Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

by Jon Ronson

  It was a lovely, engaging, strange philosophy. But there’s another side to it. Dr. Hudson chooses whom to bestow his graciousness onto. It’s entirely his choice. Taxation takes that decision out of his hands and gives it to the state. It screws up the formula completely.

  Wayne’s avuncular manner deserted him when he talked about what to do about the have-nots. “I remember an advertisement with an Indian in a canoe in a harbor,” he said, “and tears are running down his face because he sees all the trash in the water and he sees what’s happening. That’s how I feel about America. It’s an emotional thing for me.” He paused, and that’s when he said, “I’m a little surprised to find out that I’m an enemy of the state at this time in my life. They talk about your ‘fair share.’ ‘Are you paying your fair share?’ Fair is in the eyes of the beholder.” He paused. “I hope I don’t come off like some big person . . . so conservative . . . I believe in spreading it around, but I believe in doing it myself. . . .”

  “So the trash in the river is higher taxes?” I asked.

  “It’s the idea of entitlement,” he snapped. “That idea wasn’t there in the history of this country. I remember passing a building and my father saying to me, ‘That’s the poorhouse. You don’t ever want—’”

  And then we were interrupted by his daughter, a woman in her forties. She came into the room, kissed him, and asked him if he was going to walk along the beach later. He said he was. She kissed him again and left and he didn’t return to the “poorhouse” anecdote. Instead he said, “When the politicians said, ‘Everybody is entitled to a house,’ you saw what happened. And now you have ‘Everybody is entitled to go to college.’ Which is stupid! When I went to college I had to drive a truck to pay. I had a partial scholarship, but I took care of myself.”

  “So you’re saying everybody is entitled to college, but they should have to pay their own way?” I asked.

  “Some people don’t belong in college!” he said. “That should occur to you.”

  I understand why Wayne’s great love in life is his stud farm. There’s something very Thoroughbred-horses about his view of the world. Perhaps the different ways Nick and Wayne made their money may explain their politics. Nick sees an economy of luck. He got lucky, and he understands that fragility for what it is. Wayne sees an economy of earning where those with exceptional talent or exceptional grit rise, as they should, to the top.

  For Wayne’s philosophy to work, though, he needs to see those who don’t make it as kind of deserving of their ill fortune. He talked to me about “derelicts on welfare” in Los Angeles who check themselves into the hospital because they’re “bored” and “want feeding” and “we’re paying for all that kind of activity.” He said too much tax money is spent on “guys going to chiropractors, guys getting massages all over the country! On us! Give me a break. Guys getting Viagra!” He talked about “Los Angeles bus drivers who are on permanent stress leave because someone spat on them when they got on the bus and now they’re emotionally upside down. More than half the bus drivers are out on stress leave! Systems like that cannot work!”

  Later, I hunt for published data that back up Wayne’s feckless-bus-driver nightmare scenario. I can’t find any. I do find something else, though—plenty of statistics showing that a guy with Wayne’s level of wealth has never had it so good in America. And yet, of all the people I interview, Wayne is the only one who seems angry about the politics of his situation. Frantz, Dennis, Rebecca—those at the bottom looking up—showed no animosity at all.

  The government used to tell people like Wayne exactly what to do with huge chunks of their income: Hand it over and we’ll decide how to use it. Today, America’s richest citizens have won the right to control these decisions themselves, and that’s a big reason why income inequality is so dire. For every secret philanthropist like Wayne, there are many who give little or nothing back. Meanwhile, Dennis and Rebecca continue to tread water, and might even drown.

  Wayne’s heart is in the right place. He’s not parsimonious. He started from nothing and he wants to give back, but he wants to choose how. He genuinely believes that higher taxes ruin society. But I can’t help thinking that when he talks about bored derelicts and emotionally weak bus drivers, he’s really—even if he doesn’t know it—talking about Frantz.

