writing The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, until announcing a religious conversion via his 1997 Esquire piece “Confessions of a Right-Wing Hitman” and moving to team blue to head up orgs like Media Matters and Correct the Record. Brock is a unique figure in our history, as perhaps no American has ever turned his face so completely inside out in public.

I can’t indulge in homilies to Elon Musk’s X as a haven for free speech while he also continues to suppress disfavored accounts (including all Substack contributors), but the X suit at least has a chance of becoming a referendum on serious forms of media manipulation. The X allegations, which obviously need proving out, detail in microcosm a phenomenon that’s been unpleasantly familiar to Americans since about 2016. We’ve grown used to a Twilight Zone existence in which nearly every news story of consequence, from Nord Stream to Bountygate to sonic weapons in Cuba, the Dancing Syringe Panic to “Russia Trying to Help Bernie Sanders” to the pee tape have the feel of invented stories. Later, they’re often proved to be, and worse, we’ve been conditioned to forgive the institutions caught routing such fakes our way, and salute the next narratives sent up the flagpole. The method is never put on trial. 

In this case, it might be. MMfA is accused of creating a news story, reporting on it, then propagandizing it to willing partners in the mainstream press. Again, the X allegations need to hold up in an adversarial process, but the company claims to have fully captured a dollhouse version of a generation’s larger media frauds, making this a fascinating case to watch. From the suit:

Media Matters… exclusively followed a small subset of users consisting entirely of accounts in one of two categories: those known to produce extreme, fringe content, and accounts owned by X’s big-name advertisers. The end result was a feed precision-designed by Media Matters for a single purpose: to produce side-by-side ad/content placements that it could screenshot in an effort to alienate advertisers…

Media Matters therefore resorted to endlessly scrolling and refreshing its unrepresentative, hand-selected feed … until it finally received pages containing the result it wanted: controversial content next to X’s largest advertisers’ paid posts.

The described activity allegedly preceded the November 16 Media Matters article, “As Musk endorses antisemitic conspiracy theory, X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to pro-Nazi content.” The piece, which now brandishes gloating editor’s notes pointing out that Apple and IBM have since paused ads on X, included a key screenshot seemingly designed to freak out advertisers:

This whole thing would be merely a petty spat between political antagonists, except Media Matters has been a major driver of this general type of story, in which an offense is first invented, then made the focus of ginned-up outrage, then massively propagandized via unscrupulous press partners. The technique has been used to suppress interest in damaging revelations but more often to destroy or defame political figures on the right (Donald Trump), left (Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders) and in between (Tulsi Gabbard, for instance). 

As our own Matt Orfalea pointed out yesterday, Media Mattershad a key part in one larger known con, being a primary trafficker in stories sourced to Hamilton 68, the phony “dashboard” purporting to track Russian bots created by the Alliance for Securing Democracy and New Knowledge. MMfA also pushed info from the Steele reports, hyped Steele-generated details like the “Michael Cohen in Prague” story, bashed figures who dared question the “collusion” narrative, and even went after reporter Jeff Gerth for writing a Columbia Journalism Reviewopus about Russiagate reporting snafus via headlines highlighting how much “Trump and right-wing media amplified” the “questionable” CJR story. 

Proof is going to be key in this individual case, but there’s already a larger question being raised. Sites like MMfA harp constantly on the devastating impact of “fake news.” Which stories? The one constantly cited by sites like this is Stop The Steal, but the “fake news” panic started long before.

If you go back and look at fevered headlines on the topic in 2017-2018, you find lots of hemming and hawing about ridiculous, low-wattage Internet tales, ranging from the discontinuation of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup to Ted Cruz’s father being in on the JFK assassination. At worst, Donald Trump’s 2016 claim that he won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Read academic papers like “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election” and you’ll see hand-wringing about things like a defunct “wtoe5news.com” report that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump. Read a Guardianpostmortem on “how fake news helped Donald Trump win a real election,” and you’ll see references to rumors of Hillary Clinton running a pedophile ring. 

