The Ghost Network

by Catie Disabato

  During the trial, Berliner lost touch with the other New Situationists. He didn’t know most of their names and didn’t try to find out, but he would’ve liked to talk with some of them a few weeks before Kraus’s sentencing, when CNN began airing a series of investigative reports called “Who Are The New Situationists?” According to Berliner, the report got a lot of things wrong, but also got a few things right. He wasn’t specific about what details fit into what category, although CNN’s conclusion that the New Situationists had been hiding out somewhere in Chicago was clearly correct. More likely than not, the New Situationists returned to simple, everyday lives, started going to Starbucks again, bought business-casual attire, found jobs as assistants in offices, and moved slowly up the ladder. According to Berliner, one of the former New Situationists is now a popular food blogger; he says he saw her face for the first time in a picture in the Food section of the Tribune.a

  “Sometimes I wonder if I’ll run into one of them at a bar sometime,” Berliner told me, “I wouldn’t even recognize them. That’s the strangest part. The group is still part of what I am but the only person that meant something to me was Marie. That’s weird to think about.”

  After Kraus went to prison, Berliner fell in with a group of Chicago photographers and avant-garde artists, all of whom had recently graduated from Columbia College in Chicago (an arts college unaffiliated with Columbia University in New York), all of whom were at least four years older than Berliner, and all of whom used him for his cultural capital while he used them for low-effort companionship. When I asked Berliner to give me their names, he couldn’t remember more than one. He recalled them as an amorphous blob, as a group of people who worked terrible jobs in restaurants and coffee shops while trying to take their art seriously, and he could only distinctly remember one out of the clump, a lesbian portrait photographer named Claire Haskal, with whom he still occasionally gets drunk.

  Haskal, who helpfully provided me with prints of several portraits of Berliner at eighteen and nineteen years old, recalls him as a nearly “catatonic” social presence. “He’d come out to openings and just stand with a group of us, never saying a word. People thought it was an affectation, or that he was intimidated because he was so young. That’s what I thought, I thought he was intimidated, so I tried to stick close to him, like he was a skittish dog. All the art fags wanted him as a pet. I did, too.

  “But he wasn’t intimidated, he was in mourning for his whole life. I found that out later, when he snapped out of it and we really became friends. Most people would’ve stayed in bed, but he dragged himself out to these parties. He wanted to be around the living, I guess.”

  Haskal encouraged Berliner to write about maps and architecture, and use his semi-infamous name to get published. Berliner wrote one essay; it was about the city as it was used by Christopher Nolan in the movie Batman Begins and it was called “Modern Urbanism’s Tabula Rasa: Destroying and Rebuilding Gotham.”

  In the 2005 reboot of the Batman movie franchise, director Christopher Nolan and his producers decided to film the movie in Chicago (rather than New York), letting the Second City stand in for the fictional Gotham City. Until Batman Begins started filming, New York had been Gotham for so long that the cities were interchangeable; comics artists that depicted the city drew New York-esque skylines, and New York was nicknamed Gotham. Nolan’s decision to move Gotham from New York to Chicago destroyed and re-created an entire city.

  Architects that subscribe to modern urbanism aesthetics and ideals would approve of Nolan’s recast of Gotham. Modern urbanists tend to “create tabula rasa for the building of cities without memory.”b Cities without memory have no history. In moving Gotham to Chicago, Nolan was attempting to create a Gotham untainted by New York City.c

  Despite the article’s faults, Esquire magazine published the piece on its website.d

  The Columbia crowd didn’t make an artist out of Berliner, but he helped make an artist out of Haskal. He helped style her best work: animated gif portraits of all of her friends in party settings, looking beautiful and excited in early frames of the gif, but quickly transitioning to the grotesque with only slight tweaks in the framing of their faces. Haskal credits Berliner with helping her during “a very adolescent time in my development as an artist.” As with all of Berliner’s close friends, she remains fiercely loyal to him.