  The Man Who Tried to Split the Atom in His Kitchen

  Angelholm is a pretty southern Swedish town, famed for its clay-cuckoo manufacturing, a clay cuckoo being a kind of ocarina, which is a kind of flute. The crime rate here is practically zero. Except one of its residents was last year arrested for trying to split the atom in his kitchen. His name is Richard Handl and he buzzes me into his first-floor flat.

  I wanted to meet Richard because I keep seeing reports of home-science experimenters clashing with the authorities. There’s been a spate of them this past year or two.

  I glance into Richard’s kitchen and recognize his cooker from the news. It was horrendously, alarmingly blackened then, but it’s clean now.

  “So, you aren’t currently doing any experiments?” I ask him.

  “I’m banned,” he says.

  “By whom?” I ask.

  “My landlord,” he says. “And the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority.”

  When Richard was a teenager, everything, he says, was fine. “I had friends. We’d go partying. I have Asperger’s, so I was a bit of a nerd, a geek. My interests were chemical experiments. I’d make solutions that changed color. When I was thirteen, I made some explosives in the garden, using gunpowder, stuff I got from a paint store and from my father’s pharmacy. He had sulfuric acid, nitric acid. Visiting my father in his pharmacy was very exciting.”

  His father assumed Richard would grow up to be a pharmacist too. He was, Richard says, happy and proud of his son, as it was his dream to raise a boy to follow in his footsteps. But something unexpected happened to Richard fourteen years ago, when he was seventeen: “I became very aggressive to people,” he says.

  “In what way?” I ask.

  “It was toward my father,” Richard says. “Sometimes I hit him.”

  “In response to what?”

  “Very small things. Like if he was late and didn’t call.”

  “Was he worried about you?”

  “Yes, he was quite worried about me. He took me to the hospital, so I could talk to psychiatrists. They said I was depressed. And I had some paranoid disorder.”

  “And all this just came from nowhere?”

  “It just happened,” he says, shrugging.

  Richard worked in a factory for four years, but his disorder meant he spent most of his time in his flat. His love of chemistry continued undimmed, but the possibility of him becoming a pharmacist had practically gone. So, instead, he decided one day to start a collection: He would scour the Internet and buy an ampoule of every chemical element. He quickly realized he had to downgrade his ambition. “There are some very unstable radioactive elements, like polonium and francium, that last just a couple of minutes and then decay. They’re impossible to get.”

  But he persevered with the others.

  “Do you have any of them still here?” I ask.

  “Sure,” he says. “Would you like to see them?”

  He disappears into his bedroom and returns holding a basket filled with ampoules of gold and silver and platinum and thallium and beryllium. Some are solid blocks, some glittering shards, others shining slivers. The basket looks like a treasure chest.

  “This is the most amazing one,” Richard says, picking up an ampoule marked “Cesium.” It looks like solid gold. “Watch,” he says. “If you warm it up . . .”

  He closes his fist around it for thirty seconds. Then he shows it to me again. It has melted. We both look at it, amazed, as if we’ve just witnessed a magic trick.

  “And then,” Richard says, “I began to collect radioactive elements like radium and uranium and americium.”

  Richard was Googling “americium” one day when he foun
d a story, in Harper’s magazine, about a Michigan boy named David Hahn who grew up in the 1990s. Both boys spent their childhoods blowing things up in the garden. Hahn once turned up at a Boy Scouts meeting with a bright orange face due to an accidental overdose of canthaxanthin. Hahn also got expelled from camp for dismantling a smoke detector (he was trying to extract the americium—pretty much everything you need to split the atom you can find on eBay or in smoke detectors and antique luminous-dial clocks).

  Those were the days before the Internet, so getting hold of information about how to build a nuclear reactor was more complicated for Hahn than it would turn out to be for Richard. He learned how to do it by writing to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and pretending to be a physics teacher. Did they have any pamphlets on how to split the atom?

  “Nothing produces neutrons as well as beryllium, Professor Hahn,” they wrote back.