It was clear then that what these people meant by seriously impactful “fake news” was realnews they felt was over-amplified (the 2016 Wikileaks leaks, or the FBI email investigation). Meanwhile fake news they themselves generate has been cleverly kept out of the discussion, since academics and media critics — in part because of ongoing pressure from groups like MMfA — have not yet agreed to call stories based on, say, the Steele dossier or Hamilton 68 fake news. I’ll be curious to see if CNN’s ever-sanctimonious media critic Oliver Darcy will continue to stand by his statement, based on the November 16 Media Matterspiece, that “all the evidence” shows X is not a “safe” place to advertise. Does he still consider that true? Will he ever mention it if the case swings against MMfA?

Elon has always tweeted head-scratching things, and the recent “You have said the actual truth” reply post that sent press and advertisers into a frenzy is a different issue from the much-shared MMfA “analysis” article. Same with the decision to suspend anyone using the terms “decolonization” or “from the river to the sea,” on the grounds that those are “clear calls for extreme violence.” If you want to have an argument that he’s an antisemite because of the former, or that he’s canceling legitimate speech to placate Zionists because of the latter, have at it, but this article isn’t about those things. 

The defining paradox of the fake news/“anti-disinformation” era is that the people deemed authorities on what is and is not fake news consistently prove to be, themselves, purveyors of the product. Their episodes have mostly involved media tales too far-reaching to litigate. This case is small and contained enough to fit in an ordinary courtroom. Irrespective of one’s feelings about X/Twitter, this Media Matters suit could be a long-overdue chance to put the venomous and generationally influential David Brock media machine on trial. For once, MMfA does matter.

(racket.news)

WHY ‘SUPREME COURT ETHICS’ IS AN OXYMORON

by Jim Hightower

Let me be blunt: The problem with today’s Supreme Court is that it consists of too many 5-watt bulbs sitting in 100-watt sockets.

While most of the nine members are assumed to be brilliant, “smart” is as smart does, and this court’s right-wing majority wallows in stupid, consistently pushing plutocracy, autocracy, and theocracy over the democratic will of the people. Compounding this stupidity, many of the judges have flagrantly accepted “gifts” of cash, luxury vacations, and other freebies from the corporate and right-wing interests that have benefitted from the Court’s rulings. Yet, caught red-handed, the narcissistic jurists assert that We the People should just trust their integrity.…

jimhightower.substack.com/p/why-supreme-court-ethics-is-an-oxymoron

WINTERLAND BALLROOM, Post and Steiner, 1966-1978. This former skating rink was a Bill Graham venue that hosted big concerts with Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Bruce Springsteen, Led Zeppelin and more. The Band played its final show there, and the Sex Pistols played their final show with Sid Vicious there. Winterland was torn down in 1985. 

In this photo, taken June 13, 1972, fans are waiting in line for the Rolling Stones with Stevie Wonder opening. This was just before the release of the classics "Exile on Main Street" and "Talking Book," with both artists playing heavily from both. 

(Dave Randolph/The Chronicle)

AN ENGLISHMAN was driving a truck full of monkeys on an Irish roadway. The truck broke down and the man pulled to the side of the road.

An Irishman driving a truck saw the man and stopped to offer some help.

“Can I be of any help?” asked the Irishman.

“Well,” said the Englishman, “I’ll give you fifty quid if you take these monkeys to the zoo for me.”

”Sure,” said the Irishman, and he loaded the monkeys on his truck and took off.

A couple of hours pass and the Englishman saw the truck of monkeys coming his way. He flagged the Irishman over and said, “I thought you were going to take the monkeys to the zoo for me?”

”I did,” said the Irishman, “but I had a couple of quid left over so, I thought I’d take them to the movies.”

UKRAINE, Tuesday, November 21, 2023

The White House voiced concern Tuesday that Iran may provide Russia with ballistic missiles for use in its war against Ukraine, a development that likely would be disastrous for the Ukrainian people, a U.S. national security official said.

National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby noted that Iran already has been providing Russia with unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, guided aerial bombs and artillery ammunition, and may be preparing “to go a step further in its support for Russia.”

Kirby highlighted a September meeting in which Iran hosted Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to show off a range of ballistic missile systems, sparking U.S. concern.

