by Dan Barry
So Johnny Cash went out for cigarettes. Did he wind up among the flowers on the Copeland property because he needed to urinate? Because he was picking flowers for June? His motive is lost to history; his arrest is not.
Come along, wild flower child. Don’t you know that it’s 2 a.m.
Cash left Starkville later that morning, addiction intact. He supposedly went clean to marry June Carter in 1968, definitely went clean when his son, John Carter Cash, was born in 1970, and alternated between addiction and sobriety the rest of his life.
But here now was Starkville, offering formal recognition of that painful struggle and providing a posthumous pardon—all with a street-festival silliness and quasi-religious vibe.
Room 22, University Motel
You could take a walking tour of Cash’s journey, with stops at the Copeland property, the jail cell and Room 22 at the motel, where the door now bears a plaque that says:
JOHNNY CASH
MAY 11, 1965
You could eat fried pickles and listen to a band called Ring of Fire play “Ring of Fire.” You could meet a deep-voiced man who says that after Cash’s death, he asked for and received a sign from God that, yes, he should continue his impersonation of the Man in Black. You could draw pictures on the street with colored chalk.
You could listen to a lecture by Mr. Grant, who says he has never smoked a cigarette or tasted liquor; his voice sometimes breaking, he railed against the drugs that had laid low “the world’s greatest human being.”
(A note to those in search of a sign: Later, after being shown a photograph of Smokey Evans holding his jailhouse treasure, Mr. Grant said, “I must say that these look like his shoes.”)
Late on Saturday night, Rosanne Cash took the outdoor stage to serenade hundreds. She opened with a sexy take of “I’ve Got Stripes,” a prison song her father used to sing; she also sang his “Tennessee Flat Top Box” and, of course, his “Starkville City Jail.”
Then, in the full spirit of redemptive rebellion, Ms. Cash took back the Starkville night by singing a few beautiful songs of her own.
An Old Mobster Lets Go of a Long-Kept Secret
EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I.—DECEMBER 22, 2008
They came for the gravely ill racketeer last month, appearing at his North Providence home around dawn. His time was near, but not as near as the police officers at his door. He went peacefully.
Soon he was at state police headquarters, where veteran detectives knew him well: Nicholas Pari, once the smart-dressing mobster whose nickname, “Nicky,” had clearly not taxed the Mafia muse. Now 71, with gauze wrapped around his cancer-ruined neck: Nicky Pari.
The arrest, for running a crime ring from a flea market, put him in a reflective mood, and he said some things he clearly needed to say, including that he was dying. Still, ever-faithful to that perverse code of the streets, he seemed insulted when asked about the deeds of others.
“He wouldn’t cooperate beyond talking about himself and his past actions,” says Col. Brendan Doherty, the state police superintendent, who knew Mr. Pari from long years spent investigating Rhode Island crime, back when it was more organized.
The gaunt man did not weep, though his voice softened as he spoke with regret about a life that had fallen far short of its promised glamour and riches, a life heavy with guilt over one particular act. And in confessing this one act, Nicky Pari gave up a ghost.
“He was making an attempt at an act of contrition,” says Lt. Col. Steven O’Donnell, who also knew Mr. Pari from way back when and had listened to his old adversary’s words of regret.
That same day, detectives took the mobster for a 19-mile ride, following his directions as he zeroed in on the past. To East Providence. To the Lisboa Apartments. To a grassy backyard bordered by a listing stockade fence.
What he indicated next, whether through words or gestures or even a nod, was this: Here. Deep beneath this blanket of dormant grass, you will find him—here. Soon the claws of backhoes were disturbing the earth.
Thirty years ago, organized crime in Rhode Island was still like a rogue public utility. Raymond L. S. Patriarca, the old man with bullet tips for eyes, still ran the New England rackets from a squat building on Federal Hill. And men, from the merely dishonest to the profoundly psychopathic, still followed his rules.