  And that’s how David Hahn managed to turn his potting shed into a nuclear reactor.

  It wasn’t long before the Michigan police cottoned on, and in June 1995, eleven men in protective suits descended on the dangerously irradiated shed. He was shut down.

  Sixteen years later, in Ängelholm, Richard read the Hahn story and felt inspired to try it out himself. This is how Richard went about trying to split the atom. First, he got a saucepan. Into it he put his radioactive elements—the americium and radium. He mixed them up with sulfuric acid and beryllium and turned on the stove. The mixture bubbled up crazily, splashing all over the cooker and the floor. He quickly turned off the gas and posted a picture of the carnage on his blog, with the caption “The Meltdown!”

  His plan, he says, was to repeat the experiment, but this time to collect into a test tube the neutrons that were emanating from the concoction. Then he’d have fired the “neutron ray” at a chunk of uranium sealed in a glass marble.

  “What does the neutron ray look like?” I ask.

  “It doesn’t look like anything,” Richard says. “You can’t see it.”

  “How do you know it’s there?”

  “You have to measure it with a Geiger counter,” he says.

  “So what you’re saying is, you’d point the test tube filled with neutrons at the uranium marble, and that’s what would split the atom?”

  “Yes,” Richard says.

  Richard never did collect the neutrons into a test tube. After the meltdown, he decided to e-mail the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority to double-check that what he was doing was aboveboard.

  “Hello!” read his e-mail of July 18, 2011. “I’m very interested in nuclear physics and radiation. I have planned a project to build a primitive nuclear reactor. Now I’m wondering if I’m violating any laws doing so?”

  They e-mailed him back on August 11: “Hi. The short answer to your question is that if you build a nuclear reactor without permission, you are violating strict laws. It is a criminal offense and can lead to fines or imprisonment for up to two years.”

  Richard was surprised. “The amount I had was very small,” he says, “so far away from the amount needed to make a dirty bomb or something like that. To get it to explode, you must have something called a critical mass, which is fifty kilograms of radium or six kilograms of plutonium. I had five grams. The worst that could have happened was I might have got radiation in me.”

  “And got cancer years later?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “Yes.”

  Even though it took the radiation authority three weeks to respond to Richard’s e-mail, everything moved very quickly after that. Within days, they’d turned up at his flat with the police.

  “They told me to get out with my hands up. They scanned me with Geiger counters. There was nothing. They measured the whole apartment. They said I was arrested for a crime against the radiation-safety law.”

  And that’s it, so far. Sixteen weeks have passed and nothing has happened to him, besides making headlines all over the world.

  “I don’t regret it,” he says, “because it was exciting. I’m sad I can’t do it anymore.”

  We glance at his basket of elements. “There are no other experiments you could do with these?” I ask.

  “I can,” he says, “but I don’t want to.”

  “What could you do?” I ask.

  “I could . . .” Richard pauses. “This thallium is very, very poisonous. If you break the ampoule, it would start to react with the air and oxidize. Thallium oxide. Very poisonous. If you get it on your fingers, you can die.”

  “But you would never consider . . .”

  “No, no,” Richard says. He pauses. “Actually, I’m thinking of trying again to become a pharmacist. I’m going to read up on some courses from the high school and begin to study in the university.”

  • • •

  I RECEIVE a slightly alarmed e-mail from Jason Bobe, who runs DIYbio.org, an online community for home-science experimenters. I’d e-mailed him as part of my research. He says he’s worried my story may discourage home science. Maybe, he suggests, I should talk to Victor Deeb, whose experiments in his basement went disastrously wrong in a very different way and whose story might offer a counterbalance.

  Deeb lives in a small Massachusetts town called Marlborough. He’s retired, in his mid-seventies, and although he’s lived in the U.S. almost all his life, he still has a strong Syrian accent, which gets stronger as he becomes more incensed over the phone.