“We are therefore concerned that Iran is considering providing Russia with ballistic missiles now for use in Ukraine,” Kirby told reporters during a conference call. “In return for that support, Russia has been offering Tehran unprecedented defense cooperation, including on missiles, electronics and air defense.”

Kirby’s warning came as President Joe Biden’s request for more than $61 billion in emergency U.S. funding to continue to support Ukraine’s defense remained stalled in Congress. The additional aid for Ukraine is part of a larger $106 billion funding request from the Democratic president that also would support Israel, Taiwan and the U.S. operations on the border with Mexico.

A growing group of lawmakers in the Republican Party, which controls the House of Representatives, opposes sending more money to Ukraine.

Kirby and other top U.S. officials have been urging Congress to pass aid for Ukraine, saying existing funding is drying up.

He also noted Iran’s announcement earlier this year that it had finalized a deal to buy Su-35 fighter jets from Russia, and said Iran is looking to buy additional military equipment from Russia, including attack helicopters, radars and combat-trainer aircraft.

FREE BIRD

If I leave here tomorrow
Would you still remember me?
For I must be traveling on now
'Cause there's too many places I've got to see

But if I stay here with you, girl
Things just couldn't be the same
'Cause I'm as free as a bird now
And this bird you cannot change
Oh, oh, oh, oh
And the bird you cannot change
And this bird, you cannot change
Lord knows, I can't change

Bye-bye baby, it's been sweet love, yeah, yeah
Though this feelin' I can't change
Please don't take it so badly
'Cause Lord knows, I'm to blame

If I stay here with you, girl
Things just couldn't be the same
'Cause I'm as free as a bird now
And this bird you cannot change
Oh, oh, oh, oh
And the bird you cannot change
And this bird, you cannot change

Lord knows, I can't change
Lord help me, I can't change
Lord, I can't change
Won't you fly high, free bird, yeah

If I leave here tomorrow
Would you still remember me?
For I must be traveling on now
'Cause there's too many places I've got to see.

But if I stayed here with you, girl,
Things just couldn't be the same.
'Cause I'm as free as a bird now,
And this bird you cannot change.
And this bird you cannot change.
And this bird you cannot change.
Lord knows I can't change.

Bye, bye, baby, it's been a sweet love, yeah,
Though this feeling I can't change.
But please don't take it so badly,
'Cause Lord knows I'm to blame.

But if I stayed here with you, girl,
Things just couldn't be the same.
'Cause I'm as free as a bird now,
And this bird you'll never change.
And the bird you cannot change.
And this bird you cannot change.
Lord knows, I can't change.
Lord, help me, I can't change.

Lord, I can't change.
Won't you fly high, free bird, yeah?

— Allen Collins, Ronnie Van Zant (Lynyrd Skynyrd, 1973)

I AM AN OLD WOMAN NOW. The buffaloes and black-tail deer are gone, and our Indian ways are almost gone. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I ever lived them.

My little son grew up in the white man's school. He can read books, and he owns cattle and has a farm. He is a leader among our Hidatsa people, helping teach them to follow the white man's road.

He is kind to me. We no longer live in an earth lodge, but in a house with chimneys, and my son's wife cooks by a stove.

But for me, I cannot forget our old ways.

Often in summer I rise at daybreak and steal out to the corn fields, and as I hoe the corn I sing to it, as we did when I was young. No one cares for our corn songs now.

Sometimes in the evening I sit, looking out on the big Missouri. The sun sets, and dusk steals over the water. In the shadows I see again to see our Indian village, with smoke curling upward from the earth lodges, and in the river's roar I hear the yells of the warriors, and the laughter of little children of old.

It is but an old woman's dream. Then I see but shadows and hear only the roar of the river, and tears come into my eyes. Our Indian life, I know, is gone forever.

— Waheenee - Hidatsa (North Dakota)

A FATHER AND SON SHOT, DISMEMBERED AND BURNED: The Dark Side Of California Cannabis

by Paige St. John

PÁTZCUARO, Michoacán — In a small square crypt behind frosted glass in subtropical Michoacán is incontrovertible proof of the cost of California cannabis.

The tomb just within the high cemetery gates of the Panteón Municipal de Pátzcuaro, flanked by sunflowers in twin blue vases, holds all that can be found of Ulises Anwar Ayala Andrade.