  Berliner also let his grandmother, Helen Raulson, find him a job as a clerk in a shop that sold historical maps. The owner, Abraham Shapiro, was an old friend of Raulson’s and, unbeknownst to Berliner, her former clandestine lover. According to Shapiro, nothing was more sexually transgressive and therefore stimulating to Raulson than a tall, muscular Jewish man. Shapiro acted like he was doing Raulson a favor, but he was actually happy to give the front of the shop to Berliner and spend all his time in the back room, buying, cataloguing, and pricing maps. Shapiro had never married and once told Berliner that he was a lifelong bachelor because he was “a hit with the Shiksas but never managed to get a proper Jewish girl in the sack.”e

  Most of the time, Berliner stood alone at a glass counter, drafting the blueprints for his perfect apartment or reading non-fiction books about mapmaking and the Age of Exploration. He discovered that if he was knowledgeable about the maps, he didn’t have to be nice to the customers. His favorite maps, the Edge of the World maps, sold well.f

  Berliner worked in the shop for a year and a half, trying to forget the problems in his past. He learned the names of the map collectors. He occasionally dated a girl for a few weeks or a few months. He visited Kraus in prison. For a long time, nothing happened to him and he started to believe that all the excitement in his life had already passed; that, like a star athlete, the drama of his life took place entirely in his youth. But then, on a quiet Saturday morning in June, Molly Metropolis walked into his shop.

  Molly was only sixteen during The City of Chicago vs. Marie-Hélène Kraus, and though she had appreciated the sensationalism of the trial, she hadn’t focused on the specific details of the case until her first year at U of C, when she took a freshman seminar called “Modern Law and Fiction.” She studied Kraus’s case during her second week as a college student and it made a dramatic impression on her. Her obsession with the case led her to the Situationists, to Antoine/Antoinette Monson, to Berliner. She fixated on it for the rest of the semester and wrote about it for her final paper. After she decided to leave U of C to pursue a career as a singer, she sold all of her textbooks and trashed all of her notes, except for the ones about Kraus’s case. During the thirteen months between dropping out and being signed by Harmony Records, her first record label, Molly continued to research the New Situationists. When Harmony dropped her without putting out an album, she decided to take her New Situationist research to the next level. She mined her old school contacts, canvassing poli-sci and architecture majors about the New Situationists. She read in a Chicago Tribune article that the “last member of the New Situationists” was living in Chicago, working at a store selling old maps.

  Once Molly found Berliner, she didn’t waste any time. Molly walked into the cartography shop wearing a pair of huge sunglasses and a black T-shirt with a very, very deep V-neck that showed off chunks of her rhinestone-encrusted bra. Though she wasn’t yet famous, she already looked like a mega-watt pop star on a morning stroll. Without a glance at the maps on the wall, she sauntered over to Berliner’s counter. Berliner knew exactly what she wanted. Since the trial, he had warded off journalists, historians, and the fanboys and fangirls of the New Situationist movement. Berliner wanted to show Molly the door but, true to form, she refused to walk through it.

  In our interviews, Berliner was often hostile, coldly detached, frustrated, monosyllabic, nicotine-deprived, or unwilling to answer questions without providing a reason for his unwillingness. In short, he was the opposite of everything an interviewer hopes their subject will be. So, when I asked him about the early months of his collaboration with Molly Metropolis, I expected we would
play our usual game of frustration and reluctance. I was wrong. He put away a cigarette without smoking it and said, “We’re finally going to talk about Metro? I was beginning to think you didn’t give two shits about the person who is responsible for everything.”g

  The first story Berliner told me about Molly was delightfully characteristic: “The first thing she said to me, I mean as she was shaking my hand, was that her name was Molly Metropolis and she was going to be a pop star. ‘But that doesn’t matter right now,’ she said. ‘What matters is you.’ I knew immediately she was referring to the [New Situationists]. At that time, there were only two things people talked to me about, and I could tell immediately that she didn’t want to buy a map. Of course, in a way, I was wrong about that. She had me make her dozens of maps.”