Among them was Nicky Pari, who supposedly declined the honor to join the Mafia because he preferred the freelance life. If not made, he was known, in part because he had done time for helping a Patriarca lieutenant hijack a truck with a $50,000 load of dresses.
In April 1978, he and another freelancer, Andrew Merola, decided to address the delicate matter of a police informant within their ranks, a droopy-eyed young man from Hartford named Joseph Scanlon. The theories behind his nickname, “Joe Onions,” are that he made the girls cry or, more prosaically, that his surname sounded like scallion.
One morning Mr. Pari lured Mr. Scanlon and his girlfriend, who was holding their infant daughter, into Mr. Merola’s social club, in a Federal Hill building now long gone. Mr. Pari struck Mr. Scanlon in the face. Then Mr. Merola fired a bullet that shot through the man’s head and caught the tip of one of Mr. Pari’s fingers.
The girlfriend was ordered to leave the room. When she came back, her child’s father was wrapped in plastic near the door, his jewelry gone, his boots placed beside his body. A package, awaiting delivery.
The girlfriend, once described as a “stand-up girl” who wouldn’t talk, did, and the two men were convicted of murder in a case lacking a central piece of evidence: the body. They successfully appealed their convictions, but in 1982 they pleaded no contest to reduced charges in a deal that required them to say where the body was.
Dumped in Narragansett Bay, they said.
Few believed this story, perhaps because it lacked the panache desired of a Rhode Island-style rubout. For years afterward, people would call the police and The Providence Journal with tips like: Joe Onions is in the trunk of a scrapped Cadillac. Check it out.
Perhaps, too, there was the inexplicable charm of Mafia sobriquets. In a state whose mobster roll call includes nicknames like “The Blind Pig” and “The Moron,” one wonders whether Joe Onions would be remembered had he been known, simply, as Joe Scanlon.
The years passed. The paroled Mr. Merola opened a Federal Hill restaurant called Andino’s, while the paroled Mr. Pari gravitated toward flea markets. They were often seen together, sitting in a lounge in Smithfield, or attending a testimonial for a mob associate in Providence, that damaged finger of Mr. Pari’s, holding a glass or maybe a cigarette, always there.
Mr. Merola died of cancer last year, leaving Mr. Pari to bear their secret alone. He went on as a father, a grandfather and, apparently, the man to see in a grimy flea market in a stretch of Providence where auto-body shops reign.
Last month the police arrested Mr. Pari and a motley mix of others for crimes of the flea market that put the lie to The Life, including the supposed trading of guns and drugs for more fungible items like counterfeit handbags and sneakers. Still, he remained bound to Mr. Merola; in arranging to sell illegal prescription drugs for a measly $320, for example, he chose to meet an undercover officer at his departed friend’s restaurant.
At state police headquarters, before that ride to East Providence, Mr. Pari expressed remorse for helping to kill Joe Onions, remorse that he admitted had deepened as he faced his own mortality. Seeing the anguish his own family was going through, he knew he could ease another family’s 30-year pain by sharing one detail that only he knew.
Don’t misunderstand, Lieutenant Colonel O’Donnell says. Mr. Pari could have shared this detail days before his arrest, months before, decades before—but he lied instead, for reasons known only to him. “It doesn’t make him a good guy,” the police official says. “But he’s a human being.”
Hours after leading the police to the place that had haunted him since 1978, Mr. Pari appeared in District Court in Providence, unshaven, diminished, in a wheelchair. R
eleased on bail, he returned home to his hospice bed and oxygen tank.
Meanwhile, back in East Providence, backhoes mined the sandy past. They dug until dark that Monday afternoon, then returned to dig all day Tuesday, as detectives and spectators shivered and watched, as the November sun offered little warmth, as the smell of fried food wafted from a Chinese restaurant a few yards away.
Finally, late on that Wednesday, the scoop of a backhoe pulled up things of interest from more than a dozen feet below, including a boot that seemed to match a description. The mechanical dig stopped and a human dig began, with investigators using a sifting pan to separate bone from earth.