Sharing the crypt is what remains of Ulises’ teen son, a convivial boy named after his father, but whom everyone affectionately called “Chino.”

For two decades, “Ulises Zapatero” sold shoes in Pátzcuaro’s open air market, beckoning passersby to his racks of colorful Nikes and Pumas.

The shoe stock was bought with high-interest loans, and the Ayalas carried a mortgage on the family of five’s simple house in the outskirts above Pátzcuaro. Struggling with those debts, Ulises obtained a tourist visa for the United States in early 2020 and, intending to find work, boarded a bus north.

Joining him was 16-year-old Chino.

Their quest for U.S. dollars would take them deep into California’s Emerald Triangle at the height of a runaway cannabis market, to a crude shed on a Mendocino County farm, beside other Mexican laborers in the underground economy.

Traveling in the other direction were coffins.

* * *

From the southern Mojave Desert to the mist-shrouded mountains in the northern ranges, the California green rush was exploiting and killing workers.

Relaxed criminal penalties and expanding markets had set off a massive boom in illegal cultivation. Even on licensed farms, California regulators failed to protect workers in the labor-intensive industry.

A Los Angeles Times investigation documented widespread exploitation, wage theft and disregard for worker safety and housing.

The newspaper found 44 farm-related deaths, surveying just a five-year period in only 10 counties. Among them was an 8-month old infant who died in Trinity County from an undetermined cause. The rest were workers.

All but five of the deceased were immigrants.

A third of them came from Mexico.

* * *

The Ayala family lived outside of Pátzcuaro, a tourist arts haven of Spanish colonial plazas and red-tiled roofs. Ulises sold tennis shoes in Pátzcuaro’s lively central market, where a multitude of vendors called “pásale” — come on by — to peddle their wares of lake fish, dried hominy, home goods and woven shawls and fine embroidery.

At a folding table near Ulises’ shoe racks, his wife, Josefina, ladled out bowls of aromatic pozole.

At night, the family returned to their hillside colony of two-story houses erected like barnacles on the still-visible foundations of one-room casitas. Just a decade ago, one out of five domiciles still had dirt floors. Today, a third of the streets remain rutted clay, traversable only by foot.

The Ayalas could afford just the basics — an old car, a little furniture. The loans to restock Ulises’ racks dragged the family down. The reliable sales of Josefina’s pozole lifted it up. All night long, the stew’s garlic perfume filled the still air of the concrete house, simmering for market the next day.

“We lead a life, well, that is not so good,” Josefina told Ulises as she tried to persuade him not to leave the country to find more work, “but we are together.”

For Ulises, it was not enough.

And there was the question of Chino’s direction.

“He didn’t see much for himself in studying,” said the teenager’s closest childhood friend, Guille Perez.

The boy’s bedroom was filled with name brand street wear — Adidas backpacks and Bad Bunny T-shirts, and a rack of 13 colorful tennis shoes. During long walks with Guille, the visions Chino shared of his future revolved around earning money. “He planned to work,” Guille said, “and maybe someday buy something, like a car, a house …”

In early 2020, with shoe sales slumping and debts mounting, Ulises and Chino left to find work in Dallas.

It was a bust.

Ulises had been promised a job hanging mechanical doors. But in the opening days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the work was meager. He failed to earn even $300 a week.

“I’m worse than ever,” he told Josefina by phone.

Come home, Josefina said.

But Ulises heard from an old friend from Pátzcuaro, whose family had moved to Northern California. She said her brother in Mendocino County could give Ulises a lot of work.

“Hay mucho trabajo,” she told Ulises. The pay would be enormous by his standards: $10,000 for three months.

Ulises agreed to go to California. Soon, Chino followed.

* * *

Illegal cannabis has a controversial but largely tolerated footing in Mendocino County.

The crop is the economic lifeblood for small, stagnant towns like Willits, devastated by the closing of sawmills. The sheriff estimates the county’s redwood forests house more than 5,000 cannabis operations, the vast majority likely to never go legal and unlikely to ever be visited by the sheriff’s two-man narcotics squad.