  When Berliner met her, Molly hadn’t completely evolved into the public figure she eventually became, but she was a primordial version of that figure. She dressed in metallic clothing and directed the people around her like they were members of her staff. She also refused to take no for an answer; two days after Berliner told Molly he didn’t want to work with her, she came back to the cartography shop and propositioned him again. Work with her, and she would give Berliner the money to build his apartment. Berliner cautiously asked her how she knew about his apartment and she told him that she had followed him to the Chicago Public Archives where his sometimes-girlfriend, Nina Johnson, worked and had discussed it with her. Molly later confessed to Berliner that this was a lie; she had actually visited Kraus several times in prison, winning Kraus’s trust, and learning about the apartment from her. Not wanting to betray her new friend, Molly blamed Johnson. Berliner had unfortunately broken up with the confused archivist on the weight of Molly’s lie. Berliner made a point to find Johnson and apologize once he learned the truth, and managed to salvage the relationship, somewhat.h

  “Molly loved secret histories. She also loved contradicting accounts of the same historical events. She liked ambiguities. She liked answerless questions. She told me that she was investigating the world that traditional maps hide from us,” Berliner said. “She said she felt like she had been walking down the street blindfolded, but she didn’t know she was wearing a blindfold. One day, she realized the blindfold was there and she pulled it off, but the place she saw was so unfamiliar that she couldn’t recognize it without a guide. And I was supposed to be that guide.

  “That’s how she talked. She wasn’t crazy, not in any of the ways people thought she was, and she wasn’t an idiot. She had looked up all these papers David Wilson wrote as a graduate student, about philosophy and architecture, and she thought the New Situationists were hiding a secret agenda, something more secret than the subway bombings. She thought the group, the bombing, everything was incidental to—or at least, concurrent with—some greater secret goal. She didn’t think I knew what it was, she thought it had been kept at ‘the highest levels of the New Situationists.’ I asked her how she knew I wasn’t at the highest level and she said, ‘I understand how the New Situationists worked. If you had been at the highest level, you never would’ve let anybody know your name.’ ”

  Berliner told Molly Metropolis he would think about working with her, but before he could agree to divulge anything about the New Situationists, he needed to check with the only higher-up he still talked to. The next day, he took the train to the Dwight Correctional Center for an unscheduled visit. He brought Kraus an expensive new bra, cigarettes, nail polish, and a croissant from her favorite bakery. They exchanged a few pleasantries, but Berliner was anxious to ask her about the New Situationists. He asked her if she thought the New Situationists possibly had a “secret agenda.” Without batting an eyelash, she told him that it was very possible. Kraus told Berliner about a side of the New Situationists he hadn’t seen. The president had often ranted about creating a brotherhood of politicians and lobbyists who would eventually control Chicago’s infrastructure. The New Situationists were ambitious and slightly delusional, Kraus told Berliner, so of course they had secret plans. The president was always very secretive; Kraus had often been excluded from meetings. “Probably,” she joked, “they wanted to take over the world.”i Also, Kraus pointed out, they were incredibly well funded for an anarchist movement—suspiciously well funded.

  For Kraus’s benefit, Berliner recounted the story of Molly Metropolis’s visit, about her “pretentions about being famous,” and about her proposed investigation into the New Situationists’ secret agenda. Kraus told Berliner to set up a meeting between herself and Molly. She and Molly were still pretending they hadn’t met. To my knowledge, neither Kraus nor Molly ever recounted what happened during their meetings, but Molly must’ve charmed Kraus. When Berliner returned the next day, Kraus told him to go ahead and investigate with Molly. Kraus warned Berliner not to mention Molly or the investigation to David Wilson, because he would try to stop them. She insisted Berliner couldn’t use any of his old friends or contacts in the New Situationists. She also asked him to visit frequently and update her about the investigation. She wanted to see what he would find.