It isn’t as though you can dig anywhere in Rhode Island and find a body. But Colonel Doherty, the state police superintendent, says he will not confirm this was Joseph Scanlon until a match is made with some DNA provided by one of Mr. Scanlon’s siblings. He adds that even though 30 years have passed, among the Scanlons “there was always a hope that he was not dead.”
On a cold night late last week, an old mobster died at his home in North Providence, freed of one secret he would not have to take to the grave.
A World Away from Wall Street, a Bank and a Robber
CARLETON, NEB.—JANUARY 26, 2009
The man entered the intimate Citizens State Bank with a balaclava covering his face and sunglasses shading his eyes. His attire did not seem too out of place, given that workers at the nearby grain elevator are known to wear similar protection against the punishing cold of Nebraska in winter.
Here in Carleton, the standard greeting—“Keeping out of trouble?”—gleans a “Yep” or a “Nope,” both equally reassuring to its population of about 136. But this man stepped up to the counter, with its rack of candy canes and clear view of the silvery vault open in trust, and greeted the teller with: Give me your money.
The salutation received a classic Carleton response, something along the lines of: Are you serious?
The man answered by making sure she saw the pocket of his heavy Carhartt coat, bulging with his hand and maybe something else. Following bank protocol, which says no amount of money is worth a human life, she gave him the cash in her till, all the while taking quiet note of two physical traits. He had fat fingers and a fat nose.
He tucked the money into a zippered pouch and left without availing himself of either a candy cane or one of the complimentary yardsticks jutting from a bucket by the door. As soon as he left, the teller loudly called out words not common in Carleton: We’ve been robbed.
The bank’s president, Michael Van Cleef, came running out of his office, where he had been discussing a farmer’s financial situation with the bank’s loan officer. He looked out the window just in time to see the grimy getaway, in a maroon, dust-caked Grand Am with a spoiler on the back.
The event took all of 55 seconds.
Proper protocol continued. The bank locked down, and someone called 911. Within nine minutes the sheriff’s deputies arrived. Soon came the first of many calls of concern and support, a few of which, a smiling Mr. Van Cleef remembers, went like this: “Hear you’ve been robbed. Can I bring you over a pie?”
In this day of bank bailouts and subprime mortgage debacles, some of us might find Robin Hood charm in a Nebraska bank robbery. Some might whisper the lines to the old Woody Guthrie song romanticizing the violent bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd: “Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.”
But the Citizens State Bank in Carleton has no connection to any of those banking conglomerates with names like AmeriCitiComGroup. It is the only branch of a small, family-owned business that has six employees, three of whom are family and none of whom are accustomed to junkets. It has a few hundred customers and about $11 million in loans out.
Its one-story brick building, built as a bank more than 100 years ago, has remained a local fixture while most buildings in downtown Carleton, such as it is, are bricked up or closed up: the old Weddel’s grocery store; the old post office that partially caved in a few years ago; the old Little Café, where Thelma and Shirley sold fresh pies of apple and cherry.
Just outside the bank, a Cargill grain operation grinds away. Truckloads of soybeans and corn are weighed and dumped with a sound like a sigh into the mammoth grain elevators looming over the empty storefronts. Every few minutes, another long Union Pacific freight train loudly announces itself.
Inside the bank, Mr. Van Cleef, 46, is usually helping local farmers figure out how to finance the fertilizer, chemicals, machinery, fuel and irrigation needed to grow their crops, all while guessing what beans and corn will go for. There is no online banking here. It’s all face-to-face, how are you, Mike, see you later down at TJ’s for a burger.
The Van Cleef business has not exactly followed the Wharton School model. Mr. Van Cleef’s father, Lloyd, 72, was a Navy veteran working as a meter reader for a gas company in Fairbury, about 40 miles away, when a local banker offered him a career change. He worked his way up the banking ranks and then, in 1975, decided to buy the Citizens State Bank in Carleton.
His teenage son, Michael, did not appreciate moving from a town with a Pizza Hut and a movie theater to a town where the passing trains served as entertainment. But he started working in the bank after high school, attended banking seminars instead of attending college, set aside aspirations of law school and eventually became a bank president without pinstripes.