Even on the most peaceful homestead farm, to convert crops into cash requires dealing with the drug trade. Guns are common, as are armed robberies, shootouts and other mayhem. The first season Ulises and Chino were in Mendocino, a pair of Las Vegas security guards donned body armor and tried to heist a money delivery to an illegal operation in nearby Covelo. The robbers failed to make a clean getaway, leading to an armed standoff with police that ended when the ringleader shot off the top of his head in a botched suicide.

The cannabis community is also deeply segregated by race and class. Growers who own their own land are predominantly white. Those who work it are predominantly people of color, such as traveling work crews of older Hmong who immigrated decades ago, young Argentinians staying only for the summer, and crews assembled by Mexican labor contractors.

The latter are frequently branded “cartel,” a label that both creates a class of outsiders and discounts the suffering of those on that side of that fence.

“We live in fear of the cartels,” said an older white resident and longtime grower outside Willits, speaking of the shared conviction within her rural community of cannabis farmers that if there is bloodshed, a “cartel” can somehow be blamed. Another resident contended Mexican workers come from a “second world” country so violent that they value life less than do “Caucasians.”

Mendocino County has actually had no cases, arrests or prosecutions tied to Mexican narcotics cartels.

But those dying on Mendocino County cannabis farms since California legalized weed in 2016 have all been Latino workers.

In keeping with statewide patterns found by The Times, four of the men were laborers poisoned by carbon monoxide from greenhouse generators. Four others were murdered, including 19-year-old Ramon Naranjo Casteneda, a U.S. citizen who had lived with his father in Mexico. His body was dumped on the highway outside of Covelo, a holster for trimming shears on his belt and still smelling of fresh weed.

A ninth man, a San Jose flea market vendor seeking to support his family during the COVID-19 shutdown, vanished and is presumed dead.

Though state and federal worker-protection laws cover such laborers, those deaths and dozens more identified by The Times were not investigated by labor agencies. Their absence from the record makes the cannabis industry appear safer than it is, avoiding scrutiny or protections that might prevent additional deaths.

The Department of Industrial Relations, responsible for labor safety in California, said in a press office email that it “takes all worker deaths extremely seriously.” In response to stories published in The Times, the agency said it was educating sheriffs on legal requirements to report workplace deaths and also had conferred with state cannabis regulators, though it would not release public records showing it had done so.

When presented by The Times with details of dozens of farm deaths, the agency opened a single investigation — into the October 2021 carbon monoxide poisoning of Michael Puttre.

Puttre was asphyxiated by fumes from a generator. He had been working as a building contractor at a state-licensed cannabis farm in Humboldt County. The owner, contesting a $34,000 fine for failure to provide a safe sleeping space, disavowed responsibility.

“What Mr. Puttre did with his free time and sleeping arrangements was his decision,” the farmer’s lawyer wrote to a state investigator.

Only through a sheriff’s deputy did the investigator learn Puttre’s sleeping quarters was a 30-foot hoop house, the kind used to grow cannabis.

* * *

Ulises knew the man offering him work in California.

There was a time even when he and Jose Manuel Archundia Martinez were business partners, selling shoes at the tianguis— small markets — outside Pátzcuaro, traveling from village to village.

The fortunes of the men diverged greatly after Archundia moved to the United States.

After a decade in the country, the social media pages of the Archundia family flash totems of prosperity — a dancing show horse, expensive trucks and racing cars, and gold chains adorned, in one case, with a gold AK-47, and in another, a fighting rooster.

But whereas Archundia lived on the expansive ranch of a prominent local housing developer, he sent his cannabis crew — Ulises and Chino and another man and youth — to stay beside the greenhouses they tended, in an unpainted plywood shed.

The workers had access to the bathroom of a nearby cabin but mostly showered with water from buckets hung to warm in the sun. They relaxed on a pair of couches parked outside beneath the trees. The dirt around the shed was littered with chip bags and beer bottles.

Josefina came twice briefly to visit and formed an instant dislike.

She was distressed to find Ulises eating instant ramen, and to see her husband and son deslumbraban— dazzled — by the Archundia money, the cars and trucks. Ulises even changed his Facebook profile to a big red truck like one in the Archundia drive. He asked Josefina to stay in California.

She refused.