  Three years ago, on August 5, 2008, a policeman happened to be driving past Deeb’s house. “He saw smoke billowing from the air conditioner in an upstairs room, so he called the fire department.” Deeb speaks in short, exact phrases, as if he considers our conversation to be like a chemical experiment, requiring complete precision.

  A plug had shorted in the bedroom. The fire department put out the fire, glanced into the basement, and immediately called for emergency reinforcements.

  “The whole fire department came,” Victor says. “The FBI. Even the CIA was here. It couldn’t have been any more crazy. They went into the sewer system to see if I was dumping anything down the toilet.”

  What they had found in the basement was a hundred bottles of chemicals. None was hazardous. There was nothing poisonous. “I was working on a coating for the inside of beverage cans containing no bisphenol A,” Deeb says.

  BPA, he explains, is standard in beverage-can coatings. The problem is that it can seep into the drink and play havoc with our hormones, causing men to grow breasts and girls as young as seven to have periods. Back in 2008, he says, “there were few references in the media to the negative effects of BPA. Currently, there is a deluge of articles. So my desire to eliminate BPA was ahead of its time.” He pauses. “I spent an enormous amount of time with the authorities, trying to explain what I was working on, but they had no perception. No concept.”

  And so he watched as they hauled away all the chemicals and test tubes in a truck. “I had a box full of files and notes and comments,” he says. “Twenty years’ work. They hired two Ph.D. chemists to go through the box, looking for confirmation that there were hazardous materials in the basement. When they couldn’t find anything, they left the box out in the rain. It destroyed all my notes. Twenty years of my life and work and efforts to help others down the drain.”

  “When they realized their mistake, I presume they apologized and paid you a settlement,” I say.

  “The opposite!” he says. “They’re suing me for the cost of emptying my basement.”

  For America’s online community of home-science experimenters, the most outrageous moment of all came when the enforcement officer, Pamela Wilderman, explained her decision-making process to the local paper: “I think Mr. Deeb has crossed a line somewhere,” she said. “This is not what we would consider to be a customary home occupation.”

  “Allow me to translate Ms. Wilderman’s words into plain English,” wrote Robert Bruce Thompson, the author of Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments. “‘Mr. Deeb hasn’t actually violated any law or regulation that
I can find, but I don’t like what he’s doing because I’m ignorant and irrationally afraid of chemicals, so I’ll abuse my power to steal his property and shut him down.’ . . . There’s a word for what just happened in Massachusetts. Tyranny.”

  Before I hang up, Victor Deeb says he wants to remind me of something. He says that for every David Hahn and Richard Handl, there’s a Steve Jobs and a Charles Goodyear. “They started at home. Goodyear developed the vulcanization process by mixing sulfur with virgin rubber on his wife’s stove in their kitchen.”

  And then he is gone, to do—he says—what he spends every day doing. He’s going to try to remember what he’d written on the pages in the box that was left out in the rain.

  Lost at Sea

  The Port of Los Angeles, October 23, 2011. At the Goofy Pool on deck 9 of the Disney Wonder, the Adventures Away celebration party has begun. “Good-bye, stress!” the cruise director shouts. “Hello, vacation!” The ship’s horn sounds out “When You Wish Upon a Star” to indicate that we’re about to set sail, to Mexico.

  I’m standing on deck 10, looking down at the dancing crowds of guests and crew. There are 2,455 passengers this week, and 1,000 employees. You can spot the Youth Activities team in their yellow tops and blue trousers. They look after the children in the Oceaneer Club on deck 5.

  There’s no talk of it, but many people on board know something terrible occurred on this route—to Puerto Vallarta and Cabo San Lucas—earlier this year. At 5:45 a.m. on Tuesday, March 22, a CCTV camera captured a young woman on the phone in the crew quarters. Her name was Rebecca Coriam. She was twenty-four, from Chester, and had recently graduated with a sports science degree from Exeter University. She’d been working in Youth Activities on board for nine months, and apparently loved it. But on the phone she was looking upset.