“You do loans, you do deposits,” he says. “You scrape the snow outside. You change the light bulbs.”
Over the years, the bank, like Carleton, experienced some tough times. Lloyd briefly had to take a banking job in another state to help keep his own bank afloat. Michael’s wife, Nancy, held three jobs for a while: mother of five, bank officer and waitress at an American Legion hall in Hebron.
The Van Cleefs recall a common-sense practice from those times, a practice that some larger institutions seem to have forgotten. “When things get tight,” Michael Van Cleef says, “you don’t get a bonus.”
Maybe this explains why the bank and the Van Cleefs remain. Lloyd lives here with his wife, Marion, who comes once a week with mop and bucket to clean the bank. Nancy is an emergency medical technician. Michael is on the village board—overseeing a $100,000 budget and a single public employee—and was instrumental a few years ago in dissuading the Postal Service from shutting down the post office. ZIP code 68326 lives on.
This, then, is who a fat-fingered man robbed at 3:14 on the cold Thursday afternoon of Jan. 15. For the record, his was the fourth robbery at the bank since it opened in 1890, and the first in a half-century. Two were break-ins, and one, in 1950, involved a local man wearing a rubber mask and wielding a water pistol. He got away—briefly—with $12.50.
The robber and his dirty Grand Am probably turned right onto D Street, past the crumbling old post office, the new post office in the old library, and TJ’s Café, where locals gather on Fridays for the Mexican night specials. A quick left, a quick right, across Route 4 and then onto a gravel road heading north, where the Van Cleefs say his dust trail was seen by more than a local herd of Holsteins before he vanished into the great American vastness.
Through that afternoon and into the night, people in cars rolled slowly past the bank to catch a glimpse of investigators working behind the yellow caution tape, while calls of concern continued: from TJ’s, offering to send over some food; from banking competitors, offering to send over staff or money. Some said they had seen that Grand Am around.
Michael Van Cleef says he feels violated—as though someone had broken into his home—but is glad no one got hurt. And while he would not reveal how much had been stolen, he says the amount was not worth the robber’s trouble.
He says he wonders what motivated the man with fat fingers. Did it have something to do with what investigators were saying? That with this economy, we’re going to see more robberies in rural America?
No matter. On the morning after the robbery, at precisely 8:30, the Citizens State Bank once again
opened its doors to the rumbles and sighs of Carleton.
EPILOGUE
Things are as they were at the Citizens State Bank in Carleton, Nebraska.
It remains a family-owned business, with Michael Van Cleef’s father, wife, and son-in-law joining him in working there. And, as a result of some national banking scandals, business has been growing, he said. “People are calling up and saying, ‘I’m looking for a small-town bank, where someone will listen to me and talk to me—and actually befriend me.’”
The robbery of the bank remains unsolved. “Sometimes I’ve seen a strange car in town, and I’ll get in my truck and follow him around,” Mr. Van Cleef said. “Just got to check him out.”
Broken Trust Shakes Web from Farmer to Cow
FERNDALE, CALIF.—MARCH 23, 2009
In the verdant Eel River Valley of Northern California, where everyone is tied by blood or business, a dairy farmer named John Vevoda does his part. Though the roars of tractors have deafened an ear, and decades of nudging cows while milking have ruined a shoulder, he accepts his role and fulfills it.
He and his family keep a herd of 600. He employs Alan, Alberto, Dave, Edgar, Jesus, Jose and Umberto. He pays his bills. He recycles. And every two days, he forwards thousands of gallons of raw milk to the Humboldt Creamery, which rises five miles away beside the twisting, rushing Eel River.
The creamery looms as well over the area’s economy, linking many through an understood compact: the 50 farmers who own it as part of a cooperative, including Mr. Vevoda; its 200 employees; on and on, down to those who count on its support of the annual Easter Seals telethon. Just recently the creamery began selling preferred stock so people here can own a piece of something local and organic that makes them proud.