“My son, I don’t pay attention to any of it,” Josefina at one point told Chino. “Because there are things very valuable to me: to be here, to have my mother, and have (my children,) and have my job, and have peace.”

She returned to Pátzcuaro alone, holding on to the belief Ulises and Chino would follow.

* * *

It rained in the night, and by early morning one Sunday in April 2021, the dirt lane that sloped down the Mendocino County ridge was slick with mud. Gadiel Ortega Hernandez told his girlfriend to drop him off at the gate, and the portly man carefully picked his way down the hill to reach work.

Through the thick woods he could barely see the poles of a grow house, but rounding a curve, Ortega was in the clearing. Before him loomed three large greenhouses terraced into the slopes, each teeming with young cannabis plants. It was April and they were still small, but being pushed toward early flowering with a double dose of artificial light at night, sun during the day.

Given the early hour and the tequila consumption at the boss’ ranch the night before, Ortega didn’t expect to see anyone moving. But a light-blocking tarp had already been pulled from one large greenhouse. And tilted at an odd angle on the slope below it was the PT Cruiser that Ortega’s coworkers had used to come home from the party, the purple car’s passenger door hanging open.

Yet Ulises and Chino were nowhere in sight.

Instead, coming down from the tiny bunkhouse Ortega shared with the other farmworkers was Chris Gamble, the tousled middle-aged man who leased this land and owned two adjacent parcels where the crew was adding greenhouses. In Gamble’s arms was what looked like a white comforter.

“Qué pasó Chris?” Ortega asked.

“Nada. No pasó nada,” Gamble replied. “I fought with Ulises.” Gamble clasped his hands together, fingers pointing like a gun, acting out for Ortega a scenario in which Gamble claimed Ulises had threatened him.

So now, Gamble said, the father and son from Mexico didn’t work there anymore.

“Se fueron lejos,” Gamble said. They went far away.

Gamble, in his mid-40s with a paunch and bowl-cut hair, could look unimposing when needed, like confronted by someone with a gun, or standing for a police mug. He provoked vastly contradictory impressions.

His mother called him “granola.” A neighbor said he was “sweet,” even if he did once intentionally lock the fire marshal onto his property. In a courtroom feud with a neighbor over his barking pitbull, Gamble produced an elaborate narrative in the dog’s defense, replete with reconstructed conversations, and 17 character witnesses who vouched not only for the dog but called its master “caring,” “warm,” “respectable,” and “kind.” (For all that, Gamble still was ordered to restrain his pitbull, Guinness.)

Yet Gamble’s ex-wife and former girlfriend lodged domestic abuse complaints against him and sought the protection of court restraining orders. Gamble was ordered into anger management class, and still remained on criminal probation, forbidden from owning the many handguns and the assault rifle stashed in his ridge-top cabin. There was an order to pay child support, and warrants and citations for failing to appear in court, resisting arrest, burning without a permit and entering a closed disaster area.

To his Mexican business partner, who typically added a vulgarity to the label, Gamble was a “marijuana hippie loco.”

Cannabis had been Gamble’s means of support for two decades, supplementing a meager disability check. He said seizures prevented him from working at the family sawmill in Potter Valley, or making use of his community college training in medical aid and firefighting.

Year after year, Gamble’s cannabis ventures suffered misfortune. After his workers walked off the job halfway through the 2019 season, he was ready to turn over control of the farm to a neighbor down the road who said he could expand the yield with light-controlled greenhouses: Manuel Archundia. In return, Gamble would receive a 30% cut in whatever crop Archundia produced, typical of the sharecropping arrangements popularized with the expansion of illegal farming.

Gamble called Archundia “the bank.” Archundia fronted the money and goods for Gamble’s cannabis operation. And Archundia recruited the work crew: Ulises and Chino, along with Ortega and the son of Ortega’s girlfriend.

It wasn’t an easy relationship. Gamble complained about the Spanish-speaking workers, saying they didn’t know what they were doing. And the workers came to regard Gamble as reclusive and odd, an impression reinforced for Ortega that Sunday morning.

Ortega peered within the PT Cruiser. Ulises’ phone and Costco card were on the seat. Water streamed from a hose and across the floorboard. The early morning wash seemed strange, but Ortega was not yet suspicious.