  That night, Berliner called Molly and asked her to meet him at the corner of West Armitage and North Racine. She arrived an hour later, wearing a vintage floral jumpsuit and black stilettos with pink rhinestones. Berliner took her into the New Situationist headquarters; the rooms weren’t as impressive as they had been when Kraus took Berliner down for the first time. Berliner showed her Kraus’s old room. Molly ran her fingers along the walls and asked if they could stay the night. Berliner offered to find another room to sleep in, but Molly asked him to stay, if he could be a gentleman with her. She told him she had nightmares almost every night. Berliner slept on the couch.

  The next morning, Molly and Berliner spent a few hours combing through the debris the New Situationist leadership had left behind in their haste to make the strange, secretive political group part of their past. In the giant office at the end of the hall—he still called it “The Trick” then, though later he would offhandedly call it Metro’s Room—Berliner found several filing boxes full of documents.

  In the spring of 2007, Molly Metropolis signed with SDFC Records and created the General Council. She added Berliner to her personal payroll—he was her first paid staff member, ever—and christened their fledgling collaboration the Urban Planning Committee, a secret offshoot of the General Council. Molly kept her work with Berliner hidden from everyone, including her family and closest friends; taking a page out of the New Situationists’ book, she refused to even write down the name. At the top of her notebooks about the Urban Planning Committee she wrote, “Here is the Secret History of the U.P.C.”j

  Molly only mentioned Berliner publicly once, to the German music news outlet Knall Producktion: “The inspiration for the General Council came from Andy Warhol’s Factory as well as the entourage of beautiful, glowing people that David Bowie always had around him, his friends, the people at his parties. But I got the name from my friend Nick Berliner, who is teaching me about architecture.”k

  That summer, Molly Metropolis gave her first major live performance since signing with SDFC and receiving the benefit of their marketing department. She played during an early timeslot at Chicago’s giant summer music festival, Lollapalooza. She had no light show, no backdrop, no pyrotechnics, just a DJ, a drummer, and a jeweled keyboard she played herself. Molly came onstage in a metallic, silver bra and lace leggings.l She performed some songs that eventually found their way onto Cause Célèbrety, including an early version of her first single “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas),” which was produced by Astroman and included short bridge from the producer/rapper: “Work, work, work your body/Pop, pop, pop a Molly.” Molly also sang a Cause Célèbrety album cut called “Pop-timist,” as well as “Maps (Find Me),” but the crowd didn’t like the show. “Too synth-y,” several bloggers complained.m

  After her performance, Molly hung around in the artist tent for a few hours, then left, promising to meet up with her friends a
nd the record executives at the private SDFC after-party that night. She threw on one of her deep V-neck T-shirts, took a cab to Armitage and Racine, and descended into the basement, where Berliner was waiting for her. She hugged him and said, “I’ve left you alone for too long, my darling. I’ve missed you and the things we’re doing together.”

  Molly told Berliner the details of her performance and complained about the lethargic crowd while they each had a cigarette in the “smoking room”—one of the apartments, which Berliner had redecorated with vintage leather armchairs, oil paintings of deer and buffalo, and of course, framed maps. When Molly asked Berliner what he had been up to in the weeks since they’d last seen each other, Berliner revealed his utter lack of a social life by jumping right into business talk: he had found something. Berliner and Molly went back to the huge two-story office where Berliner stored the documents.

  Berliner knew the New Situationists’ record-keeping policies. They never wrote down or recorded anything about their organization on computers, instead preferring to use typewriters or hand-written notes to create archives that couldn’t be hacked and could be easily destroyed by shredding or burning. More likely than not, the two boxes of documents contained every physical record the New Situationists had ever produced, with the exception of the letter sent to the Chicago Tribune taking credit for the subway bombings, which is still languishing somewhere in an FBI evidence locker. According to Berliner, the records contained mostly letters between members. In the letters, the New Situationists mostly discussed the “most public” parts of the operation, such as Kraus’s anti-recruitment efforts.