He turned his back on Gamble and set to work, draining rainwater sagging the greenhouse tarps. Gamble lingered for awhile, halfheartedly helping, then drifted off.

Only when Ortega was done with the greenhouses did he take the trail to the bunkhouse, an unheated shed barely large enough to accommodate a camp cot used by Ortega and the bunkbed where Ulises and Chino shared the bottom berth while another worker took the top.

Ortega saw the wet floor, the tossed clothing — and only then noticed the puddle of blood outside in the dirt.

Covertly, he charged his cell phone off a greenhouse generator, then fled.

By the time Archundia picked up his worker from the ridge road, Ortega was weeping.

* * *

In Chris Gamble’s calculus, violence was a cost factor in the cannabis business.

Over the years, he had been shot at, hit with a bean bag bullet, tied up with zip ties, and repeatedly ripped off.

“If your guy gets shot and murdered, you get nothing and you lose another friend,” he told a judge. “It’s the black market, sir. Nothing is guaranteed.”

Archundia operated by different math. The first thing he did after collecting the weeping Ortega from the road was have one of his English-speaking sons summon the sheriff. The son made only a brief attempt at hiding the fact the missing men were workers on the family’s cannabis grow.

Deputies rousted a freshly showered Gamble from bed. They found a collection of prohibited guns, 345 pounds of dried cannabis flower, 800 cartridges of cannabis oil concentrate, and three greenhouses filled with young plants — a crop Gamble estimated was worth $1 million.

In a still-smoking fire pit down in the woods, they found burnt tires, charred chickens and two headless corpses.

That Gamble had killed the missing Ulises and Chino was evident: There was gunpowder on his hands, blood on his belt, 9 mm casings outside the bunkhouse and blood on the ground, the walls and the cot.

But “to this day,” said deputy district attorney Scott McMenomey, “I don’t know why he killed them.”

Details of the events leading up to the deaths of Ulises and Chino come from cellphone texts, court testimony and their killer’s own retelling.

April 24, 2021 began sweetly.

“Buen día, mi amor,” Ulises texted to his wife, the last Josefina would hear from her husband.

It was to be a day of celebration.

First, the fiesta in the woods, where Gamble said Archundia staged a large cockfight on Gamble’s land, replete with taco stand and beer truck. Archundia and his workers denied the existence of the fighting roosters, but police found many betting slips and leg bands for cockfights.

Later that day the party moved to Archundia’s ranch 10 minutes away, to celebrate the baptism of a grandson. Cellphone photos show Ulises with the other workers, their arms around one another, beside a shiny red truck. In another, Chino sported a rare open grin, revealing braces, as he stood in front of a children’s bouncing house.

There was plenty of tequila, and a minor drunken fight. Gamble remarked to one of Archundia’s sons that the laborers from Pátzcuaro, now on their second season, were “worthless” — at least as far as skills in growing cannabis went.

After dark, Ulises and Chino drove back to the farm in the Cruiser, taking Gamble with them. The two other workers went off into Willits to sleep.

The rest of the story came only from Gamble, who took the stand during his double-murder trial. Over the course of four hours, Gamble provided a characteristically elaborate version of events:

The headlamps of the PT Cruiser threw light on a black bear crossing the road as they pulled up to the gate, Gamble said, so he gave Ulises his 9 mm pistol to scare off the animal. Then it started to drizzle, and Gamble ordered the workers to help him pull off the heavy tarps that normally shielded the greenhouse lights from view, so the plants could soak up the rain. Chino obeyed, but Ulises refused, saying that was not what Archundia wanted.

“If you can’t follow directions, you don’t have a job here,” Gamble threatened, speaking in his poor mix of Spanish and English.

Ulises reddened, and waved the gun about. Gamble lunged for the pistol, and it fired, shooting Ulises in the neck and dropping him dead to the ground.

Gamble stumbled out of the bunkhouse. He could not stop Chino from entering and seeing his father. Gamble said he tried to make himself look “real small” and unthreatening, but Chino took his father’s Ruger off a shelf, and he came after Gamble.

So Gamble shot the boy, another fatal wound to the neck.

The rusty revolver in Chino’s hands was special to Ulises exactly because it was so decrepit, Gamble said.

First, the revolver had no firing pin, so could not shoot a bullet unless the end of a toothpick was inserted into the hole of the missing mechanism.

Second, the cylinder would fall out unless held in place with two hands. When Chino fell, the gun hit the ground and the loose cylinder rolled out. Gamble noticed it was empty.

Chino had no bullets.

* * *

At first, Gamble said, he sat in the rain, trying to breathe, his mind a muddle.

Then he thought of his $1 million crop.

“The police would be here … and I had a huge sum of marijuana there that is, ultimately, how I sustain my family and myself,” he told the jury. “And the thought of losing that …

“That’s a huge loss, you know, life-altering loss.”

He couldn’t move the weed — both trucks on the farm were inoperable, and Archundia’s purple Cruiser had no hitch.

Gamble believed his partner would share his interest in protecting the crop above the disappearance of two Mexican workers. He expected the two men would talk, and Archundia and his sons would help him figure out the “logistics.”

“I didn’t think that they would call the police,” Gamble said.

“I mean, I really didn’t.”

Gamble set about to “lessen the shock” of the crime scene, so that when Archundia and his men saw it, they wouldn’t just shoot him right there and then.

He dragged the bodies of Ulises and Chino from the bunkhouse down to the Cruiser, and went back to his house for a steak knife. He had decided to remove the heads.

Then Gamble drove the corpses to his burn pile in the woods.

He threw in tires. He grabbed trash. In his haste to build a hot fire, he also tossed in a burlap sack. Only too late did he realize it held living roosters from the cockfight, he said.

Then Gamble drove the Cruiser past Archundia’s ranch, until he came to a field with hogs. He threw them the heads.

He had just finished up washing out the bloody Cruiser and bunkhouse when Ortega showed up for work.

From the witness stand, Gamble indicated an area on a map where he had seen the hogs. The judge put the trial into recess and every available deputy and investigator left the courthouse to walk the fields in a futile search for skulls.

In May, Gamble was sentenced to life in prison without the chance of parole for the first-degree murder of Chino Ayala, second-degree murder of Ulises Ayala, and felonious abuse of animals for the burning of chickens. From Wasco State Prison, his case on appeal, Gamble declined to talk to a reporter.

“I am fighting for my life and my freedom,” he wrote to The Times.

But in a now-sealed pre-sentencing report, one that Gamble said is biased and erroneous, a probation officer quoted the convicted murderer calling his victims “drug users” and “not good for society.”

In an appeal for leniency, Gamble offered the probation officer a final justification.

He claimed his Mexican farm manager, the shoe salesman he incinerated, the boy he beheaded, all were “cartel.”

* * *

The California murders hit hard in Pátzcuaro, which enjoys a relative reprieve from the violence that stigmatizes some other parts of Mexico.

The Ayala family had not been told about the beheadings — that was learned two years later when the murder case went to court, the horrible news gleaned secondhand because Josefina could not afford to attend the trial.

Josefina, her family, and Chino’s friends battled immobilizing grief and depression. For days Josefina couldn’t bring herself to work. She relied on sleeping pills. And the family’s financial predicament worsened. Ulises had never received all of the promised wages, though Archundia’s sister sent $900 collected through GoFundMe to help with the funerals. For two years, Josefina could not pay the mortgage.

Guille Perez, Chino’s best friend, retreated within his house, then within himself. An acquaintance from the United States warned him the deaths of Mexicans gathered little attention across the border, dispiriting Perez further. He had trouble accepting that Chino’s killing was real.

“Until now,” he said in a voice so soft it barely carried across his living room, “I did not acknowledge that he had died.”

The Ayala family slowly adjusted. Ulises and Josefina’s eldest child, Tania, reopened her father’s shoe stall. Their youngest, Aldo, quit school to help at the market. And Josefina repainted their brown house to a bright aquatic blue. On most days, she is at the market in her red and white apron, chatting with customers as she serves pozole.

But there is a hollowness in her life.

“In fact, I’m not fine,” she said in Spanish, her voice quaking.

“Vivo porque tengo que vivir.”

I live because I have to live.

(LA Times)